Positive emotions in early modern literature and culture

Cora Fox, Bradley J. Irish, Cassie M. Miura

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781526137159
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

What did it mean to be happy in early modern Europe? Positive emotions in early modern literature and culture includes essays that reframe historical understandings of emotional life in the Renaissance, focusing on under-studied feelings such as mirth, solidarity, and tranquillity. Methodologically diverse and interdisciplinary, these essays draw from the history of emotions, affect theory and the contemporary social and cognitive sciences to reveal rich and sustained cultural attention in the early modern period to these positive feelings. The book also highlights culturally distinct negotiations of the problematic binary between what constitutes positive and negative emotions. A comprehensive introduction and afterword open multiple paths for research into the histories of good feeling and their significances for understanding present constructions of happiness and wellbeing.

I
Rewriting discourses of pleasure

1
Happy Hamlet

Richard Strier

Hamlet is, of course, ‘the melancholy Dane’, and his play is, of course, one of the world's great tragedies. But there is a way in which emphasis on the first of these (supposed) facts can be seen to diminish some of the force of the second. Hamlet is certainly not the most painful of the ‘great’ or ‘mature’ Shakespearean tragedies—Othello and King Lear compete for that honor—but Hamlet can and, I think, should be seen as the saddest of them. Part of this sadness springs from the fact that, unlike Lear, Othello, or Macbeth, Hamlet did nothing at all to initiate the tragic situation in which he finds himself. But what intensifies this sadness, I will argue, is the sense the play gives us that there was an alternative life for Hamlet. King Lear might have had a few years of contentment (‘rest’) with Cordelia after his abdication and (initial) apportionment of the kingdom, but this was to be, at best, a muted crawling toward death.¹ Othello might, as Iago thinks, have had a happy marriage if Iago had not intervened, but modern criticism is highly doubtful of this.² It is hard to imagine the Macbeths living happily, even with children. I will argue that, by contrast, Hamlet is not melancholic by nature (or humoral unbalance); that he was happy in the period before the events that form the plot begin; and that there is every reason to suppose that such happiness would have continued, since we see the components of it. I will even try to show that some of what Yeats called the ‘gaiety’ of Hamlet continues after the ‘perfect storm’ that defines the plot of the play: the death (as it turns out, murder) of King Hamlet and the accession to the place, political and nuptial, of his brother, Hamlet's uncle.³

‘As you were when we were at Wittenberg’

To see the play in this way requires that we take Hamlet himself as capable of participating in and enjoying key aspects of both the contemplative and the active life.⁴ It means basically agreeing with Ophelia that Hamlet, before his ‘transformation’, truly possessed and happily manifested the ‘courtier's, soldier's, [and] scholar's’ best qualities.⁵ This is controversial enough in the world of criticism today—a large book on the play recently espoused exactly the opposite view⁶—but my view also entails seeing the people that Hamlet was involved with, especially those in his own generation, in a basically positive light as well, so that his implied past interactions with them (along with some of his present ones) seem positive, and the destruction of all of them profoundly sad. ‘Golden lads and girls’—or something like that—is what we must see lost.⁷ This is even more controversial. Almost no one these days has a good word for Laertes or even for Ophelia (except when she is mad), let alone for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. But I will see what can be said for all of these components of Hamlet's pre-crisis world, all of whom should have continued in the ways they were then. My focus will be on what Julia Lupton calls the play's ‘horizontal strands’ rather than its ‘awful longitudinals’.⁸

However, for reasons that are nowhere given, Lupton also speaks of the ‘grim Elsinore childhoods’ of Hamlet and Ophelia.⁹ Yet Elsinore in the late Elizabethan period was anything but grim. Shakespeare was, as far as we know, the first teller of the Hamlet story to shift its locale to Elsinore in particular, and he is insistent on the location (Elsinore is mentioned four times in the text).¹⁰ What this means is that the locale of the story was the castle of Kronborg, which, from its reconstruction in the 1570s on, was one of the grandest, newest, and most heavily armed (with cannon) of Renaissance palaces—all of which, as Gunnar Sjögren puts it, was ‘well known’ to the Elizabethans.¹¹ So Hamlet, and perhaps Ophelia, grew up in a grand and contemporary structure. We are told very little about Hamlet's early life, but we do know that he idealized his father—as either a model human or a model male (‘A was a man … I shall not see his like again’ (1.2.186–7))—and had a devoted mother (in the present, we are told that she ‘lives almost by his looks’ (4.7.12), and there is no reason to think that this was not the case in the past). The one early memory strand of Hamlet's that is reconstructed is riotously joyous. His father's court jester ‘bore [Hamlet] on his back a thousand times’, and Hamlet loved him (having kissed his lips ‘I know not how oft’), and, even as a child, appreciated his performances—his gibes, gambols, songs—and was part of a festive community in this appreciation; the jester's ‘flashes of merriment’ were wont ‘to set the table on a roar’ (5.1.179–85).

The other thing that we know about Hamlet's early life is that he had two friends who were ‘of so young days brought up with him’ and were close to him not only in age but in spirit and activity (‘neighbour'd to his youth and haviour’ (2.2.11–12)). In naming these characters, Shakespeare is, again, being absolutely historically correct and contemporary. At the coronation of Christian IV in 1596, there were no fewer than nine Guildensterns and seven Rosencrantzes among the attendant Danish aristocrats¹²—so their ethnicity and their class status is assured. And we know that Hamlet was genuinely fond of them. It is his uncle who mentions the affinities in youth and ‘haviour’, and his mother reports to the two young aristocrats that Hamlet enjoys telling stories about their shared youthful exploits—‘he hath much talk'd of you’, and she believes that there are not two men living ‘To whom he more adheres’ (2.2.19–21). Hamlet's mother and uncle appeal to the ‘gentry’ of the two youths and expect them, given their past relationship to Hamlet, to ‘draw him on to pleasures’ (2.2.22; 15). I realize that this reading requires that we take the words of Claudius and Gertrude here at face value, but I cannot see any reason not to do so. Their whole plan depends on what they say being true.

Their confidence seems justified. When Rosencrantz and Guildenstern find Hamlet, they address him quite formally as a social superior. Rosencrantz says, ‘God save you, sir’; Guildenstern addresses him both more intimately and more formally as ‘My most dear lord’. In what we now recognize as a typical gesture of (using Lupton's terms again) establishing horizontal rather than vertical social relations, Hamlet changes the register and addresses them as ‘My excellent good friends’ (2.2.221–3). Michael Neill has called attention to the complexity and problematic nature of such a gesture, as has Christopher Warley, but it seems to be something that Hamlet quite spontaneously does, and is quite committed to doing.¹³ He does the same thing when he first meets Horatio, who addresses Hamlet even more formally than Guildenstern does, with ‘Hail to your lordship’, and whose ‘your poor servant’, Hamlet changes to ‘my good friend’ (1.2.159–63). Hamlet insists, at the end of the encounter with ‘the thing’ on the battlements, that precedence be ignored—the ‘Nay’ in ‘Nay, let's go together’ only makes sense as a gesture of this sort. Hamlet seems genuinely to enjoy setting friendship above hierarchy. This can, again, be seen as a hierarchical prerogative, but even so it is significant that Hamlet chooses to exercise the prerogative in this way, and so regularly.

When Hamlet asks his ‘excellent good friends’ Rosencrantz and Guildenstern how they are doing, he playfully urges them to extend the metaphor about their location on Fortune's body, and himself turns the metaphor in a bawdy direction, which the friends are happy to adopt (2.2.225–36). It is all quite light-hearted. Hamlet makes it clear that (as we already know) the two have not, recently, been living in Denmark. In the Folio text, he turns bitter, puzzling the two by calling Denmark a prison; he banters with them about the subjectivity of feelings and about the (supposed) insubstantiality of ambition and invites them, in a gesture that is now familiar, to ‘go together’ with him (‘Shall we to th’ court’?).¹⁴ They insist on his taking precedence (‘We'll wait upon you’), and he tells them that he will not ‘sort them’ with ‘the rest of his servants’ because he is ‘most dreadfully attended’.¹⁵ I do not think that this implies that Hamlet thinks of them as truly among his servants (as Warley does). At this point in both Q2 and the Folio, Hamlet turns to them and asks, with obvious sincerity, and announcing that he is momentarily giving up being witty, ‘but in the beaten way of friendship, what make you at Elsinore’ (2.2.270).

It is tempting to see this as a turning point. At the equivalent moment in relation to Horatio, Horatio makes the joke about ‘a truant disposition’ and then answers directly (‘I came to see your father's funeral’ (1.2.176)). Rosencrantz, on the other hand, tells what we know to be a bald-faced lie. Hamlet does not believe that the two turned up just to visit him, for ‘no other occasion’. But he seems willing to give them a chance to admit what he guesses, correctly, to be the true situation (‘Were you not sent for?’ (2.2.274)). I think that he really wants them to ‘deal justly’ with him. He pressures them by reference to their history, which he presents very positively: ‘by the rights of our fellowship, by the consonancy of our youth, by the obligation of our ever-preserved love’ (2.2.284–6). Again, I think that he really wants them to come through. With some hesitancy, and after another appeal to love (‘if you love me’), they finally do. He then gives them his set humanist and anti-humanist speech about ‘the paragon of animals’ who is also ‘the quintessence of dust’ (2.2.303–8). He is playing with them—pretending...