Hamlet, Duellist

HAMLET, DUELLIST S. P. ZITNER Whatever else it is, and it is notoriously everything else, Hamlet is a play of weapons. Ordnance peals, swords are flourished, there is a "daily cast of brazen cannon," rapiers and daggers are only two of Laertes' weapons; the pike and the great axe are invoked, slings and arrows, partisan and truncheon, foil and target; poison is poured into the porches of the ear or drunk off in goblets; enginers are hoist by their own petard, and there is a memorable bare bodkin. The motif of the duel dominates the play: thus Old Hamlet vanquishes Old Fortinbras in single combat; thus young Hamlet and Laertes destroy each other. The whole struggle between Hamlet and Claudius is conceived of by Hamlet as a duel: the pass and fell incensed points Of mighty opposites. The perfection of the duellist's art leads Laertes to France and prepares Hamlet for his return. The exercise of weapons is the measure of men : the fencing that, coupled with "drinking, swearing, quarrelling, drabbing," Raynaldo feels may dishonour Laertes; the valour in primitive single combat that gained the elder Hamlet his glory and "all those lands." The use of poison damns Laertes as it doubly damns Claudius. The sword becomes the Christian symbol that (in the traditional stage business) stays a Ghost; on it friendships and secrecies are sworn, kingdoms altered, princes and old fools dispatched. By the swordsman's code of honour Hamlet finds himself wanting. Within the code, he both resigns himself and triumphs. Weapons and their use shift back and forth between the action of the play and its metaphors and symbols. Weapons thus share in the play's central technique by which act and metaphor enrich one another: a player-king shedding significance on a villain playing king, a sick prince On a prince feigning illness, and indeed, the artifice of theatre on the stage that the whole world is. For such a use of weaponry in literature I know of no "source" and can think of only one precedent. The five-fold shield Hephaestus forges for another doomed and petulant and delaying hero is surrounded by the river Ocean which fUns at the limits of the world. In the Iliad, too, Vol1Ulle XXXIX, Number I, October 1969 2 S. P. ZITNEn weapons tragically become the whole of the possible, and the man who takes them up wields, too, what coarsens and destroys him. But in Hamlet weaponry has an even more remarkable role. It divides human history into distinct epochs; defining - in the single, almost judicial combat of Old Hamlet and Old Fortinbras - an unrecoverable heroic past; and - in the purchasable ordnance of Fortinbras - what was for Elizabethans the already foreseeable future, the sequestration of violence to the bureaucratic state. Because of what is in the play then - not only because of a desire to discover what is in it - I should like to consider the circumstances of personal violence at the time Hamlet was written. Hamlet was composed at the very end of the 1590s during the revival of the "tragedy of blood." The great early success in that genre, Kyd's Spanish Tragedy, was revived by Henslowe in 1597_ Both adult and children's companies apparently commissioned revenge plays about this time, and Hamlet was prompted by the vogue. The vogue itself had two phases. From 1597 to about 1607, revenge tragedy was dominated by a protagonist who undertook blood revenge as a heroic dedication. After the Revenger's Tragedy, he was replaced by a revenger-villain, who held the stage until about 1620, when the genre sank.' Its jetsam surfaced as Restoration heroics, or better, Restoration farce. In Vanbrugh's Provok'd Wife, that archetypal domestic souse, Sir John Brute, propelled by wine, lurches round his wife's gallants, blubbering, "Sir, I wear a sword." "The progression of Kydian hero to villain-revenger was inevitable ," Bowers tells us, "owing to the standards of English morality,"2 and, one might add, as does Bowers, owing to the influence of Seneca and of the Italian novelle. Yet Seneca and the Italians had been available long before the revival or the alteration. The first volume of Painter...