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  • Hamlet and the Snare of Scandal
  • Mark Dahlquist (bio)

               the dram of ealeDoth all the noble substance of a doubtTo his owne scandale.        Enter Ghost.

—Hamlet, 1.4.36–3811

When the Catholic Douay-Rheims Translation of the New Testament was published in 1582, it included a novel translation into English of the Greek σκάνδαλον (skandalon) or the Vulgate's scandalum, replacing traditional English equivalents such as "offend" and "stumbling block" with "scandalize" or "scandal."2 Pertaining to passages such as Matthew 18:6 ("whosoeuer shal offende one of these litle ones which beleue in me, it were better for him that a mylstone were hanged about his necke, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea"), this change concerned the moral obligation of Christian believers to protect one another from spiritual harm.3 While English Protestants initially criticized the Catholic New Testament's [End Page 167] "scandal" both as a neologism and as "a term vnknowen and out of vse," the word, drawn from a Greek term denoting a snare or trap, soon became a familiar part of English theological discourse.4 Though perhaps archaic today, the doctrinal sense of the term "scandal" is, I will argue, important to Hamlet, and can clarify the well-known textual crux cited in my epigraph.

Despite the initial reservations of some Protestants about the word "scandal," the term's popularity grew quickly in England, especially among those with strong reformist sympathies.5 This may have been due to the crucial role the notion of scandal had played in justifying reformist movements in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, where critics of the Catholic Church had turned to the New Testament's statements on scandal to challenge civil and ecclesiastical authorities and to demand the abolition of devotional images and ceremonies they viewed as lacking scriptural warrant.6

As the publication of the Douay-Rheims New Testament demonstrated, the terms "scandal" and "offense" could be functionally interchangeable, and they drew significance from their appearance in many of the same scriptural passages. The popularization of the English word "scandal" nevertheless introduced an important semantic shift among users of English. By providing a vivid and concrete alternative to more familiar English equivalents such as "offense," "hindrance," and "stumbling block," the word consolidated the associations of older terms into a more coherent and identifiable notion, which was also more deeply rooted in the metaphor of a snare or a trap denoted by the Greek skandalon. This emphasis on the dangers of trap-like objects was well suited for use in arguments against images and other devotional things. [End Page 168]

Medieval writers had generally described scandal as occurring when one person engages in an action that provides a bad example to another. In this respect, the doctrinal meaning of scandal is related to, but distinct from, the meaning of scandal that is more familiar today, having to do with rumor and reputation.7 Aquinas, for example, had defined scandal without regard to or discussion of intermediating objects, as "something less rightly done or said, that occasions another's spiritual downfall."8 In contrast, later discussions of scandal more often referred to the word's association with mechanical traps.

In arguing that the doctrinal sense of the word "scandal" can clarify the above textual crux in Hamlet, this essay will also suggest that scandal's doctrinal sense is related to the play's sustained emphasis on traps as mechanical instruments of deception and seduction. After considering Hamlet's interest in mousetraps and cannons as such instruments, I will examine the crux; I will argue that Shakespeare had most likely encountered the doctrinal meaning of "scandal," including its conventional association with doubt, in Samuel Daniel's Complaint of Rosamond, and that he made use of the word in its doctrinal sense in Edward III. My reading of the crux suggests that, while this passage has generally been taken to be corrupt, it artfully and intentionally evokes scandal's doctrinal meaning—a meaning tied to Hamlet's central thematic concerns and to its violent catastrophe.

I. Mechanical Deceptions: The Cannon and the Mousetrap

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