TY - JOUR
AU - Tanner,, William
AB - The seventeenth century knew Hamlet as an aberrant socialtype termed the “melancholy malcontent,” which had made its way onstage by way of the satirical malcontents of Ben Jonson and John Marston.1 In criticism, however, the question of the malcontent has long been closed, while questions of religion, revenge, and political theory in Hamlet continue to garner considerable attention.2 Moreover, critics remain resistant to examining Shakespearean “character” in terms of “type,” because the assumption is that type is deterministic.3 The complex transformations of the Vice in early modern drama—the malcontent and the Machiavel making up two such branches—demonstrate that in fact a stage type functioned as a frame structuring an evolving conversation. Common features lend intelligibility, but these are signposts for positions and problems upon which each subsequent writer plays, altering the type’s overall network of meanings. For this reason, I trace Shakespeare’s malcontent type through Marston and to some extent as far as Thomas Kyd, drawing out Hamlet’s responses and interventions. The word “malcontent” enters the English language by way of the conflicts between the Catholics and Huguenots in France. In 1572, Catherine de Médici and the Duke of Guise plotted the assassination of Coligny, a prominent Huguenot leader, which precipitated the murder of thousands of Huguenots in the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.4 As Catholic persecution of European Protestants threatened to reach genocidal levels, these Protestants could no longer dismiss Machiavelli’s analysis of power as essentially amoral. Following the Massacre, Huguenots began publishing protorepublican, monarchomach tracts, many of which, like Gentillet’s Discours contre Machiavel, attacked Catherine and the Guise’s Machiavellian practices while simultaneously conceding and modifying many of Machiavelli’s key insights. These tracts established two political narratives relevant to Hamlet. First, they cast the Massacre as a fratricidal attempt by Charles IX to murder his brother Navarre. Second, they developed a new theory of legitimate resistance to monarchical authority, founded primarily on the principles of Calvinist religious conscience and the election of a monarch by the will of the people. Out of the conflict with Catherine and the Guise emerged two dissident groups that called themselves “Les Malcontents.” The first was a band of Huguenot nobles resisting Henri III under Anjou (then Alençon) between 1574 and 1576. The second—whose connection to the English context was more immediate—was a group of Catholic Walloon soldiers who betrayed their Protestant allies in October 1578 in Flanders, provoking outraged responses such as Thomas Churchyard’s poem “The Miserie of Flaunders” (1579). John Stubbes’s infamous attack on Elizabeth’s proposed marriage to Anjou, “The discoverie of a gaping gulf,” taints Anjou through this connection, since Anjou “ioyned hymselfe with the Malcontents eyther in Fraunce or the lovve conntryes.”5 Anjou had nothing to do with the Walloon betrayal, but Stubbes’s disingenuous either/or construction seeks to establish his guilt by association through the shared name, binding together treachery, Machiavellianism, and malcontentism. The shock of the Protestant massacres in the 1570s reverberated through the influential tragedies of Marlowe and Kyd in plays such as The Jew of Malta, The Massacre at Paris, The Spanish Tragedy, and perhaps the Ur-Hamlet as well. These plays developed the stage Machiavel as the embodiment of this new conception of evil. In response Marston and Jonson delivered the stage malcontent, embodying the discontent underlying Kyd’s and Marlowe’s nihilistic political vision but also channeling it through satire as an engine for critique and change. Almost simultaneously, Marston’s verse satire gave voice to a different kind of malcontent, one fueled by resentment and pathological despair. Shakespeare’s Hamlet intervenes in this development first by reviving the more disturbing and pathological malcontent of Marston’s verse satire, and second by tracing the English malcontent to its roots in the French confessional conflicts. Hamlet’s version of the stage malcontent infuses the figure with the full force of Marstonian invective, and with it the bleak Calvinist world view that John Gillies calls the “bicameral model of the self” in his analysis of “original sin” in Hamlet: any perception of ourselves or others as virtuous arises from the visible deeds of the public self, while the true self remains essentially monstrous and unknowable.6 This misanthropic world view led many to conclude that, as the title of one seventeenth-century sermon put it, “Spiritus Calvinisticus est spiritus melancholicus,” a melancholy verging dangerously on despair.7 Marston accurately interprets Kyd’s revenge tragedy as embedded in a similar form of melancholic resentment; his Antonio plays seek to foreclose the possibility of neo-Senecan revenge tragedy by rendering the tragic response ridiculous, countering despair with satirical catharsis. Shakespeare’s Hamlet takes up Marston’s interpretation of Kyd, but, by placing a satirical malcontent at the center of the revenge fantasy, the play renders satire an all too impotent response to despair—its catharsis meaningless. In this essay, I argue that Shakespeare’s malcontent is best understood as a development of the Vice figure encompassing the problem of politico-spiritual despair as represented in Marstonian satire and monarchomach resistance theory, both of which are rooted in Calvinism. Shakespeare’s play follows many sixteenth-century adaptations of Saxo Grammaticus’s legend of Amleth, a story repeatedly deployed in the polemics of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. The most important of these was François de Belleforest’s adaptation of Amleth in his Histoire tragiques. A major opponent of the Huguenots and an infamous apologist for the Massacre, Belleforest wrote his Amleth episode two years before the Massacre, and it was his version that served as the basic outline for Shakespeare’s play.8 In this histoire tragique, Amleth, dispossessed by his uncle (Fengon) fakes madness as he plots revenge. He is sent to England to be executed, only to alter the letter and return, burning the Great Hall full of disloyal nobles and beheading his uncle. Amleth’s revenge via the simulatio of madness is strategically and successfully executed, and he becomes king of the Danes, albeit briefly. By refashioning the crude violence of Belleforest’s Fengon into the Machiavellian Claudius, Shakespeare gives Hamlet one of revenge tragedy’s most compelling motivations. Yet whereas Belleforest figures Amleth’s vengeance as the just reinstatement of the rightful king, Hamlet’s failure to put the prosperity of the realm above his private revenge ends his lineage and gives over Denmark’s throne to a foreign invader. I argue that Hamlet troubles Belleforest’s easy alignment of private revenge and public justice. In doing so, I am not arguing that Hamlet lacks compelling reasons for revenge; rather, I am arguing that he lacks moral justification despite those reasons. The questions that “dull” Hamlet’s “revenge” (4.4.32) are questions not only of epistemology but also of political philosophy and theology. These are the doubts against which Hamlet girds himself by finding in Fortinbras’s actions a deeply cynical definition of greatness: “puff’d” with “ambition” (l. 48), greatness means “to find quarrel in a straw” (l. 54), to send twenty thousand men to their deaths “Even for an eggshell” (l. 52), without regard for consequence or justification.9 Trapped between two systems of value, revenge and justice, Hamlet must convince himself that only one is valid if he is to escape the paralysis of moral conflict. Hamlet progressively evacuates his conscience as he attempts to fashion himself as a proper revenger, in the process ironically perverting the Protestant assertion of conscience as an authority for resisting temporal power. Witnesses to the body-strewn stage of Denmark, the members of Hamlet’s audience are heirs only to a radical political pessimism that leaves no apparent horizon for just resistance. I. The Metamorphosis of the Malcontent Early modern melancholy does not conform nicely to modern psychological classifications such as “disorder.” Perceived as a depressed affective state sometimes with sudden manic episodes, not unlike modern bipolar disorder, it is probably best understood as a “discursive disease.” It was shaped by and embedded in a wide array of intellectual discourses. Melancholy’s near-ubiquitous status by the beginning of the seventeenth century emerges from “the increased domain in which the concept of melancholy could be applied,” as Angus Gowland argues; what Drew Daniel calls the “melancholy assemblage” had become capable of aggregating and syncretizing a vast array of discourses, sometimes in contradictory fashions.10 The melancholy malcontent is a particular subclassification of melancholy, with its own set of assemblages. The malcontent type fundamentally personifies an affectively charged response to injustice. However, the type simultaneously contains a critique of the personal ambition and hubristic sense of self-worth that condition this response—a satirical critique that poets and playwrights employed for self-reflection and self-satire as much as for the denunciation and censure of others. Lawrence Babb’s seminal account of early modern melancholy outlines the set of tropes that define the malcontent as social and stage type: the disheveled appearance and black garments, the misanthropy born of a frustrated sense of unacknowledged superiority.11 Yet this listing of parodically reductive characteristics fails to do justice to early modern typology’s generative capability and social psychology. The stage malcontent developed along two primary strands. First, Jonson’s Every Man Out of His Humour posits the envious malcontent (Macilente) as merely the mask through which the purgative plans of the virtuous satirist (Asper) are achieved—both Macilente and Asper standing as obvious analogues for Jonson himself—although the extent to which Asper can maintain this separation between person and persona becomes increasingly questionable. Second, in Marston’s comic Antonio and Mellida, the virtuous malcontent courtier Feliche is able to speak truth to the tyrant, synthesizing the reflexive satire of the wits with the counsel of the parrhesiastes. But before Antonio’s Revenge begins, Feliche has already been murdered, and a hyperbolically violent revenge plot ensues, painting a bloody world in which the malcontent must seek catharsis not in counsel but in carnage. Thus, as a figure of social discontent, the malcontent was often the self-mocking projection of satirical wits, taking a moment to laugh at their own struggle for social mobility. As a figure of political critique, meanwhile, the malcontent named the dangerous ambiguity of the dissenting noble, who could be cast as the parrhesiastes or the seditious grumbler, as the defender of just rule or the traitorous rebel. To understand how the malcontent Hamlet challenges the assumptions underlying various available metrics of legitimate resistance, including even Belleforest’s conservative assertion that only the rightful monarch can legitimately resist, we need to trace the unique heritage of the English stage malcontent to the wits’ flurry of verse satire in the last years of the sixteenth century. Whereas in France “malcontent” indicated sincere political dissidence, the English term was laden with associations of Machiavellianism and betrayal. Even the virtuous malcontents of Jonson and Marston are ambivalent and short-lived efforts to redirect the problem of discontent into a post-Machiavellian political orientation. This ambivalence and ambiguity make the malcontent figure a flexible, fertile engine for dramaturgical experiments in social and political discourse. Hamlet plays on this ambivalence, portraying a tormented struggle to respond to the dual demands of blood vengeance and political justice. Following the massacres in Paris and Flanders, the English term “malcontent” quickly took on its more abstract, adjectival form as a label for social types defined by discontent and ambition.12 The “malcontent” became associated in the 1580s with rebellious courtiers who had absorbed too many of the Machiavellian lessons of Continental politics (and it was thus later linked to the shadow falling over Essex’s career). In the 1590s, the term became associated with the Inns of Court gentlemen, a new class of courtiers using education and wit rather than birth to define an unstable developing social class. This generation had a particular penchant for satire, resulting in a brief outpouring of printed satirical verse that ended abruptly with the Bishops’ Order (or Bishops’ Ban) of 1599.13 Everard Guilpin is a minor figure in this conflict who usefully defines the Inns of Court malcontent, and whose historical significance can be summed up in a prominent pile of ashes: his Skialetheia (listed in the Bishops’ Order under its subtitle Shadowe of Truthe) was one of seven books “burnte in the hall” along with his friend Marston’s Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image and Certaine Satyres and Scourge of Villainie.14 Guilpin’s fifteen minutes go little further, but Skialetheia most clearly defines the shifting valence of the malcontent at the turn of the century in ways that are crucial to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In a little-noted epigram “Of Pansa,” Guilpin critiques the earnestly frivolous malcontentism this new generation was breeding. Asking why “Fine spruce yong Pansa’s growne a malcontent,” the speaker suggests a number of possible causes: the death of Pansa’s father, need of a “whore,” love sickness, or perhaps Hamlet-esque lofty thoughts. However, all these are quickly dismissed as the speaker reaches his conclusion that “the cause of this melancholly” is none other than a ruined pair of shoes: Last night which did our Ins of court men call him? In silken sutes like gawdy Butterflies, To paint the Torch-light sommer of the hall, And shew good legs, spite of slops-smothering thies He passing from his chamber through the Court, Did spoile a paire of new white pumps with durt.15 Guilpin of Gray’s Inn expected his friends to recognize the Pansa among and within them. As the satirist’s conjectures proceed from the consequential to the increasingly frivolous, Guilpin suggests that the extremity of Pansa’s emotional reactions arises from the triviality of his existence. The critique of frivolity and vanity, however, seemingly an easy target for the satirist’s scourge, takes on a more bitter valence if we consider the reflexivity of the portrait. Babb notes the satirist’s “derision” for the malcontent but fails to observe the self-criticism and in-group humor underlying such satires: more often than not, the satirist and the malcontent are one and the same.16 A certain desperation attended these attempts at advancement through wit and satire, techniques James Biester calls “a most dangerous game”: “by posing as melancholic and even Machiavellian wits,” would-be courtiers could “provoke” the “wonder” that Castiglione prescribes as the goal of his courtly technē while self-consciously setting themselves up for a Hal-like reformation of character. Playing the melancholic was a way to evoke Ficino’s rarefied category of melancholic genius, but at the risk of also seeming “dangerously diseased.”17 Satirists such as Guilpin critique these dangerous strategies of advancement while simultaneously using satire as a mode of engagement in those same practices, evincing both a high degree of self-consciousness and a fraught position that an older notion of vice could not encompass. Often seen as a representative Elizabethan malcontent, Marston uses satire to project a world where vice and virtue are not separate paths we can choose: rather, vice permeates our every thought and hinders our every clumsy attempt at virtue.18 Marston’s W. Kinsayder, the satirical persona of The Scourge of Villanie, expresses the Calvinist experience of “man[’s]” “unvarying corruption” and “depravity of nature” as a nauseating disgust for self and species.19 Marston self-consciously positions his satiric persona as already morally compromised, in contradistinction to satirists who insist on their virtuous disdain for vice. Marston’s proem to Certaine Satyres frames the collection as self-critique turned outward (“Thus hauing rail’d against my selfe a while, / Ile snarle at those, which doe the world beguile / With masked showes”).20 There is certainly irony in the reformation that precedes his attack on hypocrisy in “Satyre II” (“I that euen now lisp’d like an Amorist, / Am turn’d into a snaphaunce Satyrist”), which signals a complicity in the muck of the world. While the snarling of other satirists hints “at some secret sinne” of their own that they cloak in the “milk-white robes” of feigned purity, Marston’s satiric persona wears his vices on his sleeve, even implying that his obsession with lust in the satires is no accident but rather the attempt to purge his own vice: “my selfe am not imaculate.”21 Guilpin seems more confident in the cathartic properties of satire than Marston, but both seek to diagnose the problems of their own social group. The emphasis of Guilpin’s “gawdy Butterflies” on the trivialities of fine clothing and entertainment betrays a self-conscious display of wealth and leisure designed to cultivate the image of an elite class, carefully concealed beneath an impression of careless ease. These same “gaudie Butter-flies” appear in Marston’s Scourge of Villanie, where his pun on “ingrain’d Habites, died with often dips”—habitual behavior as clothing dyed by repeated dipping in grain—suggests just how appropriate Michelle O’Callaghan’s use of habitus is to the wits’ own self-conception: Guilpin and Marston both demonstrate a keen awareness of how a set of deliberately cultivated signs such as garments can become the pattern for a nascent social class to define itself whole cloth.22 The Inns of Court fashionistas were self-fashioning in the most literal sense. But as sprezzatura turns every action into a self-conscious production, the deadly serious cultivation of frivolity becomes a distasteful performance: the dismissive tone of the seemingly objective satirist conceals the self-mocking reflexivity of the actor observing his own ludicrous costume. On these utterly superficial signs hangs all the weight of his boundless ambition, hinted at in part by the satirist’s jibe that his father’s death does not distress but rather “reuiues him” with thoughts of inheritance.23 Moreover, the almost schizophrenic duality that this fusion of the significant and insignificant produces necessarily breeds a resentment that may further contribute to the malcontent’s emotionally volatile state. Famously, the Bishops’ Order did not end public satire but rather translated it into a new medium, moving satire generally and satirist Marston particularly to the stage. Marston played a crucial role in developing the stage malcontent, particularly through his Antonio plays (1599–1600), an odd diptych of romantic comedy followed by revenge tragedy. The malcontents in these plays are different from what we might expect: a virtuous courtier speaking truth in a corrupt court and a frustrated stoic surrendering to despair. By contrast, Shakespeare seems to model his malcontent largely on verse satire. While critics have long seen a minor connection between Hamlet and the Poetomachia in the “little eyases” speech, Shakespeare’s play may be more specifically targeting Marston, who was one of the instigators of the Poetomachia and whose Antonio’s Revenge helped renew interest in revenge tragedy.24 Seeing Hamlet as directly in dialogue with Marston helps explain why the play’s language more strongly resembles earlier verse satire than the theatrical satire of the Poetomachia. Shakespeare’s response to the popularity of the Antonio plays was not merely to create a Marstonian revenge tragedy for the adult theaters but rather to place a Marstonian satirist at its center.25 Hamlet, of course, is a prince and not a struggling gentleman, yet his politically uncertain position and witty demeanor are strikingly analogous to these malcontent wits. Guilpin’s and Marston’s analysis of the ambivalent signification of clothing reflects the Hamlet we first meet: a youth dressed in black who stands silent during Claudius’s speech, expressing stylized, politic grief for the elder Hamlet’s death. Hamlet’s vehement insistence that he has “that within which passes show” (1.2.85) articulates the paradox of the malcontent: a stereotype that continually protests its singularity. Much as Guilpin and Marston resent the immense significance that trivial garments are forced to bear in the great social game, Hamlet deliberately wears the “nighted colour” (l. 68) as a sign of grief and resistance to the hasty marriage, while simultaneously despising the insufficiency of signs. Signs are iterable and potentially deceptive. Hamlet’s “forms, moods, shapes of grief” (l. 82) do conform to his inward state, but he hates that they might not: signs always carry the potential for duplicity. Hamlet’s vitriolic speech echoes Shakespeare’s other famous malcontent, Jaques, who claims that his melancholy does not conform to any one stereotype but is rather “a melancholy of mine own” (As You Like It, 4.1.15–16), a personal blend synthesized from many sources.26 Superficially at least, Hamlet is not expressing the ambition and sense of neglected superiority that drive the Inns of Court malcontents. But his insistence that the outward “trappings” (1.2.86) and signs of grief fail to define his internal state even as they correspond to that state would likely amuse Elizabethan spectators who recognized the conventional signs of malcontentism in these early scenes. At the same time, Hamlet’s rejection of signs indicates a legitimate resentment of the Machiavellian facility with appearances that Claudius represents: murderous ambition in regal guise. Malcontentism is a symptom of a larger social disorder, that “The time is out of joint” (1.5.186). Like the malcontents of Marston and Jonson, Hamlet sees his duty as more than diagnosis: he is also the cure that must “set it right” (l. 187), as the begrudging (yet self-appointed) agent of justice. But the malcontent Hamlet’s fate is tragic because the injustice he faces is not of a scale that can be balanced: the attempt can breed only greater evils and injustices. The very affective intensity that compels Hamlet unbalances his passions, rendering the line between revenge and justice as occluded as the ambivalent agency of the Ghost.27 In opposition to Peter Lake’s claim that “private revenge” and “legitimate resistance” “perhaps should” align in the case of Claudius, I suggest that for Hamlet the real dilemma is that personal motivation and the common good cannot be disentangled.28 Claudius’s crimes demand public justice and private revenge, but Hamlet cannot satisfy one demand without forsaking the other. Only recently have critics started to take seriously the degree to which personal ambition drives Hamlet.29 When Rosencrantz attempts to counsel Hamlet that “You do surely bar the door upon your own liberty if you deny your griefs to your friend,” Hamlet answers simply, “Sir, I lack advancement” (3.2.329–30, 331). The context has encouraged most critics to deem the line disingenuous, but, earlier in the same scene, “advancement” is on Hamlet’s mind when he commends Horatio’s stoicism (l. 53), and he censures himself to Ophelia for being “proud, revengeful, [and] ambitious” (3.1.123–24). As Margreta de Grazia points out, Hamlet is much more about the dispossession of land than has previously been recognized.30 Whereas our Inns of Court malcontent Pansa is macabrely elated by the expectation of a modest inheritance, Hamlet’s expectation that he would inherit an entire realm has been frustrated by the unexpected intrusion of Claudius, who “Popped in between th’election and my hopes” (5.2.64). Crucially, Claudius “pops in” and steals Hamlet’s “hopes” of the throne rather than his right to it. Hamlet seems to figure Claudius as a rival rather than as a traitor or usurper: at this point, Hamlet imagines the two of them as “mighty opposites” thundering the heavens in their competition rather than as a rightful heir attempting to wrest his throne from an illegitimate tyrant (l. 61). Guilpin’s Pansa debases the ambition of the Inns of Court gentleman to vulgar social climbing and greed, but, by packaging the motives, emotions, and methods of this class in the person of a prince, Shakespeare’s Hamlet raises the political stakes of this most dangerous game. In “Satyre II,” Marston wonders how the “squint-ey’d sight” of the frenetic satirist “Could strike the worlds deformities so right,” yet he warns in the same breath that extreme emotion skews the “iudging eye.”31 Like an inversion of physics’ observer effect, one cannot diagnose the world’s deformities without risking disfigurement. Hamlet believes that his personal ambition aligns with the commonweal, yet the violence his passionate actions produce sorely tests this assumption. Ambition is the defining characteristic of both the Inns of Court malcontent and the malcontent courtier, and this motive mingles uncomfortably with Hamlet’s just grievances. The “grief” (1.2.82) Hamlet feels for his father’s passing is itself equivocal, since the word still carried a greater affinity with the verbal sense of “grieved.”32 Interpreted in this fashion, Hobbes’s definition of melancholy in Leviathan suddenly seems not only an apt definition of the malcontent but also almost a synopsis of the play: “Griefe, from opinion of want of power, is called DEJECTION of mind. . . . Dejection, subjects a man to causelesse fears; which is a Madnesse commonly called MELANCHOLY.”33 Just as Gertrude becomes the site of an incestuous nausea that occludes Hamlet’s own desire for the throne his mother represents, in King Hamlet the prince locates a “grief” that equates the death of the father with the withholding of that throne.34 Hamlet explicitly conjoins these two grievances in Q1: “What would he do an if he had my loss— / His father murdered and a crowne bereft him?”35 Whereas Hamlet’s prototypes, Belleforest’s Amleth and Lucius Junius Brutus before him, took on a purely instrumental “antic disposition,” Shakespeare positions his Hamlet among those dispositional melancholics who deepen and deploy their condition strategically. Polonius insists that Hamlet is mad, but that his “madness” contains, hides, or facilitates a “method” (2.2.202–3). Such strategic madness had become a popular stage convention: in Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, Hieronimo’s madness is clearly established, and if Kyd did indeed write an Ur-Hamlet, his prince probably expressed a similar antic madness. Stephen Greenblatt and others have noted how the movement from “an open to a secret murder” renders Hamlet’s madness more impediment than strategy, but the reasons Hamlet “feign[s]” a real condition remain little understood.36 If “habit,” as Marston defines it, produces our sociopolitical identity, then it is hard to see how we would distinguish what we do from who we are. In the case of melancholy, maintaining the distinction between persona and identity is nigh impossible: this tension produces the comedic effect of Hamlet’s struggle to dissociate his black habits from the melancholy they represent. Such ambiguity had contemporary consequences for one courtier, the Earl of Essex. John Donne and Sir John Harington both attempted to diagnose Essex in the months leading up to his fall. Both were courtiers who deployed satire as a mode of critique, and in fact Harrington had upset the queen a few years earlier for supposedly “aim[ing] a shaft at Leicester” in his satirical Ajax.37 Perhaps their facility with the dangerous slippage between self and persona lent insight to their analyses. Harington attributed Essex’s degeneration to the workings of ambition, which “thwarted in its career, dothe speedilie leade on to madnesse.”38 While Harington’s description emphasizes an addled and eccentric mind, Donne had written to Henry Wotton that “the worst accidents of his sicknes are that [Essex] conspires with it & that it is not here beleeved.”39 Biester rightly argues that Essex is seen to be engaged in the “feigning” of melancholy, just as Ralegh and countless other Elizabethan courtiers strategically cultivated a melancholic demeanor.40 This leads some to see the madness as pure dissimulation; like Polonius, however, Donne and Harrington see the madness as real and strategic. Were Essex’s fears “causelesse”? Not entirely. Hamlet’s fears, too, are not unfounded: he uncovers his father’s murder and, due to his own actions, becomes Claudius’s next target. Unable to dissociate themselves from their affective responses, however, malcontents such as Hamlet and Essex begin to act out in ways that exacerbate or even create adversarial conditions with the most powerful people around them. As Marston’s Scourge puts it, “Thou nursing Mother of faire wisedoms lore, / Ingenuous Melancholy, […] / Inthrone thee in my blood.”41 Hamlet too “enthrones” melancholy in his blood. He eschews stoic patience or the traditional cures for melancholy and turns instead to satire—that body of work seeking to purge melancholy by indulging it.42 The book Hamlet is reading when he meets Polonius contains not amorous verses but those of a “satirical rogue” (2.2.193). Shakespeare plays on the trope of the revenger’s handbook: Kyd’s Hieronimo reads from Seneca’s tragedies, perverting them into a revenge manual, while Marston’s black-clad Antonio reads from Seneca’s De Providentia. Antonio fails to heed the call to patience and instead follows Hieronimo in his rejection of stoicism and an un-Senecan embrace of a tragic truth: “Pigmy cares / Can shelter under patience’ shield, but giant griefs / Will burst all covert.”43 Marston underlines Kyd’s message—stoicism has a breaking point that renders all its cold comfort trite and meaningless: “Pish!” Antonio tells the dead pages of Seneca, “Thy mother was not lately widowed, / Thy dear affièd love lately defamed / With blemish of foul lust when thou wrotest thus.”44 Shakespeare thoroughly shifts the ground of this convention by making his revenger’s handbook not stoic tragedy or philosophy but satire. If Marston put the viability of stoicism on trial in his satiric revenge tragedies, then Shakespeare puts Marston’s own satirical vein to the test: does malcontent satire present any better hermeneutic for dealing with life’s vicissitudes? Much contemporary verse satire drew heavily from Juvenal, but Hamlet’s particular brand of Juvenal more specifically resembles Marston’s own obfuscating wit.45 Without giving Polonius any chance to reply, Hamlet recontextualizes the generalized satire on “old men” (l. 194), suddenly suggesting that he takes personal offense. He casts himself as the old man and Polonius as the youth only to shift gears mid-sentence; he jibes that Polonius would need to age backward “like a crab” (l. 200), revealing the entire statement to be a conditional contrary to fact. The convoluted re-reframing renders the jibe clear while making it almost impossible to justify taking offense. Seeming to mistake satire for slander, echoing the tension that haunted print and theater alike, Hamlet in fact converts the general satiric portrait into an oblique slanderous attack on Polonius. Perhaps most important, however, Hamlet defines the portrait of old age as slanderous not because it is dishonest but because it should not be “set down,” a scathing critique of the process of interpreting satire as slander. First, Hamlet points out that interpreting satire as slander implies the truth of the statement, since those who take offense must find the qualities described in the satire applicable to themselves. He then proceeds to subtly mock the paradox of early modern censorship: the danger of setting down the truth. The result is a highly ambivalent anatomy of satire’s possibilities. On the one hand, if satire is upsetting because it reveals the truth, then its effects are salutary. On the other hand, wit’s capacity to slide ambiguously between the general and specific, obfuscating its true intentions, turns satire into a safe harbor for libel. The revenger’s shift from stoic to satirical reading matter signals satire’s rise as a political discourse as much as moral one. Yet what does it mean to translate a discourse obsessed with vice into politics? Marston’s Kinsayder expresses his project in the traditional terms of purgation through flagellation: “In serious iest, and iesting seriousnes / I striue to scourge poluting beastlines.” Invoking personifications of resentment (“grim Reproofe” and “Faire Detestation”) rather than classical muses, he wishes “that a Satyres hand had force to pluck / Some fludgate vp, to purge the world from muck.”46 Kinsayder projects the purgative force into a subjunctive space where the scourging of vice does not yield a cathartic effect but is mere railing against a state he cannot change. Kinsayder sees his age as a body hopelessly choked with excremental waste. Alvin Kernan points out Kinsayder’s obsession with “the functions and diseases of the human body,” arguing that the Scourge expresses a pessimism far beyond stoicism that “borders on the psychotic.”47 Unlike the satire of Guilpin and others, Marston figures satire as wishful thinking, venting one’s own frustrations and humors without hope of garnering more than the censure of his readers. Marston’s plays verge on the parodic instead, going beyond despair into the pure indulgence of cathartic fantasies. In this sense, Hamlet resurrects the question of satire’s viability, dramatizing the despair at its heart as a tragic condition. Hamlet’s character fuses Kinsayder’s deranged satirical speech with the just courtier of Marstonian drama, undermining the separation Marston seems to maintain between his verse and his dramatic characters. The physicality of the Scourge’s attacks on vice resonates with Hamlet’s tendency to map political aspirations onto grotesque bodily images. While Hamlet’s satirical attack on Polonius’s age is relatively easy to follow, despite its dizzying changes in direction, other satirical images are fragmentary and nearly unintelligible, such as his sudden shift from a dead dog to Ophelia: “For if the sun breed maggots in a dead dog, being a good kissing carrion—Have you a daughter?” (ll. 178–79). The association Hamlet makes between spontaneous generation and Ophelia’s potential pregnancy is clear enough, but the sentence fragment leaves this image like one of those “darke Enigmaes” of satire whose “strange ridling sense” eludes Marston.48 Polonius is confronted by the image without the allegory. The image develops layers of grotesque sensation on the level of sight, touch, and smell, but obfuscates the sense. Reminiscent of Kinsayder’s aimless scourging, Hamlet’s satiric method seems to be less an attempt to effect change and more the expression of a futile resentment at the state of the world and an unhealthy obsession with his own grotesque images. Like a man lingering over the dog’s corpse, Hamlet seems to find perverse pleasure in developing and deepening his rejection of the world. His suicidal impulses likewise exhibit a death drive that is halted only by doubt. Despite being an ambiguously Catholic or Protestant specter, Hamlet’s Ghost should presumably at least anchor the play’s Christian framework. Yet in Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy (3.1.55–89), the “undiscovered country” (l. 78) is a space of dread and the unknown, where God is conspicuously absent. Instead, the soliloquy contemplates suicide in stoic terms, but ultimately Hamlet falters in the face of his fear of the unknown, a reaction he oddly calls “conscience” (l. 82). Hamlet sees the world much as Kinsayder does, but Kinsayder’s futility in the face of the world’s “muck” has reached in Hamlet the level of suicidal despair. The play also entangles the audience in sympathy with the protagonist; we respect his gallows humor and his attempts to face his terrible revelations philosophically. The charisma and the sympathy Hamlet evokes derive from the morality play Vice who influenced the evolution of antic figures in both Elizabethan comedy and tragedy.49 The audience is seduced to the Vice’s position through humor and a seemingly inevitable logic; we come to share his world view and thus his atheism. In the new Elizabethan tragedy, however, there is no armored Christian figure coming with sword in hand to break the spell in the second act. Hamlet’s character syncretizes the native tradition of the Vice and the Senecan villain-protagonist, taking on a less allegorical, more psychological valence.50 In the moral comedy of sin, Vice was a separate entity susceptible to theological or theatrical catharsis. Hamlet is instead a tragedy of the ultimate Protestant peril of despair: vice can no longer be extracted from the faithful like a weed but is an inherent part of human nature. Luther had made the encounter with despair an inevitable result of Catholic modes of interpreting God’s word and integral to the Protestant conversion experience. Calvin intensified this connection, seeing the “anxiety and dejection” created by self-examination as necessary for self-abandonment to God’s grace: “In contrast to Luther’s ambivalent appraisal of tristitia [spiritual melancholy], therefore, for Calvin, despair had a necessary and unequivocally positive eschatological function.”51 Such a test risked failure: as Ficino warned in Theologia platonica, melancholy could also lead to a “despair and atheistic impiety” that could drive one to suicide.52 How we understand the play’s final act hinges on whether we see Hamlet’s despair as engendering abandonment to grace or merely fomenting tyrannicide. II. The French Context of Hamlet’s Tyrannicide Hamlet represents Shakespeare’s most elaborate meditation on the moral entanglement of revenge, resistance, and republicanism, which he began in Lucrece. The play crafts a usurper far more Machiavellian than its sources, and neither patience nor conscience, the bulwarks of Protestant political thought, finds an easy solution. English resistance theory has a long history, and Hamlet’s engagement with it is suggested, for example, by the gravedigger’s references to the Lollard John Ball’s class-leveling couplet: “When Adam dalf, and Eve span, / Wo was thanne a gentilman?” (cf. Hamlet, 5.1.14–31).53 Developing French theories of resistance, however, were not only known to the English but also were an increasingly pressing concern in the late sixteenth century, as Catholics began paradoxically to deploy these theories in Scotland and England. The malcontent’s French roots indicate the relevance of these theories to Hamlet. Richard Greaves outlines three essential lineages of political resistance from which Elizabethan Protestants could draw: the old view of obedient suffering under divinely ordained magistrates; the misogynist attacks on Mary Tudor à la John Knox, emphasizing refusal of ungodly commandments; and the new Calvinist theories of active resistance developing in France. For obvious reasons, the Knox line of thought became an embarrassment for Protestants under Elizabeth; meanwhile, it was the English Catholics who pragmatically adapted Calvinist positions of resistance. English Protestants thus tended to fall back on obedience, particularly since however disgruntled they might be with Elizabeth’s policies they had no cause to declare them irreligious.54 Hamlet’s engagement with the French context becomes most clearly visible when the play is set beside two crucial intertexts: Vindiciae, contra tyrannos (1576), the most infamous Huguenot resistance tract, and Belleforest’s Counter-Reformation Histoire tragiques, with its Amleth adaptation (1570). Although neither was translated prior to the seventeenth century, the English were familiar with both at the very least by reputation. Along with Gentillet’s Discours contre Machiavel, the Vindiciae lies at the foundation of Huguenot resistance theory, and its likely authors, Hubert Languet and “Huguenot Pope” Phillipe de Mornay, had strong ties to the radical Protestants of the Sidney circle. Written under the pseudonym “Stephanus Junius Brutus,” the Vindiciae was, as Hadfield notes, the “most widely cited source” of the treasonous belief that people can resist and even execute a tyrant who has gone against God.55 Hadfield and other critics have argued that Hamlet’s madness resembles that of Lucius Junius Brutus, a nephew to the king who overthrows his sovereign to avenge Lucrece. Polonius’s reference to the time “Brutus killed me” when he played the part of Julius Caesar alludes to the wrong Brutus, but the prophecy is fulfilled nonetheless (3.2.100).56 Rather than Marcus Brutus, it is Lucius Brutus’s double who finally kills Polonius. This double reference suggests a third reference: the Vindiciae pseudonym, which contains a similar dual allusion. This multiplicity of Bruti thus links Hamlet’s revenge to the Vindiciae’s discussion of legitimate resistance, which imagines an ambivalent revenger, unavailable to clear interpretation. While an English translation of Belleforest’s Amleth episode did not emerge until 1608 as The Hystorie of Hamblet, his historical works are often cited in English resistance debates—particularly disparagingly in English works vilifying the Guise and the French massacres—and the Histoires tragiques went through many French printings.57 András Kiséry has recently pointed out that, while critics have long been interested in Belleforest as a source of Hamlet, very little attention has been paid to the “field of political polemics” in which Belleforest positions his translation.58 While Hamlet’s borrowings may be only at a remove, through the Ur-Hamlet, the extent and precision of borrowings recently examined by Margrethe Jolly support the earlier arguments of A. P. Stabler that Shakespeare’s Hamlet has its most direct dependencies on the Belleforest account.59 Viewed in the light of Belleforest’s conflict with Huguenot resistance theory, Hamlet’s tyrannicide cannot achieve the cathartic resolution so many critics have imputed to it. Even those who see Hamlet as occupying the role of Vice have largely agreed that Hamlet’s return to England is a turning point: from scourge to minister in the case of Fredson Bowers, from passive to active stoic virtus for Geoffrey Aggeler, or from the sovereignty of reason to Protestant conscience for Mark Matheson.60 Lake has gone so far as to say that the end of the play merely stages “providence’s judgment,” removing Hamlet from the role of Vice and revenger at the last moment and (probably) saving his soul: “The moral and political effects of revenge, resistance and tyrannicide, of the doing of both private and public justice, have all been collapsed into one another and triumphantly achieved.”61 But this redemptive argument is hard to justify on either theological or political grounds. Hamlet’s obsession with appearances is so extreme that it is tempting to say that the disjunction between virtuous appearance and corrupt reality is perhaps more intolerable to the prince than the murder itself. In the Saxo and Belleforest sources, the usurper Feng/Fengon’s murder is traitorous but public: he claims he slew the old king to defend his sister-in-law from abuse.62 In Hamlet, by contrast, Claudius uses poison, the Machiavel’s weapon, and the murder is a secret Hamlet must uncover and verify. Yet the shift from open usurpation to intrigue is oddly in Claudius’s favor, at least from a Machiavellian perspective. Like Machiavelli’s hypothetical Prince who obtains his principality by wickedness, Claudius does injury all at once and almost invisibly, thus maintaining the stability of the state and the people’s support.63 It is precisely this ability to abstract evil and subordinate it to the stability of rule that garnered Machiavelli his reputation, and Hamlet directly confronts the audience with Machiavelli’s question of the lesser of two evils. So long as the murder remains a secret, Denmark remains free and secure, and God’s judgment is properly rendered in the hereafter. At the same time, critics such as Lake are correct that Hamlet’s agency as a revenger is severely limited. Hamlet’s newfound obsession with providence, which coincides with his new view of conscience, fails to correspond to the events of the play, which reveal how little control Hamlet really has. When Hamlet acts, as in the killing of Polonius, those actions do not tend to have the consequences he intended. In the fencing scene, Hamlet is once again taken in by Claudius’s device, allowing the Machiavel to propel the action, and it is only the accidental deaths of Gertrude and Laertes by poisoned instruments meant for Hamlet that reveal Claudius’s plots-within-plots. Stabbing Claudius is perhaps the dying Hamlet’s most futile and pointless “action”: murder is out by the random circumstances of fortune (or a providential hand), while Hamlet scurries to catch up and assert his agency within the tragic events. The full import of Hamlet’s self-fashioning as heaven’s scourge and minister is that he cannot accept a providence that is not aligned with his own sense of justice. Hamlet makes the fundamental mistake that Luther claimed led to despair: trying to interpret the divine in human terms. It is in this context that we must understand Hamlet’s “special providence in the fall of a sparrow” (5.2.197–98). The irony of this, one of Shakespeare’s few references to providence, is that whatever providence might operate through the chaos of fortune, in the random fall of a sparrow, it is beyond the human comprehension of Hamlet, emphasizing the divide between human and divine agency rather than the continuity Hamlet imagines for himself. Hamlet deviates from the Amleth source precisely where Belleforest’s adaptation verges too closely upon monarchomach principles and emphasizes the literally damning consequences of treasonous resistance. In Belleforest’s version, Amleth succeeds in his vengeance against his uncle, Fengon, and he is crowned king by his people. Shakespeare, by contrast, presents us with a blood-soaked stage and a Denmark left vulnerable to a foreign power. We tend to forget that in the political context of Elsinore, Claudius is a legally elected monarch, and, as Hadfield notes, despite his fraternal regicide, he seems to be a rather better ruler than the elder Hamlet.64 He is certainly a better king than the younger Hamlet. What is at stake is not whether Claudius needs to die for murdering Hamlet’s father and marrying his mother, but whether this revenge aligns with the commonweal, the level of justice that must be Hamlet’s primary priority. “His greatness weighed, his will is not his own” (1.3.17), as Laertes reminds Ophelia: 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 Whereof he is the head[.] (1.3.19–23) Hamlet’s failure to heed the demands of his station and the subsequent fall of the Danish court confront the audience with the costs of discontent as a political orientation. At the same time, the play refuses to offer a cathartic solution to the malcontent crisis Hamlet endures. In this way, the play also rejects the ease with which conservative theorists of monarchy counsel patience under tyranny. This utterly negative politics makes Shakespeare’s approach perhaps the most purely malcontent: rather than attempting to deploy malcontentism itself as a paradoxical solution to discontent, Hamlet leaves us neither patience nor conscience—just an all-consuming intensity verging on despair. Thus, Hamlet enacts one of Shakespeare’s tragic limit-cases, a kind of consequentialism: the character of Hamlet allows him to explore regicidal justifications that risk the dire consequences of civil war or foreign occupation, the twin specters haunting the early modern political imagination. The prince’s use of conscience as supreme authority aligns Hamlet with Huguenot discourses of legitimate resistance, founded in Calvinism. Hamlet takes sudden interest in “conscience” in the fifth act, which Matheson and Aggeler see as radical conversion or at least submission to divine will. But conscience emerges in fact as a troublingly cold and empty place.65 To Horatio’s remark, “So Guildenstern and Rosencrantz go to’t,” Hamlet responds, “They are not near my conscience” (5.2.56–57). Similarly, Hamlet ends his list of grievances against Claudius with the moral judgment, “Is’t not perfect conscience” (l. 66) to kill such a king? By contrast, Hamlet succeeds in “catch[ing] the conscience of the King” (l. 540), and Claudius finds himself confronted by the unavoidable fact of his soul’s corruption. Claudius struggles to find some way to repent even as he knows he will not relinquish the “effects” (3.3.54) that motivated his sin, and this moral conflict slightly humanizes him (ll. 36–72). Meanwhile, Hamlet’s conscience becomes something inhuman.66 If previously Hamlet seemed to understand “conscience” merely as a fear of the unknown, then following his near death at sea his conscience becomes a blank space—“perfect” means spiritually immaculate, unstained, like those satirists Marston critiques who cloak themselves in the “milk-white robes.”67 Yet for a conscience to mean anything, it must have content. To be troubled by conscience, as Marston makes clear, is to have a conscience, as well as to have the authority to judge the sins of others. To have a “perfect conscience” is to be in bad faith, attributing to oneself a superhuman and un-Christian state of being. Matheson is right that “conscience” represented an alternate source of authority that threatened the power not just of the church but also of the monarch; Protestant religious dissenters routinely evoked conscience in defense of beliefs deemed heretical and treasonous. Hamlet places this debate in its most dangerous context: tyrannicide. When Hamlet kills Claudius—to cries of “Treason, treason!” (5.2.307)—he effectively ends Denmark as an independent state, turning the realm over to Norway and unraveling the political stability Claudius had achieved. Tyrannicide turns security into chaos and into subjugation to a foreign power. James, future king of England, gives a succinct version of the orthodox view of patience under tyranny in True Law of Free Monarchies (1598): “it is certaine that a king can never be so monstrously vicious, but hee will generally favour justice, and maintaine some order, except in the particulars, wherein his inordinate lustes and passions cary him away; where by the contrary, no King being, nothing is unlawfull to none.”68 It is crucial that Hamlet never, among all his grievances, considers Claudius to be a usurper, against whom any and all resistance would be justified. Although an argument could be made that Claudius’s actions amount to usurpation, Hamlet does not make it, instead acting the part of disgruntled noble pitted against a monarch who has displaced his ambitions. Much as Claudius sees Hamlet’s popularity as a threat to his reign, so far as the political stakes of Hamlet’s revenge are concerned, Hamlet figures Claudius as a rival noble. As Kiséry argues, “I lack advancement” are the words not of a bereaved prince but “of the malcontent courtier whose services are unrewarded and whose suits are unsuccessful, who bristles with a frustrated sense of justice and entitlement.”69 By contrast, Claudius has achieved his throne through treachery, but election has also legally confirmed his rule, secured through his marriage to Gertrude. Like James’s imagined tyrant, Claudius provides continuity and political stability against the threat of the war of all against all. Thus, on the one hand, we are confronted with the question whether we can possibly exercise patience under a fratricidal Machiavel of a sovereign. On the other hand, Hamlet’s malcontent need for vengeance renders him incapable of any form of just resistance.70 The Huguenots struggling under what they perceived as Catholic tyranny in France had developed a rather different theory of resistance. In the wake of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, monarchomach tracts deployed conscience as the foundation of resistance theory for desperate and aggrieved Huguenots. Understanding the Massacre as an attempt by Charles on his brother Navarre’s life, they theorized the proper reaction to a fratricidal tragedy analogous to Claudius’s murder of King Hamlet. Hamlet emphasizes the revenge ethos implicit in such resistance: entangled as they are in the horror of the Massacre, Huguenot defenses of resistance are incapable of separating justice from personal vengeance. This ethos becomes clear on a careful reading of the Vindiciae.71 In the contest between a prince’s word and God’s word, God’s word takes precedence: “If the Prince commands to cut the throat of an innocent, to pillage and commit extortion, there is no man (provided he have some feeling of conscience) that would execute such a commandement [sic].” The Vindiciae follows with the example of Papinian standing up to the tyranny of Caracalla, the Roman emperor who killed his brother Geta.72 As Robert Stillman argues, “The Roman imperial allusion secures an obvious parallel to contemporary Huguenot interpretations of the Massacre (one more fratricidal tragedy in peril of a whitewash).”73 If Claudius’s election similarly whitewashes his brother’s murder, Hamlet explores whether the consequences for righting wrongs on such a scale might not outweigh the apparent justice done. Despite its stoic proclamations that tyrannical “hypocrites may not be overthrown by any device . . . and that it is a task for bended knees, not arms and legs,” the Vindiciae became a common supplement to Machiavelli’s Prince, and its pages would be ransacked for more explicit tracts proclaiming the legitimacy of tyrannicide.74 This possibility lingers in the implications of one ambiguous warning: What then? cannot God when he pleaseth stirre up particular and private persons to ruine a mighty and powerfull tyranny? Hee that gives power and ability to some even out of the dust without any title or colourable pretext of lawfull authority to rise to the height of rule and dominion, and in it tyrannize and afflict the people for their transgressions? cannot he also even from the meanest multitude raise a liberator? . . . What if Ahab cut off good men, if Jezabel subborn false witnesses against Naboth, may not a Jehu be rais’d to exterminate the whole line of Ahab, to revenge the death of Naboth, and to cast the body of Jezabel to be torne and devoured of dogs? . . . But . . . let the people be advis’d, that in seeking to crosse the Sea dry foote, they take not some Impostor for their guide, that may lead them head-long to destruction.75 While Cambridge editor George Garnett is careful to contextualize vindicia in terms of Roman law, as the legal claim for the recovery of property by its rightful owner, and vindicator as claimant, the 1648 English translation reveals that the connotations of vengeance remain resonant in these terms, and the passage clearly evokes the possibility of a scourge of God.76 Focusing on the ambiguity of signs, however, the text indicates that such a revenger is merely dangerous, not immoral, to follow. In this context, Hamlet is a play that tests the viability of a “vindicator” who faces a fratricidal Caracalla with the impulse to play the scourge. Hamlet’s authority is likewise ambiguous: on the one hand, he is one of the nobles behind whom, the Vindiciae asserts, the plebs might legitimately stand to “vindicate” the commonwealth, and Claudius fears how “loved” Hamlet is “of the distracted multitude” (4.3.4).77 On the other hand, Shakespeare juxtaposes Hamlet with Laertes, whose status as popular rebel is indisputable, emphasizing how personal Hamlet’s revenge remains. Many critics have argued that Act 5 stages a redemption in which Hamlet “has relinquished himself to the direction of God’s voice within him,” in Aggeler’s words, and Hamlet’s personal illegitimate revenge becomes legitimate political resistance.78 Yet there is no way for Hamlet to separate the personal from the political, just as his personal sense of thwarted ambition undercuts his ability to act in a disinterested capacity for the good of the commonwealth. As a liberator, Hamlet certainly sends mixed signals, and his dual status as public and private individual throws into question not only the legitimacy of popular rebellion but also the traditional aristocratic privilege of resistance. While the scourge of God could appear in a positive light, it is an ambiguous figure even in the Vindiciae, and could refer equally to the tyrant that “afflicts the people for their transgressions” or to the one who brings a tyrant to “ruine,” much as the Vindiciae’s Impostor reveals himself to be the same as the tyrant he deposes. In fashioning himself as scourge following the murder of Polonius, Hamlet seeks to usurp his role as mere instrument of the divine order and yoke providence to his own agency as revenger. To declare oneself the scourge of God was to hubristically and atheistically lay claim to providence itself. The scourge is a metaphorical or literal plague, sent to punish a tyrant or a people for their wrongdoing, but the end does not justify the means. Rather, through God’s grace, two human wrongs make a divine right. Hamlet knows he will “answer well” (3.4.174) Polonius’s death, seeing the murder as heaven forcing him to play its “scourge and minister” (l. 173). Hamlet understands providence as arranging events so as to place murder on his conscience even before his revenge is completed, as if cause and consequence have been reversed. This act bestows a certain freedom upon him: essentially pre-damned, he interprets brash accident as providential authority to pursue revenge to the utmost without fear of further consequence. Mortal sin stands as an absolute threshold beyond which all acts have the same significance. This authorization-via-damnation is an extreme version of the satirist’s war against his own vices: the satirist wields his weapon, his scourge, almost indiscriminately. His uncontrolled and impassioned critical verbiage is allowed such license because—in such a folly ridden age—wheresoever the stroke lands it is bound to light on sin. Again Hamlet pushes this logic to the extreme, questioning the value of such a histrionic war on vice, especially when the stakes are distinguishing a Vindicator from an Impostor, liberation from treason. Hamlet discharges his role as a plague to his people beyond anything he could have predicted, but God’s vengeance utterly fails to correspond to Hamlet’s notion of justice—a lesson Hamlet apparently missed at Wittenburg. Collapsing the scourge of God and the scourging satirist, discontent becomes a spectrum of social disruption from subversive to treasonous. If there is a salutary mode of satire, it is not the feedback loop of the malcontent that leaves all the backs of the world bloodied: “Use every man after his desert and who shall scape whipping?” (2.2.467–68). The madcap, satirical Hamlet of Shakespeare contrasts sharply with his closest relative, Belleforest’s Amleth. Belleforest makes clear through an elaborate apparatus of direct commentary and set-piece orations that this history—quite counterintuitively—is not in fact an account of successful rebellion against a legitimate sovereign, but rather, as Kiséry puts it, “the legitimate sovereign’s punishment of such a rebellion.”79 What might appear to be a perfect exemplar for monarchomach purposes becomes, in the hands of a Catholic loyalist, a work that defines the only legitimate “vindicator” or “revenger” as the sovereign himself. The stability of Belleforest’s framing, however, quickly begins to falter according to its own logic. If he had written the Amleth episode after the Massacre, he might have been worried enough about the implications of competing accounts of legitimacy to handle the story somewhat differently. The fact that Amleth’s authority is primarily a function of the performance of public oratory—in other words legitimacy conferred through the persuasion of the populace—makes Belleforest’s account circular. Belleforest’s Amleth delays revealing his hand in Fengon’s death: wanting to see how “the people” would react to the “Tragedie,” Amleth “durst not presently declare his action . . . but to the contrary determined to worke by policie” (“n’osa de prime face declarer son dessein au peuple, ains delibera d’user de ruses”) to spread his justifications through the populace. Only when he sees that the people are receptive to his version of events does he give the speech in which he condemns his uncle for “fear[ing] not to ad[d] incest to parricide” (“n’a craint d’adjouster incest au parricide”). Amleth claims he is also revenging the king’s injustices against the people, accusing Fengon of using “more rigorous comandements ouer you, then was either iust or conuenient.” Amleth’s coronation as “lawfull successor in the kingdo[m], & iust reuenger” (``legitime successeur du Royaume, et juste vengeur”), which he specifically asks of the people, sounds embarrassingly similar to Huguenot François Hotman’s account of the people’s ancient power of election, which Belleforest would later denounce: “you know what is the reward of so greate desert,” Amleth proclaims, “& being in your hands to distribute the same, it is of you, that I demand the price of my vertue and the recompence of my victory” (“vous sçavez quel est le salaire et retribution d’un tel merite et estant en vous mains à le distribuer, c’est aussi de vous que je redemande le pris deu de ma vertu, et la recompence de ma victoire”).80 The supposedly just account of the legitimate monarch regaining his rightful position frames that legitimacy as a function of rhetoric. The legitimate monarch thus becomes anyone who can successfully persuade the populace of his legitimacy. The assertion that one can never resist a legitimate monarch would then appear specious at best, since the would-be revenger need only establish himself as the legitimate monarch through clever rhetorical performance. In the process, this self-legitimation through rhetoric begins to seem dangerously similar to the arguments of monarchomachs such as Hotman, who fiercely debated with Belleforest the implications of the apparent historical role of election in the succession of French kings. In Belleforest’s own account, the people turn out to have ultimate authority over determining the “legitimate” monarch and deposing the “illegitimate” monarch after all.81 The inclusion of an election legitimating Claudius’s succession in Shakespeare’s play is thus a crucial addition that undermines the legitimacy Belleforest attributes to Amleth. No longer a clearly legitimate monarch punishing a usurper, Hamlet becomes a malcontent whose self-legitimating fantasies lead the country to ruin. By introducing the contemporary Danish process of election, Shakespeare also bypasses Hotman’s argument in a manner that, from an English perspective, challenges the process of election itself: the Danish Council was capable, through ignorance, of electing a murderer rather than the “natural” heir to the position of king. Election serves only to complicate a process that filial succession streamlines with stabilizing efficiency, while in no way ensuring a more just succession. In the atmosphere of a post-Massacre Europe, it is impossible not to see Amleth’s simulatio as disturbingly analogous to the self-serving manipulations of a Machiavel. Justifications of tyrannicide, even Belleforest’s own, begin to appear like thinly veiled aspirations for power. Shakespeare further deprives Hamlet of the chance to justify his actions publicly, as Amleth does. “Policie” is not the instrument of the virtuous prince, securing victory, but an instrument of intrigue, reaping civil strife. Hamlet never receives the kingship he believes he deserves; instead that position is given over to his equally illegitimate double, the invader Fortinbras. Tracing the manner in which the malcontent figure disrupts and warps Shakespeare’s source material, we can begin to see a Hamlet deeply concerned with the political turmoil of the day, by turns able to sympathize with and laugh at human despair, but ultimately fearful of its anarchic potential. The play debases the abstract political theories of Huguenot resistance, emphasizing that such ideals cannot be disentangled from petty human motivations and that conscience is not sufficient cause to kill a king. At the same time, in the face of a fratricidal and Machiavellian tyrant, the orthodox call to patience does nothing to assuage the Ghost’s call for vengeance. Hamlet plays out the dangers of violent intervention while simultaneously refusing to purge its motivating affect. The play confronts us with the possibility that in some cases the limit of political action might be despair. Endnotes 1 Hamlet has become a popular play to appropriate for a variety of presentist political stances and has garnered recent interest for its proto-republican resonances. The speculative decontextualization common to much recent Hamlet criticism overlooks the contemporary political theory that contextualizes the play; on the other hand, critics who find Hamlet to be in dialogue with proto-republican resistance theory suggest that the play tacitly endorses resistance. Andrew Hadfield provides a historicized view of the rise of republican thought in the late sixteenth century, but Oliver Arnold’s analysis of the negative representation of practical republican citizenship in Shakespeare’s plays undermines many of Hadfield’s conclusions. See Richard Halpern, “Eclipse of Action: ‘Hamlet’ and the Political Economy of Playing,” Shakespeare Quarterly 59.4 (2008): 450–82; Julia Reinhard Lupton, “Hamlet, Prince: Tragedy, Citizenship, and Political Theology,” in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. Diana E. Henderson, vol. 3 (New York: Routledge, 2008), 181–203; Paul A. Kottman, A Politics of the Scene (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2008); Andrew Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005); Oliver Arnold, The Third Citizen: Shakespeare’s Theater and the Early Modern House of Commons (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2007). 2 The critical interest paid to the malcontent in the first half of the twentieth century largely discounted Hamlet’s type due to Shakespeare’s disproportionate cultural capital and the tendency to dismiss such structures as irrelevant in light of how Shakespeare “transcends” them. Although Paul Conklin argues that the seventeenth century took from Hamlet’s bitterness and cruelty “a tone which gives what I might call the full depths of malcontentism,” Lawrence Babb’s survey of Elizabethan melancholy fails to group Hamlet with the malcontent type at all, labeling his melancholy a “purely intellectual phenomenon.” Paul S. Conklin, A History of “Hamlet” Criticism, 1601–1821 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957), 14; Lawrence Babb, The Elizabethan Malady: A Study of Melancholia in English Literature from 1580 to 1642 (East Lansing: Michigan State College Press, 1951), 106. 3 Indeed, the largest flaw in Lawrence Babb’s seminal investigation of the malcontent “type” is that it treats the malcontent as a static set of features. See Babb, Elizabethan Malady, 73–101. 4 Henri Noguères, The Massacre of Saint Bartholomew, trans. Claire Eliane Engel (New York: George Allen and Unwin, 1962), esp. 78–83, 159–60; Alfred Soman, ed., The Massacre of St. Bartholomew: Reappraisals and Documents, International Archives of the History of Ideas 75 (The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), viii. See also Philippe Erlanger, St. Bartholomew’s Night: The Massacre of Saint Bartholomew, trans. Patrick O’Brian (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1960). 5 John Stubbes, The discouerie of a gaping gulf (London, 1579), sig. D4v. Lucia Nigri refers to these printed uses of the term in Churchyard and Stubbes in “The Origin of ‘Malcontent,’” Notes and Queries 59.1 (2012): 37–40, esp. 38–39. 6 This essay extends some of Gillies insights regarding Hamlet’s “struggle with the politics of conscience.” This worldview is “without precedent in Shakespeare,” I argue, because it is rooted in the play’s engagement with Marston, the middle term that links Calvinist and satirical malcontentism. John Gillies, “The Question of Original Sin in Hamlet,” Shakespeare Quarterly 64.4 (2013): 396–424, esp. 399, 400. 7 Qtd. in Angus Gowland, “The Problem of Early Modern Melancholy,” Past and Present 191.1 (2006): 77–120, esp. 108. 8 Belleforest wrote his translations and additions to Matteo Bandello’s histoires tragiques over some sixteen years. His translation/adaptation of Saxo’s Amleth legend is the third story of the fifth volume (beginning with the argument “Avec Qvelle Rvse Amleth…”); although the work as a whole is often cited as published in 1582/3, this volume was licensed for publication in 1570. See Sir Israel Gollancz, The Sources of Hamlet, with an Essay on the Legend (London: Oxford UP, 1926), 318; Margrethe Jolly, “Hamlet and the French Connection: The Relationship of Q1 and Q2 Hamlet and the Evidence of Belleforest’s Histoires Tragiques,” Parergon 29.1 (2012): 83; András Kiséry, “‘I Lack Advancement’: Public Rhetoric, Private Prudence, and the Political Agent in Hamlet, 1561–1609,” English Literary History 81 (2014): 29–60, esp. 34. 9 Hamlet, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, Arden 3 (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2006). All Hamlet quotations derive from this edition, cited parenthetically. 10 Gowland, “Problem of Melancholy,” 84; Drew Daniel, The Melancholy Assemblage: Affect and Epistemology in the English Renaissance (New York: Fordham UP, 2013), esp. 5–12. 11 Babb, Elizabethan Malady, 76–77. 12 Nigri cites Thomas Newton’s 1581 translation of Seneca’s Phoenissae as the first known use of “malcontent” in English drama, where it is used as an adjective in the abstract sense; see “Origin of ‘Malcontent,’” 39. 13 On the Bishops’ Order and its potential relation to Essex, see Cyndia Susan Clegg, Press Censorship in Elizabethan England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997), 201–17. For a different perspective, see Bryan Thomas Herek, “Early Modern Satire and the Bishops’ Order of 1599: Manuscript, Print and Stage” (PhD diss., University of Maryland, 2005). On the wits, see James Biester, Lyric Wonder: Rhetoric and Wit in Renaissance English Poetry (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1997); Michelle O’Callaghan, The English Wits: Literature and Sociability in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007). 14 Qtd. in Herek, “Satire and the Bishops’ Order,” 1–3, esp. 3. 15 Edward Guilpin, Skialetheia. Or, A shadowe of truth, in certaine epigrams and satyres (London, 1598), sig. B4r. 16 Babb, Elizabethan Malady, 76. 17 Biester, Lyric Wonder, 69, 70, 71. 18 See, for example, Albert José Axelrad’s biography Un Malcontent Élizabéthain: John Marston, 1576–1634 (Paris: Didier, 1955). 19 John Calvin, Calvin: Institute of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: Westminster John Knox Press, 1960), 2.1.3 (291). Cf. Gillies, “The Question of Original Sin in Hamlet,” 400–401. 20 John Marston, The Poems of John Marston, ed. Arnold Davenport (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1961), “The Authour in prayse of his precedent Poem,” p. 66, ll. 43–44. 21 Marston, Poems, Satire XI: “Humours,” p. 172, ll. 1–2, 15, 6, 11. 22 Marston, Poems, Satire IIII: “Cras,” p. 121, l. 95; O’Callaghan, English Wits, 13, 45. 23 Guilpin, Skialetheia, “Of Pansa,” sig. B4r. 24 Hamlet, pp. 468–70 (F 2.2.335–60). Elmer Edgar Stoll goes so far as to say that “from 1599 to 1601 there was great interest . . . in revenge plays, and . . . it was Marston who wrote them.” See “Shakspere, Marston, and the Malcontent Type,” Modern Philology 3.3 (1906): 1–23, esp. 10. Stoll overstates the case, but Shakespeare’s plot distinctly follows Marston’s neo-Senecan model, especially with regard to the Christianized ghost, one of Marston’s key innovations on Kyd’s earlier model. On the “little eyases” speech, see James P. Bednarz, “Ben Jonson and the ‘Little Eyases’: Theatrical Politics in Hamlet,” in Shakespeare and the Poets’ War (New York: Columbia UP, 2001), 225–55. 25 Marston’s reply, The Malcontent, is beyond the scope of this essay, but see Michael Cordner, “The Malcontent and the Hamlet Aftermath,” Shakespeare Bulletin 31.2 (2013): 165–90. Drawing on his experiences directing The Malcontent, Cordner sees Marston’s numerous plays on Hamlet as heightening the despairing picture of the world while shifting the trajectory of the revenge tragedy toward tragicomedy. Rather than a cathartic purging of melancholy, however, Cordner argues that Marston’s new view of power “is rooted in a deep skepticism regarding the trustworthiness of humankind” (186), casting rulers as the jailers of mankind, themselves imprisoned by their own power. In this sense, we might read The Malcontent as an alternate history in which Hamlet is unlucky enough to successfully gain the throne. I believe that Hamlet was already responding to Marston’s bleakly Calvinist view of mankind, which accounts for the pervasive problem of “original sin” in the play to which Gillies has drawn our attention. Cf. Gillies, “The Question of Original Sin in Hamlet.” 26 As You Like It, in The Riverside Shakespeare, gen ed. G. Blakemore Evans, 2nd ed. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997). For Drew Daniel, Jaques’s anatomy of melancholy demonstrates melancholy’s potential as a Deleuzian assemblage to endlessly encompass or contract. Melancholy can express both the intimacy of interiority and the superficiality of social performance, Daniel argues, because melancholy so powerfully strings tenuous, syncretic, sometimes specious connections between a wide array of bodies and discourses, reshaping them in the process. See Daniel, Melancholy Assemblage, 10–12. 27 On the Ghost as an indeterminably ambivalent sign, where its divine or infernal agency hinges completely on the determination between Protestant and Catholic conceptions of ghostly visitations, see Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2001), 239–40. 28 Peter Lake, How Shakespeare Put Politics on the Stage: Power and Succession in the History Plays (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2016), 513. 29 See Margreta De Grazia, “Hamlet” without Hamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007); Kiséry, “I Lack Advancement.” 30 De Grazia, “Hamlet” without Hamlet, 2–3. 31 Marston, Poems, Satyre 2: “Quedam sunt, et non videntur,” p. 73, ll. 37, 38, 40. 32 OED Online (Oxford: Oxford UP, September 2019), s.v. “grieved, adj.,” 1b in the sense s.v. “aggrieved, adj.,” 2a: “Injured in respect to one’s rights, relations, or position; injuriously affected by someone’s action, wronged; having a grievance (at).” 33 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004), 42, 54. 34 See De Grazia, “Hamlet” without Hamlet, 108. 35 Hamlet: The Texts of 1603 and 1623, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, Arden 3 (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2006), 7.408–9. 36 Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory, 219. 37 John Harington, Nugae Antiquae (London, 1779), 2:288; Jason Scott-Warren, “The Privy Politics of Sir John Harington’s ‘New Discourse of a Stale Subject, Called the Metamorphosis of Ajax,’” Studies in Philology 93.4 (1996): 415. 38 John Harington, Nugae Antiquae (London, 1779), 2:225. 39 Qtd. in R. C. Bald, John Donne: A Life (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1970), 108. 40 Biester, Lyric Wonder, 102–3, esp. 103. Biester revises Karin S. Coddon’s comparison between Hamlet’s and Essex’s madness, emphasizing the element of “stratagem” (102) in Essex’s erratic actions. Cf. Karin S. Coddon, “‘Suche Strange Desygns’: Madness, Subjectivity, and Treason in Hamlet and Elizabethan Culture,” in Essays on Dramatic Traditions: Challenges and Transmissions, ed. Mary Beth Rose, vol. 20, new series (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1989), 51–75; Lake, How Shakespeare Put Politics on the Stage, 525–26. 41 Marston, Poems, “Proemium in librum primum,” p. 102, ll. 9, 10, 12. 42 Babb collects these prescriptions for treating the melancholic: “The melancholic should be urged to seek guidance and comfort in ‘the holsome counsayles founde in holy scripture, and in the bokes of morall doctrine,’ so that he may learn to regulate his passions, especially his sorrows. His friends . . . should point out to him the unmanliness of allowing passion to rule reason.” Claudius even sends for just those friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, to whom the melancholic “must confide . . . : ‘grief concealed strangles the soul,’ but when one’s sorrow is imparted to a friend, ‘it is instantly removed, by his counsel haply, wisdom, persuasion, advice.’” Babb, Elizabethan Malady, 52. Babb bases this passage on Timothy Bright’s Treatise of Melancholie (1586), Sir Thomas Elyot’s Castel of Helth (1541), and Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. 43 Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy, ed. Michael Neill, Norton Critical Edition (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014), 3.13.1–44 and notes on Seneca (n. 1, n. 6, nn. 12–13, n. 35), pp. 79–80; John Marston, Antonio’s Revenge, ed. W. Reavley Gair (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978), 2.3.4–6, pp. 90–91. 44 Marston, Antonio’s Revenge, 2.3.49–51, p. 93. 45 On Marstonian obfuscation, see Douglas Lanier, “Satire, Self Concealment, and Statecraft: The Game of Identity in John Marston’s The Malcontent,” Pacific Coast Philology 22.1/2 (1987): 35–45, esp. 35. 46 Marston, Poems, “Proemium in librum tertium,” p. 149, ll. 1–2, 11, 13, 17–18. 47 Alvin Kernan, The Cankered Muse: Satire of the English Renaissance (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1959), 121. 48 Marston, Poems, Satyre 2: “Quedam sunt . . .,” p. 73, l. 32. Of course, Marston is here making a traditional claim to “plain style” that is rather disingenuous. 49 See especially Robert Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987); Alan C. Dessen, Shakespeare and the Late Moral Plays (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1986). 50 The most extensive examination of Hamlet’s debt to Seneca is Robert S. Miola, Shakespeare and Classical Tragedy: The Influence of Seneca (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 32–67. This conversation is unfortunately generally isolated from Hamlet’s debt to the Vice. Dessen does not discuss Hamlet, but see Margreta de Grazia’s incisive analysis in “Hamlet” without Hamlet, 181–89. 51 Gowland, “Problem of Melancholy,” 104. 52 Angus Gowland, “The Ethics of Renaissance Melancholy,” Intellectual History Review 18.1 (2008): 103–17, esp. 107. 53 Richard B. Dobson, The Peasants Revolt of 1381 (Bath: Pitman, 1970), 375. 54 Richard L. Greaves, “Concepts of Political Obedience in Late Tudor England: Conflicting Perspectives,” Journal of British Studies 22.1 (1982): 23–34, esp. 26, 33–34. For an overview of Huguenot resistance theory, see Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Volume 2, The Age of Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1978), pt. 3. Although the Scottish situation is beyond the scope of this argument, the French context bears directly on the fears and hopes of Scottish succession: English Catholics had already adapted Huguenot resistance theory to their own purposes before Mary Stuart’s execution, while at the time Hamlet was written James was still an ambivalent figure, currying favor with both Catholics and Protestants, and there remained fears that he might take the throne by force. In this light, Protestants might soon have found recourse to these theories themselves: as Greaves has argued, views on political resistance in England essentially followed the accidents of royal succession (33–34). Protestant England’s defense against Catholic resistance thus entailed a repudiation of Protestant resistance in France. For an overview of the Scottish situation and Catholic resistance theory, see Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism, 34–35; Skinner, Foundations, pt. 2; Peter Holmes, Resistance and Compromise: The Political Thought of the Elizabethan Catholics (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1982). On the relationship between Hamlet and the Scottish succession, see Stuart M. Kurland, “Hamlet and the Scottish Succession?,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 34.2 (1994): 279–300. 55 Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism, 31–34. 56 Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism, 54–55, 188–89, 199, 203–4. For more on Hamlet’s relationship to the Bruti, see De Grazia, “Hamlet” without Hamlet, 68–69. 57 For example, another translation of de Serres lists the histories of Belleforest among those on the side of the Guise who “reioyce” at the Massacre. See An historical collection, of the tragicall massacres of France, trans. anon. (London, 1598), 111. Belleforest is either the fourth (according to Kiséry) or fifth (according to Holmes) most cited authority in Robert Parsons’s Conference, a controversial work on the right of resistance. See Holmes, Resistance and Compromise, 151; Kiséry, “I Lack Advancement,” 56n29. Julie Maxwell lists twelve printings of Belleforest’s fifth volume of the Histoires tragiques (which includes the Amleth tale) between 1570 and 1601 in “Counter-Reformation Versions of Saxo: A New Source for ‘Hamlet?,’” Renaissance Quarterly 57.2 (2004): 518–60, esp. 518n3. 58 Kiséry, “I Lack Advancement,” 34–36, esp. 34. Maxwell has further drawn attention to the fact that Belleforest’s account is but the best known in a web of sixteenth-century uses of the legend for Reformation and Counter-Reformation purposes. See “Counter-Reformation Saxo,” 518–20. 59 See Margrethe Jolly, “Hamlet and the French Connection: The Relationship of Q1 and Q2 Hamlet and the Evidence of Belleforest’s Histoires Tragiques,” Parergon 29.1 (2012): 83–105; A. P.  Stabler, “Melancholy, Ambition, and Revenge in Belleforest’s Hamlet,” PMLA 81.3 (1966): 207–13. 60 Fredson Bowers, “Hamlet as Minister and Scourge,” PMLA 70.4 (1955): 740–49, esp. 748; Geoffrey Aggeler, Nobler in the Mind: The Stoic-Skeptic Dialectic in English Renaissance Tragedy (Newark: U of Delaware P, 1998), 147; Mark Matheson, “Hamlet and ‘A Matter Tender and Dangerous,’” Shakespeare Quarterly 46.4 (1995): 383–97, esp. 390. 61 Lake, How Shakespeare Put Politics on the Stage, 521. 62 Maxwell argues that Shakespeare is here following the Magnus brothers’ accounts, in which the king obfuscates his role in the murder; see “Counter-Reformation Saxo,” 529–32. Although I focus mainly on contrasts with Belleforest, Maxwell’s argument supports my claim that Shakespeare is directly interested in playing off the source material, perhaps synthesizing multiple accounts. 63 Niccolò Machiavelli, “The Prince,” in The Prince and the Discourses, trans. Luigi Ricci and E. R. P. Vincent (New York: Modern Library, 1950), ch. 8. 64 Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism, 203. 65 Matheson, “Hamlet and ‘A Matter Tender and Dangerous,’” 391–93; Aggeler, Nobler in the Mind, 157–58. 66 I see this move to subtly reverse our sympathies as analogous to and likely derived from the parallelism and reversal of Antonio and Piero in Antonio’s Revenge. Philip J. Ayres has argued for this reversal in Antonio’s Revenge at length in “Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge: The Morality of the Revenging Hero,” Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 12.2 (1972): 359–74. 67 The way Hamlet uses this justification, I argue, contrasts with what “perfect conscience” should mean: as Gillies defines it, “a proactive conscience founded on faith and guided by it.” Gillies, “The Question of Original Sin in Hamlet,” 421. 68 Qtd. in Alan T. Bradford, “Stuart Absolutism and the ‘Utility’ of Tacitus,” The Huntington Library Quarterly 46.2 (1983): 127–55, esp. 140. 69 Kiséry, “I Lack Advancement,” 41. 70 Not by accident, the situation is directly analogous to Fortinbras’s desired revenge as described by Horatio in the first scene: Fortinbras aims to revenge his father’s death at King Hamlet’s hands, but this vengeance really comes down to recouping lands by force that his father legally lost in the combat (1.1.79–103). This schema, where the injustice and conflict of motives are relatively clear, is then transported into the messier and more morally fraught revenge plot of Claudius’s murder. 71 The 1648 translation reveals how inflammatory the Vindiciae’s rhetoric might be to an English reader. EEBO attests Latin versions printed abroad in 1579 and 1580, with the first available English translation in 1588 of only the fourth question (avoiding the dangerous third question), and then several complete translations printed in the crucial year 1648, when Charles I was deposed. The 1588 translation avoids translating the title or subtitle, while the 1648 editions pointedly translate: “A Defense of Liberty against Tyrants, OR, Of the lawfull power of the Prince over the people, and of the people over the Prince.” Cf. Hubert Languet, A short apologie for Christian souldiours, trans. H. P. (London, 1588); Vindiciae contra tyrannos, trans. anon. (London, 1648). 72 Languet, Vindiciae (1648), 15 (emphasis added). 73 Robert E. Stillman, “The Truths of a Slippery World: Poetry and Tyranny in Sidney’s ‘Defence,’” Renaissance Quarterly 55.4 (2002): 1287–1319, esp. 1294. 74 Stephanus Junius Brutus, Vindiciae, contra tyrannos, trans. George Garnett (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994), 170. 75 Languet, Vindiciae (1648), 133. 76 Brutus, Vindiciae, lxxxiii. 77 Brutus, Vindiciae, 170. 78 Aggeler, Nobler in the Mind, 158. See also Bowers, “Hamlet as Minister and Scourge,” 748; Matheson, “Hamlet and ‘A Matter Tender and Dangerous,’” 393. 79 Kiséry, “I Lack Advancement,” 38. 80 I am using the post-Hamlet English translation [François de Belleforest], The Hystorie of Hamblet, trans. anon. (London, ca. 1608), sigs. F3–G3. However, I have added the original passages for comparison from the facing-page 1582 edition of Belleforest’s histoire tragique with the Hystorie in Gollancz, Sources of “Hamlet,” 260–83. While the anonymous translation does not specifically reference Belleforest as the source, The Hystorie of Hamblet is, as Geoffrey Bullough puts it, “a dull, fairly close version” of Belleforest’s 1582 text. Bullough’s edition includes footnotes cataloguing the differences between Belleforest’s histoire tragique and the Hystorie, including the clearest evidence of the Shakespeare play’s influence on the translation: the addition of Shakespeare’s line “a rat, a rat” in the closet scene. Many of these notes derive from A. P. Stabler’s analysis in his 1959 dissertation, which I have not consulted, but Stabler suggests that Shakespeare’s play in fact shows some greater similarities to the 1576 edition of Belleforest’s account. Geoffrey Bullough, ed., vol. 7 of Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), esp. 94, 11. 81 Kiséry, “I Lack Advancement,” 35. © Folger Shakespeare Library 2020. All rights reserved. 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TI - To Kill a King in the Malcontent Hamlet
JO - Shakespeare Quarterly
DO - 10.1093/sq/quz018
DA - 2020-06-09
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