Tradition and Subversion in Renaissance Literature: Studies in Shakespeare, Spenser, Jonson, and Donne

TWO Hamlet and the Stoic

39 TWO Hamlet and the Stoic T. S. Eliot disliked Hamlet, describing it disparagingly as “the Mona Lisa of literature.” He claimed that it was an inscrutable work, disquieting because of the impossibility of ever identifying with precision the source of Hamlet’s emotional disturbance. The plethora of causes adduced, he pointed out, are generally projections onto the play of the critic’s personal sensibilities with no unanimity achieved, Goethe transforming Hamlet into a Werther, and Coleridge into a Romantic poet.1 However, there may be in Eliot’s comparison of the play to the Mona Lisa a more positive element than he had in mind. The two works reflect within their different media a transformation that was occurring in Renaissance concepts of human character, a transformation in large part responsible for the artistic eminence of both. By introducing the innovative technique of sfumato, a “smokiness” or delicate shading, especially at the corners of the mouth, eyes, and nostrils, Leonardo da Vinci bestowed upon his figures a subtlety and mystery lacking in earlier portraits. Like all such innovations, the technique introduced was not fortuitous but motivated by a contemporary need, a desire to convey in visual form his generation’s growing awareness of the complexity of the individual implicit in humanism. Artistic focus was no longer on external appearances —an attention to clothing, facial features, or outer appurtenances as reliable indications of character and social standing, as in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales or in the distinction between nobility and their servants in the depiction of August by the Limbourg brothers. Instead, art and literature now aimed at conveying the recondite, unfathomable elements of the individual’s inner being, the enigmatic qualities concealed within. Mona Lisa fascinates us by the ambiguity of her smile, by the impossibility of determining whether it denotes pleasure or sadness or, indeed, whether she is smiling at all. Titian’s Young Englishman, set against a somber background, gazes not at us, but past us, in a manner suggesting that he is meditating some indefinable problem , some concern that we, the viewers, will never be privileged to know. So it is in drama. In contrast to the flat characters of mid-sixteenth-century plays—such as the almost indistinguishable Ferrex and Porrex in Sackville and Norton’s Gorboduc—Shakespeare’s leading figures in his more mature phase are marked by their complexity and introspection. As Granville-Barker points out, the change can be perceived in Shakespeare’s development as a dramatist; the resolute figure of Henry V so clearly foregrounded in the play of that name has, in Hamlet, moved into the background, where his name is now Fortinbras, and our focus is transferred to the far more intriguing character of one deeply conscious of the problematic condition of man, a condition of which Fortinbras is utterly oblivious.2 Shakespeare, it seems, was fully conscious of the cultural shift in sensibility to which he was giving expression, as a seemingly minor scene in this play confirms. Hamlet, aware of the crass disloyalty of his two supposed friends, thrusts a recorder into the hands of a reluctant Guildenstern and urges him to play on it. Guildenstern replies that he can40 Tradition and Subversion in Renaissance Literature not, that he knows nothing of its stops, at which point Hamlet angrily retorts: Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me, you would seem to know my stops, you would pluck out the heart of my mystery, you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass ; and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ, yet cannot you make it speak. “Sblood, do you think I’m easier to be play’d on than a pipe?” (3.2.362–70) He cherishes here the mystery of his inner being, jealously guarding it against the intrusive attempts of others to reveal its riddling intricacies. Yet despite the close parallel between Da Vinci’s innovation and Shakespeare’s new conception of the human character , there remains a substantial difference between its representation within the contrasting media. A painted portrait , restricted to a fixed moment in time, cannot attempt to relate the story, cannot elaborate the reasons for Mona Lisa’s pensiveness. For the painter, it is sufficient to convey her mood by means of a tantalizing half-smile, but the same...