I
Derek Traversi has noted that "the action of Hamlet is, in its inner logic, the progressive revelation of a state of disease."[12] The point could be taken further: Hamlet 's plot is a virtual schematic of plague. The play's sickly images are neither inert nor ornamental; its language of bodily corruption metastasizes. What results is a subliminal thematic of contagion: a progressive dispersal of weakness, delusion, passion, and violent physical decomposition among a growing number of susceptible bodies.
Contagion in Hamlet is figured primarily as poisoning, a somatic and linguistic act which is always, sooner or later, deadly. The metaphoric relationship of plague and poison in the Renaissance stemmed from a contemporary perception about their material connectedness: the belief that one literally contained and dispersed the other, that the essential stuff of infection was toxin. Indeed, in plague pamphlets and other medical tracts the most common synonym for "infection" was "poison" or "venom."[13] For instance, Stephen Bradwell, a Caroline physician, de-
fines plague as "a Popular Feavor venemous and infectious, striking chiefly at the Heart."[14] Bradwell provides an especially interesting taxonomy of the poison resident in pestilence:
This Putrid Plague, is . . . venemous, which is granted of all both Physitians and Philosophers. Now by Venom or Poyson , we commonly understand some thing that has in it some dangerous subtle quality that is able to corrupt the substance of a living body to the destruction or hazard of the life thereof. This working is apparent in this Sicknesse , by his secret and insensible insinuation of himself into the Vitall spirits , to which as soone as hee is gotten, he shewes himselfe a mortall enemy. . . . His subtle entrance, his slye crueltie, his swift destroying; the unfaithfulnesse of his Crisis , and the other Prognostick Signes ; and the vehemencie, grievousnesse and ill behaviour of his Symptomes , all being manifest proofes of his venemous quality . (Bradwell, Physick , 6; italics in original)
We should spend a moment with this description, for its claims and contradictions epitomize the cultural discourse about the plague. To Bradwell, this disease is not merely fatal, but immoral: it conducts surreptitious assaults on the wholesome or innocent body, employing poison as its agent. The writer's tendency to allegorize the physical damage done by plague arises from a hermeneutic impulse as much as a medical one. Discussing the "venom or poison" inherent in the disease offers authoritative diagnostic stability—both physicians and philosophers agree on the taxonomy—and the everyday reader can also "commonly understand" it. But for all his confidence in having associated plague with the substance, Bradwell cannot provide a respectably precise technical definition of venom: he describes it, rather limply, as "some thing that has in it some dangerous, subtle quality" that endangers or destroys life. What is this thing? The physician's certitude expands and contracts throughout the description. "This working is apparent," he avers, recovering temporarily, but in the next phrase the disease gets the better of him; it is "secret and insensible," and its symptomatology baffles him: "The unfaithfulnesse of his Crisis, and the other Prognostick Signes" frustrate the diagnostician. Bradwell's loaded clinical attributes for the plague (subtle, sly, swift, unfaithful, vehement, grievous) substitute moral fury for comprehension. Finally the interpretive difficulty of the sickness—the "ill behaviour of his Symptomes "—surprisingly becomes the occasion for diagnostic confidence about it, and a circle of hermeneutic redundancy forms. The plague must be the product of venom because its elusiveness is venomous. We know what it is because we don't know what it is.
The function of "poison" in plague tracts is to control anxiety about the unknowable—to explain plague by assigning it a physical cause and thus to delimit that which escapes understanding. But poison is an analogy, a deferral, rather than an explanation. Physical venom does resemble plague in the manner (if not the scope) of its destructiveness. But poison's particular relevance to Hamlet lies in the epistemological problem it claims and fails to explain. When the Ghost tells Hamlet that "thy Vncle stole / With iuyce of cursed Hebona in a viall, / And in the porches of my eares did poure/The leaprous distilment" (D3), it pretends to solve a crime the sources, motives, and ramifications of which have not begun to be rooted out. Fatal, undetectable, finally uncontrollable, toxin in the play functions as it did in plague tracts: an all-encompassing explanation that cannot account for much. Even though the Ghost depicts King Hamlet's demise in allegorical terms as the simple upshot of poisonous Evil's infectious, treacherous invasion and destruction of Good, this explanation (like Bradwell's) leaves copious gaps. Claudius's poison may be the original vial of disorder, the revealed, physical cause of King Hamlet's death; but what matters in the play, what animates and infects it, is poison's psychic residue: that which is borne from the Ghost to young Hamlet. The historical transformation of the king into the Ghost produces a crucial change in the idea of poison: toxin alters from a physical to a cognitive fact, a change that is marked by the Ghost's astounding transformation from victim to transmitter of destruction. And so the specter materializes as the drama's prime figurative poisoner—an agent provocateur who, as several critics have noted, pours another venom, the virulent narrative of his death, into Hamlet's ears.[15] This narrative envenoming proliferates and proves contagious. For once having absorbed this rhetorical toxin, the son disseminates it in various forms throughout the Danish court, where it enters all ears. This plague constitutes Hamlet's characteristic business at Elsinore, his normal mode of relationship.[16]
The venom Hamlet ingests, the imaginative poison, has a time-release quality: it is let out, little by little, whenever Hamlet speaks to the quarantined population at Elsinore. His own plaguy speech becomes the drama's plot piston—not merely a lubricant but the vital moving part, animating the desultory sequence of events. For if murder "will speak / With most miraculous organ" (G1), so will Hamlet; after the interview with the Ghost, he seeks to disrupt the court through notions, not potions. Remarkably, the literal and figurative poisons have the same effect: Every character to whom Hamlet speaks with venom, with bitter-
ness and anger, is doomed to die. The catalogue is striking: Polonius, Ophelia, Laertes, Claudius, Gertrude, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern—all feel the sting of the central carrier's verbal barbs. We cannot exclude Hamlet himself from this list, as his self-lacerating language incites the danger that consumes him; he is autoinfected at the last. Perhaps most remarkable, the only characters who die in the play are the ones Hamlet has verbally assaulted. In his essay "Of the Power of the Imagination," Michel de Montaigne prepares the theatrical scene played out in Denmark:
But all this may be attributed to the narrow seam between the soul and body, through which the experience of the one is communicated to the other. Sometimes, however, one's imagination acts not only against one's own body, but against someone else's. And just as a body passes on its sickness to its neighbor, as is seen in the plague, . . . likewise the imagination, when vehemently stirred, launches darts that can injure an external object.[17]
As with the plague, clear causal evidence is elusive, but considerable circumstantial clues point to the fatal virulence of Hamlet's imagination as reified in his language; his words endanger the body as much as they imperil the mind. His discourse, and the knowledge that fires it, have an uncanny power to derange and destroy.
In his magnificent work on the nature of contagion (1546), Girolamo Fracastoro (Fracastor) takes care to distinguish the poisonous from the contagious.[18] He bases his contagion theory on similitude, the idea that "the infection is precisely similar in both the carrier and the receiver of contagion; we say that contagion has occurred when a certain similar taint has affected them both" (Fracastor, Contagion , 3). But he flatly denies that poisons can produce likeness: "poisons cannot, strictly speaking, cause putrefaction or engender in a second individual a principle and germ of exactly the same sort as was in the original individual. The proof of this is that persons who have been poisoned are not contagious to others" (49); thus, "when persons die of drinking poison, we say perhaps that they were infected, but not that they suffered contagion" (3). Fracastor categorizes poisons as primarily material or spiritual, depending on which parts of the person they afflict, and his description of the spiritual type harmonizes with the opening crises of Hamlet : "Those [poisons] that operate by spiritual images can destroy by . . . producing an intolerable sadness. But they can generate nothing similar to themselves" (49).
Because Fracastor's theory pivots on the idea of similitude, it lends
itself to a rhetorical and psychological as well as a purely medical reading of contagion. His discussion rigs a useful theoretical framework for the application of contagion theory to Hamlet . The play does not, of course, hammer out a structure built solely from the treatise's terms and propositions; but it does engage the essential metaphor of Fracastor's work. For in Hamlet , similitude is the fertile, poisonous ground of plot and character; the impulse for likeness engenders rampant similarity, parallelism, repetition, and doubling. Shakespeare employs the Fracastorian idea mainly by distributing the physical fact of infectious likeness to the moral, affective, and imaginative spheres. The symbolic ramifications of biological contagion theory receive a compelling gloss from René Girard, who enlarges (with anthropological intent) the microscopic features of Fracastor's original observations; here is Girard's characteristic statement on the literary function of plague imagery and theme: "The plague is universally presented as a process of undifferentiation, a destruction of specificities."[19] This reading of the disease can be mapped back into Fracastor's understanding that contagion produces deadly likeness. The destructive similarity that befalls bodies in epidemics afflicts minds and motives in Denmark.
Claudius obtained his brother's place, wife, and privilege through emulous fratricide, and so began the cycle of imitation and the production of likeness—read "contagion"—that ensnares his nephew. The Ghost in turn imitates Claudius by trying to engineer a murder; he calls for filial loyalty, an enforced similarity that will produce a like-minded revenger and replicate regicide.[20] Hamlet becomes, in several ways, a similitude of both fathers. The rhetorical strategy employed yet disavowed in the revenge overture to Hamlet also has Fracastorian overtones: the spirit produces sympathy ("Alas poore Ghost" [D2]). Although the Ghost expressly denies this as its goal ("Pitty me not, but lend thy serious hearing / To what I shall vnfold" [D2v]), its tale cannot but be a pathos machine, concocting and refining the myth of the father's victimage. Sympathy, the emotional correlative to contagion, manipulates identification on behalf of a sufferer to reproduce and propagate—perhaps alleviate—suffering. Fracastor's great treatise De Contagione begins with a long excursus called De Sympathia , in which he outlines the sympathy or natural attraction necessary to produce an effective contagion between objects in the world. He asserts throughout that bubonic plague is a vast pathology of sympathy, a heightened relationship between disparate, converging entities—identity run wild (Fracastor, xxxiv). Hamlet portrays a poison that, pace Fracastor, does
indeed engender contagions of similarity, in material and metaphoric ways. This venom has mercurial, variable form and function. It is an elusive, unstable substance, with one exclusive channel of entry, one avenue of force: the ear. The play's toxin is language.
The historical force of plague, so metaphorically suggestive, can become translated into textual or dramatic structure. Some evocative differences in the quartos imply that the later text internalizes something of its pathological environment. Hamlet rails wildly at Ophelia following the "To be or not to be" soliloquy in pestilential terms—"Ile giue thee this plague for thy dowrie"—and this line occurs in both early texts. But in the 1604 quarto, his poisonous language generates a rhetorical and psychic similarity. Ophelia's commentary suggests that she catches the very disorder that she hears in the prince: "O what a noble mind is heere orethrowne!/The Courtiers, souldiers, schollers, eye, tongue, sword . . . / quite quite downe" (G3). Her earlier reference to herself as possessing a "noble minde" (G2v), and the unintelligible implied sequence "Courtiers . . . eye, souldiers . . . tongue, schollers . . . sword" suggest that Ophelia has been damaged, instantaneously, by Hamlet's ferocious rant. Her reaction in the first quarto is altogether more controlled or, as it were, less infected: "Great God of heauen, what a quicke change is this? / The Courtier, Scholler, Souldier, all in him, / All dasht and splinterd thence, O woe is me" (E2). In Q2, we can sense a contracted disturbance.[21]
A more fantastic example of the depth and scope of verbally caught similarity occurs in Laertes' subjection by Claudius near the end of the play. Plotting Hamlet's death by duel, the king suggests that Laertes could easily "choose / A sword vnbated, and in a pace of practice / Requite him for your Father" (M1). Laertes assents, and his response is surprising:
I will doo't,
And for purpose, Ile annoynt my sword.
I bought an vnction of a Mountibanck
So mortall, that but dippe a knife in it,
Where it drawes blood, no Cataplasme so rare . . .
. . . can saue the thing from death
That is but scratcht withall.
(M1)
What makes this addition to the plan so interesting is that Claudius did not think of it first. Laertes devises the poisoned sword trick, which
depends on the notion of an unbated point but is more clever; when the king then proposes the hamfisted expedient of the poisoned chalice as a fail-safe maneuver, we can see that something has gone awry with the notion of character. To bring Laertes to this pass, Claudius has had to poison him slowly against Hamlet, using crafty insinuations that epitomize the play's movement of verbal corruption. No mental giant, Laertes has descended into the Charybdis of a superior intelligence; but he has emerged with something of that intelligence. He seems to have caught the very idea of poison from the primal poisoner, the king. In the first quarto the whole scheme—duel, sharp sword, and poison tip—is Claudius's idea, and Laertes follows stupidly along: "King . Nay but Leartes, marke the plot I haue layde. . . . / Laer . T'is excellent, O would the time were come!" (H3–H3v). But in the second quarto, after the onset of plague, character and interiority prove unstable, and subterfuge is a communicable attribute as it becomes possible to catch the habit of dissembling—an ailment of soul, of self.[22] This moment epitomizes a radical, inevitable invasion of history into Hamlet : pestilence infiltrates theater as a characterological device of communicated similarity. Shakespeare highlights the plaguy nature of this contraction by the unusual designation for the unction Laertes will daub on his sword: "Ile tutch my point / With this contagion, that if I gall him slightly, it may be death" (M1). As Falstaff notes in another context, "It is certain that either wise bearing or ignorant carriage is caught, as men take diseases, one of another; therefore let men take heed of their company."[23]
Hamlet 's contagion of identities begins with the verbal corruption first imposed by the Ghost. And the plague of this word poison is dispersed dementia and semantic instability: trouble in mind.