Marilynne Robinson - The Givenness of Things

As a student I was mystified though not interested by the elaborate concluding acts of so many of the later plays, thoroughgoing reconciliations, sometimes among a great many characters. Critics and professors excused these endings, and dismissed them, as the sort of thing the audience would have wanted. Old Will was a canny businessman. Our groundlings seem to prefer concluding mayhem of some kind, a shootout or an act of war, merciless and mindless retaliation for unforgivable crimes. So it might be interesting to consider what sort of crowd it was that could be pandered to with these long scenes of gratuitous pardon. The use of the word “gratuitous” is considered. Grace is gratuitous. Etymologies are lovely things.

I think it is probably an error to suppose that any serious artist allows considerations like these — i.e., what will bring in the crowds, and what will appeal to their presumedly unrefined tastes — to govern important choices, certainly not with the frequency they would have done in Shakespeare’s case. Cymbeline, Antony and Cleopatra, Measure for Measure, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest , all end with elaborate scenes of reconciliation that all of them are designed from the first act to bring about. This is to say, reconciliation is their subject. If this is conventional in comedy, it is odd in plays as grave as these are. And what happens in these scenes is no sorting out of grievances, no putting of things right. Justice as that word is normally understood has no part in them. They are about forgiveness that is unmerited, unexpected, unasked, unconditional. In other words, they are about grace.

There are perils in attempting a distinction between characteristics of a particular writer’s work and the conventions that prevailed among writers active when he was. Christopher Marlowe is as close to being Shakespeare’s peer as any of his contemporaries, and he died young, leaving just a few plays, so the value of comparisons between the two is limited. Still, Dr. Faustus goes to hell, Tamburlaine brutalizes the eastern world without compunction, Aeneas abandons Dido without a backward glance, and Edward II dies onstage, a wretched victim, leaving the child king Edward III to avenge him by sending his own mother to the Tower. Nowhere is there a glimpse of anything that might be called grace, divine or human.

Shakespeare could imagine a world without grace as well, as he did in Macbeth, Timon of Athens, Coriolanus , and the appalling Titus Andronicus. These plays are all set in pagan antiquity, but so, for example, is Pericles, Prince of Tyre , in which Diana of Ephesus emerges as the giver of grace, felt among its characters as profoundest human love. If reconciliation scenes pleased the crowd, then Marlowe might have tried his hand at one. But he had a formula of his own for pleasing them, one that seems to have appealed to unembarrassed resentment and a taste for violence. He anticipates the relentless dramas of the Jacobean theater, as Shakespeare does also in the plays I have just named. It is the movement toward reconciliation, toward act 5, that makes many of Shakespeare’s plays exemplify the kind of drama we call Elizabethan, and might as well call Shakespearean, since I at least am not aware of any other playwright who shaped his plays in this way.

Let us consider a hard case: Hamlet. Hamlet raises a great many questions. Why has Horatio been at the Danish court since old Hamlet’s funeral, for months, that is, without encountering Hamlet until he feels he must speak to him, having seen the king’s ghost? He is on familiar terms with the castle guards, who defer to him as a “scholar.” And he seems impressively informed about state affairs. Yet he seems to have stayed below stairs, as it were. By comparison with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, he is never greeted by Claudius or Gertrude or addressed by them otherwise than as a servant, though Hamlet calls him “fellow student” and mentions his “philosophy.” Clearly he has been at Wittenberg with Hamlet. Poor students often paid their way by acting as servants to wealthy students, and this might explain Horatio’s ambiguous status.

The title of the play, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark , is also ambiguous. The word “prince” could mean the son of a king, or it could mean a ruler, as in Machiavelli’s use of it. Putting aside the fact that Hamlet is male and adult, the obvious successor to his dead father, there is the fact that old Hamlet has been murdered. These are the makings of a tragedy of revenge, Prince Hamlet being the “avenger of blood,” the one singled out by ancient tradition to “set things right.” This is only truer because Claudius’s crime is beyond the reach of any other authority. And the legitimacy of a king had everything to do with the health of a kingdom, so Hamlet would have had an obligation to act even weightier than revenge.

Hamlet is a Renaissance man captive to a medieval world, and, as Laertes says, he is subject to his birth. He is a learned prince of the Renaissance type. He longs to go back to school at Wittenberg and is forbidden to. Kings kept those who might challenge them at court close at hand, where they could be watched, and Claudius has very good grounds for suspecting Hamlet, having at the least “popp’d in between the election and [his] hopes.” He is intensely aware of his nephew’s demeanor, reading in his mourning and melancholy not merely grief and disillusionment but also sinister intent.

But Hamlet does not want his traditional roles, as king or as avenger. He really does want to return to his life as a student. This is apparent in the eagerness with which he greets Horatio, who at first deflects Hamlet’s shows of friendship by insisting on his own subordinate place. Hamlet is a classic Shakespearean character, a king who is and is not a king. His rank makes his intentions toward Ophelia presumptively dishonorable, deprives him of freedom to go where he wishes and live as he wishes, and deprives him of friendship as well, which in Horatio is at first reduced to self-protective deference, and in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to feigning and informing. Granting the endless complexities of the play, the drift of it brings Hamlet back to himself, so to speak. From the first he is in some ways remarkably innocent. His father has died under doubtful circumstances, the crown has been usurped. Yet he seems to entertain no suspicions until a ghost comes from the grave to lay things out for him. He is appalled by his mother’s disloyalty to his father, but does not reflect at all on her marriage to Claudius as having been meant to help legitimize him as king. He chooses to doubt the ghost, setting a snare for Claudius with a play that enacts the murder as described by the ghost, and Claudius is terrified, losing composure altogether, so suspicion is confirmed and Hamlet tells himself he is resolved to act. Then he comes upon Claudius praying and bethinks him that if his uncle dies at his prayers he will go to heaven — an interesting assumption, considering the theological weightiness of usurpation, incest, and the murder of a king. Claudius himself remarks on the ineffectuality of repentance when the penitent intends to go on enjoying the benefits of his sins.

It is not that Hamlet cannot make up his mind, but that he refuses proof that would persuade anyone else, then, finally convinced, talks himself out of an opportunity to be avenged. In a sense the prince descends for a while into the roles that are expected of him, treating Ophelia with vicious contempt, using royal authority, both feigned and real, to have Rosencrantz and Guildenstern killed. But a strange innocence in Hamlet, recovered or never really lost, allows the ending to unfold as it does. When he receives the challenge to duel with Laertes, he takes it in good faith, seeming to anticipate nothing worse than “taking the odd hit” from his opponent’s foil. At the same time he tells Horatio, “Thou wouldst not think how ill all’s here, about my heart.” He has just recounted to Horatio Claudius’s plot to have him killed in England, which he thwarted in obedience to “a kind of fighting” in his heart. He has recounted his uncle’s crimes and asks, “Is’t not perfect conscience, / To quit him with this arm? and is’t not to be damn’d, / To let this canker of our nature come / In further evil?” And now he has accepted Claudius’s request that he engage in a sword fight with a man who holds him responsible for the deaths of his father and sister. He feels again an intuitive dread, which Horatio encourages. Yet, even after Gertrude is poisoned and Hamlet is wounded by Laertes’s unbated sword, he reacts as if the plot could have come from anywhere. He shouts, “O villainy! Ho! Let the door be lock’d: Treachery! Seek it out.” Laertes is obliged to tell him that treachery “is here,” and murderous old Claudius is to blame.