Marilynne Robinson - The Givenness of Things

In the first scene of the play we hear about Fortinbras, the Norwegian prince who means to make Denmark answer for his father’s death. Claudius, his judgment perhaps wassail-impaired, sees good news in the fact that the king of Norway is pleased with Fortinbras for saying he has given over his plan to invade, and has rewarded him with a great deal of money and an invading army — bound for Poland, the ambassadors are told. And could they please pass through Denmark on their way. So Fortinbras is spared the trouble of invading, and all the great labor of defense described in the first scene is for nothing. The play does not allow any certain judgment about Fortinbras’s intentions, whether his low estimate of Claudius and of the state of things in Denmark is being acted on in this very transparent ruse, if ruse it is. Hamlet’s one act as king is to give his endorsement to things as they are, to Fortinbras, who has brought armed men into the Danish court. The endorsement hardly seems necessary, in the circumstances. But it does mean that Hamlet sees the presence of Fortinbras as fortuitous, and him as someone to be trusted with the welfare of a country toward which his intentions not long before had been vengeful. When Claudius lays out his plot for the murder of Hamlet to Laertes, he says Hamlet will suspect nothing, “being remiss, / Most generous and free from all contriving.” Not himself deceptive, Hamlet does not look for deception in others — even after he has fallen victim to another flagrant deception. Through it all, his mind is not tainted. This seems to be what we are seeing in the matter of Fortinbras.

Hamlet’s madness is both feigned and real, and it consists in his descent into the reality of his circumstances. He cannot naturalize himself to this reality, and, consciously, at least, he cannot see his way beyond it — except, perhaps, in the thought of death. As prince, and as madman, he is flattered, manipulated, spied on. His world would compel him to an act of homicide that, thoroughly as he can rationalize it in the world’s terms, and despite continuing provocations of the darkest sort, he finally seems to have put out of mind. And when he does this, he is restored to himself. He will die because he is a generous, uncontriving man in a world where these virtues are fatal vulnerabilities. Since he seems to have forgotten to despise Claudius and to condemn Gertrude, his mother, toward whom he acts with great courtesy and tenderness, he should also be called a gracious man. He would seem to have freed all faults.

If death seems a poor reward for his having stepped almost free of this corrupting and entangling reality, among the things that were true in Shakespeare’s time was the fact that to die for one’s faith or one’s conscience was not altogether unusual. Many heroes of the age went calmly to the stake when capitulation would have spared them. And their ends crowned their lives. In Shakespeare’s plays there tends to be a strong awareness of life after death. Both life and death are appraised differently than we moderns appraise them, for this reason. The dying Laertes says, “Exchange forgiveness with me, noble Hamlet: / Mine and my father’s death come not upon thee, / Nor thine on me.” Hamlet replies, “Heaven make thee free of it! I follow thee.” The efficacy implied here for simple human forgiveness is to be noted. These two right noble youths pass into eternity together, as if the madness of earth had never contrived to make them enemies.

Still, death is grave and terrible here and in all the plays, graver because the state of the soul at death is crucial to its immortal fate. What does Hamlet fear will be remembered of him if Horatio does not live after him to tell the tale aright? That the final scene will be interpreted by its appearance, and he will be thought to have carried out a brutal revenge intentionally, as his world would have expected, rather than as the agent of a destiny he could not evade. He might have said, “At least I have avenged the crimes against my father.” Instead he reacts to the catastrophe as a potential slander on his memory. Misinterpretation would be the final snare the world could deploy to make Hamlet less than Hamlet.

It is a part of my argument for Shakespeare’s theological seriousness to point out that this consciousness of the heavens is quite particular to him among the playwrights, at least so far as I know. I may rely too heavily on Marlowe in making this comparison. But there is a tendency among critics, in my experience, to relegate striking elements in Shakespeare’s work to cultural backdrop — Elizabethans simply assumed certain things, so (the reasoning here is not really clear to me) these things should not be taken to be especially important to Shakespeare. The further I look into the period, the more inclined I am to doubt that we have equipped ourselves to make such generalizations about worldview. More to the point, no great statement about reality, for example, that the heavens are attentive to our thoughts and actions and will determine the fate of our souls, can be static, like simple information. It implies a profound relationship that unfolds continuously and compels, among other things, extraordinary self-awareness. Then in this way Shakespeare’s theological seriousness is simultaneous with his greatness as a dramatist.

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Antony and Cleopatra are two fabulous, aging reprobates who toy with the fate of the world as few people in history have had the power to do. Power is prominent among Shakespeare’s fascinations, and in this ancient moment it is so hypertrophic that the influence of individual men can be reckoned at half the known world, or the whole of it. Preposterous and true. Shakespeare studies power in its waning, its dissolution. What does it consist of? So long as it retains its integrity it seems simply to define itself, to be self-evident. When it disintegrates it is revealed to be compounded of will, custom, kinship, loyalty, and opportunism, together with a magnetism of its own, which in some part always inheres even in fallen greatness. Its ebbing exposes the fact that it has always depended on the acquiescence of people in general, as well as of its servants and lieutenants and its potential competitors.

Granting all this, why does power center itself in certain individual figures, all of whom eat bread, need friends? How does this web of dependencies manifest itself in society and history as a force not to be resisted? Monarchy in Shakespeare’s time and place claimed to take legitimacy from royal descent. But his history plays are studies in the difficulties that beset hereditary kingship, including, in its worst moments, the violent removal of some cousin claimants to the advantage of others. Still, volatile as it was, violent as it often was, it provided a theoretical basis, at least, for deference and acknowledged right. Antony, Octavius, Lepidus, and Pompey are all aristocrats, but none of them can make a claim to a dynastic right of succession, since the disaster that has elevated them to the power they hold, share, and contend for is the collapse of a republic. From the first we are shown a cold Octavius, a doting Antony, a foolish Lepidus, all of them drunkards except Octavius. The soldiers who attend them regard them with discreet contempt. Yet they are all powerful still, commanders of immense fleets and armies, and of the obedience of the familiars who see them at their worst and nevertheless are prepared to give their lives for them. When warfare among them leaves only Antony and Octavius as competitors, in battle between them great Antony disgraces himself, his fleet following Cleopatra’s in uncompelled retreat. He tries to recover in a second battle, is betrayed by Cleopatra’s forces, and fails. Cleopatra is then so fearful of him that she sends a messenger to tell him she is dead, and in his grief at this message he wounds himself fatally, botching his suicide. Hearing of this, she stages her own death.