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Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn The Age of Innocence Alice's Adventures in Wonderland All Quiet on the Western Front Animal Farm The Ballad of the Sad Café Beloved Beowulf Black Boy The Bluest Eye The Canterbury Tales Cat on a Hot Tin Roof Catch-22 The Catcher in the Rye The Chronicles of Narnia The Color Purple Crime and Punishment The Crucible Darkness at Noon Death of a Salesman The Death of Artemio Cruz Don Quixote Emerson's Essays Emma Fahrenheit 451 A Farewell to Arms Frankenstein The Glass Menagerie The Grapes of Wrath Great Expectations The Great Gatsby Gulliver's Travels Hamlet The Handmaid's Tale Heart of Darkness The House on Mango Street I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings The Iliad Invisible Man Jane Eyre The Joy Luck Club Julius Caesar The Jungle Long Day's Journey into Night Lord of the Flies The Lord of the Rings Love in the Time of Cholera The Man Without Qualities The Metamorphosis Miss Lonelyhearts Moby-Dick My Ántonia Native Son Night 1984 The Odyssey Oedipus Rex The Old Man and the Sea On the Road One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest One Hundred Years of Solitude Persuasion Portnoy's Complaint Pride and Prejudice Ragtime The Red Badge of Courage Romeo and Juliet The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám The Scarlet Letter A Separate Peace Silas Marner Slaughterhouse-Five Song of Solomon The Sound and the Fury The Stranger A Streetcar Named Desire Sula The Tale of Genji A Tale of Two Cities "The Tell-Tale Heart" and Other Stories Their Eyes Were Watching God Things Fall Apart To Kill a Mockingbird Ulysses Waiting for Godot The Waste Land Wuthering Heights Young Goodman Brown Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations William Shakespeare's Hamlet New Edition Edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom Sterling Professor of the Humanities Yale University Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations: William Shakespeare's Hamlet—New Edition Copyright © 2009 by Infobase Publishing Introduction © 2009 by Harold Bloom All rights reserved. No part of this publicat; ion may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For more information contact: Bloom's Literary Criticism An imprint of Infobase Publishing 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data William Shakespeare's Hamlet / edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom. —New ed. p. cm.—(Bloom's modern critical interpretations) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-60413-632-6 (acid-free paper) 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616. Hamlet. 2. Hamlet (Legendary character) I. Bloom, Harold. II. Title: Hamlet. PR2807.W456 2009 822.3'3—dc22 2009018234 Bloom's Literary Criticism books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk quantities for businesses, associations, institutions, or sales promotions. Please call our Special Sales Department in New York at (212) 967-8800 or (800) 322-8755. You can find Bloom's Literary Criticism on the World Wide Web at http://www.chelseahouse.com. Cover design by Alicia Post Printed in the United States of America MP BCL 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is printed on acid-free paper. All links and Web addresses were checked and verified to be correct at the time of publication. Because of the dynamic nature of the Web, some addresses and links may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. Contents Editor's Note vii Introduction 1 Harold Bloom Hamlet's Northern Lineage: Masculinity, Climate, and the Mechanician in Early Modern Britain Daryl W. Palmer Eating Air, Feeling Smells: Hamlet 's Theory of Performance Carolyn Sale 33 Staging Nothing: Hamlet and Cognitive Science Amy Cook Cognition and Recognition: Hamlet's Power of Knowledge Lingui Yang 11 55 73 The Tragedians of the City? Q1 Hamlet and the Settlements of the 1590s Paul Menzer T. S. Eliot's Impudence: Hamlet, Objective Correlative, and Formulation Bradley Greenburg 85 109 vi Contents Translating Hamlet / Botching up Ophelia's Half Sense Maria Del Sapio Garbero 135 Quoting Hamlet in the Early Seventeenth Century Sayre N. Greenfield Gertrude's Elusive Libido and Shakespeare's Unreliable Narrators Richard Levin Chronology 193 Contributors 195 Bibliography 197 Acknowledgments Index 203 201 151 173 Editor's Note M y introduction suggests "family romances," catastrophe-creation, and transference as three paradigms for studying Hamlet. Daryl W. Palmer begins with a discussion of Hamlet's origins. Carolyn Sale rightly sees Hamlet as embodying a theory of performance, while Amy Cook and Lingui Yang apply cognitive science to interpreting the play. The "City of London," commercial core of the capital, may have housed performances of Hamlet, if the argument of Paul Menzer proves correct. T. S. Eliot's absurd declaration that Hamlet is an "aesthetic failure" is fully contextualized by Bradley Greenburg. Ophelia's madness and suicide are clarified by Maria Del Sapio Garbero, after which Sayre N. Greenfield catalogs the copious quotations from Hamlet in the early seventeenth century. Richard Levin concludes this volume with a wryly wise account of poor Gertrude's permanent bad press, vilified as she may have been by the Ghost and Hamlet, two males with one common grudge against her. vii H arold B loom Introduction w il l i a m sh a k e spe a r e's T hamlet I he last we see of Hamlet at the court in Act IV is his exit for England: HAMLET: For England? CLAUDIUS: Ay, Hamlet. HAMLET: Good. CLAUDIUS: So is it, if thou knew'st our purposes. HAMLET: I see a cherub that sees them. But come, for England! Farewell, dear mother. CLAUDIUS: Thy loving father, Hamlet. HAMLET: My mother: father and mother is man and wife, man and wife is one flesh—so my mother. Come, for England! Exit It is a critical commonplace to assert that the Hamlet of Act V is a changed man: mature rather than youthful, certainly quieter, if not quietistic, and some-how more attuned to divinity. Perhaps the truth is that he is at last himself, no longer afflicted by mourning and melancholia, by murderous jealousy and incessant rage. Certainly he is no longer haunted by his father's ghost. It may be that the desire for revenge is fading in him. In all of Act V he does not speak once of his dead father directly. There is a single reference to "my father's signet" which serves to seal up the doom of those poor schoolfellows, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and there is the curious Harold Bloom phrasing of "my king" rather than "my father" in the halfhearted rhetorical question the prince addresses to Horatio: Does it not, think thee, stand me now upon— He that hath kill'd my king and whor'd my mother, Popp'd in between th'election and my hopes, Thrown out his angle for my proper life And with such coz'nage—is't not perfect conscience To quit him with this arm? When Horatio responds that Claudius will hear shortly from England, presumably that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have been executed, Hamlet rather ambiguously makes what might be read as a final vow of revenge: It will be short. The interim is mine. And a man's life's no more than to say "one." However this is to be interpreted, Hamlet forms no plot, and is content with a wise passivity, knowing that Claudius must act. Except for the scheme of Claudius and Laertes, we and the prince might be confronted by a kind of endless standoff. What seems clear is that the urgency of the earlier Hamlet has gone. Instead, a mysterious and beautiful disinterestedness dominates this truer Hamlet, who compels a universal love precisely because he is beyond it, except for its exemplification by Horatio. What we overhear is an ethos so original that we still cannot assimilate it: Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting That would not let me sleep. Methought I lay Worse than the routines in the bilboes. Rashly— And prais'd be rashness for it: let us know Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well When our deep plots do pall; and that should learn us There's a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we will— Weakly read, that divinity is Jehovah, but more strongly "ends" here are not our intentions but rather our fates, and the contrast is between a force that can shape stone, and our wills that only hew roughly against implacable substance. Nor would a strong reading find Calvin in the echoes of the Gospel of Matthew as Hamlet sets aside his own: "Thou wouldst not think how ill all's here about my heart." In his heart, there is again a kind of fighting, but the readiness, rather than the ripeness, is now all: Introduction Not a whit. We defy augury. There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. Since no man, of aught he leaves, knows aught, what is't to leave betimes? Let be. The apparent nihilism more than negates the text cited from Matthew, yet the epistemological despair does not present itself as despair, but as an achieved serenity. Above all else, these are not the accents of an avenger, or even of someone who still mourns, or who continues to suffer the selfish virtues of the natural heart. Not nihilism but authentic disinterestedness, and yet what is that? No Elizabethan lore, no reading in Aristotle, or even in Montaigne, can help to answer that question. We know the ethos of disinterestedness only because we know Hamlet. Nor can we hope to know Hamlet any better by knowing Freud. The dead father indeed was, during four acts, more powerful than even the living one could be, but by Act V the dead father is not even a numinous shadow. He is a merely a precursor, Hamlet the Dane before this one, and this one matters much more. The tragic hero in Shakespeare, at his most universally moving, is a representation so original that conceptually he contains us, and fashions our psychology of motives permanently. Our map or general theory of the mind may be Freud's, but Freud, like all the rest of us, inherits the representation of mind, at its most subtle and excellent, from Shakespeare. Freud could say that the aim of all life was death, but not that readiness is all. II Originality in regard to Shakespeare is a bewildering notion, because we have no rival to set him against. "The originals are not original," Emerson liked to remark, but he withdrew that observation in respect to Shakespeare. If Shakespeare had a direct precursor it had to be Marlowe, who was scarcely six months older. Yet, in comparison to Shakespeare, Marlowe represents persons only by caricature. The Chaucer who could give us the Pardoner or the Wife of Bath appears to be Shakespeare's only authentic English precursor, if we forget the English renderings of the Bible. Yet we do not take our psychology from Chaucer or even from the Bible. Like Freud himself, we owe our psychology to Shakespeare. Before Shakespeare, representations in literature may change as they speak, but they do not change because of what they say. Shakespearean representation turns upon his persons listening to themselves simultaneously with our listening, and learning and changing even as we learn and change. Falstaff delights himself as much as he delights us, and Hamlet modifies himself by studying his own modifications. Ever since, Falstaff has been the inescapable model for nearly all wit, and Harold Bloom Hamlet the paradigm for all introspection. When Yorick's skull replaces the helmeted ghost, then the mature Hamlet has replaced the self-chastising revenger, and a different sense of death's power over life has been created, and in more than a play or a dramatic poem: HAMLET: To what base uses we may return, Horatio! Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander, till it find it, stopping a bunghole? HORATIO: 'Twere to consider too curiously to consider so. HAMLET: No, faith, not a jot, but to follow him thither with modesty enough, and likelihood to lead it. Probability leads possibility, likelihood beckons imagination on, and Alexander is essentially a surrogate for the dead father, the Danish Alexander. Passionately reductive, Hamlet would consign his own dust to the same likelihood, but there we part from him, with Horatio as our own surrogate. Hamlet's unique praise of Horatio sets forever the paradigm of the Shakespearean reader or playgoer in relation to the Shakespearean tragic hero: Dost thou hear? Since my dear soul was mistress of her choice, And could of men distinguish her election, Sh'ath seal'd thee for herself, for thou hast been As one, in suff 'ring all, that suffers nothing . . . Which means, not that Horatio and the reader do not suffer with Hamlet, but rather that truly they suffer nothing precisely because they learn from Hamlet the disinterestedness they themselves cannot exemplify, though in possibility somehow share. And they survive, to tell Hamlet's story "of accidental judgments" not so accidental and perhaps not judgments, since disinterestedness does not judge, and there are no accidents. Only Hamlet, at the last, is disinterested, since the hero we see in Act V, despite his protestations, is now beyond love, which is not to say that he never loved Gertrude, or Ophelia, or the dead father, or poor Yorick for that matter. Hamlet is an actor? Yes, earlier, but not in Act V, where he has ceased also to be a play director, and finally even abandons the profession of poet. Language, so dominant as such in the earlier Hamlet, gives almost the illusion of transparency in his last speech, if only because he verges upon saying what cannot be said: You that look pale and tremble at this chance, That are but mutes or audience to this act, Introduction Had I but time—as this fell sergeant, Death, Is strict in his arrest—O, I could tell you— But let it be. Evidently he does know something of what he leaves, and we ache to know what he could tell us, since it is Shakespeare's power to persuade us that Hamlet has gained a crucial knowledge. One clue is the abiding theatrical trope of "but mutes or audience," which suggests that the knowledge is itself "of " illusion. But the trope is framed by two announcements to Horatio and so to us—"I am dead"—and no other figure in Shakespeare seems to stand so authoritatively on the threshold between the worlds of life and death. When the hero's last speech moves between "O, I die, Horatio" and "the rest is silence," there is a clear sense again that much more might be said, concerning our world and not the "undiscovered country" of death. The hint is that Hamlet could tell us something he has learned about the nature of representation, because he has learned what it is that he himself represents. Shakespeare gives Fortinbras the last word on this, but that word is irony, since Fortinbras represents only the formula of repetition: like father, like son. "The soldier's music and the rite of war" speak loudly for the dead father, but not for this dead son, who had watched the army of Fortinbras march past to gain its little patch of ground and had mused that: "Rightly to be great / Is not to stir without great argument." The reader's last word has to be Horatio's, who more truly than Fortinbras has Hamlet's dying voice: "and from his mouth whose voice will draw on more," which only in a minor key means draw more supporters to the election of Fortinbras. Horatio represents the audience, while Fortinbras represents all the dead fathers. III We love Hamlet, then, for whatever reasons Horatio loves him. Of Horatio we know best that what distinguishes him from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and indeed from Polonius, Ophelia, Laertes, and Gertrude, is that Claudius cannot use him. Critics have remarked upon Horatio's ambiguously shifting status at the court of Denmark, and the late William Empson confessed a certain irritation at Hamlet's discovery of virtues in Horatio that the prince could not find in himself. Yet Shakespeare gives us a Hamlet we must love while knowing our inferiority, since he has the qualities we lack, and so he also gives us Horatio, our representative, who loves so stoically for the rest of us. Horatio is loyal, and limited; skeptical as befits a fellow student of the profoundly skeptical Hamlet, yet never skeptical about Hamlet. Take Horatio out of the play, and you take us out of the play. The plot could be rearranged to spare the wretched Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, even to spare Laertes, let alone Fortinbras, but remove Horatio, and Hamlet becomes so estranged Harold Bloom from us that we scarcely can hope to account for that universality of appeal which is his, and the play's, most original characteristic. Horatio, then, represents by way of our positive association with him; it is a commonplace, but not less true for that, to say that Hamlet represents by negation. I think this negation is Biblical in origin, which is why it seems so Freudian to us, because Freudian negation is Biblical and not Hegelian, as it were. Hamlet is Biblical rather than Homeric or Sophoclean. Like the Hebrew hero confronting Yahweh, Hamlet needs to be everything in himself yet knows the sense in which he is nothing in himself. What Hamlet takes back from repression is returned only cognitively, never affectively, so that in him thought is liberated from its sexual past, but at the high expense of a continued and augmenting sense of sexual disgust. And what Hamlet at first loves is what Biblical and Freudian man loves: the image of authority, the dead father, and the object of the dead father's love, who is also the object of Claudius' love. When Hamlet matures, or returns fully to himself, he transcends the love of authority, and ceases to love at all, and perhaps he can be said to be dying throughout all of Act V, and not just in the scene of the duel. In Freud, we love authority, but authority does not love us in return. Nowhere in the play are we told, by Hamlet or by anyone else, of the love of the dead king for his son, but only for Gertrude. That Hamlet hovers always beyond our comprehension must be granted, yet he is not so far beyond as to cause us to see him with the vision of Fortinbras, rather than the vision of Horatio. We think of him not necessarily as royal, but more as noble, in the archaic sense of "noble" which is to be a seeing soul. It is surely no accident that Horatio is made to emphasize the word "noble" in his elegy for Hamlet, which contrasts angelic song to "the soldier's music" of Fortinbras. As a noble or seeing heart, Hamlet indeed sees feelingly. Short of T. S. Eliot's judgment that the play is an aesthetic failure, the oddest opinion in the Hamlet criticism of our time was that of W. H. Auden in his Ibsen essay, "Genius and Apostle," which contrasts Hamlet as a mere actor to Don Quixote as the antithesis of an actor: Hamlet lacks faith in God and in himself. Consequently he must define his existence in terms of others, e.g., I am the man whose mother married his uncle who murdered his father. He would like to become what the Greek tragic hero is, a creature of situation. Hence his inability to act, for he can only "act," i.e., play at possibilities. Harold Goddard, whose The Meaning of Shakespeare (1951) seems to me still the most illuminating single book on Shakespeare, remarked that, Introduction "Hamlet is his own Falstaff." In Goddard's spirit, I might venture the formula that Brutus plus Falstaff equals Hamlet, though "equals" is hardly an accurate word here. A better formula was proposed by A. C. Bradley, when he suggested that Hamlet was the only Shakespearean character whom we could think had written Shakespeare's plays. Goddard built on this by saying of Shakespeare: "He is an unfallen Hamlet." From a scholarly or any Formalist perspective, Goddard's aphorism is not criticism, but neither historical research nor Formalist modes of criticism have us much in learning to describe the unassimilated originality that Shakespearean representation still constitutes. Because we are formed by Shakespeare, paradoxically most fully where we cannot assimilate him, we are a little blinded by what might be called the originality of this originality. Only a few critics (A. D. Nuttall among them) have seen that the central element in this originality is its cognitive power. Without Shakespeare (and the Bible as his precursor text) we would not know of a literary representation that worked so as to compel "reality" (be it Platonic or Humean, Hegelian or Freudian) to reveal aspects of itself we previously could not discern. Such a representation cannot be considered antimimetic or an effect of language alone. IV One way, by no means unproductive, of accounting for the force of Shakespearean representation is to see it as the supreme instance of what the late Paul de Man called a poetics of modernity, of a revisionism of older literary conventions that at once subsumed and cancelled the illusions always present in all figurative language. Howard Felperin, working in de Man's mode, adroitly reads Macbeth's "modernity" as the dilemma of a figure totally unable to take his own nature for granted: "He cannot quite rest content in an action in which his role and his nature are determined in advance, but must continuously reinvent himself in the process of acting them out." In such a view, Macbeth is a strong misreading of a figure like Herod in the old morality plays. I would go further and suggest that the drama Macbeth is an allusive triumph over more formidable precursors, just as King Lear is. The Shakespearean Sublime, too strong to find agonists in Seneca or in the native tradition (even in Marlowe), and too remote from Athenian drama to feel its force, confronts instead the Sublime of the Bible. What breaks loose in the apocalyptic cosmos of Macbeth or of Lear is an energy of the abyss or the original chaos that is ignored in the priestly first chapter of Genesis, but which wars fiercely against Jehovah in crucial passages of Job, the Psalms, and Isaiah. To subsume and supersede the Bible could not have been the conscious ambition of Shakespeare, but if we are to measure the preternatural energies of Macbeth or of Lear, then we will require Job or Isaiah or certain Psalms as the standard of measurement. Harold Bloom What is the advance, cognitive and figurative, that Shakespearean representation achieves over Biblical depiction? The question is absurdly difficult, yet anything but meaningless. If Shakespeare has a true Western rival, then he is either the Yahwist, the Hebrew Bible's great original, or the Homer of the Iliad. Can there be an advance over Jacob or Achilles as representations of reality, whatever that is taken to be? What the question reduces to is the unanswerable: can there be advances in reality? The arts, as Hazlitt insisted, are not progressive, and if reality is, then its progression suspiciously resembles a speeding up of what Freud called the death drive. Reality testing, like the reality principle, is Freud's only transcendentalism, his last vestige of Platonism. Freud's own originality, as he deeply sensed, tends to evaporate when brought too near either to the originality of the Yahwist or to the originality of Shakespeare. This may be the true cause of the disaster that is Moses and Monotheism, and of Freud's own passion for the lunatic thesis that Shakespeare's plays were written by the Earl of Oxford. By Nietzsche's genealogical test for the memorable, which is cognitive pain, Job is no more nor less forgettable than Macbeth or Lear. The rhetorical economy of Job's wife, in her one appearance, unmatchable even out of context, is overwhelming within context, and may have set for Shakespeare one of the limits of representation: So went Satan forth from the presence of the Lord, and smote Job with sore boils from the sole of his foot unto his crown. And he took him a potsherd to scrape himself withal; and he sat down among the ashes. Then said his wife unto him, Dost thou still retain thine integrity? Curse God, and die. Lear's Queen, the mother of Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia, had she survived to accompany her husband onto the heath, hardly could have said more in less. In Shakespeare's tragedies there are moments of compressed urgency that represent uncanny yet persuasive change with Biblical economy. The dying Edmund sees the bodies of Goneril and Regan brought in, and belatedly turns his lifetime about in four words: "Yet Edmund was belov'd." The phrase is a vain attempt to countermand his own order for the murder of Cordelia. "Yet Edmund was belov'd"—though loved by two fiends, the shock of knowing he was loved, unto death, undoes "mine own nature." One thinks of Hamlet's "Let be" that concludes his "We defy augury" speech, as he goes into the trap of Claudius' last plot. "Let be" epitomizes what I have called "disinterestedness," though Horatio's word "noble" may be more apt. That laconic "Let be," repeated as "Let it be" in Hamlet's death speech, is itself a kind of catastrophe creation, even as it marks another phase in Hamlet's Introduction release from what Freud called the family romance, and even as it compels another transference for our veneration to Hamlet. Catastrophe creation, family romance, transference: these are the stigmata and consequently the paradigms for imaginative originality in the Bible and, greatly shadowed, in Freud, and I suggest now that they can be useful paradigms for the apprehension of originality in Shakespeare's tragic representations. The fantasy of rescuing the mother from degradation is palpable in Hamlet; less palpable and far more revelatory is the sense in which the prince has molded himself into a pragmatic changeling. The ghost is armed for war, and Hamlet, grappling with Laertes in the graveyard, accurately warns Laertes (being to that extent his father's son) that as the prince he has something dangerous in him. But is Hamlet psychically ever armed for war? Claudius, popping in between the election and Hamlet's hopes, could have shrewdly pled more than his nephew's youth and inexperience while properly arguing that his own nature was better qualified for the throne. Hamlet, in the graveyard, shocked back from beyond affect, accurately indicates whose true son he first became as changeling: Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath bore me on his back a thousand times, and now—how abhorred in my imagination it is. My gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft . . . Harry Levin, for whom strong misreading is not serendipity but misfortune advises us that "Hamlet without Hamlet has been thought about all too much." One might reply, in all mildness, that little memorable has been written about Hamlet that does not fall into the mode of "Hamlet without Hamlet." Far more even than Lear or Macbeth, the play is the figure; the question of Hamlet only can be Hamlet. He does not move in a Sublime cosmos, and truly has no world except himself, which would appear to be what he has learned in the interim between Acts IV and V. Changelings who move from fantasy to fact are possible only in romance, and alas Shakespeare wrote the tragedy of Hamlet, and not the romance of Hamlet instead. But the originality of Shakespearean representation in tragedy, and particularly in Hamlet, hardly can be overstressed. Shakespeare's version of the family romance always compounds it with two other paradigms for his exuberant originality: with a catastrophe that creates and with a carrying across from earlier ambivalences within the audience to an ambivalence that is a kind of taboo settling in about the tragic hero like an aura. At the close of Hamlet, only Horatio and Fortinbras are survivors. Fortinbras presumably will be another warrior-king of Denmark. Horatio does not go home with us, but vanishes 10 Harold Bloom into the aura of Hamlet's afterlight, perhaps to serve as witness of Hamlet's story over and over again. The hero leaves us with a sense that finally he has fathered himself, that he was beyond our touch though not beyond our affections, and that the catastrophes he helped provoke have brought about, not a new creation, but a fresh revelation of what was latent in reality but not evident without his own disaster. V As a coda, I return to my earlier implication that Shakespearean originality is the consequence of diction or a will over language changing his characters, and not of language itself. More than any other writer, Shakespeare is able to exemplify how meaning gets started rather than just renewed. Auden remarked that Falstaff is free of the superego; there is no over-I or above-I for that triumph of wit. Nietzsche, attempting to represent a man without a superego, gave us Zarathustra, a mixed achievement in himself, but a very poor representation when read side by side with Falstaff. Falstaff or Zarathustra? No conceivable reader would choose the Nietzschean rather than the Shakespearean over-man. Falstaff indeed is how meaning gets started: by excess, overflow, emanation, contamination, the will to life. Zarathustra is a juggler of perspectives, a receptive will to interpretation. Poor Falstaff ends in tragedy; his catastrophe is his dreadfully authentic love for Hal. Zarathustra loves only a trope, the solar trajectory, and essentially is himself a trope; he is Nietzsche's metalepsis or transumption of the philosophical tradition. A Formalist critic would say that Falstaff is a trope also, a gorgeous and glowing hyperbole. Say rather that Falstaff is a representation, in himself, of how meaning gets started, of how invention is accomplished and manifested. But we remember Falstaff as we want to remember him, triumphant in the tavern, and not rejected in the street. We remember Hamlet as he wanted us to remember him, as Horatio remembers him, without having to neglect his end. Perhaps Hamlet is a representation, in himself, not just of how meaning gets started, but also of how meaning itself is invention, of how meaning refuses to be deferred or to be ended. Perhaps again that is why we can imagine Hamlet as the author of Hamlet, as the original we call Shakespeare. D aryl W . P almer Hamlet's Northern Lineage: Masculinity, Climate, and the Mechanician in Early Modern Britain "That all mental form being indefinite and ideal, realities must needs become cold. . . ." —Coleridge, Coleridge's Shakespeare Criticism F or centuries, the study of early modern men has been troubled by Hamlet's famous declaration of grief: "But I have that within which passes show, / These but the trappings and the suits of woe."1 In the play, Hamlet needs to justify his dull behavior before an unsympathetic audience. In critical commentaries, scholars have accepted this fact and gone on to search for what was "within," even as others have protested that the search was hollow.2 In the essay that follows, I propose that we would be better served by focusing on the way Hamlet's rhetoric of justification evolves over the course of the play. As early modern observers would have done, I am inclined to ground this inquiry in regional and lineal terms. I will suggest that, as Hamlet unfolds, the prince aligns himself with the active voyagers of the frozen north by engaging with his environment and redefining himself in exoteric, or outward terms. How, I want to ask, do Hamlet's northern predecessors—real and fictional—inform the play's innovative apologia for early modern man? Renaissance Drama, Volume 35 (2006): pp. 3–25. Copyright © 2006 Northwestern University Press. 11 12 Daryl W. Palmer Of course the context for such questioning is both humoral and geographical. To an extent rarely remarked, we have tended to nationalize gender in this period even though early modern observers paid more attention to what Mary Floyd-Wilson has termed "geohumoralism,"3 the classical notion that habitat shapes human being. Writers such as Jean Bodin and Levinus Lemnius drew on Aristotle, Hippocrates, and Galen in order to elaborate this zonal vision.4 In the hands of these commentators, classical notions of region (centered on the Mediterranean) merged with Macrobian cartography, which seemed to frame, even explain, fluidic and thermal variation in the human body. Other commentators, such as Giovanni Botero, paid scrupulous attention to the ways in which "situation" determined human being: "So we may see, that the Englishmen which inhabit a plaine and plentifull soile, have always prevailed against the Scots & Welshmen, who presuming upon the strength of their owne countrey, have divers times molested them."5 According to these models, habitation exercised a profound and predictable influence on human behavior. In this context, Britain and its people were usually seen as "northern," an identity they shared with many other people who inhabited a region famous for its frostiness.6 In Famous Frosts and Frost Fairs in Great Britain, William Andrews documents this thermal perception with a chronology of famous English winters, beginning in c.e. 134, when the Thames was frozen for two months.7 With good reason, Macrobian cartographers located Britain in a larger territory they called "Europa Frigida." In his Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus (1555), Olaus Magnus describes the people of this region and celebrates their common identity: I have written above about the various activities of the northern peoples, looking at their violent struggles in war, their buildings, their social intercourse, and also the cheerful processions that entertain this race, who live under the influence of the harsher planets, and how they celebrate their feast days in the regular yearly course, as other nations do.8 Having chronicled the violent animosities between Poles and Swedes and Russians, the writer looks back and declares with complete confidence that his great work deals with a single "race" of people. It is no coincidence, I suggest, that the most discussed character in English literature is a Dane. And how did such theorizing matter to notions of northern masculinity? As Mark Breitenberg has pointed out, "Masculinity is inherently anxious. . . ."9 Men fumbled about in the cold, searching for a way to justify their own versions of masculine identity. Climate only complicated this search. According to humoral theory, the steady dose of northern cold could either seal in a man's natural heat or undermine his masculinity. Floyd-Wilson describes Hamlet's Northern Lineage 13 another layer of permutation: "The logic of inversion fixed the white northerner and the black southerner in an interdependent relationship: if the southerner is hot and dry, then the northerner must be cold and moist; if the southerner is weak and wise, the northerner must be strong and witless."10 To be sure, early modern Britons could find little comfort in this sort of identification. Floyd-Wilson writes, "to be white and British in the early modern period was not a badge of superiority but cast one instead on the margins as uncivil, slow-witted, and more bodily determined than those people living in more temperate zones."11 The author of Batman uppon Bartholome declares, "in the bodies that colde hath the masterie over, the coulour is white, the haire soft and straight, the wit hard and forgetful, little appetite, much sleep, heavie in going and slow. . . ."12 In this spirit, Lemnius points to northern "Dolts and Asseheads."13 Bodin simply declares that people of the north tend to be beastly and cruel.14 Of course Britons resisted such verdicts, but the complexity of this opposition has only begun to be studied. Floyd-Wilson explains, "In both imaginative and non-imaginative literature, late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century English writers struggle to stabilize and rehabilitate their northern identity."15 We can mark the heterogeneity of this rhetoric in the writings of two men, Raphael Holinshed and Robert Burton. Holinshed recounts the year of Shakespeare's birth: The one and twentith of December began a frost, which continued so extremlie, that on Newyeares even, people went over and alongst the Thames on the ise from London bridge to Westminster. Some plaied at the football as boldlie there, as if it had been on the drie land: diverse of the court being then at Westminster, shot dailie at pricks set upon the Thames: and the people both men and women went on the Thames in greater numbers, than in anie street of the citie of London.16 In these and similar humoral histories, the chronicler records winter behavior alongside accessions and depositions. In fact, Holinshed savors the winter cold, relishing the way it continues "so extremlie," transforming their known world into a place of wonder. Thermal extremity inspires masculine activity as Holinshed celebrates people (men?) who play "boldlie" and shoot "at pricks." Unlike a number of his partisan colleagues, he makes no attempt to celebrate the masculine mind. Perhaps bold football will compensate for dull wits? Another version of this response can be found in Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. As leaf after leaf charts the fluidic instabilities of the masculine body, Burton arrives at a solution. Breitenberg explains, "How can such potent internal pressure be released? By writing about it, 14 Daryl W. Palmer externalizing it, and especially by assigning it to someone other than oneself "17 Of course Burton's efforts both underwrite and unsettle those of Holinshed. One man values thought, the other physical exertion. Both value writing, and the conversation proceeds in this manner. What stands out in the growing argument, as I hope to show, is a rather consistent attempt to emphasize the external. Shakespeare, for his part, seems to have found this conversation irresistible. Cold permeates the plays. The word appears some 217 times, but more often—and with greater complexity—in the tragedies, histories, and romances. As a backdrop to these more complex invocations, Shakespeare invokes winter to sound an old seasonal note of lack, as when Cleopatra recollects Antony: "For his bounty, / There was no winter in't" (5.2.86–87). Or the playwright conjures up a chill when he wants to talk in traditional terms about justice and mortality. At the end of Titus Andronicus, Lucius addresses his dead father: "O, take this warm kiss on thy pale cold lips" (5.3.153). Likewise, Cleopatra gestures toward Antony's corpse: "This case of that huge spirit now is cold" (4.15.89). Quite suggestively, Shakespeare's characters use the same terms to talk about modesty. In this vein, Ferdinand tries to impress his purity upon his future father-in-law in The Tempest: "I warrant you, sir / The white cold virgin snow upon my heart / Abates the ardor of my liver" (4.1.54–56). On the other hand, Shakespeare's women often seem cold. Isabella in Measure for Measure and Marina in Pericles come to mind (2.2.45; 4.6.139). In Much Ado About Nothing, Beatrice takes pride in her "cold blood" (1.1.130). But, as Paster points out, the codes of humoral temperature always seem to work against women, who are figured as inherently imperfect.18 In the comedies, men feel nipped and pinched by brumal experience that usually has much to do with failed romance and usually, via the discourse of humors, intimates a moist masculinity. When the King of Navarre and his cohorts don Muscovite costumes in order to woo the visiting ladies, the Princess sends them off in this spirit: "Twenty adieus, my frozen Muscovites" (5.2.265). Shakespeare carries the theme forward in The Merchant of Venice. Once the Moor discovers he has chosen the wrong casket and lost his chance for Portia's hand, he says, "Cold indeed, and labor lost: / Then farewell heat, and welcome frost!" (2.7.74–75).19 Frost describes the suitor's penalty, for he has promised, if wrong, "Never to speak to lady afterward / In way of marriage" (2.1.41–42). In All's Well That Ends Well, the sage Lafew knows that the lords who prance before Helena will fail: "These boys are boys of ice, they'll none have [her]" (2.3.93–94). In The Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff cries, "Come, let me pour in some sack to the Thames water, for my belly's as cold as if I had swallow'd snowballs for pills to cool the reins" (3.5.21–24). In his tragedies, Shakespeare leaves little doubt that inner cold cripples a man's capacity for violent action. In Richard III, the main character instructs Hamlet's Northern Lineage 15 Buckingham how to speak with Hastings: "If he be leaden, icy, cold, unwilling, / Be thou so too, and so break off the talk" (3.1.176–177). At the end of the play, Richard describes his own weakness to himself in the same evolving language: "Cold fearful drops stand on my trembling flesh. / What do I fear? Myself? There's none else by" (5.3.181–182). For Richard, the cold that seeps into a man makes him tremulous. When Mowbray confronts Bullingbrook at the beginning of Richard II, he shows in his public address that he understands the implications of this sensibility. He wants to speak less than his adversary, but he must excuse himself: "Let not my cold words here accuse my zeal" (1.1.47). A heroic version of this condition emerges when Richard declares his sudden judgment against Bullingbrook: k. rich: Six frozen winters spent Return with welcome home from banishment. bull: How long a time lies in one little word! Four lagging winters and four wanton springs End in a word: such is the breath of kings. (1.3.211–215) As the play commences, Bullingbrook's sense of deprivation and dislocation is perfectly rendered by the king's seasonal sentence. The predicament has a long history in English literature. Old English lyrics such as "The Wanderer" and "The Seafarer" describe imposed exiles in this fashion. When set against these examples, Bullingbrook's situation seems like destiny. He does not choose winter, but confronts exile as so much snow and ice. What sets Bullingbrook apart is the way he chafes at his fate, eventually returning to his people as their ruler. When we hear Macbeth and Iago use the same terms, a paradigm of tragic incapacity becomes clear. On the verge of killing Duncan, Macbeth chides himself: "Words to the heat of deeds too cold breath gives" (2.1.61). In precisely the same spirit, Iago urges himself, "Ay, that's the way; / Dull not device by coldness and delay" (2.3.387–388). Cold overwhelms the willing minds of these male characters when it creeps inside them, unsought. Indeed, according to geohumoral theory, it makes these men too effeminate to carry out bloody business. Such examples suggest that Shakespeare, on many occasions, was perfectly content to follow geohumoral fashions. When the playwright begins to figure such predicaments in terms of voyaging, a remarkable pattern of innovation begins to unfold. The plight of Sir Andrew in Twelfth Night signals the change. Paster observes that Sir Andrew's name marks "his phallic deficiencies just as his small wit, dry hand, scanty hair, and inability to cut high-stepping capers do: they are the bodily and behavioral signifiers of his lack of manly heat."20 In other words, traditional notions of geohumoral destiny can certainly explain the man; but 16 Daryl W. Palmer Shakespeare sets a new course when Fabian describes Andrew's failure with Olivia: "you are now sail'd into the north of my lady's opinion, where you will hang like an icicle on a Dutchman's beard, unless you do redeem it by some laudable attempt either of valor or policy" (3.2.26–29). Andrew is northern man but also a failed mariner on a northerly course that will spell his doom. The reference to "a Dutchman's beard," as I discuss below, demands that the audience consider the character's masculinity in terms of contemporary voyage narratives, an interpretive leap that puts new emphasis on a man's outward and valorous engagement with the cold. Of course northern voyaging begins with the 1553 expedition of Sir Hugh Willoughby which, under the London-based direction of Sebastian Cabot, aimed for Cathay. As old markets like Antwerp had begun to fail, English merchants pooled their funds in order to share the risk of seeking out eastern trading partners. Willoughby commanded the venture from the Bona Esperanza. Richard Chancellor, a skilled navigator, served as chief pilot and captain of the Edward Bonaventure. The Bona Confidentia completed the party, which departed on May 11. Here were Britons who, instead of simply accepting their fate, chose the frosty unknown. Remarkable for its masculine boldness, the expedition also demands attention because of the way it counters the image of the dull-witted Englishman with the new "mechanician." The fact is, Willoughby and company were able to set sail because of a veritable explosion of English learning and technology in the 1540s.21 John Dee seems to have orchestrated this ferment, which included the labor of skilled pilots, craftsmen, and mathematicians. Men such as Leonard Digges and Robert Recorde published important manuals that clearly demonstrated the Englishman's perspicacity. Chancellor, as well as anyone, seems to have embodied this new masculinity. Well known as a gifted pilot, a man capable of sailing boldly through frosty seas, Chancellor was much more. E.G.R. Taylor explains that the man "was a mathematician of such an order that Dee worked with him on equal terms, and he had a further talent, one which always commanded Dee's respect: he was a mechanician. . . . "22 The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) quotes Dee and credits him with the invention of the word: "A Mechanicien, or a Mechanicall workman is he, whose skill is, without knowledge of Mathematicall demonstration, perfectly to worke and finishe any sensible worke. . . ."23 In everything that happened during his northern voyages, Chancellor stood for this improved Englishman, the mechanician who converted theory into action. Of course it would be whimsical to argue that northern cold inspired this intellectual transformation, but the activities of Chancellor and his contemporaries certainly proved that male Britons could transcend the negative influences of their region. Hamlet's Northern Lineage 17 Willoughby's great enterprise went forward without incident until the 30th of July, when the Bona Esperanza lost touch with the other ships in a heavy fog. After five days of searching for his companions, Willoughby pressed on to the east, wandering aimlessly for more than a month. Meanwhile, the winds grew contrary. The official log of the Bona Esperanza narrates the finale with a poet's eye for the exoteric: The next day being the 18th of September, we entered into the haven, and there came to an anker at 6 fadoms. This haven runneth into the maine, about two leagues, and is in bredth halfe a league, wherein were very many seale fishes, & other great fishes, and upon the maine we saw beares, great deere, foxes, with divers strange beasts, as guloines, and such other which were to us unknowen, and also wonderfull. Thus remaining in this haven the space of a weeke, seeing the yeare farre spent, & also very evill wether, as frost, snow, and haile, as though it had been the deeps of winter, we thought best to winter there. 24 On that brutal September day the men believe they have found a "haven," but come to the extraordinary conclusion that they have traveled into winter. Reduced to animal-like responses, they aim to hibernate for the season among the other animals that inspire their wonder. By way of conclusion, "winter" becomes both noun and verb. Because people thought of seasons as "natural," an order ordained by the God, it made sense to adduce the coming and going of winter as evidence of a divinely ruled cosmos. A man took his place in that order, and winter happened to him. By contrast, Willoughby and his company break out of the old seasonal order by discovering a "wonderfull" new winter that gives shape to their struggle for survival. In ways that later generations would imitate, they write their own failure as a winter's tale. If bold enough, a man could transcend his geohumoral origins and choose the season that would ultimately explain his behavior. No less compelling was the experience of Chancellor, who pushed forward and found himself in the Muscovy of Ivan the Terrible. To be sure, the pilot saw much that could be called exotic, but nothing more so than the Muscovite winter. Elaborating on Chancellor's account of the voyage, Clement Adams (Master of the Queen's Henchmen) transforms the Petrarchan discourse of fire and ice: The north parts of the Countrey are reported to be so cold, that the very ice or water which distilleth out of the moist wood which they lay upon the fire is presently congealed and frozen: the diversitie 18 Daryl W. Palmer growing suddenly to be so great, that in one and the selfe same firebrand, a man shall see both fire and ice.25 The idea of winter in Russia gave the Englishman a profoundly concrete way of writing about the yoking of elemental opposites, of temperature, and finally of intensity. Indeed, one could say that Chancellor's experience gave Petrarchan psychology a local habitation and a name. But it fell to Giles Fletcher to formulate the evolving aesthetic in a way that points directly to Shakespeare's management of his masculine characters: "The whole countrie differeth very much from it selfe, by reason of the yeare: so that a man would mervaile to see the great alteration and difference betwixte the winter, and the sommer in Russia."26 Expanding on Adams's description of opposites, Fletcher concentrates on the problem of identity, on the problem of "selfe." Here was a Russian world whose climate modeled the unstable psychologies of human beings who live north of familiar civilizations and so very often "differ from themselves." By choosing to sail on into winter, Chancellor became a hero, but he also brought the English face to face with a disturbing reflection of themselves. To be northern is to differ from oneself. Famous for this behavior and his attempts to compensate for it, Hamlet might just as well have been a Russian. 27 Surely, the advent of such frosty speculation would have been enough to mark an epoch, but the north called to a new generation of mariners whose exploits showed early modern men how to rewrite their masculinity. Some years after Willoughby's disaster, Richard Willes urged his contemporaries to seek a passage to the northwest, noting that "in the Northeast that noble Knight Syr Hugh Willoughbie perished for colde."28 With visions of frozen failure fixed firmly in his mind, Martin Frobisher set out three times to triumph over the unseasonable cold. As Samuel Eliot Morison notes, Frobisher's exploits, along with those of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, constitute "a series of glorious failures."29 Frost, snow, and ice sang like sirens to these men, whose journals echo each other with a poetics of entrapment and ruin that powerfully augment Surrey's new lyrics of failed love. What sonneteers merely thought, Frobisher and company enact with a highly evolved theatrical sense of ruin. Pointing to the way writers of voyage narratives shape their materials in terms of tragic conventions, Philip Edwards notes that such narratives "convert their own actions into theatre," with the failed hero at the center.30 As Arthur Marotti, Martin Elsky, and Mary Fuller have pointed out, writing in the Renaissance is often about failure.31 Whether the matter be lost labors of love or scuttled voyages of ambition, the writer's aim was often, in Fuller's words, to recuperate failure "by rhetoric, a rhetoric which in some ways even predicted failure."32 It would seem that Shakespeare's Sir Andrew comes from a long line of losers and apologists. Hamlet's Northern Lineage 19 Some years after the Willoughby tragedy, William Warner took up the matter of the leader's icy end in his Albions England. Warner's speaker envisions Willoughby and his crew as "Actors" whose deeds challenged the labors of Jason and Ulysses.33 Willoughby was "a Knight both wise and his stoute," and Chancellor was a kind of Arthur.34 Willoughby and party "weare in theat Climate Frozen dead, shut up with isie Driftes. / Thus died he and all with him, if so to die be death: / But no, faith Heaven, no faith their Fame, surviving there on Earth."35 In these lines, Warner's speaker argues forcefully that men who hazard greatly and fail in the face of ice and snow must triumph for all eternity. Crucial to this rhetoric is the writer's insistence on the exoteric engagement as the measure of the man. "Isie Drifts" clearly ennoble defeat. As well as any of his chilled brethren, Claudio, in Measure for Measure, illustrates Shakespeare's investment in this discourse of northern voyaging. Having violated Vienna's laws against premarital sex, Claudio will be executed. No one can fail to appreciate the extremity of the punishment, but Escalus creates a puzzle when he puts it into words: Well; heaven forgive him! and forgive us all! Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall; Some run from brakes of ice and answer none, And some condemned for a fault alone. (2.1.37–40) For generations of editors, this passage has proven opaque. Why ice? Editors have not been comfortable with the explanation. When they have been unable to account for the "ice," they have emended the text, as Kittredge did and the Norton Shakespeare does, to "vice."36 Why would editors be insensitive to the cold? Or perhaps they are already too sensitive to the cold? Such whimsical questioning actually hints at the larger methodological issues addressed in this essay. Literary interpretation has always thrived on its special relationship with the esoteric, with inwardness, with entities we call "soul" and "spirit." When confronted with exoteric masculinity, the conscientious editor prefers "vice" to "ice." We return to the "Dutchman's beard." Sarah M. Nutt has given us good reason to believe that Shakespeare was thinking of ice, more particularly Dutch explorer William Barents's experience of ice during three voyages to a string of islands off the northern coast of Russia, a region known as "Nova Zemlya." On the third voyage, in 1596, the expedition found itself trapped in the thickening ice. Against incredible odds, the party survived the winter there. De Veer published his narrative in Dutch in 1598; Latin, French, and German editions followed and circulated throughout Europe. An English translation, by William Phillip, appeared in 1609. For her part, Nutt has recounted this publishing history and described the detailed resemblances 20 Daryl W. Palmer between De Veer's account and eight of Shakespeare's plays.37 She urges us to read Measure for Measure alongside De Veer: The ice came so fast towards us, that all the ice whereon we lay with our scutes and our goods brake and ran one peece upon another, whereby we were in no small feare, for at that time most of our goods fell into the water. But we . . . drew our scutes further upon the ice towards the land . . . and as we went to fetch our goods we fell into the greatest trouble that ever we had before . . . [for] as we laid hold upon one peece thereof the rest sunke downe with the ice, and many times the ice brake under our owne feet. . . . And when we thought to draw up our boates upon the ice, the ice brake under us, and we were caried away with the scute and al by the driving ice.38 Escalus needs to explain how a man could end up in this preposterous position, and his language certainly draws from voyaging narratives of ensnarement, particularly De Veer's breathtaking prose of Arctic peril. What really confounds Escalus, however, is the irony that some (like De Veer and company?) are able to run safely from such pervasive disaster, while Claudio (like Willoughby and Frobisher?) find their fate sealed by something less, by "a fault alone." More than anything else, the invocation of northern voyaging foregrounds choice as an essential part of masculine definition. Barents and his company choose to sail north. Claudio simply discovers himself on thick ice. So much for puzzles. More victim than champion, Claudio owes his predicament, in part, to a cold man. Lucio tells Isabella that Angelo is "a man whose blood / Is very snow-broth" (1.4.57–58). The wintery terms of Barents's Russian voyaging serve his theme as he concludes: "it is certain that when he [Angelo] makes water his urine is congeal'd ice, that I know to be true" (3.2.109–111). The utterly fallen angel, Angelo has succumbed to what Falstaff calls the cold of the belly. Like the Russian landscape, he differs from himself, demanding moral stricture while indulging his own licentiousness. If Claudio turns out to be "better" than Angelo, this male aura depends on the way he comes to envision his fate, a boreality to be confronted. It is worth noting here that Claudio does not know what Escalus has said about ice; he does not borrow the figurative language of northern voyaging from the critical counselor. Instead, Shakespeare seems to be going out of his way to show Claudio choosing a frame for his plight as he talks to Isabella: Ay, but to die, and go we know not where; To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot; Hamlet's Northern Lineage 21 This sensible warm motion to become A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice; To be imprison'd in the viewless winds And blown with restless violence round about The pendent world: or to be worse than worst Of those that lawless and incertain thought Imagine howling—'tis too horrible! (3.1.117–127) Perhaps setting the agenda for later scholars, Alexander Gerard pointed to this passage in 1774 and concluded: "tho' each of the ideas is subservient to the end in view, yet they are so incongruous that they cannot be all adopted with propriety."39 By now it should be clear that what Gerard calls congruity is really another example of Shakespeare's ongoing exploration of the way men explain their own endurance and worth. Ice is the proper region for northern man. Just how horrible is this distinctively male predicament? Nutt points out that De Veer uses the descriptions of ice to heighten the drama of his chronicle: "'the ice came still more and more driving in, and made high hilles by sliding one upon the other.'"40 In point of fact, De Veer adopts these icy terms in order to conjure up a stirring marvel: "'the ice was in such a wonderfull manner risen and piled up one upon the other that it was wonderfull, in such manner as if there had bin whole townes made of ice, with towres and bulwarkes round about them.'"41 To be "incertain" and confront "cold obstruction" as Claudio does is to tap into the "wonderfull." By appropriating the popular Dutch discourse of northern voyaging, the prisoner can shift his consternation to a benumbed region of wonder that English travelers had described in vivid detail. In fact, Claudio recovers his will when he imagines himself a second De Veer: "Sweet sister, let me live" (3.1.132). Just as it does for Hamlet's temperament, the northern cold becomes a key to the moral mind of this character; and, like the Russian winter as Fletcher describes it, Claudio comes "to differ from himself." He seems to possess an interiority through that differing, and the wonder implicit in the experience of the exotic merges with his wonder at his "life." Whatever the character gains through this matrix of reference, Shakespeare carefully husbands it over the remainder of the play. In the scene we have just been discussing, Isabella quickly chastises him for his self-interest. Claudio reconsiders and begs to speak with his sister, but the Duke ushers him away. The character speaks a few words in 4.2, and then remains silent until he takes his place in the Duke's orchestrations at the play's conclusion. Shakespeare has recuperated Claudio, after a fashion. What matters most for 22 Daryl W. Palmer our discussion is the way this rehabilitation depends on an extraordinary synthesis of the old and the new. In Claudio, the ancient concern with internal cold merges with the contemporary interest in the exoteric assay.42 Sometime around 1599, in a burst of creative activity that produces Julius Caesar and Hamlet, Shakespeare sets his work apart from the ancient tradition when he divides the male population into men who are cold and men who choose the cold. (Claudio epitomizes the former category, while Willoughby and Chancellor embody the latter.) Near the beginning of Julius Caesar, Cassius invokes the rubric Hamlet will use when the prince attempts to justify his grief: "I know that virtue to be in you, Brutus, / As well as I do know your outward favor" (1.2.90–91). A man must be valued by some comparison of the inward and the outward. Caesar's confession to Antony frames Cassius's opinion: I do not know the man I should avoid So soon as that spare Cassius. He reads much, He is a great observer, and he looks Quite through the deeds of men. (1.2.200–203) Regardless of how we judge him, Cassius surely lives up to Caesar's estimation as he explains masculinity to Brutus: I cannot tell what you or other men Think of this life; but, for my single self, I had as lief not be as live to be In awe of such a thing as I myself. I was born free as Caesar, so were you; We both have fed as well, and we can both Endure the winter's cold as well as he . . . (1.2.93–99) No neutral observer, Cassius is all too aware that his fortunes have failed to keep pace with Caesar's, but this self-interest does not diminish his ability to scrutinize. Internal temperature does not matter in this analysis. Seeing through the deeds of men, for Cassius, means recognizing the male capacity for enduring winter's cold, a point the speaker supports with a story about swimming. He tells how Caesar, on a "raw and gusty day," said, "'Dar'st thou, Cassius, now / Leap in with me into this angry flood'" (100, 102–103). The formula is simple: we can value men by studying how they dare to embrace the cold.43 On that day, Caesar sank. That Cassius braved the icy waters to save this "god" is now proof (for him) that something is rotten in Rome. Indeed, invoking the language of encompassment (so prevalent Hamlet's Northern Lineage 23 in the voyaging narratives), Cassius asks, "When could they say, till now, that talk'd of Rome, / That her wide walks encompass'd but one man?" (1.2.154–155). According to Cassius, to be "incompass'd" is the fate—perhaps the birthright—of all men. He resists Caesar's claims to special status even as he inflates himself through his narrative of an icy swim. What Cassius inaugurates, Hamlet may be said to complete. From the first moments of the play, Hamlet appears to encourage boundless speculation: "But I have that within which passes show" (1.2.85). For centuries, critics have tried to pursue this claim. In the wake of Charles Lamb and Samuel Coleridge, Edward Dowden thought the play epitomized the value of "obscurity": "Hamlet might so easily have been manufactured into an enigma or a puzzle; and then the puzzle, if sufficient pains were bestowed, could be completely taken to pieces and explained. But Shakespeare created a mystery, and therefore it is forever suggestive; forever suggestive, and ever wholly explicable."44 Sigmund Freud gave this "modern" appreciation of uncertainty a new twist when he began to detect Hamlet's unconscious desire for his mother, gradually coming to see himself in Hamlet. Freud concludes, "Here I have translated into conscious terms what was bound to remain unconscious in Hamlet's mind. . . . "45 As a new century dawned, Hamlet possessed a willing mind whose obscurity could nonetheless be recovered by the aggressive analyst. Indeed it would be difficult to say whether Hamlet is the subject or the source of the analysis.46 Bradley simply declares: "How many things still remain to say of Hamlet!"47 I begin with a simple fact: Hamlet, like everyone else in the tragedy, is cold. Who in Denmark would not want to go inside, whether we think of the interior space in terms of the mind or the edifice? When Kenneth Branagh directed his film version of the play, he whitened the landscape and the main character, perhaps setting a record for the use of artificial snow. The vision recalls the geohumoralism of Batman uppon Bartholome, with its emphasis on the whiteness of northern people. Branagh's screenplay begins in terms Willoughby could appreciate: "Darkness. Uneasy silence. The deep of a Winter's Night."48 This seems right because the playwright takes pains to stress the frigidity of the environment from the opening lines. As Francisco says somewhat cryptically at the beginning of the drama, "For this relief much thanks. 'Tis bitter cold, / And I am sick at heart" (1.1.8–9). In Denmark, the cold indicates the condition of a solitary man, whose ailment will never be adequately communicated. Indeed, Francisco departs the stage and the play as a frosty cipher. Garbed in an inky cloak, Hamlet takes Francisco's place, answering questions with riddles, quips, and puns. Sick at heart, he does not fit the old model of northern masculinity. Floyd-Wilson sharpens this sense: "In its representation of a melancholic Dane, Shakespeare's play tells the story of an 24 Daryl W. Palmer extraordinary northerner—extraordinary because his inward melancholy has estranged him from his native, northern complexion."49 Hamlet acts too little and thinks too much. Claudius makes the obvious point that the prince has given in to "unmanly grief " (1.2.94). By contrast, Hamlet's father embraced his native cold. Here was the traditional northern monarch, untroubled by cogitation, who "smote the sledded [Polacks] on the ice" (1.1.63). Here was the king who "Did slay this Fortinbras" (1. 1.86) on the day of his son's birth. Hamlet, it seems, was born under the sign of his father's prowess. Measured against this example, Hamlet appears to be an extraordinary failure, a passive victim. And it is at this juncture in the play that Hamlet defends himself by claiming to "have that within which passes show." Left alone, the man reverts to the old indictment: "O that this too too sallied flesh would melt, / Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!" (1.2.129–130). Hamlet longs to "melt" and "thaw," a desire that reveals much about the way he sees himself in the world. He is a man of ice who has nearly succumbed to the cold. As Sidney Warhaft pointed out some time ago, Hamlet's sense of his flesh as something that would melt (and here, I am inclined to favor "solid flesh") certainly suggests the character's humorous condition, namely the cold and congealed body of a melancholy man, the estranged Dane, a failed man whose only recourse is silence.50 In fact, Hamlet has already begun to tinker with the old rhetoric, thinking through the cold in unprecedented ways. Although an ardent spokesman for Hamlet's inwardness, Coleridge helps to explain this innovation when he remarks the way that Hamlet's "half embodyings of thoughts, that make them more than thoughts, give them an outness, a reality sui generis, and yet retain their correspondence and shadowy approach to the images and movements within."51 Coleridge, I believe, has pinpointed Shakespeare's strategy of rapprochement. For example, Hamlet's decision to think about himself as snow and ice "half-embodies" his condition. In this spirit, Hamlet rattles Horatio by seeing his father. The friend looks about, but Hamlet explains, "In my mind's eye, Horatio" (1.2.185). Over the course of the play, Hamlet will justify himself, by straddling thought and action, interiority and exteriority, erecting a field of "outness" around him that has stabilized his challenged masculinity for more than four centuries. The irony, of course, is that Hamlet's cognitive innovation does nothing to lessen the chill. With his usual intuitive genius, Coleridge, as quoted above in this essay's epigraph, diagnoses an "exhaustion of bodily feeling from perpetual exertion of mind," concluding "that all mental form being indefinite and ideal, realities must needs become cold" Hamlet attempts to survive his ordeal with half-embodying thought, but his behavior only heightens the cold. When Hamlet decides to go out into the cold to confront the Ghost, he seems to accept the challenge set forth in the voyaging narratives. How Hamlet's Northern Lineage 25 appropriate then that as Hamlet waits for the Ghost, he declares: "The air bites shrowdly, it is very cold" (1.4.1). An Elizabethan might have wondered whether there was something effeminate in this cold, in its shrewishness, but Shakespeare emphasizes what is outside the man, namely the biting northern "air." Horatio foretells a change in the wind when he calls it a "nipping and eager air" (1.4.2). In the Danish chill, the men listen to the king's wassail, and Hamlet laments the northern propensity for "heavy-headed revel" (1.4.17). The proud prince aims for a better "attribute" (1.4.22). Indeed, we can mark his transformation when Horatio and company try to prevent him from departing with the Ghost. Hamlet declares, "My fate cries out, / And makes each petty artere in this body / As hardy as the Nemean lion's nerve" (1.4.81–83). Cold actually fortifies his body. He seems ready to follow the example of his martial father as he learns of his uncle's crime: "And thy commandment all alone shall live" (1.5.102). To be sure, Hamlet's half-embodying thoughts immediately complicate this agenda. Having promised action, Hamlet should gather his comrades. Marcellus yells, "Illo, ho, ho, my lord!" (1.5.115). Hamlet cries: "Hillo, ho, ho, boy! Come, [bird,] come" (1.5.116). The prince has not officially assumed his antic disposition, but his thinking seems already to have made it so. In his giddy mood, Hamlet half-embodies his newfound purpose. He plays the part of a falconer calling down his bird. The inspiration is aural, the application fair, the utility in question. As the group interview begins, Horatio begins to doubt: "These are but wild and whirling words" (1.5.133). Hamlet apologizes and comes to the purpose; but his survival strategy has already begun to emerge. Henceforth he will "bear" himself in a "strange or odd" fashion (1.5.170). He will, in other words, justify himself by casting his outness as madness. Claudius glosses the effect: Something have you heard Of Hamlet's transformation; so call it, Sith nor th' exterior nor the inward man Resembles that it was. (2.2.4–7) No simple disguise, Hamlet's "transformation" unsettles Claudius because of the way he differs from himself, inside and out. What we make of this strategy has everything to do with the way the playwright engages the discourse of northern voyaging. When Rosencrantz and Guildenstern come snooping, Hamlet clues them in with a famous line: "I am but mad north-north-west" (2.2.378). The declaration may suggest mere flippancy, but I hear Hamlet claiming his position as yet another northern male in Willoughby's line, encompassed by extremes, near mad with dejection, epitomizing the fate of heroic masculinity. We step back in awe at this 26 Daryl W. Palmer transformation, but Hamlet remains unsatisfied and quite mad. It is worth noting in this context that, according to the OED, for centuries before the writing of Hamlet, "mad" referred not only to insanity but also to being "'Beside oneself ' with anger, moved to uncontrollable rage; furious."52 For Hamlet, the problem is how to translate mere (even effeminate) fury into the more masculine wrath.53 His lack of success on this score finds voice as he prepares to depart Denmark for England, only to witness the army of Fortinbras and wonder "How all occasions do inform against me" (4.4.32). Like Willoughby and Frobisher, he claims our attention because he has failed. Environed by icy circumstance, he poses the obvious question: "What is a man . . . ?" (4.4.33). Shakespeare's answer comes straight from the nexus of climate and voyaging that we have been charting. Indeed, Chancellor, the man who helped Dee invent the paradoxal compass, the man who combined action and thought in the role of the mechanician, serves as a key to Hamlet's evolving experiment. Long before he reaches the despair of 4.4, he writes to Ophelia and promises love "whilst this machine is to him" (2.2.124). Capable of half-materializing thought, of mingling the inward and the outward, Hamlet identifies his own body as a "machine." The OED credits Shakespeare with the invention of this notion and so calls attention to the playwright's real innovation. What is particularly remarkable about this tack is the way the word "machine" floats between the substantial and the insubstantial, referring (as the OED explains) to structures "of any kind, material or immaterial."54 Confronting his native cold with a fluidic body that seems to have failed him, Hamlet reinvents the male body as a machine. Even more ambitiously, he becomes his own mechanician. As Chancellor might have done, Shakespeare goes on to suggest that a man is a person who sets out on a voyage. Of course he does not choose the venture; but, once at sea, Hamlet performs deeds of valor. He reports to Horatio: "Finding ourselves too slow of sail, we put on a compell'd valor, and in the grapple I boarded them" (4.6.17–19). Inspired by his own swashbuckling, Hamlet now discerns his opportunity. When Shakespeare gets Hamlet out of Denmark and into the pirates' custody, he makes it possible for Hamlet to choose to return to the "bitter cold" of his homeland. Hamlet may possess a sense of his own inwardness, but his experience under sail exposes the exoteric protocols of masculinity that he needs. Back in Denmark, Hamlet writes to Claudius and signals his explicit transformation by promising to "recount the occasion of my sudden [and more strange] return" (4.7.46–47). Hamlet is now master of his own occasion, but Hamlet's penchant for outness makes him pause. Hamlet returns to the old question with clarity: "What is a man?" No longer focused on rhetorics of self-justification and survival, Hamlet exploits his habitual outness with an eye toward more enduring questions: "Why may Hamlet's Northern Lineage 27 not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander, till 'a find it stopping a bunghole?" (5.1.203–204). Ever the pragmatist, Horatio counsels against such musing, but Hamlet proceeds to recast the old masculine engagement with winter: Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth to dust, the dust is earth, of earth we make loam, and why of that loam whereto he was converted might they not stop a beer-barrel? Imperious Caesar, dead and turn'd to clay, Might stop a hole to keep the wind away. O that that earth which kept the world in awe Should patch a wall t' expel the [winter's] flaw! (5.1.208–216) I quote the passage at length because Shakespeare's hand is so evidently marking the dynamic quality of this frosty speculation as a movement into lyrical resolution. Alexander is "converted" to loam, to matter for a "stop," in prose that suggests logical demonstration; but Hamlet teaches his conclusion in verse, in couplets that emphasize the utter mutability of life. Having chosen to face the cold of his native land with all the problems it holds for him, Hamlet has satisfied a certain standard of masculine behavior. Yet he has come to understand that a man may justify himself for a time and still end up a patch, a rich word, both noun and verb, that referred to both a mechanician's repair and a fool.55 In this way, Hamlet's outness bears fruit in the shape of skeptical wisdom: Hamlet sees through the deeds of men. Botero helps us value the prince's achievement. Questioning whether a man requires courage or wisdom most, the writer opts for courage because "wisedome is given but to fewe, and that must be gotten too by travail."56 At the end of the play, Hamlet has demonstrated both courage and wisdom. Like the accomplished mechanician, he can finish what he cannot demonstrate. By the time Hamlet receives Osric, he has outmaneuvered the old thermal tests, and we measure his superiority against the lesser man. Osric thinks it very hot, but Hamlet applies correction: "No, believe me, 'tis very cold, the wind is northerly" (5.2.95). It is telling that both times Hamlet indicates direction (hearkening back to 2.2.378), he does it aggressively while in the company of lesser men who irritate him. In both scenes, the direction implies his superiority. He is not the muddled prince who cannot act, but a man encompassed by northern cold that elevates him even as it afflicts him. Such subtleties escape Osric's notice, and Hamlet toys with him. When the courtier agrees with Hamlet's temperature reading, the prince tells him, "But yet methinks it is very [sultry] and hot [for] my complexion" (5.2.98–99). Having mastered the old discourse of voyaging and cold, Hamlet amuses himself with a "yes man." After Osric departs, Hamlet comes to the point: "Thus has he, 28 Daryl W. Palmer and many more of the same breed that I know the drossy age dotes on, only got the tune of the time, and out of an habit of encounter, a kind of [yesty] collection" (5.2.188–191). The Folio points more precisely to Hamlet's sentiments as he complains of this breed that has only got an "outward habit of encounter." Like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Osric thinks he can define his masculinity with little exoteric formulas of civility, but he seriously underestimates the venture.57 These men stand as the real failures in the tragedy because they do not rescue their prince. For his part, Hamlet has grown into the role of mechanician as Dee defined it. Shuttling between thought and action, the material and the immaterial, Hamlet discovers how to finish his "sensible work." With no boasts of what he holds within, he walks "here in the hall," in "the breathing time of day" (5.2.173–174). As the Folio emphasizes, Hamlet's attempt at a formal reconciliation with Laertes carries with it a nod to their quite public "audience" (5.2.240). Their contest occurs before judges who "bear a wary eye" (5.2.279). When the first hit comes, it is "palpable" (5.2.281). In the aftermath of the carnage, Fortinbras, who seems never to have questioned his outward obligations, gives the exoteric order: "Take up the bodies" (5.2.401). Branagh's film version of the play surely captures the exteriority of Hamlet's end as we look down on the pearly prince at rest in an open casket suspended above the snow. In 1598, the Thames froze solid, as it had done many times before, and people probably tried to read the event as a sign of the times. Perhaps Shakespeare was thinking about Hamlet. Today, we may follow scientists who talk about our playwright's epoch as "The Little Ice Age," a chilly era that engulfed the whole of Europe. Most of us will continue to think about Hamlet, the supreme representative of this age, who takes his place in a long line of men who sought to redeem themselves through engagement with the frozen north. If he manages to rehabilitate northern masculinity, we must admit that it comes with the heavy burden of skepticism. Some 325 years later, Wallace Stevens was able to fathom the heart of this discourse for a warmer world, refashioning Hamlet's early modern speculations into a modern "mind of winter," "the listener, who listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is."58 No t e s 1. William Shakespeare, Hamlet in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), 1.2.85–86. Subsequent references to the plays of Shakespeare will be from this edition and appear parenthetically in the text. 2. The scholarship devoted to this question is extensive, to say the least. One might well begin with Sigmund Freud, who has seemed to underwrite the study Hamlet's Northern Lineage 29 of inwardness in the Renaissance, particularly with his reading of Hamlet. In fact, Freud points in another direction when he discusses being as an ego-effect. In "The Ego and the Id," he explains, "The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface" (The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols., trans. and ed. James Strachey, [London: Hogarth Press, 1961] 19:26). Katharine Eisaman Maus offers perhaps the most cogent account of the controversy by arguing persuasively that the early modern stage afforded its audiences "inwardness displayed: an inwardness, in other words, that has already ceased to exist" (Inwardness and Theater in The English Renaissance [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996], 32). Other crucial discussions of this problem include Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body (London: Methuen, 1984); Cynthia Marshall, "Man of Steel Done Got the Blues: Melancholic Subversion of Presence in Antony and Cleopatra," Shakespeare Quarterly 44.4 (1993): 386; Mark Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 15; and Michael C. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 2, 76. 3. Mary Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 2. See also Mary Floyd-Wilson, "Transmigrations: Crossing Regional and Gender Boundaries in Antony and Cleopatra," Enacting Gender on the English Renaissance Stage, ed. Viviana Comensoli and Anne Russell (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 77. 4. John Wands, "The Theory of Climate in the English Renaissance and Mundus Alter et Idem," Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Sanctandreani, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, ed. I. D. McFarlane, vol. 38 (Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1986), 519–520. Floyd-Wilson provides a useful bibliography for this tradition (English Ethnicity, 3). 5. Giovanni Bolero, Historicall Description of the Most Famous Kingdomes and Common-weales in the World (London, 1603), 7. 6. Bolero, by contrast, seems content to include Britain in Europe, which he describes as "passing good, holsome, temperate, and the solie exceeding fertile" (Historicall Description of the Most Famous Kingdomes, 10). 7. William Andrews, Famous Frosts and Frost Fairs in Great Britain (London: George Redway, 1887). 8. Olaus Magnus, Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus, trans. Peter Fisher and Humphrey Higgens, ed. Peter Foote (London: Hakluyt Society, 1998), 3:771. 9. Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity, 2. In recent years, scholars have paid increasing attention to the unstable nature of masculinity, particularly in the plays of Shakespeare. See, for example, Coppélia Kahn, Roman Shakespeare: Warriors, Wounds, and Women (London and New York: Routledge, 1997); Geraldo U. de Sousa, Shakespeare's Cross-Cultural Encounters (Houndmills and London: Macmillan, 1999), The Image of Manhood in Early Modern Literature, ed. Andrew P. Williams (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999); Bruce R. Smith, Shakespeare and Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Robin Headlam Wells, Shakespeare on Masculinity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 30 Daryl W. Palmer 10. Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity, 3. Of course all recent studies of humoral theory in the Renaissance owe something to the work of Gail Kern Paster. See, for example, Gail Kern Paster, "The Unbearable Coldness of Female Being: Women's Imperfection and the Humoral Economy," English Literary Renaissance 28.3 (1998): 416. 11. Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity, 4–5. See also Floyd-Wilson, "Transmigrations," 75. 12. Stephen Batman, Batman uppon Bartholome (London, 1582), 26. 13. Levinus Lemnius, The Touchstone of Complexions, trans. Thomas Newton (London, 1633), 25. 14. Jean Bodin, The Six Bookes of a Commonweale, ed. Kenneth Douglas McRae (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), 99. 15. Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity, 4. 16. Holinshed's Chronicles, 6 vols. (London: Johnson, 1808), 4:228; qtd. in Andrews, Frost Fairs, 8. 17. Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity, 68. 18. Paster, "The Unbearable Coldness of Female Being," 439–440. 19. For an important geohumoral revision of the usual reading of Morocco's failure, see Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity, 42–43. 20. Paster, "The Unbearable Coldness of Female Being," 435. 21. On this phenomenon in particular and English contact with Russia in general, see Daryl W. Palmer, Writing Russia in the Age of Shakespeare (Aldershot and Burlington, U.K.: Ashgate, 2004), 9–11, and passim. 22. E. G. R. Taylor, Tudor Geography 1485–1583 (London: Methuen, 1930), 91. 23. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. "mechanician," n. 1. 24. Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of the English Nation, 8 vols. (London: J. M. Dent, 1927), 1:253. 25. Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, 1:279. 26. Giles Fletcher, The English Works of Giles Fletcher, the Elder, ed. Lloyd E. Berry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964), 175. 27. Moved by ethological similarities, nineteenth-century writer and artist William Morris declared to Georgiana Burne-Jones that "Hamlet . . . should have been a Russian, not a Dane" (March 17, 1888, letter 1470, The Collected Letters of William Morris, ed. Norman Kelvin, vol. 2, pt. b, 1885–1888 [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987], 755). 28. Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, 5:121. 29. Samuel Eliot Morison, The Great Explorers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 277. 30. Philip Edwards, "Tragic Form and the Voyagers," Travel and Drama in Shakespeare's Time, ed. Jean-Pierre Maquerlot and Michele Willems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 82. 31. Arthur Moroni, "'Love is not Love': Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences and the Social Order," ELH 49.2 (1982): 398; Martin Elsky, Authorizing Words: Speech, Writing, and Print in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), 188–189; Mary Fuller, Voyages in Print: English Travel to America, 1576–1624 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 12. 32. Fuller, Voyages in Print, 12. 33. William Warner, Albions England (London, 1597), 273–274. 34. Warner, Albions England, 274. Hamlet's Northern Lineage 31 35. Warner, Albions England, 274. 36. The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. George Lyman Kittredge (Boston: Ginn, 1936): 2.1.39; The Norton Shakespeare, gen. ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York and London: Norton, 1997), 2.1.39, n. 2. 37. Sarah M. Nutt, "The Arctic Voyages of William Barents in Probable Relation to Certain of Shakespeare's Plays," SP 39 (1942): 260. Perhaps the most comprehensive discussion of this sphere of exploration is found in Sir Clement R. Markham's The Lands of Silence: A History of Arctic and Antarctic Exploration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1921). 38. Qtd. by Nutt, "The Arctic Voyages of William Barents," 254. 39. Alexander Gerard, "An Essay on Genius," Shakespeare, The Critical Heritage: 1774–1801, ed. Brian Vickers, 6 vols. (London: Routledge, 1981), 6:114. 40. Qtd. by Nutt, "The Arctic Voyages of William Barents," 254. 41. Ibid. 42. It should be noted that I have chosen to treat Claudio as a kind of prologue to my discussion of Hamlet, even though Measure for Measure was written after the famous tragedy. I do this for the sake of clarity in my argument, but I realize that this example proves, yet again, that genealogy is rarely linear. Although I choose to see Shakespeare as an innovator in Hamlet, I can assume very little about the playwright's investment in that innovation. 43. Surely this credo informs Caesar's description of soldier Antony in the Alps in Shakespeare's play (1.4.66–71). 44. Dowden, Shakespeare: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art, 3rd ed. (New York: Harper & Brothers, n.d.), 112. 45. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams: The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. (1900; London: Hogarth Press, 1953), 4:265. 46. Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare's Ghost Writers (New York: Routledge, 1987), 170. See also Julia Reinhard Lupton and Kenneth Reinhard, After Oedipus: Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1993), 2. 47. A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (1904; New York: St. Martin's Press, 1969), 118. 48. Kenneth Branagh, Hamlet, Screenplay, and Introduction (New York: Norton, 1996), 1. As Russell Jackson notes in "The Film Diary" from the same volume, the exterior filming at Blenheim Palace was beset by "real snow" that "sweeps in off the lake, blanking out visibility in a blizzard that covers all of us" (190). The next day, Jackson remarks, "Dry, bitter wind. Frozen snow now like brittle wedding-cake icing, and mixed with our own foam, paper, and salt" (191). In this way, cinema elaborates the dreams of exoteric man. 49. Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity, 78. 50. Sidney Warhaft, "Hamlet's Solid Flesh Resolved," ELH 28.1 (1961), 22. 51. Coleridge, Coleridge's Shakespeare Criticism, 1:38–39. 52. S.v. "mad," 6. 53. Citing Helkiah Crooke's Description of the Body of Man, Paster notes that "anger" was associated with women while "wrath" was reserved for men ("The Unbearable Coldness of Female Being," 429). 54. S.v. "machine." 55. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Puck uses these terms to describe Bottom and company as "A crew of patches, rude mechanicals" (3.2.9). 32 Daryl W. Palmer 56. Botero, Historicall Description, 3. 57. John Lyly provides a comic prologue to these scenes in his Gallathea as Rafe, Robin, and Dick attempt to become real men after their ship sinks. Their doomed labor of masculine self-definition turns on their ability to speak in northerly terms: dick: I'll say it. North, northeast, northeast, nor'—nor' and by nor'east—I shall never do it. mariner: This is but one quarter. robin: I shall never learn a quarter of it. I will try. North, north-east, is by the west side, north and by north— dick: Passing ill. (Drama of the English Renaissance, ed. Russell A. Fraser and Norman Rabkin, 2 vols. [New York and London: Macmillan, 1976], 1:2.1.63–72). The words of Rafe at the end of the lesson aptly sum up the condition of Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and Osric: "I will never learn this language" (2.1.78). 58. Wallace Stevens, "The Snow Man," The Palm at the End of the Mind, ed. Holly Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1971), 54. C arolyn S ale Eating Air, Feeling Smells: Hamlet's Theory of Performance I n Act iii of Hamlet, just before he sits down with Claudius, Gertrude, and Ophelia to watch The Mousetrap, that play for which he has written sixteen lines, Hamlet says what may very well be the oddest of the many odd things that he says throughout the play: "I eat the air, promise-crammed" (3.2.92–93).1 He later claims that he could eat a crocodile to express the depth of his feelings for the dead Ophelia, so his culinary tastes are clearly varied, but "I eat the air, promise-crammed," part retort, part selfdefinition, takes us to the heart of the play's interaction or transaction with its audience. In his talk of eating air, Hamlet suggests that the corporate body whose members appear to be but "mutes" in relation to the staged action may be as busy as the actor playing him. They may be feeding, as he does, "of the chameleon's dish" (3.2.92); that is, sitting down to the same table as those creatures who can change color upon command, actors, and taking in, across the course of the performance, the invisible matter that circulates between them, breath. Hamlet's odd statement would thus function as a metonym for the play's theory of performance, one that takes it beyond both mimesis and catharsis. That this play offers its own theory of performance cannot be doubted. As Annabel Patterson noted some fifteen years ago, "this play contains more information, simply speaking, on the business of play-production than any Renaissance Drama, Volume 35 (2006): pp. 145–168. Copyright © 2006 Northwestern University Press. 33 34 Carolyn Sale other in Shakespeare's canon, and . . . this material is already theoretical when it reaches us, already, if incompletely, transformed by Hamlet's critical perspective."2 A powerful and enthusiastic consumer of theatrical fictions, Hamlet does indeed have plenty to say about the theater's functions and workings, and is confident enough in his understanding of how the theater works to dole out advice to professional players. This may constitute some cheek, but elsewhere Hamlet displays his critical powers with a little more humility, and as he does so offers an all-important context for his odd remark about eating the air. When he leaps to the defense of an "excellent play" denounced by critics as "caviar to the general" or too fine a theatrical delicacy to "please . . . the million" (2.2.377–380), he defends the play's "honest method" by employing an extended metaphor of play-as-food: "excellent plays" well prepared and property savored or spiced are palatable to and digestible by all, for their method, "as wholesome as sweet" (2.2.384–385), results in matter "well digested in the scenes" (2.2.380). Pursuing the methods by which the play aims to offer up fare that will "please the million," I seek to offer a specific sense of how, as Steven Mullaney has suggested, the Shakespearean theater operates as an "affective rather than a didactic forum" that "produce[s] new powers of identification, projection and apprehension in audiences."3 I will do so by focusing on the promise of Hamlet's claim, or the ways in which the character's utterance speaks to idealistic conceptions of how the theater might work—or rather work upon, and perhaps ask work of, those who take a place within it as auditors and spectators. "Promise-crammed," Hamlet may be speaking to an ideal transaction between play and playgoer, one in which something "as wholesome as sweet" may be offered up for consumption within the theatrical space. We could argue that in this play so concerned with addressing its culture's concerns about the theater, the promise is tied to the reform of theatrical practices that Hamlet urges, or rather to one aspect or another of the concerns that antitheatrical pamphleteers raised in their texts. From Stephen Gosson's 1579 The Schoole of Abuse onward, Elizabethan antitheatrical pamphleteers inveighed against the theater as a site of contagion, both physical and moral. In the first volley in a campaign to make potential playgoers run from the theater before they received any kind of "hurt" therein, Gosson conceived of their particular vulnerability in terms of the "winds" that might be in circulation in the theatrical space. Every other creature had been supplied, by God, with the capacity to "peyse their bodies" against these "winds": But wee which are so brittle, that we brake with euery fillop, so weake, that we are drawne with euery threade; so light, that wee are blowen away with euery blast; so vnsteady, that we slip in euery ground; neither peyse our bodyes against the winde, nor Eating Air, Feeling Smells 35 stand vppon one legge, for sleeping too muche: nor close vppe our lippes for betraying our selues, nor vse any witte, to garde our owne persons, nor shewe our selues willing too shunne our owne harmes, running most greedely to those places, where we are soonest ouerthrowne.4 Although in this context, the winds appear to be merely figurative, the suggestion is that in the theater playgoers open themselves up to infiltration of one kind or another and a subsequent tempest that will leave them in one way or another debilitated. More moderate than his fellow pamphleteers, Gosson nevertheless held out the possibility that the theater's dangers might be mitigated, and set the players (and those who wrote for them) a challenge: If Players can promise in wordes, and performe it in deedes, proclaime it in their Billes, and make it good in Theaters: that there is nothing there noysome too the body, nor hurtefull to the soule: and that euerye one which comes to buye their lestes, shall haue an honest neighbour, tagge and ragge, cutte and longe tayle, goe thether and spare not, otherwise I aduise you to keepe you thence, my selfe wil begine to leade the daunce.5 It is an assurance of this kind that Hamlet offers, as it employs its own culinary metaphors to respond to Gosson's rhetoric of the noxious "dyet" that playgoers purportedly dine upon in the theatrical space.6 The play reassures them that the things offered for their consumption in the theater will not only do them no hurt, but may very well do them some good. The "participation" that takes place as a result of this may be understood, as Anthony Dawson and P. A. Skantze have argued, as a kind of "secular transubstantiation,"7 and there can be no doubt that for some playgoers in the Globe Shakespeare's theater operated as a venue for the transmission of a spirit that was very much religiously inflected.8 I am not, however, interested in the religious aspects of the transmission here. I wish to pursue the play's theory and practice of the transfer of breath between actor and playgoer in purely material terms. The success or pragmatics of the play's theory of performance is not what is at issue here, but rather its character, in its full-blown idealism or "promise."9 Pursuing a sense of the play's transaction with its audience in material rather than spiritual terms, I mimic the play's own modus operandi, which is consistently to render the divine (and other complex discourses such as that of the law) into terms that are "plaine," "honest," "wholesome," and "sweet" for consumption and comprehension by "the general." To put this another way, the play consistently presents the high-flown, the philosophical, the abstract 36 Carolyn Sale in what Hamlet calls "examples gross as earth" (4.4.46). In fact, the play engages in a relentless materializing of everything it discusses. Turn to almost any line of this text and you will find the immaterial or the abstract given material form. The text bestows upon the abstraction time either anatomical or architectural form (it is "out of joint" [1.5.191]), and those other abstractions, the false and the true, find themselves figured as fish: "Your bait of falsehood takes this carp of truth" (2.1.62). There is a decided tendency in this text not only to render things material, or give them forms and figures, but to turn one form after another into what we might call, echoing the text, "baser matter" (1.5.104); and in an environment in which everything is being rendered material in one way or another, reason becomes the ability to distinguish thing from thing, or one form, from another: "when the wind is southerly," Hamlet informs Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, "I know a hawk from a handsaw" (2.2.321–322). The line also suggests that certain winds, or forms of air, make possible a rationality or perspective that Hamlet would otherwise lack, a matter to which I shall return. In fact, in this play so insistently about the material, even thinking exerts a material force: it is a "cudgel[ing] of [the] brains" which produces effects elsewhere in the body: thinking, Hamlet tells us as he considers what can happen to a lawyer's skull after his death, makes the bones ache (5.1.87). One important result of the text's tendency to construe everything as the product of material exchanges or friction between material bodies is that the Hamlet who unfolds before us insistently pursues questions of identity in what we might regard as the simplest, or the earthiest, of terms. Not only does Hamlet regularly consider how everything ultimately returns to dust, he himself continually performs a linguistic equivalent of this material turn, posing high-flown questions about being and action in language that a tenyear-old could understand. With a mere ten words, for example—"And yet to me what is this quintessence of dust?" (2.2.277–278)—Hamlet presents one of the most pressing questions about identity in terms that foreground his own materiality along with his alienation from it, an alienation that makes possible the crucial disjuncture between self-as-object and self-as-reflexivethinker from which Hamlet wrings so much linguistic payoff. The insistent materialization of everything taking place under the "majestical roof fretted with golden fire" (2.2.270–271), that is, both the earthly and the theatrical space, means that even those aspects of identity that we would deem the most abstract and intangible (soul, conscience, memory) are "limed" for us (3.3.68), made material through metaphor, that trick of language through which word is made flesh in familiar terms. This concern with ways in which to give complex thought material form extends beyond the language of the page to the semiotics of the stage, so that what the spectator experiences in the Globe is the by-product of a material aesthetic—that is, an aesthetic that everywhere Eating Air, Feeling Smells 37 turns one form into a "baser" or simpler one not only to ensure the widest possible communicability of the text, but also to draw its audience into an experience—one sensual and physiological—through which it participates in material processes of transformation. The play's language catches its spectators or auditors up in this materializing tendency in its talk of various forms of feeding or consumption. This talk insistently reminds playgoers of their own embodiment, and perhaps the fact th