The Renaissance Hamlet

Fame, one of the prologues to Legend of Good Women, and passages from the Canterbury Tales are interesting. But many of Gellrich's best ideas and hunches get lost in his deferential attitude towards recent Chaucerian readings and scholarship. Taken Qut of contextl his remarks could read as a catalogue of thirty years of critical fashion. Chaucer's various works are 'allegories of readings' (p 219); they are about writing (p 183), about language (p '97), about the audience (p 201); like all 'well-wrought' (p 243) new-<:ritical works, Chaucer's poems have 'subtle structure' (p 191); the 'virtues of narrative in the Tales' are 'concise action (unimpeded beginning, middle, and end), adequate characterization, and crisp sentence' (p 203), or, I suppose, mythos, ethos, dianoia. Gellrich's main argument, however, is that'a principle of authority ... does not prevail completely over the meaning of the text' (p 203). Right. ButGellrich never allows himself or his reader to deal seriously with this idea. Instead, he courts the very authorities such an idea is bound to subvert. Kittredge, Donaldson, Howard, and Jordan are all honourable men, but in paying tribute to them Gellrich merely reintroduces the notion of authority he claims to attack, Chaucer may be a revolutionary, a sceptic, a thinker, and a subversive, butthat, apparently, does not suggestthat we should be. It is not often that Iwould urge a professed post-structuralist to become more belligerent and nasty. But such an unpleasant tone is precisely what Gellrich must risk here. Because of his reluctance to confront Chaucerian scholarship in a critical fashion, Gellrich's ideas become reduced to scattered 'new readings: set in the context ofand offering only mild variations on'old readings' (see, e.g., pp 224-34 on 'voice' and the Chaucerian 'persona'). Many readers, having seen (or read) Gellrich's title, might expect to be challenged or put off by the jargon or tone of his book. They need not fear. I fully expected sentences such as the following to be typical: 'But insofar as Dante's poem is marginal with respect to its origin in the Book of memory, it names the incompleteness ofwhat itsupplements at the same time as it demonstrates its own inability to be complete' (p 251). Such sentences are meaningless and silly, to be sure, and in this book they are so rare as to be merely ornamental. But even one unsympathetic with contemporary criticism willieam to long for them. Gellrich's book has the unfortunate virtue of suggesting that a challenging, polemical, and difficult style ofcriticism is safe, familiar, inoffensive, and really no different from what we have been doing all along. The Renaissance Hamlet SHELDON ZITNER Roland Mushat Frye. The Renaissance Hamlet: Issues and Responses in 1600 Princeton University Press 1984. 398. $28.50 us Readers of this handsome volume will recognize at once the learning and judiciousness that have made Professor Frye's Shakespeare and Christian Doctrine UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 56, NUMBER 2, WINTER 1986/7 368 SHELDON ZITNER (1963) a standard work. The Renaissance Hamlet: Issues and Responses in 1600 (1984) is also reassuring in the hand, generous to the eye, and more absorbing and informative than books with even grander titles, so it is unpleasant to begin by quarrelling with what may have been only an editor's inspiration. Yet the title raises some of the questions that remain after one has read the book. Is there a Renaissance Hamlet - Q2? F? - significantly different from ours, or Dryden's for that matter? Are Renaissance responses to the play and are the issues in it markedly differentfrom theresponses wehave and the issues we thinkwe see? Or, if the responses of 1600 are to social and political issues, are these necessarily responses to the play? Frye is hardly unaware of such questions. Indeed he makes it clear that he does not regard the playas only a running topical allusion, or merely the form and pressure of the age. But he is far from sharing Cardinal Manning's belief that the appeal to History is a sin against the Holy Spirit. 'Our task here,' Frye writes, 'is to reconstruct, as fully as we now can, what Globe audiences would have found to interest and excite them in Hamlet.' These sources of interest and excitement, he thinks, are the social issues that give rise to I the frame ofideas within which Shakespeare could expect his audiences to react.' Frye is not concerned to determine 'Shakespeare's own convictions on these matters .. , [but] rather to reestablish the range of audience reactions on which his dramaticcreations played.' Like the title, these aims seemproblematic. One knows roughly what is meant: that many Elizabethans were interested in the succession, incest, and such matters, and so also interested in plays that touched on them; and further that those matters are reflected in a primarily thematic organization of plays, which in turn elicit responses similar to those recorded actual cases of succession or incest. But is 'reconstruction' needed? Isn't Hamlet itself what the Globe audience found to interest and excite them? A carnal and bloody plot, ceremonious and athletic stage action, words that are eloquent or exquisitely banal - what is lacking here to prompt the early and continuing ethusiasm? Nothing - or everything - depending on how narrowly one defines 'responses.' Yet even ifone accepts the Renaissance premise that omnis mens omniformis est and thinks the proscription againstmarryingin-laws curious matter for a footnote, one can argue that Shakespeare's audiences wore their rue with a difference, and reacted to Haml£t with a distinctively Elizabethan sensibility. But how can one know, let alone explain, earlier responses to the play in the detail that would make them worth discussing? Evidence of Elizabethan audience responses is thin and crude; Hamlet could please 'the wiser sort: wrote Gabriel Harvey. But Frye is not writing about either the very general or the very detailed sort of audience response. And yet he is writing about them, or hoping to provide the basis for guesses about them when he writes about 'the frame of ideas' within which he thinks the Elizabethans reacted, and the range of their (issue-related) responses on which the dramas played. One can look at this positively, Julius Caesar offers characterizations and events that seem to justify both of the available interpretations of the murder - the republican and the centralist; the Ghost in Hamlet is terminally ambiguous: a HAMLET )69 Catholic purgatorial figure, a Protestant goblin, and a sceptic's bugbear. Here is Shakespeare apparently taking into account the range of possible audience ideas about ghosts and playing with all. If we are to fully understand Hamlet (aT any otherplay for that matter) we must obviously understand the rhetorical situation it enters, that is understand among others such matters as the state of censorship, and the nature of 'safe' and'dangerous' thought as contemporaries saw it. But this sort of understanding is of limited help in recreating earlier responses to the play or in determining our own. It is valuable nonetheless. The knowledge of what was said and thought is indispensable in clarifying language and allusion, whose subsequent meanings are at the mercy of linguistic and social change. A knowledge ofthe contexts ofwhat was said can reveal the perennial issues lurking beneath strange and fashionable forms, and can suggest the character of Shakespeare's aesthetic decisions by setting forth the discarded contemporary alternatives in language, behaviour, and thought. This knowledge of contexts Frye's book often provides lavishly. The extensive consideration of burial practices can not only save us from anachronistic interpretation but can provide designers and directors with practical hints for staging the last act. However, it is perhaps less this sort of understanding than a grasp of the form of the play, its pattern of promises and fulfilments, that determines our responses - provided, of . :ourse, that the production conveys the pattern. IfFrye adopts some ofthe procedures and premises of the Old Historicism, he is 3;cutely aware of the shortcomings of its classic practitioners. The subtext of his ""ok is a caveat against the Tillyard - L.B. Campbell-Ribner mode of foreclosing =luestions ofinterpretation by invoking supposed Elizabethan orthodoxies: world oictures, mirrors of policy, the homilies. A great deal of knowledge has often ?fOved more dangerous than none, and some ofFrye's most telling passages decry·the unilateral views: the 'over-simple reading of Tudor attitudes,' and the one-sided visions' ofearlier scholarship. Frye's insistence on'the full complexity' !Od diversity of Elizabethan attitudes and his painstaking survey of the variety of iocumentation for them are great strengths of the work and will be a comfort to Joth the scholarly and the classroom interpreter. But despite his praise of Wilbur ,anders's warning against allowing 'even a fuller and more adequate historical 'econstruction to dominate and displace our literary sensibilities,' his method of Teating the playas a sequence of 'issues' exposes The Renaissance Hamlet to just iuch dangers. At times the method seems both to fragment the play and to deny the nature of he audience. Tyranny, incest, madness - necessarily detached from one another or orderly discussion as contemporary issues - are not the reign of Claudius, the narriage of Gertrude, or the distress of Ophelia. And individual reactions to : ontemporaryissues in polemic, diary or recorded behaviour are unsure guides to he briefcollective life ofan audience, whose members respond, in part because of Ine another, to symbolic events in ways often remote from everyday self-interest; hey weep for Hecuba. The limitations of method sometimes have unfortunate effects. History can be 370 SHELDON ZITNER dragged in by the heels like Polonius, as when we are told that Mary Stuart was, like Hamlet, 'loved by the distracted multitude: and that she had the support of church and state leaders, 'which Hamlet obviously lacked (4.3.4).' These observations are designed to justify the assertion of a parallel to 'the situation dramatized in Hamlet. Should Jane or Mary ascend to the throne?' Jane Grey's support by the royal Council calls up Claudius's words about support for his own succession (1.2.151). 'At least as strong arguments could be advanced for the succession of "Queen Jane" in England as for King Claudius in Hamlet - but in England they did not prevail.' Mary Hamlet is as frail an artifact as Jane Claudius, notbecause the author is distorting English history, butbecause the assertion that 'the situation dramatized in Hamlet' was the question of succession is odd at best. To politicize the play in this manner makes possible all sorts of analogues and topicalities: James as King of Scotland playing Hamlet to Bothwell's Claudius; Hamlet and the audience caught between Anglican non-resistance to tyrants and the activism ofthe newer monarchomachs. But Hamlet's accusation that Oaudius popped in between the election and his hopes is not evidence that Hamlet is a political play. The remark strikes one as an afterthought, the lengthening of a bill of particulars. Nothing is made of Hamlet's political disappointment earlier or in any dramatization of the problem of elective succession elsewhere in the play. And though we may agree with Frye about the similarities he discovers between Claudius and the tyIant of political theory, it is not primarily a tyrant or tyranny that Shakespeare has dramatized. The task of setting right a time out of joint is for Hamlet more afamilial and personal than apolitical mission. Such are the terms in which the Ghost grieves and charges him; such are the terms in which he broods and acts. All three uses of the root of the word 'tyrant' in Hamlet are metaphoric. The Hamlet realityhas little place for them; plays in which Shakespeare is seriously concerned with either the idea or the fact of tyranny (Caesar, Macbeth) use the noun often and unmetaphorically. We make the relations between literature and actuality seem - hut only seem more tangible by matching bits: stage incest with incest, stage burial with burial. Frye has found incestuous marriages of the Gertrude-Claudius variety and details the responses to them. In the light of ... Tudor attitudes [he writes], J. Dover Wilson has properly insisted that Shakespeare would have expected his audience to respond to the marriage in this play with as much abhorrence as the Athenians felt for the union of Oedipus and his motherJocasta in Sophocles. ... It is possible to increase our sensitivity to Hamlet's emotional revulsion by noting certain actual treatments of brothers- and sisters-in-law like Gertrude and Claudius. (P 80) I have quoted this passage at length because of the questions it raises, not the least ofwhich are prompted by the advice to'increase our sensitivity' to the play through reading certain documents. Are these intended to supply what the play itself HAMLET 371 omits or inadequately provides? And did Shakespeare intend his audience - in 1600 or now - to share Hamlet's revulsion orI alternatively, to respond to how the play presents both the revulsion and its object? Whatever the actual cases of incest, we are unlikely to come across a precedent for what Shakespeare has given us: incest that exercises the son of one of the offenders and is almost ignored by everyone else, induding the author.The Ghost too complains of 'damned incest' but couples the phrase with 'luxury,' 'shameful lust,' and the Queen's 'prey[ing] on garbage.' His speech subordinates incest to sexual jealousy. This, rather than incest, is emphasized in Hamlet's confrontation of his mother in the closet scene through Hamlet's comparison of his father with his uncle, and it forms the substance of his accusations. Shakespeare had his chance to introduce the idea of incest I safely' into the Gonzaga play; there's not a word of it, but much about sexual jealousy. Whatever one thinks of this (and Freudians think a great deal), Shakespeare does nothing to underline the theme, subordinating it to the general revulsion Hamlet feels at his mother's hasty, indeed, at her second - and would presumably have felt at any - marriage. Neither Claudius's pangs of conscience nor Gertrude's 'black and grained spots' need refer to anything more than the murder and the remarriage. It is not the 'issue' of incest to which an audience is prompted to react, nor to any other issue - succession, tyranny - in 'the frame of ideas.' it is rather to turns of language and event seemingly contrived to forestall merely conventional responses. The text as we have it prompts us to respond to the anomaly of Hamlet's reaction, not to the undramatized issue of incest. Perhaps indeed this anomaly, like others in the play, is designed to postpone audience stock judgments and present moral questions ambiguously. Isolating some of the problems of method in The Renaissance Hamlet may have given a misleading impression of my view of the value of the book and of its particular blend of instruction and pleasure. Let me try to right the balance. James Granger (1723-76) was an Oxfordshire vicar, remembered - ifat all - as the butt of Dr Johnson's irritation ('The dog is a whig'), and as the originator of what was to become a long-lived amusement. Granger published a Biographical History of England printed with blank interleaves on which the buyer could paste portraits or other relevant illustrations ofthe text. Filling up a 'Granger' or other book became an educational pastime, especially for Victorians. Beyond its eighty-seven admirable illustrations, The Renaissance Hamlet offers a charming and informative historical grangerization of Shakespeare's play. Abraham Fraunce, William Perkins, and the students of the University of Edinburgh tussle with something like 'To be or not to be'; Bishop Bilson takes up arms against a sea of Tudor doctrines of obedience; Donne doubts wisely, and Elizabeth herself broods Hamlet-like in a crise de conscience. This is the plenty of Minerva, an ideal rainy afternoon read. Onefollows, eager and absorbed, as Frye traces the margins ofthe play, illuminating detail, forestalling anachronistic interpretation. It is only a little dismaying to discover that the word directly after I grangerize' in the OED is 'grangousier,' after the omnivorous character in Rabelais. ...