Law and Literature Part 4

Orestes takes a different tack. He asks the Furies why they had failed to punish Clytemnestra, which would have made it unnecessary for him to shed her blood. They reply that they punish only people who kill a blood relative-a son who kills his mother, but not a wife who kills her husband.32 This reply sets the stage for Apollo, Orestes' advocate, to deliver the crus.h.i.+ng reb.u.t.tal that a.s.sures Orestes' acquittal.33 Apollo says that Orestes is not really a blood relative of Clytemnestra, because a mother is merely the incubator of the father's child; the father is the only real (we would say genetic) parent.34 The modern reader, incredulous, asks how the Greeks could have failed to notice the physical resemblance between mothers and children, which shows (without any need to know anything about genetics) that the mother is as much a parent as the father. But it doesn't show this. Environmental as well as genetic factors determine the const.i.tution of an organism. The taste of wine is affected by the soil in which the grapes are grown.

Apollo's argument is not good biology, but it is apt in its dramatic context. It comes right after the Furies have said they punish only the shedding of relatives' blood. This limitation on the Furies' jurisdiction is not So why didn't they go after Agamemnon for killing his daughter? I am not aware that this question is answered anywhere in the trilogy.

Either by a tie vote, if the jury consists of eleven Athenians plus Athena, or by a majority vote, if the jury consists of an even number of Athenians plus Athena-it is unclear which.

See Lesley Dean-Jones, Women's Bodies in Cla.s.sical Greek Science 149 n. 8 (1994). Apollo's genetic theory, as Dean-Jones points out, appears to have been a minority view even in fifth-century bc Athens, although it was later adopted by Aristotle. Like the humbling of the Furies (who are female) at the end of Eumenides, and the presentation of Clytemnestra as the sole killer of Agamemnon (rather than jointly with Aegisthus, as in most previous treatments; see Gantz, note 27 above, at 664675), Apollo's theory seems intended to disparage any claim that women might have to the rights of a citizen, rights unrelated to the role of a woman as a breeder. Cf. James Redfield, "h.o.m.o Domesticus," in The Greeks 153, 162 (Jean-Pierre Vernant ed. 1995): "Marriage, by turning the s.e.xual power of women to the end of inheritance, restrains that power and thus secures both the civic order and a right relation with the G.o.d." In like vein, Carla Spivack, "The Woman Will Be Out: A New Look at the Law in Hamlet," 21 Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 31 (2008), argues that a subterranean theme in Hamlet, reflecting a backlash against Queen Elizabeth I's long reign, is the impropriety of women's exercising political power.

*arbitrary, because of the problem that murder within the family creates for a system in which revenge is a familial duty. A supernatural agency is needed to avenge such murders, and in the Oresteia the Furies are that agency, corresponding to the plague sent by Apollo in Oedipus Tyrannus. However, for the Furies to exclude from their jurisdiction relatives by marriage, while deeming a mother and her children blood relatives, opens a loophole. Clytemnestra could have hoped to escape punishment for killing Agamemnon, knowing that the Furies would not punish her and that their children, his natural avengers, might be deterred by fear that the Furies would punish them if they avenged him.

The litigant who takes his stand foursquare on a technicality invites his opponent to do the same. Having a.s.serted a distinction, arbitrary in the circ.u.mstances, between relatives by blood and by marriage, the Furies open the way for Apollo to make a technical distinction between the male and the female parent. They play doubly into Apollo's hands: his belittlement of the woman's role in procreation makes Agamemnon's wrong, the killing of Iphigenia, seem less serious than Clytemnestra's wrong in killing him, as well as distinguis.h.i.+ng parricide from matricide.

Arguments based on legal technicalities, such as Apollo's in Eumenides or Portia's in The Merchant of Venice, are more dramatic, and hence more suitable for imaginative literature, than complex, finely balanced, well-reasoned arguments from legal principles and public policy. Technicalities dazzle and surprise, flatter the audience's expectations of what law is really like, and take less time to expound. Dramatic exigency is a reason why readers should not bring to literature too high hopes of finding legal meat.

The greatest work of revenge literature since the Greeks is Hamlet.35 Before Shakespeare's Hamlet there was another Hamlet, which has been lost, and Kyd's Spanish Tragedy, which has many parallels to Hamlet, 35. On Elizabethan and Jacobean revenge drama, see, for example, Harry Keyis.h.i.+an, The Shapes of Revenge: Victimization, Vengeance, and Vindictiveness in Shakespeare (1995); Peter Mercer, Hamlet and the Acting of Revenge (1987); Paul N. Siegel, "'Hamlet, Revenge!': The Uses and Abuses of Historical Criticism," 45 Shakespeare Survey 15 (1993).

although the avenger in The Spanish Tragedy, Hieronimo, is the victim's father rather than his son. The problem for Hieronimo, which will recur in a different form in Hamlet, is that even though he is a Spanish general and thus a man of power in the state, his son's killer, whom he wishes to kill in return-Lorenzo-is the nephew of the King of Spain. Hopeful at first that G.o.d or the authorities will punish Lorenzo, Hieronimo gradually is driven to accept that the duty to punish must fall on him. He pretends to be crazy in order to buy time in which to devise and carry out a suitable plan. Eventually, by staging a play in which both he and Lorenzo have parts, he is able to stab Lorenzo to death. Bellimperia, Lorenzo's sister, takes the opportunity to stab to death her own oppressor and then kills herself. Hieronimo bites off his tongue to prevent his giving away secrets under torture and then kills Lorenzo's father and himself. The Spanish Tragedy ends with "Revenge" saying that he "shall hale" the villains killed by Hieronimo and Bellimperia "down to deepest h.e.l.l,/Where none but Furies,bugs and tortures dwell,/...For here though death hath end their misery,/I'll there begin their endless tragedy" (IV.5.2728, 4748).

The death of Hieronimo is no accident; the avenger dies in virtually every Renaissance revenge play. (Julius Caesar and Macbeth are exceptions.) This may reflect not only Christian ambivalence about the morality of revenge, which we shall encounter in Hamlet, but also recognition that every act of revenge is a fresh wrong that calls for punishment in turn. Were the avenger left alive, the audience would be wondering who would be gunning for him.

I mentioned Julius Caesar; its character as a revenge play is obscured by the fact that Caesar, the victim to be avenged, does not die until the beginning of Act III. When that finally happens, Antony utters a bloodcurdling vow of revenge over Caesar's body (III.1.265277):36 Domestic fury and fierce civil strife Shall c.u.mber all the parts of Italy; Blood and destruction shall be so in use And dreadful objects so familiar 36. All Shakespeare quotations in this book are from The Complete Works of Shakespeare (David Bevington ed., 6th ed. 2009).

*That mothers shall but smile when they behold Their infants quartered with the hands of war, All pity choked with custom of fell deeds; And Caesar's spirit, ranging for revenge, With Ate by his side come hot from h.e.l.l, Shall in these confines with a monarch's voice Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war, That this foul deed shall smell above the earth With carrion men, groaning for burial.

These lines express to perfection the boundlessness of vengeful feelings.

Julius Caesar establishes an opposition between two approaches to keeping order in the state. Brutus's approach is "modern," rationalistic, impersonal, high-minded. It appeals to ideals of civic virtue, individual liberty, and self-government and disdains "primitive" emotions such as vengefulness. Indeed, Brutus is a Stoic; he emanc.i.p.ates himself from emotion,37 as ill.u.s.trated by his tepid reaction to his wife's death. Caesar's approach, which Antony (Caesar's protege) shares, is personalistic. It is based on a realistic understanding, exemplified by Caesar's a.s.sessment of Ca.s.sius and by his stated preference for men who are fat and sleek-headed to those with a lean and hungry look, of the sway that personal and familial ties, emotion generally, and superst.i.tion hold over men's minds. Brutus fails to understand the difference between private and public morality; even a good man cannot govern a nation by the principles by which one governs one's private life.38 Both he and Caesar make fatal mistakes, and in both cases this is due A. D. Nuttall, Shakespeare the Thinker 184190 (2007); W. H. Auden, "Julius Caesar," in Auden, Lectures on Shakespeare 125, 133134 (Arthur Kirsch ed. 2000); Geoffrey Aggeler, n.o.bler in the Mind: The Stoic-Skeptic Dialogue in English Renaissance Tragedy 139, 141 (1998). Cf. Geoffrey Miles, Shakespeare and the Constant Romans, ch. 7 (1996). (For a contrary view, see Giles D. Monsarrat, Light from the Porch: Stoicism and English Renaissance Literature 139144 [1984].) On the Stoics' desire to extirpate the emotions, see Martha C. Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in h.e.l.lenistic Ethics, ch. 10 (1994).

See Henry Sidgwick, Practical Ethics, ch. 3 (1898); Max Weber, "Politics as a Vocation," in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology 77, 117128 (H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills trans. 1946).

to a failure adequately to appreciate the emotional side of human nature. In Caesar's case this failure marks his loss of grip and fading sense of reality, which is making him more like Brutus. He fails to understand how accepting a crown, which would bring no increase in his political power, already complete, would affront the proud senators. And he exhibits excessive rationalism, in the manner of Brutus, in disregarding the repeated warnings of the soothsayer, the augurs, the elements, and Calpurnia. The play links Brutus and Caesar in small ways as well as large. Both have wives who want to be consulted (no other character's wife appears in the play). Both are susceptible to flattery. Both see themselves as occupying a higher plane than other men. Both claim exemption from ordinary human weaknesses, a claim undercut in Caesar's case by his (intermittent) superst.i.tiousness, his indecisiveness, and his physical ailments (epilepsy, partial deafness) and in Brutus's case by political inept.i.tude. Both see themselves as embodiments of pure political principle-absolutism in Caesar's case, liberty in Brutus's. Both suffer from hubris.

Brutus's mistakes, which mark him as a political naif, include failing to enlist Cicero in the conspiracy, sparing Antony and then letting him speak at Caesar's funeral, quarreling with Ca.s.sius, and ignoring Ca.s.sius's military advice. His overarching mistake, reflecting ignorance of human nature, is to a.s.sume that the conspiracy must succeed because all right-thinking men will recognize that Caesar's ambition is a threat to liberty. Brutus doesn't realize that the other conspirators do not have lofty motives; that the Roman mob is not high-minded and does not care about liberty but does care about the terms of Caesar's will (which left both money and public lands to the Roman citizenry); that Antony cares nothing about either his word or the merits of Brutus's cause but is mad for revenge out of personal loyalty to Caesar and will be able to turn the mob against Brutus, in part by stressing Brutus's ingrat.i.tude (Caesar had treated Brutus like a son); and that Caesar's ghost will hound Brutus. The ghost is the eruption of the nonrational into the political plans of a hyperrational statesman.

Brutus's blindness to the fact that personal bonds can trump principle is marked by such little things as his refusal to bind the conspirators to him by an oath and his remark that Caesar's own son, had he had one, *would have approved of the a.s.sa.s.sination once he was acquainted with the grounds and motives of the conspirators,39 and by such big things as his inability to understand what makes men like Ca.s.sius and Antony tick. Brutus is not a bad person, just as Oth.e.l.lo is not a bad person or, initially, even Macbeth. They are deceived persons (by Ca.s.sius, Iago, and the witches, respectively), but they are susceptible to being deceived because of weaknesses in their character.

The play gives us three views of Caesar. One is as a man past his prime. This is marked not only by the recklessness with which he disregards supernatural portents but also by his indecision and inconsistency-despite his expressed disdain for superst.i.tion, his first remark in the play is a request for a magical cure for Calpurnia's sterility-and by the bl.u.s.ter and hollowness of his rhetoric. He compares himself to Mount Olympus, and shortly after he has twice changed his mind about going to the Capitol he calls himself as "constant as the northern star" (III.1.60). Brutus, however, a dealer in abstractions, sees in Caesar not the aging, slipping tyrant but ambition personified.

For Antony, in contrast, Caesar is simply "the n.o.blest man / That ever lived in the tide of times" (III.1.257258), an uncritical but unshakable view based on Caesar's record and the personal relations.h.i.+p between the two men. From Antony and Cleopatra we learn that if Brutus's theory of governance was premature, and would perhaps be too idealistic for any era, Antony's was becoming outmoded and would soon give way to the calculating methods of Octavius, methods more suitable for governing an empire.40 The powerful emotional loyalties that characterize a soci The idea that willingness to condemn a member of one's own family is the acid test of devotion to justice recurs in Measure for Measure; see chapter 3. It gains added resonance in Julius Caesar from the fact that the founder of Brutus's family was reputed to have condemned his own son, although that part of the Brutus legend is not mentioned in the play. Octavius (later Augustus) Caesar, Caesar's adopted son, was emphatically not persuaded by Brutus of the justice of his adoptive father's a.s.sa.s.sination.

I am not suggesting that this is the actual course of Roman history. Julius Caesar is broadly consistent with historical fact, but many of the details are inaccurate or fanciful. On the ambiguous reputation of Julius Caesar in Renaissance England, see Ernest Schanzer, The Problem Plays of Shakespeare: A Study of Julius Caesar, Measure for Measure, Antony and Cleopatra 1124 (1963).

ety in which vengeance is an organizing principle are dysfunctional in a large polity.

Revenge literature did not end with the Greeks and the Elizabethans, as we can glimpse in Heinrich von Kleist's novella Michael Kohlhaas (1810). The eponymous hero (the fictionalized version of a historical figure) is a prosperous horse trader in sixteenth-century Brandenburg. A Saxon n.o.bleman extorts two beautiful black horses from him, mistreats them, and refuses to return them. Kohlhaas tries to sue the n.o.bleman, but the man is too influential and Kohlhaas gets nowhere. So with a band of armed followers that he has recruited he attacks the n.o.bleman's home, kills everyone except the n.o.bleman himself (who escapes), and burns the place down. His thirst for vengeance is unslaked, and meanwhile, as a by-product of his fruitless legal proceedings, his beloved wife has died, which further inflames him. With a growing band he cuts a swath of destruction through Germany, burning down cities in his futile search for the n.o.bleman and the still-missing horses. But now Martin Luther, the only man in Germany whom Kohlhaas will listen to, intervenes. Though furious at Kohlhaas for the destruction he is wreaking, Luther recognizes that he has been wronged and promises him an amnesty and a renewed effort at legal redress if he will stop the slaughter and turn himself in-which Kohlhaas does. Tangled judicial proceedings follow, but it proves impossible to recover the horses, and Kohlhaas is unwilling to accept their monetary worth in damages from the n.o.bleman, who is now terrified and contrite.

Because members of Kohlhaas's band are continuing to maraud, the Holy Roman Emperor decides that the terms of the Luther amnesty have been violated and that Kohlhaas must stand trial for treason. He is tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. He could get his sentence commuted by giving the Elector of Saxony a piece of paper that had been entrusted to him (and that he now wears in a locket around his neck) on which the Elector's destiny is inscribed. But he refuses, because he holds the Elector responsible for having failed to bring the horse-stealing n.o.bleman, a subject of the Elector, to justice. Learning that the Elector is planning to search his body after the execution to retrieve the paper, Kohlhaas, with *an air of triumph (and an echo of The Spanish Tragedy), swallows it moments before his execution, to the horror of the Elector, who is in the audience. Kohlhaas dies a happy man. But the incident with the horses, which at the beginning of the novella makes the reader's blood boil and makes him want to spur Kohlhaas on, by the end is recognized to be disproportionate to the destruction, both of others and of self, that is set in train. Kohlhaas had allowed the pa.s.sion for revenge to run away with him.

Written shortly after Napoleon's subjugation of Germany, Michael Kohlhaas is a commentary on the consequences of German disunity. One reason Kohlhaas has such trouble getting justice is that his oppressor lives in a different German state from him. The political violence and disorder to which Kohlhaas's band contributes its share are attributed to divided authority (confusingly shared by the Emperor, the Electors, and Martin Luther-the last representing a "higher law" whose principles the temporal authorities are unable to enforce) and to the absence of an effective system of justice. The ineffectuality of "public revenge," as the Elizabethans would have called it, forces Kohlhaas to a.s.sume the avenger's role. Like Hamlet and Achilles, he is carried away (notably in refusing to accept damages in lieu of the lost horses-and thus symbolically in refusing to accept civil law as a subst.i.tute for revenge), becomes a kind of monster (though also a hero), and is killed.

E. L. Doctorow's novel Ragtime (1975) transposes the story of Michael Kohlhaas to New York City at the beginning of the twentieth century. Coalhouse Walker (Kohle is the German word for "coal"), a black man who refuses to behave in the submissive manner prescribed for blacks, is the proud owner of a Model T Ford. En route to New York he is stopped by a rowdy group of firemen who try to make him pay a toll for use of a public street. When he refuses, they deface his car. He tries to obtain legal redress but is blocked by racial prejudice, and his fiancee is accidentally killed while trying to pet.i.tion the President of the United States for a.s.sistance in the matter. Giving up on the law, Walker organizes a band of marauding black men who conduct a ferocious campaign of revenge that includes blowing up the firehouse (but the fire chief is away at the time) and killing firemen. When Walker and his band barricade themselves in J. Pierpont Morgan's library and threaten to destroy its contents, which

include a five-page letter from George Was.h.i.+ngton-the counterpart to the message that Michael Kohlhaas carries in his locket-the authorities enlist the aid of Booker T. Was.h.i.+ngton, the most famous black man of the day and thus the counterpart to Martin Luther in Michael Kohlhaas. With Was.h.i.+ngton's a.s.sistance a settlement is negotiated. The Model T is to be restored to its pristine state, the fire chief undergoes a public humiliation, and Coalhouse Walker surrenders-only to be shot down by the police as he leaves the Morgan library.

Doctorow is a skillful writer, and Ragtime-with its complex plot and large gallery of historical figures-is a tour de force. The transposition of Michael Kohlhaas to a most unlikely venue is accomplished with panache. But the spirit of the original is lost. Doctorow is unable to invest the Model T Ford with the powerful symbolism of the black horses, to achieve either supernatural or political resonance (despite the ready-at-hand theme of racism), or to make credible the fear that Coalhouse Walker and his band inspire in the white community. In Doctorow's hands Michael Kohlhaas becomes farce or fantasy rather than a meditation on the moral ambiguity of revenge.

The Iliad and Hamlet In the tenth year of the Trojan War, Apollo sends a plague on the Greek camp in response to the prayers of his priest, Chryses, for the return of the priest's daughter, Chryseis, captured in a Greek raid and allotted to Agamemnon in the division of the spoils. The smart thing would be to return Chryseis to her father. Achilles-young, headstrong, tactless-insultingly advises Agamemnon to do that. But in Homeric society, which lacks formal inst.i.tutions of law and governance, the advice is dynamite. The extent of Agamemnon's authority over the allied army is not well defined; the legitimacy of his position is not established by the kind of "rule of recognition" that determines the ident.i.ty of the English Prime Minister or the American President. Were Agamemnon a man of great personal force, the ambiguities concerning his formal authority would not matter so much. But he is not; he is an insecure bl.u.s.terer. He cannot afford to lose face. If he is to give up Chryseis, he must retaliate for the affront. He cannot retaliate against Apollo, so he chooses Apollo's agent, as it were, *in the council-Achilles. He takes away the prize that Achilles had been allotted in the same raid that had netted Agamemnon Chryseis-Briseis.

This is a grievous error. One has only to compare Agamemnon's action in stealing Briseis with Paris's in stealing Helen-the casus belli-to see the point. And since Achilles is stronger than Agamemnon and, as events will prove, even more fiercely protective of his personal honor, Agamemnon's gambit is reckless. Achilles' first impulse is to kill Agamemnon on the spot, and he would have done so had not Athena swept down from Mount Olympus and grabbed him by the hair and told him to stay his hand, a.s.suring him that she would arrange an even better revenge. And she does. He sits out the battle, and in his absence the Trojans make mincemeat of the Greeks and almost drive them into the sea. A desperate Agamemnon dispatches emissaries to Achilles with instructions to promise him not only Briseis back, untouched, but also Agamemnon's (surviving) daughter and countless gifts of high value, if only he will rejoin the fighting. But conscious that if he fights he will die young, and beginning to question the heroic ethic, in which glory is considered a fair exchange for dying young, Achilles does not return to the fight until Hector kills his beloved companion, Patroclus,41 who, wearing Achilles' armor in order to make the Trojans think they were up against Achilles, had gone too near Troy. When Achilles rejoins the fighting, he pursues Hector with a savagery marked by the poem as excessive even by the standards of heroic culture, kills him, and mutilates his body. Hector, also wearing Achilles' old armor, which he had stripped from the slain Patroclus, had momentarily and fatally forgotten his own limitations, just as Patroclus had done. But eventually Achilles relents and returns Hector's body, miraculously unmutilated, to Priam. We are given to understand that by killing Hector, Achilles has sealed both Troy's fate and his own.

We learn from the Iliad that revenge works. Troy will be utterly destroyed in revenge for Paris's having stolen Helen in violation of the norms of hospitality that are so important in primitive and ancient cu*41. In Shakespeare's play Troilus and Cressida, their relations.h.i.+p is h.o.m.os.e.xual, but there is no suggestion of that in the Iliad. Rather, it is the kind of h.o.m.osocial relations.h.i.+p that is common in warrior societies. Troilus and Cressida is strongly pro-Trojan, and the depiction of the Greek heroes as h.o.m.os.e.xuals expresses derision for the Greeks. Like the Romans (see the Aeneid), the English liked to pretend they were descended from the Trojans.

tures (norms emphasized even more strongly in the Odyssey). But we are also made aware of the high costs of this method of enforcing law. And we learn that revenge ought to have limits-that Achilles went too far by mutilating Hector and that the return of Hector's body to Priam is necessary to prevent the Greeks from crossing the line separating lawful revenge from barbarism.

The Iliad also provides a glimpse of composition (compensation for a wrongful injury), both in Agamemnon's elaborate offer to compensate Achilles and in one of the scenes on Achilles' new s.h.i.+eld (XVIII.580592): And the people ma.s.sed, streaming into the marketplace where a quarrel had broken out and two men struggled over the blood-price for a kinsman just murdered.

One declaimed in public, vowing payment in full- the other spurned him, he would not take a thing- so both men pressed for a judge to cut the knot.

The crowd cheered on both, they took both sides, but heralds held them back as the city elders sat on polished stone benches, forming the sacred circle, grasping in hand the staffs of clear-voiced heralds, and each leapt to his feet to plead the case in turn.

Two bars of solid gold shone on the ground before them, a prize for the judge who'd speak the straightest verdict.42 But composition is not a perfect subst.i.tute for revenge, at least not in the heroic, wartime world, in contrast to the peaceable world depicted on the s.h.i.+eld. Or at least not for Achilles-not yet, anyway-when in refusing Agamemnon's offer he articulates one of the recurrent problems of a revenge ethic, that of emotional excess: "No, not if his gifts outnumbered all the grains of sand / and dust in the earth-no, not even then could 42. All quotations from Homer in this book are either from Robert f.a.gles's 1990 translation of the Iliad or his 1995 translation of the Odyssey. Notice that the pa.s.sage also describes a method of dispute resolution that resembles arbitration. So here, as in the Norse sagas, we catch glimpses not only of revenge as law's precursor but also of law's beginnings.

*Agamemnon/bring my fighting spirit round until he pays me back,/pays full measure for all his heartbreaking outrage!" (IX.470473). Like Michael Kohlhaas, who refuses the n.o.bleman's offer of damages, Achilles cannot be "bought." Until his anger runs its course or is deflected to another object, there can be no peaceful settlement. Until then nothing is bad enough for Agamemnon. The reductio ad absurdum of this att.i.tude is Atreus's regret (in Seneca's play Thyestes) that he did not make Thyestes drink his sons' blood while they were still living.

The Iliad teaches not only the excessive character of the pa.s.sion for revenge but also its fragility as a principle of social order. The vindication of the norms of hospitality through the successful completion of the siege of Troy is r.e.t.a.r.ded by the vendetta between Achilles and Agamemnon. Until the last book of the Iliad Achilles acts entirely out of concern for his personal honor and, what is not clearly distinguished from it, his personal possessions, including Briseis and Patroclus. (This is his "unsociability," which troubled Plato.) It is made to seem almost an accident that at the critical moment his private incentive to fight Hector becomes aligned with the needs of the Greek alliance, for which Achilles cares not a fig. We know that he will not throw up the game and go home to Phthia, but we also know that he easily could, and knowing this we may be led to wonder whether a social order based on a heroic code and the violent defense of personal honor is stable; the collision between Agamemnon and Achilles in Book I suggests it is not. Not only Achilles' own questionings of the heroic code but the events of the Iliad, which ends before the fall of Troy and depicts the Greek alliance in disarray, reinforce the suggestion. And beginning with the symbolic death of Achilles when Hector kills Patroclus, who is wearing Achilles' armor (and at first is taken for Achilles), images of death progressively enshroud Achilles,43 foreshadowing his actual death, which will occur shortly after the events narrated in the Iliad, and contributing to a sense, strongly marked in the Odyssey, that the heroic code is being depicted in its twilight.

Against this reading can be placed the sense conveyed by the Iliad that only the prospect of death gives dignity and value to life. The G.o.ds are im 43. Recall that when he is killed by Achilles, Hector is wearing Achilles' old armor. Symbolically Achilles kills himself, and indeed he will die soon after Hector.

mortal, yet frivolous and primitive (they are the generation before man); no G.o.d depicted in the Iliad has the dignity of Achilles at his best. But when is that? When he is being "modern"? Although we are shown the negative side of the heroic ethic, the poem may also be telling us that Achilles' tragic mistake was not the refusal to yield to the entreaties of Agamemnon's emissaries, a refusal solidly grounded in the absolutism of heroic character, but the compromise of permitting Patroclus to fight in Achilles' place wearing Achilles' armor to deceive the Trojans. The compromise has the earmarks of modern instrumental reasoning. It is ant.i.thetical to the code of honor that defines the vengeance ethic epitomized by Achilles, and it marks his doom and perhaps that of the ethic itself. The ethic of pity glimpsed at the end of the poem has no place for Achilles.

James Boyd White devotes a chapter in a book on law and literature to the Iliad, yet does not discuss the prelegal inst.i.tutions that the poem depicts or the theme of justice that it develops.44 Concerning the wrangle between Achilles and Agamemnon in Book I, he says: "The issue is stated with the directness of a modern legal case: there are apparently two accepted conceptions of what is 'fitting,' only one of which can be satisfied. It is like what happens in law when two lines of precedent, both solidly established, are seen to point opposite ways when a case that no one ever thought of comes up or when two rules of law are suddenly found to be in conflict" (p. 34). This is not an illuminating a.n.a.logy. What is significant from a legal standpoint about the disputes in the Iliad, but does not engage White's interest, is that the society depicted in the poem lacks public agencies for resolving disputes and must therefore fall back on custom, ritual, and the G.o.ds (as in Athena's grabbing Achilles by the hair) to minimize the costs of purely private methods of dispute settlement, such as the feud.

In Shakespeare's best-known play we encounter three avengers besides Hamlet himself, all, as it happens, avenger sons. Fortinbras is seeking to 44. White, When Words Lose Their Meaning: Const.i.tutions and Reconst.i.tutions of Language, Character, and Community, ch. 2 (1984).

*avenge his father's death at the hands of Hamlet's father. Laertes is seeking to avenge the death of his father and sister. And a speech by one of the players describes the killing of Priam by Achilles' son in revenge for the death of his father at the hands of Priam's son Paris. In Act I the ghost of Hamlet's father commands Hamlet to avenge his murder by his brother Claudius, and the rest of the play revolves around Hamlet's efforts to carry out the ghost's injunction (and, as a preliminary to doing so, to determine the ghost's bona fides) and Claudius's counterplots.

The abiding puzzle of the play is why Hamlet takes so long to carry out his a.s.signment and makes so many mistakes along the way. The mistakes and delays result in the death of seven people (besides Claudius)- Polonius, Ophelia, Laertes, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Hamlet's mother, and Hamlet himself-who should not have had to die in order for justice to be done. There is the purely mechanical necessity of spinning out the play to a proper length so that the audience gets its money's worth. Hamlet's simulation of madness is less clearly motivated than Hieronimo's in The Spanish Tragedy, making the delay in the later play seem less natural; there are, as we shall see, other loose ends as well. But we suppose that more is involved in the protraction and clumsiness of Hamlet's revenge than authorial incompetence. Shakespeare could have shrunk the interval between the wrong and the revenge for the wrong, as he did in Julius Caesar, without shortening the play (and anyway the play is very long, so could use some shortening), by making it begin before the death of Hamlet's father and the remarriage of his mother. The Odyssey shows that a revenge story does not have to be short even if the revenger is supremely competent; Odysseus's revenge is delayed by a s.h.i.+pwreck.

The medieval Denmark that Hamlet depicts has, unlike the society in the Iliad, a formal legal system. But Claudius certainly, and Hamlet probably, are above the law. Hamlet is not punished for killing Polonius. Claudius raises the issue of punishment briefly, only to reject it on the ground that Hamlet is too popular. And there is no hint that Claudius might be deposed or otherwise punished for murdering the rightful king and making an "incestuous" marriage, as Elizabethans considered marriage with a brother's widow to be except possibly under the strict conditions of a Levirate marriage-that is, if the deceased brother did not have a son; Claudius's deceased brother, Hamlet's father, of course did have a son.45 Hamlet does not try to expose Claudius's crimes. The only way for him to obtain justice against Claudius, or for Laertes to obtain justice against Hamlet, is by revenge.

Yet the play contains a good deal of implicit criticism of revenge. Those seven more or less innocent deaths mark it as an expensive way of doing justice, reminding us that revenge can place responsibilities on people who are not temperamentally suited to bear them, unlike a system of formal justice, whose personnel-judges, police, prosecutors, and so forth- are self-selected and full-time. Their specialized training and experience, plus whatever apt.i.tudes or bent made them choose a career in law enforcement, give some a.s.surance of their having the necessary skills-and the necessary callousness-for doing society's dirty work efficiently. As Hamlet puts it, "The hand of little employment hath the daintier sense" (V.1.70). And when he says at the end of Act I, having just received his marching orders from the ghost, "The time is out of joint. O cursed spite / That ever I was born to set it right!" (I.5.197198), the emphasis falls on "I." It will soon become plain that Hamlet is not a fit instrument for the ghost's plan; only there is no one else. Hamlet kills Claudius only after suspending active efforts to do so. His failure to check the foils before beginning the fencing match with Laertes-knowing what he knows of Claudius's previous effort to kill him and of Laertes' rage against him- is negligent, and it is only by chance that he discovers what is afoot and is able to kill Claudius before he himself dies.

Claudius, implicitly commenting on Hamlet's dilatoriness in making an attempt on his life, warns Laertes, another amateur revenger, that anger may cool with time, a traditional problem of revenge as a remedy for in 45. That Hamlet's first audiences would have been horrified by the remarriage, both because of its incestuous character and because of its haste, is argued in Roland Mushat Frye, The Renaissance Hamlet: Issues and Responses in 1600 7782 (1984). But Graham Bradshaw, Misrepresentations: Shakespeare and the Materialists 294 n. 25 (1993), does not think the audience would have been greatly troubled by the incestuous character of the marriage. In the play itself, only Hamlet and the ghost describe the marriage as incestuous, though the very name "Claudius," Roman rather than Danish, would remind some in the audience of the incestuous Roman emperor. English law in Shakespeare's time would have p.r.o.nounced the marriage incestuous. B. J. Sokol and Mary Sokol, Shakespeare, Law, and Marriage 152153 (2003). The action of the play takes place centuries earlier, however, and in a different country.

*justice. Claudius is also eloquent on the problem of many a slip 'twixt cup and lips, another of Hamlet's problems. They are not Laertes' problems. Hamlet acts too slowly and cools; Laertes acts too quickly while still red-hot. Hamlet wastes time building an unnecessary case against Claudius. Laertes leaps to the wrong conclusion-thus underscoring the dangers of being a judge in one's own cause. Fortinbras, the mean between Hamlet and Laertes, is the very model of an efficient avenger.

The problem of the avenger's emotional excess is ill.u.s.trated by Hamlet's forgoing an opportunity to kill Claudius at prayer. Had he taken the opportunity those seven lives would have been spared, but he wants to make sure that Claudius burns in h.e.l.l. (Notice the parallel to The Spanish Tragedy.) Similarly, though characteristically more crudely, when Claudius says to Laertes, "Hamlet comes back. What would you undertake / To show yourself in deed your father's son / More than in words?" (IV.7.125127), Laertes answers, "To cut his throat i'th' church." Claudius replies, "No place, indeed, should murder sanctuarize; / Revenge should have no bounds" (IV.7.128129). But it should; that is one of the points that we are meant to bring away from the play.

Hamlet stands to its contemporary revenge literature, in point of ambivalence as well as of quality, as the Iliad presumably stood to the lost heroic epics on which it built. In many Elizabethan and Jacobean revenge plays the violence and the revenger's emotional excess are so grotesque that any social or ethical observation is submerged in melodrama, as in t.i.tus Andronicus. Among other horrors, t.i.tus, the avenger (like Hieronimo a high official who cannot obtain justice through lawful means because the villains are royal personages), borrowing a leaf from Atreus, kills Queen Tamora's two sons and serves them to her in a pie. He remarks to someone who asks him to fetch the boys (V.3.6063): Why, there they are, both baked in this pie, Whereof their mother daintily hath fed, Eating the flesh that she herself hath bred.

'Tis true, 'tis true; witness my knife's sharp point.

Thereupon he stabs the queen and is stabbed in turn. Or consider Cyril Tourneur's play The Revenger's Tragedy, written a few years after Hamlet.

Once again the evildoer is the king; so Vindice, to avenge his wife's murder, must act outside the law. He has kept his wife's skull, and now he covers it with poison. He lures the lecherous king to a dark bower on the pretense of supplying him with a woman. The king embraces the skull in the dark. To make the king's dying more painful, Vindice has lured the queen and her lover to the bower so that the last thing the king will see before the poison kills him is his wife in an act of adultery. When the king tries to shout, Vindice cuts his tongue out. In John Webster's play The White Devil, the method of revenge against the villain, Bracchiano, is to smear poison on the inside of the lower visor of his helmet, causing him hideous agonies which go on and on until the avengers become impatient and strangle him.

The most influential rejection of the revenge ethic is found in the New Testament; and we must consider whether Hamlet, and perhaps the gorier revenge plays as well, are trying to remind the audience of Romans 12:1920: "Avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord. Therefore if thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink: for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head."46 There are two ways to take this. The first, suggested by the reference to "coals of fire," is that G.o.d will straighten out all the accounts in the afterlife. It is not a practical formula for living. No society can maintain order just by appeals to posthumous rewards and sanctions, and no person can thrive by always turning the other cheek. The second interpretation, equally impractical, is, in its purest form, leave it to G.o.d to punish the wrongdoer in this life; do not even try to get the help of G.o.d's delegate, the king. This interpretation is intimated in the last act of Hamlet when Hamlet is no longer trying to devise a plan for killing Claudius, but instead is trusting in Providence to arrange time, place, and means. "There's a divinity that shapes our 46. The King James Bible, from which I have quoted, had not yet been written when Shakespeare wrote Hamlet. But the Bibles he would have known-the Coverdale Bible (1535), the Geneva Bible (1583), and the Bishop's Bible (1588)-do not differ materially from the King James version in the relevant pa.s.sage. Here, for example, is the same pa.s.sage in the Coverdale Bible: "Avenge not yourselves, but give room unto the wrath of G.o.d. For it is written: Vengeance is mine, and I will reward, sayeth the Lord. Therefore if thine enemy hunger, feed him. If he thirst, give him drink. For in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire upon his head."

*ends,/Rough-hew them how we will ...The readiness is all"(V.2.1011, 220). (And Providence will oblige.) By Act V the ghost-a frightening, pagan figure-has been forgotten.47 The revenge ethic that the ghost embodies is made to seem primitive, pre-Christian, and Hamlet's death is suffused with a tragic dignity that it would have lacked had he carried out with smooth efficiency the task a.s.signed him by his father's ghost.48 Yet within the dramatic structure and implied values of the play as a whole, quietistic resignation would not have been an adequate response by Hamlet to the ghost's urgings. The play exhibits the negative aspects of private revenge as a method of vindicating rights and maintaining public order-in the stupid bloodthirstiness of Laertes and the destructive ineffectuality of Hamlet's schemes of revenge-but leaves us with the abiding sense that Hamlet had no choice but to try to avenge his father. "Honour has duties which Christianity refuses to recognise."49 Euripides sought to debunk the Orestes legend by situating his play Orestes in a society with a fully operative legal system in which-as Clytemnestra's father reminds Orestes-Orestes did not have to kill his mother; he could have turned her over to the authorities for punishment. Hamlet had no such option. We learn about law from its absence in Hamlet.

The ambivalent att.i.tude toward revenge that one senses in Hamlet mirrors the prevailing att.i.tude in Shakespeare's society.50 The New Testament had made revenge problematic in a way that it had not been for "The king dies for the murder of Gertrude and the prince, not for a poisoning in the orchard. Old Hamlet does not return to triumph over the corpses of his enemies." Kerrigan, note 2 above, at 187.

"In the last act of the play . . . Hamlet accepts his world and we discover a different man." Maynard Mack, "The World of Hamlet," in Tragic Themes in Western Literature 30, 54 (Cleanth Brooks ed. 1955).

William Empson, "Hamlet," in Empson, Essays on Shakespeare 79, 121 (David B. Pirie ed. 1986).

See Frye, note 45 above, ch. 2; Catherine Belsey, "The Case of Hamlet's Conscience," 76 Studies in Philology 127 (1979). This ambivalence was also mirrored in the career of James I, the patron of Shakespeare's company (the King's Men). As king of Scotland before he ascended the English throne, James had tried to control the blood feuds that were rampant in his country; yet at the same time he was a determined and ruthless avenger of his father's murder and of other wrongs done to his family. See Alvin Kernan, Shakespeare, the King's Playwright: Theater in the Stuart Court 16031613 3744 (1995).

the Greeks. The orthodox Elizabethan solution was to distinguish among three forms of revenge-G.o.d's revenge, public revenge, and private revenge-and to link the first two in the notion that the rulers of political society, as G.o.d's agents in the political sphere, were to "Smite as G.o.d Smites," wielding powers "ordained by G.o.d to fill the seat of vengeance."51 The criminal justice system was thereby reconciled with the divine monopoly of vengeance. But this left unresolved cases in which the criminal justice system was inoperative, as in Hamlet. That was the domain of private revenge. When Hamlet calls himself heaven's "scourge and minister" (III.4.182), we glimpse the possibility of linking private revenge to G.o.d's revenge in the same way that public revenge is linked to it: by const.i.tuting the private revenger G.o.d's delegate. The case for Hamlet's taking revenge against Claudius is strengthened by the fact that besides being a murderer (and of his own brother-like Cain), Claudius is an "adulterate beast" and a usurper and therefore an illegitimate ruler-a tyrant. Tyrannicide is a more defensible form of private revenge than regicide based on a king's private misconduct.52 Hamlet makes its strongest case against private revenge on the practical rather than the moral level. Hamlet commits the standard revenger's mistake of allowing himself to be carried away by emotion and then of cooling. The train of unnecessary deaths is set in motion when he forgoes the opportunity to kill Claudius at prayer because he wants to make sure that Claudius's punishment is eternal. The prayer soliloquy reveals to the audience that Hamlet is mistaken in believing that if he kills Claudius at prayer, the king may be saved. It is an odd mistake for Hamlet to make. Since he never deludes himself that Claudius might voluntarily relinquish the fruits of his crimes-the kings.h.i.+p and the queen-he should have realized that Claudius's "repentance" must be insincere and would not save Claudius from d.a.m.nation.

There is no textual basis for thinking that Hamlet could not be so bloodthirsty as to wish to d.a.m.n Claudius for eternity and that therefore the reason he gives for sparing him must be a pretext. Not only is exces 51. Lily B. Campbell, "Theories of Revenge in Renaissance England," in Collected Papers of Lily B. Campbell 153, 163 (1968).

52. Frye, note 45 above, at 3840.

*sive bloodthirstiness the occupational hazard of a revenger, but it is a marked characteristic of Hamlet in Act III. "The act required of [Hamlet], though retributive justice, is one that necessarily involves the doer in the general guilt."53 Having spared Claudius for a reason that was bad from Hamlet's own standpoint, Hamlet, though now fully convinced of Claudius's guilt, continues to dither (as he accuses himself in Act IV of doing), with disastrous results.

Worry that the ghost might be a devil had led Hamlet to delay his revenge until he could verify Claudius's guilt. His doubt about the ghost's bona fides may have been just a pretext for delay, but given the concerns expressed by Horatio and the night.w.a.tchmen at the beginning of the play-and with the existence of ghosts a given in Hamlet-the play's original audiences would have considered the ident.i.ty of the ghost (Hamlet's father? or a devil disguised as Hamlet's father?) a live issue to trouble Hamlet.54 That supernatural beings deceive would not have been a novelty; look how Macbeth is deceived by witches.

Claudius, moreover, has such a civil and plausible demeanor-he is the Stanley Baldwin of Shakespearean villains-that Hamlet could well doubt the ghost's uncorroborated accusation. Claudius's soliloquies are necessary to make his wickedness convincing to the audience, and Hamlet is not in the audience. Doubt about the ghost's good faith is reinforced by the p.r.o.nounced interrogative mood of the play, announced in the very first line-"Who's there?"-and carried forward by such seemingly peripheral scenes as the one in which Polonius sets Reynaldo to spy on Laertes in Paris and by the abundance of misunderstandings that plague the characters, such as Hamlet's belief that the person behind the arras is Claudius, Laertes' belief that Claudius killed Polonius, Polonius's belief that Hamlet can't marry Ophelia because she is too far beneath him (though we later learn that Gertrude had expected them to marry), and the belief of several of the characters that Ophelia committed suicide rather than having drowned in an accident to which her insanity contrib 53. Mack, note 48 above, at 53.

54. See Frye, note 45 above, at 1417. Notice that, if private revenge is a mortal sin (an open question for Elizabethans), the devil might in the guise of Hamlet's father be egging Hamlet on to avenge his father's murder even though Claudius was the murderer.

uted. Hamlet's doubt also ill.u.s.trates the problem of proof that plagues a revenge system (a problem also stressed in Oth.e.l.lo) because of the absence of a machinery of investigation and adjudication. Yet the doubt proceeds from Hamlet's character as much as from circ.u.mstances. He repeatedly blames himself for his delay in acting on the ghost's instructions. As late as Act V, long after the ghost's veracity has been confirmed to Hamlet's satisfaction, he is wondering whether he has enough evidence to proceed against Claudius.

A sufficient motive for delay might seem to be the possibility that Claudius is protected by guards or that someone might seek to avenge his killing. But these conjectures have scant basis in the play (in contrast to The Spanish Tragedy), and in fact no one lifts a finger when Hamlet stabs Claudius and forces him to drink from the poisoned cup. Although the royal trappings are necessary both to elevate the characters in an Elizabethan audience's esteem and to put them far enough above the law to make the need for private revenge plausible, the political overtones prominent in Shakespeare's Roman and history plays are muted. Ca.s.sius needed to organize a conspiracy in order to a.s.sa.s.sinate Caesar; there is no indication that Hamlet has a political problem in dealing with Claudius, or that the murder of the king is other than a private matter-no dissatisfaction is expressed with Claudius's management of the state.55 Hamlet is at bottom a domestic tragedy, like Oth.e.l.lo or Romeo and Juliet, not a political one like Julius Caesar or Macbeth.

An Elizabethan audience, more impressed than a modern one by the majesty of kings.h.i.+p, might have taken for granted that the ghost's command could not be carried out quickly and easily. The mention of the king's Swiss guards; the fact that Polonius, and later Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, have been set to watch over Hamlet; Rosencrantz's "cess of majesty" speech (III.3.1523); and Claudius's remark to Gertrude- deeply ironic though it is-"Do not fear [for] our person./There's such divinity doth hedge a king / That treason can but peep to what it would,/Acts little of his will" (IV.5.126129) may have been all the hints that such an audience needed.

Yet Hamlet himself voices no concerns along these lines. His words 55. John F. Danby, Shakespeare's Doctrine of Nature: A Study of King Lear 148 (1949).

*and deeds suggest that the basic cause of his delay is that he is temperamentally unsuited to play the avenger's role. He is not a Vindice (whose name means "avenger"), t.i.tus, Hieronimo (who does hesitate a little), Kohlhaas, or even Orestes, despite certain parallels to the last.56 A closer parallel to Hamlet may be Telemachus, who until his father turns up alive is acutely conscious of his duty to punish the suitors for their abuse of his mother's hospitality but is too young to carry out his duty and therefore frets and sulks. As the ghost of Hamlet's father tells Hamlet when it returns in Act III, and as Hamlet keeps telling himself, he does not have the implacable rage, the single-minded fury, that a proper avenger has. His "To be, or not to be" soliloquy reveals a mind that sees both sides of every question and devises ingenious rationalizations for inaction. More than a habit of mind is involved. Hamlet is labile; his strongly marked impulsiveness is the other side of his quickness to cool. When he asks the ghost to make haste to acquaint him with the details of the murder so that "I, with wings as swift/As meditation or the thoughts of love,/May sweep to my revenge" (I.5.3033), it is as if he realizes that unless he acts quickly he may fail to act at all.

Neither does Hamlet have that overdeveloped-and also automatic, unhesitating-sense of honor ill.u.s.trated by Fortinbras's willingness to sacrifice thousands of lives for a worthless bit of land. A prey to the teeming imagination revealed in his soliloquies, Hamlet becomes distracted by what from the standpoint of vengeance is a side issue: his mother's adultery and incest. (It is a side issue because his mother is innocent of his father's murder and because his father's ghost told him not to harm her.) Hamlet is a thinker, but not a planner like Antony. Maybe he a.s.sumes an "antic disposition" because he knows that he is no dissembler either, again unlike Antony. He even manages to botch the play within the play, by identifying the murderer as the king's nephew rather than his brother; Claudius might take this as a threat to himself since Hamlet is his nephew and so might be frightened into aborting the play even if he were not the murderer of Hamlet's father.

Hamlet seems more interested in the implications of his uncle's and mother's behavior for human nature than in getting on with the task given 56. See A. D. Nuttall, The Stoic in Love: Selected Essays on Literature and Ideas 3438 (1989). Cf. Kerrigan, note 2 above, at 173174.

him by his father's ghost. The only thing that "works" for him in the first four acts is the escape during the voyage to England from the trap set for him by Claudius. It is because his escape is due to luck or Providence-a vague unease prompts him to search Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's things for the fatal commission, and the fight with the pirates the next day enables him to get back to Denmark before Claudius discovers his couriers' fate-that he a.s.sumes a fatalistic stance in Act V.57 But should Hamlet be criticized for not having the optimal character for a revenger? That he should be thoughtful, bookish (books are an important prop in Hamlet),58 a university student, a questioner of his corrupt society, and a person inclined to deliberate before he acts59-that he should lack the grim single-mindedness of his father and of Fortinbras, both comfortable denizens of a traditional, honor-obsessed, vengeance-loving society-are these qualities not to his credit, given the ambivalence with which his society (more precisely, the society of Hamlet's original audiences) views revenge? But again we come up against the difference between private and public morality. If one accepts that Claudius really has to be got rid of because of his murder of the king, then Hamlet's hesitations and blunders mark him, like Brutus (another hesitant intellectual), as someone who either misunderstands what it is to play a public role or is incapable of playing it. But of course placing the duty of revenge on a person incapable of discharging it is one of the drawbacks of justice as vengeance.

What then should we take to be Shakespeare's "position" on revenge? Just to ask the question is to make three mistakes: that of projecting the implied moral values in a work of literature onto the author; that of wanting literature to be edifying or didactic; and that of trying to evaluate the morality of revenge without regard to circ.u.mstances. Shakespeare's plays "After the graveyard and what it indicates has come to pa.s.s in him, we know that Hamlet is ready for the final contest of mighty opposites. He accepts the world as it is, the world as a duel, in which, whether we know it or not, evil holds the poisoned rapier and the poisoned chalice waits; and in which, if we win at all, it costs not less than everything." Mack, note 48 above, at 58. Auden, who doesn't like Hamlet, remarks perceptively that "he would like to become what the Greek tragic hero is, a creature of situation." W. H. Auden, "Hamlet," in Auden, Lectures on Shakespeare 159, 164 (Arthur Kirsch ed. 2000).

Alastair Fowler, "The Case against Hamlet: Understanding the Multiple Viewpoints of Shakespeare's 'Renaissance Realism,'" Times Literary Supplement, Dec. 22, 1995, pp. 6, 7.

59. Frye, note 45 above, at 170177.

*display a range of att.i.tudes toward revenge, with Hamlet lying midway between plays like t.i.tus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, King Lear, and Macbeth, on the one hand, which depict it more or less uncritically, and The Merchant of Venice, Coriola.n.u.s, and Romeo and Juliet, on the other hand, which reject it. In Romeo and Juliet, for example, the "ancient grudge" between the Montagues and the Capulets is made absurd, though not funny, by the fact that the origin of the feud has been forgotten (unlike the origin of the Jews' "ancient grudge" against the Christians in The Merchant of Venice); by the play's being set in what is depicted as a civilized, modern, and well-governed city-state; by the lack of motive for Tybalt's malignancy; by the speed with which the feud is ended when the heads of the feuding families are finally brought to their senses by the death of Romeo and Juliet; and by the love between them, which underscores the irrationality of the murderous antipathy between their families.

Hamlet's dilemma is resolved in a curious fas.h.i.+on in William Faulkner's story "An Odor of Verbena," the last chapter of his loosely knit novel The Unvanquished. The story is set in Mississippi shortly after the Civil War. Colonel Sartoris, a violent and quarrelsome man in the tradition of the Old South,60 has had a long-standing quarrel with a local businessman, Redmond. A duel is inevitable. But Sartoris is "growing tired of killing men" and tells his son Bayard, a law student and a symbol of the New South that will rise from the ashes of the old, that he intends to confront Redmond unarmed. The next day Sartoris goes to Redmond's office, and Redmond kills him. It turns out that Sartoris was armed, and although apparently he did not draw his gun, Sartoris's supporters p.r.o.nounce it a fair duel. They nevertheless expect Bayard to avenge his father's killing. But Bayard is determined to put the revenge ethic behind him. The day after his father's death he goes to Redmond's office, unarmed, enters the office, and walks toward the desk at which Redmond is seated. Redmond fires twice, but deliberately aims wide and misses. When Bayard reaches the desk, Redmond gets up, puts on his hat, walks bravely through the 60. See Wyatt-Brown, note 21 above, ch. 2 and p. 352; Jack K. Williams, Dueling in the Old South: Vignettes of Social History (1980); Edward L. Ayers, Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the 19th Century American South (1984).

throng of Sartoris supporters outside-his bravery lies in the fact that he knows they'll think he has killed Bayard-and keeps walking straight to the train station, where he takes the next train out of Mississippi (with no baggage-nothing), never to return. The Sartoris hangers-on, who serve a choral function, uttering as in a Greek tragedy the conventional wisdom, had been insistent that Colonel Sartoris's death had to be avenged. But when they find out what Bayard has done, they are impressed by his bravery. He has made his point; Redmond has seconded it.

"Bayard, who fears the imputation of cowardice, has done a braver thing than the code demanded: he has gone to the a.s.sa.s.sin's office, thus honouring the code, but has transcended the code by having determined, at the risk of his own death, that he would not shoot Redmond."61 Hamlet, too, can be thought to have transcended his father's simple code of honor by having resisted its implications and yet in the end having achieved the goal set for him. Claudius does die, just as Redmond exiles himself.

Colonel Sartoris had a young wife, Drusilla, who was only a few years older than Bayard, and she and Bayard had fallen in love. Bayard had been on the verge of telling his father about his relations.h.i.+p with Drusilla when his father had said he was going up against Redmond the next day unarmed; Bayard kept silent. (Did he expect his father to be killed? Want him to be killed?) When the colonel is killed, Drusilla is desperately eager for Bayard to avenge him. She presses him to take two huge dueling pistols, which appear to have phallic significance for her. He refuses; and when he returns home after having spared Redmond, Drusilla has gone, apparently forever. In rejecting the revenge ethic (for law? Bayard is a law student, after all), Bayard has rejected, not entirely willingly, the complex of southern values in which masculinity is correlated with readiness to kill in defense of honor.

Richard Weisberg, a leading figure in the law and literature movement, attributes Hamlet's hesitations and mistakes not to the problematics of revenge but to Hamlet's envying Claudius as a man of action who has 61. Cleanth Brooks, "The Criticism of Fiction: The Role of Close a.n.a.lysis," in Brooks, A Shaping Joy: Studies in the Writer's Craft 143, 148 (1971).

*succeeded where Hamlet has failed-namely in a plot to kill-and to Hamlet's resentment at having to play up to Claudius in order to ensure his own succession to the throne when Claudius dies.62 Hamlet in this a.n.a.lysis personifies the weak, ineffectual verbalizer confronted with the Nietzschean "master," who, as we'll see in chapter 5, is above revenge.

Hamlet is resentful, and naturally so. But the play presents Claudius as a sneak, liar, tippler, mediocrity, and weakling who dispossessed a much superior man (Hamlet senior) of position, wife, and life and has dispossessed another superior man, young Hamlet, of his expectancy of the kings.h.i.+p in succession to his father (not an automatic succession as in a hereditary monarchy, but, apparently, presumptive). Claudius has a pleasant manner and is politically astute-he deftly turns aside the threats to his throne posed successively by Fortinbras and Laertes. We may even "sense that [Claudius] craved power in Denmark out of a conviction that he could rule more efficiently than his brother."63 But Claudius's political skills, so incongruent with his brother's austere martial virtues, are qualities that Hamlet does not admire and may not even understand. Nor is it suggested that Claudius either controls the succession or has a rival candidate to Hamlet; he seems happy to let Hamlet succeed him so long as he can continue to reign and enjoy Gertrude in peace. And Hamlet makes no efforts to ingratiate himself with Claudius-quite the opposite. He is young, bold, pa.s.sionate; Claudius is old, calculating, uxorious. They could not be more unlike.

It is true that Hamlet's reaction to the situation in which he finds himself as a result of the encounter with his father's ghost is one of "generalized negativity."64 Hamlet becomes disgusted with women, himself, indeed all of humanity; and this disgust, rather than the task the ghost set him, becomes the focus of his attention until he returns to Denmark, resigned but no longer disgusted, after the aborted voyage to England. But Hamlet's negativity cannot be equated to envy of Claudius. Nor is he one of Nietzsche's "priestly men" or "last men." On the contrary, by the last act of the play he has become Nietzsche's self-overcoming man, too "big" to plot revenge. He kills Claudius on impulse when he discovers that his Richard Weisberg, "Hamlet and Ressentiment," 29 American Imago 318 (1972).

David Bevington, Shakespeare 53 (2002).

Weisberg, note 62 above, at 325.

mother has swallowed a poisoned drink intended for him. He had said, very Nietzsche-like, "praised be rashness" (V.2.7), and Claudius had described him as being "remiss,/Most generous, and free from all contriving" (IV.7.135136), which are characteristics of a Nietzschean master.

Earlier, when Polonius had directed that the players be "used" (housed and fed) according to their "desert," Hamlet had reproved him: "G.o.d's bodikin, man, much better. Use every man after his