Hamlet and Modernity

Harold Bloom called Hamlet the most modern of Shakespeare's plays.  It is, but it is distinctive also for its hero's ultimate disavowal of modernity.

Hamlet is a modern prince, not a medieval one, a university scholar and a skeptic, one who dares to question religious authority in his private thoughts, in which he questions what happens to us after death instead of taking it as a given that either heaven or hell is at stake.  Hamlet looks back to Stoicism, but to do so is in context an Early Modern gesture.  To espouse classical ideas in a classical era is not modern; to embrace them in the Renaissance is.  Hamlet is charged with the task of the medieval warrior -- to enact vengeance on his father's murderer -- and it is no surprise that the sweet prince balks at the command.

Hamlet's father, by contrast, is a medieval warrior, right out of Icelandic saga, as Bloom puts it.  He's Beowulf, more or less, too busy making war to make love or any other nicety.  (No wonder then that slick-talker Claudius moves in on the Queen.)  The play itself spans historical eras.  At the beginning we have the Ghost, banished to Purgatory and thus a Catholic presence prefiguring the Reformation.  As the Ghost generally recedes we proceed through the Protestant era and by the end find ourselves in a post-Christian landscape, one in which the Prince, forced to choose between a Stoicism that condones suicide in certain conditions and a Christianity that forbids it as mortal sin, embraces parts of each philosophy but neither one entirely.  Hamlet makes a separate peace with fate, on his own terms. 

Shakespeare is perhaps the Colossus of the Early Modern era.  He has one foot solidly in the old world of antiquity, one in the modern era.  It is a curious choice then that, by finally enacting revenge against Claudius, Hamlet ultimately chooses the warrior code of his father and lands himself firmly on the side of traditions that were perhaps already in the process of becoming obsolete.  Modern he may have been, but Shakespeare, likewise, ultimately found his truest values in the classical tradition.

The Marriage of True Minds

Shakespeare's Sonnet 116 offers its truest vision of love if it is read as a poem not of the consummation of love, but rather of a love that could never be consummated -- at least not in any officially sanctioned way.  The poem is typically interpreted as a celebratory one -- a celebration of marriage and true love -- and I once heard a distinguished professor refer to it as just so much romantic fluff, unconvincing stuff that Shakespeare didn't really have his heart invested in -- something to keep himself busy in a plague year, I suppose.  In fact, it was this comment (overheard at tea in the Folger Shakespeare Library in the summer of 2006) that set me to thinking about the poem.

The meaning of Sonnet 116, as I see it, hinges on the allusion to the Book of Common Prayer that is framed in the opening lines:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments ....

Here's the text from the Solemnization of Matrimony, the version from 1559 that Shakespeare would have known, that would have been read (and addressed to him) at his own wedding in 1582:

[Priest:] I require and charge you (as you will answer at the dreadful day of judgment, when all the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed) that if either of you do know any impediment why ye may not be lawfully joined together in matrimony, that ye confess it. For be ye well assured, that so many as be coupled together otherwise than God's word doth allow, are not joined together by God, neither is their matrimony lawful.

The language remains pretty similar even in the 1928 version of the Book of Common Prayer.  The Alternate Service Book (1980), however, offers this much milder version:

If any of you know cause or just impediment why these two persons should not be joined together in Holy Matrimony, you are to declare it.

There is the faint ring of tradition here in "impediment," though "just" is a curious choice that pretends to nod in the direction of justice, but in fact works in the opposite direction by saying let's not quibble with frivolous or irrelevant claims here.  In contemporary civil services, however, this still friendlier version is more common:

If any one can show just cause why they may not be lawfully joined together, let them speak now or forever hold their peace.

The contemporary versions offer us a mere formality, or an excellent occasion for bringing on the climax of a romantic comedy.  The purpose seems to be rhetorical, to give heft to the service lest it become too light a matter.  There is little in it to bring a dissembling bigamist to his knees out of fear, which seems to me to be a likely purpose of the original -- a valid purpose at a time when, for instance, you might have a successful young playwright abiding in the town of London while his lawful wife lives far away in a small country town and a second marriage might be one of many temptations to occur to him.  Even the Alternative Service Book version of the impediment warning is only mildly insistent on any notion of religiosity through its inclusion of the easy-to-overlook "Holy."  My point is that we don't take marriage as seriously as we used to, and we might not be as attuned to the dire seriousness of purpose invested in the 16th-century solemnization of the event.

Of course, the newer versions of the "impediment" text also present a sharp contrast to the original in that they address the congregation gathered here today and not the bride and groom themselves.  What was an intense charge levelled on man and woman is now a mild injunction to the crowd without any specified consequence.  And the consequence, in Shakespeare's time, was indeed severe: a thumbs-down on Judgment Day, at what Shakespeare calls in line 12 of the poem "the edge of doom."  We've seen the images painted onto the wall of the chancel arch in the Chapel of the Trinity in Stratford-upon-Avon.  We know what that involves.

So, the poet is saying here that his love will last till Judgment Day.  But what kind of love is it?  How exactly does the poem riff on the original text? 

In the interpretation of the poem that I am proposing, the key phrase is "of true minds."  Implicit with these words is the sense that, in this case, a marriage of any other sort between the two relevant individuals does indeed involve impediments.  The only marriage without impediment here is of the mind -- that is, a figurative marriage and not one of the sort that can physically be consummated.  The speaker's words become all the more bold -- and more sensible -- if we see the presence of these implied impediments to an official marriage sanctioned by both church and state.  Here we have matter for the "alteration" and "remove" of lines 3 and 4, respectively; the poet will not yield to the fact that he will always be separated from the person addressed in the poem.  Thus the poem carries a broader and more purposeful range of emotion, and what has seemed to so many a straightforward love poem finds proper grounding in the tradition of courtly love, with its goal being the expression of a love that can never be reciprocated, the love of the unattainable object of desire.  The generic conventions of the sonnet supports this reading. 

So, the speaker's love is as sturdy as the North Star, immune to the ravages of time.  Comedy ends in marriage, tragedy begins with it, but the perfect love is held forever in stasis, and it endures despite the fact that it expects nothing in return.  (Keats seems to have understood this, as he demonstrates when depicting his lovers on the Grecian urn.)

Biographical readings of poetry oft prove distracting, especially when the poet is Shakespeare, but this poem seems to invite such speculation. What if Shakespeare loved a lady not his wife? He could never marry her. What if Shakespeare were gay? That situation would perhaps present the very pinnacle of unrequited love in his time. These speculations are impossible to support in any convincing fashion, and it's entirely possible that the poem was written merely as an exercise -- something to do during a plague year -- but these conjectures do illustrate some of the possible meanings of the poem. Then again, it's entirely possible that I am wrong here, and the man did simply write the poem for his wife, who was indeed at some significant remove. But still, I can't get past "true minds" and the sonnet's tradition of speaking to unrequited love.  In the end, with the sonnet, , every instance of which is an implicit allusion to every other of its type, genre prevails.