Setting the Time Right in Shakespeare’s
Denmark
R. L. P. Jackson
HAMLET’S COUPLET at the end of Act I, scene iii, of the Folio Hamlet has
become so familiar that it is easy to neglect the importance of the precise
medical metaphor it contains:
The time is out of ioynt: Oh cursed spight
That euer I was borne to set it right.
(I. iii. 85–6)1
What is implied by ‘out of ioynt’ and ‘set it right’ is a particular broken
limb of the body – an arm or, more probably, a leg – and, as the surgeon
appointed to ‘set’ that limb ‘right’, Hamlet has an unenviable task. It is
worth asking, then, in just what sense, as an integral part of the body politic, the ‘time’ in Hamlet might be said to be ‘out of joint’ and what might
be involved in setting it right.
The split in the Catholic Church as a consequence of the Reformation
represents perhaps the most obvious sense in which the time imagined in
Hamlet could be seen as being out of joint. Older, inherited ways of thinking and feeling nevertheless persisted. As long ago as 1973 Peter Millward,
1
Quotations are from the Norton Facsimile Edition of the First Folio, prepared
by Charlton Hinman, 2nd edn. (New York 1996). I have attempted to reproduce this text as far as possible because, among other things, modern-spelling
versions of the plays normalise punctuation and minimise the extent to which
Shakespeare would appear to use older spellings on some occasions and more
modern ones on others. These versions consequently obscure the continuities as
well as the differences between medieval English and early modern English,
along with the continuities and differences in ‘sensibility’ which they reflect and
which it is the purpose of this article to explore. Where the Folio text seems
clearly or arguably to be in error I have indicated as much by the use of square
brackets along with a footnote.
doi:10.1093/camqtly/bfw020
C The Author, 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Cambridge Quarterly.
V
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THE CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY
in Shakespeare’s Religious Background, pointed to some of the, often veiled,
ways in which Shakespeare’s plays might be seen as implicated in the religious divisions inherited from the Reformation. And more recent
Reformation historians such as Eamon Duffy, in, for instance, The Stripping
of the Altars and The Voices of Morebath,2 have provided plenty of evidence for
the persistence of older local habits of belief, feeling, and allegiance long
after their official proscription in England. Shakespeare himself was born
in 1564, and in October of the year in which, in November, he married
Anne Hathaway, time itself was subjected to a momentous realignment.
The various correspondences and discrepancies between the biblical and
lunar calendar used in calculating Easter, the vernal equinox and winter
solstice, 25 December as the traditional date of the birth of Christ, the presumed date of the Annunciation, the beginning of the New Year and the
beginning of the fiscal year, and the true motions of the sun and moon
were the subject of constant debate within the Church. Christianity had to
contend, first, with the effect of the Julian calendar and then, finally, the
Gregorian calendar introduced by Pope Gregory and hence immediately
adopted by the Papal States (with the Catholic Spanish and Portuguese
colonies soon following suit), but not adopted by Protestant countries –
among which were, of course, both England and Denmark – till a considerable time later (though Scotland adopted 1 January as the start of the
New Year as early as 1600, thereby curtailing 1599). Since 1582, the year
in which the Gregorian calendar was introduced by Rome, contained a
leap of some ten days between Thursday, 4 October and Friday, 15
October, and since in some cases the Gregorian calendar was also instituted retrospectively, time was indeed ‘out of joint’ for a lengthy period,
with Protestant time in England differing from Catholic time in western
Europe for some 150 years.3
In such a context Hamlet’s protest against having been chosen as the
surgeon obliged to ‘set right’ the ‘out of joint’ time has a very particular
resonance: significantly, the depiction of time in the play as a whole shifts
constantly between the precisely and meticulously delineated and the
vaguely suggestive, metaphorical and indeterminate. Although in the
graveyard scene, for instance, Shakespeare seems clearly to be identifying
Hamlet as being 30 years old at the time of the play’s action, this seeming
precision is made problematic by the larger, more metaphorically resonant
2
3
Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c.1400–
c.1580 (New Haven 1992); The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an
English Village (New Haven 2001).
Most of the information in this paragraph is derived from Bonnie Blackburn
and Leofranc Holford-Strevens, The Oxford Companion to the Year (Oxford 1999).
SETTING THE TIME RIGHT
325
coincidence between the death of old Fortinbras and the birth of young
Hamlet, a coincidence which, along with the coincidence of its being that
‘very day’ that the gravedigger himself began his occupation, fortuitously
assists him in recollecting the exact day, ‘of all the dayes i’th’ yeare’, of
Hamlet’s birth. Like other characters in the play the gravedigger functions
both as a very particular character with a very particular occupation,
rooted in a contemporary reality of ‘pocky Coarses’ (II. ii. 3334–8, 3355),
and a conduit for the larger concerns of the play with time, change, and
death within the framework of more eternal realities. And from this more
general perspective the coincidence between the date of old Fortinbras’s
death, the date of Hamlet’s birth, and the date of the gravedigger’s first
employment operates as a way of placing these events within the larger ongoing cycle of life and death, with the gravedigger’s unsentimental familiarity with death aligning him with similarly rich voices of a traditional
wisdom elsewhere in Shakespeare’s work – the old Shepherd, for instance,
in The Winter’s Tale who tells his son that ‘Thou met’st with things dying, I
with things new-borne’ (III. iii. 1553–4).
‘The Murder of Gonzago’ which, in Act II, Hamlet instructs the players
to prepare in his attempt to ‘catch the conscience of the King’, and into
which he interpolates the speech which he himself has written, clearly belongs to an older, cruder, and less self-conscious theatrical and moral world
than the one implicit in Hamlet as a whole. Its comically prolonged and repetitive minor variations on a single simple idea, its conventionally platitudinous and somnolent determinism (‘Our Willes and Fates do so
contrary run, j That our Deuices still are ouerthrowne, j Our thoughts are
ours, their ends none of our owne’; II. ii. 2079–81), its predictable syntactical inversions and parallel clauses and the equally predictable thud of the
rhyming couplets: all these features, exaggerated as they are, suggest that
this ‘play within a play’ is being offered in something like a spirit of conscious parody. Hamlet’s description of the play after its performance as a
‘Comedie’ – which, followed as it soon is by his use of the word ‘History’,
picks up on Polonius’s commendation of Seneca and Plautus as being ‘the
onely men’ for ‘the law of Writ, and the Liberty’, capable of every imaginable kind of literary genre, from unadulterated ‘Tragedie, Comedie,
Historie’, or ‘Pastorall’ to the hybrid ‘Tragicall-Comicall-HistoricallPastorall’ – certainly seems much closer to the mark than if he had called it
a ‘Tragedy’ (II. ii. 2165, 1445–50).
But the simpler, more melodramatic world to which ‘The Murder of
Gonzago’ harks back, like that evoked in the ‘wrath and fire’ and ‘coagulate gore’ of ‘Aeneas’s Tale to Dido’ (II. ii. 1503–4) which so affects him
earlier as an escape from the demands of his own more questioning and
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modern ‘conscience’, exercises its emotional hold on Hamlet – both as a
‘player’ himself and as a man – even as it arouses his critical disdain. And
it is, I would suggest, of especially pointed relevance to Hamlet’s and the
play’s need to set the time right:
King. Full thirtie times hath Phoebus Cart gon round,
Neptunes salt Wash, and Tellus Orbed ground:
And thirtie dozen Moones with borrowed sheene,
About the World haue times twelue thirties beene,
Since loue our hearts, and Hymen did our hands
Vnite comutuall, in most sacred Bands.
Bap. So many iournies may the Sunne and Moone
Make vs againe count o’re, ere loue be done.
(II. ii. 2024–31)
This might seem simply another case of the general drift at this point towards wasting night, day, and time, inviting as it does a more emphatic
repetition of Polonius’s justifiable comment on the Pyrrhus speech declaimed by one of the players earlier: ‘This is too long’. (Indeed, something
pretty much like this judgement is supplied by Baptista herself as she cuts
the King short in his attempt to embark on yet another interminable set of
couplets: ‘Oh confound the rest’ (II. ii. 2045).) But in the light of the momentous changes brought about by the replacement of the lunar and biblical calendar by the Julian and then Gregorian calendars, this selfconsciously archaic insistence on the revolutions of the sun and moon
around ‘Neptunes salt Wash, and Tellus Orbed ground’ and on measuring
time by the old pre-Julian calendar which divided the year up into twelve
months of thirty days (with the resulting 360 days nicely corresponding
with the 360 degrees of a circle) is unlikely to be accidental. ‘Is this a
Prologue, or the Poesie of a Ring?’ asks Hamlet impatiently after listening
to the lines
For vs, and for our Tragedie,
Heere stooping to your Clemencie:
We begge your hearing Patientlie.
(II. ii. 2017–19)
But Hamlet’s interjection arguably itself glances fondly at an earlier
Shakespearian scene where Theseus, Hippolita, and others comment
amusedly from the sidelines on the clumsy but touchingly innocent efforts
of ‘the mechanicals’ to introduce and perform their version of ‘Pyramus
SETTING THE TIME RIGHT
327
and Thisbe’ in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The ‘Ring’ to which Hamlet alludes might, indeed, be a ring of fairies,4 just as the ‘Banke of Flowers’
upon which the King lies down to sleep in the dumb show which precedes
‘The Murder of Gonzago’ evokes that earlier bank where the wild thyme
grows. It is not only Hamlet, but Shakespeare himself who seems here to
be drawn backwards in time. The travelling players who perform the extracts from both ‘The Murder of Gonzago’ and ‘Aeneas’s Tale to Dido’
would be equally at home performing the stock commedia dell’arte characters
of the medieval plays which probably constituted Shakespeare’s own first
encounters with the stage as a boy.5 And their declamatory style, extravagant gestures, and ‘damnable faces’ penetrate Hamlet’s critical defences
even as he enjoins them to ‘speak the speech trippingly on the tongue’ and
eschew ‘inexplicable dumbe shewes’ (II. ii. 1849–62). In Senecan melodrama of the vintage of ‘Aeneas’s Tale to Dido’, a fictional Pyrrhus’s momentary hesitation in attacking Priam, unlike Hamlet’s prolonged and
conscience-ridden modern ‘delay’, soon gives way to ‘A rowsed
Vengeance’ continuous with ‘the dreadful Thunder’ of a natural world
which mimics it and which in turn it manifests.
This intermingling of past and present, the remembered and the contemporary, along with the movement from temporal precision to temporal
vagueness and back again, is evident from the very beginning of the play.
The First Folio version of the first scene of Hamlet is headed Actus Primus
Scoena Prima. This older spelling of Scena as Scoena is not uncommon
and is used in an apparently fairly arbitrary fashion throughout the Folio
texts of Shakespeare’s plays: its deployment here may well be merely accidental. (It occurs, among other places, in the first scenes of both Macbeth
and King Lear.) But in Hamlet the spelling nevertheless does not appear in a
heading at any other point in the play, though it does recur on three occasions during the scenes with the players.6 And in this play at least the hint
of something more ancient which arguably attaches to this medieval Latin
spelling is strengthened by the introduction of the two sentinels, Francisco
and Barnardo, as ‘Centinels’ rather than sentinels. This reinforces the possible suggestion present in Marcellus’s ancient Roman name that we are to
think of Francisco, Barnardo, and Marcellus as something like Roman centurions as much as modern Danish sentinels, or at least as belonging in
something closer to an older ‘Roman’ (implying, I would suggest, Roman
Catholic as much as specifically Roman) than a strictly contemporary
4
5
6
Cf. Hecat in Macbeth: ‘And now about the Cauldron sing j Like Elues and
Fairies in a Ring’ (IV. i. 1569–70).
See Park Honan’s speculative Shakespeare: A Life (Oxford 2012).
At II. ii. 1484, 1630, and 1927.
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world. And Horatio’s ancient namesake (Horatio is, after all, ‘more an
Antike Roman then a Dane’, II. ii. 3826)7 is, of course, famous for his legendary loyalty to Rome.
From the very beginning of the play, then, time is arguably being represented in at least two different but related ways. One of these versions of
time is what we might call real, particularised or present time. The other
might be called generalised, remembered or experienced past time: a reliving or recapitulation of either the relatively remote or the more immediate
past, personal or historical (and the two are, of course, necessarily interrelated). What results in this second version of time is the simplification into
generalised and idealised images of the often bewildering complexities of
personal and historical experience, a conflation which gives an effect of the
timeless and eternal as much as the time-bound. And this second way of
imagining time is closely associated, too, with what might be called the ‘regressive’ experience which is very much at the centre of Hamlet, a regression into the past associated with the effect of the play’s major precipitating
events – Hamlet’s father’s death and his mother’s remarriage to his uncle –
upon the central character. Wordsworth’s is only one of the more familiar
of many significant testimonies to the creative force of memory, along with
its associated tricks, as a central precipitating force of art (as it is, too, of religion: ‘do this in the remembrance of me’).8 And in Hamlet the operations
and effects of memory belong not only to Hamlet himself but also both to
those associated with him and beyond them, arguably, to the creator of the
whole play, to whom Hamlet has traditionally been thought to be especially close.
‘Real time’ is complicated by the possible correspondences between this
version of time and what one might distinguish as ‘performance time’,
which pertains to the time at and during which a play is staged. (The film
High Noon, in which ‘film time’, as represented by a clock, mirrors actual
time, is, of course, well known for the kind of correspondence I am speaking of.) But I shall leave that issue relatively unexamined, simply noting
that Horatio’s ‘Goodnight sweet Prince’ certainly offers food for thought
on this particular aspect of the general subject I am discussing, given that
the duel between Hamlet and Laertes which culminates in the end of the
play both takes place during an imagined daytime and, in the open-air
Globe at any rate, would necessarily have done so in reality.
The concern of the opening scene – along with the later scene in which
the Ghost appears to Hamlet for the first time – with establishing the
7
8
The names Barnardo and Francisco are conceivably chosen because of their associations with St Bernard and St Francis.
Luke 22: 19. All biblical quotations are from the Geneva Bible.
SETTING THE TIME RIGHT
329
precise moment when the ‘Illusion’, as Horatio calls it, materialises has
often been remarked upon in commentary on the play. But though
Horatio is adamant that, when he encounters it at least, the Ghost stays no
longer than ‘one with moderate hast might tell a hundred’, Barnardo and
Marcellus (‘All’ in the Folio’s ascription) are equally insistent that when
they saw it, it stayed ‘Longer, longer’. This seems to suggest either that
their credulity in such matters exceeds that of Horatio or that their method
of counting time differs from his, both of which interpretations are, of
course, consistent with Horatio’s being, unlike his two companions of the
watch, a ‘scholler’ who has been to Wittenberg, even if he does have, significantly, a ‘truant disposition’ in relation to that particular university (I.
ii. 435–7).9
As Barnardo sees it in the opening scene, on the third occasion of its appearance (the first two occasions being reported second-hand rather than
witnessed by the audience), the Ghost ‘stalkes away’ (I. i. 64); and ‘stalking’
seems itself a strangely primitive and inappropriate form of motion for a
Ghost in arms (Marcellus notes its ‘Martiall stalke’ (I. i. 82), the two words
pulling in opposite directions emotionally). In coming from a Purgatory
abandoned by the Protestant and Reformed churches some considerable
time before the actual writing of the play, the Ghost seems clearly designed
to be an older, Catholic ghost. But the prey it is stalking is, of course, the
Wittenberg-educated Hamlet, to whom it is most directly and personally
related; and it is presumably prepared to speak at length to him alone both
because it is his father’s ghost and has private as well as public information
to impart and because of Hamlet’s greater facility with ‘words’ and greater
intellectual sophistication.
‘The Bell then beating one’ says Barnardo, when giving an account of
what is, it would seem, the Ghost’s second appearance to Marcellus and
himself, an account which seems almost to precipitate its third appearance:
Last night of all,
When yond same Starre that’s Westward from the Pole
Had made his course t’illume that part of Heauen
Where now it burnes, Marcellus and my selfe,
The Bell then beating one.
Enter the Ghost
(I. i. 46–50)
9
The OED records the ME use of ‘a hundred’ to mean either an indefinite ‘large
number’ or ‘a definite number more than five score’. It would seem very possible, too, given the concern with ways of measuring time and space and the
movement from the medieval to the modern that I am attempting to identify,
that the older meaning of ‘a hundred’ as a subdivision of a county or shire is
sounding in the background here.
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‘Last night of all’ seems an unnecessarily pedantic way of distinguishing
last night from the night before last (on which the Ghost also appeared to
Marcellus and Barnardo) particularly since it is immediately followed by a
further distinguishing temporal clause which insists, very meticulously, on
the astrological and locational identity of the night on which Barnardo,
Marcellus, and Horatio are all watching out for the Ghost (‘now’) with the
particular ‘last night’ in question (‘then’). ‘Last night of all’ has an apocalyptic feel to it suggestive, almost, of something like doomsday. And the
lines as a whole, in their sharp focus on the particular unchanged position
(‘that part of Heauen’) of ‘yond same Starre’, seem to dwell wonderingly
on the continuity between before and after, ‘last night’ and ‘now’, even as
‘of all’ hints at some kind of cataclysmic shift in time.10
It is possible – given that Barnardo is interrupted by the appearance of
the Ghost – that ‘beating one’ is meant to refer to the bell’s beating the first
stroke of midnight. In which case the Ghost’s reported appearance at this
particular moment on this occasion is temporally consistent with the two
subsequent midnight appearances to which we ourselves are privy in the
first act of the play. But if ‘beating one’ is taken, rather – and this seems
the more likely meaning – as meaning beating one o’clock, then the apparent temporal discrepancy between last night’s appearance and the Ghost’s
subsequent appearances is less clear-cut if we imagine the last night in
question as evoking a whole previous world of ‘then’ in which time was
measured less accurately than it is measured ‘now’ – in the play’s contemporary present.
The third occasion on which the Ghost appears is the occasion which is
represented in the play’s opening scene, the occasion on which Horatio
sees it for the first time. The time on this occasion is once again precisely
delineated, and delineated, I take it, as being marginally earlier than the
next occasion when Hamlet himself sees it for the first time. ‘You come
most carefully vpon your houre’ says Francisco to Barnardo, who replies
‘Tis now strook twelue’ (I. i. 10–11). This seems designed to suggest that
the bell has only just stopped beating twelve o’clock. And if we take ‘the
bell then beating one’ to mean that, on the previous occasion, the bell is
beating one o’clock rather than beating the first stroke of midnight, the
present participle ‘beating’ as opposed to the past participle ‘strook’ seems
effectively to differentiate the continuous action of a past time from the
completed action of the current time.
The next occasion of the Ghost’s appearance is the occasion when
Hamlet, Marcellus, and Horatio all see the Ghost and, a little later still, it
10
The particular star in question has been identified as Capella. See Harold
Jenkins’s New Arden edition of Hamlet (London 1982) p. 167.
SETTING THE TIME RIGHT
331
speaks to Hamlet alone. Once again, great care is taken to establish the
time, with Hamlet pointedly asking the time of Horatio, who thinks that ‘it
lacks of twelve’ but is corrected by Marcellus who, in telling him that ‘it is
strooke’ already, seems now to be telling us that the time is marginally later
still. But Horatio’s conclusion on the basis of Marcellus’s information –
that in that case it ‘drawes neere the season, j Wherein the Spirit held his
wont to walke’– is very much at odds in its apparent temporal looseness
with the precision of what has preceded it (I. iii. 606–10). ‘Held his wont’ is
especially strange, suggesting as it does a personalised ‘walking’ (‘his’)
which once used to but no longer does happen. ‘Season’, though not capitalised in Horatio’s speech and therefore presumably able to be taken as a
less specific synonym for a particular ‘hour’ rather than a time of year, is
nevertheless the same word Marcellus has used in the previous Ghost
scene. Responding as they do to the Ghost’s having behaved appropriately
and ‘faded on the crowing of the Cocke’, Marcellus’s lines express an even
more potently wistful attraction to an immemorial and timeless world of
‘story’ in which spirits do or don’t walk, fairies do or don’t talk, and witches
do or don’t charm according to their temporal connection to the Christian
calendar (with the cock that crowed on the morning of the night during
which Peter fulfilled Christ’s prophecy by denying him three times before
dawn an implicit presence behind the scenes):
Some sayes, that euer ’gainst that Season comes
Wherein our Saviours Birth is celebrate[d]
The Bird of Dawning singeth all night long:
And then (they say) no Spirit can walke abroad,
The nights are wholsome, then no Planets strike
No Faiery talkes, nor Witch hath power to Charme:
So hallow’d, and so gracious is the time.
(I. i. 157–63)11
This is not too far distant from the world of talking ‘fairies’ celebrated with
such affectionate good humour in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, though in
Hamlet, presumably, it is more like midwinter than midsummer and ‘hallow’d’ and ‘gracious’ belong to the particular, more ominously hallucinatory, atmosphere of the beginning of the later play. Horatio’s as it were
antiphonal response on this third occasion of the Ghost’s appearance to
Marcellus’s evocation of a distant past (‘then’ is repeated twice as if to emphasise and lament the disappearance of such a time) is equally redolent of
11
The Folio and most editors print ‘celebrated’ but the metrical stress requires
‘celebrate’.
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an older Shakespearian verse as much as the older religious and pagan
world with which it is closely connected. T. S. Eliot rightly identifies the
‘versification’ here (as opposed to elsewhere in the play) as being ‘of the
Shakespeare of Romeo and Juliet’.12 And indeed Horatio’s lines are not far
away from the verse in which Romeo hails the coming of the dawn after
his and Juliet’s wedding night:
So haue I heard, and do in part beleeue it.
But looke, the Morne in Russet mantle clad,
Walkes o’re the dew of yon high Easterne Hill.
(I. i. 164–6)13
Horatio might believe Marcellus’s story only ‘in part’ – the part that
speaks of the ‘Season’ of ‘our Saviours Birth’ perhaps – but a little earlier
in the scene he himself, Wittenbergian sceptic though he might seem to be
(‘Tush, tush, ’twill not appeare’), had evoked the same simpler, personified
world of cause and effect, correspondence between the natural, the manmade and the supernatural (the season of ‘our Saviours Birth’ allows ‘the
Morne’ to walk but forbids ‘Spirits’ from doing so), to which Marcellus
appeals:
Barn. It was about to speake, when the Cocke crew.
Hor. And then it started, like a guilty thing
Vpon a fearfull Summons. I haue heard,
The Cocke that is the Trumpet to the day,
Doth with his lofty and shrill-sounding Throate
Awake the God of Day: and at his warning,
Whether in Sea, or Fire, in Earth, or Ayre,
Th’extrauagant, and erring Spirit, hyes
To his Confine. And of the truth herein,
This present Obiect made probation.
(I. i. 146–55)
‘Before my God, I might not this beleeue j Without the sensible and true
auouch j Of mine owne eyes’, Horatio has said a little earlier (I. i. 71–3).
But the eyes, along with the other senses, are not necessarily foolproof.
‘Probation’ and ‘truth’ are certainly much simpler concepts for Horatio at
this point in the play than they are for Hamlet later, concerned as he is
12
13
T. S. Eliot, ‘Hamlet’, in Selected Essays (London 1972) p. 143.
Cf. Romeo and Juliet I. i. 2041–2: ‘Nights Candles are burnt out, and Iocond day
j Stands tipto on the mistie Mountaines tops’.
SETTING THE TIME RIGHT
333
with verifying for himself what the Ghost has told him: Horatio might be,
as Marcellus deferentially calls him, ‘a Scholler’, but his learning is of little
consequence when confronted by something, beyond the reach of ‘philosophy’, which affects an earlier, more fundamental and less conscious self.
And it is all of a piece that we have clearly moved from the almost ‘scientific’ accuracy with which time has been ‘set’ at the beginning of the scene
to the story-book indeterminacy of a legendary world (Horatio’s ‘I haue
heard’ echoing Marcellus’s ‘they say’) continuous with the astrologically
determined universe of the elderly Gloucester in the second scene of King
Lear. In such a world an accelerated ‘God of Day’, summoned by the
equally premature appearance of ‘the Cocke that is the Trumpet to the
day’, sees the Ghost return to its ‘Confine’ despite its having been on stage
for only a brief period immediately after midnight and despite the ‘bitter
cold’ suggesting the long nights of a Danish winter. And this movement between temporal exactitude and temporal indeterminacy culminates in the
curious blurring of the line between present and future tenses produced by
the Latinate placement of ‘this morning’ and ‘conueniently’ in Marcellus’s
remark about Hamlet’s current location with which the opening scene
concludes:
I this morning know
Where we shall finde him most conueniently.
(I. i. 173–4)
This countervailing non-historicist sense of time which runs through
the opening scene, along with both the simpler natural and moral world
which is inseparable from it (mirrored by a poetry in which ‘the Morne’
is imagined as walking ‘o’re the dew’) and the suggestion of something
like hearsay as possessing in this context the status of historical evidence, is implicit in Horatio’s answer earlier in the scene to Marcellus’s
extended question (which carries a sense of implicit reproach as to the
disruptive nature of the sabbatical activities it outlines). It is implicit,
too, in the details of the question itself, with its personification of
‘Night’ as ‘ioynt-Labourer’ with day and its sense of the natural order’s
having been overturned by virtue of the ‘Night’, as well as the ‘Shipwrights’, having been made to perform tasks which are the proper province of ‘the day’. Marcellus asks
Why this same strict and most obseruant Watch,
So nightly toyles the subiect of the Land
And why such dayly Cast of Brazon Cannon
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And Forraigne Mart for Implements of warre:
Why such impresse of Ship-wrights, whose sore Taske
Do’s not diuide the Sunday from the weeke,
What might be toward, that this sweaty hast
Doth make the Night ioynt-Labourer with the day:
Who is’t that can informe me?
(I. i. 87–95)
Horatio volunteers himself as the informant. But here, too, he significantly
prefaces his report with the cautionary qualification ‘At least the whisper
goes so’:
Our last King
Whose Image euen but now appear’d to vs,
Was (as you know) by Fortinbras of Norway,
(Thereto prick’d on by a most emulate Pride)
Dar’d to the Combate. In which, our Valiant Hamlet,
(For so this side of our knowne world esteem’d him)
Did slay this Fortinbras . . .
(I. i. 97–103)
Horatio proceeds to spell out in some detail the terms of the ‘Seal’d
Compact, j Well ratified by Law, and Heraldrie,’ whereby this particular
Fortinbras ‘Did forfeite (with his life) all those his Lands j Which he stood
seiz’d on, to the Conqueror’. Having summarised the ‘background’ to
what is currently occurring, Horatio proceeds to particularise the current
hostile military activities of the dead Fortinbras’s son, ‘young Fortinbras’, to
which the preparations Marcellus asks about are seen as a response.
Fortinbras’s military threat is implicitly interpreted as a reprisal for the perceived humiliation of his father. In other words, this opening scene’s comparatively primitive sense of the properties and behaviour of ghosts is
continuous with its mediaeval conception of the rules of honourable handto-hand ‘Combate’. And the capitalisation of generalised moral attributes
in Horatio’s speech (‘Valiant’ and ‘Pride’) reinforces this sense of an older
and simpler world. It is something like the world of the sagas – in which
the Hamlet story evidently originated – which is conjured up, with straightforward and simplified moral oppositions between the Danish ‘our Valiant
Hamlet’ on the one hand and his Norwegian opponent, ‘prick’d on by a
most emulate Pride’, on the other. Indeed, Horatio has already recalled
the world of the sagas in his comment on the relation between what he
SETTING THE TIME RIGHT
335
later calls the ‘Image’ of the Ghost and the ‘sledded Pollax’ which, when
alive, Hamlet’s father the King ‘smot’ on ‘the Ice’:
Such was the very Armour he had on,
When [he] th’Ambitious Norwey combatted:
So frown’d he once, when in an angry parle
He smot the sledded Pollax on the Ice.
(I. i. 76–9)14
Editorial attempts to determine whether or not two separate occasions are
being alluded to here are, I would argue, beside the point. The subtly different
structure of the two parallel two-line clauses – one of which suspends the verb
till the end and places the object first and the other of which delivers both the
temporal ‘when’ and the verb itself before the object and its adverbial locative
phrase – itself enacts an appropriate blurring of the line between distinction
and conflation. ‘Once’ in this context means both ‘on one particular occasion’
and ‘once upon a time’. And the occasion on which old Hamlet ‘combatted’
‘th’Ambitious Norwey’ might have been that same occasion or it might not.
Historical precision is gestured at only to be simultaneously undermined.
Possibly second-hand history is supplemented by the seeming eyewitness testimony of Horatio, who has, it would seem, been present at the ‘combat’ between old Hamlet and ‘th’Ambitious Norwey’ and seen for himself both his
‘Armour’ and his ‘frown’. But to return to Horatio’s explanation to Barnardo
of the reasons for Danish military activity.
As I have already intimated, though Horatio seems to be providing
something like a brief summary version of comparatively recent medieval
Scandinavian ‘history’, he is scrupulous to surround it with qualification.
And the Folio’s parenthesising of these qualifications contributes to the
general effect: though this is as accurate a general account as Horatio is
capable of, it is one which he is reporting rather than being one to the whole
of which he can personally testify as being true. The effect of the parentheses around ‘as you know’, ‘Thereto prick’d on by a most emulate Pride’,
‘For so this side of our knowne world esteem’d him’, and, later in the
speech, ‘[As] it doth well appeare vnto our State’ and ‘I take it’, is to withhold Horatio’s complete assent from the information he is retailing, even
14
‘He’ does not appear in F. Jenkins, and others prefer the widely printed emendation ‘Polacks’. But ‘Pollax’ (our modern ‘poleaxe’) certainly goes much more
naturally with ‘on the Ice’ (capitalised) than Polacks, however hard one works
to associate ice with Poland. I leave those with more knowledge of Viking battle
implements than I have to gloss ‘sledded’, but the common editorial speculation, supported by the OED, that what is meant is a poleaxe with something
resembling a sledgehammer attached seems reasonable.
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while appealing to his companions’ shared knowledge of Danish ‘history’.
What is implied is both something like a Danish bias in this particular perspective on history and the possibility that the new information might itself
be subject to the possible misrepresentation of hearsay rather than necessarily having the status of verified truth.
What I have called ‘remembered’ or ‘experienced’ time, then, intersects
and is sometimes confused with what I have distinguished as ‘real time’.
And the confusion is at its most confusing in the rendering of time we are
given as filtered through the intensely personal anguish of the central character, Hamlet himself. In Hamlet ‘experienced time’ is subject to the shifting intensity of yearning and revulsion evident in the soliloquy in which he
first gets to reveal to us what he has ‘within’. Certainly Hamlet’s words and
behaviour in the presence of his uncle and his mother make it clear that he
will not allow his own individual integrity, the particularity of his own
unique experience, to be compromised by their attempts to maintain that
what has happened is assimilable to the familiar pattern of life in which
‘death of Fathers . . . must be so’. (Claudius, significantly, says nothing of
his mother’s remarriage and Hamlet recoils both from Claudius’s selfexonerating imputation that Hamlet is his ‘cousin’ rather than, more pointedly and incriminatingly, his nephew, and that he is now Claudius’s ‘son’
as much as Gertrude’s.)15 But up until his first soliloquy Hamlet has to
some extent been constrained in the expression both of his grief and his
disdain by the fact that he is in a public situation. Now, alone at last, he
gives free rein both to his suicidal feelings of depression and to his intense
dislike of the uncle who has replaced his father in his parents’ marital bed.
Both regression and suicidal or near-suicidal depression are perfectly
natural reactions in a sensitive young man to the death of a parent. And
both are compounded in Hamlet’s case by the complicated sexual feelings
aroused by his mother’s rapid remarriage, a remarriage that implicates his
own sense of himself as having been the product of what he has always
assumed to be the ideally loving union of his mother and father and casts
doubt upon the possibility of any feeling outlasting the inevitable depredations of time. ‘This thing is sure’, writes Eliot in Four Quartets, ‘That time is
no healer: the patient is no longer here.’16 The Hamlet of this first soliloquy is determined that the patient will continue to be here, unchanged.
And the shifts in the way he represents the precise length of time which has
elapsed between his father’s death and his mother’s remarriage are an
index of the intensity of his feelings as expressed in his own particular
heart- and thought-sickness.
15
16
See I. i. 242–303.
‘The Dry Salvages’, III. 7–8.
SETTING THE TIME RIGHT
337
We are apt to identify Hamlet’s sense of time’s collapsing in on itself
with the metaphorical version of it in his famous ‘the Funerall Bakt-meats j
Did coldly furnish forth the Marriage Tables’ (I. i. 368–9). But there’s a
sense in which that particular manifestation of comparative brevity might
be said to be a good deal more literal than some others: it’s perfectly possible, after all, that the funeral baked meats did indeed do just that. Much
less literally possible is the kind of temporal discrepancy charted in the
increasing intensity of revulsion and idealisation manifest in the oscillations
of Hamlet’s inward reflections and self-reflections. Initially he represents
the period of time between the funeral and the remarriage as ‘But two
months’. But he quickly corrects that with ‘Nay, not so much; not two’.
This is soon contracted to ‘and yet within a month?’, then ‘A little Month’,
then ‘ere those shooes were old, j With which she followed my poore
Fathers body j Like Niobe, all teares’. Finally, returning to his earlier
‘Within a Moneth’, he qualifies even that by ‘Ere yet the salt of most
vnrighteous Teares j Had left the flushing of her gauled eyes’ (I. ii. 322–
40). Time, in other words, is determined by Hamlet here not by its strict
duration but by the intensity of his response to what he experiences as the
uniqueness of the two related events which are inseparable from its passing.
And that Ophelia should later represent the period in question as more
like ‘twice two moneths’ rather than the ‘two Houres’ Hamlet at that moment experiences it as (II. ii. 1982) is – even allowing for the possibility that
more time has elapsed since we first encountered Hamlet’s feelings – perfectly reconcilable with this particular way of representing the recurrent
‘spot’ of experienced rather than ‘real’ time.
Just as the play’s shifts from precision to imprecision in its treatment of
time are a necessary consequence of its more general interest in setting the
time right so, too, the seeming inconsistencies in Horatio’s characterisation
which have sometimes been attributed to Shakespeare’s having nodded
are, I believe, a necessary consequence of time in the play being to some
extent ‘out of joint’. As has often been noted, Hamlet’s initial greeting of
Horatio implies that Hamlet has, improbably, last seen him in Wittenberg
and not seen him again until that moment despite their both having evidently very recently attended both the wedding of Hamlet’s mother and
the funeral of his father some two months earlier (though it is, perhaps significantly, the first time Hamlet has encountered Horatio on stage). It also
implies that Horatio is comparatively unfamiliar with the Danish reputation for heavy drinking (‘Wee’l teach you to drinke deepe, ere you depart’;
I. ii. 363). This ignorance of Danish customs is reiterated at the beginning
of the scene in which the Ghost appears for the fourth time, which contrasts the ‘native’ Danish Hamlet with the ‘outsider’ Horatio apparently
unfamiliar with the ‘custom’ which Claudius observes but which, as
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Hamlet explains to Horatio, attracts Hamlet’s somewhat puritanical distaste (despite his earlier offer to introduce Horatio to ‘deep’ drinking).
Horatio’s ignorance is, of course, arguably consistent with his being introduced in the opening exchanges of the play as, like Marcellus, a ‘liegeman’
to the Dane rather than Danish-born. But if we attempt to pursue this kind
of consistency too rigorously we simply make it more improbable that
Horatio should also be represented in the opening scene as being familiar
with Danish history and personally acquainted with Hamlet’s father’s military exploits before Hamlet was born. The Horatio who informs Barnardo
about Danish history inhabits a different temporal world from the one who
asks Hamlet about Danish drinking habits and needs to be taught to
‘drinke deepe’. But his consciousness of historical perspective when recounting past conflicts between Norway and Denmark is nevertheless thoroughly modern. Whilst his being unaware that the clock has already struck
twelve and so being, as it were, behind the times is, on the other hand, perfectly consistent, metaphorically, with his being ‘more an Antike Roman
then a Dane’, as well as with his being uninitiated in the ‘deep drinking’ of
a Protestant Communion. And it’s precisely this kind of proper temporal
flexibility that allows and makes plausible Hamlet’s later heartfelt tribute to
Horatio as his closest friend:
Since my deere Soule was Mistris of my choyse,
And could of men distinguish, her election
Hath seal’d thee for her selfe.
(II. ii. 1914–16)
The particular moment at which this kind of mature valuation of Horatio
might have become evident (ever since Barnardo and Marcellus disappeared from the play?) is left appropriately vague in the very act of seeming to place it in time. Like the gravedigger, Horatio has a dual existence
in a world which is both time-bound and timeless at once.
Not long before the final appearance of the Ghost – in Gertrude’s closet
– there is some well-known byplay between Hamlet and Polonius which
finds Hamlet seemingly pondering the grammatical and syntactical distinctions between past, present, and future:
Polon. My Lord; the Queene would speak with you,
and presently.
Ham. Do you see that Clowd? that’s almost in shape
Like a Camell.
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Polon. By’th’Misse, and it’s like a Camell indeed.
Ham. Me thinks it is like a Weazell.
Polon. It is back’d like a Weazell.
Ham. Or like a Whale?
Polon. Verie like a Whale.
Ham. Then will I come to my Mother, by and by:
They foole me to the top of my bent.
I will come by and by.
Polon. I will say so.
Ham. By and by, is easily said
(II. ii. 2245–56)
If we assume that Hamlet’s ‘Then’ is a logical rather than a temporal conjunction – meaning ‘in that case’ – then the logical relation between what
precedes and what follows it seems somewhat obscure. And if we take
‘Then’ to be a temporal conjunction, though its connection with ‘Verie
like a Whale’ remains somewhat mysterious, the elusiveness of its particular
temporal reference might nevertheless be seen as contributing to what I
take to be the general playing with (and for) time which here seems to be
taking place.
What precedes the exchange about the shape of the cloud is Polonius’s
retailing of the Queen’s request to see Hamlet ‘presently’, and it would
seem to be at least partly the fact that that Latinate adverb somewhat
confusingly refers to a future time even as it seems to speak of present
time which prompts Hamlet’s implicit musings on its distinction from as
well as its affinity with its colloquial synonym ‘by and by’. (The confusion
is compounded by Polonius’s use of the subjunctive ‘would’ which,
though also the past tense of the ‘will’ used by both Polonius and Hamlet
– pointedly – on three occasions later in the exchange, here refers to future time.) Though the ‘they’ in ‘They foole me to the top of my bent’ is
usually taken as referring back to Rosincrance and Guildensterne and the
business with the recorders, it might equally plausibly be interpreted as
referring to the words ‘by and by’, emphasising the ability of these two little ‘easily said’ identical words, when joined by ‘and’, to tease Hamlet out
of thought in a way that the ineffectual efforts of Rosincrance and
Guildensterne to ‘fool’ him cannot. Just as Polonius’s ‘presently’ contains
within it a sense of both present and future time, so its even looser
equivalent ‘by and by’, while referring to a future time, nevertheless does
so by the repetition of a word which, in another context (as in ‘gone by’)
evokes a past time. Hamlet seems to be pondering the indeterminacy of
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temporal indicators (how soon is soon?), a process set in train by
Polonius’s ‘and presently’ seeming to command a more or less immediate
appearance before the Queen and yet allowing for that future appearance
to be, as it were, later (‘by and by’) rather than sooner (‘presently’). Just
as a cloud can be made to look like both a camel and a whale so, too,
can the relative indeterminacy of the language of time itself be turned to
Hamlet’s advantage. ‘There is nothing either good or bad’ – including,
even, time itself – ‘but thinking makes it so’.
The insistence of Polonius’s ‘and presently’ is presumably a response to
Hamlet’s lack of promptness in obeying his mother’s summons to speak
with him reported earlier in this scene by Rosincrance and Guildensterne;
Hamlet’s counter-insistence on the temporally vaguer ‘by and by’, along
with his manoeuvring Polonius into agreeing with him that the cloud is
both like a camel and a whale, is his way of resisting his mother’s summons
and restoring the balance of power in his favour. And it is in such a mood
of aggressive masculinity – a mood incited earlier, too, by his revisiting of
the vengeful excesses of Senecan tragedy and his staging of ‘The Murder
of Gonzago’ as ‘The Mousetrap’, with its familiar invocations of ‘Hecat’
and ‘naturall Magicke’ – that, in his famously bloodthirsty words, Hamlet
prepares the ground for the final appearance of the Ghost:
’Tis now the verie witching time of night,
When Churchyards yawne, and Hell it selfe breaths out
Contagion to this world. Now could I drink hot blood,
And do such bitter businesse as the day
Would quake to looke on.
(II. ii. 2259–63)
We are back, momentarily, in the world of Marcellus, Barnardo, and
Horatio in the opening scene, a world in which a personified external
world responds to and reflects human actions, ghosts have power to ‘blast’
(‘breaths out j Contagion to this world’) and, at Christmas time, no ‘Witch
hath power to Charme’. But this particular ‘now’ is more generalised and
less precisely delineated than ‘the verie witching time of night’ so carefully
signalled by the striking of the midnight bell at the beginning of the play.
And when the Ghost finally does appear again in Gertrude’s closet it is to
Hamlet alone that it is visible. The confirmation of an ‘objective’ presence
which Hamlet receives in the first act of the play through the Ghost’s being
seen by his male companions as well as by him is denied him on this occasion by its being invisible to Gertrude. Time has, as it were, moved on
from the beginning of the play and ghosts are no longer such simple
SETTING THE TIME RIGHT
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presences as they were then. This more sophisticated incarnation of
Hamlet’s father’s ghost is arguably simply an extension of Hamlet himself,
more properly interpreted, like Macbeth’s notorious ‘Dagger of the
Minde’, a version of which Hamlet imagines a moment later (‘I will speake
Daggers to her, but vse none’; II. ii. 2267), as ‘a false Creation, j
Proceeding from the heat-oppressed Braine’ or, in the sceptical words of
Lady Macbeth, a ‘painted Deuill’ (or Angel) rather than a ‘real’ one
(Macbeth II. i. 618–19, II. ii. 714). ‘There is nothing either good or bad, but
thinking makes it so.’ Whether the ‘painted’ is any less potent than the
‘real’ is, however, a question which the play leaves, necessarily, unresolved.
***
Setting the time right, then, involves, among other things, forging new connections between the past and the present, the literal and the metaphorical,
the particular and the general, ‘scientific’ and poetic truth: Hamlet must
rediscover ‘divinity’ in the carpenter’s shaping of a rough-hewn ‘end’.
More specifically, setting the time right eventually entails a kind of imaginative reconciliation between the pre-Christian, classical, and medieval
past , the Catholic and Protestant Christian present, and, implicitly at least,
the humanist future. A state-of-the-art French rapier dipped in poison
bought from a mountebank is the instrument of Hamlet’s death, a death
which is commemorated by ‘The Soldiours Musicke, and the rites of
Warre’. The play reaches its resolution with Hamlet’s body placed high
upon ‘the Stage’, in close proximity to ‘Flagons of Wine’ (one of them a poisoned chalice) standing on ‘a Table’ below: a modern and self-conscious
Protestant hero is given an older and implicitly Catholic farewell. An
‘Antike Roman’ Horatio bids ‘flights of Angels’ sing Hamlet to his ‘rest’
(Hamlet himself having declared that ‘the rest’ – in both senses – ‘is silence’), joining forces with the youthful heir apparent of a presumably
soon-to-be-united Norway and Denmark. Fortinbras’s French name proclaims him as the opportune arm of fortune (‘Fortin’) and, as well as having
Hamlet’s ‘dying voice’, he has ‘some Rites [rather than ‘rights’] of memory
in this Kingdome’, thereby entitling him to give Hamlet a fitting send-off.
The play ends with the stage direction ‘A peale of ordenance are shot off’: ‘a
peale of ordenance’ replaces the kettle drum and trumpet which had earlier (as Hamlet saw it) ‘brayed out’ ‘the triumph’ of Claudius’s ‘pledge’ and
the striking of the bell at the very beginning of the play, those ‘ordenance’
an appropriate accompaniment to a death which is both ordained and rediscovered as if for the first time: ‘This must be so’. With the ‘Colours’ accompanying the arrival of ‘Fortinbras and English Ambassador’ prominently
displayed on stage, James I of England and Scotland, married as he was to
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Anne of Denmark, ought to have been well satisfied, even if unaware of
the particular sense in which ‘the Natiue hew of Resolution’ – a red cross
on a white background – might be said to be no longer ‘sicklied o’re with
the pale cast’ of a white cross on a red background, the closely related flag
of the country of his queen.17
17
Quotations are from II. ii. 3847–95 and 1738–9. ‘Resolution’ implies both ‘resolve’ and the authorial ‘Diuinity that shapes our ends’ and the ‘hew’ is, presumably, red, the colour of blood. But, since ‘hue’ is spelled ‘hew’, ‘the Natiue
hew’ might also include the smiting of the Danish poleaxe ‘on the Ice’, that ‘native’ poleaxe having yielded, in the evolution of military technology, to the
‘Cast of Brazon Cannon j And Forraigne Mart for Implements of warre’ which
leaves Marcellus feeling uncomfortable in the opening scene of the play. These
warlike ‘Cannon’ are eventually transformed into the ‘peale of ordenance’
which ends the play.