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... ' . . . SOMETHING OF WHAT 'HAPPENS IN' HdMLET JOE LEE DAVIS THE tendency of recent scholarship is to seek to resolve the , vexing, many-faceted issue of what happens in Hamlet by viewing the play with reference to various Renaissance ideas rather than with reference to the frequently told'but still disputed ,story of its dramatic genesis. Approached in terms of Renaissance poli-r tical speculation, Hamlet is conceived by John W. Draper as turning upon the' theme of regicide and as having a protagonist in 'some respects comparable to Dr Stockmann of Ibsen's dn Enemy of the People. Studied in relation to Renaissance psychological notions, Hamlet becomes, according to Lily Bess Campbell, the tragedy of a sanguine temperament in the throes of an unnatural melancholy perilously teetering over the abyss of madness. When certain corio cepts of Renaissance "Christian philosophy" and pneumatology are brought forward and clarified as a basis for Shakespearean study, as has been done by Dover Wilson, Willard Farnham, Rober( H. West, and Kenneth Myrick among others, the motif of "a divinity that shapes our ends" or "a special providence in the fall of a sparrow" and the motif of "an honest ghost" versus "a damned ghost" can be regarded as bulking larger in a complete interpretation of Hamlet than an older criticism was in the fullest sense aware, although Bradley was so impressed by the role which pro:'" vidence plays in this one tragedy that he made it an exception to his dictum that the Shakespearean tragic world is distinguished by its secularity. ' The contention of the present paper is that the issue of what happens in lfamletinvolves all these classes of Renaissance ideas and can be brought nearer adequate resolution only by showing howthey are integrated and complementary in the unfolding of the action rather than by playing up one at the expense of the other,' a procedure which sometimes results, to borrow a metaphor from Ben Jonson, in pulling the "skein of silk" of "a good play" "into a knot or elf-lock; which nothing but the sheers, or a candle, will undo or separate." - _ 0 Judging from Hamlet's two explicit references to the concept of divine providence, whi'ch, according to Richard Hooker, embraced "two abilities or powers" of God, "his power to create, and his power 426 SOMETHING OF WHAT HAPPENS IN HAMLET 427 to rule," and bearing in mind the centrality of this concept in Renaissance theology, we may make the initial postulate that both Shakespeare and his audie'nce viewed Hamlet's tragedy as taking place in a world designed in all its "kinds of things," as Hooker puts it, and in all their ends by' God's general providence and-governed iO n "all particulars in each kind" by the "operations" of his "special or personal providence." One function of his special providence, according to Renaissance belief, was the visitation'ofhis justice upon those who had fallen,into evil, and in no case was the wrath of this justice mo're aroused 'than in that of regicide, the 'slaying of his vicegerent upon earth. Yet his special providence operated ,mainly, to quote Hooker again, through "gh9stly o'r immaterial natures" moved by ((their intuitive intellectual judgment" and '''natural agents,which work after a sort of their own accord" and which included secondary causes, such as time and circumstance, so ubiquitously discernible behind mundane phenomena, the multifarious diversity of empirical ,actuality. "He willeth by permission that which his creatures do," 'says Hooker, "He only assisting the natural " powers which are given them to work withal, and not hindering or barring the' effects which grow from them." Hence even the visitation of his justice for so great a crime as regicide was a subtle and inscrutable process sometimes very much delayed and complicated by the limitations of his "agents," but'unthwartable and certain in the end. For any human b~ing to be chosen the agent of God's wrath or justice in punishing an evil king with death, in «com- -pounding" regicide with regicide, was to become the' butt of a supreme cosmic paradox, to be caught up in the convolutions of a prescience' and a foreordainment beyond...

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