Abstract
This chapter discusses the player’s speech and particularly Pyrrhus’s pause (as dramatized in Euripides, Ovid, and Seneca) when he is about to kill, not Priam, but the maiden Polyxena as a sacrifice to Apollo. This pause slows time to explore what transpires in the interface between human and divine in the moment of free-willed action. Hamlet is interested in this speech since it dramatizes a situation he will soon face, when he kills Claudius. The player’s speech, moreover, intensifies the stakes by situating the murder in a momentous historical context, the killing of King Priam, signaling the extinction of Trojan civilization and evoking Virgil’s Aeneid. In this light, the player’s words suggest that Renaissance England was likewise poised at a period of great change, following the departure of its Roman Catholic bases of worship and the introduction of a Protestantism that might be undergoing imminent transformations as well.
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Notes
- 1.
See Virgil, “Aeneid I-VI,” in Virgil: Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid I-VI, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough. Loeb Edition. (London: William Heinemann and New York: G. P. Putnam, 1916 [rpt. 1929]), 239–571. All citations are to this edition.
- 2.
A brief summary of Shakespeare’s exposure to Virgil, along with relevant sources, is provided by Charles Martindale , “Shakespeare and Virgil,” in Shakespeare and the Classics, ed. Charles Martindale and A.B. Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 103. See also A.B. Nuttall , “Virgil and Shakespeare,” in Virgil and his Influence, ed. Charles Martindale (Bristol [Avon]: Bristol Classical Press, 1984), 71–2.
- 3.
Euripides, “Hecuba ,” ed. and trans. David Kovacs , in Euripides: Children of Heracles, Hippolytus , Andromache, Hecuba (Cambridge, MA and London: Loeb-Harvard University Press [1995]; rpt. with revisions and corrections, 2005), 449; line 566. Tanya Pollard notes that this play was “the most prominent Greek play in the period,” Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 8.
- 4.
Seneca, “Trojan Women,” trans. John G. Fitch , in Seneca: Hercules, Trojan Women, Phoenician Women, Medea, Phaedra (Cambridge, MA and London: Loeb-Harvard University Press, 2002), 269; line 1154. For a brief discussion of Pyrrhus as “the executioner of Polyxena” in Euripides and Seneca, see Martin Mueller , “Hamlet and the World of Ancient Tragedy.” Arion 5.1 (1997), 38.
- 5.
Jasper Heywood , Troas, in Elizabethan Seneca; Three Tragedies, ed. James Ker and Jessica Winston (London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 2012), 133; lines 87–8.
- 6.
Ovid , Ovid’s Metamorphoses : The Arthur Golding Translation 1567, ed. John Frederick Nims (New York: Macmillan, 1965), 334; line 568.
- 7.
It should also be noted that Pyrrhus was not always presented in a negative light in ancient Greek literature. As Alan H. Sommerstein puts it, “To judge by the Odyssey, Neoptolemus was nothing but a fine young warrior of whom his father could be truly proud.” Alan H. Sommerstein , The Tangled Ways of Zeus: And Other Studies In and Around Greek Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 262. Pyrrhus is also presented positively in the Philoctetes by Sophocles .
- 8.
Euripides, “Trojan Women,” trans. David Kovacs , in Euripides: Trojan Women, Iphigenia Among the Taurians, Ion (Cambridge: Loeb-Harvard University Press, 1999), 17; lines 25–27.
- 9.
This entire incident in Book Two of the Aeneid, namely Helen hiding and Aeneas wanting to kill her, is perhaps not authentically Virgilian, although it was considered to be so in Shakespeare’s time. See Fairclough’s remark in Virgil, “Aeneid I-VI,” in Virgil: Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid I-VI, 332.
- 10.
Gertrude may not be as beautiful as Venus but she is, after all, and as the play makes explicit, rather old; Hamlet is thirty.
- 11.
For an alternative, perhaps additional, reading of the closet scene in relation to a classic text of antiquity, see Louise Schleiner , “Latinized Greek Drama in Shakespeare’s Writing of Hamlet .” Shakespeare Quarterly 41 (1990), 29–48. Schleiner argues that the closet scene references the Orestes of Euripides, 37.
- 12.
See Virgil, “Aeneid 7–12,” trans. H. Rushton Fairclough , rev. G.P. Goold , in Virgil: Aeneid 7–12, Appendix Vergiliana (Loeb-Harvard University Press, rev. ed. 2000), 1–367. All citations are to this edition.
- 13.
For Belleforest’s text, see Israel Gollancz, The Sources of Hamlet (London: Oxford University Press, 1926), 164–311, interpaginated with the 1608 translation, “The Hystorie of Hamblet” (1608). Gollancz notes the publishing history of Belleforest, 318.
- 14.
Gollancz, The Sources of Hamlet, 256–7.
- 15.
Margrethe Jolly discusses relationships between Belleforest’s version of Hamlet and Shakespeare’s, and cites this passage, following Kenneth Muir, in general relation to the spirit of Virgil’s underworld, but she does not make this point. Margrethe Jolly, The First Two Quartos of Hamlet: A New View of the Origins and Relationships of the Texts (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014), 37.
- 16.
Gollancz, The Sources of Hamlet, 258.
- 17.
David Loewenstein, “Agonistic Shakespeare?: The Godless World of King Lear,” in Shakespeare and Early Modern Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 156.
- 18.
Tanya Pollard , “What’s Hecuba to Shakespeare?,” 1072. Pollard also notes that Hecuba’s skills are made specially visible in Euripides’s Hecuba where she is able “to transform her grief into violence that is depicted as both successful and justified,” 1066.
- 19.
Madeleine Doran , Endeavors of Art: A Study of Form in Elizabethan Drama (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1954; rpt. 1964), 126.
- 20.
Heather James, “Dido’s Ear: Tragedy and the Politics of Response.” Shakespeare Quarterly 52.3 (2001), 380.
- 21.
For comments on Polonius’s and Hamlet’s different reactions to the player’s speech and what they say about the production of the First Quarto, the Second Quarto, and the First Folio, see my essay, “Shakespeare as Poet or Playwright?: The Player’s Speech in Hamlet,” in Early Modern Literary Studies 11.3 (2006).
- 22.
James, “Dido’s Ear: Tragedy and the Politics of Response,” 379–80.
- 23.
James, “Dido’s Ear: Tragedy and the Politics of Response,” 381.
- 24.
Pollard, “What’s Hecuba to Shakespeare?,” 1074. Pollard notes that “sympathy, like tragedy, is a Greek word and concept; linked to the reciprocal influence of bodies and spirits, it first entered English in the sixteenth century through responses to newly accessible Greek texts.” Pollard, Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages, 9.
- 25.
Pollard, for instance, suggests the language related to Hecuba is “insistently Anglo-Saxon,” Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages, 118.
- 26.
See Adrian Streete, Apocalypse and Anti-Catholicism in Seventeenth-Century English Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
- 27.
Arthur Dent, The Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven (1601) (Belfast and Edinburgh, 1859), 186.
- 28.
Qtd. in W. David Neelands, “Predestination,” in A Companion to Richard Hooker, ed. Torrance Kirby (Leiden: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2008), 189.
- 29.
Arminius, Arminius and his Declaration of Sentiments, 135.
- 30.
Qtd. in W. David Neelands, “Predestination,” 199, 193.
- 31.
See Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists.
- 32.
John Milton , “Paradise Lost,” in John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (Indianapolis: Odyssey Press, 1957; rpt. 1981), 218.
- 33.
Alfred Lord Tennyson, “In Memoriam” (London and New York: Macmillan, 1890), 2.
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Gleckman, J. (2019). The Player’s Speech. In: Shakespeare and Protestant Poetics. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9599-5_16
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