The Penguin History of Britain: New Worlds, Lost Worlds:The Rule of the Tudors 1485-1630 (63 page)
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Authors: Susan Brigden
Tags: #Europe, #Great Britain, #Western, #History
Hamlet
was first performed, in London, in or just before 1600. Throughout the world of the play there is a dark questioning, some of the questions touching the world of the audience. Shakespeare’s art is transcendent, Prince Hamlet’s questions are for all time, but the play originated in a particular time and place, and its themes were quintessentially those of the Renaissance and Reformation. As Hamlet tells the players of the play within the play, the purpose of playing is to hold the mirror up to nature and show the ‘very age and body of the time his form and pressure’. When the play begins, King Hamlet, the godlike prince of Denmark, is two months dead. Claudius has taken both the throne and his brother’s widow, marrying her precipitately in scandalous
profanation of the sanctions of decent mourning, and of the prohibitions upon incest. Prince Hamlet is in mourning and a mood of deepest melancholy. He has bidden farewell to love and cannot tell why he has of late lost all his mirth. He laments familial betrayal, the flight of his mother to ‘incestuous sheets’, and knows that kin is ‘less than kind’ and cousinage brings ‘coz’nage’ (deception). His greatest griefs are silent, inexpressible – ‘But I have that within which passes show’ – and he seeks dissolution.
To the distraught son his father’s Ghost appears. Deep uncertainties attend the apparition of the Ghost – where it comes from, what it intends. Hamlet determines to speak to it.
Be thou a spirit of health or a goblin damn’d,
Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell.
The doubts about the Ghost’s provenance expose the lasting divisions between the faiths; uncertainties which, for some, remained unresolved. Since for the reformed faith there is no purgatory, no spirits can appear, and ghosts can only be the Devil’s conjurations. Later, Hamlet acknowledges his own susceptibility:
The spirit that I have seen
May be a devil, and the devil hath power
T’assume a pleasing shape, yea, and perhaps,
Out of my weakness and my melancholy…
Abuses me to damn me.
Reformed Catholicism divorced the essential doctrine of purgatory from ghostly appearances. It is an older world of traditional Catholicism which haunts Hamlet in the form of his father’s spirit.
Doom’d for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confin’d to fast in fires,
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purg’d away.
The Ghost tells a chilling story and gives a dreadful command:
If thou didst ever thy dear father love –…
Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder.
King Claudius was his brother’s assassin, and had dispatched him ‘Unhousel’d, disappointed, unanel’d’. That horror of dying without the
sacraments recurs throughout the play. The Ghost calls upon Hamlet’s filial duty and love, but supernatural forces impel him to obey. He is ‘prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell’.
Educated, like Faustus, at Wittenberg, Hamlet is trained to debate cases of conscience, to weigh the arguments for and against action. But he is preoccupied first by the universal mysteries of human existence, with the paradox in human nature which Renaissance minds especially meditated upon: man, endowed with ‘godlike reason’, is also, like a beast, ‘passion’s slave’; reason contends with appetite; sin with divinity. Hamlet is tormented by that human predicament: ‘What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven?’ He is obsessed with the pains of life – ‘the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to’, ‘the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’ – and with the pains of death and uncertainties of the afterlife. Resolution weakens with too much thinking – ‘conscience does make cowards of us all’ – and so does Hamlet’s, as he delays his revenge.
When Hamlet accepts the duty commanded by the Ghost, his private revenge has public consequences. Hamlet is a prince at war with his assassin uncle. In
Hamlet
, as in late Elizabethan minds, moral contagion spreads from the fatal sin of the monarch. ‘Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.’ The people grow ‘muddied, thick and unwholesome in their thoughts’. Claudius’s court at Elsinore is the kind of court that the Renaissance thought a tyrant creates and deserves. Guarded by mercenary Switzers, advised by counsellors and flatterers who speak to please rather than to tell the truth, Claudius is unconstrained in his abuse of power. The mood is of distrust, dissimulation and fear. Spies, ‘seeing unseen’, lurk behind the arras; poison is at hand. Friendship is false. Hamlet’s childhood friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, have been suborned, ‘sent for’ by the King to spy on Hamlet, who resolves to trust them ‘as I will adders fang’d’. When they die, victims of their own treachery, Hamlet’s conscience is untroubled, for ‘they did make love to this employment’. Reform may come from without. On the borders of Denmark Young Fortinbras of Norway marches at the head of a band of ‘lawless resolutes’. Or it may come from within. Hamlet is a prince, born not only to endure, like other men, but to lead, ‘to set it right’. Confronted by regicide, he is sworn to act. Here Hamlet’s hesitations bear upon the dangerous contemporary debates about the limits of obedience and the duties of resistance. The necessary action demands ruthlessness.
Not until the final act of the play are Hamlet’s doubts resolved and his conscience, which he has so painfully consulted, fully committed. ‘Does it not, think thee, stand me now upon,’ he asks, to remove the man ‘that hath kill’d my king and whor’d my mother’, and plotted against Hamlet’s life.
Is’t not perfect conscience
To quit him with this arm? And is’t not to be damn’d
To let this canker of our nature come
In further evil?
For much of the play Hamlet, though deeply Christian, has seen humanity subject to Fortune, the pagan goddess, but at the end it is rather of divine providence of which he speaks:
There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will –
He has learnt, as the Ghost had told him, that some things must be left to heaven. He understands now that he can neither avert nor foreknow what will happen:
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.
Hamlet kills the king, but is himself killed. Dying, Hamlet approves the succession of Fortinbras, the prince from the North: ‘he has my dying voice’. At the end of a century which has half shattered the old faith, which has opened new worlds of the mind and spirit, Shakespeare has Hamlet’s friend Horatio salute the dead prince in words which, haunted as they are by the traditional Latin burial service, convey how lasting were ancient certainties:
Good night, sweet prince,
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.
Bibliographical Essay
In his
Defence of Poesy
Philip Sidney wrote of the historian ‘loaden with old mouse-eaten records, authorizing himself (for the most part) upon other histories’. So it was, and is. This book rests only partly upon work on manuscripts, and is mainly dependent upon printed primary sources, transcribed, compiled and calendared by the heroic labours of editors, from John Foxe onwards.
Bibliography of British History: Tudor Period, 1485–1603
, ed. Conyers Read (Oxford, 2nd edn, 1959). See also G. R. Elton,
England, 1200–1640
in the series The Sources of English History (London, 1969). A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave,
A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland and Ireland… 1475–1640
(2nd edn, 3 vols., London, 1976–91) is indispensable for a study of the contemporary literature. Many of the poems cited are to be found in
The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse, 1509–1659
, selected by D. Norbrook and edited by H. R. Woudhuysen (London, 1993), a book for a desert island.
A New History of Ireland
, vol. 2,
Medieval Ireland, 1169–1534
, ed. A. Cosgrove (Oxford, 1987), and vol. 3,
Early Modern Ireland, 1534–1691
, ed. T. W. Moody, F. X. Martin and F. J. Byrne (Oxford, 1976) include full bibliographies. R. W. D. Edwards and M. O’Dowd,
Sources for Early Modern Irish History, 1534–1641
(Cambridge, 1985) is an important survey of printed sources, with chapters on archival collections and historiography.
Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, 1509–1547
, ed. J. S. Brewer, J. Gairdner and R. H. Brodie (21 vols., London, 1862–1932), and the
State Papers… King Henry VIII
(11 vols., London, 1832–52). Calendaring the state papers, the editors divided them in ways that do not reflect the thinking of Tudor councillors, who had to consider policy as a whole: ‘Domestic’, ‘Foreign’, ‘Scottish’, ‘Irish’, etc.
Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series of the reigns of Edward VI, 1547–1553; Mary I, 1553–1558
, ed. C. S. Knighton (2 vols., London, 1992, 1998);
Calendar of State Papers, Domestic: Elizabeth I
, ed. R. Lemon and Μ. A. E. Green (12 vols., London, 1856–72);
Calendar of State Papers, Foreign: Edward VI and Mary
, ed. W. B. Turnbull, (2 vols., London, 1861) and
Elizabeth
, ed. J. Stevenson
et al
(23 vols., London, 1863–1950);
Calendar of State Papers Relating to Scotland and Mary, Queen of Scots, 1547–1603
, ed. J. Bain,
et al
. (13 vols., Edinburgh and Glasgow, 1898–1969);
Calendar of State Papers, Venetian
, ed. R. Brown,
et al
. (9 vols., London, 1864–98);
Calendar of State Papers, Spanish
, ed. G. A. Bergenroth,
et al
. (13 vols. and 2 supplements, London, 1862–9);
The Acts of the Privy Council of England
, ed. J. R. Dasent (46 vols., London, 1890–1964). ‘State’ records were effectively private papers in this period, and remained in the councillors’ families. Outstanding among the volumes published by the Historical Manuscripts Commission are:
Calendar of the MSS of Lord De L’Isle and Dudley at Penshurst Place
(3 vols., London, 1925–36);
Calendar of the MSS of the Marquess of Salisbury at Hatfield House
(24 vols., London, 1883–1976); and
Calendar of the MSS of the Marquess of Bath at Longleat
(5 vols., London, 1904–80).
Calendar of State Papers Ireland, 1509–1603
, ed. H. C. Hamilton,
et al
. (11 vols., London, 1860–1912);
Calendar of Carew MSS… at Lambeth, 1515–1624
, ed. J. S. Brewer and W. Bullen (6 vols., London, 1867–73);
State Papers, Henry VIII
, vols. 2 and 3 (London, 1834).
Irish history from contemporary sources, 1509–1610
, ed. C. Maxwell (London, 1923) is useful. The official Irish records formerly held in the Public Record Office, Dublin, were mostly destroyed in the destruction of the Four Courts in 1922. Most of the printed sources are by the English, about the Irish. For a remarkable edition of a remarkable collection of Irish annals compiled in the early seventeenth century, see
The Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland by the Four Masters
, ed. J. O’Donovan (7 vols., 3rd edn, Dublin, 1998). See also
The Annals of Loch Cé, 1014–1590
, ed. W. M. Hennessy, (2 vols., London, 1871).
Tudor England
(Oxford, 1988). See also, on the whole period, G. R. Elton,
England under the Tudors
(2nd edn, London, 1974) and D. M. Loades
Politics and the Nation, 1450–1660
(London, 1974). Valuable general works on part of the period are: C. S. L. Davies,
Peace, Print and Protestantism, 1450–1558
(London, 1976); G. R. Elton,
Reform and Reformation, 1509–1558
(London, 1977); A. G. R. Smith,
The Emergence of a Nation State: The
Commonwealth of England, 1529–1660
(London, 1984); and P. Williams,
The Later Tudors: England, 1547–1603
(Oxford, 1995).
Ireland in the Age of the Tudors, 1447–1603: English Expansion and the End of Gaelic Rule
(Harlow, 1998) and C. Lennon,
Sixteenth-century Ireland: the Incomplete Conquest
(Dublin, 1994). Richard Bagwell,
Ireland under the Tudors
(3 vols., London, 1885–90) provides the most detailed political narrative. R. D. Edwards,
Ireland in the Age of the Tudors
(London, 1977) is a good general account. Nicholas Canny’s
From Reformation to Restoration: Ireland, 1534–1660
(Dublin, 1987) is influential.
What follows is a select bibliography of works which I have used, collected chapter by chapter, and by themes within the chapters. Articles are cited where the research is not presented elsewhere.
