6

Comparison and Distinction

‘Counterfeit Presentment’

That ‘comparisons are odious’ is an opinion that has been both oft thought and oft expressed in English letters. As early as the fifteenth century Henry VI’s Chief Justice, Sir John Fortescue, used the phrase in his treatise on English constitutional law (1471). John Donne concluded his Petrarchan / anti-Petrarchan elegy ‘The Comparison’ by declaring that ‘She, and comparisons are odious’, and writers as various as Lydgate, Burton, Swift and Hazlitt found room in their works for versions of the same sentiment. On the continent, Berni in Italy and Cervantes in Spain also cited the proverb with approval. The spectacle of Dogberry memorably mangling it into ‘comparisons are odorous’ suggests that in Shakespeare’s time the original was widely known, for otherwise there would be no joke.

But despite the popularity of the maxim, comparisons were no more odious to the poets and playwrights of Elizabethan and Jacobean England than to succeeding generations. In their more elegant guise as similes, metaphors and conceits they were, indeed, such stuff as poetry was made on. For this very reason, they were considered potentially dangerous. Puttenham, discussing figures of speech in The Arte of English Poesie, calls them ‘guilefull and abusing’, and ‘occupied of purpose to deceive the ear and also the mind’ – ‘for what else is your Metaphor but an inversion of sense by transport, your allegorie but a duplicitie of meaning or dissimulation under covert and darke intendments’, and so forth.¹ Such abuses were much on the mind of Spenser, whose villains often use language to entrap and delude; even the names of the necromancers Archimago and Busirane suggest image-making, conceit and abuse.

Puttenham goes on to distinguish between poets and judges; the poet is not a judge but a ‘pleader’, and since ‘all his abuses tend but to dispose his hearers to mirth and sollace by pleasant conveyance and efficacy of speach, they are not in truth to be accompted vices but for vertues in the poetical science’.² Even if absolved of an intention to distort or deceive, however, comparisons could be odious for reasons which were aesthetic rather than moral or ethical. The vogue of Petrarchism had encouraged such forms as the blazon and the catalogue, and extravagant but predictable analogies were the rule rather than the exception in mediocre verse. At the same time the development of what came to be popularly known as ‘Euphuism’ encouraged a profusion of elaborate similes and antitheses in prose.³ Shakespeare is very sensible of this assault from within the literary ranks, and finds numerous occasions to mock it in his plays. Thus Demetrius, bewitched by Puck’s magic love-juice, wakes to declare his passion for Helena in elaborate terms:

O Helen, goddess, nymph, perfect, divine!

To what, my love, shall I compare thine eyne?

Crystal is muddy. O, how ripe in show

Thy lips, those kissing cherries, tempting grow!

(MND III. ii. 137–40)

And so on and on. The jangling internal rhyme in ‘thine eyne’ shows quite clearly what the playwright thinks of this derivative mode of versifying. Likewise in Love’s Labor’s Lost Rosaline observes drily that in Berowne’s love letter ‘I am compared to twenty thousand fairs’ (V. ii. 37), while in the same play Don Armado’s letter to Jaquenetta draws the stock analogy between his situation and that of King Cophetua:

I am the king, for so stands the comparison, thou the beggar, for so witnesseth thy lowliness.

(IV. i. 80–1)

Whenever this mode of facile and hyperbolic comparison appears in the plays, it carries with it an implicit criticism of the speaker’s self-knowledge, and of the quality of the relationship being described. Shakespeare sums up the matter neatly in the final couplet of sonnet 130, ‘My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun’:

And yet by heaven, I think my love as rare

As any she belied with false compare.

The concept of ‘false compare’, as exemplified in the sonnet’s mock-Petrarchan catalogue, reflects not only upon the lady but upon the poet who makes the comparison. Perhaps the furthest extension of this dangerous mode can be found in Troilus and Cressida, where the lovers attempt to metamorphose themselves into the very standard of ‘true compare’, and in so doing signal to the audience the extreme fragility of their position:

Troilus True swains in love shall in the world to come

Approve their truth by Troilus. When their rhymes,

Full of protest, of oath and big compare,

Wants similes, truth tired with iteration,

‘As true as steel, as plantage to the moon,

As sun to day, as turtle to her mate,

As iron to adamant, as earth to the center,’

Yet, after all comparisons of truth,

As truth’s authentic author to be cited,

‘As true as Troilus’ shall crown up the verse

And sanctify the numbers.

(III. ii. 171–81)

Troilus’ proposal to replace the tired iteration and ‘big compare’ of love poets with his own example of truth is replete with ironies, since by Shakespeare’s time Troilus had himself become one of the biggest clichés of all. No figure is more frequently cited by Shakespearean lovers than Troilus. Lorenzo includes him in his catalogue of sighing lovers on summer nights (Merch. V. i. 4), Rosalind cites him as ‘one of the patterns of love’ (AYLI IV. i. 94), and Benedick explicitly associates him with the conventions of love poetry: ‘Leander the good swimmer, Troilus the first employer of panders, and a whole book full of these quondam carpetmongers, whose names yet run smoothly in the even road of a blank verse’ (Ado V. ii. 30–4). Even Petruchio has a spaniel named Troilus, who is presumably so called because of his fidelity.⁴ Moreover, Shakespeare from the first presents Troilus as infatuated with the same language he will later disparage: in Act I scene i, for example, we hear him describe Cressida’s ‘hand / In whose comparison all whites are ink, / Writing their own reproach’ (57–9). His celebrated characterization of the ‘monstruosity in love’, when ‘we vow to weep seas, live in fire, eat rocks, tame tigers’, pretends to more anti-Petrarchism than it embodies, since he immediately follows it by yet another claim to perfect love: ‘what truth can speak truest [shall be] not truer than Troilus’ (III. ii. 76–82, 96–7).

Manifestly, there are qualitative distinctions to be made among the kinds of self-delusion shown by Troilus, Berowne and Demetrius, but their kinship seems clear: whether infatuated by love, sex, or the mere idea of being in love, each chooses a language of comparison which comes perilously close to ‘false compare’. Such language is ‘abusing’, to use Puttenham’s term, because it falsifies both the beloved and the sentiment – and it does so in precisely the same way as do the conventional poets criticized in sonnet 130: it denies humanity and particularity to the subject, and thus reveals the shallowness of the speaker.

We know that in the sixteenth century sonnets and satirical epigrams were considered to be versions of the same type of verse, Scaliger’s mel and fel, which became in English terms sugar and salt, or honey and gall, or naive and pointed.⁵ We should not be surprised, therefore, to discover a second kind of ‘abusing’ comparison in Shakespeare’s plays – that offered by skeptics, satirists, scoffers and persons in positions of detached observation. The word ‘comparative’ itself becomes a substantive noun to denote such persons; thus King Henry IV describes the public conduct of his predecessor Richard II as such that he ‘Had his great name profanèd with their scorns / And gave his countenance, against his name, / To laugh at gibing boys and stand the push / Of every beardless vain comparative’ (1HIV III. ii. 64–7). Rosaline, provisionally rejecting Berowne’s suit in Love’s Labor’s Lost, offers him this frank assessment of his character:

    the world’s large tongue

Proclaims you for a man replete with mocks,

Full of comparisons and wounding flouts,

Which you on all estates will execute

That lie within the mercy of your wit.

(V. ii. 840–4)

In Troilus and Cressida Nestor characterizes Thersites as a slave ‘whose gall coins slanders like a mint’, who strives ‘To match us in comparisons with dirt’ (T&C I. iii. 193–4). And in King Henry IV Part I Falstaff and Prince Hal, both quick with an epithet, trade inventive insults at the same time that they reproach each other with the practice. ‘Thou hast the most unsavory similes, and art indeed the most comparative, rascalliest, sweet young prince’ (1HIV I. ii. 80–2), Falstaff complains, while after the Gad’s Hill caper Hal successfully engages his companion in a flouting match:

Prince I’ll be no longer guilty of this sin; this sanguine coward, this bed-presser, this horseback-breaker, this huge hill of flesh –

Falstaff    ‘Sblood, you starveling, you eelskin, you dried neat’s-tongue, you bull’s pizzle, you stockfish – O for breath to utter what is like thee ! – you tailor’s yard, you sheath, you bowcase, you vile standing tuck!

Prince    Well, breathe awhile, and then to it again; and when thou hast tired thyself in base comparisons, hear me speak but this.

(II. iv. 243–53)

Falstaff’s ‘base comparisons’, like the ‘false compare’ of conventional sonneteers and doting lovers, obstruct communication and truth, in this case by endlessly delaying the true story of the Gad’s Hill robbery; as Hal goes on to observe, ‘Mark now how a plain tale shall put you down’ (256–7). And just as ‘false compare’ signifies a failure in self-knowledge and communication on the part of the comparer, so ‘base comparisons’ are usually self-protective ploys, employed to distance the speaker from the events or persons he is describing. Thus Berowne is found lacking in compassion, Thersites in idealism and heroism, and Falstaff in courage by those who address or characterize them.

But such deliberately negative characterizations of the comparer are in fact the exception rather than the rule in Shakespearean drama. Indeed, it is for that reason that they have been worth our notice. For the most part, however, the capacity to compare, contrast and discriminate is highly valued in the plays, and becomes a further rite of passage for the Shakespearean protagonist. Far from being odious, the act of comparing takes on the status of a trial or test, which marks the initiate as successful – or not – in his relationships with himself, with other persons, and with history. We found in sonnet 130 an object lesson of ‘false compare’, and we may perhaps look to the sonnets once again for a model of more judicious comparison.

Sonnet 18 sets forth just such a pattern in its opening lines: ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? / Thou art more lovely and more temperate.’ The speaker’s objective here is not a facile identification of lips with cherries and cheeks with rosebuds, but neither is it a programmatic repudiation of such figures. Instead, by setting up the terms of the comparison – you are like a summer’s day – and then immediately qualifying them, he preserves both comparison and distinction. The beloved is enough like the summer’s day – lovely, temperate, and fair – that the juxtaposition provides a starting point for finding out what he is really like. The sonnet has other purposes and other directions: what we ultimately discover is a truth about the poet-speaker, rather than about the beloved. But the general pattern of analogy conjoined with differentiation is one which Shakespeare puts to valuable use in the plays.

An example from the romances will provide a useful demonstration of how this pattern can be transferred to a dramatic context. In The Winter’s Tale Paulina instructs a repentant Leontes never to marry, ‘Unless another, / As like Hermione as is her picture, / Affront his eye’ (V. i. 73–5). Leontes agrees, citing the impossibility of finding a suitable successor: ‘No more such wives, therefore no wife’ (56). Paulina, however, has an ulterior motive. She is planning to exhibit the ‘statue’ of the supposedly dead queen – a work of art which the clown significantly describes, in an unconscious echo of Paulina’s own language, as ‘the queen’s picture’ (v. ii. 177–8). Leontes is struck, as he must be, by the resemblance, but the key moment of the recognition scene is his perception of a difference: ‘Hermione was not so much wrinkled, nothing so agèd as this seems’ (V. iii. 28–9). This sounds like a complaint, but Paulina deftly turns it into an instructive compliment: ‘So much the more our carver’s excellence’ (30). The ‘carver’ now assumes for the audience the several alternative identities of Time, Nature, God and the playwright Shakespeare himself. As Leontes continues to gaze, he discovers further contrasts. The statue seems to breathe, its veins to bear blood: ‘What fine chisel / Could ever yet cut breath?’ (78–9). He leans forward to kiss it, and Paulina once more intervenes, but her point is already made: in recognizing the marks of time and the signs of life in the ‘statue’ of his wife, Leontes has undergone a crucial transition. As he progresses through a sequence of comparisons and contrasts, his faith is awakened.

We shall see shortly how such works of art as the statue and the picture are used to facilitate comparison and contrast on Shakespeare’s stage. In a sense, however, these aesthetic objects are variants – though distinct variants – of an even more common metaphor used in literary comparisons: that of the glass or mirror.

The popularity of the mirror metaphor in western literature goes back to classical and even biblical times. Plato uses it disparagingly in the Republic, alleging that the artist is only a reflector of things,⁶ and a Sophist commentator praises the Odyssey by calling it ‘a beautiful mirror of life’. Terence and Cicero both use speculum to describe works of art – to Cicero comedy was imitatio vitae, speculum consuetudinis, imago veritatis⁷ – a characterization which bears a striking similarity to Hamlet’s advice to the players. The ‘glass, darkly’ of 1 Corinthians alludes presumably not only to man’s fallen condition, but also to the ways he tries to come to terms with his earthly state. Cassiodorus compares the human mind to a mirror.⁸ As time went on, both ‘mirror’ and its Latin equivalent speculum came to denote first a mode of instruction, and then a pattern or model. Gower’s Speculum Meditantis or Mirour de l’Omme describes a contest for man’s soul between vices and virtues, and concludes that all men are corrupt, needing the intercession of the Virgin. Nigel Wireker’s Speculum Stultorum, or Mirror of Fools, was a well-known satire on monks, and the extensive medieval encyclopedia of Vincent of Beauvais was titled Speculum naturale, historiale, doctrinale. In 1559 there appeared in England the Mirror for Magistrates, collected by Ferrers and Baldwin with a preface by Thomas Sackville, which presented accounts of the rise and fall of famous men, patterned after Lydgate’s translation of Boccaccio’s Falls of Princes and Chaucer’s Monk’s Tale. Thus by Shakespeare’s time ‘mirror’ as a metaphor had acquired the primary meaning of ‘example’ or ‘model’, and it is frequently used in this way in his plays. Talbot calls Salisbury the ‘mirror of all martial men’ (1HVI. iv. 74), Oxford speaks of ‘Henry the Fourth / Whose wisdom was a mirror to the wisest’ (3HVI III. iii. 83–4), Buckingham in Henry VIII is described as ‘the mirror of all courtesy’ (II. i. 53), and Henry V is celebrated by the Prologue as ‘the mirror of all Christian kings’ (HV II. Prol. 6). A more dramatically startling and innovative use of the mirror figure occurs in the great apparition scene in Macbeth, where the witches conjure up ‘A show of eight Kings and Banquo, last [King] with a glass in his hand’ (IV. i. SD). The Arden editor, Kenneth Muir, comments that this glass is ‘not an ordinary mirror in which King James would see himself but a prospective, or magic, glass’.⁹ Yet the two kinds of glass do not seem incompatible. As Banquo was supposedly King James’ ancestor, and the present line presumed to derive from him, the use of an actual mirror to reflect the king’s face or form would reinforce, rather than war with, the idea of lineality, while at the same time renewing the audience’s awareness of the play’s pertinence. In any case, the ‘glass’ is here once again associated with ideal deportment and kingship, offering yet another model of conduct.

We may notice that all of these exemplary figures are aristocrats, either royal or noble. The concept of the individual as a mirror appears, at least in Shakespeare’s history plays, to reflect a kind of noblesse oblige, a social responsibility to set an example for one’s soldiers, servants, or subjects. Perhaps as a result, the description of such a ‘mirror’ became something of a topos, an encyclopedic catalogue of noble virtues. This may in part account for the curious similarity between two lengthier ‘mirror’ passages – the lament of Lady Percy for her slain husband, Hotspur, and Ophelia’s equally grief-stricken report of the madness of Hamlet. Lady Percy begins and ends her eulogy with the image of the ‘glass’:

    He was indeed the glass

Wherein the noble youth did dress themselves.

He had no legs that practiced not his gait;

And speaking thick, which nature made his blemish,

Became the accents of the valiant,

For those that could speak low and tardily

Would turn their own perfection to abuse,

To seem like him. So that in speech, in gait,

In diet, in affections of delight,

In military rules, humors of blood,

He was the mark and glass, copy and book,

That fashioned others.

(2HIV II. iii. 21–32)

Ophelia’s account, though it describes a living man, likewise verges on the elegiac:

O what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!

The courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s, eye, tongue, sword,

Th’ expectancy and rose of the fair state,

The glass of fashion, and the mold of form,

Th’ observed of all observers, quite, quite down!

(Ham. III. i. 151–5)

We are accustomed to think of Hotspur primarily as a blunt soldier, Hamlet as a thoughtful and articulate scholar. Yet in these speeches the two men sound oddly alike. Their grieving ladies have made use of the mirror topos to generalize a model. In a very similar way Castiglione urged upon the erring ‘princes of [his] day’, an emulation of the ancients,

who, even though they erred in some things, yet did not flee from the promptings and teachings of anyone who seemed to them able to correct those errors; nay, they made every effort to order their lives on the model of excellent men.¹⁰

With this convention in mind, we can appreciate the consternation of the elderly Duchess of York as she perceives in her son Gloucester a warped or distorted mirror, unlike his father or his dead brothers: ‘I have bewept’, she says, ‘a worthy husband’s death, / And lived with looking on his images’:

But now two mirrors of his princely semblance

Are cracked in pieces by malignant death,

And I for comfort have but one false glass

That grieves me when I see my shame in him.

(RIII II. ii. 49–54)

Like the ‘noble youth’ who follow Hotspur, the duchess peers into the mirror, not to see her own image, but in quest of the ‘model’ of her husband and sons. Characteristically, however, Richard uses the mirror, not to improve but purely to reflect himself. Despite his playful denials, he is aware of and occasionally obsessed by mirrors from the moment he takes the stage in Richard III. In the opening soliloquy he alleges that he is ‘not shaped for sportive tricks / Nor made to court an amorous looking glass’ (I. i. 14–15). Yet the wooing of Anne brings out an ironic reappraisal of his charms:

I’ll be at charges for a looking glass

And entertain a score or two of tailors

To study fashions to adorn my body… .

Shine out, fair sun; till I have bought a glass

That I may see my shadow as I pass.

(I. ii. 255–63)

In Olivier’s remarkable film version of the play, the shadow plays a recurrent and important role. The initial confrontation between Gloucester and King Edward is presented entirely as a meeting of shadows, until we are finally afforded a glimpse of Edward’s white and terrified face. After the scene with Anne, Richard’s dark shadow looms in her bedroom, this time again counterbalanced by a fragile glimpse of white in Anne’s dress as she turns toward him. During Clarence’s soliloquy, the malignant shadow of his brother looms yet again larger than life over the spy-hole of his prison cell.¹¹ In cinematic terms, the dark shadow, grotesquely misshapen, has replaced the clear image in the looking glass – as Richard had foretold, and as his mother implied in her metaphor of the ‘false glass’.

When we turn to another Richard, and another looking glass, we see a different variation on this same theme. Richard II requests a mirror in the deposition scene ‘That it may show me what a face I have, / Since it is bankrout of his majesty’ (IV. i. 265–6). When the glass is brought, the king is astonished to see no change: ‘O flatt’ring glass! / Like to my followers in prosperity, / Thou dost beguile me’ (278–80). Hurling it theatrically to the ground, he turns to address the impassive Boling-broke:

Mark, silent king, the moral of this sport:

How soon my sorrow has destroyed my face.

(289–90)

But Bolingbroke’s reply makes clear that he has understood both symbol and self-deception: ‘The shadow of your sorrow hath destroyed / The shadow of your face’ (291–2). In one sense Richard’s tragedy is summed up in his failure to distinguish, even albeit rhetorically, between the shadow of his face and that face itself. The changes are within, as is the case – to compare small things with great – with the picture of Dorian Gray. The literal looking glass has not altered, but ‘the glass wherein the noble youth did dress themselves’, the model and ideal of kingship, had been shattered long before, by Richard’s own venal conduct and by his self-absorption – of which his penchant for ritual is only a part. We have already mentioned Bolingbroke’s later comment about Richard’s behavior in office, when he had to ‘stand the push / Of every beardless vain comparative’ (1HIV III. ii. 66–7). In the deposition scene, as throughout the play, Richard is not enough of a comparative. He does not distinguish the shadow from the substance, the human face of kingship from its authority and merit. When finally in Pomfret Castle he comes to study ‘how I may compare / This prison where I live unto the world’ (V. v. 1–2) he is already imprisoned, not only by Bolingbroke, but also by solipsism and soliloquy. Had he hammered out his analogy much earlier, both kingdom and kingship would have benefited.

In a rather roundabout way, then, we have come to the central pitfall of the mirror metaphor, which is, most simply stated, that of narcissism. If the image given back by the mirror is principally for the delectation of the self, then judgment, discrimination, and comparison are all denied. Venus cautions Adonis, with some justification, against such a fate:

Is thine own heart to thine own face affected?

Can thy right hand seize love upon thy left?

Then woo thyself, be of thyself rejected;

Steal thine own freedom, and complain on theft.

Narcissus so himself himself forsook,

And died to kiss his shadow in the brook.

(Ven. 157–62)

Both Richards in their different ways are thus infatuated and themselves themselves forsake. But this is hardly an exclusive prerogative of the history plays; indeed, it is in the comedies that we see it most often, with results which are appropriately less dire. In As You Like It, for example, the Ovidian story of Narcissus, suitably cited in Shakespeare’s Ovidian poem, undergoes a Circean transformation to become the folkloric story of the fool in the brook.

Jaques By my troth, I was seeking for a fool when I found you.

Orlando    He is drowned in the brook. Look but in and you shall see him.

Jaques    There I shall see mine own figure.

Orlando    Which I take to be either a fool or a cipher.

(III. ii. 285–91)

Not a particularly subtle or edifying exchange, but one which reveals something of a home truth about Jaques. Elsewhere in the play we have seen him compare himself to an injured stag, and ‘moralize this spectacle … into a thousand similes’ (II. i. 44–5). Shortly thereafter he will encounter a fool in the forest, and delightedly report on how he ‘moralls] on the time’ (II. vii. 29). Yet as David Young has observed, not only the fool Touchstone but the forest of Arden and much that it contains are in fact reflectors, showing to the visitors from the city either ironic portraits of themselves or subjective reflections of their own preconceived ideas.¹² That Jaques elects to stay in the forest at the play’s end is a further commentary on his character. He is more at home within the mirror than outside it.

Other versions of the fool in the brook, equally ‘low’ and folkloric in origin, appear in Twelfth Night and The Merchant of Venice. In Twelfth Night Feste alludes drily to the ‘picture of We Three’, a picture of two asses so titled, in which the spectator was invited to recognize himself as the third. The implication, genially accepted by Sir Toby, is that those who address Feste as ‘fool’ may well deserve the label themselves. The Merchant of Venice offers a graphic example of such a fool in the Prince of Aragon. Aragon elects to open the silver (mirror-like?) casket, emblazoned with the motto ‘Who chooseth me shall get as much as he deserves’ (II. ix. 35), and finds inside ‘the portrait of a blinking idiot / Presenting me a schedule’ (53–4). It is possible to imagine a production in which the point would be underscored by changing the portrait literally into a mirror, but the ‘schedule’, or enclosed scroll, and the response of Aragon himself make the identification sufficiently plain. ‘Take what wife you will to bed, / I will ever be your head,’ proclaims the scroll (69–70), and Aragon supplies a further gloss:

Still more fool I shall appear

By the time I linger here.

With one fool’s head I came to woo,

But I go away with two.

(72–5)

Not only pictures of fools, but the fools themselves, often serve this mirroring function. We have noted Touchstone’s parody of Jaques as a fool in the forest. We might also cite the behavior of Feste toward Olivia, and that of Lear’s Fool toward both the king and Kent. In each case the incident has a comparative structure: the Fool, addressed or labelled as such by his employer or another person ostensibly his ‘better’, contrives in reply a witty comparison which neatly turns the tables (and the labels). Olivia bids her servants to take away the fool; Feste retorts by demonstrating that it is she who is the fool, since she continues to mourn for her brother, although he is safely in heaven (TN I. v. 38–72). Lear observes that his companion is a ‘bitter fool’, and is answered with a rhyming riddle:

That lord that counseled thee

To give away thy land,

Come place him here by me,

Do thou for him stand.

The sweet and bitter fool

Will presently appear;

The one in motley here,

The other found out there.

(Lr I. iv. 142–9)

Kent, shamed and shackled at Cornwall’s order, is offered similarly pithy advice when he receives a visit from the Fool, and asks him a question which deserves – and gets – a neat reply:

Kent Where learned you this, Fool?

Fool    Not i’ th’ stocks, Fool.

(II. iv. 84–5)

All three of these incidents suggest a basic truth about the characters who take part in them. Olivia is indeed in bondage to her brother’s memory, and uses it as an excuse to turn away from life. Lear is only beginning to realize the depths of his own folly. As for Kent, he has been put in the stocks for his conduct toward Goneril’s servant, Oswald; he follows Lear out of loyalty and love, but also out of a sense of hierarchy and natural authority. For a moment, in the Fool’s not-unsympathetic jest, he is offered a more complex view of social and class distinctions and their relationship to individual merit.

The method of comparison used by the Fool in these confrontations is what was known to the Renaissance – and to the Augustan age – as ‘wit’, the perception of similarities between things which at first appear unlike. A lively discourse on the shifting meaning of ‘wit’ took place throughout the period, with ‘wit’ being allied to such terms as ‘fancy’ and ‘imagination’, and identified with the essential element of poetry. From Aristotle’s Rhetoric on, however, wit denoted the ability to make apt comparisons. Wimsatt and Brooks define it as ‘the faculty of seeing difficult resemblances between largely unlike objects’, and ‘in practice … the enforcement of such resemblances by all the verbal resources available’.¹³ Such a concept of wit gave rise, in turn, to the definition of its opposite – the capacity, not to find similarities, but to discern differences, or what Wimsatt and Brookes call ‘an emphasis on analysis rather than synthesis’. This faculty, rather more scientific and philosophic than the very literary (and oratorical) ‘wit’, came to be known as ‘judgment’.¹⁴

Seventeenth-century theorists were quick to point out the synecdochic relationship between wit and such figures of speech as metaphor, which performed the same activity (finding similarities in things unlike) on the verbal as wit did on the intellectual plane.¹⁵ Extending the analogy one further step, we may find it useful to see in the relationship of wit to judgment a model of the pattern we have already observed in the growth of a dramatic character: a progression from the perceiving of similarities between oneself and another to the discerning of significant differences. Dryden compared wit without judgment to the movement of a ‘high-ranging spaniel’, which ‘must have clogs tied to it, lest it outrun the judgment’.¹⁶ In our investigations thus far, we have begun to discern a similar pattern, whereby distinction, or judgment, is a necessary qualification for comparison, or wit. For the men and women of Shakespeare’s plays, the ability to use these faculties and to discipline them is a crucial aspect of maturation. The progress from ignorance to wit to judgment is a sign of increased self-knowledge. However, even wit must be well used to be effective. When witty comparisons come too close to identification or tautology there is danger of misperception.

Once again, the mirror metaphor will provide a useful example of how this comes about, for those Shakespearean characters who are not licensed fools frequently discover that to make oneself a mirror, or to perceive another in that guise, is potentially both dangerous and misleading. This is demonstrably the case with twins, who bring the ‘mirror’ metaphor to life on the stage. At the close of The Comedy of Errors, for instance, we hear one Dromio remark to another, ‘methinks you are my glass, and not my brother’ (V. i. 418). The physical similarity between the two servants and the parallel likeness of their masters have been the source of comic confusion throughout, but it is the fact that they are not interchangeable that causes the difficulty. When Dromio of Syracuse is claimed by Nell the kitchen maid, or his master by Adriana, the necessity for differentiation becomes clear. The plot, in fact, depends both on wit and on judgment; the scrambling of the brothers leads initially to revelation and fruitful reordering, but a restoration of individual identities is necessary to provide a harmonious social resolution. A similar situation obtains in Twelfth Night when Viola, dressed in the clothing of a brother she believes to be dead, contemplates her image in a mirror and exclaims, ‘I my brother know / Yet living in my glass’ (III. iv. 383–4). As was the case with Errors, confusing the twins is essential to the working out of the play, and mistaking the one for the other makes possible the growth and change of those around them. Yet as Viola herself is shortly to learn, differentiation is again as important as similarity, contrast as crucial as comparison, if she, Olivia and Orsino are each to be matched with a suitable partner.

Twins constitute what might be described as ‘natural’ or ‘physical’ mirrors. When one twin reflects the other in Shakespearean drama the distortion involved is usually unintentional, and remains for most of the play undetected by any of the play’s characters. Much more complex and disturbing is the situation in which one character deliberately sets himself up to be a mirror for another, for all too often in these cases there enters a certain resemblance to the Duchess of Gloucester’s ‘false glass’. This is the accusation Rosalind levels at the doting shepherd Silvius in As You Like It. His lovesick pursuit of Phebe has made her proud and disdainful, with little justification:

‘Tis not her glass, but you, that flatters her,

And out of you she sees herself more proper

Than any of her lineaments can show her.

But mistress, know yourself.

(III. v. 54–7)

The injunction to ‘know yourself’, as always a Shakespearean invitation to maturity, is here expressed by Rosalind in the most straightforward way. Phebe will ignore this excellent advice, as will Silvius, but the play’s comic structure makes possible an eleventh-hour solution. To the last, however, Phebe appears infatuated with the fool in the brook: her acceptance of Silvius is based upon the same false glass of his devotion, suddenly converted to an asset: ‘Thy faith my fancy to thee doth combine’ (V. iv. 150).

A more ominous version of the friend-as-glass can be found in the famous exchange between Brutus and Cassius, in which the seduction is both more calculating and more difficult.

Cassius Tell me, good Brutus, can you see your face?

Brutus    No, Cassius; for the eye sees not itself

But by reflection, by some other things.

Cassius    ‘Tis just:

And it is very much lamented, Brutus,

That you have no such mirrors as will turn

Your hidden worthiness into your eye,

That you might see your shadow. I have heard

Where many of the best respect in Rome

(Except immortal Caesar), speaking of Brutus,

And groaning underneath this age’s yoke,

Have wished that noble Brutus had his eyes.

Brutus    Into what dangers would you lead me, Cassius,

That you would have me seek into myself

For that which is not in me?

Cassius    Therefore, good Brutus, be prepared to hear;

And since you know you cannot see yourself

So well as by reflection, I, your glass,

Will modestly discover to yourself

That of yourself which you yet know not of.

(JC I. ii. 51–70)

‘I, your glass’ – the phrase is sufficient warning to the audience familiar with Shakespeare’s way with mirrors. What Cassius shows Brutus is not a lie, but it is a colored truth. The real danger lies, not in Brutus’ credulity, but in Cassius’ pretense that he is a disinterested observer, reflecting nothing but fact. The obligation placed upon the listener, or spectator, is to determine the point at which resemblance ceases between himself and the portrait drawn of him.

The problem is complicated further by the necessity Brutus acknowledges in his first reply to Cassius. Without some mode of reflection, the eye cannot see itself, the individual cannot know or recognize himself.¹⁷ But for that very reason the un-cautious gazer is vulnerable to deception by his ‘glass’, as Cassius himself is quick to acknowledge, once alone:

Well, Brutus, thou art noble; yet I see

Thy honorable mettle may be wrought

From that it is disposed; therefore it is meet

That noble minds keep ever with their likes;

For who so firm that cannot be seduced?

(I. ii. 306–10)

The seduction of Brutus follows the same forked path we have been observing: he is first persuaded of a likeness, and then of a difference, between himself and Caesar. ‘Brutus and Caesar,’ argues Cassius, / ‘What should be in that “Caesar”? / Why should that name be sounded more than yours? / Write them together, yours is as fair a name; / Sound them, it does become the mouth as well’ (142–5). In the same way, although without the same calculation, the plebians will hail Brutus after the murder: ‘Let him be Caesar.’ ‘Caesar’s better parts / Shall be crowned in Brutus’ (III. ii. 51–2). Shakespeare seems to urge this parallel upon us: in Act 11 scene i Portia kneels to Brutus, imploring him to unburden his soul; in the scene that follows, with Portia’s action still vivid in the audience’s mind, Calphurnia will kneel to Caesar, and plead with him not to go to the Capitol. Yet ultimately it is a distinction, as much as a resemblance, that works on Brutus. Cassius has cleverly invoked the name of that other Brutus, Lucius Junius, ‘that would have brooked / Th’ eternal devil to keep his state in Rome / As easily as a king’ (I. ii. 159–61). And throughout the play Brutus is convinced that he is acting with a disinterestedness and a loyalty to the state which no longer characterize Caesar. The rhetoric of eyesight which begins the mirror passage is suggestive of his dilemma within the play as a whole. ‘Brutus, I do observe you now of late,’ Cassius remarks, T have not from your eyes that gentleness / And show of love as I was wont to have’ (I. ii. 32–4) – and Brutus replies, If I have veiled my look, / I turn the trouble of my countenance / Merely upon myself’ (37–9). For neither the self-absorption of these early moments nor the resolution imparted to him by his ‘glass’ shows Brutus the truth as history will show it, until he reasserts the resemblance, and slays himself as he slew Caesar.

Such is the situation when Hamlet confronts his mother in her closet, determined to persuade her of her errors. ‘You shall not budge,’ he tells her,

You go not till I set you up a glass

Where you may see the inmost part of you !

(III. iv. 19–21)

Hamlet, with his ‘antic disposition’ and his feigned – or real – madness, is another version of the fool, with the fool’s capacity and predisposition to make himself a glass. The mirror he holds up to Gertrude’s nature is not only verbal but visual, a distant cousin to the portrait of the blinking idiot and the picture of We Three: ‘Look here upon this picture, and on this, / The counterfeit presentment of two brothers’ (54–5). ‘Counterfeit’ is a telling word here; the portraits are only artists’ renderings, hence to some degree false, yet one of the brothers is doubly counterfeit, having presented himself to her in a dissembling guise. What Hamlet argues is that his mother has unaccountably failed to distinguish between the godlike Old Hamlet and the despicable Claudius (65). She has invented a likeness where none exists; she has failed to exercise judgment. ‘Have you eyes?’ he twice demands of her (66, 68), and again, ‘What devil was’t / That thus hath cozened you at hoodman-blind?’ (77–8). We may perhaps expect there to be some family resemblance of a physical kind between the two men; it is moral discrimination within that superficial similarity which is chiefly called for – and apparently wholly absent. Gertrude for her part not only accepts Hamlet as her mirror, but borrows his metaphor: ‘Thou turn’st mine eyes into my very soul’ (90). Yet the appearance of the Ghost, immediately following this exchange, adds an ironic dimension to the scene: once more Hamlet sees what Gertrude does not; once more she is convinced that ‘all that is I see’ (133). Is the Ghost, too, a ‘counterfeit presentment’? The question vexes Hamlet from the first. Is he himself only a ‘counterfeit presentment’ of hi? father? But for Hamlet, a reflective reflector, his mother’s failure to make a simple discrimination is a reminder of his own constant necessity to tell a hawk from a handsaw, a weasel from a whale, in a world of shifting perceptions and shadowy truths.

To compare and contrast – to exercise both wit and judgment. The ‘mirrors’ represented by historical collections and anthologies of the fall of princes have their counterpart in a more generalized use of history as a module. In Richard II, York’s nostalgic praise of the Black Prince – his brother and Richard’s father – bears a stylistic resemblance to the encomia for Hotspur and Hamlet. Instead of holding the Black Prince up as a generalized model, however, York chooses to compare him directly with his son. Richard looks like his father,

But when he frowned it was against the French,

And not against his friends; his noble hand

Did win what he did spend, and spent not that

Which his triumphant father’s hand had won;

His hands were guilty of no kindred blood,

But bloody with the enemies of his kin.

The elegant and apposite use of chiasmus in the last four lines shows clearly how York is balancing the one man against the other, and also gives an indication of his rising emotion. At this point in the speech he himself becomes aware of the force of his own rhetoric, and hastily interrupts the flow of words:

O, Richard, York is too far gone with grief,

Or else he never would compare between –

(II. i. 178–85)

But Richard has not really been listening, and the apology (like the analogy) is both unnecessary and unheeded.

Shakespeare uses the inverse of this comparative structure to comic purpose in Henry V when he has Fluellen attempt to develop the parallels between King Henry and Alexander the Great. Here we, like the skeptical Captain Gower, should expect a certain degree of contrast – but Fluellen is implacable. Macadon and Monmouth, after all, are both located on rivers – and if Henry did not exactly kill his best friend, as did Alexander, he did turn away Sir John Falstaff. As Fluellen explains, ‘I speak but in the figures and comparisons of it’ – ‘If you mark Alexander’s life well, Harry of Monmouth’s life is come after it indifferent well, for there is figures in all things’ (IV. vi. 43, 31–3). Like so many of Fluellen’s remarks, this one rings true. In effect, his analogy is a ‘low’ counterpart for the Prologue’s earlier identification of Henry V as ‘the mirror of all Christian kings’. At the same time it is an unconscious but apt application of Castiglione’s advice, to find classical models for virtuous conduct. Moreover, the total seriousness of Fluellen’s tone presents this ‘witty’ comparison in an effectively naive light. To Gower he may appear to be talking nonsense, but the audience, in the midst of its laughter, will recognize a time-honored and appropriate use of comparison to interpret contemporary history.

When the comparison is offered by one of the parties compared, this device takes on a new vitality, becoming at once a mode of learning and an aspect of self-knowledge. In the much discussed third scene of the fourth act of Macbeth, Malcolm makes use of just such a method to test out the loyalty of a befuddled Macduff. ‘I am not treacherous,’ Macduff asserts, and Malcolm replies pointedly, ‘But Macbeth is. / A good and virtuous nature may recoil / In an imperial charge’ (18–20). His father, Duncan, had made a fatal mistake in finding the mind’s construction in the face; moreover, he had done it twice, and been betrayed by two successive Thanes of Cawdor. Malcolm will take another path, one which assumes a disjunction between appearance and fact. Thus, seeming to accept Macduff’s protestation, he embarks upon the lengthy description of a man who threatens Scotland more even than its present king. ‘What shall he be?’ asks Macduff, and Malcolm replies

It is myself I mean, in whom I know

All the particulars of vice so grafted

That, when they shall be opened, black Macbeth

Will seem as pure as snow, and the poor state

Esteem him as a lamb, being compared

With my confineless harms.

(50–5)

Malcolm goes on, then, to detail his iniquities: there is ‘no bottom ... in [his] voluptuousness’ (60–1), he is afflicted with ‘stanchless avarice’ (78), he lacks all ‘king-becoming graces, / As justice, verity, temp’rance, stableness, / Bounty, perseverance, mercy, lowliness, / Devotion, patience, courage, fortitude’ (91–4). As he has hoped, Macduff is scandalized and horrified; the test has succeeded, and he now may ‘unspeak [his] own detraction’ (123), abjuring all the faults he has claimed. Here comparison has become a doubly valuable tool for the revelation of character. By employing the false formula, ‘I am like Macbeth, only worse,’ Malcolm can gauge the truth of Macduff’s disinterested patriotism. More subtly, by the very act of making this fictive comparison, he also establishes for the audience a crucial distinction between himself and his father, Duncan. He is not, as he pretends, like Macbeth; he is like Duncan, in that he is upright and virtuous. But he is also unlike him in a vital way, unwilling to trust the untested appearance of fidelity on the part of his subjects. It is this combination of likeness and unlikeness that makes Malcolm a fit ruler for the new Scotland which is emerging, and which safeguards both the land and the play from the dangers of a merely cyclical repetition.

The overt act of transformation Malcolm accomplishes in his final speech, when he commands that Scottish thanes shall ‘henceforth be earls’ (V. viii. 63), is an outward sign of this essential distinction. The conferring of a new name, and a name which links Scotland more closely with England, corresponds directly to the growth and change in Malcolm himself – a change itself made manifest in his assertion of his father’s title and power, without his father’s fatal flaw. This fundamental pattern, which progresses from a perceived dissimilarity, to an acknowledgment of resemblance, and then to a distinction within that resemblance, is the dominant pattern of analogy as it applies to the individual in Shakespeare’s plays. The pattern closely parallels, and indeed is a crucial element in, the hero’s growth to self-knowledge – a growth we have identified with ‘maturity’.

Malcolm’s brief pretense of venality calls to mind the larger and more complicated situation of Prince Hal, whose youthful associations with thieves, topers and prostitutes are of such urgent concern to his father, the king. Despite the famous ‘I know you all’ speech (1HIV I. ii. 192–214), with its assertion of a calculated plan for ‘redeeming time’, Hal’s taste for ‘small beer’, the friendship of Ned Poins and his fellows, is genuine, and his rejection of Falstaff is not the less painful for its prediction as early as 11. iv. of Part I (Falstaff: ‘banish plump Jack, and banish all the world!’ Prince: ‘I do, I will’ – (485–6). This extraordinarily well-balanced and finely structured play offers a series of complex interrelationships, in which its several characters are deliberately placed in juxtaposition to one another. The king and Hotspur are both rebels and potential usurpers, but the king comes to stand for authority, Hotspur for rebellion. The king and Falstaff are each in their way subversive, and each is an example and a mentor to Prince Hal, but they also demarcate the opposite poles of rule and misrule. Hotspur and Falstaff both exemplify rebellious anarchy, yet one is an idealist, one a cynical realist, one a young athlete only at home on a horse, the other an old reprobate forever on foot, though he longs for a charge of horse. Falstaff and Hal are companions and fellow scoffers at the righteousness of court life, but one is young and shrewd, the other old and inclined to folly, Hal ever conscious of time, Falstaff heedless of it. Hotspur and Hal bear the same name, and are alike in youth and valor, though they are very different in their reputations, and in their attitudes toward history, the common people and – once again – time. The king and his son are opposed and allied at once, Henry certain from the closing moments of Richard II that Hal is a wastrel yet discerning in him even then ‘some sparks of better hope’ (V. iii. 21), both men essentially pragmatists, astute politicians, apt dissemblers, Plantagenets.

The three stages of development we have posited are present in Hal’s story in a highly visible way. The king, Hotspur and the tavern world itself all regard him as behaving in a manner essentially the converse of what is suitable for the heir apparent. Early in Part I the king, hearing of Hotspur’s latest exploit, envies Northumberland his son, and expresses the wish

That some night-tripping fairy had exchanged

In cradle clothes our children where they lay,

And called mine Percy, his Plantagenet!

Then would I have his Harry, and he mine.

(I. i. 86–9)

As has often been noted, Shakespeare’s alteration of historical fact, in making the two Harrys parallel in age, reinforces the inevitable comparison, which is again pointed by Hal’s assurance to the king in III. ii. (‘the time will come / That I shall make this northern youth exchange / His glorious deeds for my indignities’ – 144–6), and by Hotspur’s typically fiery rhetoric (‘Harry to Harry shall, hot horse to horse, / Meet, and ne’er part till one drop down a corse’ – IV. i. 121–2). The one who does drop down a corse is Hotspur himself, who appears as much astonished as chagrined by this development, and who seems indeed to cede to Hal his ‘glorious deeds’, and even his rhetoric itself, as Hal completes the sentence spoken by his dying rival. As was the case with Priamond, Diamond and Triamond, the three brothers in Spenser’s Book of Friendship, the life seems to flow out of one Harry and into the other, making Hal a ‘double man’ (V. iv. 136) in yet another way.

Much the same can be said of Hal’s actions at his father’s deathbed in Part II. The king’s interpretation of his taking the crown – that the son wishes his father dead – provides an opportunity for both a comparison and a contrast between the two men. Hal does seize the crown, symbolically repeating his father’s act of usurpation, but there is no doubt that he considers himself a ‘true inheritor’ (IV. v. 168), legitimately succeeding to the throne, and this, as much as his cultivation of the common people, marks a vital distinction between father and son. In confronting first another Harry, and then another Henry, Hal engrosses up good deeds and plain titles to which, as Henry V, he will give a distinctive color of his own. We have noted elsewhere that Falstaff errs fatally in thinking that the new monarch is ‘King Hal’; unlike Hal himself, Falstaff is unable to perceive the distinctions within similarities which set the young king apart, both from his riotous past and from his father’s burden of usurpation and guilt.

In Henry V the same pattern is repeated in a condensed form. The Dauphin, a fellow prince and age-mate of the king, taunts him with the gift of tennis balls, as ocular proof that one ‘cannot revel into dukedoms’ in France (I. ii. 253). Henry’s reply disposes eloquently of the charge of revelry, but within the play the comparison goes further than the Dauphin’s insult; subsequent scenes show clearly that it is the Dauphin, and not the King of England, who is a reveller, a braggart and a rake. The king’s descent to the battlefield disguised in the cloak of Sir Thomas Erpingham makes him for a moment the anonymous equal of the common soldiers Bates, Court and Williams. He himself seeks the analogy, and speaks with meanings which are likewise cloaked: ‘I think the king is but a man, as I am; the violet smells to him, as it doth to me.… His ceremonies laid by, in his nakedness he appears but a man’ (IV. i. 100–5). But when the soldiers leave the stage, Henry V’s apostrophe to ceremony firmly outlines those responsibilities which fall to a king alone. He is a mortal man, subject to the fear of battle and of death, like his subjects – yet he is also, of necessity, different from them. The joke he plays on the soldier Williams accentuates this dual identity, as Williams ably defends himself from the charge of planning to strike the king:

Your majesty came not like yourself: you appeared to me but as a common man; witness the night, your garments, your lowliness. And what your highness suffered under that shape, I beseech you take it for your own fault, and not mine; for had you been as I took you for, I made no offense.

(IV. viii. 50–5)

Had the king been a common man, Williams would indeed have made no offense. Because he is not, he offers Williams a reward for his honesty and bravery – a reward which is paid in ‘crowns’. From the aloofness of Richard II, and even of Henry IV, King Henry V has deliberately moved toward an acknowledgment of what he holds in common with his subjects. Yet once this is established, it remains for him to acknowledge and assert, as well, his inescapable and crucial differences from them, his unique identity as their king.

The progress of Prince Hal from riotous adolescent to mature man and king may be thought of as an example of successful integration. Hal borrows freely from the personalities of others, acquiring and reflecting Falstaff’s appetitiveness, Hotspur’s aggression and honor, King Henry’s sense of duty. He forces upon his two audiences – the populace of England and the spectators in the theater – the realization that he is not only the ‘mirror of all Christian kings’, but the mirror of all England, from tavern to court. Those he seems at first to resemble, he will later reject; those whom he seems most unlike he will confront, and bear away from that confrontation their crucial strengths.

In Hamlet Shakespeare again approaches this question of integration, and its relationship to a character’s dynamic use of comparison and contrast as a vehicle for self-knowledge. For Hamlet is a play in which the principal character spends four of the five acts noting and exploring disjunctions between himself and the models of behavior he sees about him. All around him Hamlet finds contrasting figures who emphasize his own isolation. He is not like Old Hamlet, or Laertes, or Fortinbras, or the First Player, or the Gravedigger; nor is he like Claudius, or his ‘schoolfellows’, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Two of the major soliloquies bear directly upon this sense of disjunction: The ‘rogue and peasant slave’ speech (II. ii. 555–612) elaborately contrasts the First Player’s response to fictive grief with Hamlet’s failure to respond to reality; ‘How all occasions do inform against me’ (IV. iv. 32–66) similarly contrasts Fortinbras’ martial defense with Hamlet’s inactivity. And dramatic events within the play seem to support his feeling of contrast with those he should resemble. Hamlet, coming upon Claudius kneeling in prayer, will not kill him; Laertes, asked what he would undertake against Hamlet ‘To show yourself in deed your father’s son / More than in words’, replies shortly, ‘To cut his throat i’ th’ church!’ (IV. vii. 125–6). Hamlet will not claim his rights to ‘Th’ election’, the kingship; yet both Fortinbras (from without) and Laertes (from within) present themselves forcibly as candidates for the office. Laertes is successful in his suit to return to France; Hamlet is denied permission to go back to Wittenberg. Dutiful and avenging sons, deft courtiers, shrewd politicians, eloquent speakers, pithy truth-tellers – from all of these Hamlet feels himself set apart.

In his valuable study, Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare, Norman Holland remarks upon ‘Hamlet’s fondness for comparisons’, and attributes it to a ‘tendency to turn inner life into outward shows’. ‘Hamlet’, he says, ‘either uses outer events to express inner ones, or he compares inner attitudes by means of “counterfeit” outer representations of them.’¹⁸ Moreover, Hamlet’s mode of personal reflection is not only frequently comparative, but usually comparative to his own detriment. Consider his account, in the first soliloquy, of his mother’s hasty marriage. Only a month before, she had followed his father’s body ‘Like Niobe, all tears’ (I. ii. 149). His father, ‘so excellent a king’, was to Claudius as ‘Hyperion to a satyr’ (139–40). But the allusions – and the contrast – do not stop there. Inexorably, Hamlet draws himself into the equation. Claudius is

My father’s brother, but no more like my father

Than I to Hercules.

(152–3)

Why does he bring in Hercules, and the unflattering reference to himself? His point has already been made by the two previous mythological references, both of which turn inward, pointing through the parent to the child. Niobe wept not at the death of her husband, but at the deaths of her children, who died through her vanity. She had boasted that she was superior to Leto because she had seven sons and seven daughters, while Leto had only two children, Apollo and Artemis. Hearing of the boast and the insult to their mother, Apollo slew Niobe’s sons, and Artemis her daughters. Renaissance mythographers allegorized this story into a justification of the Second Commandment, which speaks of visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children.

Niobe sinned, but her children are killed; by this we see that it is no injustice in God to visit the iniquity of the parents upon the children, seeing they are a part of their parents, and in their punishment the parents suffer oftentimes more than in their own.¹⁹

So Gertrude’s sins are visited upon the son, and she will be made to suffer by his suffering. Hyperion the sun-god was the father of Phaethon, whose mother was a mortal woman. The son, taunted with having no father, obtained permission to drive the chariot of the sun through the sky, but lacking his father’s strength, fell to his death and scorched the earth beneath him. Hamlet, as the Phaethon-figure, feels likewise unworthy to take his father’s place – and feels, as well, that he appears fatherless, by reason both of his father’s murder and of his own unheroic posture. But why Hercules? The allusion seems again a reference to Old Hamlet, who smote the sledded Polacks (or pole-ax) on the ice and slew Old Fortinbras in single combat. To this titanic figure young Hamlet, the Wittenberg scholar, an indifferent rapier duellist, and at age thirty ‘fat and scant of breath’, bears small resemblance. Is he, then, associating himself with Claudius, as a diminished or corrupted version of the dead king? When we bear in mind the numerous critics who, following Freud and Jones, have argued for Hamlet’s oedipal impulses, and thus for his subliminal identification with the man who has married his mother, the link seems a possible one. Certainly, as Ernst Kris, among others, has shown, Hamlet appears to have a ‘dangerously submissive attachment to his idealized father’.²⁰ But the deprecatory self-reference is, as we have seen, characteristic. Moreover, as shrewd as Hamlet is in applying mythological archetypes, there is an aspect of the Hercules story which does fit him: not the Hercules of the twelve labors, but the allegorical Hercules of the famous choice between pleasure and virtue. Hamlet, too, stands at a crossroads, and ultimately will commit himself to the harsh path of action, rather than the seductive path of introspection and ‘words, words, words’.

Whatever complexities and nuances lie beneath his rhetorical flourish, Hamlet as we encounter him at the beginning of the play is, as we have said, pre-eminently concerned with his own isolation, his difference from other people. The degree of personal integration he achieves by the time he returns from England is manifested by a discovery, on his part, of analogies between himself and others. On the eve of that journey, he is still preoccupied with differences:

    Examples gross as earth exhort me.

Witness this army of such mass and charge,

Led by a delicate and tender prince

* * * * *

    How stand I then,

That have a father killed, a mother stained,

Excitements of my reason and my blood,

And let all sleep

(IV. iv. 46–8, 56–9)

But by Act V he has turned the tables on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, in effect making a mirror exchange between their fates and his. It is at this point that he is ready to come to terms with the terrible leveling process of the graveyard, where the skulls of unknown lawyers, courtiers and politicians mingle indifferently with that of the king’s beloved jester, and the specter of Alexander’s ‘noble dust’ stopping a bunghole gives way to the spectacle of Ophelia’s maimèd rites. In death all differences are resolved in sameness : ‘let her paint an inch thick, to this favor she must come’ (V. i. 193–4). But for Hamlet this is more than an existential truth. He now seeks and finds analogies not only with the dead but with the living; in effect he has acknowledged his own identity as a player, a trier-on of roles, and taken his own advice, to hold the mirror up to nature.

    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.

(V. ii. 75–8)

The final duel pits two avenging sons against one another, and the exchange of rapiers underscores their resemblance. As Horatio observes, ‘they bleed on both sides’ (306). Moreover, the arrival of Fortinbras adds another dimension to the analogy: one ‘delicate and tender prince’ confers his dying voice upon another as successor to the kingdom for which their fathers fought. And on his part, Fortinbras ordains for Hamlet a soldier’s funeral, and a king’s:

    Let four captains

Bear Hamlet like a soldier to the stage,

For he was likely, had he been put on,

To have proved most royal; and for his passage

The soldiers’ music and the rite of war

Speak loudly for him.

(V. ii. 397–402)

These are the terms in which Hamlet has spoken of Fortinbras; now they are used of him. The audience, like Hamlet himself, has gradually come to realize the degree to which he is like those around him. Like Laertes he can be gallant and impetuous; like Horatio, prudent and studious; like Fortinbras, princely and courageous; like the First Player, expressive and emphatic; like Old Hamlet, resolute and royal; even, like Claudius, unscrupulous and sly.

Many critics have remarked upon the technique of character splitting in the play: the three father-figures (Old Hamlet, Claudius, Polonius), the five young age-mates, sons and schoolfellows (Horatio, Laertes, Fortinbras, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern). Each of these stands in a special relationship to Hamlet, and many reflect aspects of his persona. Even non-psycho-analytic critics, as Holland observes, agree that in Hamlet ‘inner impulses are given outer expression’, and Holland himself goes on to rephrase this insight in psychoanalytic terms: ‘the defensive maneuver that permeates the language, events, and characters of the play is projection.’²¹ By ‘defensive maneuvers’, Holland (and Freud) mean the ways in which the mind protects itself against unwelcome knowledge, by such devices as condensation and displacement.²² In condensation two or more persons, images, words or events are combined into one; the most readily discerned example in Hamlet is his penchant for wordplay, including both ambiguity and punning or wit. Displacement, on the other hand, involves a diffusion or spreading out of characteristics. It may entail projection, as Holland suggests (Hamlet’s oedipal desire for his mother is transformed into Claudius’ marriage with her), splitting (also called decomposition), reversal, or symbolization.

All four of these modes of displacement are present in the structure of Hamlet, and all, interestingly, bear directly or indirectly on the matter of comparison and contrast. We have already noticed splitting as a major technique of the plot. Reversal is evidenced by the figure of Fortinbras, who is the son of Old Fortinbras as Hamlet is the son of Old Hamlet, but who is as well a successful, martial, active crown prince. But in Hamlet’s eyes, as we have seen, his other age-mates also appear to be reversals, or opposites, of his own character: this is the preliminary stage of development with which the hero begins his journey toward maturity and self-knowledge, and Freud’s word ‘defensive’ is useful as a way of reminding us that such mental disguises must be penetrated for the self to be known and accepted. Finally, the kind of displacement called symbolization involves the transfer of an association from one thing to another based upon a resemblance, whether physical or psychic, between the two. The manner of Old Hamlet’s death, by poison poured into the ear, is perhaps the most notable of many such devices in the play. Hamlet, told of this event by the Ghost, accepts it as a literal fact (and remembers a similar scene in The Mousetrap), but he also begins to speak of ‘cleav[ing] the general ear with horrid speech’ (II. ii. 568), of a knavish speech sleeping in a foolish ear (IV. ii. 24), of Claudius as a ‘mildewed ear [of corn] / Blasting his wholesome brother’ (III. iv. 65–6), and of words, words, words. Moreover, not only Hamlet, but Horatio, the First Player and even Claudius all refer repeatedly to knowing ears, ears that infect, or ears that will make the listener dumb. The ‘mildewed ear’ is one kind of symbol, seemingly provoked by an unconscious pun (condensation) – Claudius has blasted his brother through the ear; the repeated mention of ears by characters other than Hamlet combines symbolization with splitting. In Freudian terms, then, Hamlet’s progress from disjunction to comparison represents in a fictional way something like the progress made by a patient in analysis, recognizing by slow degrees certain crucial latent patterns in his life.

It may be argued, and persuasively so, that such a conclusion is unsound because it treats Hamlet as a real person, rather than as a literary character. But to this objection it may be replied that this would be the case only if we confined our scrutiny to what Hamlet learns, rather than what the audience learns – or the playwright invents. Many of the congruences to be found in Hamlet are congruences of which Hamlet himself remains unaware. Fortinbras’ final speech about his soldiery, for example, is spoken after Hamlet’s death, and many of the ‘ear’ speeches occur out of his own hearing. The discerning of such congruences, in fact, is very close to the most traditional kinds of literary criticism, which, like psychology and psychoanalysis, speak of patterns of imagery, and of symbolism, as providing a fundamental unity to the text. Whether Hamlet the character achieves such a unity – as I have argued for Prince Hal – is a more vexed question, and one directly related to the final stage of the rite of passage we have been describing: discrimination within analogy, a sense of healthful and vital difference.

Erik Erikson, in a ‘psychosocial’ examination of Hamlet, describes him as essentially a delayed adolescent, experiencing belatedly in his thirtieth year the fundamental crisis of youth, which Erikson takes to be a search for fidelity – something to believe in and be loyal to. Because of the rottenness in Denmark, he argues, Hamlet is unable to benefit from the example of his age-mates, who are ‘all sure (or even overdefined) in their identities as dutiful sons, courtiers, and future leaders’.²³ But since all of them are ‘drawn into the moral swamp of infidelity’, Hamlet suffers an ‘identity confusion’, which leads to the establishment of a ‘negative identity’, the assumption of those impulses and character traits which he has so long tried to avoid: the mad revenger, the warlike soldier-prince. Erikson thus concludes that Hamlet’s failure to find a model of fidelity prevents his achievement of a positive, integrated personality; in fact, he generalizes this conclusion to apply to all heroes of tragedy: ‘Thus do inner reality and historical actuality conspire to deny tragic man the positive identity for which he seems exquisitely chosen.’²⁴ In other words, Erikson sees Hamlet’s development as culminating in capitulation.

A somewhat similar argument by K. R. Eissler, subtitled ‘A Psychoanalytic Inquiry’, contends that the central issue in the play is Hamlet’s initial childishness.²⁵ Eissler takes a dynamic or developmental view of Hamlet’s character, discerning a pattern of growth in the soliloquies, from excessive adulation of his father (and an equation of incest with sexuality) toward a criticism and even rejection of his father in the fourth soliloquy, and a final union with Gertrude in death, thus fulfilling the oedipal wish in a symbolic act of ‘dying together’. Essentially, Eissler finds that Hamlet grows up in the course of the play, and replaces a childish and ineffectual way of dealing with his problems with a mature and functional one. He does integrate his personality and accomplish his objectives – but he does so at the cost of his own life, and is symbolically ‘reborn’ in the person of Fortinbras, who is both his mirror opposite and his twin. Like Erikson’s, Eissler’s is an argument which examines Hamlet as a real person, not a fictional construct. On the other hand, in suggesting a developmental pattern, both of these psychological approaches touch squarely upon a problem which does fall within the province of the literary critic: the degree to which Hamlet understands himself, and the events in which he is the central actor. And in order to suggest a plausible solution to this fundamental problem, we must, fittingly, return to the text.

A close examination of Hamlet’s remark about Laertes, ‘by the image of my cause I see / The portraiture of his,’ suggests one additional factor of importance. For the analogy in effect reverses Hamlet’s earlier injunction to Gertrude, ‘Look here upon this picture, and on this, / The counterfeit presentment of two brothers. ‘ In both cases, the verbal figure is of two paintings or simulacra, the first pair (Claudius and Old Hamlet) in violent contrast to one another, the second (Laertes and Hamlet) very similar. But it is useful to notice the obliquity of the second comparison. Hamlet does not merely say, as he might, ‘By my cause I see [i.e. understand] his.’ The crucial words ‘image’ and ‘portraiture’ remind us of the play’s thematic emphasis on painting and disguise, but they also emphasize the fictive, created nature of comparison itself. Once again we are dealing with simile, not metaphor. Notice the rhetorical stress on the closely linked pronouns ‘my’ and ‘his’ surrounding the inquiring and analyzing ‘I’. Hamlet’s cause is not the same as Laertes’, though they have something in common; nor is Hamlet himself Laertes, any more than he is Fortinbras, or Horatio, or any of the other men on whom he models his own conduct. As was the case with Macbeth, and indeed with Richard II and the Henry IV plays, the possibility of identity (and therefore of repetition) is first suggested, and then adroitly avoided. Hamlet learns in the course of the play that he cannot be his father; this is what Eissler calls his achievement of independence. But Hamlet – along with his audience – also learns that he is different from those around him, not in the absolute, negative ways he has feared, but instead in the uniqueness of his individual persona. Polonius’ tired advice, ‘to thine own self be true’, finds a new and vital referent in the need for individuation. Mythologically, Hamlet may be ‘reborn’ in Fortinbras, but in more strictly literary terms he will gain new life through the retelling of his ‘story’ – which is the play itself. At the close, the audience is brought to a realization of Hamlet’s place in the world of Hamlet, a realization achieved through the judicious detection of comparisons and contrasts within the context of the play.

Comparison is a particularly useful criterion by which to judge Hal and Hamlet because of their social roles as sons, heirs and successors. For them, as for such other developing figures as the two Richards, there exists a generation of ‘fathers’ and a generation of age-mates, against which the protagonist can – and must – measure his own progress. It is not surprising, therefore, that we are able to find a similar pattern of likeness and differentiation in the career of yet another successor, Octavius Caesar. Like Hal and Hamlet, the young Caesar of Antony and Cleopatra appears at first to be the direct opposite of his symbolic ‘fathers’, in this case the martial triad of Julius Caesar, Gneius Pompey, and in particular Antony himself. Caesar is an administrator and a politician; the generation of the fathers was heroic in war, striving with one another in single combat (III. vii. 31–2) – like Old Hamlet and Old Fortinbras, or Bolingbroke and Mowbray. Moreover, they were also heroic in love. Apollodorus Sicilian carried Cleopatra to Caesar in a mattress; she is Antony’s mistress, but she has also been as ‘a morsel cold upon / Dead Caesar’s trencher’, and ‘a fragment of Gneius Pompey’s’ (III. xiii. 116–18). Caesar is described by Cleopatra as ‘scarce-bearded’ (I. i. 21), an epithet which she intends as a commentary on his youth, but also an oblique reflection on his manhood; Antony by contrast has a ‘goodly thick beard’, according to Plutarch²⁶ and Enobarbus (II. ii. 7). In addition to Cleopatra, Antony has two wives; Caesar appears to have none, and lavishes his affection instead upon his sister and virtual namesake, Octavia. When, as he believes, Antony treats her shabbily, he is roused to an unaccustomed fury, almost as if he himself has been spurned. According to his rival, Antony ‘fishes, drinks, and wastes / The lamps of night in revel’ (I. iv. 4–5), preoccupying himself with ‘lascivious wassails’ (56); Caesar is abstemious, even puritanical. For political purposes, he consents to drink at the banquet, but deplores both the excess and the tipsy result, declaring with a characteristic excess of his own that he would ‘rather fast from all, four days, / Than drink so much in one’ (II. vii. 103–4). It is not clear whether or not he participates in Enobarbus’ version of the ‘Egyptian bacchanals’ (105), in which the drinkers dance hand in hand, but it is perfectly clear that he is uncomfortable throughout the proceedings: ‘our graver business / Frowns at this levity’ (121–2). In short, in almost every way Octavius is the opposite of Antony, and also of his other heroic forebears.

The presence in the plot of young Sextus Pompey, the son of Gneius, helps to emphasize this generational conflict and the sense of diminishment which is felt by the younger men and their lieutenants. Young Pompey has a legitimate grievance against Antony, who acquired his father’s house and then refused to pay for it; nonetheless, he is willing to make peace, and to accept the loss. As Menas, one of his friends, points out in an aside, Thy father, Pompey, would ne’er have made this treaty’ (II. vi. 82–3). The world of the fathers seems a lost world of warlike grandeur, very different from the manipulative Rome of the present.

In a way, it might be argued that Antony and Cleopatra is one of the most oedipal of Shakespeare’s plays, full of complex emotions directed by the ‘sons’ (Octavius, Pompey) toward the ‘fathers’ (Caesar, Pompey, Antony) and the ‘mother’ (Cleopatra). Describing the public enthronement of Antony and Cleopatra in the Alexandrian marketplace, Caesar speaks bitterly of the presence at their feet of ‘Caesarion, whom they call my father’s son’ (III. vi. 6). He himself is only an adopted son, born the nephew of Julius Caesar. His disgust at ‘all the unlawful issue that their lust / Since then hath made between them’ (7–8) reflects his prudishness, but seems at the same time particular and personal. Caesarion and the sons of Antony, Egyptian princes all, appear to displace the youthful Caesar of Rome.

But Octavius’ jealousy is directed as much at the father as at the sons. Antony’s continual references to his rival as ‘the young man’ (III. xi. 62) ‘the young Roman boy’ (IV. xii. 48), and ‘the boy Caesar’ (III. xiii. 17) obviously nettle him. ‘He calls me boy, and chides as he had power / To beat me out of Egypt. My messenger / He hath whipped with rods’ (IV. i. 1–3). Whipping with rods was a punishment for wayward children, and the word ‘chides’, too, suggests condescension to a youthful inferior. Though the two men are in many ways sharply different, Octavius in this may remind us of Coriolanus, who is also shamed by the label of ‘boy’ – a man in thrall to a powerful mother. For Octavius, it would appear, Cleopatra is a figure at once sexual and maternal, his father’s mistress and his rival’s. In his conciliatory message to her, as delivered by Thidias, there is, again, a personal note, as well as a political ploy: Caesar ‘partly begs / To be desired to give’. He wishes to be ‘a staff / To lean upon’ for her. In particular, says Thidias, ‘it would warm his spirits / To hear from me you had left Antony, / And put yourself under his shroud’ (III. xiii. 66–71). A shroud is a shelter, but it is also a garment. Caesar’s offer is to become her protector, and in so doing, to take the place of Antony. Cleopatra, for her part, is not unaware of this ambiguity. After Antony’s death, she kneels in mock submissiveness to Caesar, and twice in their short audience she addresses him as ‘my master and my lord’ (V. ii. 116, 190). But in her own suicide (which is itself both sexual and maternal in its symbolism), she eludes him at last, and is laid at his command by Antony’s side.

This brief excursion into the play’s psychological undercurrents has not taken us far from our main point, which is that Octavius Caesar, like Hal and Hamlet, undergoes a process of growth and change, from the perception of unlikeness to others, to the recognition of similarities, and thence to differentiation – and that a parallel series of changes in perception is offered to the audience. Opposite to Antony in so many ways, Caesar oddly resembles him in others, and the resemblance is reinforced by the dramatic action. We have seen that, whatever his motivations, he himself becomes one of Cleopatra’s suitors, hoping to possess and rule her. He thus follows the path of the heroic forebears from whom he has seemed to set himself apart. We also learn in the course of the play that Antony wept at the deaths of Julius Caesar and Brutus, his political predecessors (III. ii. 55–7). Addressing his servitors after the loss at Actium, he speaks so movingly that Enobarbus suggests he means ‘To make his followers weep’ (IV. ii. 24), and another follower, Eros, later does weep at his words (IV. xiv. 21). When the death of Antony is announced to Caesar, we see him weep too, and hear him declare that ‘it is tidings / To wash the eyes of kings’(V. i. 27–8). He has become one of Antony’s ‘followers’, both a servant and a successor.

Significantly Maecenas, observing him weep, employs a familiar metaphor: ‘When such a spacious mirror’s set before him, / He needs must see himself’ (34–5). The ‘spacious mirror’ that is Antony inevitably reflects, and refracts, Caesar’s own identity. Even in what seems to be a minor incident in the play’s last act, Caesar unwittingly follows Antony’s path. With characteristic generosity Antony, having heard of Enobarbus’ defection, gave orders for all his treasure to be sent after him to Caesar’s camp. Inv. ii. Caesar, learning from Cleopatra’s treasurer that she has falsified her account of money, plate, and jewels, acts with a similar (apparent) magnanimity: ‘Not what you have reserved, nor what acknowledged, / Put we i’ th’ roll of conquest: still be ‘t yours’ (V. ii. 180–1). Both of these incidents are mentioned by Plutarch, so that the resemblance between them in Antony and Cleopatra might be thought to be due to the source rather than the playwright. But North’s Plutarch calls Domitius’ (i.e. Enobarbus’) goods ‘his carriage, train, and men’, and Cleopatra’s, ‘ready money and treasure’.²⁷ In this form, there seems small parallel between them. By slightly changing the terms, Shakespeare makes possible the analogy, as Antony returns a ‘treasure’ to Enobarbus (IV. v. 12), anticipating Cleopatra’s echoing call for her ‘treasurer’ (V. ii. 142).

The final stage of differentiation for Caesar is appropriately brief, for the similarities between him and Antony have not been so pronounced that their difference ever entirely fades from our awareness – or from his. In his eulogy over the dead Cleopatra, Caesar himself draws the crucial distinction, when he speaks of ‘their story’ as ‘No less in pity, than his glory which / Brought them to be lamented’ (V. ii. 361–2). The ‘story’ of Antony and Cleopatra is ‘pity’, a tragedy; that of Caesar is ‘glory’, a history and a chronicle. Antony’s desperate attempt to encompass simultaneously the spheres of love and politics has come, inevitably, to a tragic end, while Caesar’s much diminished – and fleeting – gesture at courtship is likewise crowned by failure. Rome demands a politician, and in Octavius Caesar it has one. But in his coming of age Caesar at last takes note – as he must – of the qualities as well as the defects of his predecessor. The process by which he recognizes and to some degree absorbs aspects of Antony’s persona is not as definitive as it was for Hal, who could speak of Hotspur as his ‘factor’, laboring ‘To engross up glorious deeds on my behalf’ (1HIV III. ii. 147–8). Yet the struggle between these mighty opposites is far more interesting than it would have been were it entirely one of opposition. The complex character of each man and the complexity of their relationship challenge the discrimination of the audience, and offer to us, as well as to them, an intriguing opportunity for the exercise of wit and judgment.

Notes

1  George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, Bk. III, Ch. vii, p. 166, in English Reprints, iv (New York: AMS Press, 1966).

2  Puttenham, p. 167.

3  ‘Euphuism’ derives its name, of course, from John Lyly’s prose romance, of which the first part, Euphues the Anatomy of Wit, was published in 1578, and the second part, Euphues and his England, in 1580. The name ‘Euphues’, which means to produce or to grow, was suggested by a passage in Ascham’s Scholemaster (1570) in which he asserts that ‘’Eυφυη’ς is he that is apte by goodness of witte, and appliable by readines of will, to learning, hauing all other qualities of the minde and partes of the bodie that must another day serue learning.’ The Oxford English Dictionary defines the chief features of ‘euphuism’ as

the continual recurrence of antithetic clauses in which the anthithesis is emphasized by means of alliteration; the frequent introduction of a long string of similes all relating to the same subject, often drawn from the fabulous qualities ascribed to plants, minerals, and animals and the constant endeavour after subtle refinement of expression.

4  Shr. IV. i. 139. Cf. MND II. i. 203–7:

I am your spaniel; and Demetrius,

The more you beat me, I will fawn on you.

Use me but as your spaniel, spurn me, strike me,

Neglect me, lose me; only give me leave,

Unworthy as I am, to follow you.

5  J. C. Scaliger, Poetices Libri Septem (Lyons, 1561), p. 171, Appendix pro Epigrammate; also cf. Ben Jonson, Epigrams (1616), 2, 49; John Peter, Complaint and Satire in Early English Literature (Oxford, 1956), p. 297; and Geoffrey Hartman, Beyond Formalism: Literary Essays 1958–1970 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970) pp. 45–7.

6  Republic, 1.596 D-E., cited in E. R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, Willard R. Trask (trans.) (New York: Bollingen Foundation, 1953; rpt. New York: Harper & Row, 1963), p. 336.

7  Aelius Donatus, Commentum Terenti, Paul Wessner (ed.) (Leipzig, 1902–08), 1, 22.

8  Jacques Paul Migne, Patrologiae cursus completus: Series latina (1844–55), LIX’ 502C.

9  Macbeth, Kenneth Muir (ed.), Arden edition (London: Methuen, 1951; rpt. 1972), p. ii4n.

10  Baldessare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, Charles S. Singleton (trans.) (Garden City, N. J.: Doubleday, 1959), pp. 292–3 (IV, 8).

11  Roger Manvell, Shakespeare and the Film (New York: Prager Publishers, 1971), pp. 48–50.

12  David Young, The Heart’s Forest: A Study of Shakespeare’s Pastoral Plays (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), pp. 50–8.

13  William K. Wimsatt and Cleanth Brooks, Literary Criticism: A Short History (New York: Vintage Books, 1957), p. 229.

14  ibid.

15  As Wimsatt and Brooks point out, Francis Bacon in the Novum Organum (I, 55) describes these ‘two powers – that of perceiving resemblances and that of perceiving differences … without recourse to either of the terms “wit” or “judgment” ‘ (Literary Criticism, p. 229). For the widespread acceptance of wit and judgment as linked opposites, see, for example, Emanuele Tesauro, The Aristotelian Prospective Glass (1654), Richard Flecknoe, A Short Discourse on the English Stage (1664), John Dryden, An Essay on Dramatic Poesy (1668), Alexander Pope, Essay on Criticism (1711), Samuel Johnson, Life of Cowley, Life of Pope (1779–81).

16  ‘To the Right Honorable Roger, Earl of Orrery’, Epistle dedicatory of The Rival Ladies (1664), in W. P. Ker (ed.), Essays of ]ohn Dryden (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1900), 1,8.

17  This is a point of view upon which Achilles elaborates in Troilus and Cressida, in his discussion with Ulysses on the subject of time and fame:

The beauty that is borne here in the face

The bearer knows not, but commends itself

To others’ eyes; nor doth the eye itself,

That most pure spirit of sense, behold itself,

Not going from itself; but eye to eye opposed

Salutes each other with each other’s form;

For speculation turns not to itself

Till it hath traveled and is married there

Where it may see itself.

(III. iii. 103–11)

G. B. Evans in The Riverside Shakespeare chooses the reading ‘is mirrored there’ for line 110, following the Singer and Collier manuscripts (‘married’ is given in both the Quarto and the First Folio). It is an attractive choice, both for the imagistic consistency of the speech and because of the marked similarity between this passage and that quoted above from ]ulius Caesar.

18  Norman N. Holland, Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964; rpt. Octagon Books, 1976), pp. 203–4.

19  Alexander Ross, Mystogogus Poeticus (London, 1647), p. 317.

20  Ernst Kris, Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art (New York: International Universities Press, 1952), pp. 17–18. See also Ernest Jones, ‘The death of Hamlet’s father’, The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis and Bulletin of the International Psycho-Analytical Association (London), XXIX (1948), 174–6.

21  Holland, p. 203.

22  Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, in James Strachey (ed. and trans.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, v (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1953, rpt. 1958, 1962), pp. 279–309; Holland, pp. 14–15, 29–30.

23  Erik Erikson, Identity: Youth and Crisis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968), p. 238.

24  Erikson, p. 241.

25  K. R. Eissler, Discourse on Hamlet and Hamlet: A Psychoanalytic Inquiry (New York: International Universities Press 1971).

26  T. J. B. Spencer (ed.), Shakespeare’s Plutarch: The Lives of Julius Caesar, Brutus, Marcus Antonius and Coriolanus in the Translation of Sir Thomas North (Middlesex, England, and Baltimore, Maryland: Penguin Books, 1964; rpt. 1968), p. 177.

27  Spencer, pp. 253, 287.