[In the following essay, Srigley analyzes Hamlet's melancholy in light of Saxo's description of his powers of divination.]

For over two hundred years the nature and extent of Hamlet's madness has been discussed. It has been suggested that he was mad but pretending to be sane or, at the other extreme, that he was sane but feigning madness. In between there are various permutations on T. S. Eliot's statement that Hamlet was “less than mad, and more than feigning”. It now seems to be generally agreed that Hamlet's state lies somewhere in this no-man's-land between sanity and madness. Dover Wilson gives one account of this state:

Shakespeare wishes us to feel that Hamlet assumes madness because he cannot help it. The tragic burden has done its work, and he is conscious that he no longer retains control over himself. What more natural than that he should conceal his nervous breakdown behind a mask which would enable him to let himself go when the fit is upon him.¹

Bradley follows somewhat the same line, arguing that the “antic disposition” put on by Hamlet merges with bouts of real melancholy which nevertheless stops short of true madness.² In a recent, fascinating study of the play, Roland Mushat Frye makes a similar distinction between assumed lunacy and the real melancholy that Hamlet claims he is suffering from.³ Modern studies of Elizabethan melancholy have confirmed the view that Hamlet displays the characteristic signs of melancholy and that melancholy could but need not terminate in madness.⁴ I think it is true to say that there is now a broad consensus that while Hamlet simulates true Bedlam lunacy, he is also suffering from a form of mental imbalance which looks like Elizabethan melancholy. Is it possible to come any closer to an understanding of Hamlet's state in the play?

I believe this can be done by focussing on an aspect of Hamlet's behaviour in the play that seems, for some strange reason, to have escaped attention. This is all the more strange in that this aspect is specifically mentioned by the authors of the two main sources of the story of Hamlet, Saxo Grammaticus and Belleforest. I am referring to what I believe to be Hamlet's use of the powers of divination to guide him through the perils of the Danish Court. Saxo describes an incident during Amleth's first visit to England when he displays these powers, and Belleforest is so disturbed by them that he discusses the various theories concerning their nature in a lengthy digression. Shakespeare therefore had every warrant for endowing his own Hamlet with these powers. But first let us see what Saxo and Belleforest said about them.

Saxo's tenth-century account of Amleth is based on traditional material, and the story that he relates has a number of folkloric or mythic elements that have been exhaustively analysed in Santillana and Dechend's Hamlet's Mill.⁵ It is possible that in Amleth's riddling remarks and in the various tests he must endure (riding on a horse backwards, encountering a wolf, identifying a giant oar on the beach and the sand-dunes once ground out by the Amledhs Kvarn of the Eddas), we catch a glimpse of the initiatory ordeals of an ancient Nordic warrior. In these various ordeals, Amleth contrives always to speak the truth in the guise of some riddle, so that there is always meaning in his madness. This applies also to the incident described by Saxo in which he displays his divinatory powers.⁶ Amleth has journeyed to England with two companions, the originals of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and is invited to a banquet by the King of England. But Amleth refuses to eat or drink, claiming that the bread was “flecked with blood”, the drink contaminated by iron and the meat made foul by the “stench of a human carcase.” He also tells the King that he has the eyes of a slave, and that his queen had been born a bondmaid. The King decides that Amleth's words betray “either more than mortal wisdom or more than mortal folly”, and proceeds to check his various allegations. They turn out to be true. The bread had been made from corn grown on an old battle-field. The drink had been taken from a well containing a rusty sword. The meat had come from a hog that had fed on a human carcase. The King's mother finally revealed that this father had been a slave, and it was true that his queen had been a bondslave. “Then the king adored the wisdom of Amleth as though it were inspired.” Saxo's praise of Amleth after he has finally carried out his revenge on his father's murderer might also apply to Shakespeare's Hamlet:

O valiant Amleth, and worthy of immortal fame, who being shrewdly armed with a feint of folly, covered a wisdom too high for human wit under a marvellous disguise of silliness.⁷

Perhaps we should follow Saxo and try to regard Hamlet's melancholy as something more than an illness and as in some way related to his quickness of wit and to his possession of second sight.

Unlike Saxo, Belleforest is perplexed by Hamblet's divinatory gift. He describes the same incident at the Court of the King of England, and then pauses in his narrative to discuss the nature and origin of Hamblet's powers of divination:

in those dayes, the north parts of the worlde, living as then under Sathans lawes, were full of inchanters, so that there was not any yong gentleman whatsoever that had not something therein sufficient to serve his turn … and so Hamlet, while his father lived, had bin instructed in that devilish art, wherebye the wicked spirite abuseth mankind, and advertiseth him (as he can) of things past.⁸

Hamblet then had been instructed in the devilish art of divination by some northern enchanter. It formed part of a royal prince's education in those days. Clearly Belleforest does not approve of it, and this emerges even more strongly in his account of various contemporary theories concerning divination, which he mentions only to dismiss. One such theory is that Hamblet

by reason of his over great melancholy had received those impressions, devining that, which never any but himselfe had before declared, like the philosophers, who discoursing of divers deep points of philosophie, attribute the force of these divinations to such as are Saturnists by complection, who oftentimes speake of things which, their fury ceasing, they then alreadye can hardly understand who are the pronouncers; and for that cause, Plato saith, many deviners and many poets, after the force and fier beginneth to lessen, do hardly understand what they have written.⁹

He also rejects another current theory that “a reasonable soul becometh the habitation of a meaner sort of divels, by whom men learn the secrets of things natural”. As will appear, Belleforest is here alluding to the theories of the Florentine Platonist, Ficino, and the hermetic philosopher, Cornelius Agrippa. He is hostile to their views, and rejects the possibility that diabolic divination can provide any knowledge about the future. If we make the reasonable assumption that Shakespeare had read Belleforest before writing Hamlet, he would have learnt not only of Hamblet's divinatory gifts but also that it had a number of interesting associations. Linked with it were melancholy and the Saturnian temperament as well as the divine fury of which Plato wrote in particular in the Phaedrus. Divination also involved inspiration by spirits. These associations are obviously relevant to a play in which a spirit appears and gives information to a living human being and where the main character, as I shall now try and show, has further access to secret or hidden information by paranormal means.

HAMLET AND AUGURY

The first hint that Hamlet is what we would now call psychic is found in the scene where Horatio comes to tell him of the appearance of his father's spirit. Horatio is waiting for the right moment to do this, when Hamlet without warning says:

My father—I think I see my father.

Thinking that Hamlet actually sees the Ghost, Horatio asks, “Where, my lord”, and Hamlet replies, “In my mind's eye” (I.ii.184-5).¹⁰ The image of the Ghost flashes across his mind in anticipation of Horatio's revelation that the Ghost has already appeared which immediately follows. Let us assume that this is a case of precognition.

The same assumption will be made about Hamlet's next display. This occurs just after the Ghost has revealed the nature of his death and the identity of his murderer to Hamlet. His celebrated and yet not fully understood reaction to this information is “O my prophetic soul! My uncle!” (I.v.41). It is true that Hamlet has already suspected “foul play” and “foul deeds”, because of the appearance of his father's spirit in arms (I.iii.255-7). On the other hand, the words, “O my prophetic soul”, taken literally, point to a prior knowledge that Claudius was the murderer, received prophetically by his soul and now confirmed by the Ghost.

The next piece of evidence that Hamlet has divinatory powers is, in my view, more definite, in that we find him in possession of information which normally he would not have had access to. Towards the end of the scene with his mother, he informs her that he is to be sent to England, that sealed letters have been drawn up, and that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are to bear the mandate and marshall him to knavery. In other words, he not only knows the King's plans as outlined in Act III, scene iii, but also knows what is not mentioned there that the King intends knavery towards him and that his instruments are the “adders fang'd”, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Shakespeare provides no indication in the play (except for one shortly to be mentioned) of how Hamlet came by this information. Commenting on this, Harold Jenkins has written:

As to how Hamlet knew of it, since the text as ed. note is silent, speculation is invalid. The ‘difficulty’ passes unnoticed in the theatre, and such inventiveness as making Hamlet search Polonius' pockets is misplaced.¹¹

But perhaps speculation is not entirely invalid, for if, as I am speculating, Shakespeare followed Saxo and Belleforest in endowing his Hamlet with second sight, a new explanation of the ‘difficulty’ becomes possible. Hamlet knows about the King's purposes because he has an informant.

Hamlet identifies this informant to Claudius himself, although Claudius fails to understand. The King tells Hamlet, what he already secretly knows, that he is being sent to England:

HAM.
For England?
KING.
Aye, Hamlet.
HAM.
Good.
KING.
So it is, if thou knew'st our purposes.
HAM.
I see a cherub that sees them.

(IV.iv.47-51)

Hamlet's final, enigmatic reply reveals that his informant is a cherub which with its keen vision gazes on the face of God and knows all that will happen. King James in his Daemonologie (1597) speaks of the ability of an angel to look on God “as in a mirrour” and there see all future events.¹² In their capacity as guardian angels, they could pass on knowledge of future events to individuals in order to help them by forewarning them. This was achieved

by some internall operations: as when a mans mind foreknoweth him, that a thing shall so happen, and after it happeneth so in deede, which thynge I suppose is doone by God, through the Ministrie of Angels.¹³

The Folio version of Hamlet's words—“I see a cherub that sees him”—is normally rejected by editors as lacking sense, but it is in fact highly accurate if “him” is taken to refer to God. Hamlet would then be telling the baffled Claudius that he knows the King's treacherous purposes because he can see a cherub who sees God who has knowledge of all human intentions. As in the old versions of the story, even here Hamlet contrives to tell the exact truth in the guise of a riddling remark. His intelligence service is angelic.

The most vivid account of Hamlet acting under the influence of his powers of divination occurs in his description to Horatio of what happened on the boat to England:

Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting
That would not let me sleep. Methought I lay
Worse than the mutines in the bilboes. Rashly—
And prais'd be rashness for it: let us know
Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well
When our deep plots do pall; and that should learn us
There's a divinity that shapes our ends
Rough-hew them how we will.

(V.ii.4-11)

The fighting in his heart, a premonitory unrest, that makes him sleepless prompts him to go to the cabin of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and read the instructions they are carrying. He then learns the exact nature of the knavery planned by Claudius. In making this discovery he has obeyed an obscure, irrational impulse. He has acted “rashly”, and yet such “indiscretion” is often of more service than deeply pondered plans. It is through such rash acts that seem contrary to reason and commonsense that we arrive at the truth. This is because behind them can be glimpsed divine providence guiding us, however crudely we manage our lives on our own. It is the same spiritual guidance in a dangerous situation that was given by Hamlet's “cherub”. Still under this guidance, as if in a state of inspiration,

Being thus benetted round with villainies—
Or I could make a prologue to my brains,
They had begun the play—I sat me down,
Devis'd a new commission …

(V.ii.29-32)

Here, in Hamlet's own account, we see him acting intuitively, prompted by some inner hunch, and acting swiftly, as if directly inspired.

The final piece of evidence that Hamlet possesses the faculty of divination comes in the form of its renunciation. He is talking to Horatio just before the fencing-match with Laertes, when abruptly the following dialogue occurs:

HAM.
Thou wouldst not think how ill all's here about my heart; but it is no matter.
HOR.
Nay, my good lord.
HAM.
It is but foolery, but it is such a kind of gaingiving as would perhaps trouble a woman.
HOR.
If your mind dislike anything, obey it. I will forestall their repair hither and say you are not fit.
HAM.
Not a whit. We defy augury.

(V.ii.208-215)

As on the boat, he again feels a premonitory disquiet about his heart. Horatio urges him to obey it, but Hamlet dismisses it as “foolery”, conceding however that it is the sort of misgiving that might trouble a woman. Finally he says “we defy augury”. Although the word “defy” is invariably taken in its modern sense, this contradicts Hamlet's earlier dismissal of augury as a “foolery”. It seems more likely that Hamlet is using the word in the obsolete sense of “renounce, despise, disdain”, and as it so used in As You Like It (Epilogue, 21).¹⁴ Hamlet is rejecting or dismissing augury as irrelevant in the divinely ordered scheme of things where death will come at its preordained time. It is precisely the same train of thought as Caesar uses in Julius Caesar to dismiss the equivalent “gaingiving” of Calphurnia after her portentous dream:

                                                            What can be avoided
Whose end is purpos'd by the mighty gods? …
                                                            death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.

(Julius Caesar, II.ii.26-27, 36-7)

Thus at the end of the play, just before he dies, Hamlet rejects the gift of divination which has served him so well up to that point. In his own terms, he does not die because he refuses to avail himself of this gift to detect treachery, but because his time has come to die.

This constitutes the main evidence that Shakespeare followed both Saxo and Belleforest in endowing Hamlet with a sixth sense that warned and informed him of things that normally he would not know. He has precognitive knowledge of the Ghost's appearance and of the identity of his father's murderer. He is inexplicably aware of Claudius' plot against him, and he is guided to examine the King's letters on the boat to England. He has a premonition of something untoward just before the fencing-match, but rejects it. In addition to this evidence, there are two incidents in the play that make better sense if we assume that Hamlet possessed a sixth sense. The first occurs in the scene when he swiftly unmasks Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as tools of the King who have been sent for to spy on him. This can well be acted as if Hamlet literally reads their thoughts. Similarly, the so-called nunnery scene in which Hamlet seems to be aware of Claudius and Polonius hiding behind a curtain can best be understood as further evidence of Hamlet's divinatory powers. He did not overhear Polonius planning to hide or see him pop his head out from behind the curtain, for which there is no warrant in the text. It simply dawns on him while he is raging against Ophelia, that they are not alone.

We must now ask what light is thrown on Hamlet's melancholy by the fact that throughout most of the play he displays psychic powers. To answer this, it is necessary to consider the ideas of the philosophers cited by Belleforest on the relationship between melancholy and divination. As was suggested, the philosophers whom Belleforest treats with some hostility were Ficino and Agrippa. These two were responsible for formulating and spreading throughout Renaissance Europe a new evaluation of Saturnian melancholy which regarded it not as an illness but as the source of inspired genius.

As Klibansky, Saxl and Panofsky have shown in their Saturn and Melancholy, a detailed study of the ideas behind Dürer's engraving, Melancholy I, Ficino was probably the first to combine two psychological theories about inspiration that had previously been separate.¹⁵ The one was Plato's teachings on various types of divine or inspired madness contained primarily in the Phaedrus. The other derives from a chapter in a work attributed to Aristotle, the Problemata physica, which claimed that the great men of the world, whether heroes or thinkers, were all melancholics under the influence of the melancholic planet, Saturn.¹⁶ In Ficino's Commentary on the Phaedrus, the higher faculties in man are related to the higher, slow-moving planets, with Saturn corresponding to “intellectus purus”. It is this pure intellectual faculty that functions in the state of inspired fury (furor) described by Plato. In such a state a human being is indeed wise, though “he may be derided by the crowd as insane”.¹⁷

Ficino's fullest treatment of Saturnian melancholic genius, however, is to be found in his De vita triplici, a psycho-medical treatise specially written to safeguard the sanity of young scholars.¹⁸ It is precisely because of their solitary intellectual studies that young students were prone to come under the influence of Saturn. Ficino wishes to show them how to avoid the undesirable effects of induced Saturnian melancholy but respond to its beneficent effects, for rightly managed the influence of Saturn could lead to high creativity. Ficino suggested for example that the gloomier aspects of Saturn should be offset by cultivating Jovial and Venerean influences. Such advice was appropriate in the case of Hamlet as a student fresh from the University of Wittenberg. His melancholy would have been enhanced by study there, but now in Elsinore for various reasons it has deepened. In seeking to distract him with the players, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are doing what Ficino would have approved of. He would also have approved of the Queen's hope that Ophelia's Venerean virtues would bring Hamlet to his wonted ways again (III.i.18). But he would have objected to Polonius' foolish advice to Hamlet:

POL.
Will you walk out o'the air, my lord?
HAM.
Into my grave?

(II.ii.206-7)

Ficino particularly advises his melancholic students to take walks in the fresh air, because

the rays of the sun and of the stars reach us from all parts in free and unhindered fashion and fill our souls with the spiritus mundus which flows most copiously from these rays.¹⁹

Hamlet realizes that to leave the fresh air is to enter his grave. He is pursuing a line of thought from earlier in his conversation with Polonius when he advised him not to let his daughter walk in the sun, since then she might conceive in a way that was not a blessing. As the sun dissipates the gloom of the melancholic by its life-giving force, so can it also breed maggots in a dead dog and cause a woman to become pregnant.

To understand why the natural melancholy of Hamlet the University student deepens after his arrival in Elsinore and leads him to thoughts of suicide and to feelings that he is a coward, we can consult the Problemata physica that Ficino used. The 30th chapter deals with the melancholy of great men. The author explains that the black bile of melancholy can be either hot or cold or in-between. When cold bile predominates, this can manifest as “despondency or fear”.²⁰ This effect is exacerbated “when some alarming news is brought, making a man cowardly and even terrified”.²¹ This can lead to suicide:

For when it [bile] is colder than the occasion demands it produces unreasonable despondency; this accounts for the prevalence of suicide by hanging among the young and sometimes amongst older men too.²²

Applying these somewhat strange ideas to Hamlet, the moderate melancholy that he displays as a young scholar dedicated to his books but no doubt relieved by timely Jovial and Venerian relaxations, is suddenly made more sombre by the news of his father's death, by his mother's hasty remarriage and to top it all the revelations of his father's Ghost. His black bile is chilled. This manifests as despondency, loss of mirth, suicidal thoughts and the recurring self-accusation of cowardice. In all four soliloquies he accuses himself of being a coward. He sees himself as an inadequate Hercules compelled to try and set the world right. Unlike the melancholic Hercules cited by Pseudo-Aristotle, who sweeps into action against the enemy in a state of divine fury, like a Mediterranean berserk warrior, and who occasionally succumbs to real fits of madness, Hamlet is “pigeon-livered”, and does nothing.²³

His self-accusation, gloom and suicidal thoughts represent the negative aspects of Saturnian melancholy. On the positive side there is the gift of second sight. This was regarded both by Ficino and Agrippa as a concomitant of divine madness. In Agrippa's De occulta philosophia, in the manuscript version of 1510, there is a passage that probably derives from Ficino and also cites Pseudo-Aristotle on the subject of divine madness and the accompanying gift of prophesy.²⁴ Agrippa writes:

The humor melancholicus, when it takes fire and glows, generates the frenzy (furor) which leads us to wisdom and revelation, especially when it is combined with a heavenly influence, above all with that of Saturn.²⁵

The melancholy humour attracts certain demons into the body which bring about ecstasies in which the individual makes wonderful pronouncements. This can occur at three different levels. When the imagination is taken over by lower demons, this leads to outstanding achievement in some practical field such as architecture or painting, and to a gift of prophecy concerning future natural catastrophes. When melancholy attracts the middle demons to the seat of reason (ratio), a knowledge of natural and human things is conferred:

thus we see a man suddenly become a philosopher, a physician or an orator; and of future events they shows us what concerns the overthrow of kingdoms and the return of epochs, prophesying in the same way that the Sybil prophesied to the Romans.²⁶

The highest form of prophetic divine madness occurs at the level of the intellect (mens) and leads to a knowledge of eternal things and the soul's salvation and insight into coming major changes in human life such as the emergence of a new religion.

Klibansky, Saxl and Panovsky have argued that Dürer's engraving known as Melancholy I is based on this passage from Agrippa and represents divine inspiration at the level of the imagination. Frances Yates has suggested that Dürer's pictorial version of the highest state survives in his engraving, St Jerome in his Study, produced in 1514 the same year as Melancholy I.²⁷ The middle state involving ratio and corresponding to Hamlet's inspired state seems to have no correspondence in Dürer's work, which is a pity since Dürer on Hamlet would have been most interesting. Nevertheless Dürer's source in Agrippa's De occulta philosophia throws some light on the nature of Hamlet's melancholy. It is that of an educated, rational person, and it provides prophetic insight among other things into “the overthrow of kingdoms”. In Hamlet this political insight is closely associated with his displays of almost frantic behaviour, and such an association was justified by the traditional association deriving from Plato of the words ‘manic’ and ‘mantic’.²⁸ Mantic prophecy arose from outbursts of mania.

We can now see more clearly that any diagnosis of Hamlet's melancholy which treats it only as a psychological malady is one-sided. There was another tradition of thought which, while recognizing that it could lead to mental illness, also regarded it as conducive to all forms of creativity and inspiration. As we have seen, this tradition was revitalized by Ficino and given publicity by Agrippa. Belleforest refers to this platonic and hermetic revaluation of melancholy in his account of Hamblet, and is hostile to it. The question that can now be raised is whether Shakespeare in Hamlet follows Belleforest or Ficino and Agrippa in his attitude towards mantic mania.

As Frances Yates has suggested, there was a hardening of attitude towards the Platonism and hermeticism of the Renaissance towards the end of the sixteenth century. It is found both in Catholic countries as an expression of the Counter-Reformation and in Protestant countries.²⁹ Symptomatic of the Catholic viewpoint was the Disquitionum Magicarum (1599) of the Jesuit, Martin Del Rio, which is a frontal attack on the hermetic tradition represented by both Ficino and Agrippa. If Shakespeare had paused to read this work before writing Hamlet, he would have come across a passage dealing with the ecstatic state. There, Del Rio admits that “the Devil is able to produce ecstasy or rapture in a human being, either by binding or loosing the external senses”, but he dismisses the claim of ecstatics to be able to leave their bodies and travel to other places as an illusion of the Devil. He then cites the first known account of a Lapp shaman from Olaus Magnus' Historia gentibus septentrionalibus (1555). It describes how the Lapp magicians entered into a trance state and then were able to obtain information about people who were up to 300 miles away. For Del Rio this account contains many errors. The soul is not able to leave the body; it is all an illusion caused by the Devil. He goes on to attack the Cabalists of his period for holding this error, and he suspects that the same error is also held by contemporary Platonists because Plato himself has described the out-of-the-body experience of Er of Pamphylia.³⁰ The viewpoint of Del Rio was shared by James IV of Scotland. In his Daemonologie (1597) he expressed the view that all forms of divination by means of spirits were diabolical and punishable by death, even when performed for good ends. It was the very melancholy of the witches that exposed them to the illusionist tricks of the Devil.³¹

As usual Shakespeare seems to be aware of both attitudes to such phenomena. Hamlet himself suspects that the devil, “Out of my weakness and melancholy” is abusing him to damn him (II.ii.597), a suspicion that Del Rio and King James would have endorsed. On the other hand, it seems that Hamlet does possess a genuine gift of divination of the sort enjoyed by the Hamlets of Saxo and Belleforest. How did Shakespeare intend us to regard this gift? A possible clue to his attitude is found in Richard III (II.ii.42-44):

By a divine instinct men's minds mistrust
Ensuing dangers, as by proof we see
The waters swell before a boist'rous storm.

As John E. Hankins has shown, these lines contain direct allusions to Cicero's words concerning “some divine instinct and inspiration” which is able to foretell the future, just as “the heaving sea often gives warning of future storms when suddenly and from its depths it begins to swell”.³² But Shakespeare's echo of Cicero is double-edged, for it comes from his De divitatione which is a rebuttal from a sceptical point of view of the belief in divination held by the Stoics. It is the same Renaissance Cicero scepticus who comments in Julius Caesar on Casca's interpretation of the prodigies in Rome as portentous:

Indeed, it is a strange-disposed time:
But men may construe things, after their fashion,
Clean from the purpose of the things themselves.

(I.iii.33-35)

The same note of scepticism is, I believe, present in Hamlet, and is indicated by Hamlet's final rejection of augury. This rejection is immediately followed by a speech in which Hamlet puts his trust in divine providence. Death will come when it is ordained, and prior knowledge of the moment is therefore irrelevant. “The readiness is all.” As commentators have noted, this speech with its strong Biblical echoes marks a significant change in Hamlet. He rejects his gift of augury at the same time as the repents of his fit of madness at Ophelia's graveside. He had been seized by a “towering passion” (V.ii.80) for which he is now sorry. A little later he apologizes to Laertes for the same incident caused by “a sore distraction” (V.ii.225) and by a madness that is “poor Hamlet's enemy” (V.ii.235). This rejection of his mania coincides with his rejection of manticism. He does this against the advice of Horatio who had urged him to obey his premonition. This is but one more indication of Horatio's Stoicism, for it was against the belief of the Stoics in divination that Cicero wrote his De divitatione. Moreover the argument used by Hamlet in rejecting Horatio's advice is precisely the one used by Cicero in the course of his refutation of divination.³³ He also argues that divination is irrelevant if as the Stoics believed there was a divine providence that had foreordained all events.³⁴ Like Hamlet, Cicero argues that prior knowledge of an event that is ordained, even if accurate, is useless.

It would thus seem that in contrast to Saxo but in agreement with Cicero scepticus, Hamlet comes to see the inspired madness caused by his melancholy and the gift of divination that goes with it as something undesirable. He does not repudiate prophetic ecstasy as diabolic as did Del Rio and King James, but as an irrelevant foolishness, a female superstition. In the wider context of the play, Hamlet's melancholic imbalance is closely associated with the excesses of his own nation which he regards at the outset of the play as an inborn defect, “some vicious mole of nature” which spreading through the whole national character can break down “the pales and forts of reason” (I.iv.24,28). Hamlet, as “a native here / And to the manner born” (I.iv.14-5), undergoes a similar breakdown, and is overtaken by a similar form of psychological excess which has its origin in the ancient cult of heroic frenzy. It is as though the fragile selfconsciousness achieved in the Renaissance is threatened by an atavistic mode of behaviour in which ecstatic possession was given a higher status. Hamlet the civilized student of Wittenberg with his Stoic mentor preaching apatheia and moderation begins to regress to Saxo's heroic warrior of the 10th century, ruthless, psychically gifted and undeviating in his urge to achieve revenge. The regression is momentarily completed when, identifying himself with the nation he had earlier criticized, he cries out: “This is I, / Hamlet the Dane” (V.i.250-1). “Something dangerous” in him rises to the surface, and he goes berserk. The Queen accurately describes his state:

                                                                                This is mere madness,
And thus awhile the fit will work on him.

(V.i.279-280)

But immediately afterwards, as we saw, Hamlet repents of his mad fit, rejects his gift of augury and apologizes to Laertes for his outbreak, attributing it to an external enemy, his madness, which had taken possession of him.

In this interpretation of Hamlet's melancholy, it is seen to arise from the natural melancholy of the young scholar which is then exacerbated by the shock of events in his native Denmark, the death of his father, the hasty marriage of his mother and the revelation that the new King was his father's murderer. The chilling of the black bile that this causes leads Hamlet to thoughts of insufficiency, cowardice and a desire to end his life. At the same time, it brings into play the gift of divination associated by Ficino and Agrippa with the melancholy temperament. He communicates with a dead spirit, and finds himself able to read the thoughts and purposes of his enemies. The traditional furor or frenzy associated with this gift threatens to overwhelm Hamlet, and Shakespeare couples this threat with the inborn tendency of the Danish nation to frenzied excess. Both nations and the individuals within it can regress to a more primitive level of behaviour. But Hamlet does not completely succumb to this threatened regression, and here lies his tragedy. He achieves neither the Stoic calm of Horatio nor the martial addiction to battle of Fortinbras. It is for this reason that Hamlet continues to fascinate us after all these centuries. The pales and forts of our own rational civilization continue to be threatened by the ancient ancestral voices prophesying war. Nor is it unknown for modern nations of high culture and civilization to regress to a level of barbarism in their dealings with others.

Notes

1. J. Dover Wilson, What Happens in Hamlet (Cambridge, 1935; 1962 ed.), p. 92.

2. A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (London, 1937), pp. 120-2.

3. Roland Mushat Frye, The Renaissance Hamlet: Issues and Responses in 1600 (Princeton, 1984), pp. 185-7.

4. See, for example, Lily B. Campbell, Shakespeare's Tragic Heroes: Slaves of Passion (London, 1962) and John E. Hankins, Backgrounds of Shakespeare's Thought (Hassocks, 1978), pp. 138-43.

5. G. de Santillana and H. von Dechend, Hamlet's Mill (Boston, 1977).

6. The following account is summarized from Saxo's Historiae Danicae in Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. by Geoffrey Bullogh, VII (London, 1973), 67-9.

7. Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, VII, 70.

8. Belleforest, The Hystorie of Hamblet in Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, VII, 103.

9. Op. cit., p. 104.

10. All quotations are from the Arden ed. of Hamlet, ed. by Harold Jenkins (London, 1982).

11. Arden Hamlet, n. to III.iv.302.

12. James I, Daemonologie, ed. by G. B. Harrison (Edinburgh, 1966), I.i.5. The Biblical authority for this idea was Matthew, 18: 10: “for I tell you their angels in heaven always behold the face of my Father in heaven.”

13. Ludwig Lavater, Of Ghosts and Spirits Walking by Night (London, 1572, 1596), in Shakespeare rpt. ser., ed. by J. D. Wilson and M. Yardley (Oxford, 1929), II. xiv. 161.

14. See O. E. D. under “Defy”, v, 5, with this example from Shakespeare.

15. The following section is based on Saturn and Melancholy (London, 1964), by R. Klibansky, F. Saxl, and E. Panofsky, and on the chapter on Dürer's engraving in Frances Yates, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (London, 1979), pp. 49-59.

16. Aristotle, Problems, in Loeb ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), ch. 30, II, 154-81.

17. See Michael J. B. Allen, Marsilio Ficino and the Phaedrean Charioteer (Berkeley, 1981), pp. 111, 79.

18. See Saturn and Melancholy, pp. 259ff., for an account of this work. Its first book is entitled De studiorum sanitate tuenda.

19. Op. cit., p. 269.

20. Aristotle, Problems, II, 161.

21. Op. cit., pp. 164-5.

22. Op. cit., p. 165.

23. Op. cit., p. 155.

24. Cited in Saturn and Melancholy, pp. 355-7.

25. Op. cit, p. 335.

26. Op. cit., p. 357.

27. Yates, The Occult Philosophy, pp. 57-8.

28. See Plato, Phaedrus, 244 C.

29. Summarized from Martin Del Rio, Disquisitionum Magicarum (1599), pp. 238-40.

30. James I, Daemonologie, pp. 26, 21-2.

31. Hankins, Backgrounds to Shakespeare's Thought, p. 95.

32. Cicero, De divitatione, Loeb ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 19), pp. 387, 389. For the influence of Cicero on Renaissance scepticism, see Charles B. Schmitt, Cicero Scepticus: A Study of the Influence of the Academica in the Renaissance (The Hague, 1972).

33. Cicero, op. cit., p. 393: “For if all things happen by Fate [as the Stoics argue], it does us no good to be warned, since that which is bound to happen, will happen regardless of what we do.”