To be or not to be..." "...so like the king that was and is the question of these wars
"Look where my abridgements come." - Hamlet
"We need more light to find your meaning
out." - Love's Labour's Lost
Come my friend, sit down a while,
and let me
Assail your eyes with that which I have seen
On the printed page, on the living stage,
In sparkling pixels, on the giant screen,
And on sleepless nights, and in restless
dreams.
Be All My Sins Remembered
by Ray Eston Smith Jr
e-mail address: thyorison@yahoo.com
in memory of my father, Lt. Col. R Eston Smith
This web page hosted by Jim Haldenwang
Acknowledgements:
Bookstores, the continuing frontier.
Libraries, I only wish they were privatized so I would not have to acknowledge so great a debt to government.
Mrs. Black, my 10th-grade English teacher. When I first set foot in her classroom, I was expecting the usual stale rules of grammar and pretentious babble about Literature. Instead, she taught me how to think.
George Polya, author of "How to Solve It". It works.
Michael Malone and his novel, "Handling Sin", about a father's lively legacy to his son. In the darkest part of my life, before I had seen the light in Hamlet, his book gave me a ray of hope.
Jim Haldenwang, or I do forget myself.
To Robin, with almost all the holy vows of heaven.
Chapter 1 Mine Uncle, More Like My Father
Chapter 2 Extorted Treasure in the Womb of Earth
Chapter 3 Usurp Your Sovereignty of Reason
Chapter 4 Old Men in the Book of his Brain
Chapter 5 Hamlet’s Transformation
Chapter 6 Or I Do Forget Myself
Chapter 7 The Voice of Denmark
Chapter 8 Tis a Vice to Know Him
Chapter 9 To Inherit the Earth
Chapter 10 He Himself is Subject to his Birth
Chapter 11 A Breeder of Sinners
Chapter 13 The Cloud, the Cannon, and in the Cup a Union
Chapter 14 A Camel in My Mind’s Eye
Chapter 16 O, How the Wheel Becomes It!
Chapter 17 Some Part of Poland
Chapter 19 There Is Something Fishy in the State of Denmark
Chapter 21 The Honey of His Music Vows
Chapter 22 Neither a Borrower Nor a Lender Be
Chapter 23 A King’s Remembrance
Chapter 24 The Time Is Out of Joint
Chapter 25 With Borrowed Sheen
Chapter 27 To Thine Ownself Be True
Chapter 28 Most Sovereign Reason
Chapter 32 Disclaiming from a Purposed Evil
Chapter 33 A Necessary Question of the Play
Chapter 34 The Majesty of Buried Denmark
Chapter 2 Shakespeare, Breakspear, and Broken Pole
Chapter 3 Dangerous Conjectures In Ill-breeding Minds.
Chapter 4 In Thy Orisons Be All My Sins Remembered
Chapter 5 You the Judges Bear a Wary Eye.
Chapter 6 He Hath Borne Me On His Back
Chapter 7 It Harrows Me with Fear and Wonder
Chapter 9 The Strange Baker’s Daughter
Chapter 10 Shakebag, Falstaff, and Woodcock.
Chapter 12 Ten Thousand Lesser Things
Chapter 14 How Henry’s Divorce Led to Global Warming
Part III - Whither Wilt Thou Lead Me?
Chapter 1 More Things Dreamt of in My Philosophy
Chapter 3 Your Father Lost a Father, and That Father Lost, Lost His
Chapter 4 Born To Set It Right
Chapter 5 Mud in My Mind’s Eye
Chapter 7 Dawn in the Land of the Rising Sun
Chapter 9 Where There's Will There’s a Ray
Chapter 10 An Offense to Reason Most Absurd
Chapter 13 A Springe to Catch Woodcocks
Chapter 14 And in the Cup a Dis-Union
Chapter 16 The Scope Of These Delated Articles
Chapter 18 He Hath Borne Me on His Back
Chapter 20 The Dog Will Have His Day
Chapter 21 The Ghost of Venice
Chapter 23 Whither Wilt Thou Lead Me?
Chapter 25 He Hath Borne Me on His Back
Chapter 26 The Battlefield of Ideas
Chapter 27 Old Dynamite In the Womb of Earth
Chapter 28 So Hallow'd and So Gracious Is the Time.
Chapter 29 A Voice on the Radio
Chapter 31 Must There No More Be Done?
Chapter 32 Reflections on Hamlet
Chapter 34 This Eternal Blazon Must Not Be
Chapter 35 Extorted Treasure .For Which They Say You Spirits Oft Walk In Death
Chapter 37 Like a Bridge Over Troubled Water
Chapter 38 The Beauty of the World
What more can be said about Hamlet? After you read this book you will ask, "How could so many critics have missed so much?". Past critics have failed to find the answers in Hamlet because they have failed to ask the right questions. They have been blinded to the mysteries in Hamlet by that ever-premature question, "What more can be said?" But there is a necessary question of the play yet to be considered: To be or not to be -- what? That is the question.
To live and to love living. That is the answer. In search of that answer, we constantly question the world. And the answer comes, more than from any other part of the world, from the minds of men (and womb-men). This book is an attempt to find part of the answer in one work conceived in the mind of one man -- in Hamlet by William Shakespeare.
I am about to
reveal to you a secret that has been hidden in plain sight for almost four
hundred years. Most of the clues are in the most performed, most written-about
play in the English language. Other clues, though less obtrusive, can be found
in any large library. Clues such as:
- The English Pope and his fertility well,
and Henry VIII and his first queen. - A divorce decreed at Blackfriars.
- An imaginary kick from an imaginary fetus when the Pole Star danced.
- The day the canon disseminated "seminary".
- A brass door-knocker shaped like a nose.
- The mole under William Allen's right eye.
- Will's birthday and the day before,
Henry's birthday and the day after.
Kit's birthday and the day after, and the day after that. - A 16th-century cannon called a "falcon" (but not Maltese).
- A bunghole.
- Domini canis will have his day.
- Two provincial roses.
- A Strange baker and his "daughter."
- Christopher Marlowe was no truant.
- The name of a forest or Shakespeare's kin,
an anonymous play and a hamlet that destroyed itself,
and two games of backgammon interrupted by murders. - Black Will and George Shakebag.
- "When a man's verses cannot be understood...it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a small room."
- A printer named Woodcock.
- Christopher Marlowe's father's hometown,
a messenger's mistress who did Yeoman's service,
and a dagger in Christopher Marlowe's eye. - The twice-told tale of a St Valentine's Day murder.
- You, me, us, I am Rick, know ye not that?
- A painfully inquisitive man named Topcliffe,
a place called Marshallsea,
and a chilling tale of two shoulder bones. - A loose cannon, eight crushed bodies, and a bride-to-be.
- A cannon salute to "Henry VIII",
Global warming,
back to Blackfriars.
In "Part 2 - Where Truth Is Hid"
I will use the foregoing clues to reveal what Hamlet tells us about
Shakespeare, but first, in "Part 1 - So Like
the King," I will investigate what Shakespeare told us about Hamlet. Finally, in Part III - Whither Wilt Thou
Lead Me?, in lieu of
academic credentials, I offer my Hamletonion autobiography.
“Who’s there?” The rest of the play answers that initial
question. Hamlet is the “mirror of
fashion” and most of the other characters reflect some aspect of
Hamlet. But who is Hamlet? A “soldier, scholar.” The son of his warrior father, but also one
who “could be bounded in a nut shell and count myself a king of infinite
space.” Hamlet the soldier rants
in golden couplets of warlike noise, while Hamlet the scholar unfolds himself
through inaction and silence. But to be
true to himself, Hamlet has to recognize that he is both soldier and
scholar. He is the princely soldier who
courageously returns to the fate awaiting him in his native soil (a
graveyard). But he is also the gentle
scholar who confesses the sins of his warlike nature.
The "necessary
question of the play" for Hamlet is "to be or not to be..."
"...so like the king that was and is the question of these wars."
That is Hamlet's dilemma. And that is Shakespeare's dilemma.
In the following
essays, motifs, metaphors, puns, and wordplay are the keys to the themes of Hamlet:
villain dwelling =
hamlet
whirling words:
arrant knave = nave of a church where Hamlet will "go pray"
................. = nave of wheel of fortune.
whale = wheel
"a fine revolution"
sinews grown
instant old = weak hams
clouds = Claudius
cannon to the clouds = canon gainst self-slaughter
mole of nature...breaking down the pales and forts of
reason
= old mole ("what if it usurp your sovereignty of reason?"}
Hamlet
Mine uncle, my father's brother, but no more like my father than I to Hercules.
But later we see that Hamlet is very much like Hercules:
Hamlet
My fate cries out,
And makes each petty artery in this body
As hardy as the Nemean lion's nerve.
The Nemean lion was a mythical beast with an almost invincible hide, which could only be cut by its own claws. After strangling the lion, Hercules fashioned a tunic for himself from its hide, which he cut with its own claws. This is similar to the way Hamlet killed Rosencrantz and Guildenstern with their own message, Laertes with his own sword, and Claudius with his own poisoned cup).
Hamlet
Let Hercules himself do what he may,
The cat will mew and dog will have his day.
Hercules went mad and murdered his own family, just as Hamlet went mad ("from himself" was "taken away" by the ghost) and murdered his could-have-been father-in-law, indirectly causing the death of his should-have-been wife. "The cat will mew" refers to the du-cat. Polonius was a rat killed by a du-cat ("a rat? Dead, for a ducat"). The dog was Ophelia, the "dead dog", the "good kissing carrion" which when touched by the sun/son (Hamlet) would "breed maggots" in her "bride-bed" (her grave).
Claudius
...................but this gallant [Lemord]
Had witchcraft in 't, he grew unto his seat,
And to such wondrous doing brought his horse,
As he had been incorps'd and demi-natur'd
With the brave beast
Laertes said of Lemord "I know him well." But, as Hamlet said, "to know a man well, were to know himself." So let's exercise a little poetic license and assign some of Lemord's metaphoric qualities to Laertes. "Lemord" is French for "the death". Demi-natured with a horse is a good description of a centaur. Hercules was killed indirectly by a centaur whom he had previously killed, just as Hamlet was killed by Laertes after he had killed Laertes.
Hamlet.
Do the boys carry it away?
Rosencrantz.
Ay, that they do, my lord; Hercules and his load too.
This refers to the competition between the new boy acting companies and the older companies such as Shakespeare's, which performed at the Globe Theater. The emblem of the Globe was a picture of Hercules holding up the Earth. (According to the legend, Hercules needed help from Atlas to perform one of his Tasks. So, to free himself for Hercules’ Task, Atlas shrugged off the Earth onto Hercules for a while.) This might relate Shakespeare to Hercules, but where is the connection with Hamlet? After Hamlet died, Fortinbras provided the connection by echoing "the boys [captains] carry it [Hamlet/Hercules] away," except this time Hamlet/Hercules/Shakespeare is carried to the stage.
Fortinbras
Let four captains
Bear Hamlet, like a soldier, to the stage
Thus, as Hamlet
was like Hercules, so was his uncle like his father. Hamlet's father was
valiant, proud, war-like, rash, revengeful, and ambitious. Hamlet's
uncle was cautious, intelligent, flexible, devious, manipulative, and ambitious.
Their common vice was ambition (for control of dirt). Both were
doomed to "fast in fires" because neither could give up his
earthly kingdom.
Claudius
... O! what form of prayer
Can serve my turn? 'Forgive me my foul murder?'
That cannot be; since I am still possess'd
Of those effects for which I did the murder,
My crown, mine own ambition, and my queen.
May one be pardon'd and retain the offence?
Claudius knows that he can save his soul if and only if he gives up his earthly kingdom, but he chooses damnation. Hamlet's father has exactly the same problem (but doesn't know it):
Ghost
Of life, of crown, of queen, at once dispatch'd;
Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin,
Unhousel'd, disappointed, unanel'd,
No reckoning made, but sent to my account
With all my imperfections on my head
Note that the ghost did not ask his son to pray for him ("pity me not"), which would be the traditional remedy for a soul trapped in purgatory. What imperfections were on his head? What sin had he committed since his last confession? The sin he was still committing even after death – he could not give up his "extorted treasure in the womb of earth."
Horatio
If there be any good thing to be done,
That may to thee do ease and grace to me,
Speak to me:
If thou art privy to thy country's fate,
Which happily foreknowing may avoid,
O! speak;
Or if thou hast uphoarded in thy life
Extorted treasure in the womb of earth,
For which, they say, you spirits oft walk in death, [Cock crows.
Speak of it: stay, and speak! Stop it, Marcellus.
"Good
thing to be done" - silence. Avoid "thy country's fate"
- silence. "Extorted treasure in the womb of earth" - a
cock crows and the ghost flees. Perhaps Horatio hit a sore spot.
How can the dead King Hamlet possibly reclaim his kingdom? His son ("born to set it right") can do it for him. That son even has the same name, Hamlet. True, the son has a different mind than his father, but that can be fixed.
HAMLET
So, oft it chances in particular men,
That for some vicious mole of nature in them,
As in their birth, wherein they are not guilty,
Since nature cannot choose his origin,
By the o'ergrowth of some complexion [mole]
Oft breaking down the pales and forts of reason
HAMLET (to his father’s Ghost)
Well said, old mole! Canst work i'the earth so fast?
A worthy pioneer!" [A pioneer was a military engineer, whose duties included burrowing under pales (walls) and forts to plant explosives to break them down.]
Hamlet
...you, my sinews, grow not instant old,
But bear me stiffly up!)
Hamlet's sinew's have grown "instant old" because he has just been possessed by the ghost of an old man - his father.
Horatio.
What art thou that usurp'st this time of night
Horatio
What if it...,
deprive your sovereignty of reason
Ophelia
...Now see that noble and most sovereign reason,
...Blasted....
Hamlet
... Remember thee!
Yea, from the table of my memory
I'll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,
That youth and observation copied there;
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,
Unmix'd with baser matter
Driven by his love for his father, Hamlet has allowed his father to usurp the sovereignty of his brain. He has erased himself from the book of his brain and written his father there. He continued to write in that same "table of [his] memory":
Hamlet
O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain!
My tables,--meet it is I set it down,
That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain
At least I'm
sure it may be so in
So, uncle, there you are
Claudius
Be as ourself in Denmark.
If you hate someone, you think about him a lot. An image of him lives in your brain. That image can acquire a kind of autonomy, making you behave as your enemy behaves. In short, by hating your enemy, you allow your enemy to possess you. Hamlet seems to be taking notes not just on how to recognize a smiling villain, but also on how to be one.
If you love someone, you may want to give that person all that you have. But if your dearest friend demands that you give up your very self, then that dearest friend becomes your dearest foe.
Hamlet
Would I had met my dearest foe in heaven [or Purgatory]
Ere I had ever seen that day, Horatio!
My father, methinks I see my father!
Hamlet loved his
father and was therefore possessed by his father. Hamlet hated his uncle and
was therefore possessed by his uncle. But father and uncle both had the same
values – they valued dirt over people - as in the graveyard.
Busy-body Polonius will join the other "tedious old men" occupying Hamlet's brain:
Polonius
I'll board him presently
Polonius sees Hamlet reading a book (the book and volume of his brain) and asks him what he is reading.
Hamlet.
Slanders, sir: for the satirical rogue says here that old men have grey beards, that their faces are wrinkled, their eyes purging thick amber and plum-tree gum, and that they have a plentiful lack of wit, together with most weak hams: all which, sir, though I most powerfully and potently believe, yet I hold it not honesty to have it thus set down; for you yourself, sir, should be old as I am, if, like a crab, you could go backward.
Polonius. [Aside]
Though this be madness, yet there is method in't...
"Old men have grey beards" = Hamlet's father
"His beard was grizzled, no?"
"eyes purging thick amber" = Polonius.
"a plentiful lack of wit" = Claudius
"With witchcraft of his wit, with traitorous gifts,
O wicked wit and gifts, that have the power
So to seduce!"
"Wit and gifts" refers to Bishop Whitgift, the man who instigated the crack-down on recusants which perhaps caused the decline in fortunes of Shakespeare's father. Also, Whitgiftsigned Shakespeare's marriage license (when he married an older woman) and later he signed the license for the publication of Shakespeare's "Venus and Adonis," a poem about a boy seduced by a goddess. "Plentiful lack" mocks Claudius first speech: "defeated joy."
"weak hams" = Hamlet, weakened but still present in his own brain.
"I hold
it not honesty to have it thus set down" Hamlet knows he was not being true to himself when he set down
these tedious old men in the book and volume of his brain.
Horatio
What if it...
...assume some other horrible form,
Which might deprive your sovereignty of reason
Hamlet.
Yea, from the table of my memory
I'll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,
That youth and observation copied there;
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,
Claudius
...Something have you heard
Of Hamlet's transformation; so call it,
Sith nor the exterior nor the inward man
Resembles that it was. What it should be,
More than his father's death, that thus hath put him
So much from the understanding of himself,
I cannot dream of: ...
Ophelia
...Now see that noble and most sovereign reason,
....Blasted...
The transformation of the message borne by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is symbolic of the transformation of Hamlet into his father’s image.
Horatio
How was this seal'd?
Hamlet.
Why, even in that was heaven ordinant.
I had my father's signet in my purse,
Which was the model of that Danish seal;
Folded the writ up in form of the other,
Subscribed it, gave't the impression, placed it safely,
The
changeling never known...
Hamlet envies the
First Player, who, metaphorically, has broken the voice of
Hamlet.
...Could force his soul so to his own conceit
That from her working all his visage wann'd,
Tears in his eyes, distraction in's aspect,
A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
With forms to his conceit?
Hamlet
I am myself indifferent honest; but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me: I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious
"But yet...proud, revengeful, ambitious" - this is a description of his father, not of Hamlet when he is himself.
Hamlet
...though I am not splenitive and rash,
Yet have I something in me dangerous,
Which let thy wiseness fear
The "something in me dangerous" is his father, who is in his brain In the end, Hamlet exorcised the old men from his brain, reclaimed his own values, and saved his soul:
Hamlet
Was't Hamlet wrong'd Laertes? Never Hamlet:
If Hamlet from himself be ta'en away,
And when he's not himself does wrong Laertes,
Then Hamlet does it not, Hamlet denies it.
Who does it, then? His madness: if't be so,
Hamlet is of the faction that is wrong'd;
His madness is
poor Hamlet's enemy.
We’ve seen how Hamlet "wiped away every trivial fond record that youth and observation copied" "in the table of [his] memory" - in other words, how he forgot himself. But what was Hamlet like before he forgot himself?
Hamlet
Horatio, or I do forget myself!
And what was Horatio like?
Hamlet
Horatio, thou art as just a man
As e'r my conversation cop'd withal.
................................
...thee, that no revenue hast
But thy good spirits to feed and clothe thee.
.................................
Since my soul was mistress of her choice
And could of men distinguish, her election
Hath sealed thee for herself......
...For thou hast
Been as one, in suffering all, that suffers
Nothing. A man that fortune's buffets and
Rewards hast ta'en with equal thanks.
And blessed are those
Whose blood and judgment are so well co-mingled
That they are not a pipe for fortune's finger
To sound what stop she please. Give me that man
That is not passion's slave and I will wear him
In my heart's core, ay, in my heart of heart,
As I do thee.
Hamlet was unaware at first that he had from himself been taken away, but though he knew not why, he knew that he had lost something:
Hamlet
...I have of late—but wherefore I know not--lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? man delights not me: no, nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.
Hamlet
O God, I could
be bounded in a nut shell and count myself a king of infinite space
Laertes
he...may give his saying deed...no further
Than the main voice of
Hamlet
Pray God, your voice, like a piece of uncurrent gold, be not cracked within the ring.
Gertrude
This is mere madness,
And thus a while the fit will work on him,
Anon, as patient as the female dove,
When that her golden couplets are disclosed,
His silence will sit drooping.
Hamlet
I had my father’s signet in my purse,
Which was the model of that Danish seal,
Folded the writ up in form of the other,
Subscribed it, gave't the impression, placed it safely,
The changeling never known.
Horatio
His purse is empty already: all ‘s golden words are spent.
Hamlet
…the rest is silence.
Hamlet.
Dost know this water-fly?
Horatio.
No, my good lord.
Hamlet
Thy state is the more gracious; for 'tis a vice to know him. He hath much land, and fertile: let a beast be lord of beasts, and his crib shall stand at the king's mess: 'tis a chough; but, as I say, spacious in the possession of dirt.
Hamlet.
...to know a man well, were to know himself.
Horatio does not know Osric, but Hamlet knows him all too well. Horatio represents Hamlet's true unambitious self. Osric represents the man that Hamlet was born to be, the man Hamlet has struggled not to be.
Gertrude
This is mere madness,
And thus a while the fit will work on him,
Anon, as patient as the female dove,
When that her golden couplets are disclosed,
His silence will sit drooping.
Hamlet
I had my father’s signet in my purse,
Which was the model of that Danish seal,
Folded the writ up in form of the other,
Subscribed it, gave't the impression, placed it safely,
The changeling never known.
Horatio (referring to Osric)
His purse is
empty already: all ‘s golden words are spent.
Hamlet had his
father’s signet, the golden couplets of the voice of
Just as Hamlet Sr exhorted Hamlet to ‘remember," so Hamlet exhorts Osric to ‘remember."
Ghost.
...Hamlet, remember me.
Hamlet.
I beseech you, remember--
Hamlet tells Osric
to put his hat on his head because "'tis very cold; the wind is
northerly." But Osric is reluctant to put his hat on his head. This is
echoed by Hamlet's reluctance to let Claudius "put a great wager on
[his] head." But the wind is northerly ("I am but
mad north-north-west." The ghost appeared "when yond same star
that's westward from the pole had made his course to illume that part of heaven
where now it burns."), so Hamlet accepts the wager on his head as
Osric runs off with the shell on his head.
Hamlet was born to
carry on a line of kings. Those kings were bound to Danish dirt by birth and
fate. The "liegemen to the Dane" were "friends to this
ground" Claudius exhorted Hamlet to "be as ourself in
Hamlet's father had once fought a duel to the death with old Fortinbras to acquire a piece of ground "the inheritance of" which fell to Hamlet.
Hamlet
How long hast thou been a grave-maker?
First Clown
Of all the days i' the year, I came to't that day that our last king Hamlet overcame Fortinbras.
Hamlet.
How long is that since?
First Clown
Cannot you tell that? every fool can tell that: it was the very day that young Hamlet was born
Was this then Hamlet's "inheritance" - a graveyard?
Hamlet (standing over a grave)
The very
conveyances of his lands will hardly lie in this box; and must the inheritor
himself have no more, ha?
Laertes
... his will is not his own,
For he himself is subject to his birth
Hamlet
That for some vicious mole of nature in them,
As in their birth, wherein they are not guilty,
Since nature cannot choose his origin
Hamlet
But, to my mind, though I am native here
and to the manner born, it is a custom
More honor'd in the breach than the observance.
Hamlet
O cursed spite that I was born to set it right
Hamlet
it were better my
mother had not borne me
Fortune has doomed
Hamlet, from birth, to lose his true self for a kingdom.
Claudius
...your father lost a father,
That father lost, lost his, and the survivor bound
In filial obligation ...
Bernardo
I think it be no other but e'en so:
Well may it sort that this portentous figure
Comes armed through our watch; so like the king
That was and is the question of these wars.
Hamlet
virtue cannot so innoculate our old stock but we shall relish of it
Hamlet is from a long line of warlike kings. It’s a custom he would like to breach, but it is difficult to overcome his old stock. If he marries Ophelia and has a son, that son will likely be another death-dealing warrior-king.
Hamlet
...why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?
Hamlet
For if the sun breed maggots in a dead dog, being a good kissing carrion,--Have you a daughter?
Polonius
I have, my lord.
Hamlet
Let her not walk i' the sun: conception is ablessing: but not as your daughter may conceive.
Here sun relates to Hamlet’s father who was like Hyperion, the sun-god. If Hamlet breeds true to his old stock, he and his son will both be like Hamlet’s dead father. If Ophelia conceives a child with Hamlet, she will be breeding sinners -- maggots to eat the dead of future wars.
Polonius
Though this be madness, yet there is method in 't. Will you walk out of the air, my lord?
Hamlet
Into my grave.
Polonius
Indeed, that is out o' the air.
How pregnant sometimes his replies are!
Horatio
Or if thou hast uphoarded in thy life
Extorted treasure in the womb of earth,
For which, they say, you spirits oft walk in death, [Cock crows.
Ophelia
... They say the owl was a baker's daughter.
Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be.
There was a legend about a baker who told his daughter to give a loaf of bread to a beggar. She only gave him half a loaf (as Ophelia gave Hamlet part of herself, reserving the greater half for her father). The beggar turned out to be Jesus Christ, who then turned the baker's daughter into an owl. In Shakespeare's time, the owl was a portent of death.
Ophelia
Then up he rose, and donn'd his clo'es,
And dupp'd the chamber door,
Let in the maid, that out a maid
Never departed more.
On the surface,
this song has a bawdy meaning. A man opens the door of his room and lets in a
virgin. When she leaves the room, she is no longer a virgin. But it also has a
deeper, morbid meaning. "Dupped" means "open
upward", as with a cellar door, or a coffin lid. So the man let a maid
enter his coffin and she never left it, with or without her virginity. This
foreshadows the last act, where, rather than Ophelia entering Hamlet's grave, he
enters hers. If she hadn't committed suicide before he returned (to
Ophelia
Quoth she, 'Before you tumbled me,
You promised me to wed.'.
He answers,
'So would I 'a done, by yonder sun,
And thou hadst not come to my bed.'.
Gertrude (5,2,237)
I hop'd thou shouldst have been my Hamlet's wife.
I thought thy bride-bed to have deck'd, sweet maid,
And not have
strew'd thy grave.
Hamlet
His virtues else, be they as pure as grace,
As infinite as man may undergo,
Shall in the general censure take corruption
From that particular fault. The dram of eale
Doth all the substance of a daub
To his own scandal.
"Dram
of eale" has been correctly interpreted as "dram of
evil". That is the surface meaning. But the deeper meaning is "drama
filial (dram-o f-eale)". Within the context of the play, the drama
filial is the "Mousetrap",
the play that Hamlet hoped would catch the conscience of his father’s killer.
"Hamlet" is itself a filial drama, because it is
a drama about the conflict between filial duty and being true to oneself. (And
in Part 2, I will show how "Hamlet" is Shakespeare’s drama
filial about his father and his secret godfather.)
Claudius
How is it that the clouds still hang on you?
Hamlet
Not so, my lord; I am too much i' the sun.
The obvious pun is sun / son. Hamlet is too good a son to be cheerful less than two months after his father’s death. But there is also a metaphor on clouds and sun. Later in the scene, Hamlet compares his father to Hyperion, the sun-god:
Hamlet
So excellent a king; that was, to this,
Hyperion to a satyr
Thus sun is a metaphor for Hamlet’s father, and now clouds is an obvious pun on Claudius. Hamlet is too loyal to his father (too much i' the sun) to shift his loyalty to Claudius (to be under the clouds.) This should prepare the audience for a more subtle pun on clouds / Claudius:
Claudius
No jocund health that
But the great cannon to the clouds shall tell,
And the king's rouse the heavens all bruit again,
Re-speaking earthly thunder. Come away.
[Exeunt all but Hamlet]
Hamlet
O, that this too too solid flesh would melt
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd
His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!
Hamlet is not contemplating his own self-slaughter, rather he is wishing that Claudius would kill himself. Claudius (cloud) has just ordered his cannon to fire at the clouds. Hamlet wishes Claudius’ solid flesh would melt and turn into a dew (a cloud). Then, by aiming his cannon at the clouds, Claudius would be slaughtering himself. But, alas, the Everlasting has fixed His canon (religous law) 'gainst self-slaughter and Claudius has fixed (aimed) his cannon 'gainst self-slaughter – for now.
Later we learn more about the Danish custom of firing cannon when the king drinks:
[A flourish of trumpets, and ordnance shot off, within]
Horatio
What does this mean, my lord?
Hamlet
The king doth wake to-night and takes his rouse,
Keeps wassail, and the swaggering up-spring reels;
And, as he drains his draughts of Rhenish down,
The kettle-drum and trumpet thus bray out
The triumph of his pledge.
Horatio
Is it a custom?
Hamlet
Ay, marry, is't:
But to my mind, though I am native here
And to the manner born, it is a custom
More honour'd in the breach than the observance.
The custom
under discussion is not heavy drinking. The custom is the firing
of cannon (ordnance) when the king drinks a pledge.
It symbolizes the unity of the king with his kingdom, emphasized with the weapons
he uses to obtain and keep that kingdom. It is the King’s pledges, not his
drinking, that gets
In the end, Hamlet
gets his wish. Claudius does metaphorically slaughter himself with his own
cannon. To the accompaniment of cannon fire, Claudius drinks from a cup
symbolizing his union with
Claudius
Let all the battlements their ordnance fire:
The king shall drink to Hamlet's better breath;
And in the cup an union shall he throw,
Richer than that which four successive kings
In
And let the kettle to the trumpet speak,
The trumpet to the cannoneer without,
The cannons to the heavens, the heavens to earth,
'Now the king drinks to Hamlet.
Claudius
Stay; give me drink. Hamlet, this pearl is thine;
Here's to thy health.
[Trumpets sound, and cannon shot off within]
Give him the cup.
Hamlet
Here, thou incestuous, murderous, damned Dane,
Drink off this potion. Is thy union here?
Follow my mother.
[Claudius dies]
[A
dead march. Exeunt, bearing off
the dead bodies; after which a peal of ordnance is shot off]
Hamlet
Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in shape of a camel?
Polonius
By the mass, and 'tis like a camel, indeed.
A camel? A cloud? Claudius? Where?
Hamlet
Would I had met my dearest foe in heaven
Or ever I had seen that day, Horatio!
My father, methinks I see my father.
If your father is your foe, I can see that he would be your dearest foe, Hamlet, but he's not quite in heaven -- it sounds more like he’s on his way to heaven, going through purgatory:
Ghost
I am thy 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.........
Let me get this straight, Hamlet::
Your father is like your Uncle Claudius.
Claudius (cloud-ius) is like a cloud that’s like a camel.
The camel-cloud is floating in heaven.
You wish to see your dearest foe in heaven.
Then you see your father.
Is he in heaven? Or in purgatory?
Hamlet, where is your father?
Horatio
Oh where, my lord!
Hamlet
In my mind's eye, Horatio.
In your mind's eye? Or in purgatory? Or both?
Your father or your uncle? Or both?
Your dearest foe or a camel? Or both?
A camel in your mind's eye?
Hamlet
Why, what should be the fear?
I do not set my life at a pin's fee
So now you're a pin, Hamlet?
And there's a camel in your eye?
MATHEW, 19, 24. HOLY BIBLE in the King James version.
Jesus
And again I say unto you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven
Some people misconstrue this biblical passage to mean that wealth is evil. Actually, it means that some rich men can't get into heaven because they value their worldly possessions more than their souls; they value Situation more than Self. Being rich is not a sin; even killing a brother to gain a kingdom is not an unforgiveable sin. But the man who values an earthly kingdom more than his own soul is doomed to fast in fires. Such a man is Claudius:
Claudius
What if this cursed hand
Were thicker than itself with brother's blood,
Is there not rain enough in the sweet heavens
To wash it white as snow? Whereto serves mercy
But to confront the visage of offense?
And what's in prayer but this two-fold force,
To be forestalled ere we come to fall,
Or pardon'd, being down? Then, I'll look up;
My fault is past. But, O! what form of prayer
Can serve my turn? 'Forgive me my foul murder'?
That can not be since I am still possess'd
Of those effects for which I did the murder,
My crown, mine own ambition, and my queen.
May one be pardon'd and retain the offense?
..........................................
Try what repentance can: what can it not?
Yet what can it, when one can not repent?
And such a man is Hamlet's father:
Horatio (to the Ghost)
Or if thou hast uphoarded in thy life
Extorted treasure in the womb of earth,
For which, they say, you spirits oft walk in death...
Hamlet's father is in purgatory by choice, because he refuses to leave his "extorted treasure."
These two foolish old men (and Polonius too) are trying to go camel-like through Hamlet’s mind’s eye. Forget the camels -- what’s happening to the poor needle?
Horatio (speaking of the ghost of Hamlet’s father)
A mote it is to trouble the mind’s eye.
Hamlet (after killing Polonius, whom he mistook for Claudius)
I do repent; but heaven hath pleas’d it so,
To punish me with this and this with me;
That I must be their scourge and minister.
Pity the poor camel-crammed needle; that scourge and minister; purgatory personified.
By following a tenuous thread between three innocent words, camel, pin, and eye, my imagination has traced Hamlet’s father, his Uncle Claudius, and the false steward Polonius going camel-like through the purgatory in Hamlet’s mind’s eye. At this point, perhaps the reader agrees with Horatio:
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, as thus:
Before the age of Joe Camel, in the Elizabethan age, "camel" had just one vivid connotation -- the biblical metaphor of the camel going through the eye of the needle. The camel appears just four times in all of Shakespeare’s works; twice in Troilus and Cressida, once in Richard II, and once in Hamlet.
TROILUS AND CRESSIDA
Panduros
Achilles! a drayman, a porter, a very camel.
You cur!.
Thersites
Mars his idiot! Do, rudeness, do, camel, do, do.
Thersites
I say this
.......
Has not so much wit -
.......
As will stop the eye of Helen’s needle...
RICHARD II
Richard
It is as hard to come as for a camel
To thread the postern of a small needle’s eye.
So the mere presence of the word "camel" is enough to send us in search of the needle (or pin) and its eye (Hamlet’s mind’s eye). But must our search lead us to Purgatory?
Horatio
There’s no offence, my lord.
Hamlet
Yes, by Saint Patrick, but there is, Horatio,
And much offence, too...
A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare, edited by Horace Howard Furness, Hamlet, volume 1, New York, American Scholar Publications, INC, 1965, first published in 1877, page 111:
136. Saint Patrick] TSCHISHWITZ: If Sh. had wished to be historically correct, he would have made a Dane swear by St Ansgarius. But since the subject concerned an unexpiated crime, he naturally thought of St Patrick, who kept a Purgatory of his own. See The Honest Whore [pt 2, I, I, p 330, Dodsley ed 1825, where the text reads, ‘St Patrick, you know keeps Purgatory,’ and not as the learned German quotes, ‘keeps his Purgatory.’ Ed]
There is a very personal clue that Hamlet/Shakespeare’s mind was Purgatory. In Stratford Guild Chapel there was a mural of Judgment Day. Although the mural was daubed over with whitewash about the time Shakespeare was born (in belated obedience to a government edict against religious icons and images), I believe that young Will could see the mural through the whitewash (or perhaps the whitewash was temporarily removed for special occasions, such as secret midnight Catholic Confirmations). The mural showed a group of sinners bound together with hoops of steel (a chain) and being led toward the mouth of hell. The mouth of hell (or purgatory) was set in what looked like a giant porcupine head.
Gertrude (to Hamlet)
Forth at your eyes your spirits wildly peep,
And, as the sleeping soldiers in the alarm,
Your bedded hair, like life in excrements,
Starts up and stand an end.
Ghost (to Hamlet)
I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,
Thy knotted and combined locks to part,
And each particular hair to stand on end,
Like quills upon the fretful porpentine.
Hamlet
Why, e'en so: and now my Lady Worm's; chapless, and knocked about the mazzard with a sexton's spade: here's fine revolution, an we had the trick to see't. Did these bones cost no more the breeding, but to play at loggats with 'em? mine ache to think on't.
Within its immediate context this is a rather shallow pun about the turning (revolution) of the fine dirt in a grave, which is also the final revolution of the wheel of fortune. But it becomes more exciting when we take it as a challenge to unearth the subtle motif of wheel puns spun throughout the play.
Hamlet
There's ne'er a villain dwelling in all Denmark
But he's an arrant knave
Horatio
There needs no ghost, my lord, come from the grave
To tell us this.
Hamlet
Why, right, you are i th'right,
And so without more circumstance at all
I hold it fit that we shake hands and part,
You as your business and desires shall point you-
For every man has business and desire,
Such as it is - and for mine own poor part,
Look you, I'll go pray.
Horatio
These are but wild and whirling words, my lord.
As I will show, these are indeed "whirling words." Shakespeare often wrote of madness, but he only used the word "whirling" one other time, and then it didn’t refer to madness: "To calm this tempest whirling in the court" (Titus Andronicus,IV,2). He used "whirling" here to alert us to the "fine revolution" of Hamlet’s words.
In addition to the usual meaning of "bad guy," "villain" means a person of low birth, as in "I am no villain; I am the youngest son of Sir Rowland de Boys." (As You Like It, I,1) A villain would not live in a palace – he would typically dwell in a village or hamlet. Thus a "villain dwelling" is a Hamlet. (Ever wonder why Shakespeare never punned on Hamlet/hamlet? Here’s the missing pun.) So Hamlet and his father (Hamlet Sr) were knaves – or naves. One definition of "nave" is the nave of a church. This definition is implicitly used when Hamlet says "and for mine own poor part, Look you, I'll go pray" "Nave" can also be the nave (hub) of a wheel, as in the speech that Hamlet requested from the First Player:
1st Player
Out, out, thou strumpet fortune! All you gods,
In general synod, take away her power;
Brake all the spokes and fellies from her wheel,
And bowl the round nave down the hill of heaven,
As low as to the fiends.
King’s are bound by fortune (fate, birth) to determine the fates of their subjects:
Rosencrantz
The cease of majesty
Dies not alone, but like a gulf doth draw
What's near it with it. It is a massy wheel,
Fixed on the summit of the highest mount,
To whose huge spokes ten thousand lesser things
Are mortic'd and adjoin'd; which when it falls,
Each small annexment, petty consequence,
Attends the boist'rous ruin. Never alone
Did the king sigh, but with a general groan.
Bernardo
It would be spoke to.
{The ghosts wants more spokes on his nave as he rolls down to hell]
Putting all this together, we see Hamlet cryptically likening himself (as a prince and potential king) to the nave of a wheel. His friends are his spokes, which are perpendicular ("i' the right") to the nave. Before his wheel of fortune (his fate) turns anymore ("without more circumstance"), he wants to "break all the spokes…from her wheel" so that they won’t be carried "down the hill of heaven" with him. (In the original staging, it is likely that Hamlet spun around as he shook hands with Horatio and flung him outward.) He wants to sigh alone (in contrast to Laertes, who brought along a mob when he confronted the king). However, Hamlet is not only the nave of a wheel; he is also the nave of a church. He cannot escape death, but he will avoid damnation.
Hamlet
Do you see yonder cloud [Claudius] that's almost in shape of a camel?
Polonius
By the mass, and 'tis like a camel, indeed.
Hamlet
Methinks it is like a weasel.
Polonius
It is backed like a weasel [wassai].
Hamlet
Or like a whale?
Polonius
Very like a whale [like a massy wheel].
Hamlet
Then I will come to my mother by and by. They fool me to the top of my bent. I will come by and by. [Like a wheel buried to the top of its curve in bullshit. But what goes around comes around – by and by].
Claudius/cloud is like a camel trying to go through the eye of a needle. He can’t get into Heaven because he won’t leave his earthly kingdom.
"Weasel" might be a homonym for "wassail."
Hamlet
The king doth wake to-night and takes his rouse,
Keeps wassail,
and the swaggering up-spring reels;
"Whale" might be a homonym for "wheel."
Rosencrantz
… majesty
… is a massy wheel,
Hamlet
You do remember all the circumstance?
Laertes
... for on his choice depends
The safety and health of this whole state;
And therefore must his choice be circumscribed
Unto the voice
and yielding of that body
Polonius, with his meddling, put himself where Hamlet expected to find a king (behind the arras) and thus metaphorically imitated the nave (center) of a wheel.
Polonius
...I went round to work,
Polonius
If circumstances lead me, I will find
Where truth is hid, though it were hid indeed
Within the centre.
Hamlet
Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool, farewell!
I took thee for thy better: take thy fortune
1st Player (II,ii,486)
Out, out, thou strumpet fortune! All you gods,
In general synod, take away her power;
Brake all the spokes and fellies from her wheel,
And bowl the round nave down the hill of heaven,
As low as to the fiends.
Polonius
This is too long.
Hamlet
It shall to the barber's, with your beard.
Ophelia
They bore him barefaced on the bier;
Ophelia (IV,v,166)
You must sing 'A-down, adown', an you call him a-down-a.
O, how the
wheel becomes it!
Shakespeare weaves
a web of metaphors connecting Polonius with
Polonius
Behind the arras I'll convey myself,
Fortinbras
Go, captain, from me greet the Danish king;
Tell him that, by his licence, Fortinbras
Craves the conveyance of a promised march
Over his kingdom.
Hamlet
Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot
Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause,
Which is not tomb enough and continent
To hide the slain? O, from this time forth,
My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!
Hamlet
The very conveyances of his lands will hardly lie in this box; and must the inheritor himself have no more, ha?
Horatio
Not a jot more, my lord.
Hamlet
Is not parchment made of sheepskins?
Horatio
Ay, my lord, and of calf-skins too.
Polonius
I did enact Julius Caesar: I was killed i' the Capitol; Brutus killed me.
Hamlet
It was a brute part of him to kill so capital a calf there.
Hamlet
How now! a rat? Dead, for a ducat, dead!
Captain
Truly to speak, and with no addition,
We go to gain a little patch of ground
That hath in it no profit but the name.
To pay five ducats, five, I would not farm it;
Nor will it yield to Norway or the Pole
A ranker rate, should it be sold in fee.
Polonius
Be you and I behind an arras then;
Mark the encounter: if he love her not
And be not from his reason fall'n thereon,
Let me be no assistant for a state,
But keep a
farm and carters.
Polonius announced
the ambassadors from
Polonius
Give first admittance to the ambassadors;
My news shall be the fruit to that great feast. [the end or dessert]
After the ambassadors delivered their news:
Polonius
This business is well ended.
After Hamlet’s attempt to attack Claudius caused Polonius’ untimely end:
Ophelia
...when my father died: they say he made a good end,--
Claudius
Now, Hamlet, where's Polonius?
Hamlet
At supper.
Claudius
At supper! where?
Hamlet
Not where he eats, but where he is eaten: a certain convocation of politic worms are e'en at him. Your worm is your only emperor for diet: we fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots: your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service, two dishes, but to one table: that's the end.
There was another foreshadowing of Polonius as dessert:
Hamlet
....after your death you were better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live.
Polonius
My lord, I will use them according to their desert.
Hamlet
God's bodykins, man, much better: use every man after his desert, and who should 'scape whipping?
Hamlet
Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool, farewell!
I took thee for
thy better: take thyfortune
Polonius
Your bait of falsehood takes this carp of truth:
Polonius
Do you know me, my lord?
Hamlet
Excellent well; you are a fishmonger.
Hamlet
A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.
Hamlet
Wormwood, wormwood.
Polonius was aware that his meddling had ruined the lives of Hamlet and Ophelia. In the speech where he admitted this, he foreshadowed Ophelia's death:
Polonius (2,1,107)
What, have you given him any hard words of late?
Ophelia.
No, my good lord, but, as you did command,
I did repel his fetters and denied
His access to me.
Polonius
That hath made him mad.
I am sorry that with better heed and judgment
I had not quoted him: I fear'd he did but trifle,
And meant to wreck thee; but, beshrew my jealousy
By heaven, it is as proper to our age
To cast beyond ourselves in our opinions
As it is common for the younger sort
To lack discretion.
Gertrude
There is a willow grows aslant a brook,
That shows his hoar leaves in theglassy stream;
....
There, on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds
Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke;
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook.
Polonius, jealous and envious of Hamlet, cast beyond himself in his opinion (like a branch over a stream). When Polonius died (broke), Ophelia, who had once reached for the coronet of a princess, lacking discretion, climbed out on the envious sliver of Polonius' commands and lost her self even before she drowned.. Polonius was metaphorically like the willow that was reflected in the brook. So Ophelia metaphorically died by falling into a mirror image of her father.
Just as Polonius ruined Ophelia by "casting beyond" himself with his opinions, so Hamlet's father almost ruined Hamlet with the "secrets of [his] prison house", an "eternal blazon" that "must not be to ears of flesh and blood", "thoughts beyond the reaches" of Hamlet's soul
Ophelia was untrue to herself; she gave her brother the key to her memory and let her father tell her what to think:
LAERTES
Farewell, Ophelia; and remember well
What I have said to you.
OPHELIA
'Tis in my memory lock'd,
And you yourself shall keep the key of it.
Ophelia (1,3,104)
I do not know, my lord, what I should think.
Polonius
Marry, I'll teach you...
After her father died, Ophelia was like a puppet with the strings cut:
Hamlet (3,2,241)
I could interpret between you and your love
if I could see the
puppets dallying.
Ophelia is surely Shakespeake’s portrait of the ideal woman, one who suck'd the honey of his music vows. But did Hamlet really love Ophelia? Why did he reject her? When did he court her, and why then?
Claudius (Act I, Scene 2)
You are the most immediate to our throne;
And with no less nobility of love
Than that which dearest father bears his son,
Do I impart toward you. For your intent
In going back
to school in
It is most retrograde to our desire:
Polonius (Act I, Scene 3)
Marry, well bethought:
'Tis told me, he hath very oft of late
Given private time to you; and you yourself
Have of your audience been most free and bounteous:
....
So Hamlet began
courting Ophelia after Claudius had usurped the throne but before he had
designated Hamlet as his heir and denied permission to Hamlet to return to
Ophelia (Act I, Scene 3)
He hath, my lord, of late made many tenders
Of his affection to me.
Ophelia
My lord, he hath importuned me with love
In honourable fashion.
After Hamlet writes his father and uncle in the book and volume of his brain, he can no longer make Ophelia a scholar’s bride; he can only make her a breeder of sinners.
Hamlet
...I did love you once.
Ophelia
Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so.
Hamlet
You should not have believed me; for virtue cannot so inoculate our old stock but we shall relish of it: I loved you not.
Ophelia
I was the more deceived.
Hamlet
Get thee to a nunnery: why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners? I am myself indifferent honest; but yet I could accuse me of such things that it
were better my
mother had not borne me
Although Laertes is satisfied in nature with Hamlet’s repentance, he continues the fatal duel until by some elder masters [Claudius] he has a voice and precedence of peace. Thus he is fighthing not for himself but for a cause borrowed from Claudius. His father, Polonius, had warned him:
Polonius 1,3,75
Neither a borrower nor a lender be,
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
Laertes 4,5,138
And for my means, I’ll husband them so well,
They shall go far with little.
When Laertes allied himself with Claudius he dulled the edge of his husbandry. Then, in the subsequent duel with Hamlet, Laertes first wounded Hamlet with his poison-tipped sword, then accidently exchanged swords with Hamlet and was fatally poisoned with his own sword. Thus he was a borrower and lender of swords, and was killed by a lent sword while fighting for a borrowed cause.
Hamlet also had the husbandry of his own soul blunted by his father’s borrowed purpose:
Hamlet
Do you not come your tardy son to chide,
That, lapsed in time and passion, lets go by
The important acting of your dread command? O, say!
Ghost
Do not forget: this visitation
Is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose.
Ghost
Adieu, adieu! Hamlet, remember me.
Hamlet
........... Remember thee!
Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat
In this distracted globe. Remember thee!
Yea, from the table of my memory
I'll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,
That youth and observation copied there;
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,
Unmix'd with baser matter: yes, by heaven!
Hamlet
So, uncle, there you are. Now to my word;
It is 'Adieu, adieu! remember me.'
I have sworn 't.
Claudius
Though yet of Hamlet our dear brother's death
The memory be green, and that it us befitted
.......................
That we with wisest sorrow think on him,
Together with remembrance of ourselves.
Hamlet
The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remember'd.
Hamlet
You do remember all the circumstance?
Ophelia
There's rosemary, that's for remembrance; pray,
love, remember: and there is pansies. that's for thoughts.
Laertes
A document in madness, thoughts and remembrance fitted.
Hamlet
...Heaven and earth!
Must I remember?...
Player King
I do believe you think what now you speak;
But what we do determine oft we break.
Purpose is but the slave to memory,
Of violent birth, but poor validity;
Which now, like fruit unripe, sticks on the tree;
But fall, unshaken, when they mellow be.
Most necessary 'tis that we forget
To pay ourselves what to ourselves is debt:
What to ourselves in passion we propose,
The passion ending, doth the purpose lose.
Gertrude (to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern)
Your visitation shall receive such thanks
As fits a king's remembrance.
First Ambassador
To tell him his commandment is fulfill'd,
That Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead:
Where should we have our thanks?
Fortinbras
For me, with sorrow I embrace my fortune:
I have some
rights of memory in this kingdom,
Polonius 1,3,78
This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Conversely, if day follows night, somebody is being untrue to himself. Just after he has been false to himself by erasing himself from the book of his own brain, as the day is following the night, Hamlet says:
Hamlet 1,5,189
The time is out of joint.
Marcellus
What might be toward, that this sweaty haste
Doth make the night joint-labourer with the day:
Who is't that can inform me?
Horatio
That can I;
At least, the whisper goes so. Our last king,
Whose image even but now appear'd to us,
……
Bernardo
I think it be no other but e'en so:
Well may it sort that this portentous figure
Comes armed through our watch; so like the king
That was and
is the question of these wars.
Hamlet's father is compared to the sun; Hamlet is compared to the moon.
Hamlet
So excellent a
king, that was to this, Hyperion to a satyr
In the above line,
Hamlet says that, compared to Claudius, his father is like Hyperion, the Greek
Titan god of the sun.
In the following lines, Hamlet is compared to the moon, now crescent, soon waxing into another phase.
Laertes (warning Ophelia that Hamlet's love won't last)
For nature crescent does not grow alone
In thews and bulk, but as this temple waxes
The inward service of the mind and soul
Grows wide withal. Perhaps he love you now,
...but you must fear,
His greatness weigh'd, his will is not his own,
For he himself is subject to his birth.
He may not, as unvalu'd persons do,
Carve for himself, for on his choice depends
The safety and health of the whole state;
And therefore must his choice be circumscrib'd
Unto the voice and yielding of that body
Whereof he is the head. ...........
The chariest maid is prodigal enough
If she unmask her beauty to the moon.
Laertes was partly
right. Hamlet did change as he "waxed", reflecting more
of his father's light, losing himself and becoming a mere reflection of his
father. But Laertes thought Hamlet would then reject Ophelia because she wasn't
good enough to be a king's wife. Hamlet did reject Ophelia, but he rejected her
with the unkingly part of himself, the dark side of the moon, the part that
remained true to himself. He rejected her not because
she was not good enough, but rather because she was too good to be a king's
wife, a "breeder of sinners."
The following metaphor does not refer directly to Hamlet (although, since Hamlet is thirty years old, "thirty dozen moons" is an indirect allusion to Hamlet). However, "borrowed sheen" clearly shows that, when Shakespeare compared Hamlet to the moon, he was well aware that the moon shines by the reflected light of the sun. Hamlet is a very reflective guy. He is the mirror of fashion, shining with his father’s borrowed sheen, and holding a mirror up to his mother.)
Player King
And thirty dozen moons with borrowed sheen
That borrowed sheen was a problem. “Neither a borrower nor a lender be.” To be or not to be a borrower of his father’s sheen.
In the following lines, Polonius attempts to explain the cause of Hamlet's madness. Polonius himself does not understand the true cause, but, unbeknowst to Polonius, there is method in his own foolishness. Shakespeare uses the words of Polonius to tell the audience the true source of Hamlet's lunacy.
Polonius
.... I have found
The very cause of Hamlet's lunacy.
Polonius
... to define true madness
Polonius
To expostulate
What majesty
should be, what duty is...
"To define
true madness" invites us to examine the definition of "lunacy".
"Lunacy" is madness caused by the moon (luna), or in Hamlet's case, by being like the moon, a
reflection of his sun-father. Hamlet is losing his "sovereignty of
reason" because he thinks that his filial duty is to be majestic,
a king like his father. But, in this play, Shakespeare shows us that no one can
be a king and still be true to himself.
Hamlet tells the
players to hold the mirror up to nature. He sets up a glass
where his mother may see the inmost part of herself. Hamlet, "nature
crescent" is metaphorically the moon. His father, like "Hyperion,"
is metaphorically the sun. Hamlet the moon with "borrowed sheen"
reflects his father the sun. Hamlet by the image of his cause saw
the portraiture of Laertes’..To know a man
well, were to know himself, but Hamlet confesses to the vice of
knowing Osric, who is not quite a reflection but rather a shadow of Laertes,
"his semblable is his mirror; and who else would trace him, his umbrage
nothing more." Hamlet’s bad dreams are ambition, which is merely
the shadow of a dream which itself is but a shadow, and monarchs are beggar’s
shadows. Claudius tells Hamlet to "be as ourself in
A unifying theme of Hamlet is "To thine ownself be true" (1,3,78). Of all the main characters, Hamlet is the only one who finally is true to himself. Consequently, of all the main characters, Hamlet is the only one who avoids self-slaughter.
Even Horatio is
taught by
Fortinbras Sr. and Fortinbras Jr. value land more than they value themselves. Fortinbras Sr "did forfeit his life" fighting for land (1,1,91). Fortinbras Jr goes to war, "exposing what is mortal and unsure to all that fortune, death, and danger dare, even for an eggshell" (4,4,51), "a little patch of ground that hath no profit in it but the name" (4,4,18), that is "not tomb enough and continent to hide the slain" (4,4,65).
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, willing spokes to the king's nave (2,2,30;3,3,15), are deliverers of their own death warrant (5,2,44-59).
Polonius is a busybody, minding everybody's business but his own. Thus he was killed by a sword-thrust meant for somebody else. (3,4,33)
Laertes subverts his own life so totally and unthinkingly to filial duty that he is willing to go to hell to revenge his father's death (4,5,131). Although he is satisfied in nature with Hamlet’s repentance, he continues the fatal duel until by some elder masters [Claudius] he has a voice and precedence of peace. Thus he is fighthing not for himself but for a cause borrowed from Claudius.
When Laertes
allied himself with Claudius he dulled the edge of his husbandry.
Then, in the subsequent duel with Hamlet, Laertes first wounded Hamlet with his
poison-tipped sword, then accidently exchanged swords with Hamlet and was
fatally poisoned with his own sword. Thus he was a borrower and lender of
swords, and was killed by a lent sword while fighting for a borrowed cause. [We
shall see later that Laertes symbolized Christopher Marlowe and that "go
far with little" is a paraphrase of Marlowe’s "infinite riches
in a little room." (The Jew of
Gertrude cannot separate her too two solid flesh (this "solidity and compound mass",3,4,49) from the doomed flesh of Claudius. Her soul is grappled to his "with hoops of steel" (1,3,63) - wedding bands. So she drinks poison, extending her union into hell (5,2,331).
Ophelia lets her brother keep the key to her memory. She "does not understand herself so well as it behooves" Polonius's daughter, and so she lets her father tell her what to think (1,3,105). When she falls into the water, she makes no attempt to save herself because her true self has already been lost. She dies by falling into a mirror image of her father in the "glassy stream"
Both Claudius and Hamlet Sr are unable to separate themselves from their land. So they slaughter their own souls, dooming themselves to be dragged down into hell by their possessions. Hamlet Sr is "doom'd...to walk the night" (1,5,10) to "walk in death" for "extorted treasure in the womb of earth" (1,1,140). Claudius could save his soul by sincerely repenting, but he cannot repent because he won't give up his kingdom and he cannot "be pardon'd and retain the offense" (3,3,56), he finally drinks a poison "tempered by himself" (5,2,332).
In the end, Hamlet
recovers his true self in time to save his soul, although not his life.
Hamlet
Why, then, 'tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so
Hamlet seems to be advocating extreme moral relativism. "Good" is whatever you think it is. What’s "good" for one person is "bad" for another. But this statement could be interpreted another way --- that thought is the basis for morality. You can’t distinguish between good and bad without thinking about it. I think Shakespeare intended both interpretations. Hamlet is trying to base his morality on reason, but he is aware of the danger that reason without faith will lead him into a morass of moral relativism, where "good" and "bad" lose all meaning. Did Hamlet have faith in anything?
Horatio.
What if it..., deprive your sovereignty of reason
Ophelia
... that noble and most sovereign reason... blasted with ecstasy
Hamlet
... by my fay, I cannot reason.
"Fay" is short for "faith." It is not Hamlet’s own faith that prevents him from reasoning but the faith of his father, who has usurped his sovereigty of reason. His father’s faith is based on the "strong arm and terms compulsatory." It tells him to avoid "the pale cast of thought" and the " craven scuple of thinking." When he is possesed by his father’s spirit, his thoughts are "bloody or nothing worth." Hamlet’s own faith, before it was usurped by his father’s, was a faith in the power of reason in a reasonable world occupied by people who are fundamentally "noble in reason."
Sure, he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and god-like reason
To fust in us unused.
This goodly
frame, the earth...this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave
o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, ...What a
piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form
and moving how express and admirable! in action how
like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the
paragon of animals!
Hamlet
...some necessary question of the play be then to be considered...
Hamlet
...Heaven and earth!
Must I
remember?
Player King
...Most necessary 'tis that we forget
Rosencrantz
...you have the
voice of the king himself for your succession in
Hamlet
Ay, but sir, 'While the grass grows,'--the proverb is something musty.
Ghost
But this eternal blazon must not be
Polonius
'Lord Hamlet is a prince, out of thy star;
This must not be:'......
Hamlet
...Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand...for in the...whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance
Laertes
... for on his choice depends
The safety and health of this whole state;
And therefore must his choice be circumscribed
Unto the voice and yielding of that body
Gertrude
Do not for ever with thy vailed lids
Seek for thy noble father in the dust:
Thou know'st 'tis common; all that lives must die,
Claudius
But, you must know, your father lost a father;
That father lost, lost his, and the survivor bound
In filial obligation...
It shows a will most incorrect to heaven,
A heart unfortified, a mind impatient,
An understanding simple and unschool'd:
For what we know must be and is as common
...
You are the most immediate to our throne;
Hamlet
Not a whit, we defy augury: there's a 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 has aught of what he leaves, what is't to leave betimes?
Polonius
By heaven, it is as proper to our age
To cast beyond ourselves in our opinions
As it is common for the younger sort
To lack discretion. Come, go we to the king:
This must be known; which, being kept close, might
Hamlet
I do repent: but heaven hath pleased it so,
To punish me with this and this with me,
That I must be their scourge and minister.
I will bestow him, and will answer well
The death I gave him. So, again, good night.
I must be cruel, only to be kind:
Thus bad begins and worse remains behind.
One word more, good lady.
Ophelia
I hope all will be well. We must be patient: but I cannot choose but weep, to think they should lay him i' the cold ground. My brother shall know of it: and so I thank you for your good counsel. Come, my coach! Good night, ladies; good night, sweet ladies; good night, good night.
Polonius
This above all: to thine ownself be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not
then be false to any man
Hamlet
To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing
end them?
If Hamlet took arms against the king (a sea of troubles), he would very likely lose his own life in the attempt. Such an action might be considered suicide, which would cost Hamlet his soul. However if he waits for the king to initiate the attack (if the water come to him), then he is not guilty of his own death.
First Clown
Give me leave. Here lies the water; good: here stands the man; good; if the man go to this water, and drown himself, it is, will he, nill he, he goes,--mark you that; but if the water come to him and drown him, he drowns not himself: argal, he that is not guilty of his own death shortens not his own life.
Second Clown
But is this law?
First Clown
Ay, marry, is't; crowner's quest law.
Hamlet
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this
regard their currents turn awry,
Simple suicide is
hardly an enterprise of great pith and moment. However, Hamlet’s
conscience has (temporarily) turned aside his oath to enact revenge against the
king (an enterprise of great pith and moment), because that would
be a suicidal act.
Hamlet is the mirror of fashion; he is possessed by demons; and he is purgatory personified. By reflecting his father’s values, Hamlet becomes possessed by his father’s spirit, and thereby joins his father in the purgatory of his own mind. From purgatory, a soul is in danger of "rolling down the hill of heaven even as low as to the fiends". But there is also hope that his sins will be "burnt and purged away." If you’re caught in purgatory and searching for "the steep and thorny way to heaven," the answer is simple: "confess thyself."
Gravedigger
I'll put another question to thee: if thou answerest me not to the purpose, confess thyself--
Rosencrantz (speaking of Hamlet)
He does confess he feels himself distracted;
Hamlet (after killing Polonius, whom he mistook for Claudius)
I do repent; but heaven hath pleas’d it so,
To punish me with this and this with me;
That I must be their scourge and minister.
Hamlet
The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remember'd.
Hamlet
...I am myself indifferent honest; but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me: I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves, all.
"But yet I
could accuse me" –here Hamlet
is really confessing on behalf of his father.
The need to confess and purge oneself of one’s sins is common to many of the characters – all of them reflected by Hamlet, the "mirror of fashion."
Hamlet (to Gertrude)
You go not till I set you up a glass
Where you may see the inmost part of you.
....
...Confess yourself to heaven;
Repent what's past; avoid what is to come;
Gertrude
O Hamlet, speak no more:
Thou turn'st mine eyes into my very soul;
And there I see such black and grained spots
As will not leave their tinct.
Claudius
And what's in prayer but this two-fold force,
To be forestalled ere we come to fall,
Or pardon'd being down? Then I'll look up;
My fault is past. But, O, what form of prayer
Can serve my turn?....
Try what repentance can: what can it not?
Yet what can it when one can not repent?
Hamlet
for me to put him [Claudius] to his purgation would perhaps plunge him into farmore choler.
Ghost
I am thy father's spirit,
Doom'd for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confined to fast in fires,
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purged away.
.................................................
Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin,
Unhousel'd, disappointed, unanel'd,
No reckoning made, but sent to my account
With all my imperfections on my head:
Laertes (to Claudius)
... I must confess, that...
My thoughts and wishes....
...bow them to
your gracious leave and pardon.
Laertes’ sin was that he bowed his wishes to Claudius:
Laertes
I am satisfied in nature,
...but...
I..will no reconcilement,
Till by some elder masters, of known honour,
I have a voice and precedent of peace,
Laertes [aside]
And yet 'tis almost 'gainst my conscience.
Laertes "confessed" out of context shortly before his actual confession:
Laertes
A touch, a touch, I do confess.
Hamlet
...I am justly kill'd with mine own treachery.
Laertes
...Exchange forgiveness with me, noble Hamlet:
Mine and my father's death come not upon thee,
Nor thine on me.
Hamlet
Heaven make
thee free of it! I follow thee.
Hamlet’s father is inscribed in the book of his memory. His purpose is a slave to his father’s memory. His father’s purpose (and his uncle’s) is for Hamlet to inherit the graveyard.
Hamlet
... And let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them; for there be of them that will themselves laugh, to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh too; though, in the mean time, some necessary question of the play be then to be considered...
Gravedigger [also called "First Clown"}
I'll put another question to thee: if thou answerest me not to thepurpose, confess thyself--
Osric
...it would come to immediate trial, if your lordship would vouchsafe the answer.
Hamlet
How if I answer 'no'?
Osric
I mean, my lord, the opposition of your person in trial.
Hamlet
I am constant to my purpose; they follow the king's pleasure:
Hamlet
Do you not come your tardy son to chide,
That, lapsed in time and passion, lets go by
The important acting of your dread command? O, say!
Ghost
Do not forget: this visitation
Is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose.
Player King
Purpose is but the slave to memory,
Of violent birth, but poor validity;
Which now, like fruit unripe, sticks on the tree;
But fall, unshaken, when they mellow be.
Most necessary 'tis that we forget
To pay ourselves what to ourselves is debt:
What to ourselves in passion we propose,
The passion ending, doth the purpose lose.
Claudius [speaking of Fortinbras plan to recapture the land (graveyard) that his father lost to Hamlet’s father]
...Of this his nephew's purpose
Hamlet
Good sir, whose powers are these?
Captain
They are of
Hamlet
How purposed, sir, I pray you?
Captain
Against some part of
Hamlet
Give me your pardon, sir......
... What I have done,
... I here proclaim was madness.
Was't Hamlet wrong'd Laertes? Never Hamlet:
If Hamlet from himself be ta'en away,
And when he's not himself does wrong Laertes,
Then Hamlet does it not, Hamlet denies it.
Who does it, then? His madness: if't be so,
Hamlet is of the faction that is wrong'd;
His madness is poor Hamlet's enemy.
Sir, in this audience,
Let my disclaiming from a purposed evil
Free me so far
in your most generous thoughts...
.Who's there?... What, is Horatio there?...
Looks it not like the king? Is it not like the king? .
so like the king that was and is the question of these
wars .How is it that the clouds still hang on you?. Methinks I see my father.
Where, my lord? In my mind’s eye Must I remember?...
What does this mean, my lord? What may this mean... why is this? wherefore? what should we do?...
Why, what should be the fear?... What if it... deprive your sovereignty of reason and draw you into
madness? Whither wilt thou lead me? Thou comest in such a questionable shape...
canst work i' the earth so fast? What is't but to be nothing else but mad? Will
you walk out of the air, my lord? Into my grave... And
can you, by no drift of circumstance, get from him why he puts on this
confusion, grating so harshly all his days of quiet with turbulent and
dangerous lunacy?... some necessary question of the play be then to be considered.
To be or not to be. That is the question. so like the king that was and is the question of these wars
Who, I?... what is your cause of distemper? Sir, I lack advancement. How can
that be, when you have the voice of the king himself for your succession in
Bernardo opens the play with a question:"who’s there?" That question reverberates through the rest of the play, as Hamlet, the mirror of fashion, reflects and is reflected by the other characters.
Hamlet
...some necessary question of the play be then to be considered...
Hamlet
To be or not to be. That is the question.
To be or not to be -- what? That is the question.
After Horatio had explained that the impending war was caused by a duel over land fought by Hamlet's father, whose ghost they had just seen, Bernardo replied:
Bernardo 3,1,56
I think it be no other but e'en so:
Well may it sort that this portentous figure
Comes armed through our watch; so like the king
That was and is the question of these wars.
To be or not to
be so like the king that was and is the question of these wars. that is Hamlet’s
dilemma.
Was "Hamlet" just a ghost story? Hamlet was possessed by his father’s ghost. Hamlet’s mind was purgatory for the ghost. By the end of the play he had managed to exorcise that ghost by confessing the sins of the ghost. Who could let belief take hold of him when presented with such a silly story? But ghost and purgatory and exorcism were not the point of the story, they were merely trappings above the deeper themes which denoted Hamlet truly.
Hamlet, by study
and thought and love of life, had formed his own
character. But there was another side of his character, formed by his heritage,
by his upbringing, by the "terms of honor" defined by his
elders, and by the particular circumstances of his life. Hamlet was trying to
be true to himself, but which self? He finally realized that
What
follows is not quite history, but not quite fiction. I think of it as a
reconstruction of history. My
speculations are marked by a different type-face, the rest is accepted history, or at
least well-known legend.
William
Shakespeare was a man of words. His world was shaped by the words of others
until he mastered the words to create his own world, the Globe Theater. The
first word to circumscribe Shakespeare’s fate was his first name. Why William? He was born on St. George’s Day. Not
only was St. George the patron saint of
Before
John Shakespeare’s son was two days old, before the baptism, a modest man named
William Allen rode into town. Although John had never before met William Allen,
never even heard of him, he named his son after William Allen and named William
Allen godfather to his son. Why? One day this William Allen would be a
very important man. He would found a college in the
To John
Shakespeare, William Allen was important because he prophesied that John’s son
would become the most important man in the history of
Allen’s
prophecy wasn’t all empty words -- his story had roots in history. Some four centuries before the birth of
William Shakespeare, a man named Nicholas Breakspear was parish priest in the
hamlet of Binsey. Breakspear was not related to Shakespeare, but the mere similarity of
names would link the two men across the centuries more profoundly than any ties
of blood. From all
over
A few
years after Breakspear died, a few miles from Binsey,
About
three centuries after Breakspear, we find Henry VIII and his wife Catherine at
the Binsey well. Catherine had given him a daughter (Mary), but Henry thought
he needed a male heir. Since the Norman conquest,
By
annulling his marriage to Catherine, Henry made their daughter (the future
Queen Mary, a.k.a. Bloody Mary) a retroactive bastard. Mary’s godmother was
Margaret Pole, a cousin of Henry’s. Margaret’s son, Reginald Pole, was a
respected theologian. Because he refused to recognize the legitimacy of Henry’s
annulment (and the consequent illegitimacy of Mary), Reginald Pole had to flee
into exile on the Continent. But his mother Margaret remained in
While on the Continent, Pole was one of the chief organizers of the Council of Trent, which for many years studied ways to reform the Catholic Church and strengthen it against the encroachments of Protestantism. During the Council of Trent, Pole proposed the establishment of colleges to train priests. He coined a new word for these colleges, "seminaries." Pole was so widely respected that he was almost elected Pope -- he fell just one vote short of the required two-thirds majority.
Henry’s second wife, Anne Boleyn, gave him another daughter, Elizabeth. Then Anne gave birth to a still-born son and Henry chopped off her head. Eventually Henry found a wife who gave him a son, Edward. Edward was raised as a Protestant, so after Henry died, King Edward VI continued the break with Catholicism begun by his father. But Edward was sickly and only survived his father by a few years.
Then, at last, Mary, the Catholic retroactive bastard, inherited the throne. Mary legalized Catholicism and even burned some heretics (hence Bloody Mary), but she was unable to undo what her father had done. Henry had confiscated the extensive lands of the Catholic monasteries and sold them. The present owners of the former monastery lands were a powerful force for preserving Protestantism.
Mary needed help to restore English Catholicism to its former dominance. She needed a strong Catholic husband. Her first choice was Reginald Pole, her godmother’s son, the man whose mother had been beheaded by her father, the man who had almost become the second English Pope. But Pole declined, saying he was not up to the job because he was too old.
So
Mary settled for Philip of Spain (the same Philip who, thirty years after Mary’s
death, would send his Armada against
Pole
became Archbishop of Canterbury and supervised the burning of Protestant
martyrs, while calling himself the "Pole Star" because he was
the guiding star about whom the English people revolved. After about five years
of Catholic rule, Mary died and Protestant Elizabeth became Queen. His heart
broken, Pole died on the same day that Mary died. Despite Breakspear and broken
Pole,
In
July, 1563, several years after Pole died and about nine months before
William Shakespeare was born, the Council of Trent approved the De Reformatione
decree which included a canon for the institution of the seminaries
which Pole had proposed. This inspired William Allen to plant his own
seminaries.
Despite
his great expectations for the son, Allen had a more immediate interest in the
father.John Shakespeare was
chamberlain (treasurer) for the
In
1568, Allen founded his seminary at
In
1570 the Pope issued a bull excommunicating Queen Elizabeth and releasing
English Catholics from their allegiance to her. A
Simon
Hunt was Shakespeare’s teacher at the Stratford Gild school
from 1571 to 1575. In 1575, Simon Hunt attended William Allen’s Douai seminary.
He was ordained as a Jesuit priest in 1578 and became the first head of St
Peter’s College for English Catholics in
John
Cottom was Shakespeare’s teacher from 1579 to 1581. In June, 1580, Cottom’s
brother Thomas, a Jesuit missionary, was arrested in Shottery, a village near
Campion’s "Gallows Speech"
But we knew we were not lords of our own lives, and therefore for want of answer would not be guilty of our death.
Laertes
He is not free to carve as he pleases,
For he himself is subject to his own birth.
Gravedigger
he that is not guilty of his own death, shortens not his own life.
For want of answer? What was the question?
Hamlet
To be or not to be. That is the question.
To be or not to be -- what? That is the question.
After Horatio had explained that the impending war was caused by a duel over land fought by Hamlet's father, whose ghost they had just seen, Bernardo replied:
Bernardo
I think it be no other but e'en so.
Well may it sort that this portentous figure
Comes armed through our watch so like the king
That was and is the question of these wars.
To be or not to be so like the king that was and is the question of these wars. that is Shakespeare’s dilemma. Should he be true to himself or should he let filial duty lead him in his father's footsteps? "Whither wilt thou lead me?" Should he write plays to satisfy his artistic soul or plays to jeopardize his life?. Should he entertain his audiences or lead them into a bloody religious war?
Campion’s "Gallows Speech"
...to minister the Sacraments, to instruct the simple, to reform sinners, to confute errors -- in brief, to cry alarm spiritual against foul vice and proud ignorance, wherewith many my countrymen are abused.
This inspired Shakespeare to write the following lines, in which Hamlet compares an actor’s "dream of passion" with his own "real" passion, and in so doing expresses Shakespeare’s own feelings about Hamlet’s fictional passion compared to his own real passion:
Hamlet
...What would he do,
Had he the motive and the cue for passion
That I have? He would drown the stage with tears,
And cleave the general ear with horrid speech,
[The Elizabethan penalty for hearing sedition was to have one's ears lopped off.]
Make mad the guilty and appall the free,
Confound the ignorant and maze indeed
The very faculties of eyes and ears.
Campion said his mission was to instruct the simple, to reform sinners, to confute errors...to cry alarm...against...proud ignorance. Shakespeare feared that in carrying forward Campion’s mission with his plays, he had twisted it to appall the free, confound the ignorant.
Campion at his trial:
In condemning us, you condemn all your own ancestors, Bishops and Kings...For what have we taught, however you may qualify it with the odious name of treason, that they did not uniformly teach?...posterity’s judgment is not liable to corruption as that of those who are now going to sentence us to death.
This
speech inspired Shakespeare to take an oath, sworn to his father and his
godfather, to write a series of history plays, which was originally planned to
culminate in an incendiary version of Henry VIII.
I
explained in Part 1 of this book how Hamlet’s mind was a kind of purgatory for
his father and for his uncle. But what does Purgatory have to do with William
Shakespeare’s "motive and cue for passion?" Everything. For
centuries, rich men had bequeathed land to the Catholic Church in exchange for
shortened stays in Purgatory. Martin Luther believed that the selling of passes
out of Purgatory was the primary corrupter of the Church. Furthermore, the land
which the Church had thus acquired was a tempting prize for any king who
decided to break away from the Catholic Church. When Henry VIII separated the
Church of England from the Roman Catholic Church, he seized the lands of
English monasteries, then sold those lands. Thereafter
the English Reformation was irreversible.
In 1565 (the year after Shakespeare’s birth) William Allen wrote "A Defense and Declaration of the Catholike Churches Doctrine touching Purgatory, and Prayers of the Soules Departed"
Before the Reformation, the primary social, economic, and religious institution in many English hamlets was the local guild. These town guilds (not to be confused with the craft guilds in large cities) had been formed for the primary purpose of praying for the souls of deceased members, in order to shorten their time in Purgatory. With the Reformation, the Anglican Church declared the idea of Purgatory heretical, prolonged praying for the dead was outlawed, and the town guilds were ostensibly secularized. However, the guilds continued to be the main social and economic institutions in many towns. Furthermore, many guild members continued, openly or secretly, to be Catholics.
Shakespeare’s
father began his rise through
Some of the
hoops of steel
hill of heaven
Throughout Shakespeare’s childhood, there was a priest residing secretly at nearby Harrowden Hall. His preaching raised the spector of a religious war to restore the Old Religion, harrowing young Shakespeare with fear and wonder.
[Enter Ghost]
Marcellus
Peace, break thee off; look, where it comes again!
Bernardo
In the same figure, like the king that's dead.
Marcellus
Thou art a scholar; speak to it, Horatio.
Bernardo
Looks it not like the king? mark it, Horatio.
Horatio
Most like: it harrows me with fear and wonder.
Hamlet
The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons
Be
all my sins remember'd.
In
1577, JohnWhitgift became Bishop of Worcester and immediately cracked down on
recusants in his jurisdiction, which included
Ghost
Ay, that incestuous, that adulterate beast,
With witchcraft of his wit, with traitorous gifts, --
Oh wicked wit and gifts,. that have the power
So to seduce!
By
giving her favors to young Will, Anne diverted his destiny from Pope to Papa.
By giving her enthusiastic support to the theater, Queen Elizabeth helped to
seduce Shakespeare away from his oath to subvert his plays to inflammatory
propaganda.
About
seventy years after Shakespeare died, Richard Davies, chaplain of
William
Shakespeare was born at
There
is a legend that Shakespeare left
Hamlet
Why, let the stricken deer go weep,
The hart ungalled play;
For some must watch; while some must sleep:
So runs the world away.
Would not this, sir, and a forest of feathers, if the rest of my fortunes turn Turk with me, with two provincial roses on my razed shoes, get me a fellowship in a cry of players, sir?
Horatio
Half a share.
Hamlet
A whole one, I.
For thou dost know, o Damen dear,
This realm dismantled was
Of Jove himself, and now reigns here
A very, very - pajock.
Horatio
You might have rhymed
[Shakespeare
might have gone to Allen’s seminary in
Hamlet
O good Horatio! I'll take the ghost's word for a thousand pound.
Didst perceive?
Horatio
Very well, my lord.
Hamlet
Upon the talk of the poisoning?
Horatio
I did very well note him.
Hamlet
Ah, ha! Come, some music! Come, the recorders!
For if the king likes not the comedy,
Why then, he likes it not, perdy.
Come, some music!
Guildenstern
Good my lord, vouchsafe me a word with you.
Hamlet
Sir, a whole history.
Guildenstern
The king, sir -
At the
time he wrote Hamlet, Shakespeare still owed one more history play -- Henry
VIII.
After
he left
Ophelia
... They say the owl was a baker's daughter.
Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be.
Hamlet
.... The dram of eale
[drama Ophelia or drama filia (daughter) or drama filial]
Doth all the substance of a daub
To his own scandal.
Shake the bags of the monks.
Shall I strike at it with my partisan? Do, if it will not stand"
Young men will do it if they come to it.
By cock they are to blame.
Playing with words can be dangerous There can be stiff penalties and punishments for penile puns. Sometimes the woodcock is caught in his own springe.
Mermaid
Tavern,
Will
What do you call the play?
Kit
(Will chokes on his beer and bolts out of the tavern.)
These
two young men, Will Shakespeare and Kit Marlowe, had much in common.
Shakespeare was born on St George’s Day, 1564, Marlowe a couple months earlier
in St George’s parish.. Shakespeare was the son of a glover, Marlowe of a cobbler. Shakespeare was reputed to be
the second best playwright in
Shakespeare knew that Marlowe was a spy -- now he feared that Marlowe knew that he was one too. He thought Arden of Feversham was a trap for him.
Hamlet
...I have heard,
That guilty creatures sitting at a play
Have by the very cunning of the scene
Been struck so to the soul that presently
They have proclaimed their malefactions.
Marlowe
had been employed by the English government to spy on William Allen’s seminary
at
But
Shakespeare’s fears were groundless -- he had misunderstood Marlowe’s pun. The
actual murder of
But, at
that time, Shakespeare didn’t know that Marlowe’s father was raised in Ospringe
or that Woodcock would publish Marlowe’s Hero and Leander. He thought
Marlowe was on to him and was about to expose him. In a panic, he reported his
fears to his underground Catholic contacts. A couple months later Marlowe was
murdered by double agents, ostensibly (if that’s the right word for a spy)
working for
"When a man’s verses cannot be understood...it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a small room."
The
Catholic spymasters had decided that Marlowe had to die, but not to protect
Shakespeare. They had stronger reasons to fear Marlowe. For years, the Catholics had been wooing
King James VI of
When James was thirteen he had been seduced by Esme Stuart, an adult cousin, who Catholic plotters hoped would convert James to Catholicism. James became deeply enamored with Esme, which might have been the cause of James subsequent homosexuality. However, unfortunately for the Catholic plotters, Esme found it more expeditious to change his own religion than to covert James to Catholicism in the midst of a violently Protestant power structure. Even so, James developed and maintained a weakness for the Old Faith. For several years before Elizabeth’s death, James had been secretly corresponding with Catholics, hinting that he might convert to Catholicism after acquiring the English crown. (His wife converted to Catholicism sometime during the 1590’s,)
At
the time of his death Christopher Marlowe had been planning a trip to
The Catholics had to prevent Marlowe from reaching King James. But if James ever found out that Catholics had murdered England’s best playwright just because he might become James’ friend, then James would turn against the Catholics forever. So the Catholics decided to trick the English government into killing Marlowe. And just in case that plot fell through, they had a cover story to hide their real motive. If James discovered that the Catholics were responsible for Marlowe’s death, hopefully he would still be deceived by their backup story: that their motive was not to kill a potential friend of James, but rather to save another potential friend, Willaim Shakespeare.
. One of the three men involved in Marlowe’s
murder was Robert Poley, who had once been employed as a messenger between
Queen Elizabeth and the King of Denmark.Poley was a double agent who was actually working for the
Catholics. He had just returned from
Seven years later William Vaughn, having heard the false cover story, wrote in The Golden Grove:
...at Detford, a little village about three miles distant from London, as he meant to stab him with his ponyard one named Ingram, that had invited him thither to a feast, and was then playing at tables [backgammon} he quickly perceyving it, so avoyded the thrust, that withall drawing out his dagger for his defence, hee stabd this Marlow into the eye, in such sort, that his braines coming out at the daggers point, hee shorlie after dyed...
"Playing at tables" means backgammon. Just as Arden of Feversham was murdered while playing backgammon.
backgammon & dispute over reckoning.
Woodcock to mine own springe
When a man’s verses cannot be understood...great reckoning
Jew of Malta reckoning, small room, large denominations
LAERTES, 4,5,138
And for my means, I’ll husband them so well,
They
shall go far with little.
In
1578 William Allen was made canon of the Cathedral Chapel in
Hamlet
His virtues else, be they as pure as grace,
As infinite as man may undergo,
Shall in the general censure take corruption
From that particular fault. The dram of eale
Doth all the substance of a daub
To his own scandal.
"Dram of eale" has been correctly interpreted as "dram of evil". That is the surface meaning.But the deeper meaning is "drama filial (dram-o f-eale)". Within the context of the play, the drama filial is the "Mousetrap", the play that Hamlet hoped would catch the conscience of his father’s killer. "Hamlet" is itself a filial drama, because it is a drama about the conflict between filial duty and being true to oneself . "Dram of eale" also sounds like "drama Ophelia." This hints that Ophelia is the drama. In other words, Ophelia is an allegory for Shakespeare’s dramatic output, that suck'd the honey of his music vows." More specifically, Hamlet is Shakespeare’s drama filial, written as mirror and purgatory for his Shakespeare, his father, and his secret godfather.
Hamlet
The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remember'd.
Ophelia
They say the owl was a baker’s daughter.
For a
while, Catholic plotters were considering Lord Strange as a Catholic
replacement for
Horatio (reading letter from Hamlet)
'... Ere we were two days old at sea, a pirate of very warlike appointment gave us chase. Finding ourselves too slow of sail, we put on a compelled valour, and in the grapple I boarded them: on the instant they got clear of our ship; so I alone became their prisoner. They have dealt with me like thieves of mercy: but they knew what they did; I am to do a good turn for them.
Charles Sledd, anti-Catholic spy, describing William Allen in 1580:
tall of stature & slender; his beard cut short & somewhat red of colour; his face full of wrinkles; under his right eye a mole, not very big; long-handed; the nails of his fingers long & growing up.
Hamlet
So, oft it chances in particular men,
That for some vicious mole of nature in them,
As in their birth, wherein they are not guilty,
Since nature cannot choose his origin,
By the o'ergrowth of some complexion [mole]
Oft breaking down the pales and forts of reason
Hamlet (to his father’s Ghost)
Well said, old mole! Canst work i'the earth so fast?
A worthy pioneer!"
[A pioneer was a military engineer, whose duties including burrowing under pales (walls) and forts to plant explosives to break them down.]
Hamlet (speaking of his father) ,1,4,23
'A was a man, take him for all in all.
Juliet, (Romeo and Juliet, 2,2,55)
My name, dear saint, is hateful to myself,
Because it is an enemy to thee.
Shakespeare’s
namesake, William Allen, was an enemy to Shakespeare’s birth saint, St. George,
symbol of English patriotism. Yet Shakespeare loved both these bitter enemies, both Allen and St. George, both the Catholic Church and
Bastard, (King John, 1,1,186)
And if his name be George, I’ll call him Peter
St. Peter
was the first Pope. William
Allen was a representative of the Pope and perhaps was predicting that William
Shakespeare would become the second English Pope. William Shakespeare was born on April
23, St. George’s
Day, the day after the anniversary of the accession of Henry VIII, the king who
divided
Gravedigger
And if his name be George, I’ll call him Peter
At the baptism, William Allen poured holy water on William's head.
Hamlet
...
I knew him Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest ...
infinite jest = infinite Jesus or maybe Jesuits.
Gravedigger
... this skull has lien you i' th' earth
three and twenty years
The Winter's Tale, I,ii,152
Leontes
... Looking on the lines
Of my boy's face, methoughts I did recoil
Twenty-three years ...
An Apology and True Declaration of the Institution and Endeavors of the Two English Colleges. 1581 William Allen:
"...can not be Protestants 23 years...".
23 years before 1581, Queen Mary died and the Act of Uniformity was passed.)
Hamlet
Oh, reform it all together.
Edmund (King Lear 1,2,123)
My father compounded with my mother under the Dragon's tail, and my nativity was under Ursa Major.
This is
just the reverse of Shakespeare’s origin. Shakespeare’s father compounded
with his mother under Ursa Major (the Pole Star’s
influence) and his nativity was under St George, the dragon
slayor. Ursa Major is not a sign of the
Zodiac. It is a constellation that points to the Pole Star. Shakespeare, conceived in conjunction with the dissemination of Pole’s
"seminary," wasborn
on St George’s Day, the day after the anniversary of coronation of Henry VIII,
the king who supplanted the Pope in
Bernardo
When yond same star that's westward from the pole
Had made his course to illume that part of heaven
Where now it burns...
The Pole Star’s influence doomed Shakespeare to be a living purgatory (a part of heaven that burns) for his father, his godfather, and the whole Catholic resistance movement.
Hamlet
........Oh cursed spite,
That ever I was born to set it right!
Hamlet
So, oft it chances in particular men,
That for some vicious mole of nature in them,
As in their birth, wherein they are not guilty,
Since nature cannot choose his origin,
...........
Carrying, I say, the stamp of one defect,
Being nature's livery or fortune's star,
His virtues else, be they as pure as grace,
As infinite as man may undergo,
Shall in the general censure take corruption
From that particular fault.
Beatrice
(Much
...my mother cried, but then a star danced, and under that was I born
Bernardo
When yond same star that's westward from the pole
Hamlet
I am but mad north-northwest. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw.
Hamlet (his instructions to the actors)
Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand
Shakespeare’s coat-of-arms depicted a falcon (a type of hawk, and also the name for a type of 16th-century cannon) shaking a spear. When Shakespeare is sane (not under the influence of Reginald Pole, the Pole Star), he knows a hawk (his oath to write seditious plays) from a handsaw (acting - his obligation to be true to himself by writing plays for art rather than politics).
Claudius
Thou still hast been the father of good news!
Polonius
Have I, my lord? Assure you, my good liege,
I hold my duty as I hold my soul,
Both to my god and to my gracious king,
And I do think, else this brain of mine
Hunts not the trail of policy so sure
As it hath used to do, that I have found
The very cause of Hamlet's lunacy.
Simon Hunt
was the cause of Shakespeare’s lunacy (mental turmoil). Hunt
taught young Will that there was an unresolvable conflict between his duty to
his god and his duty to his king. Polonius doubted whether he had
been the father of good news. Polonius was the father of Ophelia,
who was an allegory for Shakespeare’s dramatic output. Shakespeare was the
father of his plays, but because of his divided loyalties, he was not sure that
his plays were good news (Gospel).
poety - great meaning in small space
Falstaff, tavern bill in pocket, pun on name like Shakebag, buffoon, bungling highway robber, died in tavern like Marlowe
Marlowe killed in Bull’s tavern on anniversary of coronation of Anne Bullen. (& Armada?)
Look up "bull" in concordance. so capital a calf
Much
be all my sins remembered
Woodcock to mine own springe
Laertes, Depford, neither a borrower...
Hamlet & Laertes in Ophelia’s grave, rant
Yeoman’s service
Frizer, bird lime, Othello
dead for a ducat, cat will meow, pith and marrow
Kit, mousetrap, St. Gertrude, St. Patrick
Merchant
of
pierce as day to your eye - Claudius to Laertes
Will is all
purgation
Polonius - false flames
Hunt,
Shrew,
Armada, St Dominic, persuasion, globe with fire
Marlowe, truant, springe
Hamlet - maid looked in window, window into men’s souls, Much Ado window, Hero and Leander
come in to supper (Much Ado)
Yeoman
Essex and Richard II
Valentine’s Day
Merrick, Yorick, Osrick, I am Richard
Gelly
(household steward for
boys carry it away
botch her words up
old Jephtha
make her laugh at that
Strange baker’s daughter
drama filial
not a mouse stirring
Winter’s Tale - 2 shoulder bones
Topcliffe
Shakespeare’s daughter was recusant
I believe that William Shakespeare's secret godfather was
William Allen, the leader of the Catholic underground. I believe
that Shakespeare had sworn to his father and to his godfather
that he would write a series of seditious history plays,
culminating in an incendiary HENRY VIII, which would spark
a religious insurrection. But when he actually started to
write plays, Shakespeare realized that his love for his art
overweighed his zeal for religious rebellion. Furthermore,
he became convinced that war was too high a price to pay for
an argument over a piece of straw (Martin Luther had called
the Epistle of James a thing of straw). When Shakespeare
finally wrote HENRY VIII, it was a tame tribute to King James I
(although it was literally incendiary - it burned down the
Globe
Theater).
The
Reader’s Encyclopedia of Shakespeare, ed Oscar
Campbell, 1966, MJF Books,
Robert Parsons, under the pen name "N. D." (Nicholas Doleman):
Robert
Parsons, The Third Part of a Treatise,
Intituled: Of three conversions of
[Sir
John Oldcastle was] a Ruffian-knight as all
John Speed, History of Great Britaine, 1611
...that N. D. author of the three conuervions hath made Ouldcastle a Ruffian, a Robber, and a Rebell, and his authority taken from the Stage-plaiers, is more befitting the pen of his slanderous report, then the Credit of the iudicious, being only grounded from this Papist and his Poet, of like conscience for lies, the one euer faining, and the other euer falsifying the truth.
The Pope and his poet
Ophelia (4,5,42)
... They say the owl was a baker's daughter.
Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be.
The owl was a portent of death. How did Shakespeare’s play’s become a portent of death?
But
Shakespeare associated Ophelia with death for a more personal reason. Ophelia
was an allegory for his writing, which recently had almost cost him his life,
when
Some of Shakespeare’s plays were based on historical truth. His last play (written a dozen years after Hamlet), was called "All Is True" (also known as "Henry VIII.")
But
Shakespeare associated Ophelia with death for a more personal reason. Ophelia
was an allegory for his writing, which recently had almost cost him his life,
when
The Essex
Rebellion was on February 8, the anniversary of the execution of Mary Queen of
Scots. Whether or not
I believe that Shakespeare was thrown into prison after the
abortive
"Hamlet" in order to curry favor with King James VI, who then
used his influence to get Shakespeare released.
Essex
Rebellion was on Feb 8, the anniversary of the execution of Mary Queen of
Scots. Whether or not
Funk & Wagnalls, vol 22, p 302
circa 1316 Walter Stewart, hereditary steward of
Fry, p 121
1406 "James,
son of Robert III, is taken prisoner by pirates on his way from
Funk & Wagnall, vol 14, p 390
1424
James, son of Robert
III, was crowned King James I of
"He married Jane Beaufort (d. 1445), niece of the English king
Richard II, and granddaughter of John of Gaunt."
Funk & Wagnall, vol 14, p 390
1437
James I of
son James II.
Fry, p 122-123
1460
James II "was enormously interested in artillery and pyrotechnics,
an interest which led to his death in 1460, when he was killed by
an exploding cannon" at the seige of
succeeded by his son James III.
Funk & Wagnall, vol 14, p 390
1469
James III of
Funk & Wagnall, vol 14, p 390
1488
James III of
James IV.
Funk & Wagnall, vol 14, p 391
1488
James IV married Margaret Tudor, the eldest daughter of King
Henry
VII of
Funk & Wagnall, vol 14, p 391
1513
James IV was killed at the Battle of Flodden on Sept. 9, 1513,
and was succeeded by his son James V.
Funk & Wagnall, vol 14, p 391
1542
"His uncle,
Henry VIII, king of
repudiate the authority of the Roman Catholic church, but James
refused, and relations between the two countries became strained.
War broke out in 1542, and in November the Scottish force was routed
at Solway Moss in northern
Mary's coronation
exactly 30 years after James IV was killed
Mary was widow of Francis II, King of France
(what was date of his death?)
James VI born
Darnell's
house blown up. Darnley strangled
in orchard.
Fraser, pg 10-11 picture: "The Darnley Memorial, painted by
Levinus de Vogelaare. Before the effigy of Lord Darnley the
infant James kneels in prayer: 'Arise, O Lord, and avenge the
innocent blood of the King.' Behind him are his grand-parents -
Matthew, Earl of
Lennox, Margaret, Countess of
uncle, their son, Charles Stuart."
Bothwell married Mary
James VI
christened at
Godmother -
Bothwell executed
Mary urged James to rebel
James disliked make-up
liked word games
predestination
liked word games
fear of death
Catholic?
Fraser titlepage. Picture: "Gold coin bearing the image of King
James and a ship"
Mary & bunghole
Mary executed
James I coronation
Guy Fawkes & Gunpowder Plot
Danish prince went
to
funeral oration: drunk himself to death
funeral procession of Danish king - Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
faint wooing
French princess
homosexual
Anne saw 8 men killed by loose cannon
pirates (?)
30 in letter (James code)
death of Richard Burbage
Hamlet also reflects William Shakespeare's effort to be true
to himself. Shakespeare himself was "born to set it right". As
is well known, he was born on
is the patron saint of
great patriot. But, as I will prove in this book, William
Shakespeare was the secret godson of William Allen, who was to
become the spiritual leader of the English Catholic resistance.
If the Spanish
Armada had succeeded in conquering
Phillip II and the Pope had planned to install William
Shakespeare's godfather as Archbishop of Canterbury and
administrator of
William
Shakespeare was torn between conflicting loyalties.
In 1581, the Jesuit Edmund Campion was martyred. In his
pre-prepared gallows speech he wrote, that, in condemning him,
the government was condemning most of the Kings of England, who
had been loyal Catholics. That speech was the inspiration for
Shakespeare's series of history plays, which, by William Allen's
plan, was to culminate in an inflammatory denunciation of Henry
VIII, the flashpoint for a revolution. But William Shakespeare
had other plans. He was loyal to his godfather, but he was also
loyal to St George. He wanted not violent revolution, but
peaceful reconciliation, a reconciliation between the English
crown and the Catholic Church, and also a reconciliation between
the warring halves of his own soul.
The general theme of Shakespeare's history plays was that the
legitimacy of the English government depended on both tradition
and morality, on peaceful continuity and on the sanction of the
Catholic church. William Allen probably criticized the
conciliatory nature of these plays, but his main complaint was
that Shakespeare was delaying Henry VIII. Hamlet was
Shakespeare's letter of resignation to the Catholic
conspirators. He was shaking off his filial loyalty to his
godfather (now deceased) and asserting his artistic freedom.
However, his resignation was not accepted. Finally, Shakespeare
did begrudgingly write an incendiary Henry VIII, the drama
filial ("dram of eale") which perhaps led to his own murder,
either by James I or by the Catholic conspirators.
Aside from patriotism, Shakespeare had two other strong motives
for rebelling against his godfather: love of beauty and fear of
death.
Shakespeare's first love was the English language. His early
talent for poetry set him apart, it was the core of his
uniqueness, his Self. On the other hand, his religion was
common. In his early years, he took his religion for granted.
He knew it had to be kept secret from the government, but he had
been taught that the majority of Englishman were secret
Catholics, so it was nothing special. Then, at age 12, as he
was preparing for his secret Confirmation into the Catholic
Church, he was told for the first time about his illustrious
secret godfather. His poetic imagination fell captive to this
new mark of distinction. For the next year, his second love,
the love of the Catholic Church, burned brightly with the
imaginary fires of romantic martyrdom. But then he saw the
Douay New Testament, which had been produced under the
supervision of his new idol, William Allen. The Douay Bible
butchered young Will's beloved English language. Here, revealed
by the Church was Truth, but it was ugly. Years later, his
Catholic godfather scorned his beautiful plays because they did
not explicitly proclaim Catholic doctrine. Apparently, Truth
and Beauty could not co-exist.
In his youth, martydom had seemed romantic to Shakespeare.
But, as he matured, he began to perceive the true face of
death. His fear of death was sharpened when, as I will show,
the anti-Catholic spy Chistopher Marlowe almost exposed
Shakespeare as a Catholic agent. I believe the Catholics, in
order to protect Shakespeare, planted false evidence to convince
the English government that Marlowe himself was the secret
Catholic propagandist, leading to Marlowe's murder. Marlowe had
been
Shakespeare. It must have seemed to Shakespeare as if his
second love had murdered his first love.
Rosencrantz
The single and peculiar life is bound,
With all the strength and armour of the mind,
To keep itself from noyance; but much more
That spirit upon whose weal depend and rest
The lives of many. The cease of majesty
Dies not alone; but, like a gulf, doth draw
What's near it with it: it is a massy wheel,
Fix'd on the summit of the highest mount,
To whose huge spokes ten thousand lesser things
Are mortised and adjoin'd; which, when it falls,
Each small annexment, petty consequence,
Attends the boisterous ruin. Never alone
Did the king sigh, but with a general groan.
Eustace
Chapuys, ambassador from Charles V to Henry VIII
Henry VIII and the
English Reformation, Arthur J. Slavin, ed., 1968, D. C. Heath and Company, a
division of Raytheon Education Company, Lexingtion, Massachusetts. The English
Schism Occasion and Cause, Gustave Constant, The
Reformation in
"The excommunication of Henry VIII passed almost unnoticed. ‘The king,’ wrote the imperial ambassador, ‘said that he took no account of it, but made as great cheer as ever . . . for if the Pope issued 10,0000 excommunications, he would not care a straw for them.’"
Ghost
…sent to my account
With all my imperfections on my head:
HAMLET Two thousand souls and twenty thousand ducats
Will not debate the question of this straw:
Even for an egg-shell. Rightly to be great
Is not to stir without great argument,
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
When honour's at the stake. How stand I then,
That have a father kill'd, a mother stain'd,
Excitements of my reason and my blood,
And let all sleep? while, to my shame, I see
The imminent death of twenty thousand men,
That, for a fantasy and trick of fame,
Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot
Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause,
Which is not tomb enough and continent
To hide the slain? O, from this time forth,
My
thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!
In October, 1593,
a Portuguese man living in
"Must" is a synonym for "musk."
Rosencrantz
...you have the
voice of the king himself for your succession in
Hamlet
Ay, but sir, 'While the grass grows,'--the proverb is something musty.
Hamlet.
Slanders, sir:
for the satirical rogue says here that old men have grey beards, that their
faces are wrinkled, their eyes purging thick amber and plum-tree gum...
On St. Peter’s Day, 1613, during a performance of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII (or All Is True), the Globe theater caught fire and burned to the ground. The fire was allegedly started accidentally, by a cannon salute to Henry VIII. But was it an accident? There are several lines of evidence pointing to arson: the profitability of the fire, the theatricality of the fire, lines in the play that referred to the fire, the continuation of the cannon motif from Hamlet, and political/religious symbolism connecting Henry VIII and his divorce, Pope’s Day, Blackfriars, St. Dominic, and the defeat of the Spanish Armada.
How could Shakespeare and the other Globe shareholders have profited from the fire? Fire insurance had not yet been invented, nor was there a complicated income tax code to motivate a tax write-off. To find the financial motive for the destruction of the Globe, we must look back to its birth:
On the night
before St. Thomas a Beckett’s Day in 1598, Shakespeare and his fellow players
assembled at the Theatre and "armed themselves with divers manye
unlawfull and offensive weapons, as namelye swordes daggers billes axes and
such...and...in a verye ryoutous outragious and forcyble manner...did...pull
downe the sayd Theater...And having so done did then also in most forcyble and
ryotous manner take and carrye awaye from thence all the wood and timber
thereof unto the Banckside [the south side of the Thames]...and there
erected a new playe howse with the sayd Timber and wood." The new
theater, built from the Theatre’s wood, was called the Globe (All the world’s
a stage). The above description of the Theatre’s deconstruction was quoted
from Giles Alleyn, the irate owner of the land on which the Theatre had stood.
Back in 1576 James Burbage had purchased a twenty-one-year lease on that land
from Alleyn and built the Theatre, the first theater ever built in
This time Shakespeare and his fellow-players did not want to move. The Globe was in a very profitable location, so profitable that they may have wanted to tear down their theater and build a larger one on the same site, as a nearby rival theater company had already done. But they probably didn’t want to re-use the wood because the Globe was built on marshy ground (flanked with a ditch and forced out of a marsh - Ben Jonson) which, over the past fifteen years, had probably rotted the wood (your water is a sore decayer). If they didn’t want to re-use the wood, the most economical means to demolish the old Globe would be to burn it. But if their landlord knew that they were deliberately burning the old Globe to clear the site for a larger Globe, he surely would have held out for much more money on the lease renewal. So the Globe burned down "accidentally," allowing the players to argue that the lease renewal was less valuable. Shortly after the fire, the landlord finally agreed to a new lease.
During the months they were rebuilding the Globe, Shakespeare’s company would have lost considerable revenue if they had not had some other place to stage their plays. By luck (or good planning), they already had an alternate theater ready by the time of the fire. Back in 1596, when he was haggling with his first landlord over the renewal of the lease for the Theatre’s land, Richard Burbage had purchased part of the former Blackfriars Monastery. His original plan had been to move the company to Blackfiars after his Theatre lease expired. However, the other residents of Blackfriars (including even Lord Hunsden, the patron of the Chamberlain’s Men) circulated a petition objecting to a theater in their neighborhood. But by 1608 attitudes had changed and Shakespeare’s company (now called the King’s Men) had finally started using their Blackfriars theater during winter seasons. Thus, when the Globe burned down in 1613, they probably resumed operations the very next day at Blackfriars.
Having decided to torch the Globe, the King’s Men could have done it in the dead of night, with no witnesses. But that would have gone against their show business instincts. They wanted an audience. So, they would have chosen to start the fire in the middle of a play. Of course they would want to avoid roasting their audience -- that would be bad for business. They needed to create the illusion of a fire, evacuate the audience, and then start the real fire. Perhaps they would start with a smokepot hidden in the rafters.
From a letter
written by Sir Henry Wotton (formerly a spy for
The King’s players had a new play, called All is True, representing some principal pieces of the reign of Henry VIII, which was set forth with many extraordinary circumstances of pomp and majesty....Now, King Henry making a masque at the Cardinal Wolsey’s house, and certain chambers being shot off at his entry, some of the paper, or other stuff, wherewith one of them was stopped, did light on the thatch, where being at first but an idle smoke, and their eyes more attentive to the show, it kindled inwardly, and ran around like a train, consuming within less than an hour the whole house to the very grounds.
This was the fatal period of that virtuous fabric; wherein yet nothing did perish but wood and straw, and a few forsaken cloaks; only one man had his breeches set on fire, that would perhaps have broiled him, if he had not by the benefit of a provident wit put it out with bottle ale. [This Bud’s for you!]
Since the original name of the play was All Is True, I wonder if this was the origin of the chant, "Liar, liar, pants on fire!"
According to legend, one man in the audience was taking notes in order to publish a pirated edition of the play. He dutifully recorded everything he heard up to and including the moment when the actor playing Cardinal Wolsey cried out, "The theater’s afire!" Recall that Wotton said the fire was thought to be "at first but an idle smoke." If indeed the players were trying to fake a fire with smokepots, the illusion failed -- they had to reinforce it with words to make the audience take flight.
If the
initial smoke had been from a real fire, it would have been remarkable that,
even after a delayed evacuation, no one was injured. As for the fellow with the
hot pants, why didn’t his shirt burn? How many comedies since then have
featured a man with burning pants? How many comedians have doused flames with
booze? This incident has all the earmarks of a well-rehearsed stunt. When he
was back inside the theater, the man (perhaps a little-known or well-disguised
actor) could have soaked his shirt and pants with water, then strapped on a dry
false bottom stuffed with straw. Then, with phony fanny aflame, he dashed
outside, where a waiting confederate quenched his bogus butt with bottled beer,
delighting the distracted multitude, while inside the real Global warming was
beginning.
The actor playing Cardinal Wolsey may have ad libbed "The theater’s afire!" But there are some prescient lines in the script which seem to be lightly veiled references to the fire. About forty lines after the cannon salute which allegedly ignited the Globe, Henry VIII first takes notice of Anne Boleyn (Bullen), a lady-in-waiting to his wife:
KING, (HENRY VIII, 1,4,91)
My Lord Chamberlain,
Prithee come hither. What fair lady’s that?
CHAMBERLAIN
An’t please your Grace, Sir Thomas Bullen’s daughter --
The Viscount Rochford -- one of her Highness’ women.
KING
By heaven, she is a dainty one. Sweet heart,
I were unmannerly to take you out
And not to kiss you. A health gentlemen!
Let it go round. [As the flames "ran around like a train."]
WOLSEY
Sir Thomas Lovell, is the banker ready
I’ th’ privy chamber? [Perhaps the King’s Men had already arranged the financing for rebuilding the Globe.]
LOVELL
Yes, my lord.
WOLSEY
Your Grace,
I fear, with dancing is a little heated.
KING
I fear, too much.
WOLSEY
There’s fresher air, my lord,
In the next chamber.
Heated too much indeed. For Henry VIII (the play), the next chamber would be the theater in Blackfriars, in the very room where Henry VIII had divorced Catherine in order marry Anne Boleyn, thus beginning the divorce of England from the Catholic Church.
When I
first read that the Globe had burned down during a performance of Henry VIII, , I had no reason to believe that the Globe fire was
anything less than a financial disaster for Shakespeare. Yet I was immediately
certain that it was arson. Why? For two very strong reasons.
First, as I explained in a previous chapter, I believed that Shakespeare had
taken a vow to write a series of provocative histories of English kings,
culminating in an inflammatory history of Henry VIII. He had begun his career
with this series of histories, but I wondered why he waited until the very end
of his career to complete the series with an apparently cool and bland Henry
VIII. Secondly, I had discovered that in Hamlet, the King metaphorically
slaughtered himself with his own cannon, fired in salute, just as in Henry VIII
the playhouse was destroyed by a cannon salute to Henry VIII. The Globe fire
was the missing piece in the puzzle. The completed puzzle showed Shakespeare’s
lifelong struggle to reconcile his Catholic faith with his love for the
theater.
CLAUDIUS,5,2,275
The king shall drink to Hamlet's better breath,
And in the cup an unionshallhethrow
Richer than that which four successive kings
In
And let the kettle to the trumpet speak,
The trumpet to the cannoneer without,
The cannons to the heavens, the heavens to earth
'Now the king drinksto Hamlet!'
(A crown in the cup? What were they drinking?
The above speech gives us a hint that the king's drinking, with the accompaniment of cannon fire, might be a metaphor for the king's attachment to his kingdom (and in the cup an union). The metaphor is strengthened when we recall the following from Act I:
[A flourish of trumpets and ordnance shot off, from within.]
HORATIO, 1,4,7
What does this mean my lord?
HAMLET
The king doth wake tonight and takes his rouse,
Keeps wassail and the swaggering upspring reels,
And, as he drains his draughts of Rhenish down,
The kettle-drum and trumpet thus bray out
The triumph of his pledge.
HORATIO
Is it a custom?
HAMLET
Ay, marry, is't.
But to my mind, though I am native here
And to the manner born, it is a custom
More honor'd in the breach than the observance.
Hamlet does not want to join his forefathers' union.
"Four
successive kings" might also refer to Kings James I, II, III, and IV
of Scotland, who all died violent deaths. The current King of Scots, James VI
did not want to join his four fathers’ union.
In the play's very first occurrence of this metaphor, Hamlet seemed to recognize the self-destructive nature of a king's union with his kingdom. He invoked the metaphor as a curse against Claudius, a wish that Claudius might destroy himself:
CLAUDIUS,1,2,125
No
jocund health that
But the great cannon to the clouds shall tell,
And the king's rouse the heavens shall bruit again,
Re-speaking earthly thunder. Come away.
HAMLET
O! that this too too solid flesh would melt
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew;
Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd
His canon 'gainst self-slaughter.
If Cloud-ius was an actual cloud he could rain himself away (melt into dew), or, when he fired his cannon at the clouds, he would indeed be slaughtering himself. The Everlasting has fixed His canon against self-slaughter, but that will not prevent Claudius from fixing (aiming) his own metaphorical cannon at himself. In the end, this curse is carried out:
HAMLET,5,2,329
Here, thou incestuous, murderous, damned Dane,
Drink off this potion. Is thy union here?
Follow my mother.
LAERTES
He is justly serv'd.
It is a poison temper'd by himself.
Thus the metaphors of camel, cloud, cannon, and cup embrace both the essential flaw of Claudius's character and the means of his consequent self-destruction.
The
range of the cannon motif extends beyond Hamlet, impacting the life of James VI
of
The cannon was also a motif in William Shakespeare’s life. He obtained a family coat-of-arms that showed a falcon shaking a spear. What does that have to do with cannons? "Falcon" was the name of a type of cannon in common use in the sixteenth century. But perhaps the most important cannon in Shakespeare’s world was the one with which he destroyed his Globe:
CLAUDIUS,#,#,#
Come, Gertrude, we'll call up our wisest friends;
And let them know both what we mean to do,
And what's untimely done: so, haply, slander,
Whose whisper o'er the world's diameter,
As level as the cannon to his blank
Transports his poison'd shot, may miss our name,
And hit the woundless air.
Blackfriars
was symbolic of the English Reformation in another way, because of another coincidence. Blackfriars had been the principal
English monastery of the Domincan order of monks, which had been founded about
four hundred years before the English Reformation by Saint Dominic. At a time
when the Catholic Church was massacring heretics, Dominic advocated the
reconciliation of heretics through "persuasion and discussion rather
than threats and belligerence" (Kristin E. White, A Guide to the
Saints). This was not the approach of Phillip II in 1588 when he sent the
Spanish Armada to restore
Did Shakespeare dismiss these coincidences as mere chance? Or did he believe they were significant coincidences, causeless consequences?
HORATIO, (HAMLET,5,2,377
...give order that these bodies
High on a stage be placed to the view,
And let me speak to th’ yet unknowing world [Globe]
How these things came about. So shall you hear
Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,
Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters,
Of deaths put on by cunning and forc’d cause,
And in this upshot, purposes mistook
Fall’n on th’inventors heads: all this can I
Truly deliver. [All Is True]
FORTINBRAS
Let us haste to hear it,
And call the noblest to the audience.
For me, with sorrow I embrace my fortune.
I have some rights, of memory in this kingdom,
Which now to claim my vantage doth invite me.
HORATIO
Of that I shall have also cause to speak,
And from his mouth whose voice will draw on more.
But let this same be presently perform’d
Even while men’s minds are wild, lest more mischance
On plots and error happen.
I believe Shakespeare had the above lines from Hamlet in mind when he named the Globe’s final play -- All Is True (all this can I truly deliver). He deliberately tied together these coincidences by continuing the cannon motif from Hamlet. This time the king who metaphorically destroyed himself with his own cannon was Henry VIII.
In a
letter dated July 4, 1613, Henry Bluett wrote, "On Tuesday last there was
acted at the Globe a new play called All is True [the alternate title of Henry
VIII], which had been acted not passing two or three times before." From
this we can infer that the first performance might have been on June 28, the
birthday of Henry VIII. Whether
or not Shakespeare had any hidden agenda, it would have been very fitting
symbolism to premiere Henry VIII on his birthday. But the fire was not on the day of the first performance
-- the Globe fire was on the next day, St Peter’s and St Pauls Day (also known
as Pope’s Day). This paralleled
on earlier coincidence of consecutive dates: Shakespeare was born on April 24, the day after the
anniversary of the coronation of Henry VIII.
KING
OF
Is it but this -- a tardiness in nature
Which often leaves the history unspoke
That it intends to do?....
HAMLET
...the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was, and is, to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure. Now this overdone, or come tardy off, though it make the unskillful laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve, the censure of which one must in your allowance o'erweigh a whole theater of others.
HAMLET
Do you not come your tardy son to chide,
That, laps'd in time and passion, lets go by
The important acting of your dread command?
O, say!
HAMLET
Why, let the stricken deer go weep,
The hart ungalled play;
For some must watch; while some must sleep:
So runs the world away.
Would not this, sir, and a forest of feathers, if the rest of my fortunes turn Turk with me, with two provincial roses on my razed shoes, get me a fellowship in a cry of players, sir?
HORATIO
Half a share.
HAMLET
A whole one, I.
For thou dost know, o Damen dear,
This realm dismantled was
Of Jove himself, and now reigns here
A very, very - pajock.
HORATIO
You might have rhymed.
HAMLET
O good Horatio! I'll take the ghost's word for a thousand pound.
GUILDENSTERN
Good my lord, vouchsafe me a word with you.
HAMLET
Sir, a whole history.
GUILDENSTERN
The king, sir -
ROSENCRANCE, (HAMLET,4,2,11
I understand you not, my lord.
HAMLET
I
am glad of it. A knavish speech sleeps in a foolish ear.
Of all
the plays the King’s Men could have chosen for the Globe’s brilliant exit,
Henry VIII was the most inflammatory.
In 1613, English law prohibited plays from even mentioning any current
political or religious controversy. -- and Henry’s
divorce eighty years before was still the hottest issue of the day. In 1588, on
St. Dominic’s Day (Dominic was the founder of the Blackfriars),
LAERTES, (HAMLET, 1,3,18)
For
he himself is subject to his birth
I,ii,138.
Hamlet. But two months dead,
nay not so much, not two.
Hamlet's father had been murdered less than two months earlier.
It
could have been Valentine's Day, February 12.
St Valentine was martyred in the reign of Emperor Claudius.
Hamlet Sr was murdered on St Valentine's Day
by the man who would be King Claudius.
IV,v,46.
Ophelia. To-morrow is St Valentine's day ...
With her whirling words, Ophelia was spinning together past
and future deaths into one metaphorical shroud. Here, she
was referring to the death of Hamlet Sr.
On Valentine's day, 1559, the bill for the Act of Supremacy,
which Anthony Cooke said would expel "the tyranny of the
Pope" (Plowden, pg 28), was sent from the House of Commons
to the House of Lords.
SMILE AND SMILE
---------------
I,v,108
That
one may smile, and smile, and be a villain
Cardinal
Grindall, Archbishop of
Grindall
= grinned all = smiled always = smile and smile
III,iii,96
King. [Rising] My words fly up, my thoughts remain below.
Words
without thought never to heaven go.
Ophelia
looked in the window.
AND LIEGEMEN TO THE DANE
------------------------
V,2,260
King. ...
The King shall drink to Hamlet's better breath,
And in the cup an union shall he throw,
Richer than that which four successive kings
In
Note: James I, II, III, and IV of Scotland all died violent
deaths. James V died of natural causes (or perhaps
of poison, but that too would be natural), but his
daughter, Mary Queen of Scots, was beheaded. Her
husband, father of James VI, was strangled in an orchard
(just as old Hamlet was killed in an orchard). Naturally,
James
VI, soon to be James I of
joining the "union" of "four
successive" kings.
Richard III, I,i,44
Clarence. His Majesty,
Tend'ring my person's safety, hath appointed
This conduct to convey me to the Tower.
He
should for that, commit your godfathers,
King John, II,i,287
Bastard. St George, that
swinged the Dragon.
King John, III,iii,7
King
John. "... see thou shake the bags of hoarding
abbots".
The Winter's Tale, IV,iv,297
Mopsa. It becomes thy oath full well
Thou to me thy secrets tell.
Dorcas. Me too! Let me go thither.
Mopsa. Or thou goest to th'grange or mill.
V,i,169
1 Clown. ... this skull has lien you i' th' earth
three and twenty years
An Apology and True Declaration of the Institution and
Endeavors of the Two English Colleges. 1581 William Allen.
"...can
not be Protestants 23 years...".
(23 years before 1581, Queen Mary died and the Act of Uniformity
was passed.)
The Winter's Tale, I,ii,152
Leontes ... Looking on the lines
Of my boy's face, methoughts I did recoil
Twenty-three
years ...
The Winter's Tale, I,iii,197
Leontes Twenty-three days
They have been absent; 'tis good speed; fortells
The great Apollo suddenly will have
The
truth of this appear
The Winter's Tale, III,iii,58
Shepherd
I would there were no age between ten and three and twenty
Another significance of 23 years: The Spanish Armada was first
assembled in 1587, when Shakespeare was 23 years old. In that
year, he first realized that his loyalty to the Catholic Church
might require treason against his country.
V,i,176
1
Clown. ... 'A poured
a flagon of Rhenish on my head once.
At
the baptism, William Allen poured holy water on William's head.
V,i,179
Hamlet. ... I knew him Horatio: a fellow of
infinite jest ...
infinite jest = infinite Jesus or maybe Jesuits.
Rowse, pg 13, "Simon Hunt was master from 1571 to 1575, when William
was a young schoolboy; but Hunt left for
So Hunt became school master when Shakespeare was 7 years old,
just as Hamlet was 7 years old when he rode
on Yorick's back.
Mary Queen of Scots married the dauphin of France, who,
after his father's death became Francois II, King of France.
Shortly thereafter, Francois II died from an inflammation of
the ear. (The History of
Fry, page 139). Thus, the first husband of the mother of
James VI died from "a mildewed ear", just as the first husband
of Hamlet's mother died from poison in his
ear.
3,4,63
HAMLET
This was your husband. Look you now, what follows:
Here is your husband; like a mildew'd ear,
Blasting
his wholesome brother.
...
Shortly after the birth of James VI, his father, Lord
Darnley, was found strangled to death in the garden of an
estate that had been destroyed by an explosion. Shortly
thereafter, Mary Queen of Scots, mother of James VI, married
the earl of Bothwell, the man widely believed to have been
reponsible for Darnley's murder.
3,2,265
HAMLET
He
poisons him i' the garden for 's estate.
3,4,28
HAMLET
A bloody deed! Almost as bad, good mother,
As
kill a king and marry with his brother.
Fraser, pg 10-11, illustration: "The Darnley Memorial,
painted by Levinus de Vogelaare.
"Before the effigy of Lord Darnley the infant James kneels
in prayer: 'Arise, O Lord, and avenge the innocent blood of
the King.' Behind him are his grand-parents - Matthew, Earl
of
son, Charles Stuart."
That painting hung in the castle where James VI spent his
earliest years. Thus, he was accustomed, from infancy, to
calls for revenge from his dead father.
1,5,6
HAMLET
Speak, I am bound to hear.
GHOST
So
art thou to revenge, when thou shalt hear.
1,5,189
HAMLET
.... O cursed spite,
That
ever I was born to set it right!
James VI married Anne, Princess of Denmark. Historians say
he married her to secure the Baltic trade; pines and sables and
amber. I say he married her because he was obsessed with the
legend of Hamlet, whose life seemed to mirror
his own.
Anne
of Denmark tried to cross the
James
in
foul weather. On that voyage, a cannon broke loose from its
moorings. Anne saw eight men crushed to death by that loose
cannon. Remembering that James II was killed by a cannon and
that his own father's death was accompanied by an explosion,
James VI might have feared that Anne's close encounter with a
cannon was a continuation of the Scottish
curse.
Since Anne couldn't come to him, James went to her. He
crossed the North Sea and married Anne in
James VI was very impressed by the Danish custom of frequent
cannon salutes.
1,2,174
HAMLET
But
what is your affair in
We'll
teach you to drink deep ere you depart.
Anne's father, the King of Denmark, drank himself to death.
The three Danish noblemen marching at the head of his funeral
procession were Rosencrance, Monk, and
Guildenstern.
1,4,8
HAMLET
The
king doth wake tonight and takes his rouse
1,4,17
HAMLET
This heavy-headed revel east and west
Makes us traduc'd and tax'd of other nations.
Thy
clepe us drunkards
2,2,33
KING
Thanks,
Rosencrance and gentle Guildenstern.
James VI never knew his mother. When he was still an
infant, she fled from rebels to
kept her prisoner for the remaining 19 years of her life.
During all that time, Mary Queen of Scots was the center of
every Catholic plot to regain
Mary's supporters tried to enlist James to their cause, but
with a crafty caution, he kept aloof. In the final plot,
messages were smuggled to and from Mary by inserting them, in
a water-proof capsule, through the BUNG-HOLE OF A BEER-BARREL.
Those messages were intercepted by the Queen's spies (among
them Robert Poley, who, six years later, killed Christopher
Marlowe). The intercepted messages were used to convict Mary
of treason. She was beheaded, with no effective protest from
James.
5,1,211
HAMLET
Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of
Alexander til he find it STOPPING A BUNG-HOLE?
............
... why of that loam, whereto he was converted,
might they not STOP A BEER-BARREL?
1,5,32
GHOST
And duller shouldst thou be than the fat weed
That roots itself in ease on LETHE wharf,
Wouldst
thou not STIR in this.
"Lethe" is a river in a hell, but this might also allude to
Leith
river in
King Lear, I,i,235
... A tardiness in nature,
Which often leaves the history unspoke
That
it intends to do!
II,i,125 in Othello
Iago. ... my invention comes from my pate
as birdlime does from frieze
- it plucks out brains and all.
In Stratford Guild Chapel there was a mural of Judgment Day. Although the mural was daubed over with whitewash about the time Shakespeare was born (in belated obedience to a government edict against religious icons and images), I believe that young Will could see the mural through the whitewash (or perhaps the whitewash was temporarily removed for special occasions, such as secret midnight Catholic Confirmations). The mural showed a group of sinners bound together with hoops of steel (a chain) and being led toward the mouth of hell. The mouth of hell (or purgatory) was set in what looked like a giant porcupine head.
Gertrude (to Hamlet),3,4,119
Forth at your eyes your spirits wildly peep,
And, as the sleeping soldiers in the alarm,
Your bedded hair, like life in excrements,
Starts up and stand an end.
Ghost (to Hamlet),1,5,14
I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,
Thy knotted and combined locks to part,
And each particular hair to stand on end,
Like quills upon the fretful porpentine.
HAMLET Two thousand souls and twenty thousand ducats
Will not debate the question of this straw:
Even for an egg-shell. Rightly to be great
Is not to stir without great argument,
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
When honour's at the stake. How stand I then,
That have a father kill'd, a mother stain'd,
Excitements of my reason and my blood,
And let all sleep? while, to my shame, I see
The imminent death of twenty thousand men,
That, for a fantasy and trick of fame,
Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot
Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause,
Which is not tomb enough and continent
To hide the slain? O, from this time forth,
HAMLET Ay, sir; to be honest, as this world goes, is to be
one man picked out of ten thousand.
Gentleman She speaks much of her father; says she hears
There's tricks i' the world; and hems, and beats her heart;
Spurns enviously at straws; speaks things in doubt,
That carry but half sense: her speech is nothing,
Yet the unshaped use of it doth move
The hearers to collection; they aim at it,
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd.
HAMLET O good Horatio, I'll take the ghost's word for a
thousand pound. Didst perceive?
ROSENCRANTZ The single and peculiar life is bound,
With all the strength and armour of the mind,
To keep itself from noyance; but much more
That spirit upon whose weal depend and rest
The lives of many. The cease of majesty
Dies not alone; but, like a gulf, doth draw
What's near it with it: it is a massy wheel,
Fix'd on the summit of the highest mount,
To whose huge spokes ten thousand lesser things
Are mortised and adjoin'd; which, when it falls,
Each small annexment, petty consequence,
Attends the boisterous ruin. Never alone
Did the king sigh, but with a general groan.
First Clown What is he that builds stronger than either the
mason, the shipwright, or the carpenter?
Second Clown The gallows-maker; for that frame outlives a
thousand tenants.
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; and now, how
abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rims at
HAMLET I loved Ophelia: forty thousand brothers
Could not, with all their quantity of love,
Make up my sum. What wilt thou do for her?
Makes vow before his uncle never more
To give the assay of arms against your majesty.
Whereon
old
Gives him three thousand crowns in annual fee,
And his commission to employ those soldiers,
So
levied as before, against the Polack:
This is a clear reference to Frizer who invented a cover story
about being struck on the pate, but who, as Shakespeare knew,
willingly plucked out Marlowe's brains.
'Whereas it was reported that Christopher Marlowe was determined to have gone beyond the seas to Rheims, and there to remain, their Lordships thought good to certify that he had no such intent, but that in all his actions he had behaved himself orderly and discreetly, whereby he had done Her Majesty good service, & deserved to be rewarded for his faithful dealing. Their Lordships' request was that the rumour thereof should be allayed by all possible means, and that he should be furthered in the degree he was to take this next Commencement, because it was not Her Majesty's pleasure that anyone employed, as he had been, in matters touching the benefit of his country, should be defamed by those that are ignorant in th' affairs he went about.'
The letter is signed by:-
The Archbishop of
The Lord Treasurer, Lord Burghley.
The Chancellor, Sir Christopher Hatton.
The Lord Chamberlain, Henry Carey, 1st Lord Hunsdon.
Mr. Comptroller, Sir William Knollys
Or perhaps outrageous fortune had destined him for that particular time and place.
But, orderly to end where I begun,
I am not a Shakespearian scholar. I turned to
Hamlet to make sense of my life and my father's death. In the end, my life and
my father's death made sense of Hamlet. Like Horatio, I am skeptical of ghosts.
But there are more things dreamt of in my philosophy than there are in heaven
and earth. My philosophy is the doctrine of plenitude. All things are possible.
Quantum mechanics regulates probabilities but places no limits on
possibilities. Everything that may be must be, in some time and place. The
necessary plenitude of times and places is provided by the many-worlds
interpretation of quantum mechanics. Thus, although some of the events I
describe are unconnected by cause and effect, they are not mere coincidences -
rather they are significant coincidences, causeless consequences.
Almost four
centuries after Shakespeare’s birth, the American Civil War began with the
attack on
Later in that war,
my great-grandfather, Parmensius Smith, was shot in the head while carrying the
Union flag in battle. Fortunately for me, since my grandfather had not yet been
conceived, the wound was not fatal, although Parmensius, an itinerant preacher,
walked the earth for the next 50-odd years with a hole in his head. He died
from complications of falling out of an olive tree when my father was about
four years old. My father remembered him as a mean old man.
My grandfather,
Robert Smith, was an English teacher for a while, but he gave it up because he
had more talent for reciting poetry than for disciplining unruly students. He
recited poetry in a Chataugua for a time, but he finally settled down to work
in a chair factory for several decades, until his retirement. I knew him as a
gentle old man with white hair and blue eyes and an easy laugh. In my memory he
is enthusiastically reciting poetry, something about "the barefoot boy on
the burning deck". My father was born on July 16, 1916, exactly 29 years before the
first nuclear explosion (in New Mexico).
I was conceived on
Flag Day and born on the Ides of March (Tax Day) in a military hospital on the
Presidio of San Francisco, within sight of the
Beware of the Ides of March.
Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's.
That year, 1950,
the hit.song was Wheel of Fortune, sung by Kay Starr. "Spinning,
spinning, spinning."
When I was about
two years old, my mother and my older sister and I moved to
My other memory of
About 550 BC, a young Prince of the Sakya family walked away from his heritage of wealth and power and found enlightenment within himself. He came to be known as Buddha. In the 13th century, the Japanese built the Great Buddha, a giant statue of the Buddha of Eternal Light. Originally it was enclosed in a building, but the building was destroyed by a tidal wave in 1495, when Henry VIII was about three years old.
When I was three
years old (some eight or nine years after the bombing of
Once we went to see the Great Buddha. I was astonished by this statue of a man the size of a building. I wanted to go inside the Buddha, the way people go inside the Statue of Liberty. But that being impossible, I could only stare awestruck at the outside of the Buddha...
I was in a car, feeling slightly carsick as usual. We were driving slowly down a crowded Japanese street. It was a feast for my eyes and ears and nose and mind. Overhead, the air was sliced by a dazzling plenitude of signs and banners. The sidewalks thronged with people in strange clothes speaking stranger words. And the air was thick with the tantalizing odors of untasted, unnamed foods. I longed to mingle with the crowd, to explore this fascinating new world, but I was sealed inside the car...
We had finally got
on-post housing, so we were moving out of our paper-house and saying a final
good-bye to our friends in the Japanese neighborhood. My sister and three
Japanese girls and I were playing ring-around-the-rosies, singing
London-bridge-is-falling-down, first in English, then in Japanese. I remember
just a few syllables, "ah-no-may, ah-no-may..." (Decades later, after
I wrote this, I learned that "ah-no-may" actually means "what’s
your name?".)
I experienced my
first Christmas when I was nine months old. To a baby, every day is a new
experience – Christmas no more so than any other day. For my second Christmas,
my father was in
It wasn’t until
decades later, after my father’s death, that I learned that, under that
Christmas joy, he hid a private sorrow.. Exactly
thirty-three years before my third Christmas, when my father was was only four
years old, his mother died. Exactly thirty-three years after my third
Christmas, my father died.
When I was four
years old I almost drowned. I had decided that keeping my head above water
required nothing more than an act of will. So I resolutely waded into deep
water. After the water had risen over my head, all I remember is standing on
tiptoe, reaching for the surface. I'm told it was my father who pulled me out.
When I was five we
were transferred to Fort Leonard Wood,
The summer before
I started first grade, I went to Bible school, happily and voluntarily because
I had a crush on a girl in my class. I remember nothing about her except her
name, Lisa. The only other thing I remember about Bible school is the walk home
on the first day. I only had to walk a couple blocks, but I walked in a
different direction. When I realized that I was lost, I knocked on a door and
tearfully announced, "I'm Way Ethton Thmif Junior and I'm lost!" The
lady who lived there knew my parents so, by the magic of my father's name, I
was whisked back to the security of my home.
One afternoon when I was about six, I came home from school and went directly to my favorite napping spot, under the coffee table. I don't remember what was covered in school that day, but, from the nature of my nightmare, I think it must have been my first encounter with astronomy and atomic physics and mechanist philosophy. I dreamed that I was flying around the world, like superman except that I had no control over my motion. I was skimming just above ground level, unintentionally knocking people down. I couldn't stop. I knew I would get blamed for hurting people, even though I couldn't help it. Then I was nothing but atoms. I was a swirling spiral in empty space. I was still me, still alive, yet I was nothing, nothing, nothing.
Hey, ho! Nobody home!
No meat, nor drink, nor anything to eat.
Nobody home!
Nobody home.
During his last
year in the army (when I was about ten), my father was stationed in
After my father
retired from the army, he became an Inspector for the Department of
Agriculture. His duties included inspecting the cargoes of ships coming into
San Pedro (the port for
When he heard that
Ronald Reagan had once been President of the Screen Actors Guild, my father
reversed his long-standing aversion to unions. Not only did he join his local
of the American Federation of Federal and State Employees, he became the shop
steward.
...bearers of this greeting....
Giving to you no further personal power
To business with the king, more than the scope
Of these delated articles allow.
When I was 21,
after flunking a couple of physics classes, I lost my student deferrment and
received Greetings from the President. Rather than surrender my fate entirely
to the whims of Big Brother, I volunteered for an extra year of servitude in
exchange for choice of initial duty station (
At Atomic
Demolition Munitions school I was at the top of the class in purely mental
tasks, such as deciphering the coded messages which specified the times and
places to detonate atomic munitions. However, I needed endless practice to master
even the most basic mechanical tasks. The first step in arming an atomic
demolition munition was to remove the lid from the 55-gallon drum (metal
barrel) in which it was packed. To pass inspection, each step had to be done in
the prescribed sequence. First, use a bung-wrench to loosen the bung-plug in
order to equalize air pressure inside the drum. Then unlatch and remove a steel
hoop from the rim of the lid. Then remove the lid. I was well into the second
week of school before I could consistently remember to loosen that bung-plug
before removing the hoop.
After ADM school,
I was assigned to the 62nd Engineer Company, at a post called Caserma Ederle,
in Vicenza, Italy (about 40 miles from Venice).. A few weeks after I arrived
there, Caserma Ederle was visited by Senator Sam Nunn. Although I was never
known for the sharpness of my military bearing, for some reason I was one of
the half dozen soldiers chosen to participate in the ADM demonstration for
Senator Nunn. The 55-gallon drum which I mentioned before, which was called a
MADM (Medium Atomic Demolition Munition), was the larger of the two weapons in
our arsenal. The smaller one, the SADM (Small Atomic Demolition Munition),
could be carried in a rather large backpack. I was chosen to demonstrate the
SADM. As I stood there with an atomic bomb strapped to my back, leaning
slightly forward to balance the weight, with my arms hanging down in front of
me and my helmet slipping over my eyes, I felt a strange affinity with Sad Sack
or Beetle Bailey. I overheard Senator Nunn talking to the General. He was
saying he didn't feel good about it. These weapons posed too great a potential
for theft by terrorists. Any Bozo could strap one on his back and walk off with
it. After the demonstration, my company commander, Lt Bungard, congratulated me
on a job well done.
Guildenstern
Happy, in that we are not over-happy;
On fortune's cap we are not the very button.
Hamlet
Nor the soles of her shoe?
Rosencrantz
Neither, my lord.
Hamlet
Then you live about her waist, or in the middle of her favours?
Guildenstern
'Faith, her privates we.
Hamlet
In the secret parts of fortune? O, most true; she is a strumpet.
The first time I saw Leila, she was playing pinball. Although she spoke little English, she was a master of body-English. I doubt whether her gyrating derriere had any effect on the motion of the pinball, but it had a profound impact on my emotions. Before she even turned around, I was half in love. For the next several months, I dated Leila about once a week. Between dates, my spare time was consumed by fervent memorization of little speeches in Italian.
That summer, there was a swim-meet at Caserma Ederle and the coach of the 62nd Engineer Company swim-team was having difficulty finding enough volunteers for a full team. Even though I'm a naturally inept swimmer, I let myself be talked into signing up for the 200-meter swim. I practiced for a couple of weeks, so on the day of the competition I was confident that I could at least finish the race. And finish it I did.
The 200-meter swim was the last event of the day. Standing on the edge of the pool, I squinted against the bright sunlight glinting off the water. Finally, I heard the sharp crack of the starting pistol and I plunged into the water. The world closed in around me. It was just me against the water in a silent struggle for air. I turned my head, gasped in air, then forced it out again into the water, preparing to gasp in more. Despite my dogged flailing, I seemed to hang motionless in the water. Time had stopped. One stroke was just like another. The end of the pool seemed to offer a breach in the endless cycle, but then I turned and the next lap was just like the one before it. When I finally completed the last lap and emerged from the pool, the sky was overcast and there was a chill breeze. All the other swimmers had finished and departed. Most of the spectators had left too, except for a few stragglers who didn't even notice my triumphant finish. Someone told me later that Leila had been there but had left before I finished.
A couple weeks
later, as I was wandering the streets of
There once was a lass named Annie Boyd
Who
insured her ass with
Her ass was covered, tho' often bare,
So
may God save her
One fine summer day, I was sent on a work detail to cut weeds around the ammo dump. The ammo dump was a chain-link and barbed-wire fenced square compound about a quarter-mile on each side . The slopes of the steep surrounding hills started almost at the ammo-dump fence, so instead of using ordinary lawnmowers we had to use sickles. A large gothic-looking building was perched atop one of the hills. Somebody told me that it was an insane asylum and that sometimes you could hear the inmates screaming. I don’t know if that was true. The same guy told me something else which I doubted at the time but which turned out to be true. He said that the largest building in the ammo dump, located in the very center, was a warehouse filled with empty aluminum coffins. Such were the preparations for war – bullets for killing and coffins for dying.
That fall I had
guard duty at the ammo dump. The sun had already set when I began patrolling
around the inside of the fence. A chill breeze was chasing clouds across the
face of a full moon. Ahead of me, scraps of leaves swirled in the wind - little
inconsequential pieces of reality taking control of the world and mocking my
delusions of free will. Then the howling began. The wind?
A dog? A lunatic? I don’t
know. Morbid curiosity drew me in toward the center of the compound. From fifty
yards away I could see that the door of the warehouse was ajar. Then I saw a
large white dog come out the door and disappear around the corner of the
building. I went into the building and saw that it was indeed stacked with
aluminum coffins. Finally I returned to making my rounds around the perimeter.
My duty was to guard against real intruders from outside, not imaginary ghosts
from within.
One of the things
that I loved about
One day, I
happened across a street vendor who was selling old photographs of
I found the place
a little after sunset. The building in the photo was now a hollow shell with a
gaping hole in the wall. I asked a passing Venetian and he told me it had been
bombed during the war. There were still a few Venetians around, but they were
all hurrying home to their families. As the last of their footsteps echoed into
silence, I stood alone, staring at the bombed-out hulk of days-gone-by. Then,
in the dim lamplight, I looked at the photograph, at the vibrant Venetians
scurrying about their business. It seemed like they were truly alive, and I was
but a pale shadow of their vitality. I had found the ghost of
The 62nd Engineer Company had a mascot, a white mongrel named Budweiser who roamed freely over the whole post. Among the thousands of soldiers stationed at Caserma Ederle, there was no one better known or better loved than Budweiser. Whenever any company on post was using it's barbecue pit, Budweiser was an honored guest. Sometimes he would walk beside me when I went to the PX or to the movies. As we walked along it seemed almost everyone we passed had some word of greeting for Budweiser. "Hey Bud!" "How's it goin Bud?"
Two or three times a year, the 62nd Engineer Company would take its turn marching out onto the parade field in dress greens for the Friday afternoon Retreat ceremony. On this particular Friday, the Post Commanding General had decided to re-instate the old custom of firing a cannon at the conclusion of the ceremony. As the 62nd Engineers marched slow and stately onto the parade field, Budweiser tagged along. As the flag was coming down, Budweiser ambled up to the Post Sergeant-Major and began sniffing at his boots. The Sergeant-Major stood stiffly at attention. Just before the cannon fired, Budweiser casually lifted his leg and pissed on the Sergeant-Major's spit-shined boots.
That was the last time that cannon was fired. Not because of Budweiser, but because of me, or rather the ceiling over my bunk. The sound of the cannon had caused about 50 pounds of plaster to fall on my bunk. It might have killed me if I'd been lying there at the time. My bunk-disaster even got written up in the post newspaper. So the General decided that, even though the cannon only fired at the woundless air, it was a custom more honored in the breach than the observance.
From that day on,
Budweiser was number one on the Sergeant-Major's shit-list. The MP's had
standing orders to capture Budweiser, but they never did. When on duty, the
MP's wore white boot-laces. Whenever Budweiser saw those white boot-laces, he'd
take off running. But he continued to collect his tribute from all the barbecue
pits, including the MP's barbecue pit.
After I got out of
the army, I went back to college and immediately joined ROTC. I don't know why.
Perhaps it was to please my father. Or maybe, after 3 years of saluting
officers, it seemed like a rise in station to become a "Gentleman by Act
of Congress." When I graduated, I was committed to two years of active
duty, but in order to be assigned to
After eight months
in trade school, I went to work for an insurance company that was a subsidiary
of a Fortune 500 military-industrial corporation. While I was working there,
the corporation got into some kind of trouble with the government.
Consequently, I, along with all the other employees, had to sign a consent
order swearing that we would not use baseball bats to collect debts.
The term
"actor" is far from an insult in a book about Shakespeare, but the
title "President" will never be a term of honor in any book that I
write. That great actor, Ronald Reagan, said, "Let’s get the government
off our backs!" Although he never gave his saying deed, he spoke the
speech trippingly on his tongue and in the very torrent, tempest, and whirlwind
of his passion gave it smoothness, and for that I love him.
When I have
patronized the same bookstore for a long time, sometimes the clerks start to
recognize me. Then I have to find a new bookstore. To be recognized is to be
defined, to be limited by the opinions of others. This attitude makes me
reluctant to form close friendships. One exception was Jim Haldenwang (whose
parents live near
For the last
twenty years of his life, all my father's spare time was consumed by a
played-out old gold mine near
That's how I found
myself in the passenger seat of our jeep, with a box of old dynamite on my lap,
bouncing along over an old road that was little more than a figment of my
father's imagination. I was thinking about what I had learned in the army about
the instability of old dynamite. My father said it was safe, and I trusted my
father; but I wasn't so sure I could trust that old dynamite. Finally we
arrived at the mine and my father carried the dynamite into the mine shaft. As
far as I know, it's there still.
On Christmas Eve,
1986, I drove from my aparment in
We stopped for breakfast at Blythe. My father, grandson of two preachers, believed in God but not in organized religion. My mother had been agnostic since childhood, when she first learned that Santa Claus wasn’t real. I had been agnostic since age 9, when I recognized the logical fallacy of trying to believe what you want instead of what facts and reason tell you must be. Belief is a matter of necessity not of choice. Or so I believed at that time. But your beliefs can determine what is to be. I wish that, before that one meal, we had said Grace. A few moments delay would have brought us to a different time and place. How you vote in the next election will make no difference, but what you did before breakfast this morning could change the course of history.
"One can’t
believe impossible things."
"I daresay you haven’t had much
practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for
half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible
things before breakfast."
-- Alice and the White Queen in Through the Looking Glass
When we were about
an hour from
I hear Karen Carpenter on the radio, singing "Yesterday, Once More". They say she's dead. Once she breathed and ate and slept and loved. She had hopes and dreams. All that's ended now. But, to me, she was never anything more than a beautiful voice on the radio. And she still is and always will be a beautiful voice on the radio. Karen Carpenter lives.
My father's body
was cremated and his ashes were buried in the Valley of the Sun, north of
In 1987 I was fired
for having a higher standard of professional ethics than my employer. I was out
of work for over a year. At one point, I found myself living in a cheap motel
room in
To determine whether a point is in the Mandelbrot set, you compute multiple iterations of a simple algorithm (Z-new = Z-old-squared plus C) for a pair of input values representing the coordinates of a point C on the complex plane.. If it seems that the result (length-of-Z) of the algorithm will stay under the value of 2 after an infinite number of iterations, then the point is in the set. Of course, you have to estimate infinity. You arbitrarily say, for instance, that 10 iterations is close enough to infinity. Sometimes that will give the wrong answer, but more often it works well enough. You assign coordinates to each point on the PC screen. If a point is in the Mandelbrot set, you color it black. If a point escapes (the algorithm yields a value over 2) on the 10th iteration, then it’s just outside the set, so you color it blue. If a point escapes after 9 iterations, you color it green. After 8 iterations, orange. And so on, repeating the cycle of colors when you run out of different colors. By this process, a very simple algorithm yields an amazingly complex display (although, with the primitive PC I had at that time it took hours to calculate all the iterations of the algorithm for all the pixels that comprised the PC screen). It seemed unbelievable that such a simple algorithm could generate such a complex picture. I had the feeling that the computer was slowing drawing back the curtain on a window into another universe. Through the window, I saw huge twisting tendrils like fat roots rising up from a mist far, far below. Sometimes they looked like writhing tentacles reaching up from a boiling sea of troubles.
The Mandelbrot set
is infinitely detailed and unendingly varied. If you change the scale of the
coordinate system mapped onto the computer screen, so that you are in effect
zooming in and magnifying one small area, you will get a different but equally
complex picture. However, the magnification comes at a cost. At higher levels
of magnification, you have to use more iterations of the algorithm to
approximate infinity. With each iteration, there is a rounding error, and with many iterations the errors add up. So, at higher levels of
magnification the picture becomes fuzzier and fuzzier.
At one o'clock in the morning, I found myself staring with red-rimmed eyes at my PC, as it slowly resolved itself into the coiling tentacles of chaos. I was staring into the face of chaos and it was the face of a gorgon. Insanity is not the inability to perceive reality. True madness lies in the inability to ignore the meaningless patterns of blind chance. But how can we shut our eyes to the patterns that govern our fates?
Finally, rounding errors reduced the pattern to a uniform mist.
I began to study physics and philosophy. I read about the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. At each instant, every sub-atomic particle in the world is in an indeterminate state. If circumstances have determined its position, then its momentum can have any value with equal probability. According to the many-worlds interpretation, the particle does not somehow choose among these many equal probabilities, but instead, the future of the world splits into a separate version for each possible momentum of that particle. This happens at each instant for each sub-atomic particle in the world. The result is that everything is possible and will in fact occur. The implications of this are terrifying. You cannot ever die. At each instant, there will be a possible configuration of sub-atomic particles, one of the many actual branches of the future, in which you will continue to live. Also at each instant, there will be many future branches in which you will suffer every conceivable affliction. You have an infinity of damnation ahead of you. However, also at each instant, you will begin a life of eternal bliss. You will be forever on the threshold of both heaven and hell. The only certainty in this eternal life will be your memory of your acts of free will. Although your will may be forever thwarted, it will always be. Because you are your will, nothing else.
Yield not thy neck
To fortune's yoke, but let thy dauntless mind
Still ride in triumph over all mischance.
(Henry VI, Part 3,
Act III, Scene 3, Lines,16-18)
After more than a
year of unemployment, I finally got a job with the
I fantasized about somehow attacking the reputation of my father’s killer. Perhaps I could camp out outside his home, passing out flyers telling everyone what he did. But those fantasies always degenerated into a final confrontation scene, wherein I stomped on his chest until his ribs caved in. And sometimes I thought about old dynamite.
My father was not
a violent man, nor was he an advocate of Big Government; but he was a career
army officer. By his profession (in which I followed him) he symbolized
institutionalized violence. I witnessed my father's murder by a joy-riding
junkie. I looked to my father's government to revenge his death. Instead, I saw
the justice system mete out a punishment of "community service" to my
father's murderer; that same week I read about a man in
I had long shunned Hamlet because, from what I had heard of it, it seemed to be a glorification of suicide. After my father’s death I was even more repelled by the idea of the son of a murdered father who might prefer suicide to revenge. But then, in 1992, I saw an interview with Mel Gibson, promoting his "gutsy" version of Hamlet. About the same time, I bought Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare. After reading Asimov’s chapter on Hamlet and after seeing Gibson’s movie, I began to see Hamlet not as an indecisive, suicidal wimp, but rather as a valiant soldier of the spirit, fighting a desperate internal battle to defend the sovereignty of his soul.
That same year, I read George Polya’s How To Solve It, where I learned a new attitude. I learned to be a connoisseur of problems. I savor each problem, walking around it and admiring it from all sides. I invite the problem into my mind and guide it through the myriad chambers of my psyche, introducing it to each idea already living there. I search the outside world for relatives of this problem, this new idea. I welcome the related ideas, like the family of a new immigrant. I become one with the new idea. It becomes a cherished part of me and I become a node in its web of interconnections with the world.
With this
preparation, I began to read Hamlet on Christmas Day, 1992, looking for proof
that Hamlet was not suicidal. I found that and much more.
Player-King
This world in not for ay, nor 'tis not strange
That even our love should with our fortunes change
Physicists say the most fundamental laws of this world are writ in very choice quantum mechanics. According to quantum mechanics, an electron in isolation has no fixed properties. It can have any position, speed, or direction. It is a probability wave spreading out in all directions. Its properties only become actual when it interacts with some larger configuration of matter; then, they say, "the probability wave collapses".
Horatio
Oh day and night! But this is wondrous stra