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Melancholy, Ambition, and Revenge in Belleforest's Hamlet

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

A. P. Stabler
A. P. Stabler*
Affiliation:
Washington State University, Pullman
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Extract

In his What Happens in Hamlet, J. D. Wilson studies Hamlet's melancholy in the light of Renaissance beliefs, and especially those indicated in Bright's Treatise of Melancholie, to which Shakespeare seems to have been indebted for a number of ideas as well as turns of phrase. Significantly, as Wilson shows, the melancholy man was not only “prone to spectral visitations,” but was also aggravated in his condition by thwarted ambition; further, he “ponders and debates long, and does not act until his blood is up: then acts vigorously.” We can reasonably agree with this author that a knowledge of the contemporary corpus of doctrines and beliefs is important for an understanding of Hamlet's character and motivation, in which the thread of melancholy evidently connects several important elements. In the Introduction to his edition of Shakespeare's play, Wilson mentions another source for a melancholy Hamlet: the Histoires tragiques of François de Belleferest, which is recognized as the most immediate extant source of the play. Belleferest does, says Wilson, make a “definite reference to Amleth's [Hamlet's] over-great melancholy,” following a hint already to be found in the version of Saxo Grammaticus (Belleforest's source); but Wilson does no more than call attention to the reference, without noting Belleforest's additional remarks on the subject, and specifically denying to either source any other contributions to Hamlet's character. It will be the purpose of this article to show that not only the melancholy complex, but also other important facets of Hamlet's character have a probable basis in Saxo and Belleferest, and especially in the latter.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 81 , Issue 3 , June 1966 , pp. 207 - 213
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1966

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References

1 John Dover Wilson, What Happens in Hamlet, 3rd. ed. (Cambridge, Eng., 1951), pp. 114–117, and Appendix E.

2 John Dover Wilson, ed., The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, by William Shakespeare, rev. ed. (Cambridge, Eng., 1954), Introduction, p. xvi. All act, scene, and line references to Hamlet are from this edition.

3 Belleferest (1530–83), a principal figure in the flourishing French Renaissance genre of tragical stories, was a source of materials for a number of Elizabethan writers in addition to Shakespeare. For a summary of what is known on Belleforest's life and works, see my diss. (Virginia, 1959), “The Histoires tragiques of François de Belleferest … ”, Vol. i.

4 Contemporary references to an English Hamlet prior to the supposed terminus a quo of Shakespeare's play have led to the positing of an Ur-Hamlet, which some scholars have attributed to Thomas Kyd. Of the contents of this work we know only that it contained a “mad Hamlet” and a Ghost who cried “Hamlet, revenge!” Whether all the material from the known sources came to Shakespeare via this Ur-Hamlet, or whether he also knew Belleferest directly, either in the original or through a translation, is not known. J. D. Wilson and F. W. Schulze (see below, n. 8) have maintained that the presence in the play of features from Saxo prove an independent line of derivation from the older source, but as I have attempted to show, in “The Sources of Hamlet: Some Corrections of the Record,” RS, xxxii (Sept. 1964), pp. 207–216, closer investigation fails to bear out this contention. Assuming that Shakespeare knew Belleferest only through the Ur-Hamlet, two subsidiary assumptions also follow: (1) any influences of the extant sources were first felt by the author of the Ur-Hamlet; (2) any features which are essentially identical in Belleferest and the textus receptus of Hamlet (barring pure coincidence) were also present in the Ur-Hamlet. Since closer study is adding to the number of such features (including both ideas and turns of phrase), thorough re-examination of the sources seems indicated.

5 Two of the most valuable and detailed statements hitherto available on Belleforest's individual contributions to Hamlet are those of M. B. Evans, Der bestrafte Brudermord, sein Verhältnis zu Shakespeares Hamlet (Hamburg and Leipzig, 1910), pp. 12 ff., and Virgil K. Whitaker, Shakespeare's Use of Learning … (San Marino, Calif., 1953), chapter on Hamlet and Appendix. On melancholy specifically, Evans identifies Belleforest's mention as the probable source; Whitaker notes the presence of the feature in Der bestrafte Brudermord (see below, n. 15) and hence infers its presence in the Ur-Hamlet, but fails to note its presence in Belleferest.

6 His host is the king of England, who was to have been entrusted with Amleth's execution, and his companions the wicked agents of Amleth's uncle—the prototypes of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

7 For the sake of convenience all references to the texts of both Saxo and Belleferest are to the reprints in Sir Israel Gollancz's Sources of Hamlet … (London, 1926), and are indicated by page references only. Translations of Belleforest's text are mine; translations of Saxo's text are those of Sir Oliver Elton as cited in Gollancz. All italics in the cited texts are mine.

8 Since the above was originally written, I find that the connecting of melancholy and the preternatural in Belleforest, as well as the concurrent danger of abuse by the devil, have been noted by John D. Ratliff, “The Kydian Revenge Play” (Stanford diss., 1954), p. 43; Ratliff also (correctly, I believe) concludes that the original suggestion for the similar features of the Ghost rôle in Hamlet originated here. Ratliff's valuable material on Belleferest as a source of Hamlet anticipates several conclusions at which I have arrived independently. F. W. Schulze, in his “François Belleforests Histoire Tragique d'Amleth,” Im Dienste der Sprache: Festschrift für Victor Klemperer …, edd. H. Heintze and E. Silzer (Halle, 1958), p. 373, also notes the connecting of melancholy and the preternatural, but not the danger of abuse by the devil, in Belleferest.

9 That Amleth's father was killed by his brother was public knowledge in both source versions where, through “lying reports to the people” Feng (the prototype of Claudius) concealed his motive, and passed off the killing as justifiable homicide rather than murder. In reporting the matter Belleferest has this line: “Fengon … poussé d'un esprit d'envie … delibera, comme que ce fust, de le [his brother] faire mourir. Ce qui lui succeda assez aisement, nul ne se doubtant de luy …” (p. 184). Belleferest here means “with no one suspecting foul play,” but he does not say so, and this passage is separated from the more specific dénouement by several lines of indignant commentary by the author, so that the reader at first infers a truly secret murder (noted also by Ratliff, p. 41). This suggestion may also have borne fruit.

10 See my “King Hamlet's Ghost in Belleferest?” PMLA, lxxvii (March 1962), 18–20.

11 Aside from these direct references to Hamlet's melancholy, the symptoms of this humor are described in several passages in which both Hamlet and his prototype bewail their unhappy condition. A case in point is a remark of Amleth in Belleforest's closet scene when the young prince speaks of his woes to his mother, and among other things regrets that he is constrained to play the madman's rôle “en lieu de m'adextrer aux armes” (p. 214). In addition to introducing Amleth as a student of swordsmanship, this passage would seem to have suggested a remark of Shakespeare's Hamlet, when to the prying Rosencrantz and Guildenstern he explains “I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all mirth, forgone all custom of exercises …” (ii.ii.299—301).

12 Curtis B. Watson, Shakespeare and the Renaissance Concept of Honor (Princeton, 1960), p. 345.

13 Discussed below, p. 211 and n. 18.

14 For example, M. M. Reese, The Cease of Majesty (New York, 1961); and E. A. J. Honigmann, “The Politics in ‘Hamlet’ and ‘The World of the Play’,” in Stratford-upon-Avon Studies, v: Hamlet (New York, 1964).

15 In this connection Watson calls attention to i.ii.139–157 and 186–188. These are the passages in which Hamlet praises his father (“So excellent a king … A' was a man, take him for all in all / I shall not look upon his like again”); compares Claudius unfavorably (“Hyperion to a satyr”; “My father's brother, but no more like my father / Than I to Hercules”); and condemns his mother for her hasty re-marriage (“Within a month, / Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears / Had left the flushing in her galled eyes / She married. O most wicked speed … to post / With such dexterity to incestuous sheets!”) To these quotations Watson might have added the Ghost's words in i.v.47–57, and Hamlet's in the closet scene, iii.iv.65–67. The source of this material is to be found in the source versions and specifically on pp. 210–212 of the cited text of Belleferest. On the Queen's deserting the better man for the worse we have: “c'est la lubricité seule qui vous a effacé en l'ame la memoire des vaillances et vertuz du bon Roy: vostre espoux, et mon pere”; and on posting with dexterity to incestuous sheets: “courant … apres celuy felon … et caressez incestueusement le voleur du lict legitime de vostre loyal espoux.” Even the “most unrighteous tears” seems to derive from the source versions: Saxo's “dissimulationem falso lamenti” (p. 114), rendered by Belleforest as “sous le fard d'un pleur dissimulé”—the “crocodile tears” of the old German Hamlet, the Bestrafte Brudermord (whose precise relationship to Shakespeare's version is still a matter of question), as noted by M. B. Evans (p. 12) many years ago. Two equally striking contributions of Belleforest relative to Hamlet's grief have also survived essentially unchanged in Shakespeare: in his harangue to the Danes Amleth says “I have until now lived bowed down with mourning (chargé de dueil) and all steeped in tears (tout confit en larmes)” (p. 274); cf. Hamlet's “suits of solemn black” and “fruitful river in the eye” (i.ii.78–80).

16 Noted by M. B. Evans, pp. 14–15.

17 A recent thought-provoking interpretation is that of Davis D. McElroy, “ ‘To Be or Not To Be‘—Is That the Question?” CE, xxv (April 1964), 543–545.

18 This, and a number of passages in which Amleth claims to be the lawful successor to the throne (pp. 268–270 and 274–276), or to have been deprived of it by Feng, who is once even termed a usurpateur, are in seeming contradiction with others (in both sources) in which it is made clear that their Denmark was, in the most literal sense of the word, an elective monarchy (Saxo, pp. 138–140; Belleferest, pp. 280–282). How, then, could an elected monarch be a usurper? The point is clarified by the reiterated observations of both authors that Feng's treason, regicide, and other crimes had disqualified him from the kingship: his election had been fraudulently brought about and hence was invalid. Moreover, by tradition only members of the royal family were eligible for election, and since Amleth was a minor (as Belleferest makes clear, p. 192), and therefore ineligible at the time of his father's murder, Feng had in a double sense “popped in between [Amleth] and the election” (cf. Hamlet v.ii.65). In Amleth's eyes Feng was therefore a usurper; as J. D. Wilson puts it (Introduction to his edition of Hamlet, p. lvi): “Hamlet's disappointment would seem just as keen and his ambitious designs just as natural as if the succession had followed the principle of primogeniture.”

19 I am well aware that the contribution of source studies to the interpretation of Shakespeare has been called into question by many critics. Without wishing to go into the matter here, I should, however, like to refer to the case for source studies advanced by Kenneth Muir in the Preface to his Shakespeare's Sources, i: Comedies and Tragedies (London, 1961).

20 See, for example, Roy W. Battenhouse, “Shakespearean Tragedy as Christian: Some Confusion in the Debate,” CRAS, viii (Winter 1964), 93, who regards Hamlet as an “utterly lapsed Christian, a lost soul to the very end.”

21 For example, Lucretius's De rerum natura, Bk. v, v. 1233.

22 While this emerges as his definitive view of the tragedy as a whole, Belleferest makes a further pertinent comment which has a probable subsidiary significance for Hamlet and therefore merits attention. As those few critics who have had occasion to study Belleforest's works per se have noticed, their author, although a fervent Catholic and protégé of the liberal-humanist Queen Margaret of Navarre, was by disposition of an almost Calvinistic severity as regards morals and something of a misogynist as well. As noted by a few commentators, several of Belleforest's anti-feminist diatribes seem to be echoed in the similar material in the “nunnery” scene and elsewhere in Hamlet; so it is not surprising that in commenting on the one grave moral defect in Amleth, Belleferest identifies it as concupiscence (p. 308). It is true that Amleth had three love-affairs, so to speak: after the incident of the “fair temptress” he married an English princess, and then, bigamously, a Scottish queen. The latter, like Amleth's mother Gerutha, eventually betrayed her husband during his lifetime and, immediately after his death, married the man who had killed him. The possible parallel of this set of betrayals has been pointed out by G. Blakemore Evans in his “Belleferest and the Gonzago Story: Hamlet iii.ii,” SAB, xxiv (Oct. 1949), 280–282.

23 Fredson T. Bowers, “Hamlet as Minister and Scourge,” PMLA, lxx (Sept. 1955), 749, points out that in the play the atmosphere of the final killing of Claudius is not that of the private revenge, but rather an “open killing … a ministerial act of public justice accomplished under the only possible circumstances.”

24 Article cited in previous note; Bowers has further developed and amplified his position in his “Dramatic Structure and Criticism: Plot in Hamlet,” SQ, xv (Spring 1964), 207–218.