[In the following essay, Andrews challenges the notion that Shakespeare's plays adhere to orthodox religious and ethical precepts that condemn the pursuit of personal revenge. Using Titus Andronicus as his chief example, the critic maintains that Elizabethan audiences might have responded sympathetically to revenge figures if their cause was just and that Shakespeare himself withheld moral judgment in the case of at least some of his blood revengers.]

Hamlet is a highly personal play. We bring to it all that we are. As L. C. Knights has observed, “more than with any other play, critics are in danger of finding reflected what they bring with them.”¹ The gratifications of interpretation may turn out to be gratifications of another sort; instead of serving the play, we are likely to make it serve us. Kenneth Muir, commenting on C. S. Lewis' view of Hamlet, emphasizes this danger: “It was inevitable, Lewis thinks, that Coleridge should ascribe to Hamlet his own weaknesses; it was equally inevitable that the pacifists should regard Hamlet as a pacifist, and that the Freudians should diagnose their favourite complex. To Lewis, the explanation is that Hamlet is not an individual at all, but Everyman, haunted by the fear of being dead, and burdened by original sin. But Lewis's theory, ingenious as it is, invites the retort that he too, the amateur theologian, has saddled Hamlet with his own prepossessions.”² Both protagonist and play, one may add, have appealed to one of our current prepossessions. Valuing multiplicity of meaning as we do, we hold Hamlet in our heart of hearts. It is a play in which many meanings dance. And, of course, since Hamlet has so much in it, critics are encouraged to find more—something overlooked, misconstrued, or imperfectly sensed by previous writers.

Contemplating the vast outpouring of heterogeneous commentary, Elder Olson began a discussion of Hamlet with the melancholy observation: “In the present condition of Hamlet studies, it is almost useless to offer one more interpretation of the play.”³ Yet the play persists; like its portentous Ghost, it would be spoke to. And much of what has been written in the years since Olson's essay confirms the soundness of his diagnosis of the state of Hamlet criticism: “… problems, methods, and solutions of the most fantastic order seem often to be given an authority equal to or even greater than that of the most solid scholarship, as if the criteria on which authority depended were novelty and ingenuity rather than cogency of proof” (p. 225).

Inevitably, of course, all readers and critics of Hamlet must form some opinion concerning what may be called the play's attitude toward Hamlet and his revenge. And it is here, I think, that the temptation to read our prepossessions into the play is particularly strong. Since many critics regard blood revenge as a great evil, they contend—to state the matter most simply—that Hamlet should either abstain from vengeance altogether, or undertake it in the proper spirit. For some only the former would suffice;⁴ for others, Hamlet may emerge from the play a noble and sweet prince if he can achieve vengeance without tainting his mind with hatred—if, in short, he learns to act as God's minister rather than out of personal vindictiveness.⁵ There are two schools of thought as to whether Hamlet passes this test, though most critics join Fredson Bowers in answering in the affirmative.

The most influential recent discussion of this subject is Eleanor Prosser's Hamlet and Revenge. Because of my profound disagreement with the critical approach her book represents, I should like to indicate some of the fundamental differences in our premises.

I agree with Prosser that “our truest guide to understanding Hamlet is our intuitive response” (p. xiii). But I disagree as to the nature of this response. Like some others before her,⁶ she argues for a dual response: emotional approval followed by moral judgment. “Is it not at least possible,” she inquires, “that the Elizabethan audience could instinctively identify with the revenger and yet—either at the same time or later, when released from emotional involvement—judge him, too?” (p. 34). This sounds plausible enough—until one realizes that Prosser means post-theatrical judgment as well as responses experienced during a performance.⁷ To speak of judgment during a play is one thing: it is true, for example, that our attitude toward Richard III and Macbeth changes; in a sense, we kill with them, but are dissociated from them before the end of the play, so that each dies alone. For both of them, there is judgment within the play. The idea that a moral judgment arrived at after a play has equal authority is, I feel sure, a dangerous one—dangerous because we are only too eager to substitute our own moral notions for the dramatic experience created by the playwright and actors.

Even in the case of judgment within the context of the play, the degree of distancing required entails a marked loss in tragic effect. Judgment and the tragic emotions, as A. C. Bradley long ago pointed out, have little to do with each other: “When we are immersed in a tragedy, we feel toward dispositions, actions, and persons such emotions as attraction and repulsion, pity, wonder, fear, horror, perhaps hatred; but we do not judge.”⁸ What has happened, I believe, in much recent criticism of Hamlet is a rebellion against the immersion of which Bradley is speaking. We are not likely, nowadays, to hear that Hamlet moves us because we feel ourselves in him, or him in us. Reacting against our natural tendency to identify with Hamlet, critics strive to maintain a judicial attitude. Hamlet has been moved from the heart's core to the realm of the other.⁹

Even so, Shakespeare makes it difficult to bring Hamlet to the bar. For the main objection to sitting in judgment on Hamlet is Hamlet. The judicial critic is in the awkward position of warning us not to be taken in by effects the playwright evidently sought to achieve. Even John Vyvyan, for example, who argues that Hamlet disowns his higher nature in seeking vengeance, candidly remarks: “Hamlet is so fully successful in hypnotizing himself that he partially hypnotizes the audience as well. We have to pinch ourselves awake in order not to accept his valuation of the other characters.”¹⁰ Whether or not we are desirous to be pinched, the judicial critic strives to pinch us to our senses. But the playwright, not the critic, must release us from tragic involvement—if he desires—and free us for judgment. When he does so he is about other business than tragedy. In Hamlet, the evidence suggests that Shakespeare was about tragedy.

Judgment within a play is something over which the dramatist exercises control. This is not the case with our reflections after—or outside—the play. Thus, if Tamburlaine is made magnificent in the theater, how relevant is the post-theatrical judgment that we really should not admire that sort of man?¹¹ When we talk of withdrawing moral approval from what we were seduced into accepting during the play, we are probably saying that we don't like the dramatist's ideas, not that we were insufficiently alert to the nuances of his play. The double response theory, with its hot baths of emotionalism followed by cold showers of judgment,¹² has little to recommend it when the cold shower is not turned on by the dramatist. In the case of revenge tragedy, as I shall explain, the danger of distorting our actual experience of the play is particularly acute.

Roughly one-third of Hamlet and Revenge, for example, deals with “Elizabethan Attitudes towards Revenge.” The purpose of this investigation, as stated in the preface, is to counteract the erroneous impressions fostered by previous scholarship: “The dominant critical tradition has explicitly told us: ‘Forget your own ethical code. The study of certain facts indicates that it is irrelevant in Hamlet.’ The facts, I submit, tell us exactly the opposite” (p. xiv). What the “facts” reveal, in short, is that we should set aside the red spectacles prescribed for us by revenge-ethic critics. By using our own unaided vision we will see better. For the Elizabethans responded to Hamlet in the same way that we will—once we learn to trust our instinctive response.

But what, according to Prosser, did the Elizabethans believe? These are her findings for the society in which Hamlet was written: “… on the subject of revenge, [Shakespeare's] plays reflect agreement with sermons, moralist tracts, poetry, and other plays of his day. No matter how base the injury, no matter how evil your enemy, no matter how dim all hope of legal redress, leave the issue to Heaven; God's is the quarrel” (p. 94).

It is somewhat disconcerting to discover that the chase had this beast in view. The Elizabethans saw their plays through moral spectacles (at least in retrospect)¹³; we share their opposition to revenge as something barbaric and unchristian. In both cases, aversion to revenge is considered instinctive.

So described, man is a creature who has taken his civilization straight; savagery and violence have lost their primordial appeal, in thought as well as in deed. The most that such a man can do at a revenge play is to grant temporary sympathy to what he cannot ultimately condone.

But is this man? Eric Bentley, commenting on the revenge theme in Hamlet, has noted the fundamental ambiguity of our response: “There is an unresolved ambiguity here which is not that of the play alone, or even of its author: it is the ambiguity of a whole civilization—a civilization that has never made up its mind but has a double, nay, a triple, standard: preaching forgiveness, while believing in justice, while practicing revenge.”¹⁴ The Christian tradition, it is true, attempts to replace hatred with love, revenge with forgiveness; vengeance itself should be left to God. “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord.” Yet, as Freud has observed, “What no human soul desires there is no need to prohibit; it is automatically excluded. The very emphasis of the commandment Thou shalt not kill makes it certain that we spring from an endless ancestry of murderers, with whom the lust for killing was in the blood, as possibly it is to this day with ourselves.”¹⁵ The problem, according to Freud, is our unwillingness to admit what we are: “Our unconscious is just as inaccessible to the idea of our own death, as murderously minded towards the stranger, as divided or ambivalent towards the loved, as was man in earliest antiquity. But how far we have moved from this primitive state in our conventionally civilized attitude towards death! … Is it not for us to confess that in our civilized attitude towards death we are once again living psychologically beyond our means, and must reform and give truth its due?” (p. 234). Prosser, who would grant our “conventionally civilized attitude” toward revenge the status of an instinct,¹⁶ seems unaware of any conflict between profession and reality; her theory of audience response thus requires precisely the self-deception Freud considered “psychologically beyond our means.”

It seems to me, on the contrary, that audiences are fully capable of responding to revenge tragedy for reasons that have nothing to do with conventional morality or religious ethics. Quite simply, audiences find the drama of “one [character] who has done something and one who is going to get him because he has done it”¹⁷ deeply satisfying. Many Elizabethan revenge plays are entirely consonant with the moral and religious precepts of the age; they are, in a sense, cautionary works. But my concern here is to emphasize the existence of another kind of revenge play, more savage than didactic, appealing to the instinctual side of man. This form of revenge tragedy encourages the audience to indulge the instinctive desire to require violence with violence. Setting aside its panoply of precepts, the audience could feel what it must, not what it ought to feel.

In the Elizabethan period, to be sure, the truer form is the rarer form. It would be most surprising if the religious and moral thought of the period had not impressed itself on the drama, leading to many plays in which revenge was presented as evil.¹⁸ But this is only to say that dramatists showed themselves ready to give audiences what they were supposed to want (and quite possibly thought they wanted) instead of meeting a deeper, more inarticulate need. Indeed, it could be argued that the religious temper of the age heightened the need for some means of indulging the very instincts that were, by general agreement, immoral. Thus an Elizabethan audience might enter the theater believing that revenge should be left to God but, caught in the dark music of the play, become vicarious participants in violence. This is the reason for the enormous emotional appeal of the revenge play in its pure and savage form, before didacticism sets in. The implacable emotional logic of blood for blood is at the heart of revenge tragedy. What is denied in civilized life is furnished in the theater. Revenge tragedy speaks to unaccommodated man, and what our response reveals about us is not pleasant to contemplate. The revenger raises his sword. The audience leans forward for the kill. It is not a time for compunction. We are given what we desire. In that sense, at least, vengeance is ours.

I have said that the double response theory, suspect in general terms, is particularly misleading when applied to Elizabethan revenge tragedy. It should now be evident why this is so. A man may respond, while in the theater, to ideas with which he would not normally be in sympathy. If his response does not imply ambivalence in an area where ambivalence is forbidden, he may be willing to admit that he was so caught up in the play that he temporarily accepted its standards; in the real world, he feels sure, he would react differently. But suppose the play appeals to what a man actually feels, but cannot admit feeling, even to himself?¹⁹ When the spectator, his dream of passion ended, re-enters the world of the preacher and the moralist, what might he be likely to do? In such a case, surely, the tendency would be to attempt to rationalize the nature of the experience. But, for all that, the experience would still be there. It happened; it was true. And, at another performance, it would happen again—unless he refused to yield himself to the play.

To this point I have mainly been speaking theoretically. But there is evidence that the Elizabethans found, in the theater, the kind of freedom I have been describing.²⁰ At a comedy, for example, there would be no reason to suppose that audiences responded in a manner consonant with moral and religious precepts. Something of a moral holiday is surely suggested by Stephen Gosson's complaint: “… in the theaters they generally take up a wonderful laughter, and shout all together with one voice, when they see some notable cosenage practised, or some sly conveyance of bawdry brought out of Italy. Whereby they show themselves rather to like it than to rebuke it.”²¹ Gosson is admittedly no impartial witness, but he would hardly risk destroying his credibility by misrepresenting audience response. On the basis of their experience in the theater, many of his readers would be able to judge for themselves.

But to delight in gullery or bawdry is relatively harmless; few would be as strict as Gosson. To delight in blood revenge is a more serious matter. Yet some plays show themselves rather to like it than rebuke it—and audiences responded to these plays with considerable enthusiasm.²²

Irving Ribner, like Prosser, has emphasized that the Elizabethan revenge play is usually moral as well as bloody: “While audiences may have delighted above all in the sensationalism and spectacle of horror, the heroes of such plays … tended to vitiate themselves by the very act of vengeance-seeking and to die as fully tainted by evil as the villains who had injured them.”²³ Revenge was, after all, the prerogative of God. Yet, in a passage anticipated by Freud's remarks on the implications of Thou shalt not kill, Ribner goes on to note the possible significance of the age's tendency to protest too much: “The vengeance of God inevitably will be executed, even by the sinner upon himself should there be no other means. We need not assume that this was a doctrine to which all Elizabethans assented; the very need of Tudor moralists constantly to assert it may suggest that many theatre-goers could sympathize with the blood revenger” (p. liii). “Traffic lights,” as a social anthropologist has remarked, “are not found where there are no automobiles.”²⁴ What is implicit in the repeated admonitions of the moralists is sometimes explicit in the plays. If “the sweet violence of a tragedy” (in Sidney's phrase) was unleavened by the addition of moral judgment, audiences could indulge this sympathy and share the revenger's bloody triumph without any necessity of judging him or themselves.

The Spanish Tragedy, which with Titus Andronicus established revenge tragedy on the Elizabethan stage, reveals at least as much about underlying attitudes toward blood revenge as many volumes of sermons. Kyd's drama affords ample proof that audiences did not require their violence seasoned with moral judgment when the cause was great and the revenger a man with whom they could identify. Philip Edwards, who has gone even so far as to say “The only essential reading for Hamlet is (besides Hamlet) The Spanish Tragedy,”²⁵ elsewhere writes of the play's “power … to lull an Elizabethan conscience while it was being performed”: “It could well be said … that it is a poor play which depends on the audience suspending its belief in law and mercy. And yet a swingeing revenge-play has its own emotional satisfaction for the audience. Vengeance is exacted from evil-doers by a man whose wrongs invoke pity; in enabling an audience to forget their daily docility and to share in Hieronimo's violent triumph, it may be that Kyd has justified himself as an artist more than he would have done in providing a sermon on how irreligious it is to be vindictive.”²⁶ That would seem a just assessment of what the play does for its audience. It is pointless to insist that Hieronimo is guilty of criminal violence. Of course he is—but not in the world of the play. Instead of presenting him as he would appear in conventional moral terms, the play portrays his vengeance, terrible though it is, with approbation rather than censure. Hieronimo has done what he had to do, and he was right to do it. His death is not the seal of his guilt but a rite of passage, for we are told that in Elysium his anguish will be metamorphosed to eternal bliss: “Andrea. … I'll lead Hieronimo where Orpheus plays, / Adding sweet pleasure to eternal days” (IV.v.23-24).²⁷ The enemies of Andrea, and of Hieronimo, on the other hand, will be tormented in “deepest hell.” Thus is the audience encouraged to share, as in a dream, the passion and triumph of Hieronimo, who slays his enemies in this life and sends them to punishment in the next.

Shakespeare is often considered too enlightened, too humane, to write approvingly of revenge. L. C. Knights, for example, declares himself unable to believe that Shakespeare “could temporarily waive his deepest ethical convictions for the sake of an exciting dramatic effect.” That Shakespeare was in the business of providing exciting dramatic effects does not deter Knights: “It is almost like believing that Dante, for a canto or two, could change his ground and write approvingly, say, of the enemies of the Empire.”²⁸

Without claiming any special insights into Shakespeare's “deepest ethical convictions,” Prosser turns directly to his plays; she concludes that, as Shakespeare cannot be said to approve of blood revenge in any of his other plays, such approval should not be taken for granted in Hamlet: “In all this evidence … we find no suggestion that Shakespeare expected his audience to accept without question the validity of private blood revenge. The evidence suggests, rather, that his plays rely on the orthodox ethical and religious injunctions against it. Despite a maturing of both dramatic skill and thought between Titus Andronicus and The Tempest, the portrayal of the revenger seems to remain constant. Titus and Prospero are two sides of the same coin” (p. 93).

The problem is not simply failure to distinguish between revenge tragedy as a form and plays which merely employ revenge motifs. Though little can be learned about Shakespeare's dramatic attitude toward revenge by comparing works as unlike in intention as Titus and The Tempest, no harm would be done if the revenge play received its due. It should not be treated as an adumbration of what is in reality quite another play; that “the rarer action is / In virtue than in vengeance” is true enough of The Tempest—but that is in another dramatic country.²⁹ Furthermore, Prosser's description of Shakespeare's “portrayal of the revenger” is of doubtful validity. At least two plays—Titus and Macbeth—take a far more favorable view of revenge than she is willing to allow.

Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare's only real revenge tragedy besides Hamlet, carries blood revenge as far as it can go: blood is poured not by the cup, but by the bellyful. Like The Spanish Tragedy, Titus is used by Prosser as an example of how the revenger becomes corrupted and loses the audience's approval. The killing of Demetrius and Chiron is the turning point: “From this point on [Titus] is, if not a ‘villain-revenger,’ at least a tainted revenger who has forfeited our sympathy” (p. 88). Yet, in this instance, Prosser has been induced to relax some measure of her usual moral rigor: apparently she would approve of Titus' vengeance if he were not quite so cruel: “The murder of Tamora's two vicious cubs would, in itself, undoubtedly call for our instinctive applause. But when Titus … stops their mouths to prevent any pleas (a typical villain's device in Renaissance drama) and then taunts them with his ghastly plans to make mush of their bones and blood, mold it around their severed heads, and serve the tempting ‘pasties’ to their mother—the stomach of the most hardened spectator would surely rise.” Before the play is over, she asserts, “Titus has lost all claim to virtue” (p. 88).

I do not deny that strong stomachs are in order. Yet it seems very likely that many in the audience cheered Titus' stratagem for its grisly propriety rather than responding with horrified revulsion. For Titus Andronicus, like The Spanish Tragedy, presents personal vengeance in a manner that accentuates the revenger's bloody triumph rather than his moral guilt. When Titus finally acts, he does not forfeit his moral position in the play: he is a good man, his enemies embodiments of evil (something of this is surely conceded by Prosser in her reference to “vicious cubs”). By the time suffering changes to action, the previous events of the play have created in the audience an emotional need for a vengeance which will provide adequate restitution; we have been given, so to speak, the formula for Titus' vengeance. Titus in his cook's attire may be grotesque enough, but he is serving what we want.

Neither Titus nor Hieronimo survives his revenge. Unlike Hieronimo, who takes his own life, Titus is slain after revealing what Tamora has fed on and stabbing her to death. Saturninus kills Titus, and is in turn slain by Lucius, who avenges his father: “Can the son's eye behold his father bleed? / There's meed for meed, death for a deadly deed” (V.iii.55-56).³⁰ Set in such a context, it is difficult to see Titus' death as evidence of his moral guilt. The revenger dies, and is revenged; instead of being punished, Lucius becomes the next emperor of Rome.

From a dramatic point of view, Shakespeare may be said to hurry past the death of Titus; it is perfunctory, undeveloped. Yet it is clearly necessary to remove Titus from the play. In securing vengeance, he has ended his reason for living: death comes as no catastrophe, but as a triumphant departure at the full flood-tide of emotional vindication. He can hardly be imagined living on. In his vengeance is his end.³¹ His death, in this sense, is like Hieronimo's.

There is another reason why Titus must die. Though in the theater, where spectators are confronted with dramatic impressions rather than legal evidence, for Titus to be struck down at this moment is no punishment for criminal misdeeds; in life such a man would stand condemned by law. Titus' death, while not imposed by us, neatly solves the problem of what to do with him at the end of the play. For him to face formal judgment would oblige the spectator to judge: the world of the play would be set against the world of Elizabethan justice.³² According to the latter, Titus should be condemned to death; for the play to spare him would seem unjust, if not morally outrageous. But by making Titus fall by Saturninus' hand, Shakespeare prevents the question of Titus' guilt from becoming an issue: it is not an issue because it is never really raised. Hence Titus remains a good man even as he betters the instructions of his sadistic tormenters. As Marcus, “the reverent man of Rome,” says of his brother's vengeance:

Now judge what cause had Titus to revenge
These wrongs unspeakable, past patience,
Or more than any living man could bear. …
Have we done aught amiss, show us wherein. …

(V.iii.125-29)

It is Titus' unspeakable wrongs, the justice of his cause, that we remember. We judge the cause, not the legality of vengeance. Titus never loses his “claim to virtue.”

For Prosser, as we have seen, a character who sheds blood for blood forfeits this claim: Shakespeare would not have us approve of him. Hence when she comes to discuss the revenge motif in Macbeth there is an obvious problem: how does Macduff, who might seem an exception to her rule, escape condemnation? The answer must be dealt with at some length, for Prosser is aware that the play is a crucial one, a “test case,” for her theory. Although Macbeth is often “cited as evidence that Shakespeare unquestioningly accepted the morality of revenge,”³³ she argues that the play contains “only one passage [which] can be offered in support of a revenge ethic. In his soliloquy on the battlefield, Macduff roars for Macbeth to show himself, swearing that if someone else has stolen from him the right to kill the tyrant, ‘my wife and children's ghosts will haunt me still’” (pp. 90-91). Prosser is quite frankly unable to account for this: “In the light of the rest of the play, I find the speech a contradiction. Elsewhere, the denial of personal revenge motives to Macduff is explicit” (p. 91).

But if the speech is out of character it is an odd place for Shakespeare to be careless. Is the evidence as explicit as Prosser believes? Here is her view of Macduff's motives: “Even when Macduff learns of the slaughter of his wife and children, his major reaction is stunned grief. He is angry at himself for exposing them to danger, not at the man who murdered them” (p. 91).

Such a Macduff would indeed want the natural touch. But let us consider Macduff's actual response to the revelation that his family has been slaughtered:

MACD.
My children too?
ROSSE.
Wife, servants, all
That could be found.
MACD.
And I must be from thence!
My wife kill'd too?
ROSSE.
I have said.
MAL.
Be comforted:
Let's make us med'cines of our great revenge,
To cure this deadly grief.
MACD.
He has no children.—All my pretty ones?
Did you say all?—O Hell-kite!—All? …

(IV.iii.211-17)³⁴

It seems to me that “And I must be from thence!” is rather an outcry of baffled pain (Why couldn't I have been there!) than of anger. But what is of crucial importance is Macduff's enigmatic response to Malcolm's suggestion that he cure his grief by taking revenge. Professor Muir, who gives three possible readings, prefers the one a blood-revenger would intend: Macbeth, that is, has no children to be slain in requital.³⁵ However this may be, the speech is followed by an unequivocal burst of anger, for one presumes that “Hell-kite” is not a term of self-reproach.

Not that Macduff does not blame himself. It seems to him that such innocents would never have been allowed to perish if Heaven were not using their deaths to punish him for his own sins:

                                                                                                    Did Heaven look on,
And would not take their part? Sinful Macduff!
They were all struck for thee. Naught that I am,
Not for their own demerits, but for mine,
Fell slaughter on their souls. …

(IV.iii.223-27)

But when Malcolm redirects his attention to Macbeth—“Be this the whetstone of your sword: let grief / Convert to anger; blunt not the heart, enrage it” (ll. 228-29)—Macduff again turns his thoughts to vengeance:

                                                                                                    … gentle Heavens,
Cut short all intermission; front to front,
Bring thou this fiend of Scotland, and myself;
Within my sword's length set him. …

(ll. 231-34)

This, Prosser remarks, is as close as Macduff comes to “a vow of personal revenge” (p. 91). But while there is piety in it—as she notes, it is a prayer—there is also something else. Of course Macbeth is the country's enemy, but Macduff also clearly hates him for imperative personal reasons. The ending of his speech, not quoted by Prosser, emphasizes this aspect of his motivation: “… if he 'scape, / Heaven forgive him too!” (ll. 234-35). These lines, surely, suggest implacable hatred.

Nor does the end of the play show Macduff in a more charitable spirit. When finally given the chance to confront Macbeth with self-comparisons, he charges the “Hell-hound” to battle. They fight on even terms until Macduff's revelation of the manner of his birth. Now Macbeth refuses to fight. But Macduff, refusing to let his vengeance slip from him, taunts Macbeth into continuing. If justice were all he sought, Macduff might ask his enemy to yield in other words than these:

Then yield thee, coward,
And live to be the show and gaze o' th' time:
We'll have thee, as our rarer monsters are,
Painted upon a pole, and underwrit,
“Here may you see the tyrant.”

(V.viii.23-27)

Goaded beyond endurance, Macbeth is induced to “try the last”; Macduff re-enters with the head of his enemy. The time is free, but so is Macduff. He has had his revenge.

We may now return to Prosser's view of the play. Macbeth, she asserts, does not contradict her theory that Shakespeare never approves of personal revenge. It is true that Macduff emerges untainted, but only because he is no blood revenger: “… all is surrendered to the will of Heaven. The … campaign is to be seen as a divine mission, not as a campaign of personal vengeance.”³⁶

The play suggests it is both. Instead of supporting Prosser's argument, Macduff remains a step on which she must fall down, or else o'erleap, for in her way he lies. To anticipate Hamlet: Macduff is prompted to his revenge by excitements of his reason and his blood. He is no impersonal minister, but what he is doing is just.

The plum survives its poems, Hamlet its critics. Yet if we accept invitations to approach this highly personal play by way of its background, wariness is appropriate. When this background includes other plays, we should remember that these plays are things in themselves:³⁷ breadth of scholarship, though giving an imposing sense of solidity, cannot provide assurance that a writer is examining the evidence with impartial eyes. For as we have seen, special pleading may assume the pleasing shape of scholarly objectivity; the “background” may be construed according to one's prepossessions. Here too we may find, in Olson's phrase, “novelty and ingenuity rather than cogency of proof.”³⁸

William Troy once observed that the critic's “problem is always to discover the approach that will do least violence to the object before us, that will reconcile the greatest number of the innumerable aspects that every object presents to the understanding.”³⁹ If we wish to “do least violence” to Hamlet, we must examine in some detail how it shapes our responses—how it creates itself in our minds. This is not my purpose in the present essay. I have sought only to demonstrate that an Elizabethan audience did not necessarily respond to revenge in moral terms; that Shakespeare does not impose moral judgment on all his revengers; and that Hamlet would not be a startling play if it presented blood revenge in a way that aroused approval as well as sympathy. My point is not that Hamlet must be such a play, but that it could be. What shocks the virtuous philosopher may delight not only the chameleon poet, but the theatrical audience.

Notes

1. L. C. Knights, An Approach to “Hamlet” (Stanford, Calif., 1961), p. 11.

2. Kenneth Muir, Shakespeare: Hamlet, Studies in English Literature, 13 (London, 1963), 13.

3. Elder Olson, “Hamlet and the Hermeneutics of Drama,” Modern Philology, 61 (1963-64), 225.

4. Most notably Eleanor Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge, 2nd ed. (Stanford, Calif., 1971). One might mention, among others, John Vyvyan, The Shakespearean Ethic (London, 1959); Herbert Randolph Coursen Jr., “The Rarer Action: Hamlet's Mousetrap,” Literary Monographs, ed. Eric Rothstein and Richard N. Ringler, 2 (Madison, Wisc., 1969), 59-97 (text), 213-17 (notes); Harold Skulsky, “Revenge, Honor, and Conscience in Hamlet,” PMLA [Publications of the Modern Language Association], 85 (1970), 78-87.

5. See especially Fredson Bowers, “Hamlet as Minister and Scourge,” PMLA, 70 (1955), 740-49.

6. Prosser cites three “parallel discussions” (p. 34, n. 71). One could add others—e.g., John Dover Wilson, What Happens in Hamlet, 3rd ed. (Cambridge, Eng., 1951), pp. 270-71.

7. For example, she speaks of the way an audience “may have sympathized strongly with the very actions that later, in ensuing scenes or after the play, they strongly, if sadly condemned” (p. 73). (Italics added.)

8. A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (New York, 1955), p. 36.

9. See T. J. B. Spencer, “The Decline of Hamlet,” Hamlet, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies, 5 (1963), 185-99.

10. Vyvyan, p. 45.

11. Prosser grants this possibility: “A skillful playwright can make even heresy attractive. Tamburlaine may be a case in point. An even better example … is Bussy D'Ambois” (p. 35).

12. I adapt Jean Paul Richter's “hot baths of emotion followed by cold showers of irony,” a “formula” for romantic irony quoted by Harry Levin, James Joyce: A Critical Introduction, 2nd ed. (London, 1960), p. 41. (I am indebted to Professor Levin for this reference.)

13. See above, n. 7.

14. Eric Bentley, The Life of the Drama (New York, 1964), p. 331. In 1966, Richard Speck was convicted of murdering eight Chicago nurses. Cf. the Associated Press account of the reaction of the father of one of Speck's victims to the news that Speck's death sentence had been commuted: “John Matusek of Chicago, father of Patricia Matusek, said, ‘I'd just as soon see him go free right now. God-fearing people would take care of him’” (The Virginian-Pilot, Nov. 22, 1972, p. 1).

15. On Creativity and the Unconscious: Papers on the Psychology of Art, Literature, Love, Religion, ed. Benjamin Nelson (New York, 1958), p. 230.

16. Cf. D. J. Palmer, Renaissance Quarterly, 21 (1968), 228: “There is an irony, perhaps unintentional, in Miss Prosser's use of the word ‘instinct’ to describe both Hamlet's desire for revenge and our own reactions to the play. …”

17. Gareth Lloyd Evans, “Shakespeare, Seneca, and the Kingdom of Violence,” in Roman Drama, ed. T. A. Dorey and Donald R. Dudley (New York, 1963), p. 128.

18. As Fredson Bowers remarks, “The public utterances of moralists and preachers insisted that revenge was evil, and the dramatists soon bowed to the doctrine.” Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy (Princeton, N.J., 1940), p. 279.

19. Cf. Bertrand Russell, “An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish,” in Unpopular Essays (New York, 1950), p. 108: “The doctrine, professed by many modern Christians, that everybody will go to heaven, ought to do away with the fear of death, but in fact this fear is too instinctive to be easily vanquished. F. W. H. Myers … questioned a woman who had lately lost her daughter as to what she supposed had become of her soul. The mother replied: ‘Oh well, I suppose she is enjoying eternal bliss, but I wish you would not talk about such unpleasant subjects.’”

20. I have already mentioned Tamburlaine; see also n. 11.

21. Stephen Gosson, Plays Confuted in Five Actions (ca. 1582), quoted by Madeleine Doran, Endeavors of Art (Madison, Wisc., 1954), p. 94.

22. Cf. P. J. Ayres' illuminating discussion of prose fiction, “Degrees of Heresy: Justified Revenge and Elizabethan Narrative,” Studies in Philology, 69 (1972), 461-74.

23. “Introduction,” The Atheist's Tragedy, Revels Plays (Cambridge, Mass., 1964), p. li.

24. Julian Pitt-Rivers, “Honour and Social Status,” in Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society, ed. J. G. Peristiany (Chicago, 1966; rpt. 1974), p. 67.

25. Philip Edwards, Shakespeare and the Confines of Art (London, 1968), p. 84.

26. “Introduction,” The Spanish Tragedy, Revels Plays (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), p. lx.

27. I quote from the edition of Philip Edwards. Prosser's view of the play may be noted: “On the surface, the play seems an emphatic portrayal of the ravages of revenge, arousing increasing apprehension and horror in the audience as Hieronimo moves from excessive grief to rage to madness to crafty intrigue to demonic barbarism. Unfortunately, there are several contradictions” (pp. 51-52). This speech is one of them. Though she doubts that Hieronimo appeared “wholly justified” to Kyd's audience, she admits to uncertainty: “we can never be sure exactly how the Elizabethans judged Hieronimo” (p. 52).

28. L. C. Knights, An Approach to “Hamlet,” p. 46. Knights goes on to assert: “If this ghost turns out to be one who clamours for revenge, then we have every reason to suppose that Shakespeare entertained some grave doubts about him.” See also Gunnar Boklund, “Judgment in Hamlet,” in Essays on Shakespeare, ed. G. W. Chapman (Princeton, N.J., 1965), p. 118.

29. Cf. Coursen (n. 4 above).

30. Titus Andronicus, ed. J. C. Maxwell, Arden Shakespeare, 3rd ed. (London, 1961).

31. Cf. Prosser's account of the end of the play: “Mercifully, Titus immediately stabs [Tamora] … and, again mercifully, Titus is immediately killed. The audience could stand no more” (p. 89). See, however, E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford, 1923), II. 458; and H. S. Bennett, “Shakespeare's Audience,” in Studies in Shakespeare, ed. Peter Alexander (London, 1964), p. 63.

32. In The Spanish Tragedy, Kyd's use of a pagan frame helps to separate the play from life. As Philip Edwards notes in the introduction to his edition, “Kyd creates, and successfully sustains, his own world of revenge, and attitudes are sanctioned which might well be deplored in real life. The moral world of the play is a make-believe world; the gods are make-believe gods” (p. lix).

33. Prosser's other test case is King Lear; there, as she demonstrates, Edgar fulfills her requirements.

34. Ed. Kenneth Muir, Arden Shakespeare, 9th ed. (London, 1962).

35. See Muir's note at IV.iii.216.

36. P. 91. Prosser concedes, however (p. 91n), that we are later told that “revenges burn” in both Macduff and Malcolm; but she dismisses this as “an offstage action.”

37. See Rosalie L. Colie, “Preface” to Some Facets of “King Lear”: Essays in Prismatic Criticism, ed. Colie and F. T. Flahiff (Toronto, 1974), p. viii.

38. Especially regrettable, therefore, is Prosser's advice to the reader who is not “particularly interested in historical backgrounds” (pp. xiv-xv). She would have this reader—and one fears he is legion—refer to her summaries rather than the evidence on which they are based: “If … he feels comfortable with the perspective established in each summary, I urge that he skip all the background material and move immediately to Part II and the discussion of Hamlet” (p. xv).

39. Selected Essays, ed. Stanley Edgar Hyman (New Brunswick, N.J., 1967), p. 121.