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Revenge, Honor, and Conscience in Hamlet

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Harold Skulsky
Harold Skulsky*
Affiliation:
Smith College, Northampton, Mass.
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Abstract

By the vagueness of his injunction, the ghost in effect leaves up to Hamlet a choice among available sanctions for revenge. Two such alternatives—unlimited ill will and the code of honor—are eventually discredited in the eyes of the audience, the one by being repellently embodied in Pyrrhus, the other by being set in opposition to the law of nature and (through a parallel with suicide) to conscience and Christian doctrine. Though Hamlet never abandons his commitment to unlimited retribution, he manages to palliate it by appealing from conscience and charity, first to the code of honor, and then, having come to think of himself as a doomed scourge of God, to divine command as a fiat superseding moral reason. These appeals lead up to Hamlet's ultimate reconciliation of conscience with divine fiat, and mark a steady spiritual decline from which he is rescued, through no merit of his own, by the brief madness of his final burst of anger.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 85 , Issue 1 , January 1970 , pp. 78 - 87
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1970

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References

1 The text of Hamlet from which I quote is the Cambridge edition, ed. John Dover Wilson (Cambridge, Eng., 1936). The present essay was written before the appearance of Eleanor Prosser's study Hamlet and Revenge (Stanford, 1967), to which some of my observations and working assumptions are parallel in tendency, though the frame of reference and the conclusions differ radically.

2 Ethica Nicomachea, 1100a 18–21, 1101a 22sq., 1101b 5–9. Cf. Pindar, 01. vra. 77–80.

3 Sir John Harington's translation of Orlando Furioso, ed. Graham Hough (Carbondale, Ill., 1962), p. 178.

4 The Question of Hamlet (New York, 1959), pp. 141–164.

5 For a different view see Levin, p. 147.

6 All Biblical quotations are taken from the Geneva Bible.

7 The Works of the Learned Sir Thomas Brown, Kt. (London, 1686), 'ii“ (1685), 38. (See Kenelm Digby's ”observation,“ p. 78.)

8 Giovanni Battista Possevino, Dialogo dell'honore (Venice, 1S65), pp. 500,503, sg., 515, 521.

9 I H. IV 'i“.ii.92-93.

10 I H. IV 'iii“.ii. 147–152.

11 John Donne, who does not scorn it, reminds us in two separate places that “all honors from inferiors flow,” and that God Himself, Who is the fountain of intrinsic value, has only such honor as His creatures grant Him. See Poems, ed. Grierson (Oxford, 1912), 'i“, 218, 263.

12 See S. Aureli Augustini, De Civitate Dei, ed. J. E. C. Welldon (London, 1924), 'i“, 37, 39.

13 Ecclus. xiv.6. Cf. Lactantius, Palrologia Latina 'vi“.407: ”Nam si homicida nefarius est, quia hominis exstinctor est, eidem sceleri obstrictus est, qui se necat, quia hominem necat. Imo vero maius esse id facinus existimandum est, cuius ultio Deo soli subiacet.“

14 Cf. Cym. 'iii“.iv.78 ff.

15 Tamburlaine the Great, ed. U. M. Ellis-Fermor (New York, 1930), p. 248.

16 Tamburlaine, p. 146. See Roy W. Battenhouse, Marlowe's Tamburlaine (Nashville, Term., 1941), pp. 108–113, 129–133, and Axiosto, Orlando Furioso 'xvii“. It is interesting that one of the texts adduced by Erasmus to illustrate the concept fits Claudius far better than Hamlet: ”Fortassis illud est quod ait Job cap. xxxiv. Qui regnare facit hypocritam, propter peccata populi.“ See Colloquia, ed. Schrevelius (Amsterdam, 1693), p. 133. The scourgeship of Claudius, in view of Hamlet's mission, would add a particularly mordant irony to the play; vengeance on the Scourge, all the authorities agree, is reserved to God alone.

17 See G. R. Elliott, Scourge and Minister: A Study of Hamlet (Durham, N. C, 1951), p. 122, and Fredson Bowers, “Hamlet as Minister and Scourge,” PMLA, ' lxx“ (1955), 740–749.

18 Bowers, p. 743.

19 Bowers, p. 745: “we may see . . . the anomalous position Hamlet conceives for himself: is he to be the private-revenger scourge or the public-revenger minister?”

20 Claudius reveals his plan in soliloquy rather than dialogue after dismissing R. and G. (‘iv“.iii.57 ff.); moreover, once they lose Hamlet to the pirates R. and G. would hardly bother to deliver Claudius’ letter if they knew what was in it.

21 De Civitate Dei, p. 36 sq., p. 42.

22 Roland H. Bainton, “The Immoralities of the Patriarchs According to the Exegesis of the Late Middle Ages and of the Reformation,” Harvard Theological Review, 'xxiii“ (1930), 39–49.

23 Faust, ll. 324–329.