While perhaps not as overt as Titus in its examination of emulation’s place within early modern culture as seen through a dramatic lens, Hamlet offers a more sustained and nuanced inquiry into the links of emulation with rhetoric, especially in terms of self-fashioning and decorum. Emulation operates at the core of Hamlet, repeatedly informing the text. Through its links to dramatic and rhetorical discourses, emulation broadly understood offers a more complete picture of the role and power of the mimetic patterns extant in Renaissance England, a more complete reading of the imitative interweavings of culture, society, literature, and rhetoric.1 Reading Hamlet through the lens of emulation offers a strong site for examining the interactions of drama, rhetoric, and emulation. Seeing Hamlet through rhetorical ideas of text construction and delivery, with special note of the rhetorical discourses of decorum and propriety, reveals a steady interest in rhetorical concerns and their broad application on the stage and in character construction as well as in social beliefs and patterns. As I will develop, the characters of Hamlet, most notably Hamlet himself, are as deeply enmeshed in emulative patterns as those of Titus. The play revolves around critical moments of emulative action and upon cultural patterns and precedents that, while not as overt as Titus, nevertheless structure the play and indicate a continued interest in emulation and its manifestations in the period.
Beyond the internal significance of emulation to Hamlet, which I will discuss at length, the play also reflects Shakespeare’s own examination (and pressing) of the theater’s emulative composition practices. Work like J. J. M. Tobin’s on Shakespeare’s incorporations of Harvey and Nashe’s public literary vying within the texture of Hamlet emphasizes Shakespeare’s quite overt patterning of his work on the everyday emulative practices of his theater and the accompanying poetic rivalries.2 David Scott Kastan also argues for (and about) Shakespeare’s emulative practices in writing Hamlet (without naming them as such): “Shakespeare borrows, parodies, quotes, echoes—imitates, in its various senses—but always to make something that meaningfully can be said to be ‘pure his owne’”—arguably a definition of emulation in the period.3
For Kastan, Hamlet and its interrogation of the revenge tradition becomes, in Shakespeare’s hands, “something that is more than a revenge play—a play finally that is neither an imitation nor one that is imitatable.”4 This distinction is significant for Kastan, who has earlier argued for the failures and anxieties of imitation, both for Hamlet and for the period and its writers: “Like the defensive literary theorists of the English Renaissance, Hamlet values literature for its mimetic and didactic functions, its abilities to generate moral exempla that will ‘show virtue her feature, scorn her own image’” (3.2.22–3); however, “imitation is effective for Hamlet neither as a mode of action nor as a mode of knowing.”5 To reinforce this point, Kastan turns to Holofernes’s deriding assertion in Love’s Labour’s Lost that “Imitari is nothing. So doth the hound his master, the ape his keeper, the tired horse his rider.”6 For Kastan and Holofernes, imitation is linked to base notions of servile, rote imitation, even though Kastan also notes the creative theories of imitation that existed in the period. Of course, Holofernes is hardly the most credible of sources or characters, nor is there any reason to feel he directly reflects Shakespeare’s own views. In the end, Kastan argues that Hamlet, as play not character, escapes (“transcends”) the “deadening effects of imitation.”7 This I agree with absolutely. Without meaning to, I believe Kastan argues for the particular nature of Shakespeare’s mode of emulation (and not deadening or rote imitation)—to outdo his predecessors and contemporaries through his texts, even as his characters (as we saw in Titus) often largely repeat the precedents of literary and cultural history. Recognized forms remain in place, but within plays that given close attention question their own assertions and the cultural and literary assumptions on which they are based.
Beyond this, Shakespeare’s desire to create another Hamlet, with its extant cultural resonations, reflects an interest in engaging in mimetic forms and processes of composition—he is particularly skilled at using familiar materials with striking poetic and rhetorical success.8 For all of the seemingly negative intimations about emulation in Titus (and imitation by Holofernes), emulation was clearly a significant part of Shakespeare’s own practice and presence in the period, and Hamlet offers a particularly insightful look into Shakespeare’s continued examination of emulation’s place on the stage and in early modern English culture, revealing emulation as a deeply engrained aspect within the period.
Shakespeare’s own emulative practices seem to have been at some level particularly noteworthy and to have blurred some of the lines of decorum even in the appropriative field of drama. As Stephen Greenblatt puts it:
At a deep level there is something magnificently opportunistic, appropriative, absorptive, even cannibalistic about Shakespeare’s art, as if poor, envious Robert Greene had sensed something more important than he knew when he attacked the “upstart crow, beautified with our feathers.”9
Greene’s famous attack on Shakespeare may well reveal the depth of his emulous craft. Shakespeare’s own self-fashioning as a playwright in early modern London seems to reflect the frequent links between emulation and envy and rivalry, as well as the subtle shades between imitation, assimilation, and emulation. What is the line between emulative appreciation through the mimetic uses of others’ materials and competitive rivalry?
Hamlet’s rich cultural position and intertextualities also point to a core questioning of the receipt of previous cultural matter in the play. As Shakespeare used the works of others in his day, so too he reflects the many uses and appropriations of Rome in the Renaissance, raising questions about the lines between following ancient patterns and absorbing, even cannibalizing, the cultures of others in the act of imitating them. How does one treat something that was considered valuable by those one admires but may not have a current cultural resonance? Further, perhaps most important, how does one sift through layers of accumulated acculturations to judge between worldviews and systems of beliefs to construct, as far as it is possible, a sense of personal and cultural identity and values? Given the role of varying value systems and practices in fashioning identities, what are the means for answering the kinds of questions of self-construction in response to earlier and contemporary texts, lived and written, raised in rhetorical theory and discussed here already in relation to Titus? These are core questions within Hamlet and for Hamlet, questions that seem to interest Shakespeare and reflect his own playwriting practices, questions that reflect his awareness of his culture’s attempts to use Rome as a site of cultural transference and self-fashioning.
Hamlet has been read by numerous critics in a number of insightful ways, whether it is Janet Adelman’s investigation of female sexuality and Gertrude’s destabilizing of Hamlet’s processes of identification, Girard’s emphasis on Hamlet’s struggles in the face of social precedents of revenge, or Greenblatt’s cultural and religious exploration of Hamlet as a Protestant young man “haunted by a distinctly Catholic ghost.”10 Many readings of the play, such as these, identify an underlying questioning of core cultural and social beliefs in Hamlet, uncertainties that significantly highlight and are highlighted by reading Hamlet in terms of the period’s beliefs and practices related to emulation. These uncertainties point to the play’s examination of the value of emulation and its place in shaping character, the supposed power of the emulative role of drama, and the choices and implications involved in appropriations of earlier cultural materials, including the collision of differing (and not easily mutually accepting) beliefs and value patterns.
Within the world of the play, Hamlet finds himself in a critical moment of uncertainty, what Alasdair MacIntyre refers to as an “epistemic crisis,” digesting “what [he] took to be evidence pointing unambiguously in some one direction [which] now turns out to [be] equally susceptible of rival interpretations.”11 Hamlet has discovered that things he took for granted within his patterns of thoughts and assumptions are no longer simply given, and he becomes unclear about the means of knowing what can be assumed or, perhaps more troubling for him, how to clearly determine what is right or wrong. Hamlet’s epistemic crisis is directly related to failures in humanist learning and patternings—patterns that are revealed through the enactment of these theories within the play. For example, David Summers argues for the way Hamlet displays the limits of reading commonplaces as life-shaping texts (as an emulative mindset would suggest), a practice developed in the period by Erasmus, Agricola, and Ascham.12 The reading of texts in search of commonplaces applicable to one’s life is an emulative pattern—a searching for simple models and paradigms to follow and adapt, shaping one’s character:
While the fundamental premise of the humanist educational program was that by reading and recording the sententiae of the classical authors one would naturally, if not inevitably, acquire the virtue those commonplaces advocated, both Agricola and Erasmus stressed that classical learning must not remain superficially rhetorical, but that the wisdom it imparts must be engrafted into, or reconstitute one’s character.13
Again we see repeated that learning and the changing of character is often assumed to occur almost automatically by the reading of ancient texts. Though some writers did emphasize the need for active self-fashioning, many implied that such learning and character shaping would happen simply through the repeated study of great works. Even those who stress the need to actively adjust one’s character assume that exposure to classic texts will naturally facilitate such character shaping.
Summers also reports Roger Ascham’s continued emphasis of the need for a unity of word and action, decorum of character and learning, to avoid superficial appearances—“to seem, and not to be”—an idea that has clear resonances within Hamlet and its interests in seeming and being.14 Further, Summers explores the specific way that “dramatic narrative imagination—the ability to be directed by the power of narrative poetry and theater to evoke moral conscience, and the further capacity to view one’s own situation as character in narrative” allows for a more useful heuristic in applying textual models to one’s life.15 He is arguing for the efficacy of theater grounded in the emulative practices my work explores. The repeated instances of dissonance that Hamlet encounters are informed by oversimplified humanist ideas of emulative modeling and self-construction, similar to what we observe in Titus. After mapping out the theoretical grounds and rhetorical influences of emulative self-fashioning, this chapter will further nuance and develop the links between rhetoric and self-fashioning in relation to Hamlet, as well as the play’s uses of self-fashioning, the significance of “emulate pride” to the text, and the interrelations between decorum and emulation within the play (1.1.86).
While Renaissance practices of identity and self-fashioning are well-trod areas, new work, challenging traditional beliefs about the period, continues to come forward; additionally, the importance the period’s rhetorical theory has on this patterning has not yet been well developed.16 John Jeffries Martin has recently critiqued both modernist and postmodernist assumptions (which he represents respectively with Jacob Burckhardt and Stephen Greenblatt) about identity and self-fashioning in the Renaissance.17 His work asserts that current studies of self-fashioning too often approach the self of the Renaissance in relation to our own age, rather than examining it as a socio-historical reality of the period. Martin claims that identity in the period
was the result of fundamental shifts in the ethical visions of the Renaissance humanists and Protestant reformers. In fashioning their religious, social, and even personal identities, Renaissance men and women could draw on two distinct, even opposed virtues. … a Renaissance notion of the prudential self (a rhetorical posture that subordinated honesty to decorum) [or] the ideal of sincerity (which subordinated decorum to honesty).18
While Martin’s work is well-grounded and offers significant new insights into how Renaissance men and women understood identity, with its focus elsewhere it does not deal at sufficient depth with the rhetorical underpinnings of these beliefs in the period. Most interesting to me is that his duality returns to a single (unstated) informing idea, that Renaissance people saw themselves rhetorically, that they called upon the alternating (and conflicted) virtues of honesty and decorum to suit their current needs, really each a subtle rhetorical gesture.
Each of these stances is a rhetorical posturing—an idea Martin notes, I believe, without naming it as such: “It was only such a self that could be called upon, as circumstances shifted, to choose whether to project a faithful representation of its concerns, its feelings, its beliefs to the outside world or whether to hold them in check, concealing them.”19 Either way, the choice is a rhetorical one, based on a reading of the situation, audience, and context as taught in the grammar schools and back through to the ancients; the “faithful representation” is still a representation and a rhetorical choice—and the opposite approach is not uniquely rhetorical, as much as it is a purposeful choice of decorous dissimulation. Martin also adds, “My point rather involves the fact that this assumption points to a new sense of the human being as an agent, subject, or author—as someone responsible for his or her actions and assertions.”20 This last claim links to a sense of the individual as an author of their identity, a rhetor of their self (public and private)—involved in the shaping of their persona and ethos—and also taps into Hamlet’s dilemma of making a choice and taking responsibility for a significant decisive action, a challenge we see Hamlet wrestle with throughout the play, but perhaps most poignant in Claudius’s prayer, where the King feels the deep impact of his past choices (3.3.36–72). Equally, the power of words to shape a public identity is nowhere more clear than in Claudius’s public speaking and the contrast he relates to the audience between his deeds and his “most painted word” (3.1.53).
The shaping of our self through rhetorical choices features in Cicero’s works repeatedly, which is particularly important, since Cicero was the single most recognized model in the Renaissance and his works are foundational to Renaissance conceptions of self-fashioning. John Dugan’s work, which analyzes Cicero’s texts on rhetoric in terms of self-fashioning, tacitly supports Martin’s assertion that self-fashioning should not be considered a particularly Renaissance notion (one of Martin’s critiques of Burckhardt and Greenblatt) and also both asserts the fully rhetorical nature of self-fashioning and the limits of self-fashioning, including a sense of the degree and role of the agency of the rhetor, offering insight into what I see as Hamlet’s seeming struggles to fashion himself as effectively and effortlessly as he seems to think should be possible.21 In his soliloquies, which I will read more closely later in this chapter, Hamlet betrays a sense of frustration with his own inability to perfectly unify what he thinks he should do and be with who he is and the actions he is taking, “unpack[ing] my heart with words” (2.2.581) and unsure “Why yet I live to say this thing’s to do” (4.4.44), for example. Dugan develops Cicero’s “model for the self” in De officiis, based on the Stoic philosopher Panaetius, which sees the self as “a series of personae or ‘masks’”:
The personae progress from greater generality and immutability: first the “universal” (communis), second the “individual” (quae proprie singulis est tribute (Off. 1.107)), to the more contingent (the third: determined by chance and circumstance (quam casus aliqui aut tempus imponit (Off. 1.115)), and, finally, to that which individuals choose for themselves (quam nobismet ipsi iudicio nostro accommodamus … ipsi autem gerere quam personam velimus, a nostra voluntate (Off. 1.115)). The first two personae are gifts of nature, the third is the product of an individual’s circumstances, and the fourth, which is within the domain of individual will, is that aspect of the self which one can shape according to design.22
Dugan’s work with Cicero suggests a sense of a substantial limit on the agency of the rhetor as self-fashioner, offering further perspective on Hamlet’s dilemma, as he deals with aspects of the self, using this model, that are out of his control, that are outside the domain of individual will. His unusual and unexpected circumstances, his shattered worldviews and conflicted patternings—social, religious, personal, sexual, political, familial, historical, rhetorical, philosophical—affect the deepest aspects of who he is, aspects that are out of the range of what he can, using these theories, shape according to his own design.23
To understand Hamlet’s expectation of his control over his self and his ability to read and interpret others effectively (as well as to understand better the significant role of rhetoric in self-fashioning), it’s valuable to review the ways in which the classrooms of the period taught the ability to read and construct character. For example, by reviewing extant educational theory and practices Nancy Christiansen argues that delivery (pronuntiatio) taught a process of character construction and analysis subject to basic rules of rhetorical decorum: “rhetoric, as it is described in British Renaissance handbooks and ideally practiced in the grammar schools, is fundamentally an art of character-fashioning, with decorum its central concern.”24 Christiansen illustrates the almost obsessive move to knowledge and discovery through rhetoric in the period, showing how rhetoric’s social application was used to create an ethic based on proper judgment of others and the self (the kind of judgment Hamlet attempts to use in The Mousetrap and the kind of judgment that Titus shows to be uncertain and more complicated than any simple formula of rhetorical practice can determine). This seeming-simple role of rhetoric, which purportedly allows for an uncovering of character through the appropriate reading of words and actions, is both reified and also heavily questioned in Hamlet, such as in Claudius’s recognition just mentioned of the distance between his deeds and “most painted word” (3.1.53).25
The link between word and deed is blurred both in Hamlet and in a close reading of many rhetorics in the period. Christiansen’s work shows that understanding rhetoric as tied up in reading and generating behavior and character reveals the following significant points, which allow for increased insight into Hamlet’s dilemma and the relation between rhetoric and self-fashioning more broadly:
1) language is behavior and behavior is language (thereby blurring the boundaries between speech and action, thought and performance); 2) all “texts” are both arguments and dramas (thereby blurring the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, art and life); and 3) rhetoric is the art not merely of expression, composition, or persuasion, but also of analysis and judgment—in fact, of ethics (thereby blurring the boundaries between eloquence and wisdom, prudence and morality).26
These ideas are critiqued and explored in Titus, as I have discussed, a critique developed further through the dramatic enactment of these ideas in Hamlet. The play directly enacts the blurring of the boundary between words and actions as well as thoughts and performance through rampant examples of duplicity (political and rhetorical), especially clear in Claudius and his self-recognized severed relation of “my deed to my most painted word” (3.1.53) and in Hamlet’s own purposeful move to “put an antic disposition on” (1.5.180). Words and deeds, thoughts and performance, are shown throughout the play to have no absolute connection—this kind of decorum is something imposed or encouraged socially (I will further discuss the importance of decorum to the play in a later section of this chapter).27
The blurring of texts (fiction and nonfiction, art and life) is foundational to emulative theory—the act of reading models from texts to be used in life depends on this blurring. As Hamlet develops, this blurring is also the necessary condition of the humanist ideal of an emulative theater. Hamlet believes he can read the dramas presented as a means to understanding his own actions, such as comparing his inaction to the Player’s performance—“What would he do / Had he the motive and the cue for passion / That I have?” (2.2.554–6)—and as a means to understanding the actions of others, such as in his attempt to “catch the conscience of the King” (2.2.601). However, even in enacting this theory, the play complicates it, showing the limitations of shaping choice based on examples. Finally, the idea of rhetoric as an ethic is profoundly complicated throughout the play, especially because of the blurring of the links between word and action, statement and intent. As Titus also developed, we are left uncertain in Hamlet about the ability to analyze and judge, effectively or appropriately, because of the complexities of feigning and deception that run rampant throughout the play. Analysis and judgment via language and eloquence are sharply affected in a pervasive culture of dissembling and concealed intent.
In relation to these difficult distinctions between intent and action, schisms between inwardness and outward behavior, Katharine Eisaman Maus points out that from poetry to law to medicine, and especially in religion, the Renaissance overtly dwelled on matters of interiority versus exteriority, of the inner self versus outward appearance, emphasizing the relation between these issues and the particular concerns of Hamlet.28 Maus’s work focuses on the theater of the period, a place where anxieties of inwardness and outward display are portrayed and developed, and details how the religious uncertainties of the period made the questions surrounding inwardly held beliefs versus outward deeds particularly crucial.29 Of interest to the larger focus of this work, the emulation of Rome, she also notes the ways in which the shaping of self were a response to the Renaissance’s classicism:
Surely it is important that several traditions furnish accounts of personal inwardness in an intellectually syncretic period like the Renaissance, which tends to respect those traditions even while shaking religious and philosophical ideas loose from their original moorings and recombining them in new arrangements. The lengthy, complex pedigree of general notions of personal inwardness helps sustain their ecumenical acceptability in an age that honors the authority of the past.30
The process of valuing ancient ideas in the period, while at the same time recreating them within new contexts (reimagining them through emulation), led to an ongoing kind of rivalry with the ancients. This often rivalrous relation with the past embroils Hamlet as he seeks to use humanist ideas of emulation to understand appropriate action in a difficult, highly specific circumstance, blending (among others) Christian doxy, his father’s model of manhood and feudal kingship, rhetorical awareness and dissembling, humanist learning, and ancient notions of honor and valor. It is then not surprising that Hamlet finds himself “lodged within incommensurable metaphysical systems” and entangled by—trapped within/between—the derivative complex of socio-cultural systems of always only partially blended thought and practices.31
These systems and Hamlet’s use of emulative reading, his repeated pattern of identification and dis-identification with models around him, reminds me of Kenneth Burke’s ideas about how character is always lodged within social systems:
[I]dentity is not individual, … a man “identifies himself” with all sorts of manifestations beyond himself … . The so-called “I” is merely a unique combination of partially conflicting “corporate we’s.” … Sometimes these various corporate identities work fairly well together. At other times they conflict, with disturbing moral consequences. … One’s participation in a collective, social role cannot be obtained in any other way. In fact, “identification” is hardly other than a name for the function of sociality.32
Hamlet’s personal sense of identity is tied up in identifications (and dis-identifications) with disparate elements of the cultures around him (ancient and contemporary).33
The multiplicity of identifications, including rejected ones, embodied in Hamlet bears out the challenges of identification and self-construction, as the play literally represents/figures the finding of identity, of self, within the conflicting beliefs of the time. One example is found in Ophelia, an overt construct of social and cultural pressures: the advice (and overbearing) of her father, the pressures of Laertes, the wooing and subsequent unseemly and misogynistic behaviors of Hamlet, and the loss of her father at Hamlet’s hands, among other influences. In her madness, we see a character unraveled down to core pieces of cultural material, pieces of songs and folk beliefs, cultural matter and lore related to flowers and other natural images, catchphrases and commonplaces (4.5.1–74, 152–98). Ophelia, psycho-socially unwrapped, un-pieced, on the stage, indicates the depths of social and rhetorical identification, the ways in which social and cultural patterns become indelibly part of identity, even after a central governing sense of self is destroyed or has eroded. She literally becomes, on the stage, a collection of cultural fragments, potential identifications, citations without a center, imitative practices that lack a sense of order, judgment, decorum, or arrangement.
Hamlet, facing similar pressures, carries through the play a relentless desire to find sense in his current circumstances through investigating ancient and contemporary patterns with an emulative mindset.34 This emulative mindset could be described as a limited construction of self as a response to a multitude of cultural identifications and comparisons, an often unrecognized socially-influenced self-fashioning pervasive in this period and repeated in Hamlet, particularly by Hamlet himself. Throughout the play, we see Hamlet compare himself to others to differing degrees. In nearly every case, he appears to see himself through a given pattern, seeking for self- and social understanding and for precedents for choice and action through the models observed (a mode of rhetorically-based reading as a move to judgment and character construction, such as Quintilian espoused and Christiansen develops), generally seeking in some way to adapt or outdo each perceived pattern.
With the Player, for example, Hamlet responds to at least two layers of emulative patterning, each revealing the pitfalls and complexities of emulative readings, as well as how deeply Hamlet is entrenched in his epistemological dilemmas. First, he calls for the playing of Pyrrhus and Hecuba, each a model with several clear applications to his own circumstances. One obvious personal application of Pyrrhus for Hamlet is as an example of a successful revenger, able to kill a king he held responsible for his father’s death (and one who, in Euripides, also responds to his father’s ghost’s call for revenge, killing Polyxena, who revealed Achilles’s only weakness). But Pyrrhus raises other issues and implications as well. While he is successful in his revenge, he is also notably brutal and bloody and, in the Aeneid, even calls himself “degenerate” and speaks of his “sorry deeds”—not the noblest exemplar perhaps.35 Hamlet is aware of these alternate readings of Pyrrhus’s character, seeing “the hellish Pyrrhus” as a “Hyrcanian beast,” “Black as his purpose,” and “horridly trick’d / With blood of fathers, mothers, daughters, sons” (2.2.459, 446, 449, 453–4).36 And, while Hamlet could, as emulation often requires, reshape the pattern, taking only the aspects that are positive and outdoing the model through a more productive, contextual revision of the pattern, Pyrrhus comes with further significant baggage as a potential model, which seems to stymie Hamlet’s appropriation of his example. Pyrrhus, from within Roman traditions especially, is an example of a regicide—and thus a parallel to Claudius’s successful slaying of Hamlet’s father. In Kastan’s phrasing: “Pyrrhus, then, becomes a figure both of the avenging son and of the father’s murderer, subverting any moral distinction in the single example which shows at once ‘virtue her feature’ and ‘scorn her own image.’”37 To ponder on Pyrrhus’s example is to open up deep moral quandaries about revenge, regicide, and redemption, among other troubling topics. Indeed, emulating complex examples is rarely as simple as many rhetorics or treatises seem to suggest. Further, Pyrrhus can also be read as a parallel example to Paris, who killed Pyrrhus’s father: “[Pyrrhus] kills Priam as Priam’s son [Paris] killed Pyrrhus’ father, and the symmetry and reciprocity mock the moral authority the revenger would claim.”38 Moral example is confounded in an enactment that can be, simply, read in too many ways—a problem Hamlet faces repeatedly in the text—the “rival interpretations” that MacIntyre noted. Emulative reading, despite Summers’s assertions that it offers a more robust example to work from than a simple commonplace (as we also see in Titus), relies on a tremendous degree of judgment and application. Almost anything can be found in cultural models. And with careful analysis almost every example reveals multiple, challenging layers and intimations.
Hamlet’s interest in Hecuba seems to accentuate the ability (perhaps even fairly natural tendency) to seek individual emphases and meanings even in well-known traditional stories and figures. Hecuba is generally known as a figure of great sorrow, as we see her here in Hamlet, but usually for her sons’ deaths and not specifically because of Priam’s death as the lines in Hamlet emphasize:
When she saw Pyrrhus make malicious sport
In mincing with his sword her husband’s limbs,
The instant burst of clamour that she made,
Unless things mortal move them not at all,
Would have made milch the burning eyes of heaven
And passion in the gods. (2.2.509–14)39
The performance here, which Hamlet has requested, focuses on the deep sorrow of Hecuba for her husband’s death, a model it seems reasonable to assume he wishes his own mother would emulate. Hamlet has called for a version of the story that matches his own current situation and frustrations. Of course, that Hecuba’s suffering is caused by Pyrrhus only adds to the complexities Hamlet faces in reading this text emulatively. It may be noteworthy that Hecuba is also a well-known figure of revenge herself, having avenged Polydorus’s death on Polymester and his family. Whatever the case, it seems Hamlet sees these texts emulatively, selecting texts with strong parallels and applications into his own life, though also confounded to a degree by the richness and contradictory nature of these examples.
Second, Hamlet responds directly to the Player’s passion, which is such that Polonius calls off the performance: “Look whe’er he has not turned his colour and has tears in’s eyes. Prithee no more” (2.2.515–16). Hamlet wishes to have the kind of passion that the Player has, or at least compares himself to the Player in terms of a “cue for passion”:
O what a rogue and peasant slave am I!
Is it not monstruous that this player here,
But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his own conceit
That from her working all his visage wann’d,
Tears in his eyes, distraction in his aspect,
A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
With forms to his conceit? And all for nothing!
For Hecuba!
What’s Hecuba to him, or he to her,
That he should weep for her? What would he do
Had he the motive and the cue for passion
That I have? (2.2.544–56)
Hamlet compares himself to the Player directly, not just in terms of what he enacts, but how the Player does so. In fact, what stands out most to me in these lines is how much Hamlet is struck by the Player’s ability to make his body and every aspect of himself work to the same effect, to construe his singular conceit in such a concerted performance, matching his words and actions with striking and evocative decorum. Further, Hamlet’s question of “What would he do” suggests exactly the mode of abstract emulative thinking, beyond direct parallels to imagined ones, like a schoolboy’s assignment to explore a question in terms of how an exemplary figure would act. Hamlet here figures his educative practices into his daily life.
Hamlet has earlier separated what is interior to him, what “seems” from what “is” in terms of distinguishing between “actions a man might play” and what he has “within which passes show” (1.2.65, 84, 85).40 Yet, here he sees a man act in such a way that every element is drawn together to represent what is not in such a way that it truly seems to be, with the Player appearing to actually feel and experience what he is enacting. Hamlet is clearly taken by this performance and its actuality, continuing to emphasize the power of the Player to
drown the stage with tears,
And cleave the general ear with horrid speech,
Make mad the guilty and appal the free,
Confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed
The very faculties of eyes and ears. (2.2.556–60)
Hamlet compares his inaction to the Player’s abilities to perform, though into his lines begin to leak important distinguishing terms. Hamlet speaks of being able to “say nothing” (564) and while he does speak of actions—“fatt[ing] all the region kites / With this slave’s [Claudius’s] offal” (575–6)—he ends, as he recognizes, simply “unpack[ing] my heart with words” (581). He sees that in his search for a show of passion, he has moved to “cursing like a very drab” (582), rather than translating a chosen model into any specific action relevant to his cause. This distance between seeing an example enacted and finding a way to actualize the cues into one’s own life and circumstances repeatedly confounds Hamlet and is linked to the broader challenges of emulative theories, how much of the exercise actually translates into behavior or changed character. Hamlet does, of course, here concoct the plan to “catch the conscience of the King” (601), working to use emulative theater to his own ends, hoping Claudius will literally (and revealingly) see himself in the actors on the stage, as humanists expected of active viewers (though even this is finally skewed by Hamlet linking the killer to the “nephew of the King” (3.2.239), muddying his evidentiary waters a bit).
The exchange with the Player offers a multi-tiered example of Hamlet’s seeing himself and others’ actions in terms of models (both textual and lived), and it is only one of many such examples enacted in the play. We see Hamlet comparing or modeling himself off of, to differing degrees, Pyrrhus, Fortinbras, his own father, the Player King, Claudius, Laertes, Hercules, Caesar, Alexander, Lucianus, and Horatio, at least, as well as applying precedents to generate judgments (often scathing ones) of those around him: referring to Juvenal in discussion with (and of) Polonius, seeing Claudius in terms of Old Hamlet on multiple occasions, comparing Gertrude to Niobe and Hecuba, and, quite likely, applying Gertrude’s actions to his perception of Ophelia—not to mention other links such as Paris to Claudius, Old Hamlet to Hyperion, Laertes to himself, and many more.
Shakespeare is not covert about this tendency of Hamlet to see one thing (especially people) in terms of another, to constantly compare and weigh actions based on precedents from life and textual examples. Ophelia’s statement that Hamlet was himself a paragon and model of the virtues of the time resonates with our view of Hamlet throughout the work—he has, it seems, always seen himself in the reflection of great examples (as perhaps his father did we might infer) and striven to construct himself as
The courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s, eye, tongue, sword,
Th’expectancy and rose of the fair state,
The glass of fashion and the mould of form,
Th’observ’d of all observers. (3.1.153–6)
This is emulative self-fashioning at its purest. Through Ophelia’s eyes, we see Hamlet as persistently acting in comparison to the ideals of the time and serving as a model to others.41
Our first introduction to Hamlet has him punning on customary beliefs about family (kin and kind) and questioning the cultural commonplaces surrounding death.42 Famously, he retorts to his mother’s attempt to assuage him by seeing death as common with a comparison of his feelings to those he has seen played, finding sense in what he sees as a distinct difference (a dis-identification) between playing a role as an actor or portraying an emotion and actually possessing such an emotion, an attempt toward insight into an inwardness that is distinct from outward behavior, but also an attempt to separate art and life in a way contrary to his other attempts to conflate them (reflective of Maus’s and Christiansen’s work cited above):
Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not “seems”.
’Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,
Nor customary suits of solemn black,
Nor windy suspiration of forc’d breath,
No, nor the fruitful river in the eye,
Nor the dejected haviour of the visage,
Together with all the forms, moods, and shapes of grief,
That can denote me truly. These indeed seem,
For they are actions that a man might play;
But I have that within which passes show,
These but the trappings and the suits of woe. (1.2.65–86)
Meaning in these early lines from Hamlet comes through cultural and social assumptions and practices (it is interesting to me that, even as he rejects the validity of these outward practices, the lines suggest he enacts them—these are indeed actions he has manifested to the queen and court). We also see here that Hamlet already links his own sense of self to the fashioning of the theater, to acting and the idea of show, and its limits. Here and throughout the play, we see Hamlet strive to determine how he can present himself truly, how he can manifest what is unseen within him in a way that is truthful and distinct from what a player can present. He may be denying the ability to represent what is within him, but he is doing so in terms of attempting to find a way to manifest to his mother (and the larger audience of the court) his true feelings and inward nature (and, later, as the plot turns, to dissemble these feelings most effectively). Hamlet is engaged in understanding the difference between pretending and really being and of showing (or concealing) the self—the blurry line between sincerity and dissembling. Hamlet tries in this speech to use words to construct himself “truly” and show his true self and emotions. He also attempts to distinguish played actions from his sincere and felt ones (and later to play at insincere actions and feelings). The blending of drama and rhetoric in these early lines becomes essential to Hamlet’s desire to represent what he believes is authentic. How do you point to or enact something in such a way that another could not also do the same insincerely? Hamlet attempts to use words, creating dissonance through verbal emphasis and dis-identifications. If we apply Martin’s model, Hamlet strives to create a pure persona of sincerity, but keeps running up against, for the rhetorically aware, the impossibility of distinguishing presentation from representation in a social sphere.
Following hard on these lines of theatrical and rhetorical distinction, Hamlet’s first monologue (1.2.129–59) revolves around self-construction (and de-construction, including “self-slaughter”) in response to divine edict through extended metaphors based on a kind of imitative and precedent-based perception, such as seeing Old Hamlet as Hyperion and Claudius as a satyr, and seeing the world itself as an “unweeded garden / That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature / Possess it merely” (135–7). The speech also includes Hamlet’s first (of many) applications of ancient precedents to current situations and actions: in this case, using Niobe’s inconsolable grief as a model to question Gertrude’s quick remarriage, seeing his own mother as acting inappropriately, indecorously, based on past precedent:
Must I remember? Why she would hang on him
As if increase of appetite had grown
By what it fed on; and yet within a month—
Let me not think on’t—Frailty, thy name is woman—
A little month, or ere those shoes were old
With which she follow’d my poor father’s body,
Like Niobe, all tears—why, she—
O God, a beast that wants discourse of reason
Would have mourn’d longer—married my uncle,
My father’s brother—but no more like my father
Than I to Hercules. (1.2.143–53)
Notice how Hamlet constructs meaning through aphoristic phrases (such as “Frailty, thy name is woman”) and by repeated layers of associations, parallels, and comparisons (love to appetite, time to the wearing out of shoes, Gertrude to Niobe, and Claudius to Old Hamlet to himself to Hercules and back, disparagingly, to Claudius).
Throughout this first monologue, Hamlet’s railing against God’s edict prohibiting suicide, his repeated emphasis on his father’s merits (compared to Claudius, and using Hyperion and Hercules as models/measures), and his misogynistic rant against his mother in terms of Niobe, each make clear that Hamlet sees his life as informed through the lives and patterns of others (past and present). He appears to have adopted absolutely Ascham’s humanist injunction to see “all the works of nature” as models to be followed or at least observed.43 Further, Hamlet’s insistence on memory and remembering (here and even more emphatically after his first visitation by the Ghost and at the time of his own death, among other moments in the play) recalls this rhetorical canon and memory’s explicit role in self-fashioning. The success of rhetorical self-fashioning depends on the incorporation of examples, generally through words, into the mind and self. There is a sense in which memory becomes the key to the humanist idea of imbibing great texts directly into the self.44
Even Hamlet’s now most famous lines, his “To be, or not to be” speech (3.1.56–88), are based on philosophical precedent, cultural patterns (the Celts who ran into the sea, for example, rather than facing overwhelming enemies), rhetorical modes of inquiry, and, among other patterns of emulation conjured in his mediation, a fear of the uncertainty of death, in part because there are no known or certain precedents for life after death, no prior experienced pattern for “what dreams may come” (67), no “traveller return[ed]” (80) offering examples or models.45 Harold Jenkins has said, “For all their brilliant use, the ideas of the speech are for the most part traditional. Even the outline of its argument has its anticipation in Augustine.”46 It is not really a surprise that one of Shakespeare’s most lasting pieces is spoken by a character who is based on an earlier play and several even earlier texts, saying lines drawn from a variety of sources—and yet none of that diminishes the work; in fact, this is arguably the source of the depth and resonance that the lines hold. What frequently stands out in Shakespeare’s works is the distinct distribution and execution of familiar materials, the emulative use of what has been done previously (others’ feathers), but in a way that is distinguishing and striking, distinctively now his own. As developed in the previous chapter, seeing this speech as enacting traditional modes of disputation and inquiry of the period emphasizes Shakespeare’s detailed examination of emulation and related modes of patterning endemic in the period.
In terms of the play and rhetorical thought, Hamlet is engaged in this speech in a humanist practice of exploring a theme from opposing perspectives, an idea that has significant roots in the period, as Joel Altman has developed.47 And these lines also show us a potential glimpse into Hamlet’s own active practice of self-fashioning, as he attempts to negotiate a tricky real-world choice, using a method that by its very nature provides for as much enlightenment as it does perplexity, a potentially perilous balance on the horns of dilemma. Altman specifically mentions Hamlet as an example of the way that transcendence through deep humanist questioning of this kind, allowing for “some vision of truth,” came into question: “Hamlet, the courtier, soldier, and scholar, standing on the edge of Elizabethan humanism, gives eloquent testimony to the failure of deep-searching wit to extricate itself from the limitations of its own conditions.”48 For Hamlet, these lines showcase the ways in which humanist theory, emulation included, does not necessarily provide any certain form of clarity or a way out of difficult situations—in fact, the character that is finally shaped by these lines seems more adept at destabilizing meaning than finding it. Summers argues that Hamlet learns to dismiss commonplaces for anti-adages, “constant reminders of the limits of certainty, either moral or epistemic,” such as “one may smile, and smile, and be a villain,” which while insightful offers nothing specific with which to make choices.49 Shakespeare is not emphasizing Hamlet’s remarkable success in finding a solution to his situation through his brilliant insights and wit; rather, the play emphasizes how Hamlet finds himself repeatedly facing circumstances that adumbrate his modes of thinking and methods for gaining insight and taking appropriate action.
Hamlet’s rejection of Ophelia, which immediately follows the “to be or not to be” speech (3.1.88–151), also uses commonplaces of thought in the period, especially common misogynistic concepts, such as the proverbial relation of beauty and honesty, the fallen nature of man, and the counterfeiting inherent in cosmetics and social niceties. The speech also shows Hamlet’s own views as heavily socially influenced and based on general as well as personal precedent. He rejects her largely, in his own words, based on a kind of constructed amalgam of precedent based on the aggregate errors of humanity, “We are arrant knaves all” (129), though with a specific and horrid misogyny: “Why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?” (121–2), “if thou wilt needs marry, marry a fool; for wise men know well enough what monsters you make of them” (139–41), and “I have heard of your paintings well enough. God hath given you one face and you make yourselves another. You jig and amble, you lisp, you nickname God’s creatures, and you make your wantonness your ignorance” (144–8). In each case (and in many I have not cited), he speaks generally, often using commonplaces, drawing conclusions abstractly from precedents but applying them specifically to Ophelia. One example, the final judgment of wantonness, may derive from Elyot’s The Governor.50 In 1.5 of The Governor, Elyot emphasizes the need for nurses and “other women” serving a young boy being prepared for a proper humanist education to
speke none englisshe but that, whiche is cleane, polite, perfectly, and articulately pronounced, omittinge no lettre or sillable, as folisshe women often times do of a wantonnesse, wherby diuers noble men, and gentilmennes chyldren (as I do at this daye knowe) haue attained corrupte and foule pronunciation.51
The focus on women here reflects Hamlet’s brand of misogyny. Note also that like Ascham (as cited in Chapter 1), Elyot further suggests (and Hamlet actively compounds) the idea that linguistic error and indecorum lead to moral laxness and gross social failings. The errors of women are united with a slippery slope of social error, making, for Hamlet, women generally responsible for the false “breeding” of all men and the failings of the social world. Hamlet’s rejection of Ophelia may also be tainted by his own awakening frustration and horror about his mother’s sexual agency and freedom. Whatever the case, Hamlet’s thinking, at its deepest and its most disturbed, relies powerfully on informing constructs of precedents and patterns, reflecting (and examining) social and cultural beliefs and intellectual, humanistic modes of inquiry within the period.
This pattern of judgment based on earlier precedent and cultural models continues throughout the play, and more than just colors Hamlet’s perception; it also extends to the very shape and nature of the play Shakespeare constructs, as we cannot help but see the play in relation to, among other things, Homer and Greek culture, Virgil and Roman culture, Seneca and the complicated Roman/British amalgam of the revenger tradition, and Saxo, Amleth, and Danish culture. In Shakespeare’s hands the work (and Hamlet’s position) becomes a nexus of ideas, cultural patterns, and intertextual stitching. According to Girard, Shakespeare’s approach to Hamlet also reflects (though Girard doesn’t recognize it in these terms) a remarkable moment of emulative supremacy over other writers of the theater. He outdoes them all and at the same time subtly (to the knowing audience) undermines their theatrical approach:
Some writers who were not necessarily the worst found it difficult, we are told, to postpone for the whole duration of the lengthy Elizabethan play an action that had never been in doubt in the first place and that is always the same any way. Shakespeare can turn this tedious chore into the most brilliant feat of theatrical double entendre because the tedium of revenge is really what he wants to talk about, and he wants to talk about it in the usual Shakespearean fashion; he will denounce the revenge theater and all its works with the utmost daring without denying his mass audience the catharsis it demands, without depriving himself of the dramatic success that is necessary to his own career as a dramatist.52
Girard claims, and I think his reading is strong, that one reason for this powerful layering in Hamlet is to show the repeated consequences of revenge, in any culture, as finally self-defeating. He argues that “the weariness with revenge and catharsis that can be read, I believe, in the margins of the earlier plays must really exist because, in Hamlet, it moves to the center of the stage and becomes fully articulated.”53 Later, he adds, with evident sarcasm,
Why should a well-educated young man have second thoughts when it comes to killing a close relative who also happens to be the king of the land and the husband of his own mother? This is some enigma indeed, and the problem is not that a satisfactory answer has never been found but that we should keep looking for one.54
The case for Hamlet as a text against revenge is strong (and, unlike when Girard wrote, finally gaining prevalence in academic discourse); however, it is only a part of what the play is about. The repetition of questionable models (such as Pyrrhus “Black as his purpose” [2.2.449] and smeared in blood—and even Old Hamlet’s insistence on revenge), similar to what occurs in Titus, further emphasizes the impact of patterns of self-construction (often destructive) in response to cultural pressures (the masculine patterns of violence Hamlet experiences are certainly an example of this) that affect the ability to determine appropriate action.55 In Hamlet, a special emphasis is placed on what the play calls “emulate pride” (1.1.86) as a significant factor in self-determination and the social challenges of self-fashioning in the period.
Perhaps the single most memorable instance of emulation’s effects in Shakespeare’s works appears in Hamlet, when Horatio speaks of Old Hamlet who was “by Fortinbras of Norway, / Thereto prick’d on by a most emulate pride, / Dar’d to the combat” (1.1.85–7). This single recalled moment, a moment of two great feudal warlords battling according to deeply traditional patterns over socially-determined spoils and, as Horatio’s line emphasizes, particularly over personal honor, provides a significant backdrop to the play, a backdrop that emphasizes emulation’s place in this period as a shaping influence at a broad social level as well as at an individual level. Emulate pride is one manifestation of emulation’s place in a competitive culture, in this case one deeply embedded in practices related to honor and martial success. And, while Horatio seems to link the pride to Old Fortinbras (the grammar here allows for the potential application of “emulate pride” to either king, though Fortinbras is the most immediate antecedent), Old Hamlet’s choice to respond in kind, risking lands and life (91), demonstrates his embrace of the emulative course of action as well.56 While emulate pride is clearly an emotional state, it closely links to the pressures of identification and self-fashioning that I have been discussing and is grounded in the enactment of emulative self-fashioning; it is part of the affective state that reinforces and motivates emulation. This moment, using Christiansen’s terms, significantly conflates words and actions, as Old Hamlet embodies his character in this contest and responds to emulate cultural precedents that link martial success and honor—words, actions, and character.
This combat precipitated by emulate pride motivates young Fortinbras to prepare for war against Denmark at the beginning of Hamlet and thus provides one possible strong rationale for Gertrude’s “o’er hasty marriage,” as she perhaps attempts to shore up the country under a mature and present king, Claudius, rather than Hamlet (which may well have been part of Claudius’s calculated machinations). Her marriage could thus be read as a motherly and protective act. Claudius’s early speech in the play, which artfully blends his supposed grief over Old Hamlet’s death and his joy in marriage to Gertrude, also implies that part of the haste of the moment is because of the nation’s “warlike state” and to deal with Fortinbras’s desire for Denmark to “surrender those lands / Lost by his father, with all bonds of law, / To our most valiant brother” (2.2.9, 23–5). Claudius’s foundational political speech (and rhetorical show) uses young Fortinbras’s political challenge, occasioned by Old Hamlet’s successful defeat of Old Fortinbras, to license his own marriage and claim to the Danish throne—in what appears to be Claudius’s own emulative besting of his brother. Whatever else it is, this speech reflects a calculated kairotic moment, a rhetorical seizing of the day to bring about the cementing of Claudius’s goals and plans, and a move to powerfully construct his character (or, perhaps more accurately, his persona) in response to this moment.
Old Hamlet’s moment of emulate pride provides a backdrop for Claudius’s actions, as he too enacts, though not by sealed contract but by poison and betrayal, a similar emulative move to possess what his brother had, to indeed overdo his brother, to perhaps prove himself a better king, a more savvy and capable (even if deceptive) politician, maybe even a better father. Claudius specifically lists his ambition among “those effects for which I did the murder— / My crown, mine own ambition, and my queen” (3.3.54–5). Claudius’s ambition (and resulting acquisitions and opportunities) can be considered another iteration of following the model of emulate pride; his ambitious move mirrors Old Hamlet’s successes (and, from what little we know of his actions, may also mirror Old Hamlet’s drive for martial, power-based emulative successes).
The early moment of emulate pride not only acts as a precipitating event for the back story of Hamlet; this moment (and model) of emulation arguably underlies all of Hamlet’s struggles and uncertainties in the play. His efforts to shape himself and his actions respond often to the shaping of character that this moment represents—a shaping that is laden with social implications, the choice of how one wishes to be perceived, the choices related to how one chooses to shape character in response to the social pressures and expectations that emulation often embodies.
For Hamlet (ironically, perhaps) young Fortinbras comes to represent (at least within Q2) the pattern of martial heroism that his own father exhibited—a pattern he feels he has failed to follow appropriately as he watches Fortinbras lead his army to Poland to “fight for a plot … / Which is not tomb enough and continent / To hide the slain” (4.4.62–5) and “hath in it no profit but the name” (19):
I do not know
Why yet I live to say this thing’s to do,
Sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and means
To do’t. Examples gross as earth exhort me,
Witness this army of such mass and charge,
Led by a delicate and tender prince,
Whose spirit, with divine ambition puff’d,
Makes mouths at the invisible event,
Exposing what is mortal and unsure
To all that fortune, death, and danger dare,
Even for an eggshell. Rightly to be great
Is not to stir without great argument,
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
When honour’s at the stake. (4.4.43–55)57
We have already been told this battle is a substitution of sorts (what kind depends on specific readings of the play) for Fortinbras’s desire to fight for the lands his father lost to Old Hamlet, so the parallel to Hamlet and to the previous example of emulate pride that I believe haunts Hamlet (both character and play) is further strengthened. Fortinbras, as seen through Hamlet’s eyes in these lines, seems to exemplify a sense of his own father’s willingness to fight for honor (for pride), despite any quantifiable worth or value beyond “the name.” Hamlet’s valuing of Fortinbras’s example is further emphasized as he gives his “dying voice” to Fortinbras (5.2.361).
Hamlet, as I discussed earlier, repeatedly sees himself in terms of those around him, particularly men following traditional male roles, such as his father and Fortinbras. Despite his growing awareness of the limits of this model, he seems unable to escape these traditional models, to decide on a different course of action or model. The emulative mindset, grounded in humanist ideologies of rhetorical self-fashioning and exemplarity, is complicated, but never disabled, by levels of incongruent assumptions and patterns of belief. Hamlet, for example, recognizes the limits of the models of Alexander and Caesar, great humanist exemplars, in the graveyard scene as he speaks of their return to earth and of Alexander being used to “stop a beer-barrel” and “Imperious Caesar, dead and turn’d to clay” used to “stop a hole to keep the wind away. / O that the earth which kept the world in awe / Should patch a wall t’expel the winter’s flaw” (5.1.205, 206, 207–9). But despite this recognition, Hamlet nonetheless, within just a few lines, proclaims himself in emulative appropriation of his father’s name and title: “This is I, / Hamlet the Dane” (250–51). And then he follows his father’s example, after a manner, butting heads with Laertes in what certainly appears to be another example of emulate pride (though with, at least seemingly, much smaller stakes), a contest in this case to proclaim his affection for Ophelia as being greater than Laertes’s love, a contest that is more about words than actions, but still about shaping who Hamlet is and quite specifically how he is received and perceived—rhetorical concerns linked to emotionally-driven pride and socially-constructed ideas and models of self. (I will return to further develop the significance of this scene later in this chapter.)
Hamlet’s final voice given for Fortinbras—despite his earlier recognition that he went to war merely “for an eggshell,” for a plot of land too small to contain the dead of the wars needed to claim it (4.4.53)—and his urging of Horatio “to tell my story” (5.2.354), each accentuate his final valuing of traditional models of emulation and the desire to see himself represented well in terms of these models. It doesn’t seem a coincidence that Horatio is also the character who first tells us of Old Hamlet’s heroic contest against Old Fortinbras, and we may wonder if Shakespeare suggests that behind this earlier story lies a more complicated tale, like Hamlet’s, shortened and adapted to match the humanist ideals of exemplarity, which Horatio, “the scholar,” presents (1.1.45).
This pattern of emulate pride also fits into Hamlet’s repeated emphasis on ancient precedents perfectly, providing a parallel to the actions of Pyrrhus and the other sons who repeatedly strive to outdo their own fathers or other male patterns, to gain the kind of honor (and questionable successes) that Shakespeare interrogates heavily in Troilus and Cressida, as suggested in my introductory discussion of Ulysses’s lines to Achilles.58 Indeed, all precedents seem to inform against Hamlet, and not just this pattern and its many shadows and iterations. It is the powerful overlay of patterns, skillfully deployed by Shakespeare, that create for Hamlet a patterning of near puzzle-like dimensions—historical and contemporary customs, examples, and precedents of wooing, marriage, thinking, fighting, learning, acting, self-fashioning, and more that together leave him (rhetorically aware and highly educated) momentarily paralyzed among models.59
Hamlet’s awareness, emphasized in rhetorical training, powerfully penetrates what others take for granted, though leaving him at times more confused than empowered. Danner argues aptly for Hamlet’s freighted place and fractured, dissonant sense of self (gesturing to similar ideas and complexities to those with which I began this chapter, but particularly emphasizing textual history—I quote at length to offer the needed view of the scope of his comments):
Rather than speak of Hamlet’s expanded consciousness, then, it would be more accurate to describe it as burdened, fraught with contradictions inherent in a narrative whose complex reception and reinvention stretch back to the ninth century. The notorious inconsistencies in Hamlet’s behavior lie less in theories of dramatic structure or character psychology than in the historical discontinuities of the Amleth legend—a narrative that is overwritten and reinterpreted with new values and assumptions without ever being reconciled to its previous incarnations, worlds that range in setting from pagan to Christian, Catholic to Protestant, medieval to Renaissance, Elsinore to Wittenburg, in versions from Saxo to Belleforest to Kyd, to at least three distinct versions of Shakespeare. Among the many breaches in “continuity” created by these reinterpretations, several appear key to Hamlet’s dislocated sense of self: the classical conception of Fortune against which one must “take action” (3.1.59) as opposed to the Christian definition of a Fortune that the mind must “suffer” (1.57); the related contrast between a pagan principle of the wyrd, the radical uncertainty of Fate against Christian, specifically Tudor Protestant, definitions of providentialism epitomized in Hamlet’s “Let be” (5.2.220); an honor code rooted in a mystique of violence as opposed to a modern culture of courtiership that refashioned dueling as rarefied sport or mere brawling; a fervent and palpable belief in the existence of purgatorial spirits as opposed to a reformation skepticism that viewed Purgatory as a superstitious “vacancy.” These competing realities form not merely the detached “background” against which characters function; they serve as central authorities for their motives and cues for passion.60
Hamlet, though not aware, of course, within the world of the play of many of these levels of narrative intertextualities (or aware at all, really; much criticism seems at times to forget he is merely a dramatic character), recognizes some of these ideological fractures and inconsistencies (and their corresponding authorities, as Danner puts it). His awareness can be seen as a burden of too much understanding without a sense of how to respond properly—knowledge without epistemic clarity and corresponding methods for judgment and selection. Life, the play may suggest, is easier (though not necessarily better) if we do not question our role in the drama of the world. Further, the play appears to specifically enact fractures within the current culture, placing Hamlet as an astute (though imperfect) observer in the midst of cultural clashes, amplifying aspects of the times with his rhetorically sharp and emulatively-driven perspective. Hamlet embodies the multiple valences of potential and conflicting, though still culturally available, models.
In contrast to Hamlet and his attempts to wrest choice and action out of a complex and model-burdened position, Laertes (as well as Fortinbras and others) acts (or reacts) within the most traditional and dominant patterns of precedent.61 As Girard notes:
The simple and unreflective Laertes can shout to Claudius “give me my father” and then leap into his sister’s grave in a wild demonstration of grief. Like a well-adjusted gentleman or consummate actor, he can perform with the utmost sincerity all the actions his social milieu demands, even if they contradict each other. He can mourn the useless death of a human being one minute, and at the next he can uselessly kill a dozen more if he is told that his honor is at stake.62
It is finally Laertes’s passionate commitment to precedents (including contradictory ones) that seems to offer Hamlet a pattern that he cannot resist; arguably, a parallel moment to his father’s contest of emulate pride finally fully overcomes Hamlet’s questionings, and Laertes’s enacted pattern of what a son and young nobleman supposedly should do catapults Hamlet into his final (socially, historically, and dramatically prescribed) role.
From their paired introductions after Claudius’s inaugural address, Laertes and Hamlet are linked in the play, each a young man hoping for education, advancement, and opportunities away from court, an opportunity for a degree of autonomous self-fashioning in an appropriate mode for the period. Through the deaths of Old Hamlet, Polonius, and Ophelia the pairing becomes more concrete, as Hamlet recognizes much later:
But I am very sorry, good Horatio,
That to Laertes I forgot myself;
For by the image of my cause I see
The portraiture of his. (5.2.75–8)
And Laertes too may see this parallel portraiture, when, after poisoning Hamlet with his blade (and being poisoned in turn), he chooses to reveal to Hamlet that Claudius was behind Gertrude’s death: “Thy mother’s poison’d. / I can no more. The King—the King’s to blame” (5.2.325–6). However, as the remainder of Hamlet’s lines to Horatio indicates, each of these young men is motivated by an emulative passion that leads to the vengeful actions that close the tragedy:
For by the image of my cause I see
The portraiture of his. I’ll court his favours.
But sure the bravery of his grief did put me
Into a tow’ring passion. (5.2.77–80)
Rationally, Hamlet can dismiss his behaviors as inappropriate and unfounded, but beyond that, as he recognizes (and Laertes also enacts along with Hamlet), there is an affective motivation, social, personal, psychological—emulative—that neither young man can escape, a pattern of deeply engrained action.
As I mentioned earlier, it is when confronted with Laertes’s hyperbolic grief for Ophelia that Hamlet finally takes upon himself his father’s name, emerging as “Hamlet the Dane” before the stunned funeral-goers and the enraged Laertes, who has just cried for Hamlet’s death (speaking in echoes of traditional prophetic precedents of cursings):
O, treble woe
Fall ten times treble on that cursed head
Whose wicked deed thy most ingenious sense
Depriv’d thee of. (5.1.239–42)
Laertes continues in his ranting (after leaping into the grave with his sister) to call for their burial mound “T’o’ertop old Pelion or the skyish head / Of blue Olympus” (246–7). Hamlet is, of course, not alone in this play (or period) in using patterns of comparisons to ancient and mythical precedents. And Hamlet, in his tow’ring passion, will come forward to compete with Laertes in this game of precedents, this o’ertopping with “such an emphasis” (248), perhaps not all that different (affectively) from Old Hamlet and Old Fortinbras’s contest of emulate pride: “Forty thousand brothers / Could not with all their quantity of love / Make up my sum. What wilt thou do for her?” (264–6). Though Hamlet follows this up with a further rant of outlandish precedents and measurements, “eat[ing] crocodiles” and piling “Millions of acres” of dirt to “Make Ossa like a wart” (271, 276, 278), Laertes (under Claudius’s tutelage) turns to a duel, a more traditional form of expressing excesses of male emulate pride.
As Hamlet responds to Laertes’s emotive enactment of emulate pride he also finds a kind of peace (or at least resolution) within the play. Similarly, it is in his reactions to Claudius’s machinations that he earlier seems to begin to find surer purpose and motivation to action (which can be noted in the progression of his “What a rogue and peasant slave am I!” speech to his resolution to try his Mousetrap: “The play’s the thing” [2.2.544–601]). Though his self-declaration and seemingly more fixed purpose derives from his response to Laertes (who is, of course, also a part of Claudius’s maneuverings). It is after his encounter with Laertes and in discussion of his actions against Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, that he shows a shedding of his doubts and hesitations, embracing a degree of rashness and even indiscretion (5.2.7, 8), as he follows his father’s example of martial combat, dared to it by another opponent full of emulate pride. Hamlet’s professed readiness (5.2.218) comes after Laertes (with Claudius’s urgings) has summoned him to martial, emulative trial—a contest laden with deep cultural models and ripe with historical (and personal) precedents.
However, as I mentioned above, Laertes and Hamlet do not mutually recognize the similarity of their situation until after Laertes has wounded Hamlet and recognizes that Claudius has also allowed Gertrude to drink the cup, poisoning his own wife. At this point, Laertes sees the villainy of the King and reveals to Hamlet the private machinations of Claudius. Those infected with pride are commonly seen in the period as self-destructive and blind, as Shakespeare’s Agamemnon states, echoing proverbial patterns of belief and commonplaces of the time, in Troilus and Cressida: “He that is proud eats up himself. Pride is his own glass, his own trumpet, his own chronicle” (2.3.152–4).63 These lines open up a distinct view of emulate pride, creating a sense of emulation in terms of a mirror that emphasizes how emulation can lead to the reading of others carefully and critically, but also to a certain blindness about oneself as a result, a blindness that Laertes experiences (and arguably Hamlet as well) and that, through Claudius’s efforts, leads to the final tragic paired deaths.64
Questions of decorum and discretion pervade Hamlet, finding their clearest development and enactment at the structural center of the play, within Hamlet’s “Speak the speech” lines. The joined idea of social appropriateness and rhetorical decorum forms a thematic center of the play, significantly informing rhetorical self-fashioning and Hamlet’s humanist interrogation of his situation. As developed by Christiansen, the ability to judge how, when, and in what way to apply earlier precedents in character-fashioning is governed by decorum.65 Decorum connects directly to the emulative self-fashioning of Hamlet, providing the means to judgment and self-awareness needed to generate iterations of the self within social spheres (even Hamlet’s indecorums are grounded in an awareness of what is considered “antic” and purposefully inverting what would be appropriate).66
In 3.2, Hamlet’s advice to the players focuses on the idea that one should “Suit the action to the word, the word to the action” (16–17). By itself this idea represents a core rhetorical concern of decorum (taken to a performative level), ensuring that action and word coincide and reinforce each other, that there is absolute appropriateness (an appropriateness that, through performance, touches on the overlap of the aesthetic and ethic which I discussed earlier). However—despite vehement arguments by many rhetoricians, including many in the Renaissance, to the opposite—this appropriateness in words and action is finally social and socially constructed; it can only be judged according to extant cultural beliefs and practices, a point the play explores.
Hamlet adds to these lines a “special observance”: “Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance, that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature,” adding that the “purpose of playing … was and is to hold as ’twere the mirror up to nature” (3.2.16–18, 20–22). By including these words, Hamlet connects his thoughts on decorum and acting to something seemingly universal and absolute: nature and its functions.67 Hamlet seeks, following the precedent of many rhetoricians (such as Ascham), to create a decorum that extends beyond social and cultural appropriateness and to link the theater to an absolute—to create an argument for theater as a potentially accurate and insightful reflection of nature (thus, also a worthy mirror for exemplarity and character modeling). However, Hamlet’s own frequent linking of nature to “things rank and gross” (1.2.136) undercuts his attempt to imagine a universalizing model in nature, as do the other repeated negative natural images throughout the play, not to mention Hamlet’s own repeated sense of the separation between the actions a man might play and what is internal.
Hamlet’s comparison of the world to “an unweeded garden / That grows to seed” full of the “rank and gross” (1.2.135–6) suggests that for him nature’s “modesty” has become corrupted, as has the whole world. It is possible to assume that Hamlet means to refer to something akin to only the modest aspects of nature, but even in that case “nature” remains a complicated term, not easily used to create broad or universal patterns of decorum—and of course judging what is modest requires tremendous discretion. Hamlet’s terms “rank” and “gross” each include a sense of the deeply indecent and a lack of judgment and discretion.68 Things in nature (at least within the world as garden metaphor) are, in Hamlet’s mind, grown in an almost universal sense far beyond any reasonable limit of decorum. His counsel to the actors appears, in his own terms, already flawed; perhaps the advice is simply hopeful, but, given his bleak perspective the gesture to nature is suspect, hardly a sturdy foundation for decorum, for action, or for decision.
Hamlet’s association of nature and the garden with things gross and with deep indiscretion is not limited only to his monologue on self-slaughter and his distaste of the uses of the world. Indeed, there seems to be a strong link between the world and the fall of man, the rank indiscretions that Hamlet reflects on throughout the play. The Ghost’s recount to Hamlet of his continual suffering for “the foul crimes done in my days of nature” (1.5.12) suggests this link between the fallen world and fallen man, and the description of the murder reifies this idea, repeatedly being described as foul (25, 27, 28)—even before it is known (1.3.255–8)—and follows the pattern of the “primal eldest curse” (3.3.37), the slaying of a brother for envious reasons, which in Biblical sources occurs not long after the fall of man and the loss of a perfect garden world. The poisoning of Old Hamlet and Hamlet’s refiguring of the event (the poisoning in The Mousetrap) each are specifically located in a man-made natural setting, an orchard or garden (cf. 1.5.35 and 3.2.255–8). Similarly, The Ghost’s description of the event also includes repeated emphases on natural imagery (stars, porcupine quills, serpents, weeds, roots, beasts, the poison itself, the body and its functions, bark, “blossoms of sin,” thorns, etc.). Much later in the play, Hamlet’s letter to England, ensuring the deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, wallows in natural imagery, linking his deceptive rhetoric to nature: “As England was his faithful tributary, / As love between them like the palm might flourish, / As peace should still her wheaten garland wear” (5.2.39–41). Hamlet’s “many such-like ‘as’es of great charge,” link the falseness of metaphors to a falseness of language and rhetoric, oratory and politics, offering a broad view of the failures of his society, rooted in a failed sense of nature as uncared for (unweeded) by people. The links throughout these examples also connect a suspicion of the natural world (of which man is part) with a suspicion of the character of man and man’s uses of nature.
These links, especially given Hamlet’s focus on rhetorical flourishes, recall Henry Peacham’s The Garden of Eloquence (1577) and thus also link rhetorical facilitas and copia (the desire to obtain a seemingly endless ability to speak and endless matters on which to speak—the eternal flowering of rhetoric, as it were) to a destabilization of language and politics and, more broadly, the unweeded garden of Hamlet’s view of the world.69 While, of course, part of the idea of an unweeded garden is that it is a man-made and then not man-maintained aspect of nature, the idea also reflects a natural tendency to disorder, not order, counteracting Hamlet’s claim to the players and the broader notion of nature as a source of order and decorum. The link to language cements rhetoric as a contributory force toward indecorum rather than the heralded source of judgment on which decisions can be safely and appropriately based.
Powerfully, nature remains throughout the play not as a great universal on which judgment can be based, but like language itself, a term that can be bandied and modified and corrupted; in fact, nature appears often as an entity already determined as corrupted before the play begins.70 Nature and discretion (a term closely linked to decorum in the Renaissance) are alluded to in Claudius’s introductory rhetorical speech, in which he manipulates events to look as positive as possible despite the questionable actions he has taken. He calls the memory of Old Hamlet “green” and goes on to excuse his indecorous wedding to Gertrude, “Yet so far hath discretion fought with nature / That we with wisest sorrow think of him / Together with remembrance of ourselves” (1.2.5–7). Here it is nature, including the natural inclination to self-possession and to (veiled) cupidity, which is reflected as the opposite of discretion.
Ophelia is introduced to us through extensive natural imagery, while her madness and death, results of the effects of emulate pride the play depicts, also reflect nature, but as something disjointed, literally “out of joint” (1.5.196) in this young woman driven mad. Ophelia is first introduced to us through Laertes’s language of flowers and nature, specifically in terms of Hamlet’s questioned amorous advances and the briefness of love, like a flower—as it turns out these images also relate to the shortness of Ophelia’s life, the flowers (real or imagined) of her madness, and the garlands of her death:
For Hamlet, and the trifling of his favour,
Hold it as a fashion and a toy in blood,
A violet in the youth of primy nature,
Forward, not permanent, sweet, not lasting,
The perfume and suppliance of a minute,
No more. (1.3.5–10)
These lines lead to Laertes’s extended “hortatory speech,” as Jenkins calls it, discussing the growth of our natures, including the specific social and political demands on Hamlet’s nature and station, which in turn lead to Ophelia’s counter advice to Laertes to not himself take “the primrose path of dalliance” (50).71 Nature and flowers, in Ophelia’s words, are connected to social (and religious) indecorums. The beauty of flowers is repeatedly linked to a misrepresentation of action and word, thought and deed, an indecorous model for flashy rhetoric that contrasts with Hamlet’s advice to the players, but reflects directly his own letter to England calling for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s death and the rhetorical flourishes there connected with deception and disorder. Natural imagery in Laertes’s and Ophelia’s lines reflects the superficial and the purposefully deceitful—flowers linked to false flourishes of rhetoric, false choices in life.
The term “nature” also connotes Hamlet’s own feigned madness, Hamlet’s playing, as did Amleth in the Saxon tale, of the natural or the fool, safe in an enemy’s court because unquestioned, safely disordered and marginalized. The OED cites “natural” as meaning “A person having a low learning ability or intellectual capacity; a person born with impaired intelligence,” as well as “A person whose moral or spiritual sense is either unawakened or uneducated, or is deduced only through human reason.” This second definition raises very specific moral questions about being natural. In either case, nature cannot be unproblematically assumed as a source of permanent or absolute judgment for decorum.
One last example, one that connects several of these points together and is perhaps particularly interesting since these lines have been often cited as the central moral of the play (while I disagree with this overt emphasis, the lines are, however, indicative of many significant lines of thought and development in the play).72 Arguably, the single most powerful reference to these ideas, linking nature, decorum, and human action, comes from Hamlet as he speaks of Claudius before seeing the Ghost, waxing general in his observations:
So, oft it chances in particular men
That for some vicious mole of nature in them,
As in their birth, wherein they are not guilty
(Since nature cannot choose his origin),
By their o’ergrowth of some complexion,
Oft breaking down the pales and forts of reason,
Or by some habit, that too much o’erleavens
The form of plausive manners—that these men,
Carrying, I say, the stamp of one defect,
Being Nature’s livery or Fortune’s star,
His virtues else, be they pure as grace,
As infinite as man may undergo,
Shall in the general censure take corruption
From that particular fault. The dram of evil
Doth all the noble substance often dout
To his own scandal. (1.4.23–38)
Here we see the critical ideas of nature and decorum (“plausive manners”) tied together in a way that counteracts agency and suggests that individual error may derive from outside of one’s control, at least in some cases. In contrast, Hamlet insists later to Gertrude that “use almost can change the stamp of nature, / And either [lodge] the devil or throw him out / With wondrous potency” (3.4.170–72). The limits of self-fashioning, discussed earlier, find resonance between these sets of lines. The general humanist sense of self-construction is not discarded, merely noted as limited, affected by aspects of personae outside of an individual’s control. Hamlet’s lines about Claudius suggest the powerful impact of influences beyond one’s control (both natural and social), but this is tempered by the humanist idea of individual power to change in Hamlet’s counsel to Gertrude. Neither model is given final supremacy in the play, though the humanist mode seems much more heavily critiqued and questioned (and Hamlet’s own final repetition of emulative behaviors can be read as reemphasizing the limits of humanist ideas of self-fashioning).
Nature, then, can be and is drawn on frequently in the play, most specifically in Hamlet’s assertions to the players, to evoke or construct a sense of universal decorum (in both aesthetics and ethics), the linking of action, whether staged or lived, to prescribed patterns, based on particular precedents, ideals, and norms. This kind of thinking results in a socially-positioned reading of nature that depends on a great deal of prior matter and beliefs to inform the ideas of appropriateness—this is a situated reading that pulls on deeply embedded and assumed commonplaces and ideological beliefs.73 Nature is read through frames of thought and social patterns that inform Hamlet’s actions (or inaction) in terms of Christian, Roman, and early modern patterns of thought and belief (each, I should add, a diffuse body of multiple and complex systems). Further, Hamlet’s clause about nature’s modesty suggests a kind of Aristotelian idea of rhetoric, one in which the observance of patterns in the world around us acts as the great model to be followed—not transcendent truths such as Plato sought, but empirical truths found by analyzing what is around us.74 In fact, this kind of Aristotelian modeling connects precisely into the relation of emulation and decorum: emulation is based on models, whether current or past, but the selection of these models is highly affected (and limited) by social and rhetorical notions of decorum and appropriateness, as Hamlet profoundly experiences. Indeed, much of the rhetorical tradition offers nature (and natural talent) as a given that is beyond education in a sense, as I discussed in Chapter 1.
Hamlet pushes such a constructed notion of nature, nature as he sees it or believes it should be, onto the actors, in terms of delivery. His emphasis on naturalness (as he sees it) in acting in fact conflicts with historical traditions of acting (which he himself makes reference to in his speech), not just in the early modern period, but also in Roman and Greek traditions, the supposed precedents and models of Renaissance theater, which emphasized declamatory language and stylized notions of presentation and delivery. Interestingly, his counsel to the clowns to “speak no more than is set down” contrasts with one idea of the natural role they play in the theater and emphasizes how scripted and contrived Hamlet’s ideal here of naturalness really is (3.2.39). Further, Hamlet himself is a consummate student of appearances and acting, engaging in dissembling that purposefully avoids the kind of linking of words to action that he here espouses (though, yes, in his role as revenger is appropriate). In fact, the practice and success of his dissembling (not to mention the many conventions and precedents for dissembling’s repeated successes, historically and theatrically) deeply questions the entire notion that any mode of accurate character reading can exist. Hamlet’s own readings of Claudius, Laertes, and his mother are further made questionable by what we as an audience see and overhear on stage, as are Hamlet’s reading of earlier precedents, such as Pyrrhus and Hercules, as they are morally questionable and easily appropriated for varied purposes.
Hamlet’s own reading of the greatness of Caesar, now become a cork, is as I have discussed, soon discarded by Hamlet as he attempts in the closing scene of the play, wounded and poisoned, to explain his own story to the shocked audience of the final tragic scene:
You that look pale and tremble at this chance,
That are but mutes or audiences to this act,
Had I but time—as this fell sergeant, Death,
Is strict in his arrest—O, I could tell you— (5.2.339–42)
Failing in telling his own story, he pleads with Horatio to faithfully “Report me and my cause aright” (5.2.344). The emphasis is on linking his tale, his previously occluded choices and his conflicted self-fashioning, to a social decorum that he believes can come from a proper telling of his experiences. However, we as an audience see immediately how his tale is appropriated by Horatio and Fortinbras in conflicting (and quite limited) stories of Hamlet. His own self-fashioning finally is subsumed into multiple and diverse potential readings, tellings, and appropriations.
Horatio, the scholar (and humanist), speaks of him as a “noble heart. Good night, sweet prince, / And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest” (364–5), emphasizing Hamlet’s relative innocence and also the lessons to be learned from what has transpired (linked specifically to the stage as a place of such learning from contemporary precedents):
[G]ive order that these bodies
High on a stage be placed to the view,
And let me speak to th’yet unknowing world
How these things came about. So shall ye hear
Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,
Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters,
Of deaths put on by cunning and forc’d cause,
And, in this upshot, purposes mistook
Fall’n on th’inventors heads. All this can I
Truly deliver. …
But let this same be presently perform’d
Even while men’s minds are wild, lest more mischance
On plots and errors happen. (5.2.382–91, 398–400)
Horatio’s concerns are for proper understanding, a sense of ordered nature, and a performance of learning and enactment of appropriate judgment.
Fortinbras, Hamlet’s own seeming ideal of action and fortitude, aside from being concerned for “some rights of memory” in Denmark (394), emphasizes Hamlet as untested but an ideal of action, worthy of military honors and rites:
Let four captains
Bear Hamlet like a soldier to the stage,
For he was likely, had he been put on,
To have prov’d most royal; and for his passage,
The soldier’s music and the rite of war
Speak loudly for him. …
Go, bid the soldiers shoot. (5.2.400–405, 408)
Fortinbras’s concern is with honor and action, seemingly reading Hamlet in terms of Fortinbras’s own sense of himself.
The singing of Horatio’s angels and the volleys of shots by Fortinbras’s soldiers jar, as do Horatio’s and Fortinbras’s mixed purposes (as their lines, embedded in each other’s, represent). Horatio seems to wish to stage a kind of humanistic lesson in exemplarity and appropriate action (a moment of stately stagecraft), while Fortinbras is preparing for a military tribute and a potentially politically advancing moment (a moment of staged statecraft), though Fortinbras is also concerned with decorum, as he specifically calls for the removal of “the bodies. Such a sight as this / Becomes the field, but here shows much amiss” (406–7). The appropriation of Hamlet (which has continued now for centuries) has already begun, the play not quite over. Additionally, the appropriation of the proper emphases, uses, and understanding of decorum, suggested throughout the play, continues as well. Quintilian argued that “Speech indeed is very commonly an index of character, and reveals the secrets of the heart. There is good ground for the Greek saying that a man speaks as he lives.”75 Hamlet repeatedly overturns this idea, revealing again and again the conflicted and uncertain nature of character and of nature itself and the limits of any means of reading and judging the “truth” in or about another through words and actions.
The linking (and questioning) of decorum and acting, proper choice and self-fashioning, is reiterated in the text in the use of the keyword “discretion.” Hamlet prefaces his comments on the need for actions to suit words with the phrase “let your own discretion be your tutor” (3.2.16–17), that same word Polonius uses to judge the merit of Hamlet’s own acting with the Player (2.2.463). As David Hillman has pointed out, using most specifically Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie (1589), discretion is in Raymond William’s sense of the term “one of the ‘keywords’ of the English Renaissance.”76 Discretion functions to limit social mobility, acting as an intangible, unteachable trait which only some have, a term designed to separate, to enforce difference. It is specifically linked to rhetoric as a means of determining propriety in language, but it carries further resonances as a means of judging (and excluding) others’ lives as well as texts.77 Puttenham specifically attempts to show that decorum and discretion (an aptitude for judging and enacting decorum, of acting based on proper judgment) are natural means for this kind of social discrimination.78 Hamlet relies on these kinds of exclusionary beliefs and fears for their loss. For example in the graveyard scene these are the kinds of issues that seem to plague him—the idea that a shifting of values (which he is recognizing and experiencing) can lead to social upheaval that may make his own life, like that of his father, undervalued, even forgotten—one of the last things, as I have just discussed, on Hamlet’s mind as he prepares to die.
Hamlet makes much of the gravemaker’s rough treatment of his social betters’ remains. Social distinction is central to the gravemakers’ discussion before Hamlet appears: “Will you ha’ the truth an’t? If this had not been a gentlewoman, she should have been buried out o’ Christian burial” (5.1.23–5). To which the other replies: “Why, there thou say’st. And the more pity that great folk should have countenance in this world to drown or hang themselves more than their even-Christians” (26–9), leading to the further discussion of there being “no ancient gentlemen but gardeners, ditchers, and gravemakers” (29–30). Though the scene is farcical, it certainly levels the commonplace idea that nobility was a social construction and that while it could not be questioned practically due to embedded social hierarchies it was easily interrogated and seen as groundless even by the lowest classes. Beyond this, the gravemakers’ act of connecting their profession to Adam and to a time before nobility and other social distinctions, not to mention the link between the gravemaker and the return of Christ (5.1.59), represents a kind of extreme overdoing of precedent-seeking and self-patterning. The gravemakers are engaged in an ultimate move of one-upmanship self-fashioning, which resonates with (and perhaps in part motivates) Hamlet’s own coming emulative contest with Laertes in Ophelia’s grave.
Hamlet laments the lack of social distinction, closely related to the social discretion that Puttenham argues only certain (elite) members of society possess, complaining to Horatio that “this three years I have took note of it, the age is grown so picked that the toe of the peasant comes so near the heel of the courtier he galls his kibe” (5.1.135–8). His emphasis on social distinction recalls Girard’s work on how imitation can destroy social differentiation, “leaving the society in a state of undifferentiated chaos”—exactly what Hamlet seems to fear most (and in part may believe has already occurred).79 Horatio notes the indecorum of the gravemaker, who appears to have no respect for death, singing as he works: “Custom hath made it in him a property of easiness” (67), but Hamlet presses it further, emphasizing specifically the impropriety of great politicians and courtiers, lords and ladies, being “knocked about the mazard with a sexton’s spade. Here’s fine revolution and we had the trick to see’t. Did these bones cost no more the breeding but to play at loggets with ’em? Mine ache to think on’t” (88–91). Note how Hamlet presses the moment to a connection to his own condition, an application to himself, as almost a personal offense. Hamlet appears largely concerned throughout this scene with the forgetting of great men, like his father, Alexander, Caesar, and, perhaps by extension, himself. The pattern of emulate pride continues. And this pride is shown to be linked to questions of discretion, questions of social distinction that are foundational in the shaping of selves through emulation.
Discretion and appropriateness interlace throughout the play, often connected with moments of self-fashioning (often related to patterns of social distinction, but also used by Claudius in his first highly rhetorical speech to show himself in the best possible light) and representation (such as Hamlet’s instructions to the players). As I have already discussed, Ophelia represents, in her madness, a sense of total social indecorum (even as she, in the sense of poetics, also perfectly reflects her current state and character in her shattered words). However, earlier she is also linked possibly to Hamlet’s initial donning of madness, like Amleth, to throw off suspicion in his search for safe revenge—a perfect example of self-fashioning and of breaking word from deed (and a moment of self-representation that is still vehemently questioned and discussed in terms that recall Martin’s dyad of Renaissance selves: is Hamlet sincere and reflecting his inner, disturbed emotional state or is this moment staged and designed to accentuate his needed feigning—or of course could it be some blending of the two?). The link to discretion and propriety is noted by Shakespeare as Ophelia recounts to Polonius Hamlet’s visit to her, disheveled, undone, inappropriate in attire (and also again linked to foulness):
My lord, as I was sewing in my closet,
Lord Hamlet, with his doublet all unbrac’d,
No hat upon his head, his stockings foul’d,
Ungarter’d and down-gyved to his ankle,
Pale as his shirt, his knees knocking each other,
And with a look so piteous in purport
As if he had been loosed out of hell
To speak horrors, he comes before me. (2.1.77–84)
Not only is Hamlet indecorous in appearance, but there is questionable propriety is visiting Ophelia in her quarters—especially after she has directly “denied / His access to me” (2.1.110). His actions suggest, as Ophelia claims, speech, the need to talk to her, but are distanced from the reality, in that he never speaks a word to her—his actions here are markedly indecorous and do not match his (lack of) words.
Polonius links Hamlet’s actions before Ophelia to love which “does afflict our natures” (2.1.106) and chides his own lack of judgment and ability to read Hamlet’s character better:
I am sorry that with better heed and judgment
I had not quoted him. I fear’d he did but trifle
And meant to wrack thee. But beshrew my jealousy!
By heaven, it is as proper to our age
To cast beyond ourselves in our opinions
As it is common for the younger sort
To lack discretion. (2.1.111–17)
Note that Polonius links his error to an appropriate failing of his age and similarly links discretion to an expected error in the temperament of youth. The inability to judge in Hamlet, as in Titus, is rampant and here directly tied to failings in human nature by Polonius.
Hamlet’s moment of greatest overt indiscretion (except perhaps at Ophelia’s grave, which I have already discussed) is facing Claudius after the murder of Polonius. Hamlet reiterates his own fascination with social distinction in his face-off with his uncle. Hamlet has made much throughout the play about the lack of discretion in everyone (especially his mother) in not noting and making more of what he sees as the unmistakable distinctions between Old Hamlet and the current King. Here, before Claudius, he puns on this lack of distinction and its broader place in the kingdom, the rotten state of Denmark, noting the lack of physiological difference between a beggar and a king, as well as between people and maggots: “Your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service—two dishes, but to one table” (4.3.23–4), likely the table of the “convocation of politic worms” or for the maggots to which Hamlet has just referred (20, 23). The idea of “politic” worms, of course, reemphasizes the lack of any means of deep distinction. Hamlet then follows with a punning on the scripturally-based lack of a difference between father and mother: “Father and mother is man and wife, man and wife is one flesh; so my mother” (54–5). He sets up the slippery nature of distinction, punning his way to a seeming disregard for social discretion.
However, while Hamlet jests about such indiscretion and loose judgments with Claudius, he seems consumed with discretion in the graveyard and earlier in the play as well. Recall, for example, his assertion that the speech of the Player, which he clearly values highly, was “never acted, or if it was, not above once—for the play, I remember, pleased not the million, ’twas caviare to the general” (2.2.431–3). The lack of popular distinction appears to irk Hamlet, the self-presented theatrical aficionado. Interestingly, the speech’s scene also has Polonius discoursing on discretion—this time in relation to Hamlet’s delivery of the opening lines to the Pyrrhus scene (2.2.463). And Hamlet, in praising the Player, specifically notes his ability to attain perfect decorum in his presentation, “his whole function suiting / With forms to his conceit” (2.2.550–51).80
Hamlet appears often as a kind of aestheticist (especially in his interactions with the players), with literary and rhetorical training, coming to terms with the reality that much of what he has grounded his life on is socially constructed and transitory. Rebhorn emphasizes the ways in which decorum was particularly employed in the Renaissance to create social and cultural distinctions, even elitism.81 Hamlet matches the patterns that Rebhorn shows, modeling assumptions from his learning and rhetorical training in socio-cultural differences (and the need to constantly reinforce these perceived and perceptual differences). Hamlet continues to insist, as he does with the actors, that discretion, nature, and social beliefs should be fixed and reliable, even as he experiences the ways in which they clash and lead to uncertainty and indiscretion. We also see in the Ghost this kind of forced assertion of natural order. As he speaks to Hamlet he reasserts again and again that his death was “unnatural,” since it went against blood ties, the law, and against religious beliefs. He specifically links this kind of unnaturalness with the “foul” and “strange”—each variations on the aesthetic and ethic intercrossings of decorum (1.5.25–8). The Ghost is of course also intent on being remembered. We see repeated in Hamlet issues with social place and remembrance, along with society’s beliefs and foundations, issues that Hamlet appears to become more and more interested in through the graveyard scene and into his final lines of the play.
As I explained above, it is finally only after Claudius and Laertes offer tangible, lively patterns of emulate pride, direct models of emulative self-fashioning, that Hamlet moves to action amidst his perpetual conundrums with socially-determined decorum, with its endless possibilities for interpretations and appropriations. Hillman may well be right in arguing that Hamlet finally also learns the impossibility of Puttenham’s exhorted “perfit discretion,” that such a thing cannot exist in a malleable social world, and in turn rejects decorum’s limitations, adopting instead rashness.82 As he tells Horatio, “prais’d be rashness”—going on to specifically discount decorum, “Our indiscretion sometime serves us well” (5.2.6, 8). I am reminded of Aristotle’s discussion of delivery, which suggests the impossibility of finally being able to please all audiences (as perfect discretion might be expected to do):
But since the whole business of rhetoric is with opinion, one should pay attention to delivery, not because it is right but because it is necessary, since true justice seeks nothing more in a speech than neither to offend nor to entertain; for to contend by means of the facts themselves is just, with the result that everything except demonstration is incidental; but, nevertheless, [delivery] has great power, as has been said, because of the corruption of the audience.83
Aristotle intends his lines to be a censure of rhetoric and delivery in some degree, to show rhetoric to be a lesser practice because it is based on opinion and limited by its audience’s judgment (or discretion). Aristotle wants to cling to a universal, as does Hamlet, but he also recognizes that persuasion depends on an audience which requires attention to things like delivery and decorum (though decorum properly belongs to Roman theory, the core aspects of it lie in Aristotle’s discussions of delivery and arrangement).84
Though Aristotle heavily disparages the need for style and delivery in his comments, wishing that logical persuasion alone would be sufficient to persuade, he still concedes delivery as being “something that has the greatest force.”85 He adds, “For it is not enough to have a supply of things to say but it is also necessary to say it in the right way, and this contributes much toward the speech seeming to have a certain quality.”86 Interestingly, delivery (hypokrisis) generally means acting (in fact, it is the root of hypokritēs, an actor, and the progenitor of our term for one who dissembles and presents false feelings, a hypocrite). Aristotle’s concerns bring Hamlet’s actions to mind—his same words, if not acted as if in feigned madness, would have been treasonous at times and unacceptably rude at others. But thinking in terms of delivery also reifies the link between acting, decorum, ethos, and self-fashioning. Hamlet learns the force of delivery and decorum, finally dismissing the need to accommodate for all audiences and instead focusing on only a few, certainly Horatio and Laertes (and perhaps the Ghost), finally enacting the revenger role thrust upon him perfectly, or at least so Fortinbras and Horatio, in different ways, want us to believe.
In many ways then Hamlet continues Shakespeare’s work in Titus, emphasizing the destructive pattern that emulation in rivalry creates and the tangled, problematic nature of a self-referential notion of judgment or decorum. Even a seemingly great king, by social and political standards of his time, who successfully engages in emulative rivalry, ends up beginning a pattern that leads to horrible deaths, “Such a sight as … shows much amiss” (5.2.406–7), including the end of his own royal line. Hamlet’s actions, as I have discussed, are directly tied up in emulative patterns. He recognizes the patterns he should follow, based on his father’s example (and the Ghost’s commandment) and other social and theatrical precedents, but he finds himself locked within disparate modes and patterns of self-construction, uncertain about the commandment to kill his uncle, struggling against the Ghost’s command to leave his mother “to heaven” (1.5.86), and seeking to find a pattern of behavior to follow—from ancient examples, such as the conflicted Pyrrhus, to the contemporary Laertes, “the card or calendar of gentry” (5.2.109–10), a socially-perfect current model Hamlet seems finally unable to resist.87 He has broad perspective, as Aristotle’s Rhetoric emphasizes, but also seems perpetually uncertain in applying this awareness, and is overwhelmed by questions of decorum and custom, full of concern with how he will be reported—how appropriate his actions will be judged.
Perhaps the play’s many uses of rhetoric, from self-fashioning to political duplicity to Hamlet’s particular quest for humanist enlightenment through rhetorical reasoning, are also meant to demonstrate the potential and the limits of rhetoric as an agent for and means within social change. The argumentum in ultramque partem (arguing of each side) of rhetoric, which Altman explores, allows a recognition of the multiple modes of action and thought extant. Rhetoric can be powerfully informing, but within the world of this play it is also finally insufficient for creating meaningful social changes, as exemplified in Hamlet’s often discussed paralysis and his final reactionary success as a revenger, deriving from his intense rivalry with Laertes (and, by extension, a reiteration of his father’s and Fortinbras’s examples). Central to Renaissance society and humanist education was the ability to argue de copia, with endless variations and repetitions, including an exercise of alternating counters to each point (a kind of invention process through opposing ideas dialectically). Joel Altman has shown that argumentum in ultramque partem generates an ability to see contradicting ideas at nearly the same moment, to live within ambiguity, and to find an (uncomfortable) place between options—reflected in Hamlet’s final unsettled position between rashness and discretion, a recognition of the instability of narrative and his desire for his story to be told properly.88 Taken to an extreme, however, seeing both sides of any question leads to a kind of suspension of choice and moral action—a kind of hyperawareness that can be paralyzing and unproductive. While this kind of thought process (exhibited, for example, in the “To be, or not to be” speech) may lead to the ability to glimpse new ways of comprehending and considering our existence, what the play reifies is the finally powerfully persuasive nature of what is current and known. Hamlet, at least, seems unable to use his rhetorically inventive insights to find a clear way to reimagine the revenger’s role.
Further, from Claudius’s first great speech (a masterful if manipulative discourse) to Polonius’s reliance on commonplaces and his duplicitous and overwrought language to Hamlet’s rhetorical musings (each an emulative use of language), the play emphasizes the ways that words—often at the core of social beliefs and the means for remembering and transferring precedents—shift and can be enacted, deployed, and questioned in the process of understanding an individual’s role within society. Twelfth Night, generally considered to have been written about the same time as Hamlet, also enacts this emphasis, as Feste too puns on kings and beggars in order to argue that “A sentence is but a cheverel glove to a good wit, how quickly the wrong side may be turned outward.”89 Just as Hamlet specifically resorts to (and abuses) sententious knowledge, Feste’s words indicate generally the same ideas of how easily language and words, their meanings and uses, socially constructed as they are, can be turned back on themselves. Hamlet focuses on the dissociation of words and actions, a disintegration of traditional norms and values—a lack of rhetorical decorum in language that reflects a similar failure in decorous action and a deeply conflicted social system.
1 Perhaps the best critical work on mimesis in the period is Jonathan Holmes and Adrian Streete, eds., Refiguring Mimesis: Representation in Early Modern Literature.
2 J. J. M. Tobin, “Gabriel Harvey: ‘Excellent Matter of Emulation,’” Hamlet Studies: An International Journal of Research on The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke 7.1–2 (Summer 1985): 94–100.
3 David Scott Kastan, “‘His semblable is his mirror’: Hamlet and the Imitation of Revenge,” Shakespeare Studies 19 (1987): 111–24, 122. The citation here is to Leonard Diggs’s commendatory poem in the 1640 edition of Shakespeare’s Poems.
4 Kastan, “Imitation of Revenge,” 122.
5 Kastan, “Imitation of Revenge,” 113, 118.
6 Love’s Labour’s Lost, ed. H. R. Woudhuysen, in The Arden Shakespeare Complete Edition, Revised Edition, ed. Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson, and David Scott Kastan, 743–72 (London: Thomson Learning, 2002), 4.3.127–9.
7 Kastan, “Imitation of Revenge,” 122.
8 That Hamlet, a repetition of another play, is so widely heralded reiterates how expertly and inventively Shakespeare borrowed from and used other works to fashion texts that reflect the mimetic powers and interests of the time. (That the original play is lost certainly helps cement the place of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but as with Lear, Henry V, and many of his other works which have extant earlier versions, Shakespeare’s versions, with his particular method of blending the accepted and the conventional according to his own literary and rhetorical practices, stand out from similar pieces.)
9 Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2001), 254. Kastan intriguingly argues that Hamlet literally parallels Hamlet, as a descendant of a better-known Hamlet (for the play, Lodge’s record of an earlier, popular Hamlet and, for Hamlet, Old Hamlet), striving for recognition and enmeshed in multiple intertextualities. Kastan also argues that revenge itself is “a desperate mode of imitation, avenging wrongs with wrongs. The revenger is prevented from originating an action” (“Imitation of Revenge,” 113). As I hope to show, imitation, emulation for Shakespeare, was often desperate, fraught with a sense of distance and uncertainty, secondary and reactionary, based in and conflicted by unknown patterns of social behavior that are always prior to any particular moment of choice or action.
10 Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest (New York: Routledge, 1992); Rene Girard, “Hamlet’s Dull Revenge: Vengeance in Hamlet,” in A Theater of Envy: William Shakespeare, 271–89 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991); Greenblatt, Hamlet, 240.
11 Alasdair MacIntyre, “Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative, and the Philosophy of Science,” Monist 60.4 (October 1977): 453–72; repr. in Why Narrative? Readings in Narrative Theology, ed. Stanley Hauerwas and L. Gregory Jones, 138–57 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), 139.
12 David Summers, “‘—the proverb is something musty’: The Commonplace and Epistemic Crisis in Hamlet,” Hamlet Studies 20.1–2 (1998): 9–34.
13 Summers, “The Commonplace,” 11–12.
14 Cited in Summers, “The Commonplace,” 12. Two of the most obvious examples are Hamlet’s speech to his mother about seeming (1.2.74–86) and his “To be, or not to be” speech (3.1.56–88), but as I will develop, these issues are much more broadly entwined within the play. All citations are to the Arden Shakespeare edition of Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins (1982; repr. London: Methuen, 2003) and are given parenthetically.
15 Summers, “The Commonplace,” 10 (emphasis in original).
16 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning is the obvious beginning citation for current sustained inquiry into self-fashioning in Renaissance England. Greenblatt mentions that “The chief intellectual and linguistic tool in this creation [of new models] was rhetoric, which held the central place in the humanist education” (162), though little more has been done to develop this point. For responses to Greenblatt’s work on self-fashioning, see Jurgen Pieters, ed., Critical Self-Fashioning: Stephen Greenblatt and the New Historicism (New York: Peter Lang, 1999) and, on his work more broadly, H. Aram Veeser, ed., The New Historicism (New York: Routledge, 1989). Other responses to Greenblatt’s ideas include Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman, eds., Shakespeare and the Question of Theory (New York: Routledge, 1991), Jeffrey N. Cox and Larry J. Reynolds, eds., New Historical Literacy Study: Essays on Reproducing Texts, Representing History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1993), Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, eds., Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism, 2nd ed. (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1994), Jeremy Hawthorn, Cunning Passages: New Historicism, Cultural Materialism and Marxism in the Contemporary Literary Debate (London: Arnold, 1996), Claire Colebrook, New Literary Histories: New Historicism and Contemporary Criticism (Manchester, NY: Manchester Univ. Press, 1997), Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2000), and Jurgen Pieters, Moments of Negotiation: The New Historicism of Stephen Greenblatt (Amsterdam: Amsterdam Univ. Press, 2001).
17 John Jeffries Martin, Myths of Renaissance Individualism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), esp. 4–20. For Burckhardt, see The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S. G. C. Middlemore, 2 vols. (New York: Harper and Row, 1958).
18 Martin, Myths, 117.
19 Martin, Myths, 117.
20 Martin, Myths, 118.
21 John Dugan, Making a New Man: Ciceronian Self-Fashioning in the Rhetorical Works (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2005).
22 Dugan, Ciceronian Self-Fashioning, 6. The significance of stoicism in Renaissance self-fashioning has been discussed in the previous chapters and will receive more attention in the following chapters as well. Perhaps the best work on the topic is Gordon Braden’s Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition: Anger’s Privilege (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1985).
23 Arguably, this may be one aspect of why Hamlet finally adopts a fortuitous vision of life: “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will” (5.2.10–11). The recognition that one cannot finally shape all aspects of life (which Hamlet seems to come to see) reinforces, especially for the clearly Christian Hamlet of the play, a belief in divinity and a letting go of some significant aspects of self-construction. The choice to “defy augury” also could be linked to the Stoical sense of recognizing influences outside of his control, the points of greater immutability Panaetius points out.
24 Nancy Christiansen, “Rhetoric as Character-Fashioning: The Implications of Delivery’s ‘Places’ in the British Renaissance Paideia,” Rhetorica 15 (Summer 1997): 298. James S. Baumlin, “Ciceronian Decorum and the Temporalities of Renaissance Rhetoric,” in Rhetoric and Kairos: Essays in History, Theory, and Praxis, ed. Philip Sipiora and James S. Baumlin, 138–64 (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 2002), argues for a similar linking of human action with the study of decorum and rhetoric. He appropriates Nancy S. Struever’s work in The Language of History in the Renaissance: Rhetoric and Historical Consciousness in Florentine Humanism (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1970), arguing for its significance to “English Humanists”:
For Continental Humanists, then, as for Cicero, “rhetoric was a coherent body of knowledge of human behavior with a special focus on the relation of discourse to action” (Struever, 116), one placing “a high value on a sense of opportunita (kairos)” and “a grasp of the relationship of choice to circumstance” (Struever, 116). (139)
25 This is an idea given critical portrayal and questioning within Shakespearean drama, such as in Duncan’s assertion, proved correct beyond his intention in Macbeth, that “There’s no art / To find the mind’s construction in the face” (Macbeth, ed. Kenneth Muir, in The Arden Shakespeare Complete Edition, Revised Edition, ed. Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson, and David Scott Kastan, 773–99 [London: Thomson Learning, 2002], 1.4.11–12).
26 Christiansen, “Character-Fashioning,” 298.
27 Margaret W. Ferguson explores this distinction in Hamlet’s purposeful destabilizing of language in the play, arguing that this destabilizing also “highlights the thin but significant line that separates those realms [of deeds and words]” and “the play raises all sorts of questions about the boundary between speaking and doing” (“Hamlet: Letters and Spirits,” in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman, 292–309 [1985; repr. London: Routledge, 1991], 292, 299).
28 Katharine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness in Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1995). Maus uses Hamlet’s insistence on the separation of his internal state from outward show as the launching point of her work (see esp. 1–7).
29 Martin’s work is grounded in these same issues, as his study uses the testimonies and trials of the Inquisition to map the self and its layers, to assert a relational dynamic between the inward and outward selves (see esp. Myths, 6–8).
30 Maus, Inwardness, 13.
31 Maus, Inwardness, 13.
32 Kenneth Burke, Attitudes Toward History, 3rd ed. (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1984), 263–4, 266. Italics in original.
33 Renaissance England, especially at the turn of the century when Hamlet was likely written (and in which the concerns of the play are set, not the Denmark of Amleth), was a time of great ideological flux, as Eric Mallin has argued in Inscribing the Time: Shakespeare and the End of Elizabethan England (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1995), making for a particularly conflicted time in which to try to identify.
34 Robert Weimann, “Mimesis in Hamlet,” in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman, 275–91 (1985; repr. London: Routledge, 1991), perhaps comes the closest (other than Girard) to making this idea explicit, as he emphasizes the intensely mimetic nature of Hamlet, claiming that “the question of mimesis is central” to the play. However, Weimann’s focus is on the limits of theoretical frames in understanding Shakespeare’s rich and conflicting uses of mimesis:
As the following study of Hamlet attempts to show, Shakespearean mimesis comprehends so many functions that neither the traditional or classical nor the poststructuralist approach to mimesis can do justice to them all. (278)
Weimann specifically counters Girard’s focus on “isolat[ing] the conflictual element of nonrepresentational mimesis, its primordial pattern of instinctive action, rivalry and victimage” with an assertion of a theory of “Aneignung or appropriation” (288). However, I think that his theory, in a different way than Girard, also fails to locate the work within the theory of its own period. The rich and nuanced theories of the period (and our best efforts to recreate these through the many theoretical texts remaining), especially rhetorical theories, offer so much insight into the work.
35 Virgil, Aeneid, 2.549, 548.
36 Kastan has noted that the idea of Hyrcanian beasts, citing Barnabe Rich’s Friar Sebastian, relates to those who “revenge themselves on their own bowelles, some Parricides, some Fratricides, all Homicides” (“Imitation of Revenge,” 114).
37 Kastan, “Imitation of Revenge,” 113.
38 Kastan, “Imitation of Revenge,” 114.
39 Jenkins, in an extended footnote, explores Hecuba’s textual history, which emphasizes her “as the extreme type of sorrow,” though generally because of “her further afflictions after Priam’s death” (Hamlet, 2.2.497LN).
40 This difference, between what is acted and what is actually felt, echoes Quintilian: “Again, whatever resembles another object is bound to be less than what it imitates, just as the shadow is less than the body, the picture less than the face, and the actor’s performance is less than the emotions of real life” (Orator’s Education, 10.2.11). For this reason Quintilian emphasizes the need to surpass what is being imitated, not to merely try to resemble it: “it is generally easier to improve on something than simply to repeat it” (10.2.10). Quintilian offers several examples to support his point, such as a man trying to follow another in order to win a race (instead of attempting to best the other): “no one can draw level with a man in whose footsteps he feels bound to tread” (10.2.10). For Hamlet, this belief in the secondariness of an actor’s emotion collides with his own experience, as he feels that the Player’s emotional response is greater than his own.
41 Jenkins notes (Hamlet, 3.2.155fn) the parallel between these lines and Henry IV, Part 2, “He was the … glass … That fashion’d others” (2.3.31–2), possibly Nashe (see Jenkins, Introduction, 105), and also North’s Plutarch. The levels of intertexuality and citation that we saw in Titus continue, more subtly but just as relentlessly, in Hamlet. Jenkins cites North’s translation of the Life of Paulus Aemilius: “as if I looked into a glass, to frame and fashion my life, to the mould and pattern of these virtuous noble men” (2.196). The meaning throughout these citations is clear: emulation is an active practice in which even exemplary models model themselves after other models.
42 Hamlet is not alone. For example, Claudius attempts in this same scene to create a new set of precedents in which Hamlet will see himself as unmanly and unnatural in his continued grieving (1.2.87–117), listing off the pattern of death, “But you must know your father lost a father, / That father lost, lost his” (89–90), and then directly questioning Hamlet’s action as “impious stubbornness … unmanly grief” (94).
43 Ascham, The Schoolmaster, 114.
44 Nicola King, Memory, Narrative, Identity: Remembering the Self (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 2000), has explored the complex relations between self-identity and memory, including its link to narrative (a link that also connects memory to drama and to rhetoric more broadly). Sharon Crowley, “Modern Rhetoric and Memory,” in Rhetorical Memory and Delivery: Classical Concepts for Contemporary Composition and Communication, 31–44 (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1993), has argued that memory was “a means of invention” (35) and suggests that it has a socially shaping function, certainly that it was itself a product of cultural and social interactions as much as other more “sensory experience” (43) and linked to commonplaces (which Summers refers in his work), such as those that Hamlet refers to, especially after his first visit with the Ghost (cf. 1.5.92–112). Here, in a grand gesture of overt self-fashioning, Hamlet swears to remember the Ghost’s injunction and to “wipe away” all other commonplace matters from his brain (1.5.99). For more on memory see Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990), and Sharon Crowley, The Methodical Memory: Invention in Current-Traditional Rhetoric (Carbondale: Southern Univ. Press, 1990).
45 See Jenkins, ed., Hamlet, 3.1.56–88LN, for more information about the Celts and other precedents and patterns followed by Hamlet in these lines. The Celts are a likely precedent for Hamlet’s alternative to suffering “The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”: “Or take arms against a sea of troubles / And by opposing end them. To die—to sleep, no more” (3.1.58, 59–61). Hamlet does not propose that it is possible to overcome outrageous fortune by arming oneself against it here, rather that the alternative is, as the Celts exemplified, to arm oneself for death, to die fighting an impossible battle against a foe of your choice.
46 Jenkins, ed., Hamlet, 3.1.56–8LN.
47 Joel Altman, The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development of Elizabethan Drama (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1978). Altman argues that while this practice had many uses, one of them was to aid rhetors in being able to see from the perspective of their clients and opponents. He also argues that it provided essential training for “future playwrights in the fundamentals of dramatic characterization” (49).
48 Altman, Play of Mind, 10, 10–11.
49 Summers, “The Commonplace,” 22.
50 Thomas Elyot, The Boke Named the Gouernour (London, 1531). Jenkins notes the possible parallel to Elyot (3.1.147–8fn).
51 Elyot, Gouernour, 19v.
52 Girard, “Dull Revenge,” 273.
53 Girard, “Dull Revenge,” 273.
54 Girard, “Dull Revenge,” 287.
55 I think it is important to here mention Kenneth Burke’s pentad (Act, Scene, Agent, Agency, Purpose), which offers a rich view of self-creation. Burke points out that we should not discount the effects that all members of his pentad can have on motive, i.e. the scene-agent (or scene-act) ratio is merely one of many possible ratios within Burke’s view. He would argue that new historicist views exorbitantly emphasize the influence of the scene in all motives, ignoring the possible influence and weight of other influences, even within an act itself. For an extended discussion of the pentad see Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (1945; repr. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1969), esp. xv–xxiii, 3–20, 127–320.
56 The grammar at this point in the play is slippery, leaving some ambiguity as to whom Horatio assigns “emulate pride” to (1.1.86). Jenkins uses a comma after “emulate pride” that clearly links the phrase to Fortinbras, but only the Q1 of Hamlet has that comma (though the phrase there is “emulous cause”). Using Bernice W. Kliman and Paul Bertram’s The Three-Text Hamlet: Parallel Texts of the First and Second Quartos and First Folio, Second Edition, Revised and Expanded (New York: AMS Press, 2003), the difference between Q1’s phrasing and use of a comma, Q2’s nebulous lack of any punctuation at that point, and F1’s parenthetical embrace of all of “(Thereto prick’d on by a most emulate Pride),” shows just how vague this point is. Whatever the assignation of Horatio’s specific phrase, Old Hamlet chooses to engage in the emulous contest.
57 Of the first editions available to us, these lines only appear in the Q2 of Hamlet. Though the argument can be made that Hamlet’s final favoring of Fortinbras still reflects a similar view, only Q2 emphasizes this view of Fortinbras as an overt example.
58 Shakespeare’s critique of emulous behavior makes a strong appearance in Troilus and Cressida. The works that come closest to the kind of reading that I am doing here are Girard’s, which I have discussed in this chapter, and Eric S. Mallin’s “Emulous Factions and the Collapse of Chivalry: Troilus and Cressida,” Representations 29 (Winter 1990): 145–79.
59 Bruce Danner, “Speaking Daggers,” Shakespeare Quarterly 54.1 (Spring 2003): 29–62, similarly argues, while pursuing other aims, that Hamlet’s engagement in representations and the theater, including humanist modes of knowledge and ideas of subjectivity, “represents the frustration and paralysis that attends such self-consciousness” (39).
60 Danner, “Speaking Daggers,” 59.
61 It is no surprise that Osric refers to him as “the card or calendar of gentry” (5.2.109–10). Laertes embraces the roles and models of the period unfailingly.
62 Girard, “Dull Revenge,” 277.
63 The Arden Third Series, Troilus and Cressida, ed. David Bevington (1998; repr. London: Thomson Learning, 2001).
64 As Danner argues, Hamlet’s blindness is specifically linked with his “blurring [of] distinctions between theater and world, fantasy and reality” and “lead[s] to Hamlet’s crippled judgment, despair, and death” (“Speaking Daggers,” 41). Danner does not talk of Hamlet’s pride or of emulation, but his work is linked to humanist understanding, theatricality (which the play links explicitly to “the mirror up to nature”), and especially to the significance of mimesis and of (abused) forms of language in the play. Danner’s primary concern is how language is used as violence in the play, an abuse of language that relates to the play’s interrogation of decorum and propriety (continuing Titus’s similar analyses), to which I now turn in the subsequent section of this chapter.
65 As I discussed in the first chapter, Quintilian declares that the process of imitation, a lengthy seven-step process of analysis, synthesis, paraphrase, composition, and performance, was directed toward allowing the teacher to “test his pupils’ judgement” (Orator’s Education, 2.5.13). Quintilian makes clear that imitation should always be based on the “excellence” of the model, which in turn requires careful judgment—he repeatedly counsels that imitation should only be undertaken with the best of models and that even with those models care should be taken to examine the models carefully, recognizing that even the best of sources have blemishes that are to be avoided (10.2.15). He also warns strictly against only having a façade of excellence (10.2.15). Further, Quintilian goes on to cite Cicero, who calls decorum, or appropriateness, “the fourth virtue of Elocution,” and adds “in my personal judgment it is the most essential” (11.1.1–2).
66 James S. Baumlin and Tita French Baumlin, “Chronos, Kairos, Aion: Failures of Decorum, Right-Timing, and Revenge in Shakespeare’s Hamlet,” in Rhetoric and Kairos: Essays in History, Theory, and Praxis, ed. Philip Sipiora and James S. Baumlin, 165–86 (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 2002), argue that Hamlet is directly linked to the general humanist project of self-fashioning in order to construct, using G. R. Eliot’s words, the so-called “Complete Gentleman” (165). Their work emphasizes that
The fact that Hamlet, Denmark’s “chiefest courtier” (1.2.117), and the greatest Humanist in English Renaissance literature, fails the test [of Humanist educational, ethical, political, rhetorical theory], reveals a crisis lying at the play’s thematic center, a crisis concerning the age’s optimism toward the powers of human reason (and action) and the Humanist aspiration to master worldly fortune. (165)
67 Danner notes “Hamlet’s essentialist, almost naïve conception of theatrical performance” (“Speaking Daggers,” 29). As I will show, and Danner also indicates, Hamlet’s essentialism has much broader import than merely in his views of theatricality.
68 While rank and gross each have multiple definitions in the period Hamlet seems to intend their negative senses and likely available usage that combine or relate the terms. Though his metaphors are a bit incongruent, in Hamlet’s sense the world grows to seed and provides nothing, no fruit, of value. Rank includes in the OED the definition “Gross, highly offensive or loathsome, in later use esp. grossly coarse or indecent,” and includes a related definition of “Corrupt, foul: festering.” Rankness is further associated with error, deep moral error, when, for example, Claudius prays for an unrealized forgiveness, beginning with the assertion “my offense is rank and smells to heaven” (3.3.36). Gross can mean “Extremely coarse in behaviour or morals; brutally lacking in refinement or decency” and relates to both persons and to “habits, language, pleasures, etc.” (OED). This later definition includes a reference in the OED to Shakespeare’s Love’s Labor’s Lost, which also links the world to grossness: “The grosser manner of these worlds delights, He throwes vpon the grosse worlds baser slaues” (1.1.29). Here Dumaine is emphasizing his renouncement of the world, but the parallel to a fallen world remains, and, given the irony inherent in the lines, including the lords’ limited abilities in the play to follow through on their renouncement of worldly things, the relation to Hamlet is strengthened. The modesty of nature has been overgrown with the weeds of indecency that the world breeds. These OED definitions also emphasize that the terms each reflect a failure of decorum in a broader sense—things are, in Hamlet’s mind, grown in an almost universal sense far beyond any reasonable limit of decorum.
69 The linking of rhetoric to natural imagery, as demonstrated by Peacham, continues today, such as in the excellent web source Silva Rhetoricae: The Forest of Rhetoric, ed. Gideon Burton, http://rhetoric.byu.edu. Here, however, there is no sense of rhetoric as naturally ordered or ordering:
A forest is the metaphor for this site. Like a forest, rhetoric provides tremendous resources for many purposes. However, one can easily become lost in a large, complex habitat (whether it be one of wood or of wit). The organization of this central page and the hyperlinks within individual pages should provide a map, a discernible trail, to lay hold of the utility and beauty of this language discipline.
For a rich discussion of Renaissance views on imitation, copia, nature, and art, linked to ancient and contemporary sources including Cicero, Quintilian, and Erasmus, see Terence Cave’s The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1979), esp. 35–77.
70 As discussed in Chapter 1, rhetoricians, especially of the Renaissance (because of Christian influence), were suspicious of nature—which was seen as fallen, both in man and in the world. However, this idea has broader use as well. I am reminded of Freud’s assertion that “it is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct” in Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XXI (1927–1931): The Future of an Illusion, Civilization and its Discontents and Other Works, trans. James Strachey with Anna Freud (London: Vintage, 2001), 97.
71 For Jenkins’s discussion of this speech see 1.3.10fn.
72 Laurence Olivier’s filming of Hamlet (Two Cities Films, Ltd., 1948), for example, posts these lines emphatically on the screen (though significantly edited, even directly altered at points) at the start of the film, ponderously read before any action takes place, acting as a kind of epigraph to the entire play/film and followed (as a continuous statement) by the famous introductory line: “This is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind.” The linking of these together creates an interesting, evocative choice, pairing Hamlet’s words about Claudius (and a general pattern of faults among men) with a popular negative reading of Hamlet himself. It is important to note that the Folio does not include these lines, certainly throwing into question their centrality in the play, though I believe the ideas I discuss in relation to them inform the play, with or without their inclusion in the text.
73 Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1966), esp. 44–62, would emphasize the terministic screen with which all people come to these kinds of discussions—our limited ability to see certain aspects of a given idea (in this case nature) because of the screen of terms that we begin with, our assumptions that filter out certain readings:
Even if any given terminology is a reflection of reality, by its very nature as a terminology it must be a selection of reality; and to this extent it must function also as a deflection of reality. (45)
Reality, whatever that finally is, is constantly deflected into certain modes of thinking, certain limitations of thought, depending on our position, context, and conditioning.
74 For a brief review, cf. Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg, eds., The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present, 2nd ed. (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2001), 170, where they discuss this common distinction between Platonic and Aristotelian theory and approaches to knowledge construction, epistemologies, and the assertions of truths.
75 Quintilian, Orator’s Education, 11.1.30.
76 David Hillman, “Puttenham, Shakespeare, and the Abuse of Rhetoric,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 36.1 (Winter 1996): 73–90, 74. Note that Baumlin and Baumlin argue for a direct parallel between decorum and discretion (“Chronos,” 165).
77 Hillman cites John Hoskyns’s Direccōns for Speech and Style (1599), “Let Discrecōn bee the greatest & generall figure of figures” (“Abuse of Rhetoric,” 76). Hillman also emphasizes how the term general used here and in Puttenham’s Art acts to create a kind of universalizing of application and meaning—quite similar to Hamlet’s use of nature and discretion with the players. Puttenham also uses decorum as synonymous with discretion.
78 Hillman, “Abuse of Rhetoric,” 78–9.
79 Laurie E. Osborne, “Crisis of Degree in Shakespeare’s Henriad,” Studies in English Literature 25.2 (Spring 1985): 337–59, 337. Osborne works from Rene Girard’s Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1977) and “To double business bound” (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1978) to discuss the ways in which this kind of crisis of distinction plays out in the Henriad and in what I would call Hal’s emulative rhetorical self-fashioning.
80 As Kastan notes, Hamlet is more interested (and more capable) in imitating the “player rather than Pyrrhus” (“Imitation of Revenge,” 116). Hamlet perhaps strives to be a consummate actor in part because of the seeming unlimited control over action the Player represents and in part because the Player is able to act again and again, always seemingly effective, never in danger, and applauded publicly for what he does. There is no sense of finality in the theater, as there is for Hamlet in revenge and in death and judgments of the afterlife.
81 Wayne A. Rebhorn, “Outlandish Fears: Defining Decorum in Renaissance Rhetoric,” Intertexts 4.1 (Spring 2000): 3–24.
82 Hillman, “Abuse of Rhetoric,” 85–6. As Hillman notes earlier (in footnote 13), Henry Peacham in The Garden of Eloquence offers rashness as the opposite of discretion. For Hamlet, who still wants his story told properly, the ambivalence between rashness and discretion seems to never be fully resolved.
83 Aristotle, Rhetoric, 3.1.5. Bracketed text appears in the original. Hamlet’s own frustration with the reception of the Player’s speech when it was first performed parallels his frustration with Aristotle’s about the corruption of the audience.
84 As I mentioned earlier in this chapter, decorum is a core aspect of Roman rhetoric and Cicero and Quintilian speak highly of its need and use. Quintilian cites Cicero, who calls appropriateness “the fourth virtue of Elocution,” adding “in my personal judgment it is the most essential” (Orator’s Education, 11.1.1–2).
85 Aristotle, Rhetoric, 3.1.3.
86 Aristotle, Rhetoric, 3.1.2.
87 Note how Hamlet immediately turns from the Ghost’s command to “Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive / Against thy mother aught” (1.5.85–6), promising that “thy commandment all alone shall live / Within the book and volume of my brain, / Unmixed with baser matter. Yes, by heaven!” (102–4), to railing against his mother (105). His reference here to tables and proverbial learning is one of many that indicate that Hamlet is indeed well-schooled and a practitioner of rhetorical training.
88 Altman, Play of Mind.
89 Twelfth Night, ed. J. M. Lothian and T. W. Craik, in The Arden Shakespeare Complete Edition, Revised Edition, ed. Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson, and David Scott Kastan, 1191–217 (London: Thomson Learning, 2002), 3.1.11–13.