The Gospel according to Shakespeare

Piero Boitani, Vittorio Montemaggi, Rachel Jacoff, Vittorio Montemaggi, Rachel Jacoff

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780268075682
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Literature & the Arts in Christianity

In this slim, poetically powerful volume, Piero Boitani develops his earlier work in The Bible and Its Rewritings, focusing on Shakespeare's "rescripturing" of the Gospels. Boitani persuasively urges that Shakespeare read the New Testament with great care and an overall sense of affirmation and participation, and that many of his plays constitute their own original testament, insofar as they translate the good news into human terms. In Hamlet and King Lear, he suggests, Shakespeare's "New Testament" is merely hinted at, and faith, salvation, and peace are only glimpsed from far away. But in Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest, the themes of compassion and forgiveness, transcendence, immanence, the role of the deity, resurrection, and epiphany are openly, if often obliquely, staged. The Christian Gospels and the Christian Bible are the signposts of this itinerary.

Originally published in 2009, Boitani's Il Vangelo Secondo Shakespeare was awarded the 2010 De Sanctis Prize, a prestigious Italian literary award. Now available for the first time in an English translation, The Gospel according to Shakespeare brings to a broad scholarly and nonscholarly audience Boitani's insights into the current themes dominating the study of Shakespeare's literary theology. It will be of special interest to general readers interested in Shakespeare's originality and religious perspective.

CHAPTER 1

Amen for the Fall of a Sparrow

There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow.

What happens to Hamlet during the voyage that should bring him from Denmark to England but then leads him home? What—I ask specifically—happens to him on a psychological, mental, and moral level? What happens to his inner self, his way of thinking? Because, more or less, we know what happens materially. His uncle Claudius—brother of Hamlet’s father, usurper of his throne and too-soon husband to his widow Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother—is not convinced that Hamlet’s seeming madness is, as his courtier Polonius claims, caused by his rejected love for Ophelia. Claudius has watched a play, directed by the prince himself, in which the murder of Hamlet’s father—which had been denounced to his son by the father’s ghost as having been the work of Claudius—is performed with altered names and a Viennese setting. He is perturbed and frightened by this. He therefore thinks, immediately, of sending his nephew to England, so as to rid himself of him. Hamlet then accidentally kills Polonius, who is spying behind a curtain on his conversation with his mother; Claudius understands that, had he been in that hiding place himself, Hamlet would have stabbed him mercilessly.

This murder gives Claudius one more reason to get rid of Hamlet—a political one, he holds, for people will start murmuring against Hamlet for the death of a person who was much loved. Hamlet knows well, and says so to his mother Gertrude at the end of their encounter, that the voyage to England is a trap. This is indeed the case. At the end of his brief audience with Hamlet, as the latter heads towards the ship escorted by guards and accompanied by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the king reveals his plan to us. “Like the hectic in my blood he [Hamlet] rages,” and England must cure Claudius. England is in debt towards Denmark. It therefore may not “coldly set / Our sovereign process, which imports at full, / By letters congruing to that effect, / The present death of Hamlet.”

England will have to kill Hamlet. The prince leaves. But while the king and queen witness the outburst of madness in Ophelia, and her brother Laertes returns, full of vengeful thoughts towards Claudius (whom he considers responsible for protecting his father’s murderer, Hamlet), some sailors arrive who bring to Hamlet’s faithful friend Horatio a letter from the prince. In it, Hamlet asks Horatio to see that the sailors are received by the king, to whom they will deliver a message. He also entreats his friend to join him as soon as possible (the sailors will lead Horatio to Hamlet), because he has “words to speak in thine ear” that, even though “too light for the bore of the matter,” “will make thee dumb.” He then explains what has happened:

Ere we were two days old at sea, a pirate of very warlike appointment gave us chase. Finding ourselves too slow of sail, we put on a compelled valour, and in the grapple I boarded them. On the instant they got clear of our ship, so I alone became their prisoner. They have dealt with me like thieves of mercy; but they knew what they did: I am to do a turn for them. . . . Rosencrantz and Guildenstern hold their course for England; Of them I have much to tell thee. (4.6.14–28)

As will in fact be revealed, this message relates only half the story. Meanwhile, the sailors carry Hamlet’s letter to Claudius, who is conversing with the incensed Laertes. The letter simply says that the prince has returned to Denmark—“naked” and “alone”—and asks for an audience for the following day. He will reveal to the king then “th’ occasions of my sudden and more strange return.”

This does not actually happen. Instead, much later, after Ophelia’s funeral and burial, Hamlet tells Horatio the other half of the story. He confirms the “sea-fight” of which he had written in the letter (“and what to this was sequent / Thou knowest already,” he adds, though there is no trace in the play of what actually happened after the encounter with the pirates), but claims that on the night before it, having “rashly” left his cabin in his sea-gown, he had looked for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, stolen their message, broken the seal, and found Claudius’ order to the English to cut off his head as soon as he landed. Showing that document to Horatio, Hamlet then says that he forged—and “wrote it fair”—a new order from the king to execute immediately the bearers of the message, sealing it with his father’s seal. “So Guildenstern and Rosencrantz go to’t,” Horatio comments.

This, then, is what has materially happened to Hamlet during his voyage to England: first, his finding proof that his suspicions were correct and his rapid turning against the two so-called friends who had lent themselves to the king’s scheme; then, the encounter with the pirates. However, Hamlet reveals neither to Horatio nor to others what has happened in his inner self.

The Hamlet who left for England was prey to feigned madness and profound melancholy. Even before seeing and speaking to what he says was his father’s ghost, Hamlet had told his uncle and his mother that, beyond the “trappings and the suits of woe,” he had “that within which passeth show.”

Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not ‘seems’.

’Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,

Nor customary suits of solemn black,

Nor windy suspiration of forc’d breath,

No, nor the fruitful river in the eye,

Nor the dejected haviour of the visage,

Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief

That can denote me truly. These indeed seem,

For they are actions that a man might play;

But I have that within which passes show,

These but the trappings and the suits of woe.

(1.2.76–86)

Hamlet is ever absolute and precise on the intellectual plane: not appearance, but being. However, he is reserved in public about that which he truly has “within.” Nonetheless, when alone, he voices his feelings, in the first of his famous soliloquies, beginning with one of those general, introspective, and melancholic reflections that will become typical of his character. He desires “O that this too too solid flesh would melt, / Thaw and resolve itself into a dew.” He laments that God should have forbidden man to kill himself: “Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d / His canon ’gainst self-slaughter!” He feels that “all the uses of this world” are, for him, “weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable”; that the world itself is “an unweeded garden / That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature / Possess it merely” (1.2.129–37).

Later, after the exchange with the ghost has confirmed what his “prophetic soul” had foreboded, Hamlet returns, this time in the presence of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, to his particular vision of the world, the radical sense of everything’s inanity that afflicts his heart. A man of the Renaissance, a university student at Wittenberg, he cannot but perceive the majestic beauty of the universe and recognize “What piece of work is a man!” But against such considerations there rises his lack of mirth and the fact that “it goes so heavily with my disposition”:

I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame the earth seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god: the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? (2.2.294–308)

Hamlet is certainly prey to melancholy. He defines the times he lives in to be “out of joint”; he considers it a “cursèd spite” to have been born “to set it right”; and he behaves in strange and bizarre ways because “I perchance hereafter shall think meet / to put an antic disposition on.”

But it is a two-faced melancholy: on the one hand are uncertainty, indecisiveness, inaction, paralysis; on the other are absoluteness and originality of thought, logical invention, and metaphysical penetration. One could even think—and Hamlet does indeed think—that the latter determine the former. For example, when the actors arrive in Elsinore, he asks the first player to recite “Aeneas’ tale to Dido”—that is, the story recounted in Virgil’s Aeneid and absolutely central to the Western imagination, of the Greeks’ capture and destruction of Troy, beginning with “The rugged Pyrrhus, he whose sable arms, / Black as his purpose, did the night resemble.” He then makes the actor continue, prompts him, wanting him to reach Hecuba. “But who, O who had seen the mobbled queen,” the actor begins. “The mobbled queen?” Hamlet interjects, immediately followed by Polonius: “That’s good; ‘mobbled queen’ is good.” But the first player goes on, full of fervor, telling of Priam’s death at the hands of Pyrrhus, of Hecuba’s screams. Hamlet is satisfied and dismisses the company, inviting the actors to prepare the Murder of Gonzago, to which he himself will add a dozen lines, for the following day. Once Polonius, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern have left, he remains alone. He then pronounces one of his great soliloquies, reproaching himself for his inaction, comparing the actor’s passion for a fiction to his own paralysis before reality, and finally deciding to use a fiction—a play—to force King Claudius to confess the murder of his brother:

O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!

Is it not monstrous that this player here,

But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,

Could force his soul so to his whole conceit

That from her working all his visage wann’d,

Tears in his eyes, distraction in his aspect,

A broken voice, and his whole function suiting

With forms to his conceit? And all for nothing!

For Hecuba!

What’s Hecuba to him, or he to her,

That he should weep for her? What would he do

Had he the motive and the cue for passion

That I have?

(2.2.544–56)

What, then, is Hecuba to the actor reciting her despair? What is a character of “fiction” to a man made of flesh and blood? Why should he cry for her, given that there is no relationship between them? “All for nothing,” Hamlet says. There is no reason to lend to fiction any “passion,” to “force” the soul towards “conceit.” Hamlet is clearly speaking of theatrical action: why identify with characters on stage? His doubt, so far, concerns acting. Nonetheless, Hamlet formulates it, to begin with, in radical, ontological fashion: “What’s Hecuba to him?” What is a mythical and literary character to a man of flesh and blood?

That this is the fundamental question here is clarified in the second part of that same line, when Hamlet, in a seemingly casual and rhetorical fashion, driven perhaps by his own discourse—says: “or he to her.” What, he to Hecuba? What is a man made of flesh and blood to an imaginary character? This is a paradox and also an ontological abyss. Yes, certainly, this is still a question pertaining to theatre, but not for that any less paradoxical. What is the actor who recites a part to the character whose affairs he recites? If “Hecuba” is an imaginary character, and therefore represents fiction in general, what sense is there in asking if reality means anything to fiction, as the second half of Hamlet’s question seems to imply? If Hamlet poses this question, should we conclude that he is subverting the established order of priorities, presuming not that fiction should reflect nature, but that nature should question itself before the mirror? The idea itself of reality thus breaks into a thousand smithereens.

This uncertainty immediately leads to indeterminacy and inaction. Hamlet continually comes up against the tragic impossibility of an empirical and rational recognition of the ghost’s identity and of Claudius’ guilt, while it is the recognition of his own inactivity that pushes him to organize the play with which he hopes to procure evidence against his uncle. The comparison with the actor’s invention leads to the first step, which ends with the impossibility of speech, a total gnoseological silence right in the middle of the longest and most articulate discourse of the protagonist: “Yet I, / A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak / Like a John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause, / And can say nothing.”

Like Pyrrhus in the actor’s story, Hamlet remains “neutral to his will and matter.” But the problem lies in the fact that, having recognized that this is the case, Hamlet cannot fathom why it should be so. Once again an unfillable void emerges from his knowledge. Now, just as he is about to leave for England, Hamlet reflects on his inaction. He has seen Claudius kneeling in prayer (the king confesses his guilt, but the prince does not hear him) but has decided not to kill him so as not to send him to Paradise. He begins his meditation from nothing less than the Creation of man, who was not made to live like a brute but rather to pursue knowledge, if not also virtue. The human being has been gifted with “such large discourse,” with “godlike reason.” It is impossible that this should “fust in us unus’d.” But it is precisely the excess of reasoning, the “scruple of thinking too precisely on th’ event,” that blocks Hamlet even on the threshold of self knowledge (“I do not know why”):

How all occasions do inform against me,

And spur my dull revenge. What is a man,

If his chief good and market of his time

Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more.

Sure he that made us with such large discourse,

Looking before and after, gave us not

That capability and godlike reason

To fust in us unus’d. Now whether it be

Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple

Of thinking too precisely on th’ event—

A thought which, quarter’d, hath but one part wisdom

And ever three parts coward—I do not know

Why yet I live to say this thing’s to do,

Sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and means

To do’t.

(4.4.32–46)

Hamlet always speaks of general principles. Here, he starts from the Principle, the Beginning itself, in which—it should now be noted—he seems to believe. But he is not able to see the end. In the most famous soliloquy in the history of theatre, before the disturbing, disastrous conversation with Ophelia, he interrogates himself, in at first precise Scholastic fashion (Hamlet has attended university, where teaching would have certainly been by means of the traditional quaestiones), whether to be or not to be. He does not formulate ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Note on the Texts
• Preface to the American Edition
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Amen for the Fall of a Sparrow
• Chapter 2. God’s Spies
• Chapter 3. Music of the Spheres
• Chapter 4. Divineness
• Chapter 5. Resurrection
• Chapter 6. Epiphany
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography