SOURCE: Tobin, J. J. M. “Gabriel Harvey: ‘Excellent Matter of Emulation.’” Hamlet Studies 7, nos. 1-2 (summer-winter 1985): 94-100.

[In the following essay, Tobin argues that Shakespeare's Hamlet contains references to Harvey's A New Letter of Notable Contents and Pierce's Supererogation.]

Gabriel Harvey, though clearly one of the wiser sort in his admiration for Hamlet,¹ was the luckless victim of Thomas Nashe's lampooning power in their celebrated pamphlet war. Shakespeare was a close student of their conflict and incorporated a considerable amount of material from Nashe's side of the conflict into the texture of a great many of his plays, most especially Hamlet.² However, Shakespeare was not so one-sided in his coopting enthusiasm for things Nashean as to ignore Harvey's writings for there are clear signs of borrowings from Harvey in Much Ado About Nothing, Twelfth Night,³ and, ironically enough, given Harvey's comment about the play in the margin of his copy of Speght's Chaucer, Hamlet itself.⁴

In my note on Harvey and Hamlet I argued that Shakespeare borrowed some of the diction of his most famous soliloquy, the “To be or not to be …” speech at 3.1.55ff,⁵ from Harvey's A New Letter of Notable Contents (1593), and I wish now to point out additional Harveian material in both A New Letter and the simultaneously published Pierce's Supererogation.

It is important to remember that the Nashe-Harvey quarrel almost ended with the edition of Christ's Tears Over Jerusalem in 1593 with its apology to Harvey whom Nashe admits to having “rashly assailed” (12) in some “spleanative vaines of wantonnesse” (13). But for whatever reasons of arrogance or sense of still injured merit, Harvey rejected the overture to peace in A New Letter of Notable Contents, and Nashe as a consequence wrote a new Epistle to the Reader for the edition of 1594, resuming his spirited attack against the Harveys. Although there is no certainty in the matter, it is most likely that Harvey published along with A New Letter of Notable Contents, his Pierce's Supererogation or a New Prayse of the Old Asse. In both of these works Harvey reveals considerable anxiety and only fitful enthusiasm for revenging himself upon Nashe. Accordingly, when Shakespeare studied Christ's Tears with its apology made and then withdrawn, he studied also Harvey's response to the issue of acting or suffering, revenge or forgiveness. The result of his close reading of all three interconnected texts is that all three appear in interwoven strands in the course of the tragedy, especially in those expressions of doubt and uncertainty in the matter of revenge.

Harvey addresses his New Letter to his friend the printer John Wolfe and begins his work with a distinction between good news which should be sent quickly and messages of “condolement” (A2)⁶ which may be delayed. Harvey seems to have picked up the word from Nashe's dedication of Christ's Tears, the same dedication which has “beautified” (9), where Nashe writes of “my true cause of condolement” (10). Claudius refers to Hamlet's “obstinate condolement” (1.2.93), where “condolement” is unique in the canon. Two pages later, Harvey refers to “obstinate foes” (A3 recto), and later to a “retrograde Planet” (B2 verso), an adjective which may have contributed to Claudius' phrase, “retrograde to our desire” (1.2.114).⁷

Harvey then goes on to talk of truces between nations, apprehensive that not all truces are equally sincere, e.g., the possible truce between himself and Nashe. Christianity, in the case of the truce between France and Croatia, has “pregnant cause” to thank God (A2^v). Hamlet reflecting on his own inaction in his vengeance against Claudius, tells how he is “unpregnant of (his) cause” (2.2.568). In Pierce's Supererogation, Harvey berates himself for failing to defend “with pregnant arguments” the ass, a beast to which Nashe had likened Harvey, “but what an asse am I, that proceede so coldly, and dully in the Apology of so worthy a Creature” (167).⁸ Hamlet berates himself for his failure to implement his revenge by calling himself “dull” (2.2.567), and catching himself short, as does Harvey, with “Why what an ass am I” (2.2.582).⁹

As he develops his letter of 1593, Harvey writes of a man with a “coat of interchaungeable colours” (B2^v) who wrote the “Pamphlet of Strange Newes” (B3^r), a work seemingly full of the “holyest devotion” (B3^r). Polonius and Claudius provide Ophelia with a (prayer) book, an exercise Polonius hopes “may color” (3.1.44) her loneliness and by “devotion's visage” (3.1.47) conceal their true purpose.

Harvey expresses uncertainty over Nashe's possible apology to him, and deliberates upon the consequent need to either accept the apology or revenge himself upon his opponent. There is no doubt that he fears duplicity on the part of his enemy and especially the duplicity that is cloaked in moral or religious guise. He marvels “… how Machiavel can teach a Prince to be, and, not to be religious? Another question, or …” (B3^r). Mistrusting Nashe's seeming reformation and equally concerned with the justice of revenge. Harvey states, “I am no way rigorous in revenge …” (D2^r). Nashe may indeed have changed for the better and “if unfaynedly he hath stripped-of the snakes skinne, and put-on the new man, as he devoutly pretendeth” (B3^v), Harvey will forgive.

The elements of diction in the midst of the theme of justifiable revenge are parallel to the situation and speech of Hamlet, a Prince, who states “To be, or not to be, that is the question” (and then goes on to argue the religious consequences of suicide) and speaks of an end to struggle, “a consummation / Devoutly to be wish'd” (3.1.62-63). The propinquity of these terms to each other in each text is at least suggestive of borrowing, and when one notes that page B3^v concerns itself explicitly with the humanity of forgiveness in the face of great injury rather than revenge, the suggestion becomes still stronger.

Particularly interesting is Harvey's image of the shedding of the snakeskin which anticipates Hamlet's “when we have shuffled off this mortal coil” (3.1.66) for “shuffle” means fundamentally to move without lifting one's feet (cf. OED), while “coil” is glossed as “turmoil”, although the New Cambridge edition adds “with a quibble upon ‘coil’ of rope.”¹⁰ Reading the line in the light of Harvey's reference to the shedding of the snakeskin, one sees that Hamlet's “shuffle” is an image of serpentine removal of the external body.

Harvey has a mysterious gentlewoman, the inspiration of much of his writing. When he refers to her in A New Letter, he gives to Hamlet's gentlewoman, Ophelia, some of the diction for her anguished description of his irrational behavior. The speeches of Harvey's gentlewoman are “beautified”¹¹ with the grace of Affabilitie” (C^r), “she never hated, but One” (C^r), her verses have no note “out-off tune” (C^v), praised by Harvey “not the first time” (C^v), and “her whole discourse is the combe of honey” (C^v). “Her proceeding [is] like the soverainest wine in the butt: her ending like the sweetest honey in the bottome of the hooney-pot” (C2^r). She was always forgiving, except when “she saws the fowle mouth so shamefully runne-over, without all respect of manners, or regard of honestie, or pretense of Truth, or colour of Reason” (C2^r). Hamlet has allowed his foul mouth to run over on the issue of Ophelia's honesty and the duplicity of others, of whom “all but one shall live” (3.1.148). Ophelia laments the change in Hamlet, having once “suck'd the honey of his music vows” (3.1.156) and now forced to “see that noble and most sovereign reason / Like sweet bells jangled out of time and harsh” (3.1.158). The Folio reading is “out of tune.”

When Hamlet reflects on the difference between the Norwegian certitude and his own doubts in his seventh soliloquy, he incorporates some of the diction from Harvey's New Letter. It will be remembered that A New Letter is a response to Christ's Tears, and we have already noted that Hamlet's question, “what is a man if” construction is found in Christ's Tears (29). Harvey writes of “a sounde conscience [which] is a brasen wall against the mainest battry of sprite,¹² or Feude” (B4^r), of his gentlewoman who will write a rejoinder if a competent satisfaction is not made to Harvey, wasteful though it is for some one who should better write “to gaine a relenting soule” (B4^v), and of “a settled resolution to proceed according to Reason in generall, and Occasion in speciall” (B4^r). He feels that in regard to his struggle with Nashe he may “justly say: I have cause to use, as I am used” (B4^r) and that he should act, for “who in my case would give eare to the Law of Oblivion, that hath the Law of Talion in his handes” (B4^r). Later in the letter Harvey will declare: “I am in no way rigorous in revenge” (D2^r), and that his “reason” tells him “to pause awhile; and a scruple, or two of some dependence, may seeme to say No” (D2^v), a repetition of his earlier view of the caution of the once-burned, “Security cannot be too precise, or scrupulous” (C4^r). Hamlet, clearly not very rigorous in revenge, asks the Norwegian captain whether the battle will be against “the main of Poland” (4.4.15), learns from him that the Norwegians “go to gain a little patch of ground” and then begins his soliloquy with “How all occasions” inform against him. He states that man has “godlike reason” which should not “fust in us unused,” and that he hesitates in his task perhaps out of “bestial oblivion” or some craven scruple of thinking too precisely on th' event.” Yet he goes on to say, “I have cause and will, and strength, and means / To do't” (4.4.18-46).

There are some other scattered elements in this short letter which have become part of the texture of Hamlet. For example, just before calling Nashe “a ridiculous Vice in a Tragedy” (D2^r), Harvey refers to mocking writers like Nashe who have wits “Capon-crammed in Vanity” (D1^v). This image Shakespeare gave to Hamlet when he tells Horatio that the Court is “coming to the play” (3.2.90) and tells Claudius in an ambiguous expression, seemingly indicative of frustrated ambition, “I eat the air, promise-cramm'd—you cannot feed capons so” (3.2.94-95). Harvey argues that “petty foiles incense choler & enrage fury” (A3^r), that “men may stand upon braving termes” (B2^r), and that he will attack Nashe with pen and ink, “why man, I will dowse thee over head” (C2^r). These phrases from A New Letter have come together in Hamlet's narrative to Horatio of his discovering and changing of the letter Claudius had written to the King of England: “Why man, they did make love to this employment” (5.2.57), “the pass and fell incensed points” (5.2.61), echoed dichotomously in Hamlet's “these foils have all a length” (5.2.265) and Claudius's “Part them they are incens'd” (5.2.303), and the rhetorical question, “Does it not, think thee, stand me now upon” (5.2.63).

Finally, Hamlet's celebrated “what piece of work is a man” speech to Rosencranz and Guildenstern, which has something of Montaigne in it, and more than a little of Nashe's Lenten Stuffe, has also some of the diction from Harvey's A New Letter. Harvey writes of the virtues of his gentlewoman, after referring to Nashe's “pestilent and virulent sheets of wast paper,” the arguments of which will “Vanish like smoke in the Ayer” (B4^r) She is a “heavenly Creature” (B4^v), best assigned “a divine piece of service” (B4^v), rather than an indictment of Nashe, “a thing … contrary to the shining lovelinesse of her milde disposition, as the bitterest bitter seemeth repugnant to the sweetest sweet” (B4^v). She is among other things “a serpent in wit, a Dove in life: a Fury in execution an Angell in conversation” (B4^v). Indeed, like Nestor, her whole menage is brave, “and she is such a Paragon, as may compare with the excellentest of Homers women” (B4^v). Her conceits are “illuminate with the light of Reason” (B4^v-C). Her sentences are “perfumed with delight” (C). Nothing is more savory than “all her platformes & actions” (C), and yet “what patterne or skill, or Practise, more admirable then the whole” (C). Her hatred, if she has any, is “like the flashing weapon of the fiery Aier” (C). Were Harvey to do her justice, he would have to be more skilled than the ideal orator described by Cicero. Then he “could display her excellent perfections, whose minde is as full of ritch giftes, and precious Jewells, as New-yeares-day. Yet her goodliest ornament and greatest wonder is the sweet humilitie of that brave courage” (C). Hamlet in describing the wonders of man borrows the rhythm and some of the diction from this description by Harvey of a special woman. Among the pieces of diction are “disposition” (II.ii.298), and like Harvey's gentlewoman his current task and attitude is against the true nature of that disposition which is “goodly,” “most excellent,” “air,” “brave,” “appeareth”-“seemeth,” “pestilent,” “what,” “piece,” “reason,” “form,” ‘admirable,” “an angel in,” “paragon,” and “women” (2.2.298-309).

When Harvey cites the virtues of his gentlewoman, he argues that she is the equivalent of the bravest man who is “A Lion in field, a Lamme in the towne, A Joves Eagle in feude, an Apollos Swanne in society: A Serpent in wit, A Dove in life: A Fury in execution, an Angell in conversation” (B4^v). Seven lines later Harvey calls his gentlewoman “a Paragon” (B4^v). Here with all these beasts, one fury and one angel is the origin of Hamlet's new view that man is not only an angel, but the paragon of animals.

Such was Shakespeare's willingness to adopt the rhetorical structure of praise that he has transformed Harvey's extolling of a single woman into another hesitant revenger's qualified praise of man in general.

There is something especially satisfying in the fact that the Ramist Harvey, wondering how to save the honor of his brothers, his father, and himself, provided Hamlet with the perfectly Ramistic, dichotomously divided opening of his fourth soliloquy, “To be, or not to be … ;” as well as one of the thematic threads woven into that soliloquy, that of action versus passivity, in particular, that virulent form of action, revenge.

I am well aware that one of the many perils facing the student of sources, especially Shakespearean sources, is the hubris arising from the belief that one has unearthed a new influential text, forgetting both that “originality,” as Housman said of Hopkins' poetry, “is not nearly so good as goodness, even when it is good” (letter to Robert Bridges, 30 December, 1918) and that in the field of Quellenforschung issues are not so much a matter of either/or but both/and, for Kenneth Muir is right: Shakespeare's creative imagination was coalescent, his works poly-genetic.¹³ Harvey is but a strand, albeit an important strand in the composition of Hamlet, a strand closely interwoven with Nashe and others.¹⁴

Noteworthy among these others is Duplessis-Mornay, the case for whose irenic influence upon Hamlet and especially the fourth soliloquy has been made most persuasively by Kenneth Rothwell.¹⁵ Harvey, temperamentally, if not philosophically, in an explicit manner an irenicist, knew Duplessis-Mornay in the Countess of Pembroke's version, Discourse on Life and Death. Muir has reminded us that “among the difficulties in determining Shakespeare's source material is the fact that a phrase in Shakespeare's consciousness which allowed the linking of two passages may itself be absent from his work.”¹⁶ Diction from Harvey's A New Letter appears in the fourth soliloquy, as does that from the Discourse on Life and Death. In A New Letter Harvey writes of the Countess of Pembroke and mentions specifically her work on Duplessis-Mornay:

What Dia-margariton, or Dia-ambre, so comfortative, or cordiall, as Her Electuary of Gemmes, (for though the furious tragedy Antonius, / be a bloudy chaire of estate, yet the divine Discourse of life, and Death, is a restorative Electuary of Gemmes) whom I do not expressly name, not because I do not honour Her with my hart, but because I would dishonour Her with my pen, whom I admire, and cannot blason enough.

(A4^v-B)

Here is a link sufficient to have joined Harvey and Duplessis-Mornay, two irenicists, in the mind of a thinker equally dubious about the advantages of rash action.

The scholar bent upon source study may sometimes appear to act with divine confidence and believe indeed that his powers of apprehension border at the very least upon the angelic, when in fact his contributions are often of the most modest kind, seeing the origin of a theme, the resolution of a textual crux, or even providing the probably correct placing of a comma, all this hardly the work of an angel in apprehension, hardly like a God. Only a contribution for the benefit of the wiser sort.

Notes

1. J. J. M. Tobin, “Harvey and Hamlet,” AN & Q (February 1980), 86-87

2. See, for example, my “Nashe and Hamlet, Yet Again,” Hamlet Studies, 2 (1980), 37-46; Hamlet and Christ's Teares Over Jerusalem,” AJES, 6 (1981), 158-167; and “Hamlet and Nashe's Lenten Stuffe, “Archiv, 219 (1982), 388-395.

3. For Harvey in Much Ado see my Shakespeare's Favorite Novel; A Study of ‘The Golden Asse’ as Prime Sonrce (Lanham: University Press of America, 1984), pp. 62-63. For Harvey in Twelfth Night, see my “Gabriel Harvey in Illyria,” English Studies, 61 (1980), 318-328.

4. “The younger sort take much delight in Shakespeares Venus & Adonis, but his Lucrece, & his tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, haue it in them, to please the wiser sort.”

5. Line references are to The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. B. Evans et al. (Boston, 1974).

6. Page references to A New Letter of Notable Contents as in the Scholar Press reproduction of 1970.

7. “Retrograde” also occurs in Ben Jonson's Cynthia's Revels, otherwise influential upon Hamlet. See my “On the Name Ophelia,” American Notes and Queries, 16, 134-35.

8. Page references to Pierce's Supererogation are to the Scholar Press facsimile of 1970.

9. See also the analogous phrasing in Nashe's Strange Newes.

10. Dover Wilson goes on to say, rightly, “the image in Shakespeare's mind was, I think, that of the soul standing erect and freeing itself from the lifeless body which has fallen to the ground like a divested garment,” in Hamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969 repr.), p. xxxiv.

11. Perhaps deliberately echoing Nashe's adjective praising Elizabeth Carey in Strange Newes.

12. See again the echoing words in Strange Newes.

13. Kenneth Muir, The Sources of Shakespeare's Plays (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1977), esp. pp. 11-13.

14. For the role of Apuleius in Hamlet, see Shakespeare's Favorite Novel (n. 3 above), pp. 74-86.

15. Kenneth S. Rothwell, “Hamlet, Duplessis-Mornay, and the ‘Irenic’ Vision,” Hamlet Studies, 3 (1981), 13-31.

16. Muir (n. 13 above), p. 11.