The Renaissance Hamlet: Issues and Responses in 1600

by Roland Mushat Frye

Overview

Drawing on recent advances in historical knowledge, the author describes contemporary attitudes toward issues such as rebellion, conscience, regicide, incest, retribution, and mourning. His investigation reveals a number of convincing new reasons for viewing Hamlet not as an irresolute young man but as a vigorous and determined figure in confrontation with the moral dilemmas of his age. By understanding the play in its original terms, we find that it takes on new depth and power for our own time.

Originally published in 1984.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691640389
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	04/19/2016
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #116
Pages:	416
Product dimensions:	8.20(w) x 10.10(h) x 1.10(d)

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The Renaissance HAMLET

Issues and Responses in 1600

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By Roland Mushat Frye

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1984 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06579-3

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CHAPTER 1

The Form and Pressure of the Time

Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observation, that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature. For anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.

THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET poses challenges to every intelligent person, challenges that vary depending upon the points of view from which we see it. My purpose here is to examine the play afresh in the light of the audiences for which it was initially written, and to see it in the ambience of Elizabethan attitudes. In this context, much can now be seen which has been missed in the past. Continuing advances in historical knowledge, made by many different scholars in many different fields of investigation, make it possible now for us to reestablish more fully, more accurately, and more sensitively the audience responses upon which Shakespeare played. We can thus see that his Hamlet was so constructed as to evoke very different understandings in 1600 from those which have become typical of modern times. To recover the Elizabethan understandings to which Shakespeare appealed, I shall document relevant Elizabethan frames of reference Globe audiences would have brought to the play. In this way, we shall see Hamlet in a fresh light: we shall discover in its familiar text a play which in many ways is surprisingly unlike what we are ordinarily accustomed to expect, and we shall discover a different set of certainties and an equally different (and equally important) set of mysteries from those we may assume. My purpose throughout will be to examine the play in terms of the form and pressure of its own time, approached in the light of rigorous historical scholarship.

The most profound and seminal definition of drama as a representation or imitation of life comes in the forty lines of Hamlet's advice to the players, from which the headnote to this chapter quotes the central passage. Containing Shakespeare's most extensive comments on drama, these words are primarily applied to the play-within-the-play, but they can also serve as a highly useful commentary upon the more general relations between life and art, and they provide the basis for my method of interpretation here.

In this definition of dramatic art, Shakespeare unites the universal with the particular by showing "virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure." The derivation of the universal from the particular is the essence of the poetic, as Goethe saw it, and his words are directly pertinent to Hamlet:

It matters a great deal whether the poet is seeking the particular for the universal, or seeing the universal in the particular. The former process gives rise to allegory, in which the particular serves only as an instance or example of the universal; the latter, on the other hand, is the true nature of poetry.... And he who vividly grasps the particular will at the same time also grasp the universal, and will either not become aware of it at all, or will only do so long afterward.

It is in some such way that Shakespeare's genius operated. By holding up a mirror to reflect the age and body of the time he knew best, he transmuted the problems, attitudes, and concerns of his own age into something rich, fresh, and marvelous, transcending any one cultural epoch. It is this successful combination of effects that sets him apart. Even the most highly regarded writers of any age begin to appear oddly old-fashioned or even out of date after a few decades and their most serious concerns often seem irrelevant to later generations. But the words Shakespeare's characters speak still voice our concerns, and their problems merge into our problems. Whether they are dressed in Roman togas or medieval armor or Elizabethan doublets, they are perennially our contemporaries.

Marvelously universal though they are, however, Shakespeare's plays originate in his own time and place. It could not be otherwise, because even a great genius must begin by perceiving, reflecting upon, and transmuting what is immediately before him. Hamlet's description of the players as "the abstract and brief chronicles of the time" underscores that point (2.2.512). What Shakespeare knew that is relevant to all men and to every society was learned in his own period and place, and was timelessly expressed in the language of his own age. If we are to understand his universality, we can scarcely better begin than with his particularity.

When viewed in its original milieu, Hamlet takes on unexpected freshness. Some things which are problems to us would not have appeared to be problems in 1600, and different sets of questions would have arisen in Elizabethan minds, which often do not occur to us at all. Furthermore, certain discontinuities and discrepancies in the play when approached in twentieth-century terms simply would not have appeared in its original context. The Elizabethans for whom Shakespeare wrote would have found in Hamlet different excitements and challenges from those we today generally recognize. They would also have found a more pervasive unity, and an even more profound resolution to the play. Viewing Hamlet against the background of the time and the people for whom it was written yields a number of fresh perceptions, but this "novelty of interpretation" is not really new: it results from a systematic reconstruction of Elizabethan conceptions the words of the dramatist would have evoked in the minds of his original audiences. Playing upon the interests and concerns, the convictions and the doubts of his English contemporaries, Shakespeare has indeed held a "mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image."

But caution and balance are necessary, for that "mirror" to which Hamlet refers is a more complicated image than modern experience automatically prepares us to recognize. Thinking of large modern mirrors which can cover as much as an entire wall and reflect sweeping panoramas of nature with perfect fidelity, some readers in recent generations have assumed that Shakespeare's definition of art stipulated an absolute, virtually photographic or naturalistic reproduction of nature. Thus even so great a scholar as C. H. Herford maintained that for Shakespeare "the height of art is reached by a copy of nature exactly like the original" and that his criterion for art is "the elementary one (invariable in Shakespeare) of being like," and the even greater Edmond Malone had earlier interpreted Hamlet's mirror as requiring a play to "delineate exactly the manners of the age and the particular humor of the days." The problems and meanings of Hamlet's mirror are treated in considerable detail in Appendix A, but it is important to observe here that neither for Shakespeare nor for his earlier audiences would the "mirror up to nature" have evoked the kinds of mirror Malone, Herford, and others have apparently had in mind in their interpretation of Hamlet's words.

As artifacts, Elizabethan mirrors were small instruments, and as often as not represented a flawed or changed image of what they reflected. More importantly, mirrors were familiar metaphors for knowledge and understanding, beginning of course with the self-reflection which comes from looking into even a small glass: put in terms familiar to twentieth-century analysis, the "vehicle" was the small Elizabethan mirror, the "tenor" was the understanding and knowledge it conveyed. Furthermore, the mirror as a symbol for art and drama had a long history before Hamlet gave it its finest expression, and it did not suggest naturalistic or one-for-one reproduction of the reality it conveyed. No Elizabethan would have understood Hamlet's mirror metaphor as promising a literal or isomorphic reproduction of events and persons in their society or in any other society. What they would have understood was that the "mirror up to nature" excluded a non-representational world removed from the world they and all men know. In short, it was not a self-contained and self-reflexive artifact. Such art as Hamlet postulates represents or imitates human reality, a reality Shakespeare's audiences could recognize as evoking concerns familiar to them and with which they could therefore identify, even while elevating this reality into a broader and more profound understanding of human existence. Shakespeare's "mirror" indicated his intent to present the breadth and depth of human nature as he understood it, but not a precise, reproductive picture of any historical events.

Our task in this book will thus not be to find one-for-one sources in the world of Shakespeare's time for the events, persons, and ideas in Hamlet. Indeed, we are not seeking sources at all, but rather resources Shakespeare could employ as stimuli to evoke audience response in his creation of a great work of art. If we identify historical situations comparable to those Shakespeare dramatized and if we establish the reactions of Shakespeare's contemporaries to those comparable situations, we will be in a better position to postulate the kinds of reactions Shakespeare's dramatization would have evoked, through an understanding of the human concerns he appealed to in his audiences. By reconstructing and entering into the pertinent contexts of the sixteenth-century world, we can better appreciate what he was doing and what he achieved in Hamlet. We will not achieve a perfect appreciation, of course, because there are no perfect parallels and even if there were we should not assume that exactly the same reaction would occur to a dramatized event in the theater as to a similar event in historical reality. But we will at least have established working approximations and qualified probabilities for what Hamlet meant to its author and to his Elizabethan contemporaries in the Globe Theater.

This does not mean that we can or will find an historical person who served as the original model for Hamlet, or for Polonius, or for Gertrude. If there were such, and I doubt that there were, we are not likely to be able to identify them across the intervening centuries and through the shadows of aesthetic distance. Nor should we expect to uncover many passing and topical allusions to famous persons and events in Elizabethan England: there are only a few such allusions in all of Shakespeare, the best-known being perhaps the reference to the expedition into Ireland in Henry V and the glance at the "wars of the theaters" in Hamlet, and neither of these is very significant. On another plane of allusion, our understanding of Measure for Measure may be enriched if we recognize the play's complimentary treatment of the ideas of King James, but what can be an aid to understanding becomes an obstacle if we substitute James Stuart's ideas for William Shakespeare's poetry. Furthermore, Shakespeare did not write his plays to advise crown, court, parliament or people as to what should be done about this, that, or another problem of state. If we expect such "timeliness" in Shakespeare we will miss the point of his peculiar greatness, and if we never go beyond Elizabethan frames of reference in interpreting him, we shall miss his universality. Shakespeare neither can nor should be confined within a straight jacket of Elizabethan opinions, nor should we reduce the majesty of his words to the commonplaces and clichés of his time. Here balance and moderation are as important to the interpreting scholar as to the interpreting actor: Hamlet's advice to the one should also apply to the other, "that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature." Or, as one distinguished historian of drama has put it, knowledge and tradition "must be used with all the skill and caution with which one handles edged tools."

But if we are to appreciate Shakespeare's plays fully, we should not omit any practicable means for seeing them in their own nascent environment. Thanks to generations of careful scholarship, we know a great deal about that environment, and Shakespearean interpretation has greatly profited from research into Elizabethan stage and theatrical practices, literary forms and genres, the transmission of texts, and the history of ideas. With such contributions taken for granted, my concern in this study is to explore the broader cultural milieu of Shakespeare's time, and my purpose is to reconstruct relevant aspects of the Elizabethan context so that modern readers may be able to see Hamlet more nearly as it would have been seen by the original audiences for whom Shakespeare wrote it. The achievements of historical research, especially since the Second World War, have provided insights into Elizabethan attitudes and customs which can assist, revitalize, and in important ways change our understanding of Hamlet.

To attain that understanding, at least in some measure, is easier than to express it in writing. A cultural milieu is an encompassing phenomenon and is thus best conceived as circular or even global, whereas historical criticism requires a linear presentation. To convey the complex and sophisticated concerns of Elizabethan minds demands organization and clarity. Yet the very organization and clarity which will make the subject accessible and intelligible in twentieth-century terms can lead to oversimplification, on the part either of the writer or of the reader, or both. In writing this book, I have been pervasively aware of a tension between the sixteenth and the twentieth centuries, a tension which cannot be entirely dispelled but which I hope as a literary historian to mediate and make fruitful.

Such an historical approach can provide safeguards against the precarious subjectivisms of individual critics and the provincialisms of critical schools. The most dangerous type of critic, according to T. S. Eliot, is "the critic with a mind which is naturally of the creative order, but which through some weakness in creative power exercises itself in criticism instead. These minds often find in Hamlet a vicarious existence for their own artistic realization." Historical reconstruction can give some protection against that danger.

But while protecting us from that danger, historical approaches typically expose us to others. Scholars can be betrayed by historical reductivism as readily as by any other form of oversimplification. While studying historical backgrounds, we must remind ourselves that a great creative writer like Shakespeare used the materials his culture made available to him, but that he refused to be used by those materials. Instead, he transcended and transmuted them. Wilbur Sanders has wisely observed that "historical criticism, if it is to be useful, needs to know the difference between the greatness which is unique, and the competence for which one can find adequate parallels elsewhere."

What I attempt to do here is to present a sufficiently broad cross-section of relevant Elizabethan attitudes so that we who are each other's contemporaries in the twentieth century can also feel ourselves at home with the responses of Shakespeare's contemporaries. At points this entails the re-establishment of Elizabethan uncertainties, ambiguities, doubts, and disagreements in such a way that we in our time can understand them and see their implications. At other points, Elizabethan agreements and consensuses are treated in the same way and to the same end. In some cases, these sixteenth-century attitudes are broadly interesting and significant in themselves and in other cases they would be only marginally so were it not for their pertinence to Hamlet. Throughout, the pertinence to Hamlet is our overriding concern.

When that concern requires information on Elizabethan burial and mourning practices, that subject will be explored: even though scarcely a lively subject in itself, Shakespeare has vitalized it by his dramatic treatment. In the same way, incest is seen in Elizabethan terms by recapturing typical reactions to actual unions such as that of Claudius and Gertrude. Similarly, Hamlet's agonizing debates over resistance to the monarch and tyrannicide are placed in frames of reference familiar to the playwright and to those before whom the play was originally presented. In sum, I am drawing assistance from a number of historical fields (political, social, intellectual, religious, artistic, and so on) in order to draw modern readers into the cultural ambience of the Globe Theater audiences. Throughout, the particular is surveyed as an avenue for approaching the universal. In all these ways, I hope we can better understand and in good measure participate in the responses Shakespeare could have expected from the original audiences for whom he wrote Hamlet, thereby enriching our own responses today.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Renaissance HAMLET by Roland Mushat Frye. Copyright © 1984 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• Contents, pg. vii
• Illustrations, pg. ix
• Acknowledgments, pg. xv
• ONE. The Form and Pressure of the Time, pg. 1
• TWO. Problems, Challenges, and Ambiguities, pg. 11
• THREE. The Court and the Prince, pg. 76
• FOUR. Choosing Sides, pg. 111
• FIVE. The Deliberate Prince, pg. 167
• SIX. The Prince amid the Tombs, pg. 205
• SEVEN. Finale, pg. 254
• APPENDICES, pg. 281
• Notes, pg. 311
• Bibliography, pg. 367
• General Index, pg. 383