SOURCE: Jacobs, Henry E. “Shakespeare, Revenge Tragedy, and the Ideology of the Memento Mori. Shakespeare Studies 21 (1993): 98-108.

[In the following essay, Jacobs argues that, unlike his contemporaries who codified their skepticism of religious orthodoxy in the memento mori tradition in their plays, Shakespeare actually remained true to the medieval tradition and to orthodoxy in his revenge plays.]

The severed hand, the skull beneath the skin, the blood-soaked handkerchief, and other such gruesome relics of human carnage show up repeatedly on the English stage between 1585 and 1640 in Renaissance revenge tragedy.¹ The memento mori of a revenger may be quite literal: Hieronimo keeps Horatio's rotting corpse, Hoffman preserves his father's skeleton, and Vendice clutches Gloriana's death's head.² These tableaux of the living and the dead are derived, at least in part, from well-established medieval traditions. In most cases, they represent a displacement of orthodox religious ideology and a superscription of the perverted and subversive religion of revenge over normative religious discourse. Shakespeare's use of the emblem and the tradition, however, is remarkable in its fidelity to medieval tradition and the orthodox discourse of the memento mori.

I

The God-centered orientation of the Middle Ages was expressed in a theoretical contempt for this world and a preference for the next. While both concerns emphasized the right way to live and to die, a notable aspect of the latter was an ever-growing fixation on the inevitability and horrors of death. The medieval fascination with death is well-documented; its pervasiveness in the early Middle Ages is illustrated in such texts as Notker's Memento Mori (c. 1060), Helinant's Vers de la mort (1194-97), and Pope Innocent III's De contemptu mundi (c.1200).

Throughout the Middle Ages, this fixation on death grew more focused and vivid, more emotional and realistic, and more pervasive. By the fifteenth century, English and Continental society were consumed with images and shows of death. In The Waning of the Middle Ages, J. Huizinga observes that “no other epoch … laid so much stress as the expiring Middle Ages on the thought of death” (124).³ Similarly, Willard Farnham notes that “healthy people were writing memento mori and picturing the death's head over their fireplaces, on articles of daily use, wherever they would be likely to look while they were immersed in the business of living” (39).

In the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, this fascination with death was expressed in three characteristic modes: the “genre” of the Ars moriendi, the Dance of Death, and the meditation on death. The Ars moriendi, in either textual or visual form, illustrates the temptation and ultimate salvation of the dying man. At the close of one of the shorter illustrated versions, we see the powers of salvation drive out the devils: “Moriens … used his free will responsibly, ‘made a good death,’ and found eternal salvation” (Beaty, 4). The Dance of Death presents a series of images in which “emperor and pope, empress and king, everyone down to the lowest peasant and child … is led away by dancing and grinning skeleton” (Spencer, 4). The symbolic iconography of the “dance” spread throughout England and the Continent in the form of frescoes, carvings, woodcuts, and even masques (Boase, 104). The third characteristic form—the meditation on the instant of death, the putrefaction of the body after death, or the death's head—is most germane to Hamlet and to revenge tragedy in general. In these meditative exercises, the same pattern is repeated over and over. Meditation on the moment of death and the decaying corpse leads to the contemplation of one's own sins, judgment after death, and ultimately, the Last Judgment and salvation.⁴ “To think of death was to think of sin, and to think of sin was the only way to purify the soul” (Spencer, 6).

Taken in their totality and reduced to the common elements, the late medieval treatment of death establishes a series of orthodox religious doctrines that may be summarized as follows: (1) the inevitability of death; (2) the egalitarian universality of death; (3) the horror of the corpse and the grave; (4) the inexorable connection between sin and death; (5) the need to thrust aside worldly things; and (6) the movement beyond death and sin to judgment and salvation. The tradition thus creates a specific ideological matrix within which the literal memento mori can be seen. This discourse suggests that the memento mori should remind us of death, bring us to the contemplation of our own sins, detach us from the world, and move us beyond death to thoughts of God and redemption. Thus, the memento mori should re-present social and religious ideology that directs the contemplative individual into normative and codified patterns of meditation which spell out a logical and authorized progression from death to salvation.

II

This, however, is far from the case in most Renaissance revenge tragedies. Most revenge tragedians who employ death relics in their plays intentionally pervert the discourse of the tradition and obliterate the encoded orthodox religious ideology. In Kyd's Spanish Tragedy (c.1592), for example, we find two subverted forms of the memento mori. Although vengeance ostensibly begins with the appearance of the Ghost of Andrea and Revenge in the induction, the central revenge plot does not get underway until Horatio is hanged and stabbed in act 2. When Hieronimo discovers the body (2.5.), he immediately creates two remembrances of revenge, each of which we might term a memento vindictae. One of these is the handkerchief soaked in Horatio's blood that Hieronimo removes from the body: “See'st thou this handkercher besmeared with blood? / It shall not from me till I take revenge” (2.5.51-52).⁵ The second and more gruesome memento is Horatio's body, which Hieronimo vows to keep unburied until he gains vengeance:

See'st thou those wounds that yet bleed fresh?
I'll not entomb them till I have revenged.
Then will I joy amidst my discontent,
Till then my sorrow never shall be spent.

(2.5.53-56)

At the end of The Spanish Tragedy, Horatio's body appears once again. We must assume, I think, that Hieronimo has kept the corpse at home as a memento vindictae which goaded him, not toward the contemplation of mortality and salvation, but rather toward vengeance. Hieronimo's production of Soliman and Perseda ends with the revelation that mimetic death has become the real thing, and the body is transformed into a sacred relic that justifies all:

Behold the reason urging me to this: [Shows his dead son.]
See here my show, look on this spectacle.
… hope, heart, treasure, joy, and bliss
All fled, failed, died, yea, all decayed with this.

(4.4.88-95)

For Hieronimo, then, the memento mori becomes a visual and visceral encoding of the religion of revenge rather than a symbolic inscription of orthodox religious ideology. The blood-soaked handkerchief and the rotting corpse become the central relics in an inverted religion that displaces God with man and authorizes personal blood vengeance.

We find a similar perversion and subversion of religious discourse in Henry Chettle's The Tragedy of Hoffman (c. 1602). Here, the revenger walks on stage, commits himself to vengeance, and reveals his memento vindictae to the audience:

Hence clouds of melancholy;
I'll be no longer subject to your schisms.
But thou, dear soul, whose nerves and arteries
In dead resounding summon up revenge,
And thou shall ha't; be but appeased sweet hearse,
The dead remembrance of my living father,
And with a heart as air, swift as thought,
I'll execute justly in such a cause.

(1.1.1-8)

While Clois Hoffman speaks these lines, he “strikes open a curtain” and reveals the bare “anatomy” or skeleton of his father hanging in a tree. The father was legally executed for piracy by having his brains burned out with a red-hot iron crown, having his flesh cut away, and being hanged in chains on the public gallows. The play never makes clear at quite which point in this process Hans Hoffman died. In any event, Clois has maintained his relic with all its symbolic attributes intact: the chains and the iron crown still adorn the skeleton.

The degree to which Hoffman cancels orthodox discourse and substitutes his own religion of vengeance is emphasized in his reaction to heavenly signs. During his first apostrophe to the skeleton, Hoffman hears “thunder and lightning.” He reads into this celestial text divine authorization to strike swiftly:

See, the powers of heaven in apparitions,
And frightful aspects as incensed,
That I thus tardy am to do an act
Which justice and a father's death excites …

(1.1.11-14)

Thus, Clois commits himself to a self-sanctioned course of ritual murders in which he will execute both the judges who condemned his father and their families.

Hoffman's first act of vengeance similarly reflects the extent to which the religion of vengeance has supplanted the orthodox discourse of the memento mori. His first victim, the son of the duke of Luningberg, is fortuitously shipwrecked on the coast of Prussia near Clois's cave. Hoffman captures Prince Otho, tells the history of his father's execution, and reveals the memento vindictae as a justification of the subsequent murder: “Look, Luningberg, 'tis done; / Behold a father hanged up by his son” (1.1.191-92). Hoffman then ritualistically duplicates his father's execution as he dispatches the prince of Luningberg; he burns out Otho's brains with a “burning crown” and strips off the flesh. Finally, he presents Otho's flayed corpse to the skeleton of his father and to the shrine of vengeance as a votive offering: “The first step to revenge, this scene is done; / Father, I offer thee thy murderer's son” (1.1.238-39).⁶ Later, in the third scene, he actually hangs Otho's skeleton in chains next to his “long injured father's naked bones” (1.3.406), thus completing the ritual of duplication.

The perversion of the memento mori and the ideology it should represent reaches new heights (or depths) in Tourneur's The Revenger's Tragedy (1605-6). Vindice, like Hoffman, opens the play accompanied by his icon of death; he walks on stage holding the skull of Gloriana, his mistress, who was poisoned by the duke nine years earlier. Initially, Vindice plays the presenter; he introduces us to the nobles passing over the stage and to the skull. The opening monologue thus moves directly from a description of the corrupt courtiers to an apostrophe to the death's head:

Thou sallow picture of my poison'd love,
My study's ornament, thou shell of death,
Once the bright face of my betrothed lady …

(1.1.14-16)

This vision of Vindice clutching Gloriana's skull seems to carry all the symbolic inscriptions of orthodox religious ideology. Indeed, many scholars view it as an emblem of traditional medieval discourses. Peter Mullany, citing Theodore Spencer (238-41) and L. G. Salingar (402-22), asserts that Gloriana's skull “combines the themes of death, corruption, and judgment drawn from the medieval and Renaissance traditions of the Dance of Death, the memento mori, from homilitic and moral tradition, and from morality drama” (36). Parts of Vindice's first speech to the skull seem to support this interpretation. The skull has been the focus and the object of his contemplation for nine years: his “study's ornament.” Such a perspective, however, fails to recognize the extent to which Vindice cancels or erases the very medieval discourses that the skull should encode. This “ornament” has not led him to contemplate his own sins, death, judgment, and salvation. Rather, it has become a memento vindictae, a sacred relic in Vindice's worship of revenge.

This displacement is hinted at in the three lines quoted above. Vindice calls the skull “thou shell of death.” The near-homophonous pun on “shell” and “shall” converts Gloriana's skull from an object to a text that articulates the central commandment of the revenger's catechism; the phrase becomes the single “thou shall” of death. Cancellation and superscription are also evident in the parallel rhetorical and psychological movements of Vindice's opening speech. He moves directly from an apostrophe to the skull and meditation on Gloriana's beauty and death to an explicit commitment to revenge:

Vengeance, thou murder's quit-rent, and whereby
Thou show'st thyself tenant to Tragedy,
O, keep thy day, hour, minute, I beseech,
For those thou hast determined!

(1.1.39-42)

This prayer to “Vengeance” is actually self-directed; as his name indicates, Vindice is both the spirit and the agent of revenge. The prayer thus displaces God, cancels the divine text of the memento mori, and replaces vengeance and Vindice at the center of a superscribed discourse of death. Like Hieronimo and Hoffman, Vindice turns the memento mori into the memento vindictae; his piece of dead flesh becomes the central relic in a perverted religious discourse that justifies his usurpation of God's place and authority.

But Vindice “out-Hieronimos” Hieronimo. His death's head—his memento vindictae—is more than simply a goad or a reminder. It moves beyond the symbolic encoding of the ideology of revenge to become the instrument of vengeance. Vindice, playing Piato the pander, arranges an assignation for the duke. He dresses out the skull, envenoms the teeth of the “bony lady,” and leads his victim to a literal kiss of death. Before the deadly rendezvous begins, Vindice explains to his brother the ironic and perverse justice of his methods:

I have not fashion'd this only for show
And useless property; no, it shall bear a part
E'en in its own revenge. This very skull,
Whose mistress the duke poison'd, with this drug,
The mortal curse of the earth, shall be reveng'd
In the like strain, and kiss his lips to death.

(3.5.100-105)

And it falls out just as planned: the duke kisses the lady with the “grave look” and is poisoned. As he dies, he is forced to face the death's head and acknowledge the consummation of revenge. Thus, we see the ultimate perversion of the memento mori and the orthodox discourse it encodes. No longer a key to meditation or a text that points toward the nexus of sin, death, and salvation, the skull becomes a relic of death and vengeance; the sign that saves becomes the kiss that kills.

III

This pattern of cancellation and superscription is duplicated in many other revenge tragedies, including Marston's Antonio's Revenge (c. 1601), where Antonio creates a highly ritualized religion of vengeance centered on three crucial relics: the body, the coffin, and the tomb of his murdered father. The singular exception to this pattern, however, is Shakespeare's Hamlet, for the prince's contemplation of Yorick's skull remains consistent and conformative with the medieval traditions and the subtext of the memento mori.

We should note, at the outset, that there is a difference in kind as well as effect between Yorick's skull and the memento mori discussed in connection with other revenge tragedies. Unlike Horatio's corpse or Hoffman's skeleton, Yorick's skull is not a dead remnant of the once-living flesh that must be avenged. Nevertheless, the meditative tableau and the icon of the skull derive from the same late medieval tradition as the other gruesome relics, and they evoke the same contextual discourse of religious ideology. In addition, it is possible and reasonable to view Yorick's skull as an emblematic object that holds the place of two significant others. On the one hand, it simultaneously displaces on the stage and replaces in the audience's imagination the skull we really want to see—the relic of the dead father. This association between the present skull of Yorick and the absent skull of Old Hamlet is supported, at least in part, by Avi Erlich's assertion that “Shakespeare may have viewed Yorick as an ancestral figure in Hamlet's life. In fact, we know that Yorick must have substituted for the absent, wayfaring King Hamlet as a father to the Prince” (139). On the other hand, the skull is literally displaced to accommodate Ophelia's corpse.

The connection between Hamlet's contemplation of the skulls and the medieval traditions of meditation and memento mori has drawn significant critical comment, most notably by Louis Martz and Harold Jenkins. Martz's observations are seminal:

The most striking aspect of all such meditations … is the full self-awareness of the vision: the eye of truth cuts aside all cant, looking with a grim, satirical humor upon all the follies of the world, seeing the worst of life and death with the poise of a detached, judicious intellect: the very poise of Hamlet in the gravediggers' scene.

(137)

Similarly, Jenkins asserts that the “passage on the skull … is especially reminiscent of one in a popular book of meditation by Luis de Grenada” (551). And Theodore Lidz sees traces of the Dance of Death in Hamlet's musings: “as if viewing a painting of the Dance of Death, Hamlet sees the skeleton beneath the trappings, the pride, the pretense, the skin of Everyman” (98). The scene and the phenomenon warrant further consideration, however, in the context of the counter-tradition established in revenge tragedy.

The remarkable feature of Hamlet's reactions to the skulls is the degree to which the meditative Prince re-presents and reinscribes the orthodox religious ideology of the memento mori tradition. This fidelity is even more remarkable given the corruption and subversion that the conventions of revenge tragedy and the “School of Kyd” (Bowers, 101) seem to countenance. The first two skulls that are disinterred (5.1.73 s.d. and 95 s.d.) bring Hamlet to traditional and orthodox considerations of death's universality and the uselessness of earthly possessions. He suggests that the first skull may have been a politician, courtier, or “Lord Such-a-one” (5.1.83). He identifies the second skull as that of a “lawyer” or “great buyer of land” and goes on to contemplate the emptiness of worldly chattels:

Hum, this fellow might be in's time a great buyer of land, with his statutes, his recognizances, his fines, his double vouchers, his recoveries. Is this the fine of his fines and the recovery of his recoveries, to have his fine pate full of fine dirt?

(101-6)

The question, of course, is rhetorical; Hamlet clearly understands that this is the inevitable “fine” or end of earthly delights.

When the gravedigger identifies the skull of Yorick, Hamlet is led still farther along in the traditional meditative process. Similarly, his reflections further underscore the orthodox religious ideologies of the memento mori. At this point, Hamlet considers the horror of death and the corruption of the body: “He hath bore me on his back a thousand times, and now—how abhorred in my imagination it is. My gorge rises at it” (5.1.179-82). Again, he is led to consider the vanity of earthly existence: “Where be your gibes now, your gambols, your songs, your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now to mock your own grinning?” (5.1.183-86). Finally, Hamlet moves on to contemplate the universal leveling power of death when he observes that Alexander and Caesar, like Yorick or any other corpse, are ultimately rendered dust, earth, and clay: “Imperious Caesar, dead and turn'd to clay, / Might stop a hole to keep the wind away” (5.1.206-7).

Beyond these immediate observations, Hamlet's meditation on Yorick's skull seems to have a traditional and ideologically normative impact on him. After the “gravedigger” scene, he is, at least in part, more prepared for death than for vengeance. This preparation is indicated symbolically in performance when Hamlet “leaps” into Ophelia's grave, grapples with Laertes, and calls for “Millions of acres” to be thrown on them (5.1.276). While the events may only indicate Hamlet's raging grief at Ophelia's death, the symbolism of leaping into the grave, an action justified by the stage direction in the First Quarto and centuries of performance practice, continues the linkage between Hamlet and death established in the meditation.

Hamlet's preparation for death, the authorized response to the ideology of the memento mori, is also conveyed in a subsequent conversation with Horatio. After Osric and an unnamed lord arrange the fencing match, Hamlet tells Horatio that he is ready:

If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come,
it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come.
The readiness is all.

(5.2.216-18)

Harold Jenkins glosses the “it” in this set of parallel phrases as “death” (470n). The “readiness” that Hamlet prizes thus indicates his own preparation for death.

Hamlet's meditation on the memento mori does not conform in every respect to the authorized patterns of thought mandated by the tradition. He does not, for example, contemplate the connection between sin and death. Nor does he move to an explicit consideration of his own sins, death, judgment, and salvation, although other parts of the play suggest that these considerations are much in his thoughts. Most important, however, is the degree to which his articulated contemplations re-present and reinscribe the orthodox vision/version of the religious ideology encoded in the memento mori. Hamlet does not obliterate the authorized discourse; he does not deface the text of the skull, and he does not turn the memento mori into a memento vindictae.

IV

We are left, at the end of this excursus, with two questions. First, how can we account for the perversion of the memento mori and the cancellation of its orthodox religious discourse in most English Renaissance revenge tragedy? And second, how can we account for Shakespeare's singular avoidance of this phenomenon? The answer to the first question is somewhat more accessible than the second. One solution to the general pattern is offered by Jonathan Dollimore, who argues that the plays themselves are subversive and that they “inscribe a subordinate viewpoint within a dominant one” (28). He goes on to assert that most Jacobean tragedy “subvert[s] providentialist ideology” (83) and “challenge[s] the basic premise of providentialism: … the idea of a teleologically encoded law governing the nature, identity, and interrelationship of all things” (107). Such a solution, while perhaps true in general, begs the question with reference to revenge tragedy. In these plays, the cancellation of orthodox religious doctrine stems from revenge itself rather than from a general subversive impulse in the drama. Revenge is the ultimate displacement of the God-centered discourse; it represents a personal usurpation of power that has already been appropriated explicitly by God (”Vindicta mihi,” Rom. 12:19) and implicitly by the church and the state. Revenge itself is thus a subversive and dislocating process that obliterates God-centered texts and recenters man as god-revenger. The cancellation of the discourse normally associated with the memento mori and the superscription of the ideology of revenge thus re-presents the greater and more radical subversion embodied in vengeance itself. Memento mori becomes memento vindictae to illustrate the corruptive and subversive power of the impulse toward personal revenge. The ideological message is clear and providentialist: revenge disrupts authorized ideology, and religious discourse is one of its first victims. The memento vindictae thus became an emblem of the ideological subversion inherent in personal blood vengeance.

The answer to the second question has more to do with Hamlet and its revenger-protagonist than it does with ideology. Unlike Hieronimo, Hoffman, or Vindice, Hamlet never abandons religious orthodoxy and he never fully commits himself to vengeance. His adherence to doctrinal orthodoxy is reflected in both his eschewing of suicide and his careful evaluation of the Ghost's status. And while he affirms the need to eliminate Claudius after the Ghost's accusations are confirmed, his attitude throughout might best be described as ambivalent. This ambivalence even shapes the catastrophe of the play. Here, Shakespeare radically breaks with tradition and allows Claudius (the villain) rather than Hamlet (the revenger) to establish the shape of events. Thus, the fatal fencing match, the envenomed foil, and the poison wine are all Claudius's (or Laertes') inventions; Hamlet remains reactive to the end. It is this ambivalence, coupled with Hamlet's religious scruples and philosophical introspection, that accounts for the sustained orthodoxy of Hamlet's treatment of the memento mori. Hamlet never creates a religion of vengeance. Thus, he feels no need to cancel the orthodox ideology of the death's-head or transform it into a relic of vengeance.

Notes

1. The research for this essay was made possible by grant number 1231 of the Research Grants Committee of The University of Alabama.

2. Throughout this essay, the term memento mori is used in its most literal sense to refer to physical reminders of death. In this sense, it usually signifies some portion of (dead) human anatomy, ranging from a skull to a complete skeleton and even an entire corpse. Occasionally, however, the term refers to a type of late medieval text in which death is “remembered” through the contemplation of dying, human mortality, the corruption of the flesh, and the like. In all cases, context clarifies which usage is intended.

3. In Death and Elizabethan Tragedy, Theodore Spencer makes a similar observation, noting that “more than any other period in history, the late Middle Ages were preoccupied with the thought of death” (3).

4. This pattern of meditative and psychological progress from death, corruption, and the corpse to sin and then to judgment and salvation is evident in Renaissance texts that offer instruction in meditation. Frey Luis de Granada's Book of Prayer and Meditation (1554, translated 1582) instructs us to devote each Wednesday night to a meditation on every aspect of death and sin. The second part of this meditation focuses vividly on the corruption of the rotting body and the “loathsomeness of our grave” (191). Thursday night's meditation moves on to the contemplation of the Last Judgment and salvation. Similar meditative patterns are found in Gaspar Loarte's The Exercise of a Christian Life (1579) and Saint Francois de Sales's Introduction to a Devout Life (1609).

5. The handkerchief has a convoluted and interesting history as a symbolic object representing a series of sequential discourses. It begins as a favor of love that Bel-Imperia gave Don Andrea; she recognizes it and tells Horatio the beginning of its story:

   I know the scarf, would he had kept it still,
   For had he lived he would have kept it still,
   And worn it for his Bel-Imperia's sake:
   For 'twas my favor at his last depart.

   (1.4.44-47)

   Horatio rescues the handkerchief from Don Andrea's corpse: “This scarf I plucked from off his lifeless arm, / And wear it in remembrance of my friend” (1.4.42-43). The transference thus cancels the amorous textuality of the handkerchief and turns it into a memento mori. Bel-Imperia, however, reinvests the scarf with some of its original significance when she awards it to Horatio: “But now wear thou it both for him and me, / For after him thou hast deserved it best” (1.4.48-49). At this point, the scarf bears a double encoding as a memento mori (“for him”) and a memento amoris (“for me”). Almost immediately, however, Bel-Imperia begins to subvert these inscriptions and transform the handkerchief into a memento vindictae as she contemplates vengeance against Don Balthazar and asserts that “second love shall further my revenge” (1.4.66). This is the “handkercher” that Hieronimo removes from Horatio's corpse and transforms into his own memento vindictae.

6. The couplet illustrates the heavy-handed metadramatic devices that Chettle imposes at the beginning of the play. As we might expect, these lines actually signal the end of the play's first scene. One line earlier, Clois calls the murder of Otho “but the prologue to the'nsuing play” (1.1.237). It is, in fact, the first of five successful murders.

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