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“I Know My Course”: Hamlet's Confidence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Harold Skulsky
Harold Skulsky*
Affiliation:
Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts
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Abstract

At the outset, Hamlet remarks on the futility of attempting to guess at his state of mind by appeal to the notatio, or standard behavioral model, favored by the science of physiognomy. Although the possibility of knowing other minds is provided for by Renaissance theory of natural law and by certain tenets of Neoplatonism, Hamlet's initial skepticism is in full accord with the weight of received opinion—e.g., with folk wisdom, orthodox theological authority, and traditional reservations about friendship and selfknowledge. The deceptiveness of notatio, moreover, is illustrated in the play by the hubris of Polonius' art of espionage and by the bitter testimony of Claudius to his success as a dissembler. In practice, however, both Claudius and Hamlet rely with no less confidence than Polonius on the possibility of reading the inner by the outer man. Though Hamlet is sustained in this confidence by a hopeful theory of histrionic performance, a scholar's habits of observation, a flair for satirical portraiture, and even a few trivial successes, the treachery of notatio is ominously revealed, along with the Polonian arrogance of relying on it, in his encounter with Gertrude, and especially in his conception of how the “Mousetrap” can be sprung.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 89 , Issue 3 , May 1974 , pp. 477 - 486
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1974

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References

Note 1 in page 485 Cf. De Ratione Dicendi ad Herennium iv.63–65: “No-tatio est, cum alicuius natura certis describitur signis quae sicuti notae naturae sunt attributa. . . . Huiusmodi nota-tiones quae describunt quod consentaneum sit cuiusque naturae vehementer habent magnam delectationem; totam enim naturam cuiuspiam ponunt ante oculos . . . denique cuiusvis studium protrahi potest in medium tali notatione.” Quoted from the edition of Friedrich Marx and Winfried Trillitsch (Leipzig: Teubner, 1964). My source for all quotations from Shakespeare is the New Cambridge Edition, The Complete Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare, ed. William Allan Neilson and Charles Jarvis Hill (Cambridge, Mass.: Houghton, 1942).

Note 2 in page 485 As You Like It iii.ii.387–403. The point of Rosalind's mockery is that there are no unequivocal “marks” (notae) of lovesickness.

Note 3 in page 485 Cf. Diogenes Laertius ix.72; Cicero, Academica, i.44, ii.32.

Note 4 in page 485 The Complete Poems of Sir John Davies, ed. A. B Grosart (London: Chatto & Windus, 1876), i, 19.

Note 5 in page 485 E/egantiarum e Plauto et Terentio Libri Duo, Publilii Syri Sententiae, ed. Erasmus and Fabricius (1581), Sent. 169.

Note 6 in page 485 Cf. iv.vii. 109–10.

Note 7 in page 485 Elegantiarum, Sent. 327; cf. Sent. 311.

Note 8 in page 485 See Tommaso Campanella, La cittá del sole e poésie, ed. Adriano Seroni (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1962), p. 64: “II mondo è un animal grande e perfetto. … Se ignoriamo il suo amor e '1 suo intelletto, / né il verme del mio ventre s'assottiglia / A saper me.”

Note 8 in page 485 See Plotini Enneades cum Marsilii Ficini Interpretatione, ed. Friedrich Creuzer and Georg Heinrich Moser (Paris: Didot, 1855), which supplies Ficino's scholia as well as his translation. For the cosmic sisterhood, see Ennead iv.iii.7, 8, and esp. 6.

Note 10 in page 485 See Ficino's scholia at iv.iv.6, 16; vi.iv.12.

Note 11 in page 486 Scholium at iv.iv.4.

Note 12 in page 486 Bartas His Divine Weekes and Words, trans. Joshua Silvester (1605), p. 280–81. Cf. Plotinus, Ficino's scholium at iv.iv.12 (“plenitudine [rationum seminalium] res futuras anticipat in praesentibus”), 33, 39.

Note 13 in page 486 See The Sermons of John Donne, ed'. Evelyn M. Simpson and George R. Potter (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1962), x, 82–83. See also Letters to Several! Personages by John Donne, ed. Charles Merrill, Jr. (New York: Sturgis & Walton, 1910), p. 94. For original sources see Aquinas, STh I, q. 57, a. 4 and Duns Scotus, Quaestiones in Libros, Sententiarum, II, distinctio ix, q. 2, ad 1 ; iv, dist. x, q. 8, ad 3. It is, of course, highly unlikely that Shakespeare was directly acquainted with the literature of this controversy. However, the prestige and currency of lore about angels during his lifetime are notorious. On the general problem, cf. Bembo's celebrated affirmation in Castiglione's Courtier iv.lvii: “I fisionomi al volto conoscono spesso i costumi e talvolta i pensieri degli uomini.” But it is a mistake to appraise it without reference to the same speaker's bitter acknowledgment in ii.xxix: “negli animi nostri sono tante latebre e tanti recessi, che impossibil è che prudenza umana possa conoscer quelle simulazioni, che dentro nascose vi sono.” To be sure, Erasmus, the apostle of humanism, draws a happy moral from the parallel between the method of the natural theologian and that of the physiognomist: “EV. Credisne Deum esse? FA. Maxime. EV. At nihil minus videri potest quam Deus. FA. Videtur in rebus conditis. EV. Idem videtur animus ex actione” (Erasmi Colloquia, ed. Cornelius Schrevel, Amsterdam: Blauw, 1693, p. 399). But St. Paul, an apostle of somewhat higher standing, draws from the same parallel a moral that is both authoritative and considerably less happy (i Cor.ii.ll).

Note 14 in page 486 Ethica Nicomachea 1170b 5–12; cf. 1157–30-31, 1157b 4 -5.

Note 15 in page 486 Ethica Nicomachea 1155b 26–27, 1165b 10–11; Cicero, Laelius, 92.

Note 16 in page 486 Complete Poems, p. 26. What normally passes for self-knowledge in the rational soul is a humble inference from the nature of its own processes ; as with other things not directly observable, “the work the touchstone of the nature is” (Complete Poems, p. 35). Serious people seek the friendship of the judicious, Aristotle tells us (Eth. Nic. 1159a 22–23), precisely to confirm their opinion of themselves : “They are gratified because they put their trust in the judgment of those who pronounce them good.”

Note 17 in page 486 Ars Amatoria, 1. 618, Remédia Amoris, 11. 497–98.

Note 18 in page 486 Patrologia Latina xxvi.363 (cf. Psalms xxiv). Harvey typically associates Jerome with Menander as authorities for the “Ulyssean” insight that a lie is preferable to a destructive truth. See Gabriel Harvey's Marginalia, ed. G. C. Moore Smith (Stratford-upon-Avon: Shakespeare Head Press, 1913), pp. 118–19. See also Erasmus, Colloquia, p. 473.

Note 19 in page 486 Henry Vii.iv.38 .

Note 20 in page 486 Sir John Harington's Translation of Orlando Furioso, ed. Graham Hough (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1962), p. 39.

Note 21 in page 486 Plutarch, Moralia, trans. Philemon Holland (London: Dent, 1911), p. 47.

Note 22 in page 486 Harry Levin, The Question of Hamlet (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1959), p. 54.