Abstract
This chapter shows Hamlet’s desire to exert his free will, and how free will swiftly falls prey to demonic influence, in this case a Ghost who twists Hamlet’s opinions regarding his mother’s remarriage into an inescapable hatred for sexuality. Under the auspices of his newly revived free will, Hamlet imagines he can deliberate, choose, and act wisely. But sparing Claudius’s life, demonstrating both mercy and reason, is a moral low point; Hamlet’s efforts to be his mother’s conscience only reveal how the angry ‘conscience’ creates sin. As Hamlet becomes increasingly afraid of himself, he fears his free will may be somehow transformed after he kills Claudius. Nonetheless, Hamlet resists the catharsis and the evocation of pity that Aristotle considered the essence of tragedy, suggesting the extent to which free will is at odds with the aims of theater.
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Notes
- 1.
Robert Burton [Democritus Junior], The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) (Philadelphia: J. W. Moore, 1857), 109, 159. Angus Gowland concludes that early modern melancholy was generally characterized (following Galen ) as manifesting “groundless fear and sorrow.” Angus Gowland , The Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy: Robert Burton in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 61.
- 2.
For a discussion of akrasia in the Renaissance , see Risto Saarinen, Weakness of Will in Renaissance and Reformation Thought. Saarinen discusses akrasia in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (219–23) but surprisingly not in relation to Hamlet . As Saarinen points out, Luther , for instance, had little interest in akrasia since sins of incontinence and other sins (such as those resulting from a more deeply engrained ‘intemperance’) were minimal to him. As Saarinen puts it, “incontinence is sin in the same way as concupiscence in general,” 124.
- 3.
See The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662, ed. Brian Cummings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 686.
- 4.
See for example, Margery Stone Schauer and Frederick Schauer, “Law as the Engine of State: The Trial of Anne Boleyn,” William and Mary Law Review 22.1 (1980), 71.
- 5.
As Maureen Quilligan summarizes, “Princess Elizabeth was thus, quite officially and notoriously, the child of an incestuous mother; less officially, the daughter of an incestuous father, and as such the product of a doubly incestuous union.” Maureen Quilligan , Incest and Agency in Elizabeth’s England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 34. Quilligan suggests this may have empowered Elizabeth to think about incest in a positive manner, creating a sense of “holy incest – which … authorizes … her simultaneous inhabitation of the multiple roles of mother, spouse, [and] daughter/maiden,” 68. For additional citations of incest accusations in relation to Elizabeth’s parentage in the wake of the 1570 Papal bull excommunicating her, see Bruce Thomas Boehrer, Monarchy and Incest in Renaissance England: Literature, Culture, Kinship, and Kingship (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), 47.
- 6.
Jason P. Rosenblatt , “Aspects of the Incest Problem in Hamlet,” Shakespeare Quarterly 29.3 (1978), 350–1.
- 7.
Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, 19.
- 8.
While it is possible to read ‘radiant angel’ as Valerie Traub has, as a reference to Gertrude , nothing else in the Ghost’s words implies a positive perception of this “most seeming-virtuous queen” (1.5.46). Valerie Traub , Desire and Anxiety, 150.
- 9.
This term, “adulterate,” could, however, be only an echo of Hamlet’s earlier reference to Claudius as a half-man, half-beast “satyr” (1.2.140).
- 10.
Eleanor Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge, 2nd edition (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1971), 135.
- 11.
Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge, 135.
- 12.
For citations of purgatory as a place of torment, see Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001), 68–73.
- 13.
Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge, 134. Catherine Belsey, Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden: The Construction of Family Values in Early Modern Culture (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, London: Macmillan, 1999), 158.
- 14.
Eric S. Mallin , Inscribing the Time: Shakespeare and the End of Elizabethan England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 67.
- 15.
Mallin, Inscribing the Time, 74.
- 16.
Grace Tiffany, “‘Hamlet’ and Protestant Aural Theater.” Christianity and Literature 52.3 (2003), 311.
- 17.
Daniel Westberg, Right Practical Reason: Aristotle, Action, and Prudence in Aquinas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 131.
- 18.
For the citation from Johnson (8:990 in the Yale edition) as well as a summary of some twentieth-century responses to his view, see Edward Tomarkan, Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare: The Discipline of Criticism (Athens, GA and London: University of Georgia Press, 1991; rpt. 2009), 141. Tomarkan notes, for example, Dover Wilson’s opinion, in opposition to Johnson, that wanting to send your enemies to hell was not an unusual desire in this era. Wilson cites the English patriot Iden in King Henry VI, Part Two, who kills Jack Cade by saying, “as I thrust thy body in with my sword,/So wish I might thrust thy soul to hell” (4.10.77–8). Yet, unlike the case with Iden, it is the careful, deliberative nature of Hamlet’s approach, focusing on the choice that he must make, that is highlighted in the prayer scene.
- 19.
Christopher Tilmouth, “Shakespeare’s Open Consciences.” Renaissance Studies 23.4 (2009), 504.
- 20.
Tilmouth, “Shakespeare’s Open Consciences,” 505.
- 21.
John Wilks, The Idea of Conscience in Renaissance Tragedy, 116.
- 22.
Belfiore, Elizabeth S., Tragic Pleasures: Aristotle on Plot and Emotion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 292.
- 23.
Pausanias , Description of Greece, Books III-V, trans. W.H.S. Jones and H.A. Ormerod (Cambridge, MA: Loeb-Harvard University Press, 1926; rpt. 2006), 548–9; Elis I 27.10.
- 24.
Stephen Orgel, The Authentic Shakespeare, 133.
- 25.
For two arguments that Aristotle did not in fact use the term in the Poetics see Gregory Scott, “Purging the Poetics” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 25 (2003), 233–63, and Claudio William Veloso, “Aristotle’s Poetics Without Katharsis, Fear, or Pity.” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 33 (2007), 255–84.
- 26.
Aristotle, Poetics, ed. and trans. Stephen Halliwell (Cambridge, MA and London: Loeb-Harvard University Press, 1995; rpt. 2005), 47–9.
- 27.
Thomas Rist , “Catharsis as ‘purgation’ in Shakespearean Drama,” in Shakespearean Sensations: Experiencing Literature in Early Modern England, ed. Katharine A. Craik and Tanya Pollard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 139.
- 28.
Qtd. in James P. Bednarz, Shakespeare and the Poets’ War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 21. Bednarz argues that Shakespeare’s purge involved presenting Jonson as Ajax in Troilus and Cressida, 32. Bednarz cites additional examples of purgation language in Jonson’s dramas, 33–5, largely drawn from similar medical discourses claiming satire was a purgative agent. Sarah Dewar-Watson argues that The Taming of the Shrew (Induction 2.129–36) also refers to medical purgation as the work of theater. Sarah Dewar-Watson, “Shakespeare and Aristotle.” Literary Compass 1.1.5.
- 29.
As Leon Golden notes, Antonio Sebastiano Minturno (1500–1574), in his 1550 De Poeta and especially in the 1563 Arte Poetica (1563), explicitly spoke of tragedy as engaging in a purging process analogous to the medical purgation of poisons from the body. Leon Golden , “The Purgation Theory of Catharsis.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 31.4 (1973), 473, 478. Modifying the widely held view expressed by Jakob Bernays (1824–1881) that catharsis “could only have two meanings, moral purification or medical purgation,” Golden’s position is that “intellectual clarification” is another significant component of catharsis, 474.
- 30.
See Anne T. Thayer, “Ramifications of Late Medieval Preaching: Varied Receptivity to the Protestant Reformation,” in Preachers and People in the Reformations and Early Modern Period, ed. Larissa Taylor (Leiden, Boston, Köln: Brill, 2001), 371.
- 31.
Philip Sidney, “An Apology for Poetry,” 1:177–8. Tanya Pollard argues that the play in question was Euripides’s Hecuba. Tanya Pollard, “What’s Hecuba to Shakespeare?” Renaissance Quarterly 65.4 (2012), 1073.
- 32.
Sidney, “An Apology for Poetry,” 1:178.
- 33.
See Sarah Dewar-Watson, Shakespeare’s Poetics: Aristotle and Anglo-Italian Renaissance Genres (Abingdon, Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2018), 104–6.
- 34.
Sidney, “An Apology for Poetry,” 1:174.
- 35.
John Milton , “Samson Agonistes,” in John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (Indianapolis: Odyssey Press, 1957; rpt. 1981), 549.
- 36.
Golden, “The Purgation Theory of Catharsis,” 474.
- 37.
For a discussion of inwardness in Hamlet, see David Hillman, Shakespeare’s Entrails: Belief, Scepticism and the Interior of the Body (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 81–116.
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Gleckman, J. (2019). Hamlet and the Free Will in Action. In: Shakespeare and Protestant Poetics. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9599-5_15
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