[In the following essay, Trienens traces the relationship of the cloud-shaped whale—which Hamlet points out to Polonius– in Hamlet to the Gesta Romanorum's depiction of the whale as a signifier of lust.]

When Polonius informs Hamlet of the Queen's urgent desire to see him, Hamlet feigns madness and points to the sky:

HAM.
Do you see that cloud that's almost in shape like a camel?
POL.
By the mass, and it's like a camel, indeed.
HAM.
Methinks it is like a weasel.
POL.
It is back'd like a weasel.
HAM.
Or like a whale?
POL.
Very like a whale.
HAM.
Then will I come to my mother by and by. Aside. They fool me to the top of my bent.—I will come by and by.

(III.ii.393-402)

Hamlet's remarks about the cloud may be devoid of significance, mere foolery, or they may be richly suggestive; but, in any event, it is improbable that they involve such a complicated symbolism as Harold C. Goddard attributes to them. Goddard fantastically interprets the three shapes of the cloud as symbolizing three stages in the development of the play; so that for him the camel symbolizes Hamlet's burden in the first two acts, the weasel symbolizes his hot wrath and wiliness in the third, and the whale is the “monster” of the unconscious which finally swallows Hamlet.¹

It would be a mistake not to seek any significance in the imagery of the cloud, because even when he feigns madness Hamlet's speech is usually meaningful or allusive. As Polonius says, there is method in his madness. Therefore I am going to offer an interpretation which is simpler and more plausible than Goddard's; namely, that the three creatures which Hamlet sees in the cloud all connote lust. During the Renaissance, at least, any bestial creature might have been suggested by lust or sensuality; for that was a time when man keenly sensed the opposition between the soul and the flesh, between the divine and the bestial components of his own nature. It is not necessary to believe that the camel was associated with lust more than other animals were; yet Edward Topsell wrote that “this beast is very hot by nature, and therefore wanton and full of sport and wrath” and that camels “continue in copulation a whole day together” and Robert Burton wrote that “those old Egyptians, as Pierius informeth us, express in their Hieroglyphicks the passion of Jealousy by a Camel; because that fearing the worst still about matters of Venery, he loves solitudes, that he may enjoy his pleasure alone, and he will quarrel and fight with whosoever comes next, man or beast, in his jealous fits.”² According to the modern and monumental Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens, the weasel had possessed an erotic signification since antiquity and its foot was used as a love-charm in the sixteenth century.³ As evidence that the English also associated the weasel with lust we might cite a passage from John Ford's play, The Fancies Chaste and Noble (1638), wherein Nitido is called a “wanton monkey” and a “whoreson, lecherous weasel.”⁴ If, however, in order to suggest lust, Shakespeare utilizes goats, monkeys, and the Barbary horse in such a play as Othello, for example, and if he utilizes the camel, the weasel, and the whale in Hamlet, his particular choice of creatures may be governed by merely incidental reasons. The animals named in Othello, for instance, are incidentally suggested by the hero's native country; whereas the animals named in Hamlet are incidentally suggested by the amorphous shape of a cloud, the camel and the whale being bulky creatures and the weasel having a rounded back which imparts to it a similar outline.⁵

Modern scholars would have guessed the meaning of the symbolic cloud long before now if Shakespeare had mentioned an animal commonly associated with lust, such as the goat, along with the camel and the weasel. The whale, which Shakespeare selected partly on account of its shape, has completely misled them. Nevertheless, during the Renaissance educated men could easily have associated the whale with lust, because they identified the whale with the sea-monsters in classical mythology that abducted virgins.⁶ To some extent they might also have been influenced by the medieval tradition that hungry whales emitted an enticing, perfumed breath capable of attracting great numbers of fish into their mouths. Medieval writers compared the enticements of the whale to those of the devil, and in the multiple settings of the early miracle plays the open-stretched mouth of a whale (or dragon) symbolized the gates of hell.⁷ It is interesting that the copulation of whales was said to cause a great deal of sperm to rise to the surface of the sea, which might be gathered and dried and turned into amber; because the aroma of amber was that with which the whale enticed its victims.⁸ The capacious appetite of the whale seems to be connected with the classical tradition in a melodramatic passage from the Gesta Romanorum where the daughter of Ancelmus the Emperor figures as the sole survivor aboard a tempest-tossed vessel. “Thenne the mayde sette all hire hope strongly in God; and at the laste, the tempest sesid; but their folowide strongly a gret whale, to devowre this maide [italics mine]. And whenne she sawe that she moche dradde; and whan the nyȝht com, the maide dredynge that the whale wolde have swolewide the ship, smot fire at a stone. …” Though she temporarily fended off the whale by keeping a fire, she eventually succumbed to sleep and the whale swallowed up the whole ship and the virgin with it. But the virgin was the morsel he particularly desired. Shakespeare may have read this passage; for it is a part of “The Story of the Choice of Three Caskets” which W. C. Hazlitt included in Shakespeare's Library as a possible direct source for the story of the caskets in The Merchant of Venice.⁹

Shakespeare unquestionably knew about the whale's mythological role as the abductor of virgins; for in The Merchant of Venice Portia mentions

                    young Alcides, when he did redeem
The virgin tribute paid by howling Troy
To the sea-monster.

(III.ii.55-57)

William Warner, in Albion's England (1586), terms this same monster a “fiend-like fish” and a “boisterous whale”; and he describes it as follows:

Anone the dreadfull Divell drives
          The sea before his brest,
And spitting mighty waves abrode,
          Disgorgde from monstrous chest,
Lifts up his ugly head above
          The troubled waves to catch
The trembling lady, for which pray
          His yawning jawes did watch.(10)

On account of its mythological role, Shakespeare makes the whale a virtual symbol of lust. In The Merry Wives of Windsor Mistress Ford stresses his lust when she compares Falstaff, her fat suitor, to a whale (II.i.64-69); and in All's Well That Ends Well Parolles says of Bertram, “I knew the young Count to be a dangerous and lascivious boy, who is a whale to virginity and devours up all the fry it finds” (IV.iii.247-250). This latter example is especially interesting because in it the classical motif of the whale assaulting a virgin and the medieval motif of the whale devouring small fish are united and because it constitutes our best evidence that the whale which Hamlet sees in the cloud should suggest lust even more strongly than the camel or the weasel.

By means of the symbolic cloud Shakespeare indicates the state of Hamlet's mind after the play-scene. As soon as the exhilaration which immediately follows his “tenting” of Claudius wears off, Hamlet begins to think of the crisis which must ensue in his relationship with his mother, and the thought of his mother's guilt brings bestial images into his troubled mind. As a poetic image the cloud ultimately signifies how deep-seated Hamlet's grief continues to be, even in his moment of triumph, and it subtly anticipates the emotionally climactic scene in the Queen's chamber.

Notes

1. The Meaning of Shakespeare (Chicago, 1951), pp. 357 and 374.

2. Topsell, The Historie of Foure-Footed Beastes (London, 1607), p. 94; Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. F. Dell and P. Jordan-Smith (New York, 1927), p. 825. Pierius, otherwise known as Valeriano Bolzani, is the sixteenth-century Italian author of Hieroglyphica, sive de Sacris Ægyptiorum, a frequently reprinted book, of which the earliest edition given in the Brit. Mus. Cat. is dated 1567.

3. Ed. E. Hoffman-Krayer and Hanns Bächtold-Stäubli, 10 vols. (Berlin and Leipzig, 1927-42), Vol. IX, cols. 584-85.

4. The Dramatic Works, ed. W. Gifford and A. Dyce, 3 vols. (London, 1895), II, 259.

5. This idea accords with the following evidence presented by A. L. Mayhew in Notes and Queries (Ser. 6, I [March 27, 1880], 251): “Compare Dictionnaire Historique de l'Ancien Langage Français, par La Curne de Sainte Palaye (s. v. ‘Chameau’):—

   ‘Chameau—Nuage épais. C'est en ce sens qu'on emploie ce mot dans le langage champenois, pour signifier une nuée très épaisse, qui fond tout-à-coup sur une grande étendue de pays. On l'appelle balin aux environs de Cosne.’”

6. In Chapter Eighty-two of Moby Dick Herman Melville notes that the monster from which Perseus rescued Andromeda was believed to be a whale and he states that “in many old chronicles whales and dragons are strangely jumbled together, and often stand for each other.” Cf. Ovid, Met. iv. 663-752.

7. P. Ansell Robin, Animal Lore in English Literature (London, 1932), p. 125.

8. Batman uppon Bartholome (London, 1582), f. 200 verso.

9. Shakespeare's Library, 6 vols. (London, 1875), I, 361-366. The passage on the whale is on pp. 363-364.

10. In A. Chalmers, The Works of the English Poets, 21 vols. (London, 1810), IV, 515. Cf. Ovid, Met. xi. 211-215.