Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists, to the displeasure of neoclassic critics, loaded their plays with material apparently tangential to the main business of the works. It has been the occupation and pastime of later critics to discover the integral roles of this material. In Hamlet, notable for its diversity, nearly every scene and passage has proved susceptible to such discovery. Reynaldo's investigation into Laertes's activities, for example, seems without bearing on the main plot. Yet inspection of Acts II and III shows that Reynaldo's mission is related to an extensive series of investigations which culminates in Hamlet's ‘Mousetrap’ and is farcically concluded with the search for Polonius's body. Again, the impromptu depiction of the ‘rugged Pyrrhus’ in a fragment from an actor's repertoire is not excrescent, but rather provides both an analogue to Claudius and a foil to Hamlet. Comparable instances abound. My interest in this essay is to demonstrate how the Player King's lines on friendship—which possess on the surface the tediousness without the humour of a lecture by Polonius—have broad relevance to the activities of Hamlet's three schoolfriends and by extension to the behaviour of all the major characters. They form indeed the salient statement of an important theme of the whole drama.

After the Player Queen has sworn eternal devotion to her husband, his speech in response deals, among other things, with the changeableness of friends:

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.
The great man down, you mark his favourite flies;
The poor advanc'd makes friends of enemies.
And hitherto doth love on fortune tend;
For who not needs shall never lack a friend,
And who in want a hollow friend doth try,
Directly seasons him his enemy.

(III.2.195)¹

A brief inspection of the extensive literary relationships of the lines helps to elucidate their implications for Hamlet's schoolfriends. The locus classicus for both medieval and Renaissance discussions of friendship was Cicero's De Amicitia, which sixteenth-century schoolboys would have read as a matter of course. Along with Cicero's tract, three other works are probably part of the total allusion of Shakespeare's lines: Ovid's Tristia, the Consolation of Philosophy of Boethius, and the Middle English translation of Jean de Meun's Roman de la Rose.

The subject of Cicero's discussion is male friendship, as exemplified particularly by the relationship between Laelius and Scipio; also in the three other works mentioned the reference is rather to the alliance of friends (presumably male) than to that of marriage partners. In all four the contrast between faithful and unfaithful associates is emphasized. The diction and phrasing of Shakespeare's lines may be indebted to all of them: His fourth line, for example (‘Whether love lead fortune, or else fortune love’), is very close in idea and rhetorical form to Cicero's ‘Non igitur utilitatem amicitia, sed utilitas amicitiam secuta est’ (‘Friendship does not follow advantage, but rather advantage friendship’).² Ovid's complaint in exile is paraphrased by the last six verses in Shakespeare's passage: ‘While you are happy, you number many friends; once skies are overcast, you are alone’.³ The emphasis by the Player King on the transience of the world, however, and the image of Love in attendance on Fortune seems indebted to a later development of the tradition, expressed most notably in the Consolation of Philosophy and the Roman de la Rose.

Shakespeare could have read Boethius in any of several vernacular versions as well as in the original, and the English Romaunt of the Rose appeared (along with a translation of the Consolation) in all the sixteenth-century editions of Chaucer after Pynson's.⁴ In both works, as in the lines from Hamlet in question, Lady Fortune is depicted as a competitor for one's friends. Philosophy asks in the Consolation:

Dost thou esteem it a small benefit that this rough and harsh Fortune hath made known unto thee the minds of thy faithful friends? She hath severed thy assured from thy doubtful friends; prosperity [fortuna] at her departure took away with her those which were hers, and left thee thine.⁵

Jean de Meun uses both Cicero's tract on friendship and the Consolation for his discourse in the Rose about Fortune's influence on friendship. In representative lines from the English version of this discourse, Reason states that Froward Fortune has better effects than her happy counterpart, since the former reveals

Freend of effect and freend of chere,
And which in love weren trewe and stable,
And whiche also weren variable,
After Fortune, her goddesse.

(l. 5486)⁶

Misfortune is therefore beneficent in proving the mettle of one's friends.

These four works, two classical and two medieval, provide a rather full background for the Player King's expression of the idea that bad luck provides the test of friendship. In its context his statement has immediate—though certainly not striking—relevance to the behaviour of Gertrude. But its less obvious application to the actions of Horatio, the good friend, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who are Fortune's friends, is of profound significance in setting up a contrast between them and indicating their intrinsic characters. The contrast is developed throughout the first three acts, particularly in the discussions and evocations of Fortune which are plentifully associated with Hamlet's three former schoolmates.

Just before the play scene Hamlet clearly identifies Horatio as the faithful friend who does not follow Fortune. Having protested initially that he has no motive for flattering Horatio,⁷ Hamlet proceeds to compliment him for his stoical indifference to the vicissitudes of existence:

                                                                                                    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 comeddled
That they are not a pipe for Fortune's finger
To sound what stop she please.

(III.2.63)⁸

As viewers we must take this eulogy of Horatio mostly on trust; he does little in the play to substantiate it. At the same time, given what happens on stage, Hamlet's characterization of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as ‘adders fanged’ seems insufficiently motivated, and his peevish reaction to their questioning has appeared excessive to many critics. But the implicit opposition between the three school-friends set up by the imagery and discussions of Fortune serves to confirm his strong opinions about them and to indicate to the audience that Hamlet's is the proper evaluation, thus in a way supplying the lack of significant activity on the part of these characters.

Balancing Hamlet's praise of Horatio in the above passage is his attack on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern later in the same scene; he feels that they are trying to play upon him like a pipe—presumably the pipe of Fortune which Horatio refuses to become—and explodes: ‘You would play upon me; you would seem to know my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery; you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass’ (III.2.355). That this imputed alliance of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern with the forces of Fortune does not result simply from Hamlet's subjective prejudice is shown by their own words. Though they do not openly tell Hamlet that their friendship is with Fortune and not with him, they admit it to him in a riddling manner. In their first discussion with him they claim to be ‘indifferent children of the earth’, neither the button of Fortune's cap, nor the sole of her shoes (II.2.226-30). In their position in the ‘middle of her favours’, however, they are her ‘privates’, operating in her ‘secret parts’ (231-5). The bawdy humour of the repartee is darkened by ominous undertones, for they are in fact secret operatives and private detectives of Claudius, who in his first speech has clearly allied himself with Fortune, evoking strongly the traditional connexion of kingship with Fortune.

As he sits in state, before dispatching the embassy to Norway and ruling on Hamlet's and Laertes's petitions to return to their studies, Claudius speaks in justification of his marriage:

Therefore our sometime sister, now our queen,
Th'imperial jointress to this warlike state,
Have we, as 'twere with a defeated joy,
With an auspicious and a dropping eye,
With mirth in funeral, and with dirge in marriage,
In equal scale weighing delight and dole,
Taken to wife.

(I.2.8)

This brazen statement, echoing traditional descriptions of the brazen Dame Fortune, shows what kind of man Claudius is and as a consequence in what manner Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are the privates of Fortune. In the first place, the one glad, one sad eye is a commonplace in the iconography and literature of Fortune. In Chaucer's Book of the Duchess, for example, the Black Knight says in describing the fickle goddess:

She ys fals; and ever laughynge
With oon eye, and that other wepynge.

(l. 633)⁹

Second, the oxymorons in Claudius's self-description—‘defeated joy’, ‘mirth in funeral’, and ‘dirge in marriage’—are especially pertinent to Fortune's behaviour; the Black Knight exclaims that she is a ‘dispitouse debonaire’ and ‘Th'envyouse charite, / That is ay fals, and semeth wele’.¹⁰ Claudius's weighing of ‘delight and dole’, finally, seems to involve a reference to Fortune's scales, in which she balances happiness with sorrow. Like the wheel the scales were a familiar trademark of the goddess.¹¹

Claudius in this scene is acting like Dame Fortune, who arbitrarily gives and takes away; he grants Laertes leave to return to his studies but denies Hamlet the same thing. References in other plays of Shakespeare also reflect the conventional association of the king's powers with those of Fortune and allude to the king's usual position, in artists' representations, on top of Fortune's wheel. The artists often give Fortune a king's crown; and the king who nearly always appears on the top of her wheel frequently has an appearance very like or identical with that of the goddess. Various aspects of the association of the king and Fortune are reflected in passages from Richard III, Richard II, and Antony and Cleopatra: Richard III, in the remarkable scene in which Buckingham urges him to accept the crown, protestingly surrenders with a graphic image of himself as the pack-horse of Fortune:

Since you will buckle Fortune on my back,
To bear her burden, whe'er I will or no,
I must have patience to endure the load.

(III.7.228)

Richard II's Queen, when she is told by the gardener of her husband's deposition, finds her own ignorance anomalous, since she as Queen is properly Fortune's (in this case, Misfortune's) ambassadress:

Nimble mischance, that art so light of foot,
Doth not thy embassage belong to me,
And am I last that knows it?

(III.4.92)

And when Antony imagines himself led through Rome, his image of a charioted Caesar preceding him seems to suggest that the new emperor of the world is at once astride and in control of Fortune's wheel:

                                                                                                                        Eros,
Wouldst thou be window'd in great Rome and see
Thy master thus with pleach'd arms, bending down
His corrigible neck, his face subdu'd
To penetrative shame, whilst the wheel'd seat
Of fortunate Caesar, drawn before him, branded
His baseness that ensued?

(IV.14.71, italics mine)

Later in Hamlet itself the image of the wheel associated with kingship evokes the iconography of Fortune. Rosencrantz in his famous speech on monarchy asserts:

                                                                                                    The cease of majesty
Dies not alone, but like a gulf doth draw
What's near it with it. It is a massy wheel,
Fix'd on the summit of the highest mount,
To whose huge spokes ten thousand lesser things
Are mortis'd and adjoin'd; which when it falls,
Each small annexment, petty consequence,
Attends the boist'rous ruin.

(III.3.15)

The many ‘lesser things’ attached to this figurative wheel suggest the numerous figures depicted on the periphery of Fortune's wheel in some representations; for example, around the rose window of the south porch of Amiens Cathedral.¹²

The factors which point to Claudius as Fortune's surrogate give a deeper significance to the bantering about Fortune's privates.¹³ Rosencrantz and Guildenstern seem to delight in this word-play by which they classify themselves as true friends of Claudius-Fortune and oppose themselves to Horatio, the faithful friend who is insensitive to the frowns and smiles of the capricious goddess. Their adherence to the King particularly emphasizes the reasons for Hamlet's unhappiness, since previously, by Gertrude's testimony, there had not been ‘two men living’ to whom Hamlet was more attached (II.2.20). They are the exemplars of those, among whom Gertrude and Ophelia seem to be numbered, who have proved to be more Fortune's friends than Hamlet's.

At the same time, however, Fortune has done Hamlet a service by demonstrating the quality of Horatio's affection. ‘The firm friend is discerned in unstable circumstance’, says Laelius in De Amicitia.¹⁴ Hamlet's bad fortune has revealed to him a true friend whom he may prize in his ‘heart of hearts’. Horatio's presence comforts and reassures him very much as the faithful Danites revive Milton's Samson:

Your coming, Friends, revives me, for I learn
Now of my own experience, not by talk,
How counterfet a coin they are who friends
Bear in thir Superscription (of the most
I would be understood): in prosperous days
They swarm, but in adverse withdraw thir head
Not to be found, though sought.

(l. 187)¹⁵

Samson's friends, as well as Horatio, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern, illustrate very well the ancient commonplaces about friendship which make up Cicero's treatise and became, by way of Boethius, a part of discussions of Fortune. In Hamlet the exploitation of this tradition, explicitly evoked by the Player King, firmly establishes the contrast between the friends of the Prince and also points to the essential character of Claudius as vicar of Fortune.

Notes

1. Quotations of Shakespeare are from The Complete Works, edited by Peter Alexander (1951).

2. De Amicitia, xiv.51, from the Loeb edition by William A. Falconer (1923); I have occasionally modified Falconer's translations.

3. Donec eris sospes, multos numerabis amicos:
   Tempora si fuerint nubila, solus eris.

   (Tristia, I.ix.5)

4. The Romaunt and Boece appeared, that is, in the editions of Thynne, Stow, and Speght. See Eleanor P. Hammond, Chaucer: A Bibliographical Manual (New York, 1933), pp. 114-25.

5. II. Prose viii. I quote the translation of ‘I.T.’, revised by H. F. Stewart, in the Loeb Boethius (1918).

6. The Romaunt and Chaucer's works are quoted from The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, edited by F. N. Robinson, Second edition (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1957). The currency of the Consolation in the sixteenth century makes Shakespeare's familiarity with it almost certain (compare Hamlet's ‘There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so’ with the nearly identical statement in II. Prose iv of Boethius). His knowledge of the Romaunt is less sure, though his acquaintance with all of Chaucer seems probable. W. W. Skeat (Athenaeum, 8 August 1891, 203-4) thought that Hamlet's ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy was inspired in important ways by passages of the Romaunt found very near the discussion of friendship. In any event this paper assumes only a general influence, not a direct use, of Boethius and the Romaunt.

7. Laelius similarly notes that Scipio had nothing in a worldly way to gain from friendship with him (De Amicitia, ix.30).

8. Lady Philosophy likewise extols the steadfast man who is unperturbed by either aspect of Fortune (utram fortunam, I. Meter iv).

9. Beatrice White cites a number of other uses of the auspicious and dropping eyes in literary descriptions of Fortune in her article ‘Claudius and Fortune’, Anglia, 66 (1959), 204-7. She finds that the image stamps Claudius ‘from the first as a hypocrite’.

10. Howard R. Patch discusses the common use of paradox in descriptions of Fortune in The Goddess Fortuna in Medieval Literature (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1927), pp. 55-7.

11. Fortune's scales are related to her two tuns, one of adversity and one of prosperity, and to her well which has two buckets, one full and one empty (see Patch, pp. 52-3).

12. See Émile Male, Religious Art in France of the Thirteenth Century (1913), pp. 94-5.

13. The implications of Hamlet's musing about the ‘slings and arrows of outrageous Fortune’ are also widened by the association of Claudius with Fortune. And the player's tirade against Fortune comes to have a particular relevance to Hamlet's rage:

    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.

    (II.2.487)

14. ‘Amicus certus in re incerta cernitur’ (De Amicitia, xvii.64). Laelius is quoting Ennius approvingly.

15. Poetical Works, edited by Helen Darbishire (Oxford, 1958).