1 - Where Fantasy and History Meet

Summary

For, men striving who should most honour him, they made him hateful and troublesome to themselves that most favoured him, by reason of the unmeasurable greatness and honours which they gave him.

(Plutarch, The Life of Julius Caesar, trans. Sir Thomas North (JC 155))

A dream of Caesar mingles with the world of Hamlet; it haunts his play as a second spectral presence, a shadow behind the dead father's more famous ghost. It is with Julius Caesar, or with a travesty of Caesar, that Shakespeare asks us to identify Polonius the Renaissance courtier and intellectual, the man whose name is so close to the classical one, Apollonius, that was borne by a grammarian long ago. Shakespeare makes Polonius volunteer that when he was at the university he had taken the part of Caesar in one of their dull Latin plays: ‘I did enact Julius Caesar. / I was kill ‘d i’ th’ Capitol. Brutus kill ‘d me’ (Hamlet, 3.2.103–4). This might perhaps suggest to us, as his audience, that along with the New Learning, notions about relationship and power, notions where intimacy was identified with betrayal, were passed on at the university to Hamlet the student as they had been to Polonius before. The figure of the murdered Caesar resonated in the imagination of Shakespeare even when he was not directly engaged in writing a Roman play. He may well have felt that the world in which he lived himself was a Roman one.

There's a special name, ‘trahison des clercs’, for the betrayal that is performed by intellectuals as a group. It 's used to describe what happens when they compromise the pursuit of understanding and choose to become collaborators, to identify with the state. Shakespeare seems to have had reservations about the classical heritage and about what embracing it meant for the time in which he himself lived. In Hamlet the audience sees that same Polonius killed as he stands behind the arras in Gertrude's room. Could this be a modern example of intimacy betrayed? Brutus stabbed Caesar, the man who loved him: Hamlet claims not to know the man who is standing spying on him in his mother's room.