SOURCE: Kiefer, Frederick. “Fortune and Occasion in Shakespeare: Richard II, Julius Caesar, and Hamlet.” In Fortune and Elizabethan Tragedy, pp. 232-69. San Marino, Calif.: The Huntington Library, 1983.

[In the following essay, Kiefer surveys the interaction of fortune and occasion in Shakespearean tragedy, focusing on three tragic Shakespearean figures: Richard II, Brutus (of Julius Caesar), and Hamlet.]

Playwrights seldom provide an elaborate description of Dame Fortune—certainly no counterpart in words to the vivid depictions of Continental emblematists. Nevertheless, their plays reflect the changing concept of Fortune in the Renaissance. And in the work of one playwright in particular, Shakespeare, we can actually observe the transition away from the traditional view of Fortune.¹ In three tragedies written during the closing years of the sixteenth century, Shakespeare manifests a growing interest in Occasion.

The plays are Richard II (c. 1595), Julius Caesar (c. 1599), and Hamlet (c. 1600). In the earliest of these the protagonist expresses an attitude toward Fortune that seems characteristically medieval. King Richard sees himself as Fortune's victim, inescapably vulnerable to her whim. By contrast, his antagonist represents an emerging new order. As confident as he is skilled, Henry Bolingbroke determines to shape his own future. Moving with events rather than against them, he cooperates with the time to advance his purposes and to vanquish Richard. The psychology of a man who would pursue Occasion is explored yet more deeply in Julius Caesar. Brutus, like Bolingbroke, has a highly developed sense of opportunity, which he expresses in his speech on the tide in the affairs of men. Unlike Bolingbroke, however, Brutus lacks the skill to realize his aspirations: instead of capitalizing upon the world's mutability, he destroys himself. More adept is Hamlet, perhaps because he possesses a greater capacity for adaptability than Brutus. Initially, Hamlet's view of Fortune is conventional, hardly distinct from Richard's; and he blunders in his efforts to fulfill the Ghost's command. After a series of remarkable personal experiences, however, Hamlet adopts a new outlook. He begins to attune himself to the time and, locating opportunity under the aegis of providence, at last pursues his goal successfully.

I

Shakespeare's treatment of Fortune in Richard II, it is generally agreed, both draws inspiration from and transcends de casibus tragedy. The play has been called “an almost perfect example of de casibus tragedy in its formal structure and in its technical mastery.”² The pattern of rise and fall evokes the traditional progression dictated by Fortune in the de casibus stories of Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Lydgate. Richard, of course, undergoes a spectacular transition from prosperity to adversity, ascribing it, at least in part, to a perverse Fortune. For his part, Bolingbroke, according to Irving Ribner, is “made to appear as a minion of fortune who rises to fill a position which Richard vacates.”³ At the same time, readers of Richard II see evidence of a turning away from convention on Shakespeare's part. Arguing that the king attains considerable insight into his own culpability, they claim that Richard's characterization transcends that typical of de casibus tragedy. Peter G. Phialas, for example, suggests that “from a de casibus concept of his fall Richard advances to full awareness and acceptance of his own moral involvement.”⁴ And, according to S. C. Sen Gupta, “by making Richard personally responsible for his disasters, Shakespeare seems to stress his independence of the medieval idea of tragedy and show in the true Renaissance spirit that man is the architect of his fate and not a victim of the blind goddess Fortune.”⁵

Richard II undoubtedly represents a step toward what today is called tragedy of character. Nevertheless, Richard's characterization remains profoundly shaped by de casibus tradition, for throughout the play Richard harbors the conviction that he has been victimized by circumstance, undone by Fortune. Characterization in Richard II may transcend the pattern common to metrical tragedy, but it is Bolingbroke, not Richard, who diverges sharply from that precedent. Indeed, much of what readers say about Richard's perception of the connection between one's deeds and one's fate applies more properly to Bolingbroke, who sees himself as master, not servant, of circumstance. Confident of what he can achieve through his own efforts, Bolingbroke never directly acknowledges Dame Fortune. Shakespeare's characterization of these two antagonists, then, represents the juxtaposition of the traditional and the innovative: he preserves de casibus convention in the portrayal of Richard while rejecting it for something newer in the depiction of Bolingbroke.⁶

The attainment of self-knowledge is, in the view of most readers, the most profound change that Richard undergoes. Richard's request for a mirror in IV.i is seen as “a move towards self-knowledge, and even repentance.”⁷ One critic speaks of Richard's “increasingly bitter self-awareness,”⁸ while another finds a gradual but clear development in Richard's understanding of himself: “At first Richard sees himself exclusively in the light of a victim of fortune's wheel; only very slowly does he accept the moral of the specula principis that kings must be virtuous or they may be punished, even deposed, by the vengeance of God.”⁹

Actually, it is Richard's histrionic flair that creates the impression of a deeper self-knowledge than he really attains. Upon close reading his speeches reveal, at most, a seriously deficient understanding and an unwillingness to assume responsibility for his plight. The king may occasionally express regret over his words or deeds. Upon his return from Ireland, for instance, he laments that “this tongue of mine” ever banished Bolingbroke (III.iii.133). This remark represents, however, concern over a tactical error rather than a profound acknowledgment of wrongdoing. And even on those occasions when Richard castigates himself more vigorously, he seems unable to do so without sharing the blame liberally with his enemies. Thus while he concedes that he is a traitor to himself, he also in the same breath complains bitterly of the traitors who surround him (IV.i.244-48). And he cannot speak of his “weav'd-up follies” (IV.i.229) without in the same speech comparing himself to Christ and his enemies to Pilate. Here, as elsewhere, Richard displays an indulgent self-pity scarcely synonymous with true self-knowledge, much less contrition.

If Richard's attitude toward personal responsibility is ambivalent, so too is his attitude toward the divine power that exacts retribution for wrongdoing. The king may express confidence in providential justice when he tells Aumerle that “The breath of worldly men cannot depose / The deputy elected by the Lord” and that “heaven still guards the right” (III.ii.56-57, 62), but he seems not to recognize that the divine dispensation subjects him also to its strictures. Carlisle tells him that “The means that heavens yield must be embrac'd, / And not neglected” (29-30). Yet this reproof works little change in Richard, who, oblivious to the responsibilities he should fulfill, succumbs to torpor and despair. Despite his penchant for likening himself to Christ, Richard offers little evidence that the providence with which he threatens others has personal meaning for himself.

Significantly, when Richard is overtaken by adversity, he looks for explanation not to providence but to a capricious power that seems to frustrate his own purposes and to favor those of his opponents. In these words, for example, Richard in the deposition scene invites Bolingbroke to grasp the crown:

                                                            Here, cousin, seize the crown;
Here, cousin,
On this side my hand, and on that side thine.
Now is this golden crown like a deep well
That owes two buckets, filling one another,
The emptier ever dancing in the air,
The other down, unseen, and full of water:
That bucket down and full of tears am I,
Drinking my griefs, whilst you mount up on high.

(IV.i.181-89)

There is little here to suggest that Richard's understanding of either himself or his world is very profound. The lines evince no sense of accountability. Based on the medieval figure of Fortune's buckets,¹⁰ they in effect transfer responsibility for what is happening away from Richard and to an external force.

In this case, then, far from abandoning the de casibus mode, Shakespeare draws his inspiration from it. For Richard's speech almost certainly is in the tradition of metrical tragedy, where the notion that one man's rising dictates another's fall is ascribed to Fortune. The idea survives in the foremost de casibus work of Shakespeare's era, the Mirror for Magistrates, where a complainant observes, “Fortune can not raise, / Any one aloft without sum others wracke.”¹¹

Richard's references to Fortune may be appropriate in the sense that chance seems to work against him; his return from Ireland, for instance, is delayed by adverse weather, and his discouraged army disperses prematurely. Moreover, the caprice of the London crowds may, as J. M. R. Margeson suggests, be interpreted as signifying the fickleness of Fortune.¹² Nevertheless, when Margeson writes that “the law of change in earthly kingdoms governed by indifferent fortune seems almost as probable an interpretation of these events as any providential order,”¹³ he fails to note Richard's inconsistency: the king threatens his enemies with the justice of God, yet blames capricious Fortune for his own reverses.

In so doing Richard is not necessarily being insincere. He may honestly believe himself to be a victim of circumstance. Despite the admonitions of royal counselors and despite even his own self-recrimination, Richard seems to remain baffled by the relationship between cause and effect. Certainly his language reveals no particular comprehension of the underlying principles at work in his deposition. The image of the buckets, for example, tends to blur, if it does not altogether obscure, the reason for the political upheaval. Fortune may be the only notion that allows a bewildered Richard to explain to himself how he could fall so far so fast.

Most readers contend that Richard moves beyond bewilderment, that eventually he sees beyond the caprice of Fortune and comes to accept responsibility for his plight. Irving Ribner, for example, finds evidence of maturation when Richard tells his wife, “I am sworn brother, sweet, / To grim Necessity, and he and I / Will keep a league till death” (V.i.20-22). Ribner comments: “Richard's awareness of his brotherhood to ‘grim necessity’ may be regarded as the culminating evidence of a growth in self-knowledge which had begun with his first awareness of Bolingbroke's inevitable triumph.”¹⁴ Yet Richard himself does not specify the source of that necessity as being within; in fact, he repeatedly locates causality outside of the individual.¹⁵ The fact that Richard has come to think of the world as governed by inflexible laws does not necessarily mean that he perceives his own role in creating his destiny. His remark about necessity suggests, rather, an abject surrender to circumstance.

Nor does Richard discard the image of himself as victim. Indeed, only moments before his death he continues to speak of Fortune, and he intimates that his relationship remains one of thralldom: “Thoughts tending to content flatter themselves / That they are not the first of fortune's slaves, / Nor shall not be the last—” (V.v.23-25). Here, virtually at the end of his life, he still employs the terminology of the de casibus narrative. And even Richard's eloquent admission in this last speech, “I wasted time, and now doth time waste me,” recalls the tragedies of Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Lydgate, for implicit in the lines that follow the admission is the image of the wheel of Fortune:

For now hath time made me his numb'ring clock:
My thoughts are minutes, and with sighs they jar
Their watches on unto mine eyes, the outward watch,
Whereto my finger, like a dial's point,
Is pointing still, in cleansing them from tears.
Now, sir, the sound that tells what hour it is
Are clamorous groans, which strike upon my heart,
Which is the bell. So sighs, and tears, and groans
Show minutes, times, and hours; but my time
Runs posting on in Bullingbrook's proud joy,
While I stand fooling here, his Jack of the clock.

(V.v.50-60)

The shape of the clock's face corresponds to that of Fortune's wheel. The steady progress of “minutes, times, and hours” suggests the ceaseless revolution of the wheel. And the motion of Richard, or rather his finger, around the circumference as a “dial point” evokes the conventional representation of a man bound to Fortune's wheel. The image, then, undercuts Richard's acknowledgment of his prodigality. To the very end he portrays himself as acted upon by hostile forces. Thus, to the extent that the tragedy is seen through Richard's eyes, it is a “Boccacesque tragedy of Fortune.”¹⁶

Richard, of course, bears responsibility for his demise: the speeches of Gaunt (II.i.31-68, 93-115), Carlisle (III.ii.27-32, 178-85), and York (II.i.186-208, II.ii.77-85) demonstrate the connection between his deeds and his downfall. Collectively, they suggest that Richard is insensitive to both people and custom, that he is ineffectual in dealing with political crises, that his thralldom to circumstance stems largely from his own deficiencies.¹⁷ Richard, however, does not share the view of Gaunt or Carlisle or York—or of the reader or audience.

And it remains unclear whether Richard even seeks to look within himself very deeply. Although his request for a mirror in the deposition scene may constitute an outward sign of such a desire, the smashing of that mirror, as Wilbur Sanders observes, signifies a “renunciation of self-knowledge.”¹⁸ Perhaps self-recognition is too difficult for one who has customarily looked outward to discover the source of his predicaments. Perhaps his histrionics, his violent moods, prevent him from ever gaining the quiet stability and perspective from which he might sensibly assess his plight. Or perhaps his rigidity of character simply will not allow Richard to look forthrightly at himself. Whatever the nature of the impediment, Richard fails to achieve any greater understanding of himself or of causality than the ghostly figures of the Mirror for Magistrates had in life.

Although critical opinion has tended to minimize Richard's link with metrical tragedy, a long critical tradition has identified Richard's antagonist with Fortune. J. Dover Wilson, who argues that the wheel of Fortune “determines the play's shape and structure,” describes Bolingbroke as “borne upward by a power [Fortune] beyond his volition.”¹⁹ E. M. W. Tillyard writes that the usurper “having once set events in motion is the servant of fortune.”²⁰ And Raymond Chapman claims that at the beginning of the play Bolingbroke is so situated that “The next turn of the Wheel must draw him up and cast Richard down.”²¹ Source material is sometimes cited to buttress this argument. Dover Wilson, for instance, quotes one of Shakespeare's sources, Daniel's Civil Wars, which links Bolingbroke's return from exile and subsequent activity with Fortune:

Then fortune thou art guilty of his deed
That didst his state above his hopes erect,
And thou must beare some blame of his great sin
That left'st him worse then when he did begin.(22)

M. M. Reese believes that Shakespeare “allows” Daniel's view to be a possible interpretation of the play, and perhaps the dramatist does.²³ This interpretation, however, does not sufficiently take into account Bolingbroke's dynamism and his conception of himself as one who largely determines his own destiny.

Never in the play does Bolingbroke see himself as a passive agent of Fortune. Nor does he directly acknowledge the existence of the Fortune whom Richard and his queen contemplate.²⁴ When Bolingbroke uses the term, it is “fortune,” his personal lot, to which he refers, not the goddess Fortune.²⁵ Consider, for example, his conversation with his followers upon his return from exile. When Henry Percy meets Bolingbroke, he pledges his “service … Which elder days shall ripen and confirm / To more approved service and desert” (II.iii.41-44). To this Bolingbroke replies in kind:

I thank thee, gentle Percy, and be sure
I count myself in nothing else so happy
As in a soul rememb'ring my good friends,
And as my fortune ripens with thy love,
It shall be still thy true love's recompense.

(45-49)

And in conversation with Ross and Willoughby, Bolingbroke again employs the image. Responding to Ross' comment, “Your presence makes us rich,” Bolingbroke says:

Evermore thank's the exchequer of the poor,
Which, till my infant fortune comes to years,
Stands for my bounty.

(65-67)

The expressions, “fortune ripens” and “infant fortune,” are no less revelatory of Bolingbroke's self-image than Richard's references to the buckets and clock. Bolingbroke's words indicate that he sees his situation, at any moment, not as unalterably fixed, but rather as temporary and capable of amelioration. The epithets “infant” and “ripening” also suggest growth from within rather than constraint from without. Indeed, a “ripening” fortune is one that holds within itself the promise of improvement and fulfillment. This language, then, reflects Bolingbroke's sense of his own capacity for change and development, his sense of responsibility for the shape that his career takes.

Bolingbroke, of course, has to contend with external forces, just as Richard must. Unlike Richard, however, he perceives those forces as natural rather than mechanical, and this attitude allows for a more amicable and productive relationship with them. They are to be accommodated, not merely endured. Cooperation is Bolingbroke's watchword, for he perceives that he can capitalize on those forces and employ them to advance his own purposes.

Nowhere is this sense of cooperation more apparent than in his relationship to time. The Gardener comments upon this collaboration when he compares his own tending of the plants according to the “time of year” (III.iv.57) with Bolingbroke's tending of the kingdom. In his actions, of course, Bolingbroke demonstrates himself to be a master of timing. For example, he delays his return from exile until Richard has left for Ireland. And, later, having managed to secure York's promise of neutrality, Bolingbroke immediately persuades the duke to accompany him to Bristow Castle where he will seek to dislodge Bushy, Bagot, and Green (II.iii.162-67). Even Bolingbroke's opponents acknowledge his sensitivity to the exigencies of the moment. Berkeley, sent to learn of his intentions upon his return, declares that he has come “to know what pricks you on / To take advantage of the absent time, / And fright our native peace with self-borne arms” (II.iii.78-80). The query suggests Bolingbroke's aggressive seizing of opportunity, his confidence that dependence upon circumstance need not mean passivity.²⁶

Admittedly, Bolingbroke sometimes appears resigned to events. When York tells him that “the heavens are over our heads,” Bolingbroke replies, “I know it, uncle, and oppose not myself / Against their will” (III.iii.18-19). But this seems merely a pose, calculated to assuage the qualms of those uneasy about the prospect of usurpation. There is no evidence that the heavens are any more real to Bolingbroke than they are to Richard.²⁷ And Bolingbroke, for all his outward obeisance, is certainly not slow to capitalize on his opponent's errors.

In view of Bolingbroke's aggressiveness and resolute spirit, it seems inappropriate to regard him as a passive figure, “whom the Wheel of Fortune … carries aloft as it carries Richard down.”²⁸ In fact, the image of Fortune's wheel, which never explicitly appears in the play, should, it seems to me, be discarded in describing Bolingbroke and his relationship to Richard.²⁹ What is required is a different formulation, one that indicates Shakespeare's indebtedness to de casibus tradition in the characterization of Richard (and Richard's Fortune) and, at the same time, his departure from that tradition in the characterization of Bolingbroke. The Fortuna-Virtus topos provides the basis for just such a formulation. Imagine the rivals in Richard II as each identified with one side of the antinomy. Together, they form a composite of the old and the new: Fortuna as conceived in such a “medieval” work as the Mirror for Magistrates, Virtus as conceived in such a distinctively Renaissance work as The Prince.

Throughout the play Richard is, by his own words, associated with Fortune. And his remarks seem not an expression of conventional sentiment for the sake of convention; rather, they seem to grow naturally out of his character. Richard's is, in fact, the sort of personality that by its very nature gives life to Fortune. His obtuseness leads him to ascribe events to Fortune that a more discerning and conscientious individual might himself claim responsibility for. Moreover, Richard's association with Fortune is subtly underscored in another way as well: his mercurial temperament resembles that of the moody goddess he describes. His rapid oscillation between confidence and despair in III.iii rivals any caprice of Dame Fortune; his behavior upon his return from Ireland may, like Fortune's, best be described in terms of antitheses.

Shakespeare makes the relationship between character and Fortune even more explicit when in the deposition scene Richard calls for the mirror. The use of this hand prop evokes the very image of Fortune, for as Samuel C. Chew explains, “when the King dashes the mirror to the ground and comments upon the brittleness of glory, we remember the figures of Fortuna Vitrea and those representations of the goddess where … she holds in her hand a brittle globe of glass.”³⁰ The very physical presentation of Richard on stage no less than his temperament recalls the image of Fortune, who wields such awesome power in the realm of de casibus tragedy.

On the other hand, Bolingbroke's association with Fortune is minimal. He is so determined and energetic that, one imagines, Fortune (at least of the traditional kind) can scarcely exist for him. And while Richard seems to have stepped from the pages of de casibus tragedy, Bolingbroke draws his values and outlook from another source altogether. Irving Ribner suggests the likely inspiration when he writes, “The political activity of Bolingbroke in Shakespeare's Richard II closely adheres to Machiavelli's political philosophy as contained in The Prince.”³¹ In the twenty-fifth chapter of that work, Machiavelli argues that man need not remain at the mercy of Fortune, that he can by his skill and daring prevail, at least at times, over circumstance. What Machiavelli urges is the practice of those traits that make for success. And these he sums up in the word virtù. … [T]his is not virtue in any moral sense, for Machiavelli, guided by his reading of Roman authors and by his own experience, recasts the medieval Fortuna-Virtus antinomy by defining Virtus in a thoroughly secular light.

Like the model of success for Machiavelli, Shakespeare's Bolingbroke never surrenders to circumstance; he finds in adversity not catastrophe but challenge. In contrast to Richard's penchant for contemning the world when adversity strikes, Bolingbroke retains a stubborn determination to persevere. Clever and resilient, he is an embodiment of energy and purpose. His is a spirit of indomitable strength and resolution; he incarnates Machiavelli's virtù.

The application of the Fortuna-Virtus topos to Richard II is suggested through the stage imagery. For when the king and the usurper jointly hold the crown at IV.i.181-83, they evoke the figures of Fortuna and Virtus, who jointly hold a crown above a monarch's head in Guillaume de la Perrière's La Morosophie (Paris, 1553). Shakespeare may not seek to make the emblematist's point—that a king, ideally, needs to combine happy circumstance with his own integrity; Shakespeare, like Machiavelli, interprets Virtus in a secular sense. But Richard's identification with Fortune and Bolingbroke's with virtù suggest that Shakespeare may well have intended to realize the topos in emblematic terms.

The composite formulation suggested above (old-fashioned Fortune and new-fangled virtù) provides a more useful means of characterizing the profound shift in power that takes place during Richard II than does the wheel of Fortune. For when the crown passes from Richard to Bolingbroke, it passes from a man intimidated by Fortune and doubtful of his capacity to prevail over hostile circumstance, to a man confident of his virtù, secure in his belief that he can achieve whatever he sets his will to. The crown, then, passes not merely from one individual to another but also from a figure who embodies one set of assumptions and attitudes to a figure who embodies quite different values; Richard and Bolingbroke are each representative of a distinctive world view. Richard's is a world that views ambition with horror, that prizes acquiescence over aggressiveness, that takes pride and comfort in the observance of ritual. His fall marks the demise of a habit of mind and a political climate as well as that of a man. As Robert Ornstein observes of Richard, “When he falls, a way of life and a world seem to fall with him.”³² The world coming into being is one that prizes adroitness, audacity, and pragmatism, above all. The triumph of Bolingbroke, champion of these attributes, signals the sharp displacement of traditional values.

In triumphing, Bolingbroke remains enigmatic, never overtly alluding to the skill with which he seizes the right opportunity at the right time. Not until 1 Henry IV is there any explicit evocation of Occasion in connection with Bolingbroke. And there it is not Henry but a disgruntled former confederate who makes the point. Recalling events in the latter part of Richard's reign, Worcester reminds Henry, “from this swarm of fair advantages / You took Occasion to be quickly wooed / To gripe the general sway into your hand” (V.i.55-57).

II

Were Bolingbroke a more voluble character, we might know more about his concept of opportunity. But he is as taciturn as the king is loquacious. And we learn almost nothing of his private thoughts. Not until Shakespeare's next tragedy do we meet a figure whose speeches and soliloquies permit a fuller consideration of Occasion. The character is Marcus Brutus, who while very different from Bolingbroke in temperament, faces a similar task—the removal of a head of state and the substitution of a new regime. Though Brutus is only partially successful, his character permits an especially detailed treatment of the quest for opportunity.

In one of the earliest studies seeking to relate Renaissance literature to iconography, Henry Green suggested that Brutus' image of “a tide in the affairs of men” resembles the emblem of Occasion,³³ and in this century the correspondence has been widely noticed. Occasion, however, has significance not only for the imagery of Brutus' speech but also, more generally, for his character. That is, the concept of Occasion underlies a cluster of Brutus' traits, including his penchant for predicting the future, timing his actions with precision, and staking chances of success upon a single daring move. All of these stem from Brutus' profound sense of opportunity, which informs his psyche throughout the play, from his early meditation on Caesar's “tyranny” to his last orders on the plains of Philippi.

Brutus' “tide” speech is essentially a plea for action, designed to convince a dubious Cassius that the struggle with the enemy has reached a critical point, that the time for battle is now:

Our legions are brimful, our cause is ripe:
The enemy increaseth every day;
We, at the height, are ready to decline.
There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.

(IV.iii.215-24)

The speaker's sense of urgency is expressed in part through the language of height and declination. And for some readers this imagery, together with the reference to “fortune” (meaning simply “success”), suggests Fortune and her wheel. But the playwright eschews the image of a mechanical wheel which raises a man to the top only to begin a steady and inexorable downfall. Instead, he constructs the passage upon the nautical image of a ship riding the waves and seizing the tide. And this belongs, more properly, to Occasion.³⁴

There is much in Brutus' speech that recalls pictorial representations of Occasion—more even than Henry Green recognized. As we have already seen, the “sea” almost always appears in emblems of Occasion, and sometimes Occasion actually stands above the waves. In addition, Brutus' assertion that they are “afloat” recalls the vessels that sail on the sea of Occasion, driven by the force of wind and tide. Brutus' references to “fortune” and “ventures,” moreover, express the element of contingency associated with Occasion and made manifest by one of her accouterments, the wheel lying flat beneath her feet. Brutus' speech, then, incorporates several features associated with Occasion.³⁵

The assumptions on which Occasion is predicated (that powerful forces are at work in the world but that man may, if skillful, harness them) inform Brutus' very character. His experience of prophecies, portents, and visions undoubtedly contributes to his belief that man's powers are circumscribed, and he expresses this notion after the assassination when he says, “Fates, we will know your pleasures. / That we shall die, we know, 'tis but the time, / And drawing days out, that men stand upon” (III.i.98-100). Later, after his vision of the Ghost, he speaks of “the providence of some high powers / That govern us below” (V.i.106-7). This conviction does not, however, deter Brutus from acting decisively. A resolute figure, he displays a fixedness of purpose befitting one who believes he is the master of events, not their servant. His confidence is nourished by his association with Cassius, a forceful embodiment of man's autonomy. For his part, Cassius is an Epicurean, who believes that even if the gods exist, they take no interest in humankind. Thus man is, or should be, free to assert himself as he wishes. Brutus may not display the pugnacious arrogance before men and gods that characterizes his friend. But by his tacit acceptance of Cassius' arguments, his participation in the conspiracy, and his active role in the assassination itself, Brutus affirms his capacity to shape his own future and thus history as well.

The balance between fatalism and self-determination that characterizes Brutus is perhaps most apparent in his attitude toward time, which he sees as both imposing constraints and offering opportunities. Typically, time (of the month and the day) is much on his mind the night before Caesar's death. Reflecting on the warning that he had heard along with others that day (“Beware the ides of March”), Brutus asks his servant, “Is not to-morrow, boy, the ides of March?” (II.i.40), and he directs Lucius, “Look in the calendar, and bring me word” (42). Later, as the details of Caesar's murder are plotted with the other conspirators, Brutus remains mindful of the hour. When he hears a clock strike, he interjects, “Peace, count the clock” (192). This anxiety is prompted in part by his fear that Caesar may not leave home the next day. And although Decius assures them, “I will bring him to the Capitol” (211), the nervous Brutus seeks to fix the exact hour. When Cassius says, “We will all of us be there to fetch him,” Brutus responds, “By the eight hour; is that the uttermost?” (213). In the morning Brutus is obviously mindful of the hour, for when Caesar at his home inquires the time, Brutus quickly replies, “Caesar, 'tis strucken eight” (II.ii.114).

Collectively, these references to time betray Brutus' reservations about man's ability to control his own destiny. For him, successful endeavor is not guaranteed by immediate, straightforward action. Man's capacity is limited by circumstance; some times are more propitious than others. In the words of Cassius, “Men at some time are masters of their fates” (I.ii.139). By embracing this view, Brutus manifests his sense of opportunity, the very essence of which is astute timing.³⁶

For all his sensitivity to the exigencies of circumstance, however, Brutus has great difficulty capitalizing on his opportunities. In fact, whenever he faces a decision that requires a deft handling of the time, he makes a calamitous error. For example, the decision to allow Antony to deliver an oration—and over Caesar's body—proves to be lamentably inopportune. At this point the fortunes of the assassins are at a crucial stage, for they need to appease the multitude and thus to consolidate their political gains. To permit Antony, a well-known friend of Caesar's, to address the populace at such a volatile moment is to court disaster. Similarly, the decision made near Sardis to commit the troops proves to be a fateful error. It plays into the hands of an enemy awaiting an opening to strike; Octavius greets the sight of the conspirators' forces with the words, “Now, Antony, our hopes are answered” (V.i.1). And Brutus' actions at Philippi are singularly ill-timed. Taking advantage of initial success, Brutus, heedless of the disaster overtaking Cassius' forces, precipitously charges the enemy. As Titinius explains to Cassius after the battle:

O Cassius, Brutus gave the word too early,
Who, having some advantage on Octavius,
Took it too eagerly. His soldiers fell to spoil,
Whilst we by Antony are all enclos'd.

(V.iii.5-8)

Since Plutarch attributes the error chiefly to the impatience of the soldiers,³⁷ it is clear that Shakespeare has accentuated Brutus' failure in timing. This departure from the source is, however, entirely consistent with the playwright's conception of the character. In Julius Caesar Brutus' habits of thinking and acting are such that they dictate errors in timing.

The way in which Brutus arrives at his resolution for action reveals why he so often errs. Consider the first critical decision that Brutus makes in the play:

                                                                                'tis a common proof
That lowliness is young ambition's ladder,
Whereto the climber-upward turns his face;
But when he once attains the upmost round,
He then unto the ladder turns his back,
Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees
By which he did ascend. So Caesar may;
Then lest he may, prevent. And since the quarrel
Will bear no color for the thing he is,
Fashion it thus: that what he is, augmented,
Would run to these and these extremities;
And therefore think him as a serpent's egg,
Which, hatch'd, would as his kind grow mischievous,
And kill him in the shell.

(II.i.21-34)

Here Brutus indulges his predilection for anticipating the behavior of others and tailoring his own deeds to that expectation. In this instance he decides that Caesar is a tyrant in embryo whose maturation must be thwarted. It is his confidence that he knows what the future holds for Caesar and for Rome that leads him to attach such importance to the present and to believe that, if the Republic is to be preserved, his decisive action now is necessary.

The soundness of Brutus' proposed action, however, depends upon the accuracy of his prediction. And that is highly questionable, for Brutus' premise seems dubious. Indeed, he himself admits that “the quarrel / Will bear no color for the thing he is.” But Brutus somehow manages to evade the implications of this admission. Suppressing his personal feeling for Caesar, Brutus resorts to an austere cerebration that takes on a life of its own.³⁸ His rationalism is apparent in the progression of his thought from general truth to specific instance to deduction; in the use of such words as “since” and “therefore,” indicating logical relationships; and in his framing of the simile, a consciously thought-out correlation, likening Caesar to a serpent. By relying so confidently on rational processes and by denying the promptings of his own instincts, Brutus dooms himself to misconstrue the futures of others and to construct a seriously flawed design for his own future conduct.³⁹

Reason, as exercised by Brutus, is an imperfect guide to prediction and to the formulation of action in a capricious, tumultuous, even mysterious world. And its inadequacy is underscored by the other decisions that punctuate his career, none of which is more important than that to commit the troops at Philippi. The decision has its origins in Brutus' anxiety over the allegiance of the populace. Only grudgingly have they aided the forces of Brutus and Cassius. And this reluctance signifies to Brutus a sympathy with the enemy. In the future, Brutus tells his comrade, this will render their military position precarious:

The enemy, marching along by them,
By them shall make a fuller number up,
Come on refresh'd, new-added, and encourag'd;
From which advantage shall we cut him off
If at Philippi we do face him there,
These people at our back.

(IV.iii.207-12)

When Cassius interrupts to voice his own opinion, Brutus silences him with the speech on “a tide in the affairs of men.”

Here, as in the earlier meditation on Caesar, Brutus bases a momentous course of action on a personal prediction; in this instance he gauges the likely behavior of the populace. And here, too, he fails to question closely the premise that underlies that prediction. The people near Sardis may or may not favor the forces of Antony. What Brutus interprets as their hostility may simply be their resentment against the intrusion of any military forces in their land. It is not clear that Brutus and Cassius need do anything at present to secure their safety; Cassius seeks not a battle, but a campaign of attrition. By forcing the issue and seeking a confrontation, Brutus may be attempting to seize an opportunity that does not truly exist.

If that opportunity is genuine, it is certainly mishandled. In the field Brutus proves an erratic general. His orders are given, as we have seen, “too early.” Indefatigable, he decides on a second contest with the enemy. He tells his men: “'Tis three a' clock, and, Romans, yet ere night / We shall try fortune in a second fight” (V.iii.109-10). Like the first encounter, this one also ends short of success, and no less inevitably. When Brutus should respond to the rhythm inherent in events, his rationality leads him to look to the regular, precise measurements of clock time. Norman Rabkin, commenting on Brutus' speech on “a tide in the affairs of men,” succinctly points to the nature of his problem: “His wisdom here is undercut only by his failure to realize that the flood cannot be gauged by the reasoning mind.”⁴⁰

Brutus' plight demonstrates that the individual who conceives of time as containing specially propitious moments for action faces a burdensome difficulty, for his world view requires him to select a certain moment for action and to concentrate all his energies then. But which moment? How is it to be recognized? And, once recognized, how precisely should it be handled? It was just such questions—and the possibility of failure—that led thinkers traditionally to link Occasion with another personification, Regret or Penitence. In antiquity Ausonius linked the two in his poem, “In Simulacrum Occasionis et Paenitentiae.”⁴¹ (In the Renaissance Machiavelli translated the poem into Italian; his version is entitled “Dell' Occasione.”) Renaissance emblematists vividly expressed the same idea. For example, in Gilles Corrozet's Hecatomgraphie (Paris, 1543), Penitence sits in the stern of Occasion's vessel. And in Jean Jacques Boissard's Emblemes latins (Metz, 1588), Penitence, holding a whip in her hands, walks immediately behind Occasion. These representations are meant to suggest that for some aspirants the self-reproach and the public opprobrium of missed or bungled opportunities could be severe indeed. And such is the case of Marcus Brutus who, unwilling to face the disgrace of capture, follows Cassius' example and takes his own life.⁴²

Brutus' death constitutes, in effect, an eloquent commentary on his quest for opportunity and, in particular, on his speech on “a tide in the affairs of men.” That speech aptly expresses the possibilities open to the individual who moves swiftly and decisively, the fleeting quality of the opportune moment, and the inevitable disaster that awaits the action taken at an inauspicious time. Perhaps no passage in Elizabethan drama captures so well the meaning of Occasion. Yet those lines, in their context, must surely be ironic, for Brutus is precisely that figure in Julius Caesar who consistently misjudges the “right” moment. His tragedy is that of a man convinced of the existence of opportune moments, yet lacking the qualities of personality and mind needed to assess and exploit them effectively.

To deepen the irony, Shakespeare surrounds Brutus with friends and enemies who possess a far surer sense of opportunity than he. Thus the pragmatic Cassius realizes his compatriot's error in allowing Antony to survive the assassination and to deliver the funeral oration. And it is Cassius who would dissuade Brutus from waging war at Philippi. Appropriately, Cassius expresses his anxiety before battle in a nautical metaphor that seems to evoke Occasion: “Why now blow wind, swell billow, and swim bark! / The storm is up, and all is on the hazard” (V.i.67-68). Similarly, Mark Antony has a keener sense of opportunity than Brutus, which allows him to capitalize on circumstance following Caesar's murder and turn the people against the assassins. Over Caesar's body he speaks of “the tide of times” (III.i.257), and after the oration he calls to mind a distinctively Renaissance Fortune when, flushed with success, he tells a servant, “Fortune is merry, / And in this mood will give us any thing” (III.ii.266-67).

III

Calling him “the sensitive philosopher misgivingly impelled to action,” Harley Granville-Barker remarks on Brutus' similarity to Hamlet: “The likeness is distinct.”⁴³ Like Brutus, Hamlet is an intellectual, a man whose cerebration is perhaps the most salient feature of his character. Like Brutus, moreover, Hamlet is called to action of a particularly violent kind, the killing of a head of state; and such a deed runs counter to his cautious nature. To be sure, Hamlet can be impulsive. But his celebrated delay in exacting revenge is the product of a mind that weighs things with great care and of a temperament that tends naturally toward meditation. When, for example, Hamlet finds Claudius at prayer, he ponders the situation, considers the possible consequences of killing the king at this moment, and finally deems the circumstances unsuitable to the deed. Hamlet's soliloquy at III.iii.73-96 is as revealing of his character as is Brutus' reflection on Caesar-as-serpent the night before the assassination.

For Hamlet, as for Brutus, some times are more propitious than others. These moments of opportunity are, however, difficult to locate. And in his pursuit of them Hamlet, like Brutus, lurches and stumbles. Hostile Fortune, rather than responsive Occasion, dominates Hamlet's mental world. During the play, however, Hamlet profoundly alters his world view, replacing Fortune with something more benign. With his acceptance of divine providence, he perceives opportunity where formerly he saw only opposition.

The transition is thrown into bold relief by the specifically visual way in which Hamlet conceives of his world.⁴⁴ This trait manifests itself in a variety of ways: in his reference to miniature painting; his use of actual portraits in the bedroom scene (“Look here upon this picture, and on this”); and his habit of speech (“By the image of my cause, I see / The portraiture of his”). Even more important, this trait expresses itself in Hamlet's vivid description of those forces which he perceives as dominating his world, forces which he personifies and describes in an almost painterly fashion.⁴⁵ Among these none is more important than Fortune.

The first important description of Fortune occurs in the context of the players' visit to Elsinore. A playgoer himself, Hamlet welcomes them warmly and asks a player to recite a speech about the killing of Priam, a speech which the prince had heard on some earlier occasion. After Hamlet declaims the lines that he remembers, the player obligingly continues.⁴⁶ From its beginning the narrative is richly descriptive—and gruesome. The Greek warrior is a ghastly figure: his arms are “Black as his purpose” (II.ii.453); he is “total gules, horridly trick'd / With blood of fathers, mothers, daughters, sons” (457-58). This appearance mirrors the horror of the deed he is about to commit: the slaying of an aged king, a figure presented sympathetically. As the Player speaks, Hamlet's purpose in requesting the recital becomes clear: he seems to feel a kinship with the bloody warrior. Life parallels art, for just as Pyrrhus is engaged in avenging his father, Achilles, so too Hamlet is embarked on avenging his father. The correspondence between Pyrrhus and Hamlet is hardly exact; we witness no soul-searching on the part of the Greek. But there is this similarity: both revengers pause before claiming their victims. Although the hesitation of Pyrrhus may have nothing of Hamlet's complexity, it is nonetheless pronounced:

                                                                                                    lo his sword,
Which was declining on the milky head
Of reverent Priam, seem'd i' th' air to stick.
So as a painted tyrant Pyrrhus stood
And, like a neutral to his will and matter,
Did nothing.

(477-82)

Only after this does “A roused vengeance” set Pyrrhus in motion; finally, the sword falls.

The parallel between Pyrrhus and Hamlet goes even further, for the deeds of both revengers are identified with the will of Fortune. Notice that the Player's speech proceeds to castigate not Pyrrhus but the power ultimately responsible for the killing of Priam:

Out, out, thou strumpet Fortune! All you gods,
In general synod take away her power!
Break all the spokes and fellies from her wheel,
And bowl the round nave down the hill of heaven
As low as to the fiends!

(493-97)

Pyrrhus, the speech suggests, is Fortune's agent, executing her decrees. Like him, Hamlet too feels impelled by Fortune, and so he shares vicariously in the vitriolic denunciation directed at Fortune by the Player: “Who this had seen, with tongue in venom steep'd, / 'Gainst Fortune's state would treason have pronounc'd” (510-11). In Hamlet's mind, as in the Player's speech, revenge is associated with a malign Fortune.

In the next scene Hamlet's tone is subdued. His passion has spent itself, but he is still thinking about his response to Fortune:

To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing, end them.

(III.i.55-59)

Although these most famous of Shakespearean lines concern Dame Fortune, few listeners or readers are truly conscious of the personification; editors seldom capitalize Fortune's name here. Yet the attributes that Hamlet assigns to Fortune are traditional parts of her iconography. From at least the time of Dante, Fortune was associated with arrows, and sixteenth-century emblem books depict Fortune brandishing those arrows.⁴⁷ Moreover, the “sea of troubles” also belongs to depictions of Fortune. As we have seen, Fortune in the Renaissance is often pictured standing just above the waves or riding in a vessel.

Unless we recognize Hamlet's personification of Fortune, we are likely to construe his thinking as more abstract than it actually is. Critics commonly cite the “To be, or not to be” soliloquy as evidence of Hamlet's philosophic bent. One even concludes that “Hamlet is a metaphysician.”⁴⁸ Admittedly, Hamlet is given to cerebration; he accuses himself of thinking too precisely on the event. Yet when he speaks of Fortune here, he is not speaking vaguely of some generalized condition; rather, he has in mind a specific antagonist, one armed with slings and arrows. So direct and intense is his response to his situation that it issues in this particular image of Fortune. Despite his intellectuality, then, there is an immediacy and vividness about the way Hamlet conceives his world. One can almost imagine him as Seneca and Machiavelli envision man: in hand-to-hand combat with Fortune.

What Wolfgang Clemen has said of Hamlet's image-making applies as well to his thinking about Fortune: “When he begins to speak, the images fairly stream to him without the slightest effort—not as similes or conscious paraphrases, but as immediate and spontaneous visions.”⁴⁹ Hamlet's way of envisioning Fortune, then, differs from, say, Fluellen's. In Henry V Fluellen ticks off Fortune's features as though he were taking an iconographic inventory (III.vi.30-38). He tells us that Fortune “is painted blind,” that she is “painted also with a wheel,” that her foot “is fixed upon a spherical stone which rolls, and rolls, and rolls.” By contrast, there is nothing laborious about Hamlet's description of Fortune. She springs quickly to his mind's eye. She is a familiar part of the cosmic furniture, as much a part of his world as the sun and moon.

Hamlet's way of envisioning Fortune is distinctive in another way as well: rather than enumerating several of her accouterments in the manner of Fluellen, he suggests her power by naming only one. Marvin Spevack's observation about Hamlet's method of constructing images is apposite: “Hamlet is like a caricaturist who dwells on some ruling trait or feature … and makes the part stand for the whole.”⁵⁰ It is this characteristic which manifests itself in his speech to Horatio:

                                                                                                                        thou hast been
As one in suff'ring all that suffers nothing,
A man that Fortune's buffets and rewards
Hast ta'en with equal thanks; and blest are those
Whose blood and judgment are so well co-meddled,
That they are not a pipe for Fortune's finger
To sound what stop she please.

(III.ii.65-71)

The only visual counterpart to this passage that I have discovered shows Fortune not only with a pipe, which she plays while a man dances to the tune, but also with other familiar accouterments—blindfold, globe, and sail. The representation appears as an emblem in Guillaume de la Perrière's La Morosophie. If Shakespeare knew this emblem or some other like it, he has chosen to simplify it drastically so as to focus on only one of Fortune's features.

Artistic constructions of one kind or another—portraits, theatrical speeches, even an entire play—form an integral part of Hamlet's expression. They function as a screen onto which he projects his emotions of anger or depression or admiration. Maurice Charney remarks that Hamlet “thinks of experience as a work of art that can only be mastered by aesthetic means.”⁵¹ Hamlet habitually locates himself within the confines of an already created artistic world. Art enables him to recapture his past, define his situation, and express his most intense feelings.

Such an application of art is apparent in the play-within-the-play, where Hamlet's personal feelings find a parallel. When the Player King declares, “What to ourselves in passion we propose, / The passion ending, doth the purpose lose” (III.ii.194-95), Hamlet must be reminded of the difficulty he has in marshalling and sustaining emotional resolution. He keenly appreciates the problem of directing one's action in a perilously uncertain world; he knows how riddled with contingency is the human condition. The Player King's line, “Grief joys, joy grieves, on slender accident” (199), must strike a responsive chord in Hamlet whose entire life has been irrevocably changed by the discovery of his father's murder. So too this recognition of man's bondage to circumstance must strike Hamlet as particularly apt to his own situation:

Our wills and fates do so contrary run
That our devices still are overthrown,
Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own.

(211-13)

In so many of these lines we seem to hear Hamlet's own sentiments. Indeed, it is entirely possible that these are meant to be Hamlet's own words, the “speech of some dozen lines, or sixteen lines” (II.ii.541-42) which he asked the Player to insert in The Murder of Gonzago.

If Hamlet detects accident in his own life, he sees it also in the lives of others, especially those of his parents, whose relationship is reflected in that of the Player King and Queen. Contemplating the gulf between present resolve and future action, the Player King says:

This world is not for aye, nor 'tis not strange
That even our loves should with our fortunes change:
For 'tis a question left us yet to prove,
Whether love lead fortune, or else fortune love.

(200-3)

The speaker knows that although the queen may vow eternal fidelity, human behavior is unpredictable. And he expresses his sense of contingency by personifying Fortune.⁵² Like the references to Fortune by Hamlet, this one has a pictorial counterpart, for in Jean Cousin's Liber Fortunae Dame Fortune quite literally leads Cupid (or Love) by the hand.⁵³

The series of references to Fortune in the play convey, collectively, Hamlet's sense of victimization. To him circumstance seems always to favor predatory figures. It is the innocent—Hamlet's father, Priam, the Player King—who fall prey to their adversaries.⁵⁴ It is inevitable, then, that Hamlet should feel demoralized and that, consequently, he should find it difficult to act decisively. With the success of the play-within-the-play, however, Hamlet gains a new sense of belligerency, one that leads him to rebuff Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: “'Sblood, do you think I am easier to be play'd on than a pipe?” (III.ii.370-71). Compared with his comments on Fortune's pipe earlier in the scene, this remark bespeaks new resolve to resist intimidation from without. And Hamlet's killing of Polonius manifests, in an even more vivid way, his determination to act. When he sees the body, Hamlet says, “I took thee for thy better. Take thy fortune” (III.iv.32). These words underscore his changed disposition. For the first time, he speaks of “fortune” rather than Fortune. That is, he speaks of a person's individual lot rather than the goddess.

Nevertheless, this new aggressiveness does not immediately issue in the fulfillment of the Ghost's command, for Hamlet proves singularly inept. The killing of Polonius fails to advance his purpose; it only jeopardizes Hamlet's already precarious position at Claudius' court. He seems dimly to recognize his inability to find or to seize opportunity when, just before leaving Denmark, he sees the doughty Fortinbras and says:

How all occasions do inform against me,
And spur my dull revenge!

(IV.iv.32-33)

That Hamlet should admire a soldier who has been termed an “opportunist” is not surprising, for despite his preoccupation with the time, Hamlet lacks any sense of timeliness. He resorts to quick, jerky, ineffectual action. He has no sense of the rhythm of events, no sense of what is opportune. Instead of cooperating with the time, he thinks of himself as correcting the time: “The time is out of joint—O cursed spite, / That ever I was born to set it right!” (I.v.188-89).

Hamlet's antagonism toward and fear of time parallels and perhaps derives from his attitude toward Fortune. These two are closely allied in the Renaissance and, as we have seen, are sometimes conflated iconographically. To Hamlet both are implacable foes. In the same speech in which he talks of the slings and arrows of Fortune, he also complains of “the whips and scorns of time” (III.i.69). And a whip, Samuel C. Chew has shown, was actually carried by Father Time in the Renaissance.⁵⁵ When, later on, Hamlet's attitude toward Fortune alters, he also modifies his attitude toward time.

The change takes place on Hamlet's voyage to England, one of the most mysterious journeys in Shakespeare. Since it occurs offstage, we are denied first-hand knowledge. We perceive its effects as soon as we see the returned Hamlet, but the nature of the change we learn only gradually through Hamlet's words to Horatio.

Hamlet recounts to his friend his experience of several events involving chance: the discovery of the royal commission intended to work his death; the substitution of one letter for another; and the capture by pirates. The series of coincidences is striking: that he should have chanced to discover the contents of Claudius' letter; that he should have had his father's signet with him; that he alone should have been captured at sea. We might expect Hamlet to perceive the hand of Fortune in all of this. After all, as recently as his last speech before leaving Denmark, he was still talking about Fortune, expressing his admiration of Fortinbras for “Exposing what is mortal and unsure / To all that fortune, death, and danger dare” (IV.iv.51-52). Moreover, Hamlet's journey takes place upon the sea, associated with the operation of chance. Indeed, Hamlet has himself invoked the symbolism when he spoke of the “sea of troubles.” But Hamlet defies our expectation. Instead of ascribing events to Fortune, he says to Horatio:

                                                                                                                                            Rashly—
And prais'd be rashness for it—let us know
Our indiscretion sometime 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.6-11)

And in answering Horatio's inquiry about the signet, Hamlet again cites divine agency: “Why, even in that was heaven ordinant” (48). Clearly, Hamlet places an entirely different interpretation on contingency than he did previously. Why?

Hitherto Hamlet has considered himself the victim of “slender accident.” He has been tormented by Fortune—her slings and arrows, her pipe, her wheel. From his earliest reference (to Fortune's star), every mention of Fortune has been negative, and understandably so. But now, on the voyage, chance begins to work in his favor. He finds himself guided rather than manipulated; the power responsible he deems benign. Contingency emerges as part of an overarching pattern. John Holloway writes, “Over and over in Hamlet, chance turns into a larger design, randomness becomes retribution.”⁵⁶ Believing God to be the author of that design, Hamlet supplants Fortune with providence in his cosmology. Never again will he mention Fortune.

Concomitantly, Hamlet gains a wholly new attitude toward time. No longer does he complain of Time's whips and scorns. Nor does he shrink from action. There is now no flailing about in search of the right moment. He has a sense of opportunity which he had not previously possessed. It is appropriate that this should be owing to his experience on the voyage, for in the Renaissance Occasion was usually depicted on the sea, sometimes riding in a vessel. Earlier in the play Laertes implicitly links Occasion with the sea when, about to embark, he says to Ophelia, “A double blessing is a double grace, / Occasion smiles upon a second leave” (I.iii.53-54).⁵⁷ And Hamlet, on his voyage, seizes an opportunity that presents itself quite literally on the sea. It is perhaps not too much of an exaggeration to say that Hamlet re-enacts the shift from Fortune to Occasion that was taking place in so much Renaissance thought and iconography. That is, he moves from a world dominated by an antagonistic Fortune, to one inhabited by a more responsive Occasion.

When Hamlet returns to Denmark, his demeanor has utterly changed. Despite the brief altercation with Laertes at Ophelia's funeral, Hamlet seems invested with quiet confidence, even in the face of peril. When the duel with Laertes is proposed, Horatio urges caution. But Hamlet refuses to delay:

Not a whit, we defy augury. There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. 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.

(V.ii.219-22)

To some, this marks the nadir of Hamlet's life. H. B. Charlton, for instance, interprets Hamlet's utterance as “merely the courage of despair.”⁵⁸ In my judgment, however, Hamlet expresses neither despair nor indifference. His attitude, after all, is based upon faith in providence, a benevolent force which invites man's cooperation. Providence allows him to fulfill his potential by aligning himself with a larger design. Acknowledgment of providence thus inspires a mood of calm, rather than despondency. Hamlet no longer needs or wants to play the malcontent. His demeanor takes on the subdued aspect of one who believes himself acting in accord with some greater power.

Hamlet's readiness should not be confused with passivity.⁵⁹ Readiness involves an alertness to the rhythm of events. It implies a willingness to respond actively to circumstance. It presupposes an ability and a disposition to cooperate with the time, for readiness signifies “both prompt compliance and a state of preparation.”⁶⁰ Believing himself an instrument of God's will, Hamlet can act with equanimity and at the right moment. He will not now plot revenge as he had earlier done. Yet “it will come”—as the unpremeditated response to Claudius' device of the poisoned sword.

By the end of the play, when Hamlet has come to accept the role of providence in his life, not only has Fortune been expunged from Hamlet's world view but also from the play itself. This is owing to the fact that, earlier, the representation of Fortune was so completely an expression of Hamlet's personal vision. Apart from the Player and the Player King, who describe Fortune “in character” so to speak and implicitly at Hamlet's direction, only the prince speaks of Fortune repeatedly. Since Hamlet is the chief source of Fortune's representation and since it is through him that we so largely perceive the world of the play, it is natural that she should disappear when Hamlet revises his picture of the world. Fortune, whose image has loomed so prominently for so long, must vanish as suddenly as she first appeared.

Notes

1. General studies of Fortune in Shakespearean tragedy include: Paul Reyher, Essai sur les idées dans l'oeuvre de Shakespeare, Bibliothèque des langues modernes (Paris: Marcel Didier, 1947); Soji Iwasaki, The Sword and the Word: Shakespeare's Tragic Sense of Time (Tokyo: Shinozaki Shorin, 1973), esp. pp. 13-49; J. Leeds Barroll, “Structure in Shakespearean Tragedy,” ShakS [Shakespeare Studies], 7 (1974): 345-78. See also Robert Kilburn Root, Classical Mythology in Shakespeare, Yale Studies in English, 19 (New York: Henry Holt, 1903), pp. 61-64. For Shakespeare's treatment of time, see Frederick Turner, Shakespeare and the Nature of Time: Moral and Philosophical Themes in Some Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971). A wide-ranging study of time in the Renaissance has been made by Ricardo Quinones, The Renaissance Discovery of Time, Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature, no. 31 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1972).

2. Virgil K. Whitaker, The Mirror up to Nature: The Technique of Shakespeare's Tragedies (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1965), p. 119.

3. Patterns in Shakespearian Tragedy (London: Methuen, 1960), p. 51. Ribner makes much the same point in The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare, rev. ed. (London: Methuen, 1965), p. 162.

4. “Richard II and Shakespeare's Tragic Mode,” TSLL [Texas Studies in Literature and Language], 5 (1963): 350.

5. Shakespeare's Historical Plays (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1964), p. 119.

6. Studies of Fortune in Richard II and in the other histories include: Reyher, Essai sur les idées dans l'oeuvre de Shakespeare, esp. pp. 245-52; and Walter F. Schirmer, “Glück und Ende der Könige in Shakespeares Historien,” Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Forschung des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen, 22 (1954): 5-18.

7. Peter Ure, ed., New Arden King Richard II, 5th ed. (London: Methuen, 1961), p. lxxxii.

8. H. M. Richmond, Shakespeare's Political Plays (New York: Random House, 1967), p. 134.

9. Rolf Soellner, Shakespeare's Patterns of Self-Knowledge (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1972), p. 99.

10. According to Peter Ure, ed., King Richard II, “The figure of buckets and well is adapted from the medieval and Elizabethan figure of Fortune's buckets …” (p. 136). Howard R. Patch discusses the figure, in The Goddess Fortuna in Mediaeval Literature (1927; reprint ed., New York: Octagon Books, 1967), pp. 53-54. Guillaume de Machaut uses the image of Fortune's buckets in Remède de Fortune (c. 1342), printed in Oeuvres, ed. Ernest Hoepffner, 2 vols. (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1911), 2: 35-36.

11. The Mirror for Magistrates, ed. Lily B. Campbell (1938; reprint ed., New York: Barnes and Noble, 1960), p. 163.

12. The Origins of English Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), p. 109.

13. Ibid., p. 124.

14. Patterns in Shakespearian Tragedy, pp. 49-50.

15. Richard's most memorable images—the buckets and, later, the clock—while implying some sort of cause and effect, locate the cause without rather than within.

16. Willard Farnham, The Medieval Heritage of Elizabethan Tragedy (1936; reprint ed. with corrections, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1970), p. 415.

17. Samuel Schoenbaum, in “‘Richard II’ and the Realities of Power,” ShS [Shakespeare Survey], 28 (1975): 1-13, has argued that the king is actually more astute, at least in the trial-by-combat scene, than readers of the play recognize. Diane Bornstein, however, in “Trial by Combat and Official Irresponsibility in Richard II,” ShakS, 8 (1975): 131-41, argues that the scene demonstrates serious error on Richard's part.

18. The Dramatist and the Received Idea: Studies in the Plays of Marlowe and Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1968), p. 178.

19. Ed., New Cambridge King Richard II (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1939), p. xx.

20. Shakespeare's History Plays (1944; reprint ed., New York: Barnes and Noble, 1969), p. 260.

21. “The Wheel of Fortune in Shakespeare's Historical Plays,” RES [Review of English Studies], NS 1 (1950): 3.

22. Quoted in the New Cambridge King Richard II, ed. Wilson, p. lxii.

23. The Cease of Majesty: A Study of Shakespeare's History Plays (London: Edward Arnold, 1961), p. 251.

24. Like her husband, the queen speaks of Fortune, using imagery in keeping with her sex: “methinks / Some unborn sorrow, ripe in fortune's womb, / Is coming towards me” (II.ii.9-11). There is an interesting parallel in Fulke Greville's Life of Sir Philip Sidney, Intro. Nowell Smith (London: Clarendon Press, 1907): “these Tyrannicall encrochments doe carry the images of Hell, and her thunder-workers, in their own breasts, as fortune doth misfortunes in that wind-blown, vast, and various womb of hers” (p. 109).

25. The distinction is expressed in this line of Sidney's: “Nor Fortune of thy fortune author is” (The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. William A. Ringler, Jr. [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962], sonnet 33, p. 181). Editors of Shakespeare and many commentators as well frequently fail to observe this distinction in their handling of capitalization.

26. Shakespeare's treatment of Bolingbroke probably was inspired, in part, by this passage in Holinshed regarding the departure of the Welsh troops: “… wheras if the king had come before their breaking up, no doubt, but they would have put the duke of Hereford in adventure of a field: so that the kings lingering of time before his comming over, gave opportunitie to the duke to bring things to passe as he could have wished, and tooke from the king all occasion to recover afterwards anie forces sufficient to resist him.” Quoted in Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. Geoffrey Bullough, 3 (New York and London: Columbia Univ. Press, 1960), 400.

27. Holinshed's Third Volume of Chronicles (1587) interprets the rise and fall in providential fashion: “in this dejecting of the one, & advancing of the other, the providence of God is to be respected, & his secret will to be woondered at.” Quoted in Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 3: 402. R. Mark Benbow, in “The Providential Theory of Historical Causation in Holinshed's Chronicles: 1577 and 1587,” TSLL, 1 (1959): 264-76, argues that the 1587 edition is more insistently providential in emphasis than the earlier edition and that this shift is largely due to the additions of Abraham Fleming (additions which include, according to Benbow, the sentence quoted above in this note). Benbow also makes the point that “Fleming attempts to subordinate the concept of Fortune to that of Providence” (p. 267). Evidently, the providential interpretation found in the Chronicles was not shared by Shakespeare. As Henry Ansgar Kelly writes, in Divine Providence in the England of Shakespeare's Histories (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1970), “After viewing the providential themes in Richard II, we may ask if there is any indication that Shakespeare intended us to feel that God was active in bringing about any of the actions of the play, or in aiding any of the characters. It would seem that we must answer in the negative, for not even the characters themselves are dramatized as considering any of the play's vicissitudes to have been brought about by God” (p. 214).

28. A. R. Humphreys, Shakespeare: Richard II (London: Edward Arnold, 1967), pp. 43-44.

29. Moody E. Prior, in The Drama of Power: Studies in Shakespeare's History Plays (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1973), writes that the “evidently calculated absence” of the wheel of Fortune suggests that Shakespeare “was trying to avoid a reductive cliché” (p. 165).

30. The Virtues Reconciled: An Iconographic Study (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1947), p. 15. See also Heinrich Schwarz, “The Mirror in Art,” Art Quarterly, 15 (1952): 105-06.

31. “Bolingbroke, A True Machiavellian,” MLQ [Modern Language Quarterly], 9 (1948): 183.

32. A Kingdom for a Stage: The Achievement of Shakespeare's History Plays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1972), p. 102.

33. Shakespeare and the Emblem Writers: An Exposition of Their Similarities of Thought and Expression (London: Trübner, 1870), pp. 260 ff.

34. John W. Velz, in “Undular Structure in ‘Julius Caesar,’” MLR [Modern Language Review], 66 (1971): 21-30, has suggested that the imagery of Brutus' speech may have been inspired by a passage in Plutarch dealing with “the small boat which carried ‘Caesar and his fortune’ to safety through an adverse surf and a dangerous storm when he made his secret journey to Brundisium” (24). This seems to me unlikely.

35. Brutus does not, of course, actually describe the figure of Occasion. George Lyman Kittredge, however, writes in his edition of Julius Caesar (New York: Ginn, 1939) that Brutus' speech “gives superb expression to a philosophical commonplace that Shakespeare had read in one of his earliest schoolbooks—Cato's Distichs, ii, 26:

    Rem tibi quam noris aptam dimittere noli:
    Fronte capillata, post est Occasio calva.”

    (p. 176)

    A translation, in Preceptes of Cato with annotacions of D. Erasmus of Roterodame (London, [1553]), Book II, sigs. G5^v-G6, reads:

    A thing that thou knowest mete for thy purpose.
    See in no case, thou dooest it lose.
    Occasion in the forehead hath heare
    And the polle, balde and bare.

36. The connection between Time and Occasion is suggested in The Bloody Brother, or Rollo, Duke of Normandy, in which a character says: “Blest Occasion / Offers herself in thousand safeties to you; / Time standing still to point you out your purpose. …” See The Works of Beaumont and Fletcher, ed. Rev. Alexander Dyce, 10 (London: Edward Moxon, 1846), 391. So closely related are Occasion and Time that Shakespeare sometimes conflates the two. In Much Ado About Nothing, for instance, a character speaks of Time when the metaphor, referring to a topknot or forelock, properly demands Occasion: “if he found her accordant, he meant to take the present time by the top …” (I.ii.14-15). Similarly, in All's Well That Ends Well a character says, “Not one word more of the consumed time. / Let's take the instant by the forward top” (V.iii.38-39).

37. See Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes, in Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. Geoffrey Bullough, 5 (New York and London: Columbia Univ. Press, 1964), 122.

38. Among those who find Brutus' reasoning seriously flawed are Virgil K. Whitaker, who writes of Brutus' soliloquy, in Shakespeare's Use of Learning: An Inquiry into the Growth of his Mind and Art (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1953), “Shakespeare has done his best to make the fallacies in the reasoning obvious” (p. 245) and Kenneth Muir, who writes, in Shakespeare's Tragic Sequence (London: Hutchinson Univ. Library, 1972), that “in this crucial soliloquy Brutus is not given a single valid argument” (p. 48).

39. This soliloquy is not so explicitly informed by the concept of Occasion as is the speech on “a tide in the affairs of men.” However, Douglas L. Peterson, in Time, Tide, and Tempest: A Study of Shakespeare's Romances (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1973), observes that Brutus' images of the serpent and of seizing the tide resemble those in a poem by Robert Southwell “on the importance of seizing occasion when it presents itself” (p. 67, n31).

40. Shakespeare and the Common Understanding (New York: Free Press, 1967), p. 117.

41. See Ausonius, ed. and trans. Hugh G. Evelyn White, LCL, 2 (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard Univ. Press, 1949), 174-77.

42. Brutus' suicide was a popular subject among emblematists. Andrea Alciati, for example, in Viri Clarissimi … Emblematum Liber (Augsburg, 1531), depicts Brutus plunging a sword into his chest (sig. C1). And Geoffrey Whitney, in A Choice of Emblemes (Leyden, 1586), portrays Brutus falling on his sword (p. 70). Both interpret the action in similar fashion; their common motto reads, “Fortuna virtutem superans” (“Fortune conquering virtue”). In Shakespeare's treatment, however, it would be more accurate to say that Brutus falls victim to Occasio rather than Fortuna.

43. Prefaces to Shakespeare, 1 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1946), 30. Granville-Barker had made essentially the same point earlier, in “From Henry V to Hamlet,” in Proceedings of the British Academy, 11 (1924-25), 283-309.

44. For Shakespeare's interest in the visual arts, see Margaret Farrand Thorp, “Shakespeare and the Fine Arts,” PMLA, 46 (1931): 672-93; and Arthur H. R. Fairchild, Shakespeare and the Arts of Design, Univ. of Missouri Studies, 12 (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1937).

45. For discussions of the world of the play, see Maynard Mack, “The World of Hamlet,” YR [The Yale Review], 41 (1952): 502-23; and Bernard McElroy, Shakespeare's Mature Tragedies (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 29-88.

46. For analyses of the Player's speech, see Harry Levin, “An Explication of the Player's Speech,” in The Question of Hamlet (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1959), pp. 138-64; Arthur Johnston, “The Player's Speech in Hamlet,” SQ [Shakespeare Quarterly], 13 (1962): 21-30; Harold Skulsky, “Revenge, Honor, and Conscience in Hamlet,” PMLA, 85 (1970): 78-87.

47. For Dante's suggestion that arrows belong to Fortune, see the Paradiso, Canto XVII, 23-26. For the pictorial rendering of Fortune with arrows, see Jean Cousin, The Book of Fortune, Two Hundred Unpublished Drawings, ed. Ludovic Lalanne, trans. H. Mainwaring Dunstan (London and Paris: Librairie de l'art, 1883), pls. VII and XIII. Alfred Woltmann, in Holbein and His Time, trans. F. E. Bunnètt (London: Richard Bentley, 1872), notes that a design by Ambrosius Holbein, brother of the painter, associates Fortune with the arrow of Death (p. 257). And the title page of a German work, published in 1564, depicts the figure of Fortuna-Occasio-Tempus holding in her hand an arrow. In this design by Heinrich Lautensack, the figure is identified as “Die Zeit,” but may more accurately be called Occasion: she is winged, carries a razor, wears a forelock, and stands on a winged hourglass. Reproduced in Hollstein's German Engravings, Etchings and Woodcuts, ed. Fedja Anzelewsky, 21 (Amsterdam: Van Gendt, 1978), 128. As for the slings of Fortune, I think it likely that the bridle held by Fortuna-Nemesis in many Renaissance representations was mistakenly interpreted as a sling. Erwin Panofsky, in “‘Virgo et Victrix’: A Note on Dürer's Nemesis,” in Prints, ed. Carl Zigrosser (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962), pp. 13-38, notes that “the excellent Joseph Hilarius Eckhel (1737-1798) found it necessary to devote a whole page to proving that her [Nemesis] most frequent and distinctive attribute, the bridle (‘frenum’), is indeed a bridle and not a sling (‘funda’) …” (p. 17).

48. H. B. Charlton, Shakespearian Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1948), p. 97.

49. The Development of Shakespeare's Imagery (London: Methuen, 1951), p. 106.

50. “Hamlet and Imagery: The Mind's Eye,” NS [Die Neveren Sprachen], 15 (1966): 208.

51. Style in Hamlet (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1969), p. 318.

52. Fortune in the Player King's speech is discussed by James I. Wimsatt, in “The Player King on Friendship,” MLR, 65 (1970): 1-6.

53. See The Book of Fortune [Liber Fortunae], pl. LXVII. There is an interesting parallel in Webster's Duchess of Malfi, ed. John Russell Brown, The Revels Plays (London: Methuen, 1964). In the “marriage” scene the Duchess says to Antonio, “I would have you lead your fortune by the hand, / Unto your marriage bed” (I.i.495-96). Webster may be indebted to the lines in Hamlet or perhaps to some pictorial representation like that of Jean Cousin.

54. One of these adversaries, Claudius, has been linked to Fortune by his own self-description. Beatrice White, in “Claudius and Fortune,” Anglia, 77 (1959): 204-07, writes: “the reference of Claudius to his ‘one auspicious and one dropping eye,’ in an ancient antithesis supported by paradoxes reminiscent of those used by writers on Fortune to stress her fickleness, stamps him from the first as a hypocrite, underlines the dubious nature of his real intentions, and marks him out at once as a potentially ‘treacherous villain’” (206).

55. The Pilgrimage of Life (1962; reprint ed., Port Washington, N.Y. and London: Kennikat Press, 1973), p. 18.

56. The Story of the Night: Studies in Shakespeare's Major Tragedies (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), p. 35.

57. Nigel Alexander, in Poison, Play, and Duel: A Study in Hamlet (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1971), finds a correspondence between Hamlet's lines at III.i.85-87 and Brutus' speech in Julius Caesar about “a tide in the affairs of men” (pp. 74-75). Doris V. Falk, in “Proverbs and the Polonius Destiny,” SQ, 18 (1967), sees a reference to the wheel of Occasion in Ophelia's mention of a wheel at IV.v.172 (35).

58. Shakespearian Tragedy, p. 103.

59. J. V. Cunningham usefully assesses the meaning of “readiness,” in Woe or Wonder: The Emotional Effect of Shakespearean Tragedy (Denver: Univ. of Denver Press, 1951), pp. 9-13.

60. S. F. Johnson, “The Regeneration of Hamlet,” SQ, 3 (1952): 205.