Yale University Press

Chapter Title: Antic Disposition

Book Title: The Elizabethan Hamlet

Book Author(s): Arthur McGee
Published by: Yale University Press. (1987)
Stable URL: [Link]

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The Elizabethan Hamlet

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 4
Antic Disposition

IN THE LITERATURE of the seventeenth century Paul S. Conklin

concluded that
Hamlet was seen, first of all, most decidedly as a malcontent;
and at times as 'madd', either as a lover or as possessed with a
madness that is quite primitive and realistic, with comic
overtones.
And, focussing particularly on the first twenty years of the
seventeenth century, Conklin adds:
His madness was a phenomenon of special interest; in fact the
malcontent was supposed to be suffering from a malady which
hovered between melancholy and downright insanity. 1
The controversy about Hamlet's sanity seems to have been started
in 1778 by a Dr. Akinside and when Hudson reviewed the posi-
tion in 1872 medical opinion seems to have crystallized:
Now the reality ofhis madness is what literary critics have been
strangely and unwisely reluctant to admit; partly because they
did not understand the exceeding versatility and multiformity
of that disease. 2
In our own time, with the advances in psychiatry, diagnosis has
been more specific. In 1962, for example, W.I.D. Scott claimed
that Hamlet was suffering from manic-depressive psychosis. 3 On
the other hand in 1967 we find Eleanor Prosser concluding that
Hamlet is unquestionably morbid at times, emotionally un-
balanced at times, and even out of control for brief moments.
But his erratic behaviour cannot be compassionately dismissed
as the symptom of a mental illness for which he is not
responsible. 4
The 'antic disposition' has in fact a long confused history, a
study of which leads to the predominant impression that it is a
phrase that is uniquely associated with Hamlet- no one before, or
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 The Elizabethan Hamlet
after, Hamlet assumed one voluntarily or developed one 'natural-
ly'. But before proceeding further we must realize that if an
Elizabethan agreed with Dr. Scott that Hamlet was 'madd' he
would have expected the Devil to be involved. If on the other
hand we accept Eleanor Prosser's contention that 'antic' meaning
'grotesque, ludicrous' was the 'usual epithet for Death', 5 there
again we must at least have regard to an Elizabethan word-
usage that we no longer share. In either case then there would
appear to be no exact modern equivalent to the 'antic disposition';
whatever standpoint we assume, the connotations will be dif-
ferent. To adopt the Elizabethan point of view however is to enter
a quite alien world of ideas and attitudes. For example we have to
realize that madness inspired as much mirth as it did fear - the
custom of paying a penny to visit the sights in Bedlam was
discontinued only in 1770. And we must accept that the standard
treatment of the insane was confinement in a dark place, fetters
and whipping, and the pharmacopeia of the leading expert in
'mental and nervous affections' included 'the skull of a stag and of
a healthy man who had been executed' and 'the backbone anointed
with a very choice balsam of earthworms or bats'- this was the
best that the 'Harley Street' of 1606 could do. 6 As E.M.W.
Tillyard said, 'it must be confessed that to us the Elizabethan is a
very queer age'. 7
Ifwe turn to C.T. Onion's A Shakespeare Glossary, 'antic' as an
adjective meant 'fantastic, grotesque, ludicrous'; 'antic' as a noun
is 'grotesque entertainment' or 'a burlesque performer, buffoon,
merry-andrew'; and 'antic' as a very is 'to make like buffoons'.
Harold Jenkins quotes a gloss dated 1604: 'anticke, disguised' and
goes on: 'The word is particularly used of an actor with a false
head or grotesque mask. ' 8 Etymologically 'antic' according to the
OED seems to have been derived from the Italian 'antico' perhaps
from its application to fantastic carvings found in the ruins of
ancient Rotne. Perhaps too it carried overtones of the comic
persona of the Roman actor. At any rate we find 'antic' applied to
the comic grimaces of the jester Will Somers:
At last out comes William with his wit, as the foole of the play
does, with an an tick looke to please the beholders. 9
Or we may look at Lodge's description of a 'jeaster':
This fellow in person is comely, in apparel courtly, but in
behaviour a very ape, and no man; his studye is to coin bitter
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 Antic Disposition
jeastes, or to show antique motions, or to sing baudie sonnets
and ballads: give him a little wine in his head, he is continually
Bearing and making of mouths . . . It is a special marke of him
at table, he sits and makes faces. 10
It could also refer to a comic dance:
... and Archee Armstrong the King's Fool, on the back of the
other fools, to tilt one at another, till they fell together by
the ears; sometimes Anticke Dances. 11 [The king referred to is
James I.]
We may then appreciate why a grinning, dancing skeleton was
called an antic - the figure of Death in the Danse Macabre whose
companion is often depicted as a jester. Douce records that
printers in the sixteenth century used such engravings as decora-
tions for the alphabet and shows a letter A illustrated in this
manner. Death the antic and Death's fool went together. 12 Thus
fat then it would seem that 'antic' did not mean 'mad' in the sense
of 'insane'.
But if we look further afield we find that it could, and did. For
example in Middleton's The Changeling:
Thou wild, unshapen antic; I am no fool,
You bedlam.
(4.3.129-30)
And in Dekker's The Honest Whore:
There are of mad men, as there are of tame,
All humoured not alike: we have here some,
So apish and fantastic, play with a feather,
And though 'twould grieve a soul to see God1s image
So blemished and defaced yet do they act
Such antic and such pretty lunacies
That spite of sorrow they will make you smile.
(Part 1, Act 5, Sc. 2)
'Antic' was a word which Shakespeare knew well, to his cost,
for Greene in his diatribe had written of actors: 'these antics
garnished in our colours' and scorned Shakespeare as 'an upstart
crow, beautified with our feathers'. And we may tum to M.C.
Bradbrook for an explanation of the language:
Country 'anticks' were used to present grotesque derisory
mimes against objects of social contempt, reducing their
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 The Elizabethan Hamlet
victims to animal level. Queen Elizabeth was disgusted when
Cambridge tried to entertain her with an anti-papal show of this
kind, although at her first Twelfth Night cardinals, bishops and
abbots appeared in the likeness of crows, asses and wolves.
Such grotesque beast-shows were found in plays ... and dumb
shows of scorn ... In real life, such rituals of public humiliation
as riding through the city, dressed in 'papers' setting out the
victim's crime (a punishment for perjury), could precede the
worse humiliation of the pillory or the stocks. Shakespeare, as
'the upstart crow', is wearing a feather costume of black, which
was what the Devil wore in the old craft plays (he 'pomped in
feathers'); he has become part of Greene's private beast fable, at
once an 'antick' in a disgraceful show, and also the victim of
it. 13
'Antic' then we may certainly accept as 'ludicrous' or 'gro-
tesque' but we may add that it described the behaviour of a clown
or jester or of a real madman whose behaviour was considered
humorous. If also we take 'disposition' separately we find from
Onions that it meant 'natural constitution or temperament' so that
if we ask ourselves who, to the Elizabethans, would, other than
Hamlet, have possessed an 'antic disposition' we might answer
that it would be a 'natural fool'. We may then turn to Robert
Armin for further information:
Naturall fooles are prone to selfe conceipt:
Fooles artificiall, with their wits lay wayte
To make themselues fooles, liking the disguise,
To feede their owne mindes, and the gazers eyes. 14
The 'natural fool' therefore was mad, and the 'artificial fool', the
professional entertainer, acted as though he were mad. Armin,
speaking of a visit to Oxford, says:
I promised them to proue mad; and I thinke I am so, else I
would not meddle with folly so deepely, but similis similem. 15
Indeed, a doubt about the sanity of a fool seems to have enhanced
his reputation. For the author of Tarlton's Jests said:
Well, howsoeuer, either naturall or artificiall, or both, he was a
mad merry companion, desired and loved of all.
In the courts and households of Westerns Europe in the Middle
Ages the fools became collectors' items and the real madness of a
fool was no barrier to his employment. Enid Welsford gives an
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 Antic Disposition
absorbing account of the subject and what follows is taken from
her book The Foo/. 16 In Italy, for example, Matello, who died in
1499, 'could not have been wholly imbecile', and 'Buffoon
Symone' (c.1500) was probably 'simple'. In Germany Conrad
Pocher had a successful career although he began it by hanging a
man - homicidal mania was no barrier to advancement. Claus
Narr mentioned in the Dresden archives in 1461 and 1518 was a
half-wit who also 'displayed uncanny powers of insight and
prophecy'. In France, Triboulet, the famous court fool, was a
simpleton; Thony, fool to the Duke of Orleans, was an imbecile;
and other French fools are described as being slightly deranged or
insane. In England, Wolsey's fool, Patch (c.1529), was a natural;
· Jack Oates blinded a rival; and another, Leonard, was mad
without doubt.
There were of course 'artificial' fools too, some of them
eminent, such as Chicot, a gentlemen trained to the profession of
arms who was killed at the siege of Rouen in 1592. Although he
was officially 'bouffon du roi' he gave Henry IV political advice.
And in England Henry VIII's jester Will Somers and Elizabeth's
Dick Tarlton were famous, the latter being also a skilled
swordsman. The distinction between the 'natural' and the
'artificial' fool in fact goes back to at least the twelfth century- the
court fool, that is. But the fool also became part of dramatic
tradition, for the domestic fool or jester influenced the develop-
ment of the Vice, according to Sir Edmund Chambers, who noted
that he was always a 'riotous buffoon'. Enid Welsford agreed with
him. Professor Cushman on the other hand believed that the Vice
was derived from the Morality play, and Bernard Spivack
supported this view. 17 Others trace him back to the Miracles and
the comic devils that became so popular.
What is important for our purpose is to recognize that the
medieval Church made a contribution to the complex symbol that
was the fool- besides being comic the Vice was also evil and his
satanic aura remained even though the Devil who had been an
indispensable part of the Miracles faded out and made a personal
appearance in only nine of about sixty Moralities. And the Vice
also became associated with anti-Catholic satire in the reign of
Henry VIII. For example injohn Bale's Three Laws (c.1531) there
is the stage direction:
The aparellynge of the six vyces, or frutes of Infydelyte. Lete
Idolatry be decked lyke an olde wytche, Sodomy lyke a monke
of all sectes, Ambycyon lyke a byshop, Couetousnesse like a
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 The Elizabethan Hamlet
pharyse or spyritall lawer, false doctrine, lyke a popysh
doctour, and hypocresy lyke a graye fryre. 18
Then in the reign of Edward VI there is Lusty ]uventus in which the
Vice is part of the anti-Catholic satire and his 'father' the Devil
appears:
DEVIL. 0 my child, how dost thou fare?
HYPOCRISY (THE VICE). Sancti amen. who have we here?
By the mass, I will buy none of they ware;
Thou art the chapman for the devil.
DEVIL. What, my son, canst thou not tell,
Who, is here, and what I am?
I am thine own father Satan.
And later the Vice says:
And [I have] brought up such superstition,
Under the name of holiness and religion,
That deceived almost all.
As holy cardinals, holy popes,
Holy vestments, holy copes,
Holy hermits and friars ...
The list continues and includes 'holy oil', 'holy saints' and 'holy
crosses'. It would therefore seem reasonable to suppose the audi-
ence's reaction to Hamlet- in which Satan plays 'father' to Hamlet
and complains that he did not receive 'holy oil' ('unaneled') and in
which Hamlet swears by the 'holy saint' Patrick - would have
been similar.
The Vice also made his appearance in revenge tragedy. Thus in
Horestes (1567) we find the Vice urging rebellion, then pretending
to Horestes that he is 'courrage' sent to help him from heaven, and
Horestes exclaims:
My thinkes, I feel courrage prouokes my wil forward againe
For to reuenge my fathers death and infamey so great
Oh, how my hart doth boyle in dede, with fiery perching heate!
Corrrage, now welcome, by the godes: I find thou art in dede
A messenger of heauenly gostes; come let vs now procede
And take in hand to bringe to pas reuengyd forto be
Of those which haue my father slaine ...
Later the Vice reveals himself as Revenge and Horestes instructs
him to dispose of Clytemnestra. While there has been critical
argument about the play as a whole the role of the Vice as demonic
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 Antic Disposition
tempter and agent seems clear. To an Elizabethan audience it
would be preposterous that Heaven would urge a man to murder
his own mother. As we have seen ~ust revenge' was the twisted
thinking of the villain or the crazed murderer. A human avenger
had no connection with God and neither had the Vice. And we
should also remember that the author of the play put a joke about
Purgatory in the Vice's mouth thereby adding a touch of anti-
Catholic satire.
Whatever the true genealogy of the Vice it is generally accepted
that he became the ancestor of the Elizabethan stage clown - there
appear to be no dissentient voices. But concurrent with this
evolution of the artificial fool in the drama there remained in the
real world the natural fool, the idiot, the madman, representing a
range of mental impairment which included what we would now
term mental deficiency to psychosis. Enid Welsford recalls that in
Roman times real lunatics wore hoods with asses' ears and the
practice continued into the Middle ages, and she adds that 'there is
indeed considerable variety in fool-clothes and we hear of fox-
tails, cockscombs, long petticoats and feathers as suitable wear
for lunatics'. She goes on: 'The fact that the fool's dress was
sometimes imposed on offenders as a peculiary degrading form of
punishment is only explicable on the assumption that it was no
mere carnival costume, but a badge of madness and servitude. ' 19
This can be seen in the Morality play called Robert Cicyll which
was presented at Chester in 1529, although it probably dates from
the preceding century. In this play, Enid Welsford informs us,
King Robert of Sicily . . . was punished for spiritual pride by
being transformed into a fool and forced to play the part of
court-jester in his own palace:
He was evyr so harde bestadd,
That mete nor drynke noon he had,
But his babulle was in hi hande ...
When that the howndes had etyn their fyll,
Then mygt he ete at hys wylie
At lower degre he myght not bee,
Then become a fole as thynketh me. 20
The tale was, incidentally, presented by Lodge as a play, and also
rechauffe as a poem by Longfellow.
A similar story was that of The Lyfe of Robert the Deuyll printed
in London in 1599, a prose version of the original which dates
from 1496. It is of particualr interest because it is so close to the
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 The Elizabethan Hamlet
probable genesis of Shakespeare's Hamlet. According to this tale
the Duchess of Normandy (wife of the father of William the
Conquerer), barren after twelve years of marriage, promises that
if she conceives she will give her child 'both soule and bodye' to
the Devil. Robert is born and grows up to be a killer, a rapist and a
robber. Eventually he goes to Rome where he confesses to the
Pope, who sends him to a hermit. He in turn commands that as
penance Robert 'must counterfeyt a fole in all manere', and he
'taere hys clothes and grewe his shyrte'. Robert also could not eat
food unless a dog ate the same morsel. This amused the Emperor
who said:
sythe I was borne
Saw I neuer a more foole naturall
Nor such an ydeot sawe I neuer beforne.
And the Court were 'gladde to see hym playe the foole'. In the
end, his penance completed, he performs mightily against
the Saracens. 21
There are other examples of such 'transformation' in the
dramatic tradition of the fool. In Wyt and Science (c.1530)
'Ignorance' puts a fool's cap and coat on 'Wyt'; and after 'Idleness'
has blackened his face he looks in a glass which 'Reason' gives him
and says:
Hah! Goges sowle! what have we here? A dyvell?
Goges sowle, a foole, a foole, by the mas!

Ingrorance [sic] cote, hoode, eares, - ye by the masse

kokescome and all ...
the stark foole I playe
before all people. 22
Thus too in The Marriage of Witt and Wisdome (1579) we find:
Here shall Wantonis sing this song ... and hauing sung him a
sleep vpon her Iappe, let him snort; then let her set a fooles
bable on his hed, and colling his face: and Idleness shall steal
away his purse from him, and goe his wayes. 23
But, to focus particularly on the dress of the natural fool, we
must remember that what he wore in real life set the pattern for
the costume of the artificial fool. There were no institutions other
than Bedlam in England for the mentally handicapped and the
insane, and thus a person wearing a fool's insignia had been
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 Antic Disposition
'certified', so to speak. Thus Robert the Devil above is shown in a
contemporary illustration as barefoot and clad in a petticoat with a
coxcomb on his head and so represents a tradition of stigmatizing
lunatics which began in the early Middle Ages and continued into
Shakespeare's time. Minsheu's dictionary (1627) records that
'natural idiots and fools have and still do accustome themselves to
wear in their cappes cockes feathers, or a hat with a necke and head
of a cock on the top'.
To 'play the fool' then Will Somers imitated the 'certified
lunatic'. Leslie Hotson, commenting on an engraving of him,
says, 'On his head he wears a cap, with the feather which some-
times replaced the bell or "cock's comb" of red cloth'. And he also
quotes from The Passions of the Mind (1604) by Thomas Wright: 'It
will become them as well as a peacock's feather in a fooles cap. ' 24
Again, in Kemps Nine Daies Wonder (1600), his own account of his
dance to Norwich, an illustration shows him with a plume of
feathers in his hat.
F.P. Wilson records that
when Lovell in Henry VIII speaks of 'fool and feather', and
the Princess in Love's Labour's Lost asks 'What plume of feathers
is he that indited this letter?' the collocation was already so well
established as to have become proverbial; and for many
generations 'he has a feather in his cap' was a periphrasis for a
fool. 25
In Italy we find the same symbolism. Leslie Hotson refers to
Florio's apt dictionary definition of the bird called by the
Italians guffo: 'An Owle called a Horne cout [coot] with
feathers on each side ofhis head ... also a simple foole or gross
- pated gull, a ninnie patch'. 26
Then too Arlecchino, the ancestor of Harlequin, wore headgear
usually decorated with an animal's tail or a bunch of feathers. A
print in the Recueil Fossard (sixteenth century) shows 'Harlequin'
with a horned cap and a single feather protruding from the back of
it, the combined symbolism perhaps illustrating the fusion of his
demonic origin with his comic role. 27 Callot, it may be added, has
a painting of clowns wearing feathered head-dresses.
If we go to Germany we find that Douce has a woodcut of a
German jester wearing a hood with ass's ears and with a single
peacock's feather in it. And Ben Jonson in his Masque of the
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 The Elizabethan Hamlet
Fortunate Isles (1626) describes Eulenspiegel, the legend of whom
goes back to the fourteenth century:
With feathers upr~ht
In his horned cap
So too the Hamlet of the Brudermord refers to 'the black hats [of the
players] full of feathers on their heads, and with about as many
feathers below as above'.
What the English Vice wore is a mystery. Chambers said:
'Whether he ever had a cockscomb, a bauble, or an eared hood is
not apparent'. 29 But Enid Welsford believed
there is evidence that the Vices were sometimes dressed as
fools, and a 'vice's coat', of motley and cap and bells, was pro-
vided for the real jester Will Somers when he appeared in the
train of the Lord of Misrule in the reign of Edward VI. 30
Thus as we have already learned from Hotson that Will Somers
sometimes wore feathers in his hat it is reasonable to suppose that
Vices sometimes did too. And we may note in particular that the
combination of horns and feathers worn by Arlecchino and
Eulenspiegel would have caused an English reader or member of a
theatre audience to have identified them as Vices.
As for the petticoat which Robert the Devil wore, Hotson
records:
The petticoat, we find, was inescapably part of the Elizabethan
mental picture of an idiot. For even when they thought of an
ancient Roman pretending to be an idiot, they would clothe
him in their mind's eye with their own fool's familiar long coat.
In proof of this, we have Shakespeare (both in Henry V and in
the Rape of Lucrece) describing what the classical Junius Brutus
put on when he simulated idiocy to avert suspicion when
plotting the death of Tarquin the tyrant. 31
For Chambers this long coat and lathen sword which the Vice
carried linked him with the domestic fool who also carried a
gilded wooden sword, 32 and Hotson's findings were similar:
Domestic fools and little boys often showed another piece of
equipment in addition to the long coat. This was the dagger,
worn at the back, suspended from the girdle. It was usually
wooden (sometimes gilded) like the dagger of lath wielded by
the Knavish Fool or Vice of the Morality plays. 33
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 Antic Disposition
Douce contributes:
In some old plays the fool's dagger is mentioned, perhaps the
same instrument as was carried by the Vice or buffoon of the
Moralities; and it may be as well to observe in this place that the
domestic fool is sometimes, it is presumed improperly, called
the Vice. 34
Shakespeare seems to have favoured the wooden dagger rather
than the sword, for in Twelfth Night we find 'dagger of lath' at
4.2.136, and in 1 Henry !Vat 2.4.151, 'wooden dagger' in Henry V
at 4.4.77, and 'Vice's dagger' in 2 Henry IV at 3.2.343. There is
only one reference to a 'sword of lath', in 2 Henry VI at 4.2.2.
But by Shakespeare's time the distinction between the Vice and
the jester was blurred. For example Hotson points out that
in The Divell is an Asse Ben Johnson introduces an old-time
Vice named 'Iniquity', who recalls that about the year 1560
'every great man had his Vice [meaning his domestic jesterJ
stand by him, in his long coat, shaking his wooden dagger'. 3
Then in Bussy d'Ambois:
A merry fellow, 'faith; it seems my lord
Will have him for his jester: and, believe it,
Such men are now no fools; 'tis a knight's place.
If I, to save my Lord some crowns, should urge him
T'abate his bounty, I should not be heard;
I would to heaven I were an arrant ass,
For then I should be sure to have the ears
Of these great men, where now their jesters have them.
'Tis good to please him, yet I'll take no notice
Of his preferment, but in policy
Will still be grave and serious, lest he think
I fear his wooden dagger.
(1.1.197- 208)
And in Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany:
MENTZ. I am the Jester.
EDWARD. 0 excellent! is your Holiness the Vice?
Fortune has fitted you, i' faith my Lord;
You'll play the Ambidexter cunningly. 36
John Florio in his A World of Wordes, or Dictionarie in Italian and
English (1598) glosses 'Zane' as 'a simple vice, clowne, foole, or
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 The Elizabethan Hamlet
simple fellow in a plaie or comedie'. 37 Cotgrave in his dictionary
(1611) defines the French 'mime' as a 'Vice, foole, jeaster, scoffer,
dauncer in a Play'. And we may turn to Enid Welsford who
records that Richard Tarlton, 'the most famous jester to Queen
Elizabeth', was 'sometimes called a Vice'. 3H Spivack observed:
In his own time and after, the Vice is often identified explicitly
as the fool of the play, or his behaviour is described in such a
way that the association is unmistakable. Thus Philip Stubbes in
his Anatomy of Abuses (1583) asks, 'For who will call him a
wiseman, that plaieth the part of a foole and a vice?' In his Art of
English Poesie (1589) Puttenham refers to 'Carols and rounds
and such light and lascivious poems, which are commonly and
commodiously uttered by those buffons [sic] or Vices in playes
then by any other person. ' 39
So also in Massinger's The Duke of Milan (1623):
No smile, not a buffoon to be seen
Or common jester.
(Act 1, Sc. 1)
Most importantly the fool-jester- Vice association is found in
Shakespeare. Prince Hal uses all these terms to describe Falstaff.
Dover Wilson's comment is therefore apposite:
as heir to the Vice, Falstaff inherits by reversion the functions
and attributes of the Lord of Misrule, the Fool, the Buffoon,
and the Jester, antic figures the origins of which are lost in the
dark backward and abyss of folk-custom. 40
Then too Hamlet describes Claudius as 'a vice of kings' (3.4. 98)
and as 'A king of shreds and patches' (3.4.103), of which latter
phrase Harold Jenkins says: 'Some eds. suppose the phrase to have
been suggested by the parti-coloured dress of the Vice' _41 Dover
Wilson indeed glosses it as 'referring to the motley of the "Vice"
or clown'. 42 But if we again turn to Harold Jenkins for his reading
of'pajock' at 3.2.278 we find that he glosses it as 'a contemptuous
diminutive of patch, clown'. 43
Hamlet's first appearance - to Ophelia - after meeting the
Ghost has been much argued about:
Lord Hamlet, with his doublet all unbrac' d,
No hat upon his head, his stockings foul'd,
Ungarter'd and down-gyved to his ankle,
Pale as his shirt, his knees knocking each other,
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 Antic Disposition
And with a look so piteous in purpot
As if he had been loosed out of hell
To speak of horrors.
Hamlet indeed looks like a ghost to Ophelia - he is pale, as the
Ghost is, and his stockings are like fetters such as were believed to
be worn by the damned in Hell (the 'prison-house'), a tradition
which goes back at least to Virgil's Tartarus in the Aeneid and
which Dickens followed in presenting Marley's Ghost. He also
waves his head up and down 'thrice'- the diabolic number again-
and sighed piteously. Dover Wilson quotes Quincy Adams who
refers to Scoloker's lines:
Puts off his clothes, his shirt he only wears
Much like mad Hamlet
and concludes that 'Hamlet's madness, as it impressed the
audience of the Globe, was conspicuously a madness . "in
clothes"'. But Adams meant real madness:
This slovenliness in costume has usually been interpreted as the
pose of the forlorn lover. It is true that literary artists of the
seventeenth century sometimes represented a disappointed
lover as adopting a melancholy pose accompanied by a certain
carelessness in dress. But Hamlet's appearance cannot be
explained on this score. 44
I agree. We may compare Hamlet's 'madness in clothes' with 'a
special clown's get-up' worn by Tarlton, 'who came like a rogue
in a foule shirt without a band, and in a blew coat with one sleeve,
his stockings out at the heeles, and his head full of straw and
feathers'. 45
This leads on to the question of Hamlet's dress in the play
and whether it could be identified as being that of a Vice or
jester. As tradition would seem to support the idea of plain
black clothes we may note that Guerin, the jester of Margaret of
Navarre, wore a cassock of black satin, and Chicot who died in
1592, wore black taffeta. 46 As for Hamlet's sword, Chambers
considered that Touchstone's sword was perhaps 'inherited from
the "Vice" of the later moralities'. 47 (Perhaps we should also
remember that Tarlton was a skilled swordman.) Chambers also
believed that Shakespeare was 'aware of the abundant fool-
literature, continental and English', and pointed out that Feste
quotes Rabelais 'in whose work ... the fool Triboulet figures'. 48
Thus there is nothing incongruous in seeing Hamlet as a Vice
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 The Elizabethan Hamlet
wearing a sword or in supposing that Shakespeare knew Chicot
had used his in earnest at the siege of Rouen.
Then again, while this is to anticipate, when Hamlet feels
that he is good enough to 'turn professional' as an actor his
reference to 'a forest of feathers' is almost certainly to the
costume of fool, jester, clown, Vice, buffoon, idiot, lunatic -
call him what you will. The phrase in fact is echoed in a
comic context in Chapman's Monsieur d'Olive (3.2.152-5).
So too in The Malcontent (1604) the following dialogue takes
place:
CONDELL. I beseech you, sir, be covered.
SLY. No, in good faith, for mine ease: look you, my hat's the
handle to this fan: God's so, what a beast was I, I did not
leave my feather at home! Well, but I'll take an order with
you. Puts his feather in his pocket.
BURBADGE. Why do you conceal your feather, sir?
SLY. Why? Do you think I'll have jests broken upon me in the
play to be laughed at? This play hath beaten all your
gallants out of the feathers: Blackfriars hath almost spoiled
Blackfriars for feathers.
SINKLO. God's so, I thought 'twas for somewhat our
gentlewomen at home counselled me to wear my feather
to the play.
Dover Wilson, following Steevens, believed that Sly might have
been the original performer of Osric and that 'not only Sly but
Sinklo, and probably the other members of the company, are
represented as wearing ridiculous feathers'. Yet while Dover
Wilson believed that this has 'obvious reference' to the 'forest of
feathers' he still glossed the phrase thus: 'Plumes were worn by
tragic actors and contemporary references to the fact are fre-
quent. ' 49 But no editor has produced any convincing evidence to
support the contention.
But what of the 'razed shoes' decorated with 'two Provincial
roses'? Is Hamlet raving or could a clown have worn such
footwear? We may observe that 'razed' shoes- shoes slashed for
decoration - had been popular in the later part of Henry VIII's
reign but had faded out by 1560. So we may guess that the clown's
costume may have belonged to that era. But the rosettes on the
shoes are a puzzle because the fashion of wearing rosettes on shoes
did not appear in England until the 1590s, and even then the
rosettes are small. 50 As Harold Jenkins indicates, the 'Provincial
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 Antic Disposition
roses' referred to the cabbage rose, the rose of Provence, and
'what persists, through many shifts of identity, as the essential
feature of a "provincial rose", and one of particular relevance to
Hamlet's shoe-roses, is the profusion of its Ia yers of petals' Y So
the rosettes are large if they are contemporary with Hamlet but in
spite of their apparently French origin there are no allusions to
them in sixteenth-century France as a decoration for shoes; nor do
they appear to be connected with any other continental country.
But if we look at what Brachiano says in The White Devil we find:
Why, 'tis the devil
I know him by a great rose he wears on's shoe,
To hide his cloven foot.
(5.3.106-8)

And in Jonson's The Devil is an Asse Fitzdottrell says:

'fore hell, my heart was at my mouth,
Till I have view' d his shoes well; for those roses
Were big enough to hide a cloven hoof.
(1.3.7-9)
Thus it seems possible that a clown's costume which included
feathers on the head and slashed shoes with big rosettes would
belong to a comic devil - to a Vice in fact. And we may date the
costume c.1560 which agrees with the period when the Vice was
in his heyday. 52
That this hypothesis may be correct may be seen from Hamlet's
Ah hal Come, some music: come, the recorders.
For as we have seen 'Ah hal was an exclamation which was
characteristic of the Vice, and recorders were played by clowns in
the jig which followed a tragedy. Woodcuts of Tarlton and
Kempe show them thus equipped, ·as is Rafe Simnel, Henry VIII's
fool, on the title-page of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay.
While more will be said about Hamlet's costume when we look
at the Play Scene we may pause briefly to consider how several
eminent critics have seen Hamlet's role. First there is A.J.A.
Waldock who thought of the 'antic disposition' as producing
effective theatre, but in explaining it 'Shakespeare has not
proferred his assistance'. He believed that 'a partial failure to
assimilate . . . original material' might have been a contributory
factor, and he goes on:
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 The Elizabethan Hamlet
We can easily see the purpose which Hamlet's madness serves in
the economy of the play. He realizes himself in and through
it. And what a shield for his satiric comment! From its shelter,
with the security of a jester, he launches his barbs. But the
motivation of it is another question. 53
For Dover Wilson:
The 'antic disposition' was assumed on a sudden impulse ... it
was obviously prompted by his hysteria at the moment; and it
would be accepted as a convenient disguise while he was
maturing his plans. To consider it more curiously than this is to
treat Hamlet as history not drama ... Shakespeare saw that
it possessed immense dramatic possibilities . . . 'Mad Hamlet'
is indeed the fool of the play that takes its name from him.
By acting the natural, he usurps the natural's privileges, and
Touchstone-like uses his madness 'like a stalking-horse, and
under the presentation of that he shoots his wit'. Far too little
has been made of this aspect of the play. 54
Gilbert Murray said:
It is very remarkable that Shakespeare, who did such wonders
in his idealized and half-mystic treatment of the real Fool,
should also have made his greatest tragic hero out of a Fool
transfigured. 55
And Harry Levin:
Hamlet, like Robert the Devil in the legend, becomes a court
jester . . . Hamlet, at the court where he cannot be king, must
perforce be fool, an artificial fool pretending to be a natural. His
assumption of foolishness is the archetypal feature of his story,
as it has come down from primitive legend. In fact his name
derives from the Old Norse Amlo i, which means 'a fool, a
ninny, an idiot' - and, more especially, a Jutish trickster who
feigns stupidity. 56
Thus all four see Hamlet as acting the part of fool/ jester. But,
as we have seen, George Rylands, Leslie Hotson and most recently
Harold jenkins have found echoes of the Vice in Hamlet's dialogue
with the Ghost. I therefore suggest that as we have good grounds
for believing that the Ghost is diabolic and that jester and Vice
were synonyms for Shakespeare's audience we may accept that all
these commentators are in fact in agreement. Hamlet does become
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 Antic Disposition
a fool, the Devil's fool, his Vice I jester. But the irony is that he
never realizes it - he has become a natural who thinks he is acting
the artificial. This is Levin's 'formula' but in reverse. Hamlet has
become 'le fol', the madman, transformed by the poison of
revenge, a natural in his own court like Robert of Sicily; like
Lodge's 1easter' a man who coins 'bitter jeastes' who is 'con-
tinually flearing', who shows 'antique motions' like walking about
reading a book or playing hide and seek with Polonius's body. He
is more than this for us of course and probably too for the
Elizabethans but for them the symbol of the fool is something we
can no longer share. As Enid Welsford says:
It is impossible to study Shakespeare's use of the fool in tragedy
without realizing afresh how deep and how wide-spreading
were the roots of his art, and how much even the greatest poet
owes to the environment which supplies him with suggestive
poetic symbols. The king and the fool still walked the world in
Shakespeare's day; but even in the world they were regarded
with a certain superstitious awe, which was no doubt ultimately
related to the old notions of possession and inspiration. 57
Thus while we have seen the development of the court fool into
the Vice, and then into the Elizabethan stage clown, there was
always the real madman, the real idiot, the 'poor fool' who did not
even have a Bedlam to go to:
What if your Fiery spirits had bin bound
To Antick Habits; or your heads bin crown'd
With Peacock Plumes; had yee bin forc'd to feed
Your Saviour's dear-bought Flock in a fools weed;
He that was scorn' d, revil' d, endur' d the Curse
Of a base death, in your behalfs; nay worse,
Swallow'd the cup of wrath charg'd up to th' brim,
Durst ye not stoope to play the fooles for him?
(Francis Quarles, 1592-1644)

But how mad did Hamlet seem in soliloquy to Shakespeare's

audience? Consider for example his attitude to Fortinbras and his
army:
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 The Elizabethan Hamlet
Led by a delicate and tender prince,
Whose spirit with divine ambition puffed
Makes mouths at the invisible event,
Exposing what is mortal and unsure
To all that fortune, death and danger dare,
Even for an egg-shell.
(4.4.48-53)
'Delicate and tender' was the title given to Babylon in the Genevan
version of the Bible, 58 while 'puffed' was commonly associated
with 'pride' by the Elizabethans. In Nowell's Catechism for in-
stance we find: 'the mind of man . . . is puffed with pride, and
loth to be under other's commandment'. 59 But the context was
not exclusively ecclesiastical, for the collocation is also common in
the drama. For example, in Antonio and Mellida Feliche says:
this same smoke, called pride
Entices princes to devour heaven,
Swallow omnipotence, out-stare dread fate ...
Heaves up their heart with swelling, puffed conceit,
Till their souls burst with venom'd Arrogance.
And ambition was universally condemned because it was the sin
of Satan himself- 'by that sin fell the angels'. James I wrote,
referring to the Devil: 'so ambitious is hee and greedy ofhonour'.
Thus a Fortinbras possessed of such 'ambition' was also possessed
of the Devil who
trusted to have equalled the Most High,
If he opposed; and with ambitious aim
Against the throne and monarchy of God
Raised impious war in Heaven and battle proud,
With vain attempt.
This attitude and word usage persisted at least until the time of
Coleridge who wrote:
I do not approve the so frequent use of this word relatively to
Milton. Indeed the fondness for ingrafting a good sense on the
word 'ambition', is not a Christian impulse in general.
Thus when even Byron scorned 'vile ambition' we must accept
that Hamlet's attitude is warped, to say the least. 60
So too the following lines:
Rightly to be great
Is not to stir without great argument,
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 Antic Disposition
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
When honour's at the stake.
(4.4.53-6)
are often quoted out of context and lose their essential meaning -
that this is the Devil's honour. L.C. Knights however is not
misled:
Professor Dover Wilson paraphrases the last sentence: 'Fighting
for trifles is mere pugnacity, not greatness; but it is greatness to
fight instantly and for a trifle when honour is at stake.' Right
enough, but this is arguing in a circle, for it leaves honour as no
more than the prompting to fight instantly and for a trifle ...
Honour here is not a defining word, but a mere justifying blur. 61
It might be added that one of the symptoms of Ophelia's
madness is that she 'spurns enviously at straws' and hears 'There's
tricks i' th' world' which sounds like echoes of 'find quarrel in a
straw' above and 'for a fantasy and a trick of fame'.
The truly Elizabethan view of what Hamlet has so distorted can
be seen in a passage from Marston's Histrio-mastix:
What should make
Men so enamour'd on this Strumpet war
To dote upon her form? When (in herself)
She's made of nothing but infectious plagues,
Witness the present chaos of our Scene
Where every street is chain' d with links of spoil,
Here proud Ambition rides; there Fury flies,
Here horror, and there ruthless Murder stalks,
Led on by Ruin, and in Steel and fire,
That now on tops of houses; now in vaults,
Now in the sacred Temples; here, and there
Runs wild.
What we see Hamlet doing is adopting a kind of inverted
morality- 'good' has become what is evil, 'foul' is 'fair'. 'Divine
ambition' was the sin of Satan and thus in the same category as
'just revenge', both being denials of the goodness, and the
supremacy, of God.
Similarly Hamlet claims that 'conscience doth make cowards of
us all'. This has been quoted so often out of context that it has in
effect come to mean that guilt makes us fearful of consequences
whereas Hamlet repudiates the workings of his conscience and
thus agrees with the villainous Richard Ill.
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 The Elizabethan Hamlet
Let not our babbling dreams affright our souls;
Conscience is but a word that cowards use,
Devis'd at first to keep the strong in awe:
Our strong arms be our conscience, swords our law.
(5.3.309-13)
Hamlet also says later:
is't not perfect conscience
To quit him with this arm? And is't not to be damned,
To let this canker of our nature come
In further evil?
(5.2.67-70)
Both Hamlet and Richard III are justifying unlawful killing, and
Hamlet reaches a point where he can dismiss his murderous
scheme to dispose of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern with 'they are
not near my conscience'.
In his 'To be' soliloquy Hamlet also claims that if conscience did
not make him a coward he could have taken his own life- a brave
man would have committed suicide. This again is nonsense for it
contradicts Christian teaching-Job for example shows the need to
endure the tribulations of life. And again we see from Nowell's
Catechism that the Elizabethan child was taught that
Christ hath set himself for an exemplar for us to follow, to
frame our life according thereunto and ... we ought henceforth
to put on the image of the heavenly man, quietly and patiently
bearing, after his example, all sorrows and wrongs, and
following and expressing his other divine virtues so far as
mortal man be able. 62
We may see how this teaching bore fruit by looking again at the
drama. In Massinger's The Maid of Honour we find Adorni saying:
What will become of me now is apparent.
Whether a poniard or a halter be
The nearest way to hell (for I must thither,
After I've killed myself) is somewhat doubtful.
This Roman resolution of self-murder
Will not hold water at the high tribunal,
When it comes to be argued; my good genius
Prompts me to this consideration. He
That kills himself to avoid misery, fears it,
And, at the best, shews but a bastard valour.
This life's fort committed to my trust,
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 Antic Disposition
Which I must not yield up till it be forced:
Nor will I. He's not valiant that dares die,
But he that boldly bears calamity.
(Act 4, Sc. 3)
As L. C. Knights remarks in An Approach to Hamlet (p. 79): 'What
Hamlet needs is not less of conscience but more'. And he quotes
one of the murderers of the Duke of Clarence in Richard III,
who declared of conscience, 'it makes a man a coward . . . 'Tis a
blushing shamefast spirit, that mutinies in a man's bosomj it
fills a man full of obstacles: it is turned out of towns and cities
for a dangerous thing; and every man that means to live well
endeavours to trust to himself and to live without it'.
It is also valuable to note that Charles Lamb, speaking for all of
us, remarked:
I confess myself utterly unable to appreciate that celebrated
soliloquy in Hamlet beginning, 'To be, or not to be,' or to tell
whether it be good, bad or indifferent; it has been so handled
and pawed about by declamatory boys and men, and torn so
inhumanly from its living place and principle of continuity in
the play, till it has become to me a perfectly dead member. 63
But a glance at the possible associations of parts of the soliloquy
may be worthwhile. Georg Brandes, for instance, quoted a close
parallel to 'To die, to sleep ... ' from Florio's translation of
Montaigne's summary of the Apology of Socrates:
If it [i.e. death] be a consummation of ones being, it is also an
amendment and entrance into a long and quiet life. Wee finde
nothing so sweete in life, as a quiet rest and gentle sleepe, and
without dreames. 64
The association is all the more plausible because the context also is
suicide, and therefore unChristian, just as the taking of arms
against a sea of troubles may have been a reference to a pagan
Celtic custom mentioned in Fleming's translation of Aelian's
Histories (1576). Moreover, Hamlet regarding death as sleep beset
with troubled dreams is not just a striking image, because this
attitude to death was not regarded as Christian by the Church, as
can be seen in the draft Forty-Two Articles:
They which say, that the souls of such as depart hence, do sleep,
being without all sense, feeling, or perceiving, until the day of
judgment, or affirm that the souls die with the bodies, and at
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 The Elizabethan Hamlet
the last day shall be raised up with the same; do utterly dissent
from the right belief, declared to us in holy scripture.
The Church had clearly indicated what happened to the soul after
death- it went either to Heaven or to Hell and that was what was
to be believed. Hamlet has lost his moral bearings but the
corrector, we may be assured, had not, and so allowed this speech
because he did not think that Shakespeare's audience would be
misled by it.
Thus also Shakespeare's word 'shuffie' suggests shirking the
burden of life, and the association of 'coil' with rope (I have in
mind Dover Wilson's note in his edition of Hamlet, p. xxxiv)
connotes suicide by hanging. It seems that 'a poniard or a halter' as
above was the classic means of committing suicide which Satan
and his minions offered to their intended victims, as we may see in
Doctor Faustus:
My heart's so hardened I cannot repent!
Scarce can I name salvation, faith or heaven,
But fearful echoes thunders [sic) in mine ears,
'Faustus, thou art damned': then swords and knives,
Poison, guns, halters and envenomed steel
Are laid before me to dispatch myself:
And long ere this I should have done the deed,
Had not sweet pleasure conquer'd deep despair.
(2.2.18-25)
Also the description of death by suicide as a 'consummation' may
be a blasphemous reference to Christ's last words, 'Consum-
matum est' - Faustus's oath ends with the words:
Consummatum est: this bill is ended,
And Faustus hath bequeathed his soul to Lucifer.
(2.1. 74-5)
With such associations I find it difficult to believe that 'To be
... ' could refer to anything other than suicide. Two recent editors
- T.J.B. Spenser and Irving Ribner- take the same view. 65 After
all, Cassius, who was no philosopher, said:
I had as lief not be as live to be
In awe of such a thing as I myself.
Uulius Caesar, 1.2. 95-6)
To a groundling- and why should we neglect him?- the meaning
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 Antic Disposition
surely was plain enough. The whole soliloquy presents us with the
problem of existence, of life itself, entailing as it does suffering and
mystery. 'Why did I not die at birth?' says Job. Aristotle- and
Faustus- wrestled with 'on kai me on' (ov xat [Link] ov). Boethius
claimed, as L. C. Knights pointed out, that evil men do not in fact
exist - his answer to the problem of evil. 66
For the Christian, including the Christian groundling, accep-
tance of the goodness of God was the answer - Man could not
stand alone. The slings and arrows to which Hamlet refers may
have come from the book of Job: 'The arrow cannot make him
flee; for him slingstones are turned to stubble' (Job 41:28-9).
Eleanor Prosser also sees an association of ideas between 'The
undiscover'd country' and the book of Job, and Harold Jenkins
also refers to Job 10:21. 67 But there are no certain sources for the
images in the passage, and there is no clear line of thought. Instead
there is confusion - neither acting nor refraining from action offers
a solution to his problems. Not even death is a solution. But what
never occurs to him is to act as a Christian should, and as an
Elizabethan had been taught since childhood to do, that is turn
to God and pray for guidance. Even Claudius tries. Today we
probably wouldn't either and this may well enable us to empathize
with him, but in Elizabethan eyes Hamlet is in a state of despair -
not merely 'depression' (which in the modern sense has also a
psychiatric connotation) but theological despair.
'To bee or not to bee' fascinated Pepys and the fascination
remains. When the speech is so compelling it is difficult to
maintain that in layman's terms Hamlet is mad, for he speaks for
all of us. It is only when we reflect that he is on the verge of
stabbing himself that we can think in modern terms of a manic-
depressive psychosis, or in Elizabethan terms of a despair so deep
that he is close to damning his soul for all eternity. Hamlet is in a
state where he feels no one, not even God, loves him. We have all
been there. Little wonder then that we identify with Hamlet, and
the very imprecision of the imagery may make the identification
easier. It does not seem helpful to regard Hamlet as uttering
philosophical profundities when in dramatic terms Shakespeare's
first audience waited to see whether Hamlet would sink his dagger
into Claudius or himself. In either case his soul would have been
damned to eternity. And to a contemporary audience whose
acquaintance with Christian ideas was almost certainly greater
than with philosophic speculation, instruction such as this in
Nowell's Catechism would perhaps have been apposite:
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 The Elizabethan Hamlet
M. Is man able in this fear and these hard distresses to deliver
himself by his own strength?
s. Nothing less. For it is only God which strengtheneth man
despairing of his own estate, raiseth him up in affliction,
restoreth him in utter misery, and by whose guidance the
sinner conceiveth the hope, mind, and will. 68
We also, I think, have to realize that in the language of despair
words come to mean their opposites. For example, just as Hamlet
'devoutly' wishes the consummation of death, so Faustus is
counselled by Mephistopheles to 'pray devoutly to the prince of
hell', and also Faustus asks pardon for his 'presumption' - but
from Lucifer, not God. Today, Catholic children are more likely
than others to react in the Elizabethan manner to words like
'despair' and 'presumption', as these extracts from a modern
Catechism show:
Despair. To be without hope of salvation.
Presumption. Expecting salvation without taking the necessary
means to obtain it.
And:
Sins opposed to the virtue of hope are:
1. Despair, or want of confidence in God.
2. Presumption. An expectation that God will save us even
though we do not make use of the necessary means of
salvation.
As for 'disobedience' we have only to remember the opening lines
of Paradise Lost:
Of Man's first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe
to realize that certain words had a fixed religious meaning and
that Elizabethan children had been conditioned to them from a
very early age. Thus they would be the more aware as adults of
words, like those of the Black Mass, that were perverted parodies
of Christian doctrine- 'just revenge', 'divine ambition', 'coward
conscience', and death as a 'consummation devoutly to be wished'
and as 'sleep'.
The book of Job was one of Shakespeare's favourite books
in the Old Testament, 69 and parts of it were included in the
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 Antic Disposition
lectionary of the Book of Common Prayer. And it is virtually
certain that when Shakespeare and his contemporaries thought of
despair the name ofJob came to mind, for he was an object lesson
in overcoming it. Falstaff for example knew that life was a
'weaver's shuttle', and even today the patience of Job is prover-
bial. Robert Burton's comments illustrate the importance of Job
in counselling against despair:
[They] talk familiarly with Devils, hear and see Chimeras,
prodigious, uncouth shapes, Bears, Owls, Anticks, black dogs,
fiends, hideous out-cries, fearful noises, shrieks, lamentable
complaints, they are possessed, and through impatience they
roar and howl, curse, blaspheme, deny God, call his power in
question, abjure religion, and are still ready to offer violence
unto themselves, by hanging, drowning &c. . . . To such
persons I oppose God's mercy, and his justice; the judgments of
God are mysterious, not unjust ... To put confidence, and
have an assured hope in him, as Job had, Though he kill me, I
will trust in him. 70
The advice of the Old Man to Faustus follows the same line,
and we must remember that this was a popular play, a box-office
success, and not a sermon delivered in church to a bored con-
gregation:
0 gentle Faustus, leave this damned art,
This magic, that will charm thy soul to hell,
And quite bereave thee of salvation ...
FAUSTUS. Where art thou Faustus, wretch, what hast thou
done?
Damned art thou Faustus, damned; despair and die.
Hell claims his right, and with a roaring voice,
Says, 'Faustus come, thine hour is almost come',
And Faustus now will come to do thee right.
OLD MAN. 0 stay, good Faustus, stay thy desperate steps!
I see an angel hover o'er thy head,
And with a vial full of precious grace,
Offers to pour the same into thy soul;
Then call for mercy, and avoid despair.
(5.1.35 ff.)
Hamlet's reference to the 'pale cast of thought' is also part of his
'satanic' vocabulary, for man's reason was a unique gift bestowed
on him by God:
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 The Elizabethan Hamlet
Thou art a man, endued with reason and understanding,
wherein God hath engraven his lively image. In other creatures
there is some likeness in him, some footsteps of his divine
nature; but in man he hath stamped his image. Some things are
like God in that they are; But this is not the image of God. His
image is only in that we understand. Seeing then that thou art of
so noble a nature and that thou bearest in thine understand-
ing the image of God, so govern thyself as is fit for a creature
of understandinf. But not like the brute beasts which want
understanding. 7
Coleridge of course also accepted this religious formulation: 'Man
is distinguished from the brute animals in proportion as thought
prevails over sense. ' 72 Indeed Hamlet himself accepts it elsewhere:
a beast that wants discourse of reason
Would have mourned longer
and:
What a piece of work is man . . . in apprehension, how like a
god.
Yet in this soliloquy he rejects the very faculty which places him
nearer than all other creatures to God.
The entire soliloquy is, in Elizabethan terms, 'desperate'.
Hamlet for all his flashes of wit and gaiety is sinking deeper into
'despair', which is for most of us today, unless we are Catholics, a
rather remote conception. Despair of this kind could not hold
a theatre audience today, but the despair of Faustus and of
Hieronimo enthralled the Elizabethan audience. Shakespeare
strikes the note early, for when we first meet Hamlet he is already
contemplating suicide:
0, that this too too sullied flesh would melt,
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew,
Or that the Everlasting had not fixed
His cannon 'gainst self-slaughter
(1.2.129-32)
Philip Edwards says: 'Hamlet when we first meet him is in a
state of despair. He longs for death, and would take his own life if
suicide were not forbidden by divine decree. ' 73 To add to the
complexities Hamlet's melancholy must also be considered. It
has been claimed that his mental state could be described in con-
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 Antic Disposition
temporary terms as 'melancholy adust'. Thus Burton quoting
Avicenna: 'those men ... are usually sad and solitary, and that
continually, and in excess, more than ordinary suspicious, more
fearful, and have long, sore, and most corrupt imaginations'. 74
Whatever the contemporary diagnosis it is clear that Hamlet
himself is aware of his melancholy:
The spirit that I have seen
May be a devil, and the devil hath power
T'assume a pleasing shape, yea, and perhaps
Out of my weakness and my melancholy,
As he is very potent with such spirits,
Abuses me to damn me.
(2.2.602-7)
Dover Wilson believed that Shakespeare drew on Timothy
Bright's Treatise on Melancholy. Kenneth Muir agrees. 75 Bright
wrote:
The perturbations of melancholy are for the most parte, sadde
and fearfull, and such as rise of them, as distrust, doubt,
diffidence, or dispaire, sometimes furious, and sometimes
merry in apparaunce through a kinde of Sardonian, and false
laughter. 76
But Dover Wilson did not pursue the topic of diabolic inter-
vention in the life of a melancholic. On that score Bright wrote:
Of this kinde [of temptations] are certaine blasphemies suggest-
ed of the Devill, and laying of violent handes of them selves, or
upon others neither moved therto by hate or malice: or any
occasion of revenge: of the same sort is the dispaire and distrust
of gods mercy, and grace. 77
Burton took the same line in his Anatomy of Melancholy:
The melancholy humour is the Devil's bath; and as in Saul,
those evil spirits get in, as it were, and take possession of us.
And so he agrees with Hamlet.
Once again we are faced with the strange phenomenon of
Hamlet making what seems to be a poetic statement of what is
universally valid, when in fact, in the context of Shakespeare's
age, he is talking nonsense, even blasphemous nonsense. But the
very decay of our own religious beliefs brings us closer to Hamlet
-suicide is no longer sinful in most people's eyes, nor does it lead
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 The Elizabethan Hamlet
to eternal damnation. Our view of the soliloquy is also distorted
because we know in advance that Hamlet does not in fact use
his 'bare bodkin' on himself. If he had done we would of course
have had a different play, but we would also have questioned his
wisdom and even his sanity, for we reject any philosophy which
would cause death by our own hands. And we would certainly
have ceased to identify with Hamlet.
At the end of this soliloquy an Elizabethan would see Hamlet
advancing further along the Devil's road, which leads only to
Hell:
There is a path upon your left-hand side,
That leadeth from a guilty conscience
Unto a forest of distrust and fear,
A darksome place and dangerous to pass:
There shall you meet with melancholy thoughts,
Whose baleful humours if you but uphold,
It will conduct you to despair and death.
(The Spanish Tragedy, Act 3, Sc. 2)
As Hamlet's conscience is no longer in working order, as it
were, he is heading for destruction. The association of the 'sea
of troubles' with conscience may have been a familiar one to the
Elizabethans, for in 'Prayers for a quiet Conscience' the Primer of
1553 has:
The wicked is like a raging sea which is never quiet, neither is
there any peace to the ungodly; but such as love the law, 0
Lord, they have plenty of peace, they have quiet minds and
contented consciences. ' 8
Thus, to sum up, when we examine Hamlet's attitude to
ambition, to conscience and to suicide we must see them in a
religious context as the Elizabethans did, and that means in effect
recognizing that Satan is at the root of his troubles. It is not
enough to take the view of the psychiatrist:
It is evident to the Elizabethans that melancholy comprehended
a wide range of mental attitudes, from a normal and praise-
worthy gravity ofbearing, through mild eccentricity, to estab-
lished neurosis and to the wildest psychotic derangement. 79
In Harold Jenkins's view,
in modern criticism there has been much discussion of Hamlet
as a melancholic type. But although this is often illuminating
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 Antic Disposition
the formalistic approach unduly restricts the characteriza-
tion.
In symbolic terms which they were familiar with Hamlet has let
himself become the tool of the Devil and a modern approach
which does not appreciate this misunderstands the diabolic role of
the Ghost in the play. Timothy Bright, however up to date he was
as a physician, did not deny Satan's exploitation of the melan-
cholic, so that even an illiterate groundling would have shared the
religious view of Nashe:
The Devil when with any other sickness or malady the faculties
of our reason are enfeebled and distempered, will be most busy
to disturb and torment us. 80
In Elizabethan eyes Hamlet
More needs ... the divine than the physician.
(Macbeth, 5.2.81)

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