The Theatre of Revenge: The Intrusion of Hamlet’s Shadow Between Drama and History

1 The Question of Hamlet’s Discomfort. From a Literary Facet to a Critical Obsession

So far from being Shakespeare’s masterpiece, Hamlet is most certainly an artistic failure. In several ways the play is puzzling, and disquieting, as is none of the others. Of all the plays it is the longest and is possibly the one which Shakespeare spent most pains; and yet he has left in superfluous and inconsistent scenes which even hasty revision should have noticed.

[…] We are surely justified in attributing the play with that other profoundly interesting play of intractable material and astonishing versification, Measure for Measure, to a period of crisis, after which follow the tragic succession which culminate in Coriolanus.^[1]

These are the famous, iconoclastic words used by Thomas Stearns Eliot to provocatively attack Shakespeare’s Hamlet. His subversive accent moulds the tone of a heterodox tradition of uncomfortable voices, which disfigures the Mona Lisa of Literature.^[2] Following the direction already taken by Robertson and Stoll,^[3] Eliot adds his personal contribution finding new reasons, other than the effect of a mother’s guilt on her son,^[4] apt to transform the story of an older play into an aesthetic miscarriage.

As it is well known, Hamlet’s structural defect – in Eliot’s view – would lie in the overflowing excess that the playwright’s power is not up to controlling: the uncurable disease is the not objectifiable disgust which remains to poison life and obstruct action. This intense feeling is qualified properly as ecstatic and terrible:^[5] it sounds to be absolute, unbounded to any possible external situation or chain of events, and therefore incomprehensible, inexpressible, and even unbelievable. The double Hamlet, the play and the individual character, would win the artistic inevitability based on the complete adequacy of the external to the emotion, but this unnatural outrage is hardly punished: the entire work comes to be filled with superfluous and inconsistent scenes; the versification, unable to keep the pace of an aberrant emotion, abandons itself to a variable, fluctuating rhythm.

Eventually, all is out of joint.

From Romantic period^[6] up to the present day, Hamlet’s obscurity has obsessed the minds of literary scholars;^[7] the attempts to drill the dark and transfix the mystery have been multiplying with the result of making ambiguity even more ambiguous, increasing the sense of discomforting undecidability. The essentialist mood has rendered the figure of the melancholic prince a symbol of anachronistic futurity;^[8] an embodied icon of consciousness;^[9] a paradigmatic emblem of a new subjectivity decomposed by the inner lacerations of the Self;^[10] definitively, a workable totem exhibiting a proleptic predisposition towards future incarnations, both modern and postmodern.

Throughout these pages, Hamlet returns to the stage as a representational understanding of English culture and society at the dawn of post-Renaissance modernity. In this epochal framework of dramatic presentation, the goals of the essay are plural and interconnected. To begin with, it turns back to Eliot-Schmitt’s interpretative polemic both to clarify that the juxtaposition between their two forms of criticism is distancing the final conclusions more than the questioning premises, and to bring to the surface legal elements which would be combined with the political facts and circumstances described by Schmitt in order to aid and amplify the validity of his argumentative approach. This intellectual claim is closely related to a critical destitution of the canonical Hamlet-centric approach to the genre of revenge tragedy and is justified by a juridical reading of Hamlet’s distinguishing traits.^[11] More precisely, the main thesis here supported is that the disjunctive threshold between what Early Modern audiences identify with in Hamlet’s unresolved character and what they would expect from a revenge tragedy can be explained by reconstituting the socio-legal discourse in the vital texture of which Hamlet’s fibers were embedded and drew new fluid.

2 Eliot and Schmitt Facing the Hamletian Excess. From an Aesthetic Failure to an Epochal Stamp

In Hamlet or Hecuba,^[12] Schmitt clearly denounces Hamlet’s departure from the typical literary traits of a revenge drama, contrary to Shakespeare’s original and structural ideation.^[13] The avenger, the decisive figure, undergoes an ontological and internal distortion, which metamorphoses his character and motivation, transmuting the hero into a doubtful, problematic and broken individual. Hamlet’s reflections delay subjective impulses, insofar as they do not relate to the practical means of committing a crime, but instead affect the very ontology of revenge, which is transformed into a dramatic issue and an ethical dilemma. This astonishing deformation is at the same time a motif of paradoxical scandal in the present and a reserve of success for the future: the Hamletization of the avenger^[14] is the legacy consigned to posterity.^[15] In Schmitt’s view, the transfiguration of the vindicator represents the outcome of a violent confrontation between Shakespeare, as the Author of the drama, and something of indisputably ungovernable, that remains open and unresolved. It is precisely this situation of suspension which serves as the genial mark of the play.

Actually, Schmitt and Eliot share the statement: Shakespeare has to face with an overwhelming force, with something of unspeakable.

In the last part of his essay (usually under-quoted) Eliot says: “We must simply admit that here Shakespeare tackled a problem which proved too much for him. Why he attempted it at all is an insoluble puzzle; under compulsion of what experience, he attempted to express the inexpressible horrible, we cannot ever know. We need a great many facts in his biography […] We should have, finally, to know something which is by hypothesis unknowable, for we assume it be an experience which, in the manner indicated, exceeded the facts”.^[16]

Schmitt provides the answer to Eliot’s pessimistic curiosity. What Shakespeare has to cope with is not a sense, nor a sensibility, and certainly not a personal bio-fact, but simply and ponderously history: a piece of historical reality projects into the drama.

On this ground, a polemical critique of the critics is engaged. In Schmittian analysis, the most renowned interpreters of the Shakespearean text (and especially T.S. Eliot, R. Bridges, J. Dover Wilson) are guilty of focusing more on the subjectivity of the poet than on the objective condition from which the drama originates. Therefore, the defectiveness lies not in the literary composition (in the plot of the play or in Hamlet’s malformed temper), but rather in the readers’ heuristic ability. When the attention is turned from the personal motifs to the historical reality, to the living external context, all becomes understandable and defensible: Hamlet is not exhausted in his fictional mask.

It is evident from the previous remarks that, even though the jurist and the literate have a common perception of an Hamletian surplus, the outcome they arrive at is entirely different.

According to the first, other than to find an objective correlative for fixing themselves,^[17] Hamlet’s feelings are unbearable, out of balance, therefore unrepresentable and inexpressible just because of the excess of the events that arouse them.^[18]

The undeclarable, viewed by Eliot as an impediment to be resolved, becomes in Schmitt a limit to be respected and preserved. Shakespeare is not experiencing a defect of creativity, but, on the contrary, a pick of incomparable greatness: he stops in front of incontrovertible events and, led by tact and deference, extracts from the disordered of contemporary politics a ‘tabooed form’ that could be intensified to the level of a myth.

Schmitt seals his argumentative thought with a touch of stylistic intensity: “This unalterable reality is the mute rock upon which the play founders, sending the foam of genuine tragedy rushing to the surface”.^[19] Subjectivity and creative inspiration are strongly restricted by the public sphere established by the spectators’ presence.^[20]

The excess, not contained nor solved by Hamlet’s stage character, is due to the presential absence of another image fixed to the mask, perceptible and visible with backlighting by the audience at that time: Hamlet’s face is mirroring the dramatic contours of King James I’s shape. The dilemmatic tensions, that inactivate the expected revengeful reaction, are the wounds inflicted onto the soul of a real man, “the unhappy son of an unfortunate lineage, who asserted himself painstakingly between his Catholic mother and her Protestant enemies, between intriguing courts and unruly noble factions, between fanatically disputing priests and preachers”.^[21] Synthetically, the problematic of the avenger character, its anti-canonical essence and behavior act as dramatic signatures of the break that the tragedy of history opens into the play. Hamlet can be justified only by the coeval existence of James I, the carnal king who dramatically embodied all the catastrophic lacerations of an entire century,^[22] the loss of certainty and forms experienced by the English world at the downfall of Queen Elizabeth I’s reign. James’ political indecision is responsible for Hamlet’s irresolution; the King’s traumatic destiny is the source of the Prince’s strange melancholy. As the first of the Stuarts is unable to cross the time towards a Modern era, resolving the catastrophic end of the traditional order, so the revengeful hero remains blocked and abandons himself to an inconclusive anguish.

In the same manner and with the same gravity, Schmitt asserts that the suspension of Gertrude’s culpability is due to Mary Stuart’s possible participation in the murder of James’ father. Out of consideration for James, the designated King to whom Shakespeare attributes his favour, it is impossible to insinuate the guilt of Hamlet’s mother (considering the identification between Hamlet and James). On the other hand, in view of the fact that Protestant Scotland and the devotees of Queen Elizabeth are convinced that Mary Stuart is the real instigator of the murder, it is impossible to insinuate Gertrude’s innocence.

From the previous arguments, one can conclude that Schmitt has objectified what Eliot perceived as unobjectifiable. The solution of the intellectual riddle engaged by Eliot is simpler than expected: it is sufficient to look away from the framework of the pages and grasp the substance of factual reality, which ultimately outweighs all other aesthetic considerations. In some sense, Shakespeare stages a problematic tragedy before his contemporary audience with the same intent that leads him to include a fictional drama (The Gonzago’s murder) in the body of his main play: to provoke a reaction from the spectators, placing them in face of their responsibilities and destiny. In allowing the imaginary to enter into the story of Denmark reign, Hamlet becomes a bystander to Claudius’ reaction; in allowing history to penetrate into his literary world, Shakespeare becomes an observer to the attitudes and beliefs of the English people of his day.

3 Beyond Schmitt’s Findings. Hamlet’s Suspension in Front of the Taboo of Justice

In the light of the critical perspective here proposed, there is something more that goes beyond the correspondence between historical and dramatic characters (Hamlet/King James I; Gertrude/Mary Stuart) and directly concerns the idea of Justice.

If it is acceptable – based on Schmitt’s view – that King James I embodied the entire conflict of his age, it could be arguable that even the schism, which tore the unity of English legal system, is evoked by a certain degree of allusiveness in the text of the play. Therefore, the crisis and ecstasy, firstly referred by Eliot to Shakespeare’s genius and to the metaphysics of a feeling, and already objectified by Schmitt in political terms, would also be extended to the troubling consistency of English Jurisdiction.

This argument can be understood if one locates Hamlet within the context of the revenge culture that dominated the last years of Elizabeth’s I reign and if one views this specific cultural dimensionality as a reflective product of a given nomos.^[23] More precisely, it could be asserted that, moving from Medieval to Modern times, England has been affected by a momentous and radical transition, from a documentary to a revenge culture, caused principally by the different ways in which Law was (re)presented and Justice was made.

As Emily Steiner has brilliantly noted, the proliferation of legal documents in fourteenth and fifteenth century England informed the literary culture of the time: it was common for English poetry to reference legal texts, both in terms of the formulas that were used in their compositions and their material forms of dissemination.^[24] Medieval writers borrowed the textual apparatus of the law to invent a rich documentary poetics.^[25] An example of this is the uniquely English tradition of the Charters of Christ. Here the material and juridical ontology of the charter, the object that replaces the ancient symbolic artefacts to give evidence of a concluded transaction, is transposed in literary domain, becoming the very substance of a huge corpus of Passion Lyrics in which the same Christ’s body is transfigured into a bloody charter granting heaven to true penitents.^[26] In the same manner Langland’s poem, Piers Plowman, unfolds itself like an archive of salvation: it presents numerous documents as key texts (precisely Mede’s charter, Truth’s Pardon, Piers’s testament, Hawkyn’s quittance, Moses’s maundement, Peace’s patent) in the construction of salvation history, which becomes a documentary history.^[27] The tangibility of the written records is used to poetically grant God’s presence in the earthly life of humanity, the immanence of the divine in the human condition. Synthetically, the documents used to express form and contents of the literary creation show “how the trans-historical experience of the divine might be historically apprehended through the social and material practices of documentary culture”.^[28]

In this perspective, Law with its new consistency fed Literature and enabled writers to develop a metaphorical language of ritual performance, re-envisioning the conditions of textual production and developing an identified model of literary practice.

When the benefits provided by the fixity of legal certainty started to fade and the pluralisation of the voices empowered to declare the Law seemed to be a new dawn for a new era, weapons were being sharpened in the secret cave of history to prepare one of England’s most cruel internal wars, the war among Jurisdictions.

The English legal body knew the violent ‘passion’ that produced an ecstatic response – like a theatrical conversion –: the birth of Equity out of the anatomy of the Common Law. It was an act of going outside of the Law’s original Self, as the etymology of the word ecstasy suggests, an exceptional movement of excision that transformed what remained and what emerged, the gesture in spectacle. The new ‘passionate’ Self of the Law estranged itself, yet took a risk in the rush of a loss that led to a gain in knowledge; a knowledge which bloomed not as a fruit of reason, but as the loot of the same passion.^[29] The pristine organism deflagrated in a catastrophe, which paralleled but exceeded the Christian-platonic dualism of body and soul, or better distanced itself from it. The fragmented body was purged from the nostalgia of the ancient union and lived, nurtured by a paradoxical yet generative dissonance.

Jurisprudential Equity appeared on the stage of the legal theatre in a form of vindictive and retributive justice: it offered correction and comfort when the Common Law did not provide adequate remedy.^[30] It was an extra-legal form of retaliation, imparting a moral slipperiness like that of revenge and evoking terms and measures also applied to revenge: it rendered everyone what is due by seeing that a proportionable satisfaction be made, or a quid pro quo.^[31] Therefore, the advent of Equity (the classical Aequitas Englishized), as a separate bulk of substantive and procedural forms, once again made patent the darker side of justice and provoked a re-location of vengeance into the spatial dimension of normative order. Far from opposing the lawless revenge to the legal redress, the late medieval and the early modern vision maintained a more sophisticated and intermingled conception, so that the social audience would have been capable of considering the possibility that justice could be vengeful and revenge just.^[32] According to this perspective, revenge was interstitial: it existed in the margin between justice and crime.^[33] As one minister said in his sermon, “Revenge is the punishment of injuries and the redress of wrongs: the question is to whom this punishment and vengeance belongeth”.^[34]

The relevant matter for our understanding is to determine how revenge could be institutionalized, that is to say removed from the borders of the legal order and put inside of a situated sphere of public administration. This inquiry becomes even more important in that transitional period of English legal system when the question of jurisdictional heterogeneity became central and unavoidable, insofar as Law was distributed among different forums and legal orders. As a result of such internal and spatial dislocation, even revenge, which, from the past, was stigmatized as the demonized twin of the judicial system, has become complex and unstable. In the new contest, Equity could vindicate the inadequacies of the common law; the Lord Chancellor, later the Court of Chancery, could correct the ordinary course of justice. Therefore, a form of vengeance, other than the one enacted by the Common Law, made its appearance on the stage of history to mitigate the strictness of the law and to concede a concrete relief when the common law judges failed to provide a remedy, thus undermining the status of ‘public revengers’ once attributed to them.

This was the competitive framework in which, in the shift from Tudor to Stuart dynasty, a rampant revenge culture flourished and, like melancholy, became a chronic malady.^[35]

What was the sense of the revenge tragedy in that cultural time and what was Hamlet’s provocative message?

As a genre so diffused in that time, revenge drama represented a powerful site for the critical examination of early modern law. In a very opposite way from the classical times, when tragedy dealt with the issue of replacing private revenge with public legal institutions, in the turn of the XVI and XVII century, revenge drama was used to denounce the tensional crisis of law and justice, the defective holes that lurked under the veil of a proclaimed effectiveness. This important deviation from the common paradigm to attribute the preeminent role to the community, not to the individual,^[36] can be used as an interpretative filter to transform the way in which one could read these plays. In their texts revenge is commuted from a personal duty to a political act: revenge tragedies staged a form of new participatory justice carried out by a group of citizens in opposition to the settled powers and the established way of rendering justice. A literary device of resistance was granted to blame the major stresses and strains the English systems was undergoing at that time, such as increasing professionalization (which undermined the same participatory structures on which the pristine English common law was founded), exponential growth in litigation, jurisdictional conflicts.

Confronted with the cohorts of its similar, Hamlet manifests its absolute singularity for several reasons.

On the one side, Hamlet, as a play, is the enhanced figuration of the juxtaposed double: the living and the not-dead; the Father and the step-father; the mother and the lover; the being and the not being. Every figure is crossed by the absence of its opposite; the manque is governing the entire plot and paradigmatically precipitates into the inconsistent consistency of the ghost as the scenic contour offered to the memory of a murdered form. Hamlet, as character, repeats the problematic tension between the Father and the Son: if the son would perform the father’s will, then the double order of the kinship and the kingship would be reconstituted. Father and Son would be merged into a new mystical person, into a twin-natured body that would represent the fusion of the carnal and the spiritual.

On the other hand, Hamlet’s figure performs the crisis of the double: he delays time and consigned himself to an undecided in between, transfixed on the cross between the father’s murder and revenge, tied to a wooden stake rooted into the kin and sunk into blood.

In face of the double and of its tentative solution, every form of justice is suspended and Hamlet rests, stuck and puzzled, at the door of revenge, anticipating a sort of Kafkaesque style.

Other elements confirm the unique and complicated place occupied by Hamlet within the genre of revenge tragedy.

The idea of a participatory justice that the other dramas have in common here does not appear. In contrast to the common revenger, personified by heroes from outside the aristocracy, the main character is a noble prince. Moreover, as it has been cleverly noted,^[37] in the act of seeking forgiveness, Claudius abandons himself to an intense soliloquy, which stands for a dramatic confession to the audience. He refers to a brother’s murder, and a brother’s blood;^[38] his tragic discourse replicates the archetypical motif of Cain’s killing of Abel instead of telling the new political and juridical story of a corrupt and usurping king being deposed by the righteous dispossessed prince.

Once again, there is something that exceeds the text of the play.

Schmitt’s focus can be enlarged: another taboo, the taboo of justice (as the other face of earthly revenge), stands alongside the taboo of the Queen and of the Avenger.

Hamlet’s thought on the performance of justice is excepted from the plot of the play. In the final part of the drama, Hamlet makes his return as a renewed man. At a critical juncture, in the first scene of the Final Act, he encounters the materiality of death together with the dreadful vagaries of the law. The final confrontation is with the gravediggers (intent on burying Ophelia’s corpse), the grotesque clowns who make the graves and turn the skull, the same figures chosen to search out the intricacies of early modern jurisprudence, repeating the motifs at the basis of the decision in the case Hales v. Petit as reported by Plowden’s Commentaries.^[39] The dialogue goes deep, excavating the metonymic expression of the law from the levelling of human existences. Having be heedless of law and its concrete working for four acts, suddenly Hamlet is comforting using all the technicalities that affects legal language:

There’s another. Why may not that be the skull

of a lawyer? Where be his quiddities now, his qualities,

his cases, his tenures, and his tricks? Why does he

suffer this rude knave now to knock him about the

sconce with a dirty shovel and will not tell him of his

action of battery? Hum! This fellow might be in’s

time a great buyer of land, with his statutes, his recog-

nizances, his fines, his double vouchers, his recoveries.

Is this the fine of his fines and the recovery of his

recoveries, to have his fine pate full of fine dirt? Will

his vouchers vouch him no more of his purchases, and

double ones too, than the length and breadth of a pair

of indentures? The very conveyances of his lands will

hardly lie in this box, and must th’inheritor himself

have no more, ha?^[40]

Hamlet proceeds for a full 13 lines abandoning himself to the same vertigo of the list which took possession of Dickens’ humour in the first chapter of the Bleak House. With a hint of sardonic taste, the law is ridiculed: in front of death, it becomes inessential and trivial, losing the documentary capacity promised during its vital span of time. “To have his fine pate full of fine dirt”: this is the untameable destiny of every lawyer.

Hamlet renounces to profess his faith in the law, because the law does not provide any assurance, and turns himself toward the upper hand of providence and the inner rule of conscience.

“There’s a divinity that shapes our ends”, he says to Horatio before questioning, for the last time, its internal verdict:

Does it not, think thee, stand me now upon –

He that hath killed my King and whored my mother,

Popped in between th’election nad my hopes,

Thrown out his angle for my proper life,

And with such cozenage – is’t not perfect conscience

To quit him with this arm? And is’t not to be damned

To let this canker of our nature come

In further evil?^[41]

A new dimension is described, where a divinity shapes human ends, and a perfect conscience can command what has to be made. Hamlet insists that the readiness is all, when one is resigned to the silent work of an upper justice, and frees himself from much of the guilt associated with a premeditated murder.

The conclusive duel between Hamlet and Laertes, with the King and the Queen as active spectators, takes the place of the ordinary trial, redressing the course of willingness and unwillingness, action and inaction.

Once again history works on the drama and impresses it in the form of the allusion.

Out of the stage of the theatre, the time was be prepared for the epical clash between the venerable Common Law, armed with its asphyxiating intricacies, and the pretensive Equity, equipped with its grace and mercy. On the rickety boards of the Elizabethan theatre a threshold was triumphally transformed into a rift that no longer authorized the enjambements of generations and jurisdictions.^[42] Hamlet’s confrontation unrolled in the intimacy not only the metaphysical anxiety of a tormented age, but also the political struggle embedded into a jurisdictional contention.

The final question posed by the playwright to his public for the time to come is: what form of Justice will take revenge on all?

Shakespeare adumbrated the answer: as the Master of history and stories, he offered the skull of the law to King James I, to be cleaned of dust and refilled with new nourishment.

Which is what happened in 1616, when a royal decree, putting end to the fight between Sir Edward Coke and Lord Ellesmere, proclaimed that Equity had legal supremacy over the Common Law.

Out of the stage curtain, Hamlet’s ghost went hand in hand with the memory of a new murdered form, the pristine body of common law justice, one time sovereign of its kingship.