Troy, Romans, and Revenge in Shakespeare’s Hamlet

Understanding the ambiguous morality of one of Shakespeare's most complex plays

The Death of Priam (1861) by Jules Lefebvre

From its opening act to its final bloody scene, William Shakespeare’s Hamlet poses difficult questions about the nature of morality, justice, and revenge. Notoriously ambiguous, the play leaves us with many questions about the nature of its tragic hero (Hamlet) his quest to avenge his murdered father (also named Hamlet), and the virtual pile of bodies that accumulates as he haphazardly pursues that revenge. Claudius, the uncle who kills Hamlet’s father and seizes the throne of Denmark, certainly seems to deserve his death, as perhaps does Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother who marries Claudius only days after her husband’s death. But there are many other casualties whose deaths trouble us. Polonius is a busybody responsible for such well-known Shakespearean phrases as “to thin own self be true” and “neither a borrower nor a lender be” and for meddling disastrously in Hamlet’s love life. And while Polonius may have earned some kind of dramatic comeuppance, being stabbed to death seems to more than compensate him for his mistakes. Finally, there is Ophelia, daughter of Polonius, and Hamlet’s lover. When Hamlet kills her father, she turns mad, drowning herself in a river. Her death too is the result of Hamlet’s revenge, an unforeseen casualty of his quest for retribution.

How then, are we to make sense of the vengeance depicted in Hamlet? Throughout the play, Shakespeare presents several models for interpreting the vengeance which makes up the drama’s principal action. Of all these, I believe it is in a moment from Act II, Scene 2, where a player (actor) delivers a speech about the Trojan king Priam’s slaughter, that we find the hermeneutic for interpreting the revenge plot as a whole. Prince Hamlet, as part of his elaborate attempt to confirm his uncle’s guilt, hires a troupe of of actors to stage a loose reenactment of his father’s murder: The Murder of Gonzago, the famous play within a play. While the players are rehearsing, Hamlet requests a specific performance from one of the actors, a scene out of Greco-Roman mythology: that of Pyrrhus, Achilles’ son, and the vengeance he exacts upon the Trojans amid the fall of their great city.

Below, is the Player’s speech in full. Ellipses mark the places where the narrative is briefly interrupted by other characters.

The rugged Pyrrhus, he whose sable arms,

Black as his purpose, did the night resemble

When he lay couchèd in th’ ominous horse,

Hath now this dread and black complexion smeared

With heraldry more dismal. Head to foot,

Now is he total gules, horridly tricked

With blood of fathers, mothers, daughters, sons,

Baked and impasted with the parching streets,

That lend a tyrannous and a damnèd light

To their lord’s murder. Roasted in wrath and fire,

And thus o’ersizèd with coagulate gore,

With eyes like carbuncles, the hellish Pyrrhus

Old grandsire Priam seeks.

…

Anon he finds him

Striking too short at Greeks. His antique sword,

Rebellious to his arm, lies where it falls,

Repugnant to command. Unequal matched,

Pyrrhus at Priam drives, in rage strikes wide;

But with the whiff and wind of his fell sword

Th’ unnervèd father falls. Then senseless Ilium,

Seeming to feel this blow, with flaming top

Stoops to his base, and with a hideous crash

Takes prisoner Pyrrhus’ ear. For lo, his sword,

Which was declining on the milky head

Of reverend Priam, seemed i’ th’ air to stick.

So as a painted tyrant Pyrrhus stood

And like a neutral to his will and matter,

Did nothing.

But as we often see against some storm

A silence in the heavens, the rack stand still,

The bold winds speechless, and the orb below

As hush as death, anon the dreadful thunder

Doth rend the region; so, after Pyrrhus’ pause,

Arousèd vengeance sets him new a-work,

And never did the Cyclops’ hammers fall

On Mars’s armor, forged for proof eterne,

With less remorse than Pyrrhus’ bleeding sword

Now falls on Priam.

Out, out, thou strumpet Fortune! All you gods

In general synod take away her power,

Break all the spokes and fellies from her wheel,

And bowl the round nave down the hill of heaven

As low as to the fiends!

…

But who, ah woe, had seen the moblèd queen—

Run barefoot up and down, threat’ning the flames

With bisson rheum, a clout upon that head

Where late the diadem stood, and for a robe,

About her lank and all o’erteemèd loins

A blanket, in the alarm of fear caught up—

Who this had seen, with tongue in venom steeped,

Gainst Fortune’s state would treason have

pronounced.

But if the gods themselves did see her then

When she saw Pyrrhus make malicious sport

In mincing with his sword her husband’s limbs,

The instant burst of clamor that she made

Unless things mortal move them not at all

Would have made milch the burning eyes of heaven

And passion in the gods. (2.2.477-89, 493-522, 527, 530-44)

In this speech, Pyrrhus, the raging son of Achilles, plays the role of the avenger, yet he is indistinguishable from the conventional villain of the revenge tragedy genre. And it is this conflation of villains and avengers that comes to characterize Hamlet’s own moral stance on revenge.

Shakespeare’s depiction of this iconic scene from the Trojan War places him within a longstanding English tradition of appropriating Roman political and cultural authority through the translation and adaptation of Roman myth. This practice, called translatio imperii (Latin for “translation of empire”) dates back to the early Middle Ages, as newly emerging Germanic kingdoms sought legitimacy by positioning themselves as heirs to the Romans. Rome, in this understanding, did not truly fall, but passed the mantle of authority to a worthy successor. Naturally, for the English of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, that successor was England (France and the Holy Roman Empire making similarly exclusive claims).

For medieval and Early Modern England, the myth of the Trojan War began with the Aeneid of Publis Vergilius Maro (Vergil). Vergil, of course, adapted the Trojan myth from Greek poets such as Homer, transforming it into a politically useful, legitimizing source of power for the burgeoning Roman Empire under Augustus. This translation of cultural status from the ancient Greeks and Trojans to the Romans of the first century BC, established a powerful precedent for European writers after the fall of Rome. Translatio imperii allowed the emerging autonomous states of Europe to trace their authority all the way back to Troy by way of the Romans and to justify their own dreams of imperial hegemony. Vergil’s work inspired writers to see themselves as next in the line of an elite cultural tradition, and they attached themselves to the Trojan myth to establish their own mastery as well as the cultural supremacy of their homeland

The Ricardian poets of the fourteenth century – Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, and the anonymous Gawain-poet – all attempted to translate Greco-Roman culture into English. Chaucer and Gower, specifically, engaged extensively with Trojan mythic history and attempted, with varying levels of success, to outdo their Roman predecessors. In House of Fame, Chaucer, after himself retelling a part of the Aeneid, explicitly discusses the competitive spirit that characterizes those poets who write about Troy:

And ech of these, as have I joye,

Was besy for to bere up Troye.

So hevy ther-of was the fame,

That for to bere hit was no game.

But yit I gan ful wel espye,

Betwix hem was a litil envye. (III.1471-6)

The “litil envye” that exists between these poets is what drives the continual cycle of translation and adaptation of the Troy myth and makes them “besy” (preoccupied) with putting their own stamp on the ancient tale.

Chaucer’s own attempts at Anglicizing Trojan history, which he took up in many works, especially Troilus and Criseyde, was mirrored by his contemporary, John Gower, whose Confessio Amantis retells several of the stories found in the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses and renders London a “New Troy.” The anonymous romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight begins and ends with a recitation of Troy’s fall, Aeneas’s journey to Italy, and the founding of British civilization by the Roman exile Brutus, thereby linking the poem’s primary setting of a mythic Arthurian past with the founding myths of the Romans.

The fifteenth-century saw a continuation of English translation of the Trojan myth, with the production of works like John Lydgate’s Troy Book and Thomas Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes. In the early sixteenth century, a number of vernacular translations of the Aeneid entered the English literary sphere. Gavin Douglas produced a translation in Scots, the Eneados, in 1513. By 1557, Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey, translated Books II and IV of the Aeneid into English. Although he relied on and borrowed phrases from Douglas’ work, Surrey’s translation is in many ways an assertion of his own superiority, and his use of blank verse, the first recorded instance of this poetic form in English, attempts to more closely mimic the rhythms of Vergil’s Latin. Shortly afterwards, the translations of both Douglas and Surrey were challenged by Thomas Phaer’s more comprehensive translation attempt, which rendered the first nine books of Vergil’s epic into English in 1560.

Thomas Twyne completed Phaer’s work in 1573, giving the English a translation of the entire Aeneid. By the Elizabethan Age, English writers had to contend both with a lengthy Greco-Roman tradition as well as a more recent, yet significant, English corpus of Trojan-themed literature. George Peele, who collaborated with Shakespeare on Titus Andronicus, ambitiously condensed the entire narrative of the Trojan War into a poem just shy of five hundred lines. Aside from the sheer ambitiousness of this project, Peele’s work is of interest because of several additions he makes to the Vergilian account of Troy’s fall, additions which are mirrored in Hamlet’s Player’s speech. In The Tale of Troy, written in 1589, he presents a “fierce unbridled Pyrrhus” (443) who, though bloodthirsty and cruel, has clear motivation, incited by “his fathers angry ghost” (444).

Peele greatly amplifies Pyrrhus’ avenging motive. In his article, “The Player’s Speech in Hamlet,” Arthur Johnston points out that “this aspect of Pyrrhus’ slaughter of Priam is not made explicit in Vergil or in the medieval versions of the story” (24). In fact, though Peele lingers on this scene for longer than many others, he represents Priam’s death as just another casualty in a line of revenge killings. He writes:

The mightie king of Troy,

With cruell yron this cursed Greekish boy

Rids of his life: as whilome hee had donne

With shaft envenom’d Paris, old Priam’s sonne. (450-3)

This passage does not deny Pyrrhus’ cruelty, but it does place his revenge in a wider context that makes him seem less monstrous. Peele’s novel characterization of Pyrrhus as an avenger rather than a pure villain disrupts the conventional Vergilian narrative and provided Shakespeare with a model for how to portray the character in his own work.

The task of rewriting Vergilian verse for the London stage (rather than in English poetry) was taken up by Christopher Marlowe, a friend and rival of Shakespeare, in his tragedy, Dido, Queen of Carthage. This adaptation retells the early books of the Aeneid, describing the doomed love affair of Aeneas and Dido. Of particular relevance here is Marlowe’s representation of Pyrrhus in the story that Aeneas relates to Dido, for it seems likely that Shakespeare had this version in mind when he wrote Hamlet. Marlowe’s Aeneas describes his Pyrrhus in terms more frightening even than Vergil’s:

At last came Pyrrhus, fell and full of ire,

His harness dropping blood, and on his spear

The mangled head of Priam’s youngest son. (2.1.213-15)

Pyrrhus does kill Priam’s youngest son in front of him in the Aeneid, but the mounting of that son’s head on the raging warrior’s spear is purely of Marlowe’s own imagining, an attempt to increase the violence and shock value of Vergil’s original. This addition is symptomatic of the rivalry and escalation that is an integral component of English rewritings of Troy. By amplifying the gruesomeness of Vergil’s iconic scene, Marlowe stamps the Trojan myth with his own signature and demonstrates his mastery of the classical material. A similarly horrific scene is Marlowe’s description of the frantic Hecuba who pries open Priam’s eyelids with her fingernails. This is also largely his invention. In translating the Latin of Vergil’s epic to English drama, Marlowe is transferring cultural authority from Rome to London, but he is also engaging in an equally significant transferal of cultural authority from Vergil to himself.

Having established the context of the English rewriting of Troy, I now turn to Hamlet, where Shakespeare, like Marlowe, participates in this poetic one-upmanship by creating a Roman revenge plot that is best understood through the Player’s speech, itself a rewriting of the Roman Aeneid. Early Modern revenge tragedies as a genre were greatly indebted to classical forms. As A. J. Boyle observes,

“Italian and English revenge tragedies especially seem to follow a tripartite Senecan model: the appearance of a revenge spirit (ghost or fury), the formation of an avenger, the vengeance (including the all-important revelation to the victim)” (153).

Shakespeare places the Player’s recitation of the death of Priam, the turning point of the revenge plot, in the second stage of the Senecan tragedy, at the moment when the avenger (Hamlet) is being formed. By this point, following the revenge spirit’s appearance in Act I, the play has already presented us with one image of the revenge plot. From the moment that the ghost of his father informs Hamlet of his murder and commands him to “revenge his foul and most unnatural murder!” (1.5.25), the play reveals itself to be a revenge tragedy in the Senecan tradition. The uncomplicated message that the ghost delivers –- that Claudius’ wickedness must be avenged to restore balance to the kingdom of Denmark — is soon problematized when Hamlet sets out to exact vengeance and uncovers the darker, more twisted side of revenge. We begin to see that ugly truth in the Player’s speech. The story of Pyrrhus’ bloodthirsty revenge complicates the celebration of just retribution at the opening of the plot and foreshadows the death and destruction that will follow the staging of the Murder of Gonzago.

The image of revenge presented in this speech conditions our perception of revenge in Hamlet as a whole. Shakespeare’s Pyrrhus is a bloodthirsty maniac, divorced of whatever few sympathetic traits Vergil’s Aeneas allows him. The focus of sympathy in this scene is entirely on Priam and Hecuba. They are the sole sufferers, and the avenging Pyrrhus the sole inflictor of suffering. Shakespeare consistently uses the imagery of rage and darkness to draw his vivid portrait of Pyrrhus, describing him as he “whose sable arms / Black as his purpose, did the night resemble” (2.2.449-50). The overwhelming blackness of Pyrrhus echoes the dress and demeanour of Hamlet, who, following his father’s death, wears black and exists in a state of melancholy (stemming in Renaissance thought from an abundance of black bile). Unlike Hamlet, however, Pyrrhus is not trapped in melancholic grief. He possesses the rage necessary to exact revenge. Shakespeare depicts Achilles’ son as a terrifying sample of choler and rage, describing Pyrrhus as:

roasted in wrath and fire,

And thus o’ersized with coagulate gore

With eyes like carbuncles (2.2.458-60).

The bloodiness of Pyrrhus’ vengeful quest overtakes him completely. This is manifested in his heraldic arms, so that he “is total gules, horridly tricked / With blood of fathers, mothers, daughters, sons” (2.2.454-5). In Peele’s account, Pyrrhus’ cruelty is at least explained as an act of revenge for a fallen father, but, in Shakespeare’s passage, even that small justification is excluded, so that Pyrrhus is reduced to an archetype of bloody mayhem. This unequivocally violent figure becomes the hermeneutic through which we are to read the rest of the revenge plot. Once Shakespeare has exposed the darkness of revenge in this speech, it lingers, colouring our understanding of revenge in the rest of the play.

The Pyrrhic model of revenge is characterized by the pain that it brings to innocents. Whatever his provocation (the death of his father, Achilles), Pyrrhus cannot but strike us as unjust when he inflicts suffering on Priam and Hecuba. Shakespeare emphasizes the unfairness of the fight between Pyrrhus and Priam and marks Priam as an innocent sufferer. He calls it an “unequal match” (2.2.467) and describes the doomed king as “th’ unnerved father” (2.2.470). In inviting pity for Priam he depicts the “milky head / Of reverend Priam” (2.2.474-5). Similarly, Hecuba is the subject of compassion, pitifully clothed in nothing but a blanket “about her lank and all-o’erteemed loons” (2.2.504), as she watches “Pyrrhus make malicious sport / In mincing with his sword her husband’s limbs” (2.2.509-10). The Player condemns “strumpet Fortune” for the horror she has allowed and expects any onlooker to similarly rail “’gainst Fortune’s state” (2.2.507). The gods themselves are called on to weep for the monstrous injustice of Pyrrhus’ revenge. Those who possess any level of compassion are imagined to weep; this is in sharp contrast to the heartless avenger, who possesses burning “eyes like carbuncles” (2.2.460). Shakespeare’s line that this scene “would have made milch the burning eyes of heaven” (2.2.513) serves to create a sharp distinction between the merciless avenger, whose burning eyes remain unquenched, and the rest of feeling humanity who cannot help but be moved by this scene.

Here, Shakespeare explores the moral ambiguity of his protagonist’s vengeance. In the Player’s speech, it is Priam and Hecuba who are the objects of our sympathy. But for Hamlet to be a dutiful son and avenge his father, he requires the inhuman, violent cruelty of a Pyrrhus. Arthur Johnston provides useful insight on Hamlet’s struggle, and his realization that pursuing revenge will make him an unsympathetic villain:

What is significant about the episode chosen to mirror the act that Hamlet is called to do is the reversal of emotional sympathy; the deed is one of terror, its perpetrator inhuman and brutalized. ‘Roasted in wrath and fire’ the ‘hellish Pyrrhus’ is damned. The speech is an oblique device for pointing the deed to be done and the qualities required to perform it. Sympathy lies with the victim, not the avenger. (27)

The avenger is damned, existing beyond our sympathy. He is to be pitied when he is himself the victim, as Hamlet is the victim of Claudius’s treachery, but, once he begins to take revenge, he becomes Pyrrhus, a being of pure rage. After having heard the Player’s speech, Hamlet delivers a soliloquy in which he bemoans his inability to act, his failure to avenge his father as Pyrrhus does:

For it cannot be

But I am pigeon-livered and lack gall

To make oppression bitter, or ere this

I should have fatted all the region kites

With this slave’s [Claudius’s] offal. (2.2.603-7)

And though Hamlet, even in the darkest moments of the play, never reaches the full cruelty of Pyrrhus, his vengeful actions (such as the murder of Polonius) place him further and further from our sympathy and bring him closer to that hellish ideal.

With Pyrrhus, Shakespeare asks us to look closely at the dark, muddled nature of revenge, where the distinctions between avenger and villain become hopelessly blurred. Pyrrhus’ rage stems from the death of his father, but in taking out his vengeance on the aged Priam, he moves from avenger to villain, committing atrocities that demand their own retribution. Because of the confusion of justice and revenge in the Pyrrhus episode, it is difficult to map the characters in the Player’s speech directly to the characters in Hamlet. Pyrrhus, the vengeful son of the slaughtered Achilles, is analogous to prince Hamlet, but, as the murderer of the fatherly Priam, he is also associated with the villain Claudius. Joseph Westlund discusses this confusion of characters in the Pyrrhus scene, arguing:

Hamlet would like to see himself as Pyrrhus taking revenge on Priam for the death of his father Achilles; but, on the other hand, Hamlet can also see himself as Aeneas recounting the horrible murder of his king and ‘father’ Priam. That is, the Player’s speech serves as both a rehearsal of Hamlet’s revenge on Claudius and as a retrospective view of Old Hamlet’s murder. (248)

This confused identification of murderers and avengers becomes a dominant theme in the play’s revenge plot. To succeed in avenging the death of his father, Hamlet must divorce himself from the humanity that restrains his murderous intent. The escalating madness and viciousness of the avenger brings him closer in character to the villain and demonstrates the ultimately nihilistic, self-defeating nature of revenge.

Shortly after this scene and the subsequent performance of the Murder of Gonzago, Hamlet embarks on a crash course of blood and violence. He inhabits the world of the mad avenger whose destruction far exceeds what is justified. Mistaking the concealed Polonius for the desired object of his rage, Hamlet stabs him, and expresses no visible remorse for his demise. The murder of her father launches Ophelia into a terrible madness that culminates in her suicide. From these undeserved and unexpected repercussions of Hamlet’s revenge, Laertes, Polonius’ son is himself thrust into the role of the avenger. Hamlet has moved from being the justly enraged avenger of his father to the villain who robs Laertes of father and sister. Laertes’ passionate demand for justice recalls the condemnation of Fortune and appeal to the gods in the Player’s speech. Laertes says of his father, “His means of death, his obscure burial […] Cry to be heard as ‘twere from heaven to earth” (4.1.208, 211). With Laertes’ appeal to a natural world that should be astonished at Polonius’ death, we see Shakespeare transfer the role of avenger from Hamlet to Laertes. The conflation of avenger and villain, first presented in the Pyrrhus speech, reaches its climax in the final scene where Claudius, Hamlet, and Laertes, each a villain in another’s eyes, each an avenger in their own, die at one another’s hands.

Though it has received less critical attention than the Murder of Gonzago, the Pyrrhus episode demands closer study, as the scene offers us a way to interpret the revenge plot as a whole. The moral ambiguity introduced in the Player’s speech persists long after, dominating the rest of the play’s treatment of revenge. This passage also allows us to place Shakespeare in the context of translatio imperii. By adopting the classical genre of Senecan revenge tragedy, Shakespeare is already participating in the English translation of Roman authority. And by using one of the most iconic moments of the greatest Roman epic to represent the revenge plot in miniature and to explain the play’s moral stance as a whole, Shakespeare presents a work saturated in classicism, more Senecan than Seneca, more Roman than the Romans, positioning Hamlet as a worthy rival to his contemporaries and a fitting successor to his literary predecessors.

References

Boyle, A. J. Tragic Seneca. An Essay in the Theatrical Tradition. New York: Routledge, 1997. Print.

Johnston, Arthur. “The Player’s Speech in Hamlet.” Shakespeare Quarterly 13 (1962): 21-30. Print.

Marlowe, Christopher. Dido Queen of Carthage and the Massacre at Paris. Ed. H. J. Oliver. London: Methuen, 1968. Print.

Peele, George. The Life and Minor Works of George Peele. Ed. David H. Horne. New Haven: Yale UP, 1952. Print.

Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. The First Folio (1623). Ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. New York: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2006. 173-360. Print.

Westlund, Joseph. “Ambivalence in the Player’s Speech in ‘Hamlet.’” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 18.2 (1978): 245-56. Print.