To Kill a King in the Malcontent Hamlet

The seventeenth century knew Hamlet as an aberrant social type termed the “melancholy malcontent,” which had made its way onstage by way of the satirical malcontents of Ben Jonson and John Marston.¹ In criticism, however, the question of the malcontent has long been closed, while questions of religion, revenge, and political theory in Hamlet continue to garner considerable attention.² Moreover, critics remain resistant to examining Shakespearean “character” in terms of “type,” because the assumption is that type is deterministic.³ The complex transformations of the Vice in early modern drama—the malcontent and the Machiavel making up two such branches— demonstrate that in fact a stage type functioned as a frame structuring an evolving conversation. Common features lend intelligibility, but these are sign- posts for positions and problems upon which each subsequent writer plays, altering the type’s overall network of meanings. For this reason, I trace Shakespeare’s malcontent type through Marston and to some extent as far as Thomas Kyd, drawing out Hamlet’s responses and interventions.

The word “malcontent” enters the English language by way of the conflicts between the Catholics and Huguenots in France. In 1572, Catherine de Médici and the Duke of Guise plotted the assassination of Coligny, a prominent Huguenot leader, which precipitated the murder of thousands of Huguenots in the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.⁴ As Catholic persecution of European Protestants threatened to reach genocidal levels, these Protestants could no longer dismiss Machiavelli’s analysis of power as essentially amoral. Following the Massacre, Huguenots began publishing protorepublican, monarchomach tracts, many of which, like Gentillet’s Discours contre Machiavel, attacked Catherine and the Guise’s Machiavellian practices while simultaneously conceding and modifying many of Machiavelli’s key insights. These tracts established two political narratives relevant to Hamlet. First, they cast the Massacre as a fratricidal attempt by Charles IX to murder his brother Navarre. Second, they developed a new theory of legitimate resistance to monarchical authority, founded primarily on the principles of Calvinist religious conscience and the election of a monarch by the will of the people.

Out of the conflict with Catherine and the Guise emerged two dissident groups that called themselves “Les Malcontents.” The first was a band of Huguenot nobles resisting Henri III under Anjou (then Alençon) between 1574 and 1576. The second—whose connection to the English context was more immediate—was a group of Catholic Walloon soldiers who betrayed their Protestant allies in October 1578 in Flanders, provoking outraged responses such as Thomas Churchyard’s poem “The Miserie of Flaunders” (1579). John Stubbes’s infamous attack on Elizabeth’s proposed marriage to Anjou, “The discoverie of a gaping gulf,” taints Anjou through this connection, since Anjou “ioyned hymselfe with the Malcontents eyther in Fraunce or the lovve conntryes.”⁵ Anjou had nothing to do with the Walloon betrayal, but Stubbes’s disingenuous either/or construction seeks to establish his guilt by association through the shared name, binding together treachery, Machiavellianism, and malcontentism.

The shock of the Protestant massacres in the 1570s reverberated through the influential tragedies of Marlowe and Kyd in plays such as The Jew of Malta, The Massacre at Paris, The Spanish Tragedy, and perhaps the Ur-Hamlet as well. These plays developed the stage Machiavel as the embodiment of this new conception of evil. In response Marston and Jonson delivered the stage malcontent, embodying the discontent underlying Kyd’s and Marlowe’s nihilistic political vision but also channeling it through satire as an engine for critique and change. Almost simultaneously, Marston’s verse satire gave voice to a different kind of malcontent, one fueled by resentment and pathological despair.

Shakespeare’s Hamlet intervenes in this development first by reviving the more disturbing and pathological malcontent of Marston’s verse satire, and second by tracing the English malcontent to its roots in the French confessional conflicts. Hamlet’s version of the stage malcontent infuses the figure with the full force of Marstonian invective, and with it the bleak Calvinist world view that John Gillies calls the “bicameral model of the self” in his...