SOURCE: “Mouse and Mousetrap in Hamlet,” in Shakespeare Jahrbuch, Vol. 135, 1999, pp. 77-92.

[In the following essay, Hassel examines the mouse and mousetrap imagery in Hamlet.]

When Hamlet names “The Murder of Gonzago” for Claudius, he calls it “The Mousetrap”, adding, “Marry how? Tropically”.¹ Since Hamlet has already told us that he hopes to use the play to “catch the conscience of the king” (2.2.591), we quickly hear several teasing puns and figures. Hamlet the mouser may be playfully connecting the “trap” of “trapically” with the “marry” of Claudius' marriage to “his mouse” Gertrude. He is also probably punning on “tropically” as “in the way of a trope; metaphorically, figuratively”, using the common Renaissance figure of the mousetrap as “A device for enticing a person to his destruction or defeat”.² But though we quickly get Hamlet's “tropical” gist, his general meaning, we have not done so well with its ingenious particularity. John Doebler has made a good start by suggesting that the well-known Augustinian trope of the muscipula diaboli, the mousetrap of the devil, highlights and informs the mouse and mousetrap imagery in Hamlet. Doebler also shows that popular Renaissance beast-lore combines with this theological context to present in a mouse-like Claudius “all that was gluttonous, lascivious, corrupt, and defiling”:

“What better image for the corrupter of Denmark, the polluter of the royal wedding bed, the one who banqueted in a time proper to mourning? Claudius is consistently presented by Shakespeare as being both diabolic and erotic.”³

However, by focusing his interpretation almost exclusively on Claudius and by assuming a basically redemptive Hamlet, Doebler misses some of the most interesting possibilities of this material. What are we to make, for example, of Hamlet's perplexing portrayal as mouse and mouser, the tragic destroyer paired ambiguously with the heroic redeemer? How are we to understand Hamlet's problematic fury over what he considers Gertrude's excessive lasciviousness, and the resultant associations of his mother with the mouse and the mousetrap? Doebler has also left relatively unexplored the traditional associations of the mouse with secretive destructiveness and the play's persistent pairing of the destructive and the lascivious Claudius. Undetected mouse-predators, mouse-banes, and mouse-medicines are also lurking in the darker corners of Hamlet. Legendary mouse-quellers like St. Gertrude and Apollo may share some of these hiding places. Finally, theological and iconographic traditions may connect Hamlet with Joseph the archetypal maker of mousetraps in ways that Doebler has not suggested. Neither Shakespeare, his characters, nor his audience could be expected to have kept all of these associations suspended in one rich and contradictory mixture, but each would have known some of them. The quality of their theatrical experience, and ours, is enhanced by their recovery. Let us start our own unique and imperfect concoction with Gertrude.

GERTRUDE AS MOUSE AND MOUSETRAP

Hamlet embarrasses Ophelia with his quips about “country matters”, lying in “laps” and “between maids' legs” just before the “mousetrap” play begins, and he jokes easily with his schoolmates about Fortune's “secret parts” (3.2.109, 113; 2.2.232). However, from the start of the play he is also obsessed by what he perceives as his mother's lasciviousness. He calls her sexual “frailty” worse than “a beast”, who would with “wicked speed” “post / With such dexterity to incestuous sheets” (1.2.146, 150-51, 156-57). He insults her more publicly with the Player-Queen's outrageous promise of a fidelity that will survive her first husband's death: “Such love must needs be treason in my breast”, she says, and “A second time I kill my husband dead / When second husband kisses me in bed” (3.2.170, 176-77). In her closet after the play, Hamlet is even more voluble on the subject of what he considers Gertrude's inappropriate lust. It is at the end of this scene that Hamlet spits out Claudius's sobriquet “mouse”, the name he imagines his stepfather using when he is about to make love to Gertrude (3.4.184). “What have I done”, she asks him, “Ay me, what act”? (3.4.40, 52). His answer roars and thunders her salaciousness at her:

[It] blurs the grace and blush of modesty,
Calls virtue hypocrite, takes off the rose
From the fair forehead of an innocent love,
And sets a blister there, makes marriage vows
As false as dicers' oaths.

(3.4.42-46)

“[S]uch a deed / […] from the body of contraction plucks / The very soul, and sweet religion makes / A rhapsody of words!” Her lust and the resultant times are to Hamlet “ulcerous”, “corrupt”, “infecting unseen”, “pursy” or corpulent, like a “compulsive ardor” to “charge” in battle. She has let reason pander to will, virtue's wax melt in the flaming fires of youth. She lies in “the rank sweat of an enseamed bed, / Stewed in corruption, honeying and making love / Over the nasty sty.”⁴ At Hamlet's urging Gertrude finally sees in her own soul “such black and grained spots / As will not leave their tinct” (3.4.46-49, 148-50, 154, 83-89, 91-95). Of course, this general remorse does not concede all of Hamlet's outrageous charges against her. Gertrude certainly comes off better than her son in this scene, who seems if not mad drunk with a moral outrage and an accompanying misogyny that would seem to indict his own imbalance as much as his mother's lust.⁵

This “mouse” Hamlet refers to could of course be merely a term of endearment in Shakespeare and the proverbs and poems of his near-contemporaries. In Love's Labour's Lost (5.2.19), for example, Rosaline calls Katherine “mouse” innocently enough. We see the potential misogyny more clearly in Romeo and Juliet. When Lady Capulet wants to call her husband “a nocturnal prowler after women” (Pelican gloss), she says “You have been a mouse-hunt in your time” (4.4.11). The joke or the insult can be gender-neutral, as in the poem “Our Sir John” a century or so before Shakespeare, where neither the woman nor the friar can resist their lust:

Ser Iohn ys taken in my mouse-trappe:
ffayne wold I haue hym bothe nyght and day.
he gropith so nyselye a-bought my lape,
I haue no pore to sa[y hym nay.](6)

But while Andreas Alciatus and Edward Topsell concede that “white mouse” or “bad mouse” can be applied as Doebler does “to a man who is lascivious or of immoderate lust”, this pejorative is more commonly applied to a woman. Topsell reflects the misogynistic early modern commonplace that among mice (and men of course) “the female is much more venerious than the male”, and Meyer Schapiro mentions from popular tradition that the mouse is often “the womb, the unchaste female, the prostitute”. Topsell illustrates this same prejudice when he credits Alciatus with the saying, “she was a mouse's hole, signifying that her virginity was lost, and that she suffered any lovers as a mouse-hole doth any mouse”. This tradition of the salacious female mouse is so strong that the story reappears in many sources of a dead pregnant female mouse cut open to reveal “all the young females within her belly […] also found pregnant”.⁷ English proverbs are also fond of connecting the devil's entrapment of human lust with the mousetrap. One of Whiting's proverbs reads “Women are the devil's mousetraps”, and a similar one in the Oxford Proverbs “Women are the devil's nets”.⁸ The mouse is also in the popular tradition an animal in which witches and the devil sometimes manifest themselves, and a form taken by the graven images of vicious, malignant, and evil gods. As Schapiro says, “the mousetrap is, at the same time, a rich condensation of symbols of the diabolical and the erotic and their repression; the trap is both a female object and the means of destroying sexual temptation”.⁹

Though it wears a fur coat, the misogyny woven into the lining of this tradition is as clear as the female lasciviousness it purports to describe. However unfair it is to Gertrude, she is to her son this “unchaste female”, virtually Alciatus's emblem of female lasciviousness. As Hamlet urges his mother Gertrude to amend what he considers her lack of chastity and sanctity, “Repent what's past, avoid what is to come,” (3.4.151), he often uses terms that suggest the diabolic as well as the erotic associations of the mouse. Her lust is like “Rebellious hell”, mutinying “in a matron's bones”. This “Devil” “of habits” is lust as well as custom, and Claudius seems to be, and to bear, the “devil” lust that “cozened” Gertrude “at hoodman-blind”. If she can just “[r]efrain to-night”, Hamlet says, “that shall lend a kind of easiness / To the next abstinence; the next more easy”. Not to repress her sexuality, yielding to Claudius's “damned fingers”, is yielding to the devil himself. With practice she will be able to “either … the devil, or throw him out / With wondrous potency” (3.4.77-84, 162-171). I would conjecture “trip” or “trap” against the more traditional “curb” or “quell” for the missing verb here, especially since Hamlet names her “mouse” and asks her to help him trap Claudius at the end of this conversation: “Let the bloat king tempt you again to bed, / Pinch wanton on your cheek, call you his mouse” (3.4.183-84). But Hamlet's fear that she will not be able to abstain from Claudius' bed even after all of his chastising words also confirms the lyric's picture of a woman with “no power to say him nay”.

The tension between Hamlet's perception and his mother's reality is emphasized by one of the most curious pieces of mouse-lore in Hamlet. St. Gertrude of Nivelle, a woman of great sanctity and absolute chastity, was well-known in England and throughout northern Europe because she stopped a plague of mice. She was for this reason invoked as often as the more material vermifuge wormwood against rats and mice, and is pictured iconographically with mice running around her or on her crozier. One wonders if Shakespeare changed her name from Geruthe in Belleforest to emphasize Hamlet's confusion?¹⁰ Hamlet's “That's Wormwood” just as the Player-Queen is about to “protest too much” her eternal fidelity to her first husband could inject more mouse-lore into his relationship with Gertrude (3.2.173; 221-22). Wormwood is of course both rotten timber and the bitter Biblical taste of contrition or mortification. It is also according to Topsell a common herbal remedy against mice: “Wormwood laid among clothes, and skins, defend them from mice; and also the water of wormwood sod, sprinkled upon clothes, hath the same operation” (p. 512). Hamlet seems to hope that once the “mouse” of Gertrude's lasciviousness is out, once his own “wormwood” has begun to have its shriving way with his mother, he will be able to persuade her to be wormwood as well as taste and use it, to repel the mouse of her own lust and Claudius in whom it resides.¹¹

Oedipal impulses compete with self-righteous ones as Hamlet perceives his mother as the paradoxical combination of subject and object of temptation, attraction and repulsion of lust. He seems to see her at once as the snare that catches the devil Claudius (and the son Hamlet?) in lust, and snared herself in the same devil's mousetrap. She is a potentially repellent wormwood who tastes in her own mouth its corrective gall even while inspiring Hamlet's galling words. In most productions, Hamlet's repulsion and attraction are blazoned across the stage or screen in the looming bed on which they often perform some enigmatic rite. Only in some productions, most notably the Olivier Hamlet, does Gertrude cool towards Claudius after the bedroom scene, apparently as a direct result of Hamlet's shriving. The 1982 Time-Life BBC videotape is I think more characteristic, where Gertrude remains Patrick Stewart's mouse. In almost every case Hamlet's perception of his mother's demonic sexuality competes interestingly with her more modest representation on the stage. Commonly her own allegiance remains as painfully divided as Hamlet's relationship to her.

THE LASCIVIOUS AND DESTRUCTIVE CLAUDIUS

In Shakespeare's Henry V the destructiveness of the mouse is thought of as underhanded, secretive work, sometimes connected to human thievery; the “weasel Scot” “[c]omes sneaking, and so sucks her princely eggs, / Playing the mouse in absence of the cat” (1.2.170-72). “Mouse” can also be a verb meaning “to ransack, rummage, pillage”: “They have rifled and mowsed the cofer by a false key thei made” (1589) (OED 2 Mouse 4). Whiting cites an English proverb about destructiveness from 1546, “A mouse in time may bite a cable in two” (M738). In Troilus and Cressida Nestor is similarly called “that stale old mouse-eaten dry cheese” (5.4.9-10). Sometimes the mouse's destructiveness takes on especially sacrilegious, even diabolical overtones. Noah, according to Riegler, had to throw his glove at a mouse that was gnawing away at the hull of the Ark, and Rowland illustrates it “nibbling the sacred host”, the communion wafer.¹²

In describing Claudius, Hamlet characteristically connects the lascivious and the destructive, the main characteristics that Alciatus, Shakespeare and the English proverbs all associate with the mouse. In fact, their pairing becomes something of a formula for understanding his mouse-uncle. Just before Hamlet decides to use the play as “the thing / Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king”, he calls Claudius a “Bloody, bawdy villain”, and then a “treacherous, lecherous” one for killing his father and marrying his mother. His act is both “remorseless” in its destructiveness and “kindless”, unnatural, in its heedless, incestuous lechery. We hear another reference to this pair of sins in the line “Upon whose property and most dear life / A damned defeat was made” (2.2.590-91, 565-66, 555-56). In Hamlet's eyes Gertrude as well as the kingdom is the erotic property, his father's the diabolically destroyed life. Finally, in Act 5, Claudius is called “incestuous, murd'rous damned Dane” by Hamlet and “carnal, bloody, and unnatural” (5.2.314, 370) by Horatio. Earlier in the same scene Hamlet describes Claudius as “He that hath killed my king, and whored my mother” (5.2.64). Claudius is “Bloody, bawdy villain”, and “treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain”; he has “killed” and “whored”; he is “incestuous, murderous”, “carnal, bloody”. Such concise and formulaic statements of the destructive and lascivious impulses in this Claudius reinforce Hamlet's obsession with his uncle as the perfect quarry for a mousetrap.

The ghost of Hamlet's father is similarly fixated on Claudius's combination of lechery and treachery. He calls him “that incestuous, that adulterate beast”, who “won to his shameful lust / The will of my most seeming-virtuous queen”. Claudius is “lewdness”, “lust”, “garbage” in the same sequence. Denmark's bed is called “A couch for luxury and damned incest” (1.5.42, 45-46, 54-57, 83). At the same time that Hamlet is hearing what his father's ghost describes as Gertrude's “lust” and “luxury” with Claudius, he learns of his destruction of his father's body and the imperilment of his soul. “The leperous distilment […] / […] a most instant tetter barked about / Most lazar-like with vile and loathsome crust / All my smooth body”, and left me “Unhouseled, disappointed, unaneled, / No reck'ning made, but sent to my account / With all my imperfections on my head” (1.5.64, 71-73, 77-79). Hamlet hears of this lechery and destructiveness, and he believes. As late as 4.4.56-57 the formula still holds: “How stand I then, / That have a father killed, a mother stained?” Treacherous, lecherous Claudius is a memory that never leaves “the book and volume of [Hamlet's] brain” or his father's (1.5.103).

Claudius shares this dual perception. To Polonius's “’Tis too much proved, that with devotion's visage / And pious action we do sugar o'er / The devil himself” (3.1.47-49), Claudius replies:

How smart a lash that speech doth give my conscience!
The harlot's cheek, beautied with plast'ring art,
Is not more ugly to the thing that helps it
Than is my deed to my most painted word.

(3.1.50-53)

In this self-indictment Claudius admits killing his own brother and covering it up, sugaring it o'er, with the “plast'ring art” of the harlot. But though experiencing “The Mousetrap” may remind Claudius of his sexual as well as his political guilt, the king is more concerned about his treachery than his lechery as a result of seeing the play. He mentions the queen as one of the “effects for which I did the murder”, but the “rank” offense, the crime that “smells to heaven”, the “primal eldest curse” is Cain's sin, “A brother's murder” (3.3.54, 36-38). Catching Claudius's conscience in that treachery is also the primary purpose of Hamlet's strategy. It is “murder, though it have no tongue, [which] will speak”, and “the murder of my father” (2.2.579, 581) that he will play before his uncle. Claudius feels deep remorse after “The Mousetrap”, but “Though inclination be as sharp as will” he says that he cannot give up “th'effects” of his sin, the sexual and political property he has gained by killing his brother. Thus in the midst of his apparent moment of honest contrition, honest self-appraisal, a moment of “purging” close to “heaven” in Hamlet's mistaking eyes, Claudius is still ironically self-deceived. By confusing “can” and “will” he implies that he is unable to repent, rather than unwilling. But he will not repent. Therefore his prayer, beyond Hamlet's wildest hopes, “Has no relish of salvation in't”. Though Claudius's “heels may kick at heaven”, “his soul may be as damned and black / As hell, whereto it goes” (3.3.39, 54, 85, 74, 65-66, 92-95). Even without Hamlet's help, Claudius is hell-bound.

Of the dumb-show to “The Mousetrap”, Hamlet tells Ophelia “This is miching mallecho; it means mischief” (3.2.131-32). Is Hamlet referring here not only to his own mischief but also to the mouse-thief of his father's life, crown and wife, and of his own hopes? Hanmer thought it meant “secret, covered, hidden iniquity”, from the Spanish malhecho. So did Malone (misdeed). Warburton preferred lying in wait for the poisoner, from the eponym Malhechor (who is probably a criminal rather than a poisoner). Capell suggests an ill-looking, munching animal, compared to the mean figure of the poisoner in the dumb-show, and paralleling the Iniquity figure from the moralities.¹³ In Henry IV, Part 1 a similar micher munches blackberries (2.4.389-390). Combining these readings could yield “munching mischief”, with Claudius as the muncher. Interestingly, Robert Herrick once called such a stealing, sneaking creature a “miching mouse”, a phrase reminiscent of Hamlet's description of the “miching mallecho” of the murderer in the dumb-show. Whatever “mallecho” refers to, nonsense, mischief, poisoning, or something yet undiscovered, “miching” can definitely refer to the secretive destroying or theft of a mouse. But Hamlet could also be referring to himself and the play as the truant means to reverse the wrongs of the sneaking pilferer Claudius. This would support the image pattern of undermining the underminer, hoisting the engineer with his own petar (3.4.207-8), a secretive destruction that may be the mole's work as well as the mouse's. The “vicious mole of nature” (1.4.24) may then be the imperfection all must carry, even Hamlet, imaged as the underground destructiveness of these rodents that were associated with mice in the symbolic contours of the Renaissance mind.¹⁴ Once again, Hamlet seems both mouse and mouser in this ingenious imagery.

HAMLET AS MOUSE AND MOUSER

One of Hamlet's first insults of Claudius is the cryptic “I am too much in the sun” (1.2.67). We usually assume he means that he is closer than he wants to be, in kin if not in kind, to this new father-king, the sun of Denmark, and this is surely one of Hamlet's meanings. But in the same scene Hamlet also calls his father “Hyperion” to Claudius's “satyr” (1.2.140). Hyperion is the father of Helios, the sun-god who is identified with Apollo by the fifth century B.C. Is Hamlet playing Apollo to his father's Hyperion? One of the names by which Apollo (Iliad 1.39) is known, “Sminthius”, means “mouse-killer”. Like the St. Gertrude we mentioned earlier, Apollo eliminated a plague of mice to earn this epithet. Hamlet shares Apollo's idealized nature, his love of philosophy, his inculcation of virtue.¹⁵ Does he also share with him this role of exterminator? He certainly hopes to rid Denmark of its rodent-king. The connections are as provocative as they are unexpected.

There are grounds more relative than this. Predators of mice like the cat and the hawk and the owl occur in Hamlet in obscure but potentially threatening places. Hamlet's “The cat will mew” (5.1.279) during Ophelia's funeral promises the reassertion of the proper order of things, good triumphing over evil, morality and hierarchy restored. In Henry V the absent cat is understood as this sort of mice-warden (1.2.170-72). But pictures of gleeful mice (or rats) dancing around caged cats embody the same reversal of natural order that now seems to reign in Denmark. In the epigram in Geffrey Whitney's emblem book, for example, these mice are called “the wicked sort”, the trapped cats “worthy men”. Even Dürer's little mouse in “The Fall of Man” is still held by the tail under Adam's foot, though he looks ready to spring loose as soon as Eve takes the serpent's proffered apple. The cat there looks languid; perhaps before the fall he knew nothing of mice, or of the need to catch them.¹⁶ Hamlet's “I know a hawk from a handsaw” is similarly elusive and threatening, possibly connecting competent predation and pruning with a carpenter's competence to tear down and rebuild. Hamlet's manipulative playfulness with Polonius about the weasel-shaped cloud (2.2.370; 3.2.364) adds another mouse-predator to the cat and the hawk. Topsell tells us that the weasel was the mouse's worst enemy, “not only more inclined to hunt after them, than the cat, but […] more terrible also unto them” (p. 508).

The cat-like, teasing method in Hamlet's madness is nowhere more clearly revealed than when he also refers to a mouse-bane just before “The Mousetrap”. begins. The king asks “How fares our cousin Hamlet?” Hamlet replies, “Excellent, i'faith, of the chameleon's dish” (3.2.89-90). Now the chameleon was thought, as Maplet and Topsell both reveal, to eat air,¹⁷ and so Hamlet is certainly referring to all of the false promises in the air of Denmark as well as Claudius's deceptive coloration. But Topsell tells us that chameleon (OED Chameleon 3) is also a potent mouse-poison: “The juice of the root of the herb Camelion, mixed with water and oil, draweth mice unto it, and killeth them by tasting thereof, if they drink not presently” (p. 512). Hamlet would indeed “fare” well if this mouse who is soon to be caught in “The Mousetrap” were drawn to eat of the chameleon's dish; unfortunately, their eating of death is almost simultaneous.

Oddly, mouse could also have had medicinal uses for Hamlet and his father. Topsell tells us, for example, that “the flesh of a mouse is hot and soft, […] and doth expel black and melancholy choler”. As Hamlet says of “my melancholy”, the devil “is very potent with such spirits” (2.2.588). But if young Hamlet could use some of this medicine, Topsell gives us three good reasons why Old Hamlet could also. First, “Mice being cut and placed into wounds which have been bitten by Serpents, […] do […] cure and perfectly heal them”. Old Hamlet calls his poisoner “The serpent that did sting thy father's life”. Second, as a result of Old Hamlet's poisoning, “a most instant tetter barked about / Most lazar-like with vile and loathsome crust / All my smooth body”. According to Topsell, “The dust of a mouse pounded and beaten to powder, and mixed with a certain oil, is very good and wholesome, for those which are grieved with a tettor or scab which may overrun their whole body”. Finally, mouse is also considered good for “pain in his ears” (pp. 514-16). Claudius, of course, “did pour / The lep'rous distilment” “into the porches” of Old Hamlet's ears (1.5.38, 71-73, 63-64).

Art historian James Snyder connects Joseph's mousetraps in the Merode Altarpiece to Joseph's apparent unimportance to Satan: “The marriage of Mary and Joseph was staged to make the miraculous birth of Christ less conspicuous to Satan by hiding the fact of his divine parentage. According to Saint Augustine, the marriage took place to fool the devil just as mice are fooled by the bait of the trap.¹⁸ Hamlet, playing the fool or madman with Polonius, Claudius, Ophelia and Gertrude just before the performance of his own ”Mousetrap”, hopes similarly to disarm his adversaries by exaggerating his own weakness and asserting therefore his implausibility as an avenger. The second of Hamlet's two carpenter images, “There's a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough—hew them how we will—”, also connects Hamlet with Joseph as two carpenters humbly acquiescing in the superior craftsmanship of providence.¹⁹ Hamlet's “I must be idle” underlines this strategy of disarming humbleness. But the many negatives of Claudius's “Nor what he spake […] / Was not like madness.” suggest that he is alerted, not disarmed, by the feigning conversation with Ophelia: “I do doubt the hatch and the disclose / Will be some danger;” (5.2.10-11; 3.2.87; 3.1.163-64, 66-67). He will not be an easy prey for Hamlet's mousetrap.

Punctuated as it is with the poisoned rapier and the poisoned cup, the final scene illustrates one last time how often the play's imagery of ironic reversal is associated with iconography of mouse and mousetrap. The rapier, which can symbolize honor but also sexuality and murder, is here the rodent king's means to pervert honor in a last underhanded plot of destructive treachery. The cup, emblem of fellowship and forgiveness but also of gluttony, serves Claudius's mouse-like drunkenness until the end, and then joins the rapier in more secretive and destructive mischief.²⁰ Even Claudius's mouse Gertrude dies by coming between the incensed points of these fearful adversaries. “Not a mouse stirring” is the tenth line of the play. In Hamlet the trap eventually silences all of them. Doebler finds clarity and closure as he finishes his exploration of the imagery of mouse and mousetrap in Hamlet. Hamlet is the redeemer; Claudius is the villain; Gertrude is discreetly omitted from the picture. But to me the transparent paradox that the trapper must himself die to purify a diseased kingdom, “set it right”, (1.5.189) is not the play's last word.

The mousetrap trope becomes instead part of a pattern of images in Hamlet that poises the clarity of poetic justice against a universe of dark unknowing. On the one hand Laertes proclaims himself caught “as a woodcock to mine own springe”, “justly killed with mine own treachery.” Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who would “sweep [Hamlet's] way / And marshall [him] to knavery.”, will instead serve as “sport to have the enginer / Hoist with his own petar”. Hamlet “will delve one yard below their mines / And blow them at the moon.” Polonius “find'st to be too busy is some danger.” Finally, Claudius is “hurt” with his own “envenomed” point. But as Horatio summarizes the play we are challenged to question Laertes' naive and dying notion that Claudius is “justly served”, even if “It is a poison tempered by himself” that kills him, and forced to look again at Hamlet's reassuring if momentary sense of “a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough—hew them how we will—”. To Horatio the “judgments” seem “accidental” and the “slaughters” “casual”. What “purposes” there are, in the human universe, at least, are “mistook”. Horatio may hope of Hamlet that “flights of angels sing thee to thy rest”; but neither angels nor providence are asserted to govern similarly these “carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts” on earth. Hamlet is part of Horatio's bloody summary. Mouse and mouser are all carried off in the end by “this fell sergeant, Death,” Augustine's “Bailiff”,²¹ and we are left deeply moved but also darkling.

One last proverbial tradition concerning the mouse would seem apposite to this troublesome denouement. In 1629 T. Adams says in a sermon: “The empiric to cure the fever, destroys the patient; so the wise man, to burn the mice, set on fire his barn.” In 1816 Wolcot (P. Pindar) echoes this commonplace in his 2nd Epistle to Mrs. Clarke (WKS. 4:446), when he says, “Who, but a Bedlamite, would fire his house / To wreak his vengeance on a pilfering mouse”.²² One answer, apparently, is Hamlet. His reluctant doctoring loses a lot of patients, breaks a lot of bones, to reset time's dislocated joint. Is he then a Bedlamite? Hamlet the obsessed son and spiritual physician may think that only contribution, the wormwood of mortification, can cool those “fires that mutine in a matron's bones”. Hamlet the moral and political exterminator may hope that his complex arsenal might at once expel the mouse-like lust in his too-lascivious mother and deter the object of her lust, the devilish, mouse-king Claudius, thus killing two mice with one application. Hamlet says he “must be cruel only to be kind.” and he and Laertes also apparently “exchange forgiveness” (3.4.179; 5.2.318, 321), but neither the prince nor his audience can know how his wholesale destructiveness will weigh against the cure in the balance. The inner mystery in this play is almost as dark as the outer. On earth at least, here if not hereafter, Hamlet is punished along with his victims in his double role. And though he promises his mother earlier to “answer well / The death I gave” (3.4.177-78), such answers are not much in evidence in Denmark's dark world of mice and mousers.

Far from “plucking out the heart of his mystery”, this learning impresses us with the unfathomable complexity of Hamlet's mind and his heart, as he plays, and is, Gertrude's loving but imperfect son and Denmark's scourge and minister. His lowest note would be the mischievous schoolboy, the sadistic spoilsport, the frustrated prince and the obsessive reformer, revelling in the public and private embarrassment and bitterness he is causing the mice Gertrude and Claudius to suffer. The “top of [his] compass” would be Hamlet's enactment of the deepest caring and the profoundest ministry to the “black and grained spots” of his mother's immortal soul. But even in that ministry there is something rank, choleric and diseased. We may play upon Hamlet even as we tease so “much music”, such “excellent voice” (3.2.353-54) out of Shakespeare's uses of mouse and mousetrap lore. We cannot thereby know Hamlet, any more than Hamlet can know himself. In Denmark's unweeded garden it is as hard to distinguish mouse from mouser as it is to know which plants are poisonous, and which medicinal.

Notes

1. The Complete Pelican Shakespeare, (ed. by) Alfred Harbage (New York: Viking, 1984), 3.2.229; subsequently cited in text.

2. Mousetrap 1b and Tropically 1 in J.A. Simpson and E.S.C. Weiner, The Oxford English Dictionary, (2nd ed.) (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989); subsequently cited as OED. On the “trap” “trope” pun, see A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare, Hamlet, (ed. by) H.H. Furness (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippencott, 1905), 1: 255.

3. John Doebler, “The Play Within the Play: the Muscipula Diaboli in Hamlet”, SQ 23 (1972), 162-69; see also Meyer Schapiro's classic, “‘Muscipula Diaboli’, The Symbolism of the Merode Altarpiece”, Art Bulletin 27 (1945), 182-83, 186.

4. “Swine” is also one of Luther's favorite metaphors for our uncontrolled desires; see Index, (ed. by) Joel W. Lunder in Luther's Works (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986), for over thirty references. See “Hamlet's ‘Too, Too Solid Flesh’” in The Sixteenth Century Journal 25 (1994), 609-22, for my argument that Luther's idea of the prudence or wisdom of the flesh might gloss Hamlet's problems with doing and knowing perfectly in a fallen world.

5. As Cherrell Guilfoyle says, Shakespeare's Play Within Play (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Pubs., 1990), p. 9, Hamlet often suffers from the “delusion of female wantonness”. John King, Tudor Royal Iconography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 183, and Arthur McGee, The Elizabethan Hamlet (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), pp. 152-53, remind us of its biblical heritage.

6. Secular Lyrics of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, (ed. by) Russell Hope Robbins (Oxford: Clarendon, 1955), p. 20.

7. Andreas Alciatus, Emblemata cum commentariis (Padua, 1621; first published 1531) (New York: Garland, 1976), pp. 348-49; and Edward Topsell, The History of Four-Footed Beasts (London: William Jaggard, 1607), pp. 505-6. See also Pliny, Natural History, trans. Philemon Holland (London: A. Aslip, 1601), pp. 304-5.

8. Bartlett Jere Whiting, Proverbs, Sentences, and Proverbial Sayings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), W530; The Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs (3rd. rev. ed.) F.P. Wilson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970), p. 910.

9. R. Riegler, “Maus”, in Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens, (ed. by) Bächtold-Stäubli (Berlin & Leipzig: W. de Gruyter, 1934-35) 6: 31-59; Schapiro, p. 186.

10. Riegler, 6: 39; S. Baring-Gould The Lives of the Saints, (rev. ed.) (Edinburgh: J. Grant, 1914), 1:viii, says, “People forget the age and parentage of St. Gertrude, but they remember the mice running up her staff.” For another illustration see Baring-Gould 3: 306.

11. See my article “‘Wormwood, Wormwood’,” ShJb (1993), 150-62.

12. Riegler 6: 50; Beryl Rowland, Animals With Human Faces (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press), 1973, p. 129.

13. See Hamlet Variorum, 1: 243-4, and OED 1 Mitching.

14. Topsell affirms this belief by disagreement (p. 498).

15. See Oxford Classical Dictionary, (ed. by) M. Cary and others (Oxford: Clarendon, 1949), pp. 68, 375, 445.

16. Geffrey Whitney, A Choice of Emblems (Leyden: Christopher Plantyn, 1586), p. 222; Emblemata: Handbuch zur Sinnbildkunst des XVI. und XVII. Jahrhunderts, (ed. by) Arthur Henkel und Albrecht Schöne (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 1967), pp. 590-99. Erwin Panofsky, Albrecht Dürer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1948), 2: fig. 117.

17. See Pelican gloss; see also John Maplet, A Green Forest, or a Natural History (London: Henry Denham, 1567), p. 76, and Topsell, p. 114; Topsell is, however, skeptical.

18. James Snyder, Northern Renaissance Art (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1985), p. 121. On this metaphor in Augustine's writing and its history see J. Rivière, Le dogme de la rédemption chez saint Augustin (Paris, 1933), pp. 117 ff., 320-38, cited in Schapiro, “A Note on the Merode Altarpiece”, Art Bulletin 41 (1959), 327-28.

19. On Joseph's humble acquiescence to God's will, see Luther, Sermons on the Gospel of St. John (1957), 22: 76. On the association of carpentry tools with humility, see Luther, Selected Psalms II (1956), 13: 378; and Lectures on Genesis (1970), 6: 133, 157 (all ed. by) Jaroslav Pelikan, in Works (St. Louis: Concordia).

20. “Drunk as a mouse” is a common simile from the 14th to the 16th century. Whiting gives examples from Chaucer, Lydgate, Greene, Skelton, and three others.

21. 5.2.295-96; 3.4.205-10, 34; 5.2.310-17, 10-11, 369-74, 349, 325. So Schapiro, “Muscipula”, p. 182, translates Augustine's “quasi praepositus mortis”, when, speaking of the devil's mousetrap, he says “He has rejoiced in Christ's death, like a bailiff of death.”

22. The Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs, (ed. by) William George Smith, rev. Sir Paul Harvey (Oxford: Clarendon, 1948), p. 69.