Michael Platt
I. Nothing that boys and girls dream of can be alien to man and woman. Some dream of emulating heroes, others of being rescued by them. Some aspire, some wait. A girl dreams of a beloved who will save her, a boy admires a hero he wishes to become. Such dreams make boys and girls into young men and women, who still dream. And when they meet, their idea of a hero is the matchmaker. She loves him for the hero he imitates; he loves her for allowing him to believe his heroic imitation successful, or like to be. In the conviction that he is a hero and hence her saviour, and his conviction that she completes him, many couples unite ever after. Yet they stand in opposite relations to the hero. For her the hero is a saviour coming towards her; for him the hero is a man he is on his way to becoming for her. She waits, he aspires. She loves, he emulates. She settles, he searches. She bears and nurses a child, he burns and thirsts for a distinction. She dwells, he thinks.[1]
II. If all young women are something like Nausikaa, Ophelia, or Emma Bovary, all young men are like Telemachus, or Prince Andrei, or Hamlet.
Throughout her lost, violent life, Emma Bovary dreams some man will be her saviour. In the convent, she dreams of the Saviour, later she dreams of a husband, still later of a lover, and then another. As a consequence of her dreams, she finds daily life and daily love shabby. Shabby as she is, her world is shabbier. We shall never know whether the appearance of a real man would have rid her of what is vaporous in her longing. In the end, we only know that there is more spirit in her worn, wasted, dead body than in the souls of the two men who stand beside her it at her funeral: Father Boursinien and Monsieur Homais, representatives of the ancien regime and the nouvelle. No one adequate to her confused longing was then living, and she had not the imagination to leave modern times.
Tolstoy wrote of a greater woman, greater suffering, and greater men. He knew all three better that Flaubert. (Perhaps there are no men in Madame Bovary because the author was not much of one; “Mme. Bovary, c’est moi,” as he is said to have confided.) Tolstoy is the greater artist because he was, with all his vices, the greater man. His Prince Andrei shows what a man is when he admires his hero, Napoleon:
And his fancy painted the battle, the loss of it, the concentration of the fighting at one point and the hesitation of all the commanders. And then the happy moment—the Toulon for which he had been waiting so long—presenting itself to him at last! Firmly and clearly he speaks his opinion to Kutuzov and Weierother, to the Emperors. All are struck by the truth of his arguments but no one offers to put them into execution, so he takes a regiment, a division—stipulates that no one is to interfere with his arrangements—leads his division to the critical spot and wins victory alone.[2]
At Austerlitz as he picks up a standard and rallies the troops, Andrei not only thinks “this is my hour” but meets his hero, Napoleon. Lying wounded on the ground, he hears the Emperor of all the French praise his death, notice that he is still alive, and order him cared for, but such is Andrei’s astonishment at the spacious, blue sky high over the battlefield that his hero seems as inconsequential as the buzzing of a fly. In the midst of War, Prince Andrei finds Peace, which frees him from all fond emulation, though only to detach him from all life.
It takes a Tolstoy or a Flaubert to paint the dreams of boys and girls and how they make boy and girl into man and woman, man and woman who still dream. Human life cannot be understood without understanding these emulative and salvationary dreams. Both our folly and our wisdom are advanced by the worship of heroes. Adults are children who once worshipped heroic versions of what they now are. (Rare the man over forty who still cares for justice, and rarer still he who still cares to learn.) The hero of the boy is the father of the man, the heroine of the girl is the mother of the woman. Sometimes, watching an old movie, you can spot where a friend picked up a way of speaking, from Basil Rathbone, a red-jacket he still wears with a smile, or a way of always appealing with his hands, from Jimmy Stewart.
III. Everything great done by human kind was done by some one who first imagined himself a hero never before seen by anyone and then emulated that hero, until he had become him, by doing his great deeds. Leave out heroes and life is but breath and calculation. Change heroes and heroines and you change everything: Achilleus to Socrates, Moses to Christ, Helen to Mary, Aristotle to Bacon, these exchanges changed the world. Every new era in our long human history is inaugurated by a new hero. Consider the Renaissance.
Writing to Francesco Vettori on 10 December 1513, Niccolò Machiavelli recounted his day. In exile from Florence, poor, abused by princes, reduced to playing tric trac with bakers, disputing over nothing, only as night descends does his spirit soar:
When evening has come, I return to my house and go into my study. At the door I take off my clothes of the day, covered with mud and mire, and I put on my regal and courtly garments; and decently reclothed, I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where, received by them lovingly, I feed on the food that alone is mine and that I was made for. There I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason for their actions; and they in their humanity reply to me. And for the space of four hours I feel no boredom, I forget every pain, I do not fear poverty, death does not frighten me. I deliver myself entirely to them. And because Dante says that to have understood without retaining does not make knowledge, I have noted what capital I made from their conversation and have composed a little work De principatibus where I dive as deeply as I can into ideas about this subject, debating what a principality is, of what kinds they are, how they are acquired, how they are maintained, why they are lost.[3]
Who were the ancients Machiavelli put on his robes for? Judging from his works, it was Xenophon, the Xenophon of the Cyropaedia, an oriental prince, not of the Memorabilia, not Socrates, that Machiavelli most honored with questions. By doing so he emulated the greatest advisors of princes and, departing from them, became the unarmed prophet of armed modernity. In his emulation of the philosophers, there is no emulation of Socrates, and there is hatred of Christ.
Sir Saint Thomas More emulated both. His Utopia is the first imitation of a Platonic work with Socrates in it, namely The Republic, since antiquity itself.[4] His life and his death are also such an imitation. In all the accounts of Socrates that have come down to us Socrates never cries, but he does laugh, twice or thrice. And at least once, he does so on the way to death. Now Thomas More was, to employ one of his favorite words, a merry man; he was wont to jest and was often the cause of jest in others; yet his death resembles that of Christ, who cried out, as much as Socrates, who laughed, and the oath he would not take was in the presence of God, not nous, still less Zeus. And of Christ, More in his Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation, composed in the Tower, writes:
And for to prove that this life is no laughing tyme but rather the tyme of wepyng, we fynd that our saviour hym selfe wept twise or thrise, but never fynd we that he laughed so much as onse, I will not swere that he never did but at the lest wise he left us no samples of it.[5]
More was both merry and sad, he both laughed and wept. He was both a gentleman and a hero, an ascetic and a husband, a statesman and a saint. The wonder is that in being all these he emulated both Socrates, who was no gentleman, and Christ, who was no philosopher.
IV. Were Shakespeare to spend the day as Machiavelli did, say with Ben Jonson at the Mermaid, he a yare English Frigate, Jonson a formidable but heavy Spanish galleon, if we credit Fuller’s story[6], who among the ancients might he later put on fresh robes for? Among the worthy candidates, Ovid, Vergil and Plutarch, the last seems to stand out for the obvious reason that Plutarch was the chief direct source for three of Shakespeare’s plays and for another, more general reason as well: Plutarch’s book is a book of lives. He judges the relative merits of Greece and Rome by the lives its noblest warriors, statesmen, and men chose to live. When we read such lives, we always read them with another parallel life in mind, our own. Plutarch knew this and if Shakespeare did too, as he surely did, he probably learned it from Plutarch.
Now, in the Lives of Plutarch one pair stands out especially, those of Alexander and Caesar; they are for Plutarch the noblest Grecian and noblest Roman of them all. Yet Shakespeare’s most modern hero, while keeping them paired, reduces their antique greatness to the indistinguishably circulating atoms of Lucretius:
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 turned to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away. (5.1.196-202)[7]
It was not always so with Shakespeare’s modern hero. Earlier Hamlet had heroes and, aside from his father, his greatest hero was Aeneas. What then was Aeneas to him? And he to Aeneas?
We learn what Aeneas meant to Hamlet from a single passage in Hamlet in which our modern hero is gripped with the desire to retell a portion of Aeneas’ story; upon meeting the master Player newly come to Elsinore, Hamlet, who had seen him play the role of Aeneas at Wittenberg, launches into a recital of the part where Aeneas himself tells the story of the fall of Troy as he saw and felt it, to the hospitable Dido.[8]
This story is one of several in Hamlet, told, retold or nearly told in the course of the drama. The whole play is set in motion by the first, the Ghost’s story of his own murder. Had Hamlet never heard it, he might have returned to Wittenberg and become a professor. Told to his son, this story whets and checks, whets and checks and thus double-binds, him. It freezes and fires up his young blood at once. Being unretellable, this story separates young Hamlet from his fellow men, from his intended woman, Ophelia, and often from himself. (One story, told but once, and a thousand consequences, many unintended by the teller, indeed indifferent to his intentions, and often far from them! What a potent instance of the life our stories may lead beyond us and an image of what potent poetry can be. Think of the consequences of Hamlet itself.)
Finally, as he is dying, Hamlet asks Horatio to tell his story. Yet it is clear Horatio could never do it properly; he never heard the Ghost’s story, does not know Hamlet’s soliloquies, and could never follow all Hamlet’s curious thoughts. Told by Horatio Hamlet would return to the pale sources from which Shakespeare made it start forth. Only Shakespeare could fulfill Hamlet’s dying commission. As we live it, life is a drama; only when we die does it become a story, one that can only be told by another, unless we be Moses, who narrates his own death in his Pentateuch (but he did have “a divine preceptor”). It is an important fact of Hamlet’s life, that he cannot tell his story, the vitally perplexing part, to anyone. Nothing would have unburdened his soul more than to retell the Ghost’s story, but nothing was more impossible. Whom could he trust to not retell it? Or to understand it! Revelations seem unsharable. Instead, Hamlet retells another man’s story. At Wittenberg, the fall of Troy as told by Aeneas, meant one thing; back in Elsinore a bare month or so later, it means much more. Great stories add rings of meaning, as we grow older, even if suddenly. Had Hamlet got to retell it yet again, to Ophelia, she and he might have praised the Aeneid with “Galeotto” as Francesca and Paolo did. But even before he returned to Elsinore, Hamlet knew the Fall of Troy to be sad, Dido lovely, and Rome worth, if sadly worth, forsaking her for.[9]
This story, Aeneas’ tale to Dido is chosen and begun by Hamlet, interrupted by Polonius, and finished by the Master Player. The Player speaks so movingly that he moves all who hear, though each according to his own peculiar ear. Moved by Hecuba, Polonius pleads “no more” and by so doing reminds us that even an old fool can be wifeless and forlorn and thus the object of sympathy as well as irritation. Moved by Hecuba and by the Player, Hamlet discovers a way to find out Claudius, test the Ghost, and delay commanded revenge.[10]
Polonius recognizes our passage as a piece of art and, critic that he is, feels compelled to blame and later praise it. “Non ridere, non lugere, neque destestari, sed intelligere” is not his maxim. For Hamlet and for us, it asks to be understood. Unless we understand it, we shall not understand Hamlet and why it moves him. Of course, it is possible that it cannot be understood. Perhaps Hamlet does not understand it, perhaps only Shakespeare understands it. Can we? We can only know by essaying. Let us begin.
Polonius is right to recognize our passage as a piece of art, for it stands apart, distinct in style and elevation from all that surrounds it. Its ornate gravity arrests the quick motion of the drama. For a moment we escape from the prison of modernity and breathe the liberal air of antiquity. True, we hear of a vehement deed and feel its ensuing sadness, but all in a sober and ennobling cadence. Here is neither the breathless romage of modern life, nor the ever-ready wit its most exemplary prince keeps its thousand heartaches at bay with. The sober cadence of antiquity is not for Northern and modern speakers whose breath must needs be harshly drawn. Within the play Hamlet only the Murder of Gonzago and the tale unfolded by the Ghost share the sober cadence of this passage.[11] (Of this affinity we will say more later.)
Our speech is known as the Player’s speech. It deserves to be known as Hamlet’s speech. It is also Vergil’s speech. The Hamlet who chooses it, memorizes it, and may have written it, must be a lover of Vergil and of his Aeneas. A candidate for the most revealing modern hero is, then, an admirer of a candidate for the most exemplary of ancient heroes. The Northern and Modern Prince has taken the trouble to commit to memory a speech immediately or mediately derived from Aeneid, II, 506 ff. Not only is our passage epic in style and matter, it is known to be so by Hamlet. (What Hamlet knows, Shakespeare cannot be ignorant of.)
The suggestion that this passage is meant to ridicule the bombast of a certain kind of play is belied by the facts. Although there are ten words here that never appear elsewhere in Shakespeare, Hamlet’s love of this passage alone should dissuade us from derision. To ridicule it would be to cast our lot with the critic, Polonius, who praises the one word Hamlet puzzles at. Indeed, in the history of our language the general have sided with caviar Hamlet; “mobled” has never been current and I hope it will never be. Coleridge was right when he observed of our speech—“it is a substitute of the epic for the dramatic.” And thereby hangs a long tale. To wit: the whole relation of this modern play and its witty hero to the antique epic and its pious civil hero.
Within the play Hamlet, this passage is a brief epic, not self contained and whole like Shakespeare’s other brief epic The Rape of Lucrece, but embedded in a modern dramatic whole.[12] An epic abbreviated is somehow no longer an epic, but Hamlet in his brief epic does not mean to replace Vergil’s account. Nay, his recitation of Pyrrhus, Priam, and Hecuba presupposes for its full effect a loving knowledge of Vergil. Unless we have been schooled in Vergil, or despite schooling, loved him, how will we experience in the frail and decapitated Priam the shudder of all Troy falling or hear in the tears of Hecuba the sadness of all that passes through mortal nature to eternity? Hamlet’s brief epic speech is the tip of a spear from which we must infer the whole warrior.
The significance of the passage resides not in its brevity but in its embedding. A passage from an epic embedded in something else finds itself altered, even when still admired as epic. What the epic simile is to an epic, a moment of repose fetched from a more pure, necessitous, or natural world, this brief epic is within the drama of Hamlet. In this drama that epic passage becomes a simile, an eddy in a rushing stream. While Hamlet listens, he can think; while he hears the composing strains of antique passion, breathes its ennobling air, he can auscultate his heart of hearts and devise some means to fathom his own painful mystery. Thus for Hamlet this martial passage comes as a violin beside a window looking upon a twilighted sea must come to a man who has spent the day midst guns, and drums, and dust. Distant hardship affords repose. The whole reminds one of those tranquil, green, and distant scenes, framed by a window perhaps, that the Renaissance masters like to place behind Christ suffering in the central foreground of their paintings and frescoes.
It is hard to know who has written this passage, aside from Shakespeare. Hamlet’s well-known love of the players, his advice to them, his hearty greetings to them, his apparent intimacy with the first Player, his later insertion of lines in the Gonzago play and his occasional speech in couplets all suggest the possibility that Hamlet himself may be the author of this speech and of the play it comes from. His praise of the play as “caviar to the general” is something warmer than impersonal admiration and his surprise at “mobled Queen” argues an author’s suspicion of corruption of his text by an actor’s memory. (Is “mobled Queen” a corruption of “noble Queen”?) But whether Hamlet be its author or no, there can be no doubt that he loved the play and in it chiefly this passage. In his own words, “One speech in it I chiefly loved, ‘twas Aeneas’ tale to Dido and thereabout of it especially where he speaks of Priam’s slaughter.” Such love makes Hamlet the adoptive father, if not indeed the ‘only begetter,’ of the passage.
Polonius does not ask if there is method in Hamlet’s choice of this passage. If there is, it must be indirect. Such indirection should not surprise us. When we first meet Hamlet, he is in a situation where he must be silent, but it is not easy. It is like to break his heart. Between the absolute silence that would protect him and the honest open speech that would unburden the heart, Hamlet takes a middle path. He speaks, but cunningly. He shouts, but obscurely. He purrs, but menacingly. He is ever a man who speaks as much to himself as to others. Although he has much to say to others, we feel he would prefer not to. And when he must speak to them, always there is reserved a meaning meant only for his private ear. In truth, whom could Hamlet talk to? Some he must mistrust from the word “Who goes?” such as Claudius and Polonius; others he must learn to soon mistrust: Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and Laertes. One he must come to mistrust, most disappointedly: Ophelia. Nor can Mrs. Frailty, his mother, be trusted; at least half of her is Claudius’ wife. With all these he must deliberately speak so as to be misunderstood. As for the good, valiant, antique Horatio—since there is more in either heaven or hell than he kens of, since one’s earthiest thoughts will be “too curious”—one must smile and smile and suffer and smile. Small wonder then that Hamlet’s sense is always winking out of nooks, angles, cracks—perplexing all who hear it, and sometimes even himself. He is not used to speaking only with himself. His new esoteric speech has reminded some of the schizophrenic; if so, then philosophers are strong schizophrenics—enduring misunderstanding in the knowledge that every noble thing is rare.
It was not always so with Hamlet. In his green and student days he was amiable and witty, the life and the leader of his informal fraternity, as his fellow students’ expectations show us. If he studied theology at Wittenberg, he probably took it more seriously than many, yet without becoming so rebellious-faithful as to nail numerous theses on a door, whet up peasants, and call for their slaughter. In the play he acted in, he imitated gentlemen, not saints, Aeneas, not Christ. In the newly troubled Denmark, Hamlet must find comfort in playing Aeneas speaking to Dido, as he once did, on a safer stage where all deaths were in jest. Still, the repetition of the speech now cannot mean what it meant a month ago. To understand why Hamlet selects it, what it means to him, why it provokes him, means to become the person whom Hamlet could unfold his tale to.
To become that person we must examine the passage from Hamlet’s point of view. The first part describes the rage of Pyrrhus, the second the killing of Priam, and the third the grief of Hecuba. From Hamlet’s point of view the armed rage of Pyrrhus, the avenging son of the slain Achilleus, must resemble the vengeance his ghostly father has commanded him to accomplish and he had declared himself ready to. From Hamlet’s point of view then, the killing of Priam, a murder that put everything out of joint, must resemble the killing of Old Hamlet. And finally the grief of Hecuba must, from Hamlet’s point of view, resemble the grief of Gertrude over her dear husband. However, there is something wrong with these resemblances. It is not only that Gertrude does not, as Hamlet passionately notes (3.4.54 ff.), weep over Old Hamlet, but that the whole action described in the passage is profoundly deranged. Consider all in a figure:
PYRRHUS kill >> PRIAM < < grieve HECUBA
CLAUDIUS
HAMLET kill >> << grieve GERTRUDE
OLD HAMLET
Hamlet’s resemblance to the rugged Pyrrhus makes Priam into a Claudius, but the tears Hecuba did shed (and Gertrude should have) over Priam make Priam into Old Hamlet. Things are jammed up. Hamlet seems required to kill his father so that his mother will weep. (In truth, he must wonder if he does kill Claudius whether his mother will not indeed weep as Hecuba did for Priam.) The suggestion that young Hamlet is somehow to kill his father seems only strengthened by the details in the description of Priam, about milk and ear (465-466), which remind one of the Ghost’s description of how Claudius did kill his father, through the ear. Well, perhaps we’ve got it wrong. Perhaps Claudius resembles the Greek Pyrrhus killing Priam (Old Hamlet), but then why does Hamlet admire the up-sword vigor of Pyrrhus, and anyway Claudius did not use anything so open, honest, sharp, and quick as a sword.
Moreover, the revenge of Pyrrhus, whose father was killed by Paris not Priam, Paris’ father, is rather indirect. Achilleus and Priam were reconciled. Priam kissed the man-killing, Hektor-killing hands of Achilleus. Achilleus served meat to Priam, protected him, and gave up the corpse of Hektor to him.
Should Hamlet then avenge his father’s death by killing a son of the king (as Paris is son of Priam)? But the only “son” (too much in the sun) of this king is himself? Should Hamlet kill himself? Whichever way we turn, we seem lost. Our deep interpretations do pall. Yet if we return to the surface, what new clarity do we have? Pyrrhus’ revenge still makes Priam a Claudius and Hecuba’s grief still makes Priam an Old Hamlet. Before we conclude that jamming and the perplexity that arises from it is precisely the point, let us see if we can find some clarity by noticing that all this is Aeneas’ tale to Dido.
AENEAS {PYRRHUS kills >> PRIAM << grieves HECUBA} DIDO
It is Aeneas who narrates what he saw of Pyrrhus, Priam and Hecuba. Aeneas, son of Anchises, tells the story of the greatest Trojan father, Priam, father of fifty sons and twelve daughters. It is in little the story of the fall of Troy. And when told to Dido, who already knows it and whose palace is decked with scenes of it, it wins her heart. Now we see why Hamlet recollects this story. He too the son of a dead father, a lost Trojan, homeless in his own home, would, like Aeneas, like to sit by some hearth and tell of the death of fathers and by telling win a queen and found a state. This tale of Aeneas’ to Dido is an antique version of a modern tale he would like to relate. It is a version of what he could tell. He could tell?
We overstep ourselves. Hamlet cannot tell the story of his father’s death, certainly not till he avenges it. He would most like to tell that story to his Dido, to Ophelia, but for the duration he dare not, for Ophelia has returned his letters and keepsakes. She probably takes orders from her father; if not a spy, she is surely an instrument of a sure one. Hamlet’s tale of Aeneas is meant for Ophelia, but it will never reach her. Aeneas won Dido with his tale and the result was suicide. Hamlet does not win Ophelia with his recited tale and the result is suicide. Jeptha Polonius sacrificed his daughter to YHWH-Claudius.[13] Of those in Hamlet who honor and obey their fathers, on earth or not yet in heaven, none, none shall marry. The only way this sad celibacy might have been averted is if either, on the one hand, Hamlet had swiftly killed Claudius, or even belatedly killed him at his prayers, or, an impossibility, if Ophelia had been present at Hamlet’s recitation and understood it. To do so she would have had to have a mind the equal of Hamlet’s or Shakespeare’s. Hamlet impersonates Aeneas speaking of the death of a civil father to reach his Ophelia; yet we cannot understand what he means precisely. Perhaps he doesn’t either. The chance that Ophelia could understand is as good as that of the rich man going to heaven. The message in Hamlet’s bottle was buried, not even launched on the sea, and the message was in Vergilian cipher. He needed a Kitty, she wanted a glass of fashion.
Ophelia is good enough to like Hamlet and even to describe the outer parts of his virtuous mind (3.1.150 ff.) but not good enough to draw near him or even take him as her hero. There is not an ounce of emulation in her. Emma Bovary is more spirited, Beatrice more witty, and Rosalind more virtuous.[14] Too respectfully does Ophelia obey her foolish father. Too servilely does she, at his bidding, return Hamlet’s keepsakes. Is there nothing she would shrink from if her father bid her, not even whoring? Hamlet wonders. Ophelia does not, like Cordelia, know that the best of daughters must leave mother and father before she can truly cleave unto her beloved, so that one day they become one flesh. But the house of Polonius has no store of Biblical or of ancient wisdom. The ten—count them—commandments Polonius gives son Laertes are neither Biblical nor pagan (1.3.59 ff.). They say neither “Love thy God” nor “Love thy virtue.”[15] Their coda, “And this above all, to thine own self be true, And it must follow as the night the day, That thou canst not then be false to any man,” are less beautifully, but no less accurately, rendered: “Watch out for number one, and f … f … f. . . forget the other guy.” “Best safety lies in fear,” as brother Laertes says to frail sister Ophelia. Men grab, women flee, or submit, according to this family‘s wisdom. Virtue is naught—unless it be successful vice.
Probably Hamlet guesses how futile it is to love Ophelia. In comparing himself to Aeneas, he must remember that Dido was lost, lost utterly, and so will Ophelia be. But Hamlet must also hope that, like Aeneas, he will gain a greater thing, a new home and even, if old prophecy have new sight, that his new home will become the home of all homes, a new Rome. Such is the vision that Anchises, Aeneas’ guide in the undiscovered country, discloses to him, of a new Troy peopled with great, long-warring heroes and crowned with world imperial peace. We who know the end of Hamlet know it is not to be. Hamlet and his line will be extinguished, not continued. Hamlet could have had a presentiment of this. Nothing could be more different than the ghost of Anchises and the ghost of Old Hamlet, the one filled with ample public thoughts of future goods and glories, the other filled with small attachments (“All my smooth body”) and small hates (Claudius). Ghost Anchises fills his son with a vision of great future deeds that build a world-commanding state and please the gods themselves. Ghost Hamlet fills his son with the dread of something after death and with commands that may send him to fires eternally hotter than those that for a time will burn his father. Vergil’s Hades is a place of pleasures as well as pains. Hamlet’s Hell, or Purgatory, is a place solely of pains. Father Anchises cared about setting things right in the state, Father Hamlet does not give a tinker’s damn.[16]
Surely this seems to be one of Shakespeare’s deepest points: something in Christianity or in one version of it makes care for human things, such as a great ruler or statesman exercises, more difficult than in antiquity. If so, does Shakespeare agree more with Machiavelli than More? Certainly it is hard to find in Shakespeare the hatred of God that burns so unquenchably in the soul of prince Machiavelli, and to perceive that statesmanship is harder than the ancients thought may, being true, only mean heroism is also harder than they kenned of. Certainly Machiavelli could not imagine the Ghost in Hamlet, or why a serious man must take seriously the possibility of miracles such as ghosts, and if one appear, all the consequences. Hamlet and his maker could imagine these. They did.
Hamlet, the modern hero, is a man who reasons about a revelation. In drama, he, like his maker, finds the best instrument of that reason and thus the best test of revelation. The results in Hamlet are ambiguous. The drama Hamlet puts on proves the Ghost’s revelation true, but the very evidence of its truth (Claudius kneeling) that proves the Ghost’s story a true revelation also prevents Hamlet from taking just revenge, since the souls of kneeling murderers may fly up to heaven while their bodies are laid in a grave below. Just at the moment when Hamlet might “do it pat,” when he is certain Claudius is guilty, not only because he called for “lights” but because he is at prayer, and just when Claudius is most vulnerable to attack, Hamlet cannot act, and not just, as Hamlet says, because Claudius might skip over his father and arrive in heaven but because Hamlet, for killing Claudius, might very well one day be confined in fires. You see, the fact that the Ghost’s story of his murder has now been confirmed by the living murderer’s conduct also tends to prove true the Ghost’s testimony about the dreadful afterlife, and that prospect puzzles the will mightily, as the deliberation “to be or not to be” both proves and shows. The deepest dread in Hamlet and throughout Hamlet is the dread of something after life, in other words, the dread of ghosts. Those, such as Freud, who know there are no ghosts, must find Hamlet unintelligible and miss entirely the pathos of his spiritual warfare.[17] As the Pyrrhus-Priam-Hecuba analogy implies, Hamlet may well have to kill not his living father but his Ghostly one, his Father who is not yet in heaven.
The fact that the Ghost disappears from Hamlet and does not reappear after Hamlet’s voyage toward England marks a momentous victory of the soul. Banished like a vapor by the sun are the Ghost, the dread of all ghosts, and the fundamental dread of becoming one. Hamlet defeats the Ghost, yet in doing so he obeys his father. Hamlet does what he should do even though it would please his Ghost father. The fact that he never denies the Ghost or the existence of ghosts (5.2.321 ff.) and even begins to speak like the Ghost (5.2.322 ff.), makes his victory over the dread of ghosts all the more courageous. Courageous but also numb, for it seems that Hamlet could not triumph over dread without extinguishing or very nearly extinguishing his fondness for life, in himself (5.2.208-12) and in others, such as the careerists, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, whose murder he perpetrates entirely without necessity and relishes beyond justice. One cannot praise Hamlet’s soul’s victory without lamenting how much it cost him.
The tale of Aeneas to Dido, of Pyrrhus, Priam and Hecuba, which Hamlet recites and has recited, is then in its very jamming and obscurity an image of his own soul’s struggle, and thus not suitable for presentation at Elsinore. Its meaning, which he himself only divines obscurely, if at all, would have been absolutely unintelligible to everyone else, indeed invisible. Had he had the Players present a play about Aeneas it would have been attributed to a University man’s love of the classics, on a par with Polonius’ “Brutus killed me.” Polonius, Claudius, and Gertrude might have thought Hamlet sane again and Ophelia would have found no more meaning in it than she does in anything else Hamlet tells her far less obscurely, if not directly. He needed a partner, she wanted a saviour.
(Complex as the meaning of Aeneas’ tale to Dido is for Hamlet, so complex he may only dimly sense it, it is made even more complex for Shakespeare and thus potentially for us, by two bits of information: 1) that the actor who plays the Ghost usually also plays the Player, which ‘means’ that while in the beginning Hamlet is commanded by a Ghost who resembles the Player, he now begins to command a Player who resembles the Ghost. Both Ghost and Player, as we’ve noted, speak more elevatedly than others, employ epic diction and epic similes. Now add this: 2) that Old Rumor has it that Shakespeare himself acted the part of the Ghost, thus presumably also part of the Player, which ‘means’ Hamlet is first commanded and terrified by Shakespeare, then begins to command him, and later sees him enact a representation of the deed his tale unfolded. Shakespeare as Player acts out what Shakespeare-Ghost reveals so as to secure proof the tale was true and the author an honest author. Enough turning of the screws for now.)
Small wonder then that Hamlet’s favorite story and play is not presented in full to the court. Yet the recitation of a passage from it is not without consequence. Hamlet is much moved by the recitation, chiefly by the grief of Hecuba. Immediately upon Polonius’ “no more,” Hamlet asks the players to put on the Murder of Gonzago with an addition by himself. Although his “rogue and peasant slave” soliloquy follows this request, it seems to explain it by representing what Hamlet has been feeling and thinking during the recitation. First, he was stirred to vengeance in thought, then to thoughts about vengeance. The two parts are divided, by a smile, into passion and deliberation. First Hamlet is passionate, then he smiles at how passionate a play can make him, and from this discovery recognizes the purpose he can make the Gonzago play serve. In truth only now does Hamlet discover the best reason why he selected the Gonzago play and inserted lines in it. Before, he wanted to express his situation, now he wants to imitate Claudius’ deed. If the recitation of Aeneas’ tale to Dido can make a Polonius weep and a Hamlet rage, then the Murder of Gonzago may make Claudius start like a guilty thing. If so, that will confirm the Ghost’s not yet credible revelation.
Only in this indirect way then is the ancient Aeneas of help to modern Hamlet. Although the story of Pyrrhus, Priam and Hecuba can represent Hamlet’s heartache, it does so too curiously to be understood by anyone but Shakespeare. And in that case it only represents the heartache, it does not show Hamlet either what to do or how to be. Like Aeneas, Hamlet is a son with a father on his back, but there the analogy ends. Aeneas never had to deal with such a passionate Ghost, one so indifferent to his good and the good of the fatherland. Imitation of Aeneas is impossible and even emulation may be more a hindrance than a help. In truth Hamlet sometimes seems to invoke heroes as saviors.
The solution Hamlet finds is his own. To balance the dread of ghosts he weighs up the love of skulls. The fact that our flesh turns to dust, leaving bones in the earth, calms a man afraid of ghosts. And so the discovery of the skull of Yorick:
Clown: A pestilence on his for a mad rogue! ‘A poured a flagon of Rhenish on my head once. This same skull, sir, was—sir— Yorick’s skull, the king’s jester. (5.1.167-69)
and the retelling of the story of how Yorick, like a good father, carried little Hamlet:
Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath borne me on his back a thousand times. (5.1.172-75)
entirely reverses the image of Hamlet burdened by his father on his back and recalls that primal image of Aeneas, known to Shakespeare’s Cassius (1.2.112 ff.), as a father carrying a father and leading a son. Hamlet could not be further from such a father as Aeneas. He is perhaps a Jacob who wrestles with an angel all night, but wins no blessing. Or rather a Danish Rider by Rembrandt, ever ready and intrepid, but solitary and no longer seeking happiness. He is not pious, stern Aeneas who did not, though suffering the world, refuse, like Christ, to rule it.
And yet just as Hamlet loses all emulative desire, he begins to resemble Aeneas. Through most of the Aeneid, Aeneas is a beaten man, beaten by defeat, by fortune and beaten by his father. When in Hades Anchises shows him the glories of the future Rome (VI, 756 ff.), Aeneas only wants to stay there. After he leaves Hades, mysteriously through the gate of ivory (VI, 898), he never again remembers his father or the glories he was shown. Presented with a new shield depicting those glories, he recognizes nothing (VIII, 730). Does he remember to spare the conquered and war down the proud, as is the Roman way? (VI, 853) Not at all. In the final lines of the Aeneid, he does not spare the supplicating Turnus, will beat down humble Latinium (XII, 567 ff.) and will unite with the native Lavinia, thus setting aside his own son, Ascanius. Like Hamlet, Aeneas could not have become who he is without emulation and without leaving it utterly behind. As he loses his worship of Aeneas, Hamlet becomes more like him. To emulate is not to be. We grow by emulation, till we outgrow it, or had better. There is something wrong in a young man without emulation and wrong in a mature man with too much of it.[18]
V. Did Hamlet know that his putting away the Ghost to become himself made him resemble the self-reliant Aeneas who emerges in the second half of the Aeneid? Certainly not. Did Shakespeare? We shall probably never know. How did Shakespeare read the Aeneid? If Shakespeare read as he wrote, few in the world can match him, but, so saying, we do not know exactly how he read the Aeneid. The evidence, say in a commentary, does not exist. Without that, we do not know whether he read him seriously at all. Do minds of the order of Shakespeare or Vergil read their equals? Our curricular piety holds that they do, and that we do well to listen to the conversational music of their great spheres, speaking across light years each to each.
Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patens of bright gold.
There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins:[19]
Can we hear it? Only partly. Vergil read Homer, Dante read Vergil, Thomas read Aristotle, Heidegger read most every one. But the rest of the heavens are silent. It may be that far from conversing, these minds shine like solitary stars, warm up close and to themselves, but unable to shed any but the palest fire on each other.[20] Our curricular piety is permitted by the silence of the record, justified by the benefits to ourselves and the emulative young, but may not be sanctioned by whole truth.[21] Unless it be sanctioned by the truth that the great conversers are related not by what they say to each other, but through what they talk about, and by so doing husband from expense—call it, as Shakespeare does, nature’s riches.[22] Unless emulation discovers such nature in its heroes, it will be cowered by dread, comforted by salvators, and tempted by progress.
The essence of the Renaissance is the emulation of the antique hero. Montaigne was the first man in a thousand years to agree with Julius Caesar that the best death is unprepared.[23] Although Hamlet would understand, he had no choice but “readiness” as his watchword. The man he most wanted to emulate had turned into a ghost whose revelation he found it impossible not to reason about. For all its emulative fire the Renaissance failed to revive antiquity; their imagination of it was narrow; Machiavelli admired the Xenophon of the Cyropaedia, not the Xenophone who admired Socrates; and though Montaigne did admire Socrates, he did not recognize that Socrates did prepare for death; for the West it has ever been the task how to unite Socrates and Christ, to think like the one and love like the other; those in the Renaissance who tried to carry on, such as gentle Erasmus, mighty Michelangelo, and profound Rembrandt, did not prevail; a hundred noble souls whom Creation might call men were not enough; soon the Renaissance forgot such uniting emulation and turned into modernity. The rough magic Prospero wisely drowned was picked up by an urbane Caliban and has never been laid aside since. In his brave New Atlantis the only statues are of inventors. If a new Aeneas washed up there, he would not be able to say:
sunt hic etiam sua praemia laudi,
sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt. (I, 461-62)
(Here too virtues are rewarded and there are tears for mortal things.)
To the Bensalemites, worshiping a statue of Edison, this would be “all Greek.” According to Chief Inventor, Archprojector, and Lord Francis Bacon, only emulation of the inventor is salutary, for only inventions that conquer nature to relieve man’s estate are salvationary. According to his amending secretary, Thomas Hobbes, no emulation is salutary, all honor is empty, and only the absolute sovereign can save us from the kingdom of darkness and rescue us from the nasty state of nature. The timid wee world these new Englishmen fashioned has little place for aspiration, for inquiry, for suffering, or for emulation, in short, no place for Hamlet. Nor his natural superior, Shakespeare, who, emulated a “hero” who makes you ever more what you are. To emulate nature is to be. And to emulate nature’s God is to be a Shakespeare, who made to know, knew to make, and by making came to be and to know who he was and who he is.[24]
Nothing that boys and girls dream of can be alien to man and woman. Some dream of emulating heroes, others of being rescued by them. Some aspire, some wait. Some emulate, some love. Some search, some settle. Some burn and thirst for distinction, some dive deep in thought. And a very few human beings dream of doing all these. They dream of being both Hamlet and Ophelia, Henry V and Kate—and more: Falstaff and Mistress Quickly, Caliban and Ariel, Osric and Gonzalo, Lear and Iago. Such a boy was Shakespeare once and by emulating all the likes of these in childish imagination, reading Vergil perhaps, he became—Shakespeare, who in his plays is all his players.
No country is as noble as a hero, no hero as noble as the virtue he, being also human, only partly embodies, and no virtue as exalted as the good itself. Yet there are some men who know that that the good calls forth the virtues, which in turn require heroes to embody them, and that they in turn need countries to support them, even as they lead them. Shakespeare was such a man.[25]
Michael Platt
Friends of the Republic
ENDNOTES
[1] For accounts of the natural inclinations that differentiate most men and women, which antedate current views, see Nietzsche, Zarathustra I, 18; for an interpretation of it, see my “Woman, Nietzsche, and Nature,” Maieutics, No. 2: Winter 1981, pp. 27-42; for drawing out an educational consequence, namely separate education in adolescence, see Charles E. Garman, “The Training of a Boy,” in Letters, Lectures, and Addresses (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1909), pp. 389-404; see also the contemporary counsels of Thomas Davidson, “The Ideal Training of an American Boy” The Forum, July 1894, pp. 571-58; and his “The Ideal Training of the American Girl The Forum, June 1898, pp. 471-480. The oldest argument against separate education is the ironic proposal of Plato’s Socrates, in the Republic. Shakespeare is hardly ironic, for his witty lasses, his Viola, his Juliet, his Rosalind, his Beatrice, and his Portia stand out beyond all in previous literature as lovable; they are certainly more intelligent and virtuous than their male wooers, and yet they were all educated separately. Note also how Shakespeare’s comparison of Troilus and Othello shows that in modernity only does the man feel himself judged in love by the woman.
[2] War and Peace, trans. Rosemary Edmunds (Penguin Books), s. v.
[3] I quote the translation of Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr, The Prince (Chicago: University Press, 1985), p. 109-110; for a democratic version of reading the ancients in the evening, see Alexis de Tocqueville, letter to Lord Hatherton (27 November 1857), Englished in Selected Letters on Politics and Society ed. Roger Boesche (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1985), No. 98, pp. 358-359. Judging from his writings, the man to whom this essay is festschriftlicly dedicated, omnivorous reader, indefatigable teacher, and wherever he is a free man, George Anastaplo must enjoy such evenings as Tocqueville describes.
[4] Yehuda Halevi’s dialogue, The Kuzari, which More probably did not know, is Socratic in form, in relation between surface and depth, and perhaps in teaching. More did not live to behold the next example, of Montaigne in his Essais, Socratic in their spirit of inquiry and in the cameo appearances of Socrates through quotation, often long, which was an important cause of something Socratic in the greatest reader of Montaigne, Shakespeare, whose most famous soliloquy by his most famous hero comes straight out of the long portion of Socrates’ Apology that Montaigne quotes in “Of physiognomy.”
[5] See Volume 12 of The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, A Dialogue of Comfort (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), Book I, Chapter 13, p. 42. I am grateful to Leo Strauss for directing attention to this passage, also to the death of Emma Bovary, and also for describing Hamlet as a man who reasons about revelation. Reading this essay, I hope he would not be disappointed he did.
[6] Thomas Fuller’s (1608-61) account of the wit-combats ‘twixt Shakespeare and Jonson is conveniently reprinted in Frank Kermode’s bargain Four Centuries of Shakespearian Criticism (New York: Avon Books, 1965), p. 41.
[7] All references to Shakespeare, unless otherwise noted, are to the one volume Pelican Shakespeare, under the general editorship of Alfred Harbage, William Shakespeare: The Complete Works (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1969).
[8] An earlier version of this paper was delivered to the combined Classical and English Faculties of the University of Heidelberg in 1974; I would like to thank my hosts, Profs. Horst Meller and Vicktor Poschl, and those I met then, especially Profs. Jan and Aleida Assmann, for their hospitality and conversation. A later version was presented to a Shakespeare Association Seminar on “Shakespeare and the Classical Tradition” in Cambridge (1984). A version much the same as this appeared in the Festschrift for George Anastaplo: Law and Philosophy: The Practice of Theory ed. William Braithwaite, John Murley, & Robert Stone (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University / Swallow Press, 1992), Vol. II., pp. 917-936.
[9] The distance between such stories and modern literary study is brought out by a friend of mine (Chuck Balestri). While studying at Cambridge, he travelled to Italy. There on a train, he was invited to share the large meal a large family had brought along. After the meal, his hosts asked, “What do you do?” When he answered, “I study literature,” immediately came the request, “So, tell us a good story.” And he could not.. In a similar straight I was once asked by my two daughters, “What do you do?” Seeing that they found my “I teach Shakespeare” lame, or maybe too curious, I began to retell the story of Hamlet, which when retold to such an audience turns out to pose the question, “Should you always obey your father?” And Lear becomes “Are older sisters always nasty?” and “Should we really never ask ‘Do you love me?’ ?”
[10] This essay owes a good deal to Harry Levin’s concise, precise, nice, “An Explication of the Player’s Speech” in his The Question of Hamlet (New York: Viking Press, 1961). This essayist owes the author even more, for I began my study of Shakespeare five and more decades ago with Prof. Levin.
[11] Yet of the difference between the style of the Player’s speech and the Murder of Gonzago, Clifford Leech observes, justly: “one need merely ask an actor which of the two he enjoys speaking.” See “The Hesitation of Pyrrhus” in Morality of Art ed. D. W. Kefferson (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1969), p. 43.
[12] For Lucrece as a brief, un-Vergilian epic see Part One of my Rome and Romans According to Shakespeare Second Edition (Lanham: Univ. Press of America, 1983), s. v.
[13] Cf. Kierkegaard in Fear and Trembling understands his decision not to marry Regina Olsen as analogous to Hamlet’s not to woo Ophelia. That Regina read Fear and Trembling aloud with the husband she then chose does not make her an Ophelia incapable of seeing the point of Aeneas’ tale to Dido. It does not take supernatural insight to see that the author of Fear and Trembling was unfit for marriage. Might not Ophelia conclude the same if Hamlet sent her Aeneas’ tale to Dido? She might, but not because her Dane was speculating about teleological suspensions of the ethical. He had met one.
[14] One of the greatest achievements of Shakespeare is, as I remarked above, his women; nothing before and little since approaches their combination of wit, intelligence, and vivacity. See my “Tragical, Comical, Historical,” in The Existential Coordinates of the Human Condition: Poetic—Epic—Tragic, Analecta Husserliana; Volume XVIII, ed. A-T. Tymieniecka (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1984), pp. 379-399 and its elaboration as Wonder Three in my Seven Wonders of Shakespeare (forthcoming).
[15] One can also compare Polonius’ “ten commandments” to the ten counsels of Lord Burleigh to his son, Robert, who succeeded him as Queen Elizabeth’s chief counselor. The mix of the high and the low, the worshipful and the prudent, is interesting. http://www.bartleby.com/209/166.html
[16] The only group of students who, in my long experience, truly admired Aeneas, even preferring him to Odysseus, were Mormons; they are brought up to remember their founders, their suffering, and their prevailing and flourishing, in short their founding of their faith and State; would that all Americans still recalled the American founding and its heroes so reverently. And for the importance the Aeneid had for our founders, read Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution.
[17] On the consequences of not believing in the Ghost, see C. S. Lewis, “Hamlet: the Prince or the Poem,” in his Selected Literary Essays ed. Walter Hooper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), Chapter Seven.
[18] The presence of a Laertes in the play, suggests a similar relation to Odysseus. Although the young, dread-distracted Hamlet is no Odysseus and frail Ophelia is no circumspect Penelope, Hamlet does reject the fascination of Hades, returns from a sea voyage, clears his home of his mother’s reechy suitor and all his rotten train, and finally departs on another adventure to reach a country from which he will never return. Yet these similarities do not make Hamlet the equal of Odysseus; there is a Laertes in the play, but no Odysseus, capable of setting things at home aright. According to Homer, Penelope is all a woman can be, and Odysseus a man. Portia and Prospero are the Shakespearean analogues. All are beyond emulation by being.
[19] Merchant of Venice, 5.1.58-62.
[20] Nietzsche, Zarathustra II, “Nachtlied.”
[21] Machiavelli, cited above as a reader of the classics, seems to have taken to heart only what pleased his flinty heart, e.g. the Cyropaedic side of Xenophon, not the Socratic. Even Tocqueville, cited above, seems to have read the classics intensively but intermittently, not thoroughly, suggesting that the philosopher’s virtue may not include the scholar’s.
[22] See my interpretation of Sonnet 94, “Shakespearean Wisdom?” in Shakespeare as Political Thinker ed. J. Alvis and T. West (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 1981), pp. 257-76. For how different the poem would be if it said “environment’s riches” rather than “nature’s riches” consider George Anastaplo’s fine observation about the difference between speaking of the environment or of nature, in “Pollution, Ancient and Modern,” in Human Being and Citizen (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1975), Chapter 8.
[23] Montaigne, Essais II, 13: “Of judging the death of others”; cf. Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, 2.2.32-37. See also the first chapters of Theodore Spencer’s Death and Elizabethan Tragedy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936).
[24] One of the best investigations of the thought of artists I know of is George Anastaplo’s Artist as Thinker (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1983); see especially his characterization of the imprudence of Hamlet, which might be taken as the starting point of this my festshriftive essay, in his first essay: “Of prudence and mortality in Shakespeare’s tragedies.”
[25] Much more could be said about the place of the hero in the lives of the young, for example about the “crush” the young have on someone of the same sex a little older; this was once so beneficial, but in the age of the “Teenager” (an innovation of the 1950s) the objects of such worship became celebrities, barbaric (Rock) singers, and now criminals (vicious drug dealers); for remedies, see my “The Young, the Good, and the West” in my book mss, The Age of The Teenager.
Friends Of The Republic 