Tragic Proportions: the Art of Tyranny and the Politics of the Soul in Hamlet

KATHERINE BOOTLE ATTIE

Tragic Proportions: The Art of Tyranny and the Politicsof the Soul in Hamlet

If you give power to those who are bad, and hand the city over to them,you destroy those who are better. In exactly the same way, we shall say,the imitative poet sets up a bad regime in the soul of each individual,gratifying the senseless part of it, the part which cannot distinguish largerfrom smaller, and which regards the same things at one time as large andat another time as small. He is nothing but an image-maker, and hestands far removed from the truth.

—Plato, The Republic1

Just before Hamlet welcomes the players to Elsinore, Rosencrantztells him that a company of boy actors, “an eyrie of children, little

eyases” (2.2.326), have hit it big.2 Hamlet asks if in their rivalry withthe men’s companies, the boys “carry it away” (2.2.344). They do,affirms Rozencrantz, “Hercules and his load too” (2.2.345–46). Theimage of a troupe of boys bearing both Hercules and the world ontheir small shoulders strikes the mind’s eye as a rather strange picture.The strangeness makes some sense when we shift our gaze fromHamlet’s Elsinore to Shakespeare’s London and the sign of the Globe.Probably a reference to the successful troupe of boy actors who playedat the Blackfriars from 1597 to 1603 under Elizabeth’s patronage, theimage fittingly conveys how unbalanced and out of proportion it isthat these precocious boys could pose an artistic or commercial threat

I would like to thank Anita Sherman and this journal’s anonymous readers for their helpfulcomments on earlier versions of this essay.

1. Plato. The Republic ed. G. R. F. Ferrari, tr. Tom Griffith (Cambridge, Eng., 2000),605b–605c. Hereafter cited in the text by marginal number and letter.

2. Quotations are from The Norton Shakespeare, 2d ed., gen. ed. Stephen Greenblatt (NewYork, 2008). This edition of Hamlet uses F as its control text and inserts passages from Q2 intothe body of the play; lines appearing in Q2 but not in F are numbered using decimal points toindicate that an insertion has been made.

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to the Lord Chamberlain’s Men.3 Yet Hamlet is unsurprised by theboys’ success: “It is not strange; for mine uncle is King of Denmark,and those that would make mows at him while my father lived givetwenty, forty, an hundred ducats apiece for his picture in little.’Sblood, there is something in this more than natural, if philosophycould find it out” (2.2.347–51). Although Hamlet’s reply sounds likea non sequitur, the correspondence is there if we reach for it: the boyactors are a miniature version, diminutive copy, or “picture in little”of adult companies; because “[t]hese are now the fashion” (2.2.328).The boys fetch more money than they are worth, just like miniatureportraits of Claudius, which have also become the fashion since hetook the throne. That the measure of Claudius’ political magnitude isreduced to a miniature plays up the gap between the public’s percep-tion and Hamlet’s perception of the new King. As far as the Prince isconcerned, the “picture in little” is a size-appropriate representation ofClaudius’ moral stature. Hamlet is to Claudius what the exceptionallyjudicious critics are to the boy company. Flourishing despite theobjections of the “wiser sort,” the boys “cry out on the top ofquestion and are most tyrannically clapped for’t” (2.2.326–27).

Shakespeare uses the word “tyrannically” to describe the behavior ofa theater audience, a contextually surprising move that requires someexplanation. The idea derives from The Republic, in which Socratesreasons that tyranny can happen to anybody because it is as much amoral state as a political one, the consequence of an internal coupd’état in which passion usurps reason’s rightful rule. The soul is out ofproportion when we find “a small element, the most evil and insane,possessing the mastery” (577d). In the tyrannical man, the weak,desiring part of the soul has overwhelmed and enslaved the rationalpart so completely that “there will be no foul murder, no food, nodeed, from which he will abstain. Lust will dwell within him as atyrant, in total anarchy and lawlessness” (574e-575a). In the critique ofimitative poetry in Book 10 of The Republic, tyranny is linked totheatricality; the pleasure experienced by a theater audience is tyran-nical because it is a manifestation of the “bad regime” that has been set

3. On the history of the boy companies see Charles William Wallace, The Children of theChapel at the Blackfriars 1597–1603 (1908; New York, rpt. 1970). For Wallace’s explication ofShakespeare’s reference to the boy company in Hamlet, see pp. 173–85. See also MichaelShapiro, Children of the Revels: the Boy Companies of Shakespeare’s Time and their Plays (NewYork, 1997).

79Katherine Bootle Attie

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up in their individual souls by the imitative poet who penned the playand by the actors who perform it. Holding the mirror up to theignorant multitude, the mimetic artist deliberately reflects its lowstandard, its “faulty opinion about what is valuable.”4 The audience isfar from blameless in all this; “the harmful effects of mimetic art are akind of joint progeny of both artist and audience,” especially “whenthat audience is the ignorant ‘many’ ” who inevitably mistake mimesisfor knowledge, appearance for reality.5 Like all arts of imitation, dramaappeals primarily to the desiring part of the soul, which is opposed toreason because it is awakened and fed by sense perception alone. “Ifwe rely on our eyesight,” Socrates explains, “the same thing does notlook the same size close to and far off . . . Our souls are clearly full ofthis kind of confusion. Things like shadow-painting, conjuring, and allthe other arts of the same kind rely on this weakness in our nature toproduce effects that fall nothing short of witchcraft” (602c-d). Thethreat posed by the mimetic artist, then, is that he exploits andexacerbates the inherent weakness of human perception and the mis-judgment of proportion that follows from it. When, despite discerningcritics’ objections, the audience members at the Blackfriars are taken inby the pint-sized boy company, their enthusiasm is not simply igno-rant or misguided but something worse, something tyrannical.

Like Plato in The Republic, Shakespeare in Hamlet aestheticizestyranny as a misperception of size, scale, and proportion. Thisaestheticizing impulse is evident in Hamlet’s observation about theDanes’ sudden desire for the royal miniature. In thrall to their ownmisperception, the citizens who overvalue Claudius’ portrait demon-strate the perspectival instability on which tyranny feeds; they nowcovet copies of the very face they once made “mows” at. WhenWalter Benjamin traces the debasement of art back to “the desire ofcontemporary masses to bring things ‘closer’ spatially and humanly . . .[as] [e]very day the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object atvery close range by way of its likeness, its reproduction,”6 his view-point seems to encompass Denmark’s social decline as the peopleclamor for their own little copy of Claudius. In the changeability and

4. Verity Harte, “Republic 10 and the Role of the Audience in Art,” Oxford Studies inAncient Philosophy 38, ed. Brad Inwood (Oxford, 2010), p. 90.

5. Harte, pp. 70, 76.6. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Illumi-

nations, ed. Hannah Arendt, tr. Harry Zohn (New York, 1968), p. 223.

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corruptibility of the Danes’ political-aesthetic judgment, there is notonly something “more than natural,” there is also something tyranni-cal, something that Platonic philosophy can and does find out: thetransgressive power of mimesis. Plato’s “drive to aestheticize politics”7

is clearly manifested in his depiction of tyranny itself as a kind ofmimesis. A master of deception, the tyrant is an imitative artist in hisown right, relying on tricks of perspective to create the illusion ofauthority, legitimacy, and harmony. Shakespeare’s drive to aestheticizepolitics is evident in Hamlet’s preoccupation with images of imbalance,readable as symptoms of the insidious moral tyranny in the soul of thebody politic. Among the images discussed in the following pages arethose of literal, spatial imbalance—Hamlet’s reckoning that there aretoo many Norwegian troops to fit on the contested piece of Polishland, for example—and those of metaphorical, moral imbalance, suchas Hamlet’s equation of Claudius to a tiny fraction of a fraction of theman his father was. On the whole, this imagery reveals an aspect ofShakespeare’s Platonism that “platonic” readings of Shakespeare largelyhave failed to notice: his tendency to associate perceptive instabilityand aesthetic misjudgment with tyrannical regimes both internal andexternal.

Discussing the critique of mimesis in The Republic, Jonas Barishimplies that “the excessively spatial character” of Plato’s logic and theapparent triviality of his “visual fixation” are philosophical weak-nesses.8 But these alleged philosophical weaknesses are also aestheticstrengths to which Shakespeare must have been irresistibly drawn.Plato’s imagistic, metaphoric richness certainly attracted Sir PhilipSidney, who proclaimed reverently, “of all philosophers he is the mostpoetical.”9 It is no accident that the “poet’s philosopher” is also thephilosopher who attacked poetry. Shakespeare loved images, but healso loved irony, so he must have loved Plato, who designed beautifulimages while denigrating them, and who issued a manifesto against themimetic arts in the form of a mimetic dialogue. Through an intricatespatial poetics of tyranny as well as through his own anti-poetic,

7. Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley, 1981), p. 18.8. Barish, p. 7.9. Sir Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poesy (1595), Sidney’s “The Defence of Poesy” and Selected

Renaissance Literary Criticism, ed. Gavin Alexander (London, 2004), p. 38.



anti-theatrical posturing, Shakespeare pays tribute to the most poeticand most ironic of philosophers.

While Hamlet has not been a go-to text for scholars wishing todemonstrate Shakespeare’s knowledge of Plato, the play nonethelessaffirms the moral-political-aesthetic nexus that underpins The Republic.Shakespeare likely encountered The Republic in the complete Latintranslation of Plato’s dialogues by Marsilio Ficino (1484) or by JoannesSerranus (1578), both of which were well known and circulatingin Elizabethan England.10 Stephen Medcalf makes the plausible andappealing suggestion that Shakespeare may have been introduced toPlato in Latin by Ben Jonson; the playwrights were acquainted since1598 at the latest, when Shakespeare acted in Every Man in hisHumour.11 Jonson knew his Plato—he probably owned Ficino’s trans-lation as well as Serranus’, neither of which would have been toodifficult for Shakespeare with his “small Latin” (by Jonsonian stan-dards).12 In response to the commonplace claim that Shakespeare couldhave derived Platonic ideas solely from the writings of popularPlatonists such as Cicero, Erasmus, and Sir Thomas Elyot, I agree withBarbara Parker and others who have read Shakespeare through the lensof The Republic and concluded that “Shakespeare was governed bymore than a secondhand familiarity with Plato’s text.”13

Along with The Republic, Shakespeare likely read works by Renais-sance Platonists who aestheticized tyranny in terms of visual distortionand spatial imbalance. For instance, in The Book of the Courtier, Baldesar

10. Sarah Sutton, “Introduction to the Renaissance and Seventeenth Century,” Platonismand the English Imagination, ed. Anna Baldwin and Sutton (Cambridge, Eng., 1994), pp. 69–70.

11. Stephen Medcalf, “Shakespeare on Beauty, Truth, and Transcendence,” Platonism andthe English Imagination, p. 118.

12. Medcalf, p. 118.13. Barbara L. Parker, Plato’s Republic and Shakespeare’s Rome: A Political Study of the Roman

Works (Newark, 2004), p. 136. In her study Parker alludes to numerous political and literaryelements “that appear in the Republic but in none of Shakespeare’s known sources” for The Rapeof Lucrece and the Roman plays (p. 27). Other studies dealing with the influences of The Republicon Shakespeare’s dramatic art include Leon Harold Craig, Of Philosophers and Kings: PoliticalPhilosophy in Shakespeare’s Macbeth and King Lear (Toronto, 2001); David Lowenthal, Shake-speare and the Good Life: Ethics and Politics in Dramatic Form (Lanham, 1997); Barbara Tovey,“Shakespeare’s Apology for Imitative Poetry: The Tempest and The Republic,” Interpretations 11(1983), 275–316; Paul A. Cantor, “Prospero’s Republic: The Politics of Shakespeare’s TheTempest,” in Shakespeare as Political Thinker, ed. John Alvis and Thomas G. West (Durham,N.C., 1981), pp. 239–55; Howard B. White, Copp’d Hills towards Heaven: Shakespeare and theClassical Polity (The Hague, 1970); and I. A. Richards, “Troilus and Cressida and Plato,” HudsonReview 1 (1948), 362–76.



Castiglione likens tyrannical princes to a Roman parade of heroiceffigies, “whiche outwardlye declared a likeness of great men andhorses of triumph, and inwardly were full of towe and ragges. But thePrincis of this sort are so muche woorse, as the Colosses by their ownewaightye pese stande upright of them selves, and they [the princes]bicause they be yll counterpesed and without line or level placed uponunequall grounde, throughe their owne waightinesse overthrowe themselves, and from one errour renn into infinit.”14 Metaphorically equat-ing moral and political principles with sculptural and architecturalones, Castiglione represents the bad princes as aesthetically inferior tothe giant stuffed figures of Roman celebration: the effigies may havebeen literally kings of shreds and patches, but at least they wereproperly proportioned, hence able to stand up on their own. Bycontrast, the princes are “Images of horrible greatnesse”—they “wexeloftie” until they are toppled by their own lusts and arrogance.15 InGeorge Bull’s rendering of the same passage, the tyrannical princes are“badly balanced within and out of proportion in relation to theirbase.”16 Thus does the modern translation recover the Platonic empha-sis on inner balance, which crucially informs Shakespeare’s ownaestheticizing of tyranny as a moral problem.

Hamlet has received surprisingly little attention from scholars inter-ested in the link between tyranny and theater. In the important bookTragedies of Tyrants, Rebecca Bushnell limits her discussion of tyrannyin Shakespeare to Richard III, Macbeth, and Julius Caesar.17 Whiletyranny may be represented with more subtlety in Hamlet than inthose plays, it is also more pervasive and more Platonic in Hamletbecause it is more clearly a universal moral problem: anyone, king orsubject, man or woman, can succumb to the tyrant within as he or shebecomes enslaved to passion. As should be evident by now, thepassage from The Republic which heads this essay contains in micro-cosm the Platonic matrices that inspired Shakespeare’s depiction oftyranny in Hamlet: the equivalence of moral and political regimes; theenabling of passion’s rule by sensory weakness, spatial misjudgment,

14. The Book of the Courtier, From the Italian of Count Baldassare Castiglione: Done into Englishby Sir Thomas Hoby, The Tudor Translations vol. 23, ed. W. E. Henley (1900; rpt. New York,1967), pp. 299–300.

15. Henley, pp. 299–300.16. Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, tr. George Bull (1967; London, rpt. 2003), p. 287.17. Rebecca W. Bushnell, Tragedies of Tyrants: Political Thought and Theater in the English

Renaissance (Ithaca, 1990), 1–36, 118–63.



and perceptive instability; and the alliance between the tyrant and thetragedian. Among the imitative poets, it is the “writers of tragedies” inparticular whom Socrates proposes to banish from the ideal state “onthe grounds that they are apologists for tyranny” (568b). Shakespearewas not an apologist for tyranny, but he could have become one soeasily that Plato would have been wise to banish him just in case.Giving an attractive aesthetic form to moral and political deformity,Shakespeare mirrors Plato through a glass darkly while revealingtyranny, like tragedy, to be an art of disproportion.

II

By Platonic standards, Claudius is a natural in the role of tyrantbecause he possesses, as Socrates puts it, “the greatest and most bloatedtyrant in the soul within him” (575d). Hamlet articulates how thebloated tyrant within becomes grossly magnified in the body politic as“the fatness of these pursy times” (3.4.144); when those who are betterare enslaved by those who are bad, “[v]irtue itself of vice must pardonbeg” (3.4.145). With the monarch’s usual metonymic privilege,Claudius calls himself “Denmark,” which makes doubly significantMarcellus’ observation that “[s]omething is rotten in the state ofDenmark” (1.4.67). Whatever corrupts the country as politic body hasits microcosmic equivalent—or its pathological cause—in the King’sown moral and spiritual decay. Visually and spatially modeling thevery political instability that unfolds in the plot, Hamlet constantlyshifts focus between inner and outer regimes, making us regard thesame things at one time as large and at another time as small. In atestament to how metaphor exaggerates the instability of perception,Hamlet describes his uncle as “[a] cutpurse of the empire and therule, / That from a shelf the precious diadem stole / And put it in hispocket” (3.4.89–91). In social terms, this metaphor makes the monarch“small” by reducing him to the level of a common pickpocket and byreducing political corruption to the level of petty crime. But in visualterms, it does the opposite, making Claudius preposterously huge inproportion to the realm he has usurped. Compelling us to imagineClaudius as a miniature in one scene and as a colossus in another,Shakespeare dramatizes the perceptive mutability that jointly underliespolitical and poetic image-making. Employing a similar hyperbole,Cleopatra recounts her “dream” of Antony in which “Realms and



islands were / As plates dropped from his pocket” (Antony andCleopatra, 5.2.90–91). The simile contributes to the vision of an out-sized Antony, “past the size of dreaming” (5.2.96)—an anthropocen-tric vision that, as Dolabella recognizes (5.2.93), could never beanything but a glorious lie. Saying more about Cleopatra than it saysabout Antony, the disproportionality is a symptom of her moraltyranny: a visual and rhetorical reminder that Egypt’s queen is passion’sslave. By the same token, the image of Claudius dropping Denmarkinto his pocket bespeaks not only the King’s status as tyrant butalso the tyranny of the Prince’s own unstable viewpoint. Where thereis tyranny there is passion, and where there is passion there ismisperception.

With respect to scholarship on Hamlet, the concept of politicalinwardness traditionally has not held much currency. This may bebecause the concept runs counter to the die-hard essentialist view thatof all Shakespeare’s plays, Hamlet is the one that most vividly shows us“the self” as transcending political life or existing in a space apart fromit—or so Hamlet implies when he claims to “have that within whichpasseth show” (1.2.85). By calling attention to “Hamlet’s politicalsubjectivity,” historian Andrew Fitzmaurice is moving in the rightdirection.18 However, despite his acknowledgement that political phi-losophy in the Renaissance “was generally regarded as a branch ofmoral philosophy,”19 Fitzmaurice perpetuates the very personal/political binary he ostensibly wishes to challenge when he seems totake for granted a Machiavellian separation of the moral and thepolitical spheres: “[d]iscussions of Hamlet’s subjectivity have focusedupon what in the Renaissance would have been regarded as moralquestions . . . and not specifically upon his political character,” as ifthose were necessarily separate categories; the usual interpretation ofthe “to be or not to be” speech as a meditation on suicide “reflects abroadly moral, rather than political, understanding of Hamlet’s moti-vations.”20 The “rather than” is misleading because it reinforces adichotomy that would have been essentially foreign to Shakespeareand his contemporaries; his plays do not call for an either/or choicebetween the moral and the political but instead assume an order

18. Andrew Fitzmaurice, “The Corruption of Hamlet,” Shakespeare and Early Modern PoliticalThought, ed. David Armitage, et al. (Cambridge, Eng., 2009), p. 140.

19. Fitzmaurice, p. 140n.20. Fitzmaurice, pp. 140, 154.



in which “all moral questions were understood to have politicalimplications”21 and vice-versa.

By attending to how Shakespeare envisages tyranny aesthetically,this reading also highlights Platonism’s relevance to the politics ofgenre. As the plot of Hamlet revolves around the man who should beking, it makes political disproportion central to tragedy as literaryform. In a tragedy that unfolds in the world of the Court, as most ofthem do, it is a kind of disproportion in itself for any character to be“bigger” than the king, as Franco Moretti suggests: “If for fourcenturies the tragedy of the prince of Denmark has baffled its specta-tors and readers, perhaps not the least reason is that Hamlet is a workwith the wrong protagonist. If Claudius were its centre of gravity, every-thing would run far more smoothly and to pattern. Instead the pro-tagonist is Hamlet, and nothing runs smoothly at all.”22 In otherwords, The Tragedy of Claudius, had Shakespeare written that one,would be a “smoother” tragedy because, like King Lear or Macbeth, itwould conform to the monarch-centric conventions of the genre.However, as Rebecca Bushnell points out, the tyrant in Greek tragedyis often “a secondary character, opposed to the hero or paired with awoman who threatens his masculinity.”23 By de-centering and emas-culating Claudius, Shakespeare actually follows the Greek model moreclosely in Hamlet than in other tragedies. Moretti also makes a claimabout tragedy that would seem to make Hamlet its perfect paradigm:“Tragedy evokes proportion and harmony only to dissolve them, incharacters as well as in the overall structure.”24 T. McAlindon finds theworld of Hamlet “aesthetically depressing” because it is a world inwhich “there is division, disjunction, imbalance, discord, contradic-tion, and deception; everything is unfitting, haphazard, rough–hewn,in shreds and patches, in flux.”25 But this critique seems to miss theartistic method in the madness. It is these very qualities—or rather the

21. Armitage, p. 4.22. Franco Moretti, “The Great Eclipse: Tragic Form as the Deconsecration of Sover-

eignty,” Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms, 2d ed., tr. SusanFischer, et al (London, 1983), p 65–66. “The Great Eclipse” tr. David Miller.

23. Bushnell, p. 23.24. Moretti, p. 72. Compare Terry Eagleton: “Tragedy needs meaning and value if only to

violate them. It disrupts the symmetry of our moral universe with its excess and inequity, but itspower depends on a faith in that even-handedness. Otherwise words like ‘excess’ and ‘inequity’would have no meaning” in Sweet Violence: the Idea of the Tragic (Oxford, 2003), p. 26.

25. T. McAlindon, Shakespeare’s Tragic Cosmos (Cambridge, Eng., 1991), p. 113.



appearance of them, since whatever looks unfitting, haphazard orrough–hewn in Shakespeare is carefully crafted to look that way—thatgive Hamlet its unsurpassed aesthetic power. All the play’s dissolutionsand disruptions of pattern dynamically come together to form a patternof their own, as Shakespeare makes moral and political disorder into anaesthetically unified and pleasing whole.

Reading Hamlet through a Platonic lens reveals that a critical focuson the Prince’s interiority, rather than obscuring our view of thepatriarchal landscape of the play, invites a consideration of preciselythese larger political concerns. At several points, the play’s languageconcentrates and complicates the connection between moral andpolitical life, between internal and external regimes. For example,when counseling Ophelia to beware Hamlet’s advances, Laertes makesa direct link between the Prince’s private desire and the well-being ofthe state: “His greatness weighed, his will is not his own” (1.3.17)—Hamlet’s sexual appetite, or “will,” has important consequences forthe body politic of Denmark, “[a]nd therefore must his choice becircumscribed / Unto the voice and yielding of that body / Whereofhe is the head” (1.3.22–24). Laertes is articulating the classical, hier-archical model of the corpus politicum, which, even when the “body” isin balance, makes disproportion normative insofar as the capriciouslust of one individual potentially affects the lives of the multitude.Albeit with a different metaphor, Rosencrantz similarly points to thenormative imbalance between ruler and ruled when he comparessovereignty to

a massy wheelFixed on the summit of the highest mount,To whose huge spokes ten thousand lesser thingsAre mortised and adjoined, which when it falls,Each small annexment, petty consequence,Attends the boist’rous ruin. Never aloneDid the King sigh, but with a general groan. (3.3.17–23)

It is simply in the nature of monarchy, Rosencrantz implies, that onesovereign is responsible for the fate of “ten thousand lesser things.” Atthe same time, the image more subtly depicts a political system that isout of tune precisely because it is weighted against the people. Whileit is unlikely that this or any courtier would intentionally point out theimperfections of monarchy to the king himself, the lines nonethelesssuggest that for the one at the top, there is nowhere to go



but down: it is not a question of whether Fortune’s “massy wheel”will plummet, but when.

While the image is “proleptic of tragedy’s end,” to borrow a phrasefrom Christopher Pye, it simultaneously politicizes that end.26 Tragedyacquires its Aristotelian “magnitude” in part from the larger socio-political consequences of the tyrannical subject’s actions; whateverpain and suffering is felt by the declining monarch is increased andmultiplied when felt by his people. Arguably, it is not only themonarch’s natural death that is worrisome here (the rationale of “theking’s two bodies” effectively took care of that), but his moral “cease”or “cess” (Q2): the probability of an absolute ruler’s dark descent intotyranny and the devastating repercussions such moral collapse held instore for all those who depend on him. As much as Plato insisted onthe absolute difference between king and tyrant, Shakespeare mightwell have sensed that the philosopher protests too much, as Shake-spearean tragedy shows how this crucial difference always “threatens tocollapse into identity.”27

III

I want to return to Laertes’ invocation of the body politic, particularlythe suggestion that the choice of the head is “circumscribed” by thevoice of the body, because it destabilizes the “top-down” politicalmodel in a striking way: contra the rhetoric of absolutism, the linesimply that the body has a voice apart from the head, that the vox populiknows best, and that it balances the sovereign will in a way thatprioritizes and insures the state’s own “sanity and health” (1.3.21).However, it must be admitted that Shakespeare raises this possibility ofa democratic ideal only to squelch it later in the play: when the“rabble” rally around enraged Laertes and make him the figurehead oftheir rebellion—“ ‘Choose we! Laertes shall be king’ ” (4.5.102)—their cries, not heard but reported second–hand, are marginalized andemptied of any real significance. The vox populi is at once capriciousand utterly ineffectual. Shakespeare thus holds true to a Platonic visionin which the members of the body politic reflect rather than correctthe moral weakness, instability, and divisiveness modeled by the head.

26. Christopher Pye, “ ‘To throw out our eyes for brave Othello’: Shakespeare andAesthetic Ideology,” Shakespeare Quarterly 60.4 (2009), 428.

27. Bushnell, p. 22.



But perhaps the most glaring incongruity in Laertes’ invocation of theanalogy is that he speaks of Hamlet as though Hamlet were always andalready king, referring to that body “whereof he is the head”—not“will be” or “might be.” This slippage should make us wonder notonly why the Prince’s inner regime looks “bigger” than the public,outer regime of Denmark to which it corresponds but why it corre-sponds at all, given that Hamlet is not and never will be king. Bydestabilizing in drama what was supposed to function in politicaldiscourse as an authorizing metaphor for kingly power, Shakespeareappears to undermine the normative metaphysical framework of theearly modern worldview and its essential correspondence of micro-cosm and macrocosm, of bodies natural and politic. Yet because theearly modern worldview required man—who paradoxically containsand is contained by the macrocosm—to be regarded at one time aslarge and at another time as small, that worldview itself insured thatshifting perspectives, ontological instability, and relative judgmentwere always and already normative.

IV

Francis Bacon famously termed revenge “a kind of wild justice,” bywhich he meant that it is not really justice at all.28 The desire forrevenge is driven not by reason but by the dominance of the soul’sinferior parts. Besides reason and passion, the Platonic soul has a thirdor middle element: thumos, often translated as “spiritedness,” whichperforce must be strong in someone bent on revenge. The proud,ambitious, or spirited part of the soul is the warlike part, tenaciouslyconcerned with “power, victory, and reputation,” and it loves honorabove all else (581b). When the soul is in proper proportion, thespirited element serves as an auxiliary to or subordinate ally of therational element, just as the military follows the philosopher-king’sorders in a well-governed city: “One makes the decisions, the otherdoes the fighting, under the leadership of the ruling element, using itscourage to put those decisions into effect” (442b). In this way, “thetwo of them will exercise control over the desiring element” (442).Socrates postulates the existence of the tyrannical alternative—a soul inwhich the spirited element sides with base desires over divine reason,but passes over it anxiously, as if that configuration is too monstrous

28. Francis Bacon, Francis Bacon: The Essays, ed. John Pitcher (New York, 1985), p. 72.



to imagine (440b). Yet this must be the way the three parts areconfigured in the distended soul of the avenger. In representing a soulruled by a combination of passion and ambition, Shakespeare mayhave drawn on Plutarch, who “is far more willing than Plato toexplore the pathology of the soul’s second part. Plutarch in his Moraliamakes uncharacteristic common cause with the Stoics against Plato . . .in adopting the ‘absolutist’ position against anger.”29 However, Plato atleast implicitly acknowledges the possibility of the middle elementeither staging a moral coup on its own or conspiring with the passionsagainst reason’s rule; Socrates suggests that both parts can becomedangerously aroused in dreams and thus should be quieted by themorally balanced individual before he retires: “As for his desiring part,he will expose it neither to want nor to excess. He wants it to go tosleep . . . The same goes for the spirited part of the soul. He will calmit down, and avoid getting into a rage with anyone and going to sleepwith his spirit in a state of turmoil” (572a).

When Hamlet, speaking with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, callsDenmark a prison, the obscure exchange that ensues is illuminated bythis idea that ambition, like passion, can overthrow reason in dreams.These lines resonate with politicized problems of proportion; accord-ing to Rosencrantz, Hamlet’s ambition must be disproportionatelylarge if it makes Denmark a prison, the whole country being “toonarrow for [his] mind” (2.2.246–47). Hamlet rightly understands theremark to be a comment on his political ambition; Rosencrantz thinksthe Prince dreams of possessing an empire extending far beyondDenmark’s confining boundaries. But in his response, Hamlet reflectson his imbalanced inner regime: “O God, I could be bounded in anutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that Ihave bad dreams” (2.2.148–50). Insofar as proportion is a matter ofperception, and perception is a matter of moral proportion, these linesremind us of Plato’s spatial reasoning—of the relation between therational, ambitious, and passionate parts of the soul. Perhaps Hamlet’sdreams are bad in the sense of being morally bad. A violent dreamabout killing Claudius is unlikely to differ much from the terribledreams of the Macbeths, dreams in which the lower elements of thesoul overwhelm the higher. Guildenstern’s equation of Hamlet’s bad

29. Gordon Braden, “Plutarch, Shakespeare, and the Alpha Males,” Shakespeare and theClassics, ed. Charles Martindale and A. B. Taylor (Cambridge, Eng., 2004), pp. 195–96.



dreams with his “ambition” thus implies a soul out of balance, a soulin which noble reason has been wrongfully made subject to “so airyand light a quality” as ambition (2.2.254–55). As part of the anticdisposition he puts on for Ophelia, Hamlet claims his sins are too largeand too numerous to be contained: “I am very proud, revengeful,ambitious, with more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to putthem in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in”(3.1.125–27). This weirdly imprecise self-vilification shows Hamletstruggling to become what Old Hamlet’s ghost has commanded himto be: a soul ruled by pride, revenge, and ambition, despite howawkwardly the mantle rests on his shoulders.

Critics have long noted the inconsistency between Hamlet’s adviceto the players to imitate humanity with “temperance” and “smooth-ness” (3.2.7), and those moments of his own performance in which heproceeds to “tear a passion to tatters” (3.2.8–9). But the bit of histri-onic advice that most clearly signals Hamlet’s ironic association withpassion’s tyrannical reign is the injunction against any performance that“out-Herods Herod” (3.2.12–13). For Shakespeare’s contemporaryaudiences, the mention of Herod would have immediately suggestedthe familiar biblical tyrant of the mystery cycles, who “was remem-bered for a theatrical style of swaggering boastfulness, rage, inarticulatepassion, and the indulgence of appetite” as well as for his disturbingphysicality, especially anatomical distortion and bodily decay.30 Hamletassociates himself with another classic stage tyrant of the Renaissancewhen, preparing to face his mother, he says in soliloquy, “Let notever / The soul of Nero enter this firm bosom” (3.2.363–64). Osten-sibly aiming to distance himself from the Roman emperor who wassaid to have murdered his mother by cutting open her womb, thePrince claims he will only “speak daggers to [Gertrude], but use none”(3.2.366). Yet Gertrude is evidently so terrified by her son’s cruel andunnatural assault, which may actually be physical as well as verbal, thatshe fears for her life: “What wilt thou do? Thou wilt not murder me?Help, help, ho!” (3.4.21–22). There are other ironic parallels: Accord-ing to some biographical accounts, Nero may have fatally poisoned hisgreat-uncle, the emperor Claudius, who had adopted him as a son andnamed him as heir-apparent.31 Hamlet’s passion for the theater harkensback to Nero, who as Bushnell notes “was deeply infatuated with

30. Bushnell, pp. 84, 87.31. Bushnell, p. 30.



music, dance, and theater; he loved to mask himself.”32 Nero’s famouslast words were “Qualis artifex pereo”—“What an artist dies in me”—which bring home the conception of tyranny as an art form realized inand through histrionic performance.

When Hamlet boasts, “Now could I drink hot blood, / And dosuch bitter business as the day / Would quake to look on” (3.2.360–62), he seeks to embody the spirit of the tyrant in more than words.He is attempting to play the tyrant in spite of himself, and his “anticdisposition” (1.5.173) is less about tricking others than it is abouttricking himself into becoming the part he plays. He believes thathabitual behavior has the potential to transform the self from theoutside in. “Assume a virtue if you have it not . . . For use almost canchange the stamp of nature,” he counsels his mother while trying toconvince her to stay out of Claudius’ bed (3.4.151, 151.8). However,shortly before he says this, he kills Polonius, thereby affirming in hisown vicious action the usual tendency of “[t]hat monster custom”(3.4.151.1) to do the opposite and morally transform the actor for theworse. Hamlet assumes a vice because he has it not, thereby reinforc-ing Plato’s warning against all arts of imitation. If a man can becomea raging lunatic simply by acting like one, so can he become avengeful murderer simply by acting like one. Where reason provesunable to justify Hamlet’s cause, he resorts instead to the potentiallytransformative power of the performance of passion.

The attempt to do his filial duty and awaken the tyrant withinreaches its histrionic summit when Hamlet leaps into Ophelia’s graveafter Laertes, warning his rival that “I have something in me danger-ous, / Which let thy wiseness fear” (5.1.247–48). The dangerous“something in him,” which no longer passes show if it ever did, is nota break from the patriarchal will but an exaggerated attempt to respectit. With the announcement, “This is I, / Hamlet the Dane” (5.1.241–42), the Prince announces his intention to enact his father’s badcommand—to unmake himself into passion’s slave. He is about todeliver the sort of performance he thinks his father’s ghost expects ofhim, one in which reason looks like a molehill beside a mountain ofpassion and ambition. The play’s attention to problems of scale peaksin the outrageous image of the two wronged sons being buried alive,as Hamlet says to Laertes:

32. Bushnell, p. 30.



And if thou prate of mountains, let them throwMillions of acres on us, till our ground,Singeing his pate against the burning zone,Make Ossa like a wart. (5.1.265–68)

While Margreta De Grazia rightly observes that the image is one inwhich “the topographical and the dermatological intermesh,”33 itmay be helpful to ask what’s wrong with this picture. This immea-surably, impossibly high burial mound suggests the drastic instabilityof perspectives associated with tyrannical regimes. How apropos thatthe image builds on a Greek mountain, since it invokes precisely thekind of instability of proportion that preoccupied Plato. In makingOssa like a wart, Hamlet’s simile makes us regard the same thing atone time as large and at another time as small. Expressing his regretto Horatio in the following scene, Hamlet presents the episode asresulting from an upsurge of tyranny within; the overreachingrhetoric of mountains reflects a groundswell of competitive, mascu-line anger: “the bravery of [Laertes’] grief did put me / Into atow’ring passion” (5.2.80–81, emphasis added).

The funeral scene is of course not the first time Hamlet workshimself up into a towering passion. In his mother’s chamber he ishell-bent on making her second husband look miniscule compared tothe towering figure of her first. But like the sun-scraping burialmound, this patriarchal mountain exists only in Hamlet’s head. Inorder to reflect the “inmost part” of Gertrude (3.4.20), where allegedlylust rules and “reason panders will” (3.4.78), Hamlet holds up not “aglass” but two small portraits, “[t]he counterfeit presentment of twobrothers” (3.4.53). As Hamlet sees it, there is a world of differencebetween these portraits: his father with the stature of a god, “[n]ewlighted on a heaven-kissing hill” (3.4.58), overshadowing his beast ofan uncle as a “mountain” does a “moor” (3.4.65, 66). Gertrude’s utterlack of discretionary judgment thus manifests itself as a problem ofproportion, a preposterous inability to distinguish the obviously greaterman from the lesser. On stage, however, the two portraits often areclosely comparable in size, scale, and appearance, which is arguably themost effective way to stage the scene. When Hamlet’s rhetoric ofdrastic difference conspicuously fails to accord with the visual similar-ity of the portraits and perhaps of the brothers themselves, Hamlet

33. Margreta de Grazia, Hamlet without Hamlet (Cambridge, 2007), p. 40.



appears guilty of the very misjudgment for which he blames hismother.

One scholar points to Hamlet’s mocking use of mathematical lan-guage as he “parodies Osric’s inflated praise of Laertes through therhetoric of numbers”: “I know to divide him inventorially woulddizzy th’arithmetic of memory” (5.2.102.8–102.9).34 Yet the Prince isserious in his accusation that Gertrude has senselessly chosen “[a] slavethat is not twenti’th part the tithe / Of your precedent lord” (3.4.87–88). He grasps desperately at the very kind of mathematical precisionand exactness which he later mocks, arguably because he wants to lendhis opinion the indisputable weight of objective judgment. Or to put itin Platonic terms, he tries to exercise the superior, rational element ofthe soul, the part that bases its judgments not on mere appearances buton the higher, more reliable standards of “measuring, counting, andweighing” (602d). Comparing the moral character of king and tyrant,Socrates proposes a mathematical formula for calculating “preciselyhow much worse off [the tyrant] is” (587c) and precisely how farremoved he is from real pleasure, which is afforded neither by food,sex, and money nor by victory, honor, and glory but by knowledge,wisdom, and truth. By “squaring and cubing” relative distances,Socrates offers the following solution: “if you are talking about how farremoved the king is from the tyrant, in terms of true pleasure, you willfind, when you complete the multiplication, that his life is nine– andtwenty– and seven hundred-fold more pleasurable, and that a tyrant ismore wretched by the same amount” (587d-e). Socrates’ interlocutor,Glaucon, calls this “a horrendous piece of arithmetic” because of thehuge moral discrepancy it exposes, but as a mathematical exercise, it isobviously ludicrous (587e). The specious figure evinces that it ishumanly impossible to weigh and measure the moral worth of otherswith mathematical or geometric precision, as much as we may long forsuch unambiguous data. Similarly, by reducing Claudius preposterouslyand no less irrationally to a tiny fraction of a fraction, Hamlet revealshis own inevitable failure to quantify the qualitative, to define exactlythe difference between his father and his uncle.

What is most ironic about this scene, however, is that Hamlet chideshis mother for being ruled by passion even while he repeatedly chideshimself—and expects his father’s ghost to chide him in the same

34. Paula Blank, Shakespeare and the Mismeasure of Renaissance Man (Ithaca, 2006), p. 123.



scene—for not being ruled by passion, despite the “rash and bloodydeed” (3.4.26) of killing Polonius providing ample evidence to thecontrary. That Hamlet’s ire is displaced or rather misplaced fromClaudius onto Polonius (and will be misplaced again onto Laertes)serves to demonstrate the mutability of passion’s object and the natureof passionate action: erratic, indiscriminate, boundless. Hamlet thinkspassion drives his mother to love the wrong man, but it also driveshim to kill the wrong man. As Gertrude’s crime of sexual appetite andHamlet’s crime of vengeful homicide collide and collapse into oneanother, Shakespeare makes a moral philosophic move toward St.Augustine and his dualistic simplification of Plato’s tripartite soul. InAugustine’s early works, the ambitious or spirited part of the soulmerges with the passionate part, thereby crystallizing the Neoplatonicconfiguration of reason and passion as a moral dichotomy. Nowclassified together under the vast rubric of “the passions,” sexual desireand vengefulness, appetite and ambition significantly are of a piece.Augustine counts both “desire” and “fires of vengeance” among the“conflicting storms” that torment the soul in which “the reign of lustrages tyrannically.” Anyone who is not governed by divine reason isenslaved to its demonic opposite: “Wherever he turns, greed amasses,extravagance wastes, ambition entices, obstinacy goads, submissivenessharasses, and all the other innumerable things that throng and busythemselves in the kingdom of lust. Can we think that this is notpunishment which, as you see, all must endure who do not cling towisdom?”35 Once lumped together in the “kingdom of lust,” woman’sdesire and man’s vengefulness are qualitatively no different from oneanother. The same irrationality that Hamlet attempts to drive from hismother has been driven into him by his father’s ghost.

V

The only time the word “tyrant” appears in this play, vengeful actionand artistic evaluation are explicitly linked. When the First Playerrecites Aeneas’ tale of Priam’s slaughter, he describes Pyrrhus’ hesita-tion before his sword descends on the neck of the elderly Trojan King:“So, as a painted tyrant, Pyrrhus stood, / And, like a neutral to his will

35. St. Augustine, On Free Choice of the Will, tr. Anna S. Benjamin and L. H. Hackstaff(Indianapolis, 1964), p. 22.



and matter, / Did nothing” (2.2.460–62). Shakespeare’s languageencourages us to study the scene as we would a painting in whichevery aspect of the composition is morally and politically charged.Even Troy’s burning streets “lend a tyrannous and damnèd light”(2.2.440) to Pyrrhus’ bloody rampage. According to Senecan tradition,a perfect revenge killing achieves an artful symmetry, mirroring theoriginal crime in kind while surpassing it in degree. Yet the Pyrrhusnarrative is a miniature portrait of vengeance so exaggerated as tomake revenge an art of grotesque proportions.

In his compelling approach to vengeance as mimesis in Hamlet,David Scott Kastan reads the vignette as “[serving] only to confirm thedisturbing resemblances Hamlet needs to deny”—namely, the resem-blance of the revenge act to the original crime and the resemblance ofthe revenger to the original victim as well as villain.36 Evincing thatrevenge is merely pointless repetition—“a desperate mode of imita-tion, avenging wrongs with wrongs”—Pyrrhus “kills Priam as Priam’sson killed Pyrrhus’ father, and the symmetry and reciprocity mockthe moral authority the revenger would claim.”37 Complicating thisreading, however, is the way the speech itself emphasizes asymmetryand incommensurability. First of all, there is the conspicuous disjunc-tion between the metric balance of the blank verse and the moral andpolitical imbalance of its narrative content: in wiping out Troy,Pyrrhus is avenging one life by taking many, while feeble old Priam isan obviously “[u]nequal match” (2.2.451) for Pyrrhus’ overwhelmingstrength. To play up this disproportionately cruel and excessive use offorce as Shakespeare does is to play up the problems of injustice thatmark, or mar, the action of the archetypal Greek hero. After all,Pyrrhus is the son of Achilles. Significantly, this first part of the speechis recited not by the First Player but by Hamlet himself, whoseconscientious inaction is set off by the foil of “hellish Pyrrhus”(2.2.443). At the same time, Pyrrhus mirrors Hamlet in that he, likethe Prince, is made to seem bigger than everything around him. Theblood-soaked avenger is “o’er-sizèd with coagulate gore” (2.2.442);“o’er-sizèd” is usually glossed in terms of a canvas coated with sizingin preparation for painting, but the word may also punningly suggest

36. David Scott Kastan, “ ‘His semblable is his mirror’: Hamlet and the Imitation ofRevenge,” Shakespeare Studies 19 (1987), 113.

37. Kastan, pp. 113–14.



an enlargement of epic and tragic proportions. Pyrrhus is an oversizedwarrior who dominates the scene in which the “tyrannous anddamnèd light” (2.2.440) of burning Troy serves merely as his personalbacklighting.

Yet despite Pyrrhus’ “nightmare proportions,” he remains a swollenfigure in a small frame.38 That “he counts for us as a subject hardly atall”39 is largely a result of Shakespeare’s formal strategy, which putshim at two removes from the main dramatic current of the play.Pyrrhus belongs to the tableau of the metadramatic, but he is furtherrecessed and flattened within that tableau because, unlike the PlayerKing and Player Queen at the center of The Murder of Gonzago, helacks the ultimate dramatic privilege of speaking for or about himself.He is a mute, two-dimensional topos of a speech belonging to aTrojan hero, Aeneas, whose voice Hamlet and the First Player areassuming in their shared delivery. The whole narrative account ofPyrrhus and his murderous rampage is also ironized and trivializedwithin the main frame of the play by Polonius’ judgment, “[t]his is toolong” (2.2.478), which momentarily knocks the wind out of thebombastic blank verse. The “foolish prating knave” (3.4.189) mayhave a point this time. The speech has already rumbled passed what isarguably its dramatic climax, which not coincidentally is also its onlymoment of psychological interest: when Pyrrhus hesitates with hissword drawn over Priam’s head. As readers have long recognized, thispictorially self-conscious moment anticipates that of Hamlet with hissword drawn over the kneeling Claudius, seemingly at prayer.40 But inits own way, Hamlet’s hesitation is an inversion, a negative image ofPyrrhus’ excessive follow-through once “[a] rousèd vengeance setshim new a-work” (2.2.468). For Pye, Pyrrhus is “a vastly overdeter-mined tyrant” whose “encounter with the aged Priam represents thetyranny the Prince must overcome.”41 To the contrary, I would arguethat Hamlet darkly mirrors the figure of the overdetermined tyrant in

38. McAlindon, p. 105.39. Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago,

2004), p. 30. For an ecological reading of Pyrrhus’ wrath as coextensive with his environmentand with the affective reciprocity between inner and outer in Hamlet at large, see Paster,pp. 25–60.

40. On the Pyrrhus narrative as ekphrastically working out the play’s problems of inaction,see Richard Meek, Narrating the Visual in Shakespeare (Burlington, 2009), pp. 99–105.

41. Pye, The Regal Phantasm: Shakespeare and the Politics of Spectacle (New York, 1990),p. 168.



his murderous desire to effect Claudius’ eternal damnation. In hisdecision to sheathe his sword and wait for “a more horrid hint”(3.3.88) so that he might send his uncle’s soul to hell, Hamlet seeks nota symmetrically perfect revenge but a disproportionately cruel one. HisFather’s ghost, after all, is in purgatory, not in hell; what Hamlet wantsto do to Claudius amounts to spiritual “overkill, not retaliation.”42 Assuch, it represents the inward counterpart to the exaggerated show offorce or physical overkill enacted by Pyrrhus as he tears through Troyand “make[s] malicious sport” (2.2.493) in dismembering Priam’scorpse. Despite what appears to be another case of thinking himselfout of acting—“and so a goes to heaven, / And so am I revenged.That would be scanned” (3.3.74–75)—Hamlet’s hesitation and deferralof the deed is too mean-spirited to be called cautious or reasonable.Rather, it reflects his continuing struggle to establish a tyranny withineven while it evinces passion’s notorious unreliability as a motive anda cue to action.

The description of Pyrrhus “as a painted tyrant” also implicates theplay’s other “painted tyrant,” Claudius, who reveals tyranny to be anart that tries but ultimately fails to hide itself. The majority of thosesurrounding the tyrant are taken in by his act because, as Socrateshistrionically describes it, they see his character “from the outside . . .and [are] dazzled by the display of grandeur which tyrants put on foroutward show” (577a). The worse the man in power, the better hisacting needs to be. To see the tyrant for what he really is, he must beseen in private, “stripped of his theatrical costume and props” (577b),where we necessarily find his inner state to be disjoint and out offrame.43 Of course, even “good” monarchs do their share of illusion-making; in Shakespeare’s England, Elizabeth I and James I amplydemonstrated the inherently theatrical, spectacular nature of monar-chical power. The line between “good” and “bad” performance onthe political stage, then, can be a difficult one to draw; from a certainpoint of view, the “constant acting of the king . . . comes dangerouslyclose to the tyrant’s hypocrisy.”44 Yet there remains something egre-giously false about the tyrant’s performance in particular. A good kingostensibly uses theatrical self-display to showcase his rightful authority

42. de Grazia, p. 192.43. On the Platonic connections among tyranny, theater, and femininity, see Bushnell, esp.

pp. 17–36 and 63–69.44. Bushnell, p. 61.



and benevolence. With regard to policy, he is permitted, evenexpected, to dissemble for the sake of his people’s security and well-being, as Socrates allows: “if anyone is entitled to tell lies, the rulers ofthe city are. They may do so for the benefit of the city, in responseto the actions either of enemies or of citizens” (389b-c). By contrast,the tyrant, who lies only to serve his own selfish desires, constantlymakes foul look fair.

Stephen Orgel claims that in all Renaissance concepts of kingship,“it is the image of the monarch that is crucial, the appearance of virtue,whether it accords with an inner reality or not.”45 But for Shakespeare,whether a monarch’s virtuous image accorded with an inner realityclearly was a matter of crucial concern. In his first confession of anywrongdoing, which comes in the form of an audience aside, Claudiusadmits to coating his crime with the cosmetic beauty of rhetoric:

The harlot’s cheek, beautied with plast’ring art,Is not more ugly to the thing that helps itThan is my deed to my most painted word.O heavy burden! (3.1.53–56)

Claudius figures himself as the maker of a deceptively flatteringself-portrait, a political trompe l’oeil. It is telling that Shakespeare chosethe adjective “plastering” here, because plaster cracks; the King’swrongdoing will inevitably emerge through the cracks in his carefullycrafted façade of temperance, wisdom, and justice. By stressing theincongruity between Claudius’ outward show and his inward truth,Shakespeare reinforces the Platonic conception of tyranny as a thor-oughly duplicitous, hence feminized art. He aligns Claudius withfemale treachery in part by likening the King’s rhetorical performanceto a whore’s heavy makeup. Moments later in the scene, cosmeticsagain are implicated when Hamlet sneers at hapless Ophelia: “I haveheard of your paintings, too, well enough. God hath given you oneface, and you make yourselves another” (3.1.142–43). Since Claudiusalong with Polonius is eavesdropping on this conversation, the Kingreceives another painful reminder of his own two-facedness. Weak-ened by his reliance on the “feminine” art of deception, burdenedwith his lustful deed like a woman heavy with child, and mocked by

45. The Illusion of Power (Berkeley, 1975), p. 42.



Hamlet who calls him “my mother” (4.3.51–54), the tyrant Claudiusis branded by a womanish enslavement to passion.

In his first speech of the play, the King insists Fortinbras is wrong in“thinking by our late dear brother’s death / Our state to be disjointand out of frame” (1.2.20), yet the play’s pattern of strange divisionand disproportion establishes itself even in the midst of this denial,suggesting that the Nordic Prince’s assessment of his rival power isdead on. As Claudius publicly broaches the awkward subject of hishaving hastily and incestuously married his brother’s widow, theregular iambic pentameter is tellingly fraught with opposites:

Therefore our sometime sister, now our queen,Th’imperial jointress of this warlike state,Have we as ’twere with a defeated joy,With one auspicious and one dropping eye,With mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage,In equal scale weighing delight and dole,Taken to wife. (1.2.8–14)

The formal, metric balance of this passage is a red herring, intendedto distract the auditors from the obvious fact that Claudius does notweigh “delight and dole” equally; if discretion fought with nature inhim at all, discretion did not put up much of a fight. The King triesto truss himself up with a string of conventional paradoxes, but the“defeated joy,” the “mirth in funeral” and “dirge in marriage,” cannotsustain the swelling pressure of moral judgment. The Petrarchan para-doxes are part of poetry’s “plastering art,” which Claudius slathers overhis ugly behavior ultimately to no avail. The most visually shockingimage here, the one that gives a clear glimpse of Claudius’ equallyshocking immorality, is that of his own face imagined “with oneauspicious and one dropping eye”—disturbing in its asymmetry, like aPicasso portrait or like the comic and tragic masks of theater bizarrelyconflated into one. It is the image of a face that conspicuously fails tomirror the face of the body politic, which is ideally symmetrical anduniform in its expression of collective grief for the late King, thewhole kingdom being dutifully “contracted in one brow of woe”(1.2.4).

While Moretti reads Claudius as a displaced tragic hero or would-beMacbeth, A. C. Bradley reads him as “no tragic character,” possessing



a “small nature.”46 Reinforcing Bradley’s reading is the way the King’sidle drinking becomes the centerpiece of his exaggerated performanceof power, a performance calculated to conceal and to compensate forhis smallness. Claudius fails to measure up to the office; he lacks themoral authority to rule and his power is undeserved, so his image isoutlandishly large to make up for the lack. Thus he trumpets hisimminent bout of drinking as though it were a show of power to rivalthe gods:

No jocund health that Denmark drinks todayBut the great cannon to the clouds shall tell,And the King’s rouse the heavens shall bruit again,Re-speaking earthly thunder. (1.2.125–28)

If an echo is understood to be a kind of aural mimesis, then this echoserves ironically to amplify not the greatness but the triviality of whatthe King is actually doing. In defiance of reason, the King’s drinkingis blown out of proportion by art, the tyrannical art of politicalcustom. In the preposterous image of divine authority echoing or“re-speaking” human authority, the cosmic hierarchy is inverted, andDenmark’s political instability and moral brokenness are sounded on ametaphysical scale.

As suggested by the likely pun on “bruit” quoted above, Claudiusalso disguises brute force as real power in a way that Hannah Arendtwould have understood: “[W]hile violence can destroy power, it cannever become a substitute for it. From this results the by no meansinfrequent political combination of force and powerlessness, an arrayof impotent forces that spend themselves, often spectacularly andvehemently but in utter futility. . . . In historical experience and tra-ditional theory, this combination, even if it is not recognized as such,is known as tyranny.”47 Not power but the ruthless ambition andempty arrogance of “proud man” reverberate in the cannon shots,making Claudius an example of Isabella’s general complaint in Measurefor Measure about the audacity of “every pelting petty officer” who“[w]ould use his heaven for thunder, nothing but thunder” (2.2.115–16). A mere noise-maker, dressed in a little brief authority, the Kingis a thing of nothing. According to Isabella, man’s very essence is“glassy” (2.2.123)—even if he is created in God’s image, he is at best

46. A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, 4th ed. (1904; New York, 2007), p. 124.47. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, 1958), p. 202.



a pale reflection of his creator. In the politics of mimesis, man mimicsdivine power aggressively, preposterously, stupidly, “like an angryape” (2.2.123), in a performance that is as laughable as it is heartbreak-ing. An instance of the “witchcraft” perpetrated by Plato’s imitativeartist, the political agent’s “fantastic tricks before high heaven”(2.2.124) might fool other men, but as Claudius knows all too well,“ ’tis not so above” (3.4.60).

VI

Judging the custom of militarily saluting the King’s empty cup “[m]orehonoured in the breach than the observance” (1.4.18), Hamlet under-stands that what is intended to be a celebration of royal power andstrength is in effect a proclamation of political weakness and vulner-ability: the King drains his cup and is tyrannically clapped for it. In theeyes of foreigners the King’s drinking bespeaks the bad habits of thenation, creating an undeserved reputation for drunkenness that over-shadows what are usually seen as legitimately honorable achievements(1.4.18.1–18.6). Hamlet explains this instance of political disproportionin a Platonic way as corresponding to the moral disproportion of“particular men” (1.4.18.7), in whose souls “some vicious mole ofnature . . . Oft breaking down the pales and forts of reason” (1.4.18.8,18.12), becomes a much larger blemish. Public opinion fixates on “thestamp of one defect” (1.4.18.15) so that it comes to dominate thewhole impression:

His virtues else be they as pure as grace,As infinite as man may undergo,Shall in the general censure take corruptionFrom that particular fault. (1.4.18.17–18.20)

In these lines the object of Hamlet’s reflection has tellingly slippedfrom plural to singular, from “these men” to “his virtues,” whichsuggests that he has in mind a particular man—not the current King asis sometimes assumed, but the previous one, whose ghost in factreenters at this point.

Whether or not the late King regularly had cannons fired when hedrained his cup, he did have a “particular fault” which grew into amore general problem. Even if, as Horatio says, “[a] was a goodly



king” (1.2.185), Hamlet’s response, “[a] was a man” (1.2.186), leavesample room for all-too-human flaws, for seemingly small moral lapsesthat can have much larger political consequences. Lurking in the playis the possibility that the body politic’s rottenness has more subtle andinsidious origins not in Claudius’ full-blown crime but in the moralcharacter of his victim. After all, it is the late King, not Claudius orFortinbras, who is ultimately responsible for the time being out ofjoint, for making “the night joint-labourer with the day” (1.1.77) inDenmark. His martial exploits arguably point to a “vicious mole ofnature” in their own right. Old Hamlet may have been widelyesteemed as valiant, but he was nevertheless “pricked on by a mostemulate pride, / Dared to the combat” (1.1.82–83)—in other words,he was taunted by a rival into fighting essentially for the hell of it, andboth sides wager lands that rightfully should be inherited by theirrespective sons. Just as Claudius is no less a tyrant for being legiti-mately elected King, the wager is no less reckless for being a “sealedcompact / Well ratified by law and heraldry” (1.1.85–86). While on alarger scale and with higher political stakes, this conflict is not unlikethat “bred of an airy word” between two alpha males of Verona,Capulet and Montague (Romeo and Juliet, 1.1.82). In Hamlet, theDanish-Norwegian war appears no more necessary or justifiable thana duel between two equally proud, hot-headed, entitled individuals. Inidentifying Old King Hamlet as “the king / That was and is thequestion of these wars” (1.1.106.3–106.4), Bernardo implies, howeverunintentionally, that like his Norwegian rival, Old Hamlet was awarmonger—a “particular fault” whose cost is only just beginning tobecome apparent. Young Fortinbras is expected to invade Denmark,reclaiming his lost inheritance by force, and the King, the King’s toblame.

But as it happens, Fortinbras only has to bide his time and wait forDenmark to self-destruct. Pace de Grazia’s ambitious effort to placeland-based conflicts at the center of Hamlet, this particular conflict ispushed so far out of the main frame of the play that the Norwegiansare shown not charging into Denmark to fight for those valuable landsthat fell to Hamlet, but curiously, almost comically, passing through tofight in Poland. The troops march off into the play’s margins in orderto fight for a margin; their cause is thus doubly de-centered, doublydistanced by the worthlessness as well as by the location of the land inquestion. In Q2, when Hamlet asks the Norwegian captain if their



target is “the main of Poland” or “some frontier” (4.4.9.5–9.6), thecaptain replies, “[w]e go to gain a little patch of ground / That hathin it no profit but the name” (4.4.9.8–9.9). He tells Hamlet that hewould not pay so much as five ducats for this tract (4.4.9.10), yet at thecommand of Fortinbras, he is leading an army of men to their deathover it.

The Polish skirmish is outlandish in both senses of the word: it isforeign, remote, and out-of-the way in its location, and it is flagrant,strange, and aberrant in its moral, political, and economic dispropor-tion. Hamlet perceives that this particular campaign is not worth thecost in human lives, let alone in monetary expense: “[t]wo thousandsouls and twenty thousand ducats / Will now debate the question ofthis straw” (4.4.9.15–9.16). When the disproportion takes on a cor-poreal dimension in the Prince’s mind, the number of troops strangelyjumps to match the number of ducats as he pictures the “imminentdeath of twenty thousand men” (4.4.9.50) who will fit neither on theland nor under it; they

fight for a plotWhereon the numbers cannot try the cause,Which is not tomb enough and continentTo hide the slain. (4.4.9.52–9.55)

If so many lives are willingly risked for so little, “[e]ven for aneggshell” (4.4.9.43), he wonders, then why can’t he bring himself torisk the “pin’s fee” (1.4.46) of his own life for what he sees—or wantsto see—as a right and noble cause? He implies that Fortinbras and hismen are models of action not because they “go to gain a little patchof ground,” but because they go to gain the “profit” of the name, theright to claim it for Fortinbras and call it Norway, which presumablymeans they are acting upon honor’s motive and cue:

Rightly to be greatIs not to stir without great argument,But greatly to find quarrel in a strawWhen honour’s at the stake. (4.4.9.43–9.46)

The question of honor, the profit of the name, can thus turn whatwould otherwise be a small grievance into a great cause.

Yet it is not at all clear here that “honor” is an unqualifiedlyadmirable goal in and of itself. Young Fortinbras is “with divine



ambition puffed” (4.4.9.39)—or inflated with godhead–aspiringpride—as he leads soldiers to die for “a fantasy and trick of fame”(4.4.9.51), fame that will surely never come to those who fight for aneggshell and are bound for anonymous graves. The more closely weexamine so-called acts of honor and glory in the tragedies and histo-ries, the more those acts can begin to look like arrogance, futility, oreven insanity; Shakespeare’s use of “straw” (l. 9.16, 9) to connote thetriviality of the Norwegian cause has a pointed echo in the sceneimmediately following: describing Ophelia’s madness, Horatio says she“[s]purns enviously at straws” (4.5.6), which casts a shadow of irratio-nality, injustice, and moral disarray back upon the invasion. De Graziamaintains that “Norway purges itself back to health” as Fortinbras,“even if the stakes are negligible, gives his army the military exercisenecessary to make the state wholesome.”48 But it is just as likely thata military action claiming to be wholesome exercise or necessarypurgation for an idle or sick body politic might be an exercise intyranny, especially if the stakes are negligible. The skirmish over the“little patch of ground” may appear to be nothing fatal, no more thana minor blemish on the face of the Norwegian body politic. But here,too, a little patch of ground becomes a vicious mole of nature thatovertakes the forts of reason, perhaps signaling that something is rottenin the state of Norway.

However tempting it might be to read Hamlet’s return from the seavoyage and Fortinbras’ return from the Polish wars as two phases ofthe same cure, the bloodbath that ends the play is more a culminationthan a cleansing of political rot. During Hamlet’s duel with Laertes inthe final scene, the pattern of disproportion comes full circle asClaudius’ drinking is once again presented as a grand occasion worthyof military tribute. The King calls for cannon shot ostensibly to honorHamlet each time he wins a bout; however, the real cue for noise isnot Hamlet with his foil but Claudius with his cup:

The King shall drink to Hamlet’s better breath,And in the cup an union shall he throwRicher than that which four successive kingsIn Denmark’s crown have worn. Give me the cups,And let the kettle to the trumpet speak,The trumpet to the cannoneer without,

48. de Grazia, p. 78.



The cannons to the heavens, the heaven to earth,“Now the King drinks to Hamlet”.

Trumpets the while [he drinks] (5.2.209–16)

By placing an exceptional pearl in the cup and insisting on its supe-riority to that which adorned the crown of “four successive kings” ofDenmark, Claudius implicitly figures himself as the latest and thegreatest in that same royal series. But if Claudius is proposing here todissolve this perfect pearl, the play is equally perfect in its politicalirony, since Claudius represents not the Danish monarchy’s continu-ation but precisely its dissolution. As the heavens re-speak the earthlythunder of the King’s wassail, the triviality of the tyrant’s drinkinggives way to something of greater magnitude, something actuallybefitting the sound of cannons: regime change.

Signaling that he is now in charge, Fortinbras orders the final peal ofordnance, this military sound-off both repeating and replacing theDanish custom of saluting the King’s rouse—a custom of corruptionthat not only foreshadowed this very takeover but now seems to havesummoned it. At this point the shots actually match the momentous-ness of the occasion, which would seem to herald the restoration ofboth aesthetic and political proportion. The same might be said aboutHamlet’s assassination of Claudius, which appropriately raises thestakes of drinking from trivial to tragic. The Prince’s final action doespossess a certain symmetry: having killed the late King with poisonand planning to kill Hamlet the same way, Claudius is “justly served”(5.2.269) a taste of his own medicine as Hamlet forces upon him onelast drink. The revenge killing thus mirrors the original crime as wellas the custom of the cup that Claudius so eagerly observed.

Yet the end of the play resists the restoration of aesthetic andpolitical order. Surveying the carnage, Fortinbras comments on thedisproportion, the shocking mismatch of scene and setting as bodiescrowd the court (and stage): “Such a sight as this / Becomes the field,but here shows much amiss” (5.2.345–46). This is the closing couplet,which appears to reclaim the right of rhyme to impose formal orderon this play just as the Norwegian claims his rights of memory in thiskingdom. But as it turns out, the final couplet isn’t quite final—thereturn to political stability is resisted by metric irregularity. Hamlet isvirtually unique among Shakespeare’s plays in that the tidy poeticclosure normally provided by the rhyming couplet is undermined by



a prose appendage: “Go, bid the soldiers shoot” (5.2.347), which hasa rather ominous ring to it. Supposedly, the gunshots are a salute tothe fallen Prince and the warrior-King he might have been. Yetbecause the military nature of the tribute—“the soldier’s music and therites of war” (5.2.343)—seems conspicuously inappropriate and ill-suited to the character of Hamlet, a pattern of imbalance persists untilthe end. And it is precisely through this continuous chain of discon-tinuity, this carefully ordered sequence of disorder, that the play givessuch powerful aesthetic pleasure. As Bacon suggests in what could bea comment on Hamlet and on Shakespearean tragedy in general,“There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in theproportion.”49

TOWSON UNIVERSITY

49. Bacon, The Essays, ed. Pitcher, p. 189.



Tragic Proportions: the Art of Tyranny and the Politics of the Soul in Hamlet

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