V

An epidemic is a vast, dominating anxiety machine. Because of its enormous scale and the randomness with which it spread death, bubonic plague differed fundamentally from even the most disfiguring and agonizing illnesses such as syphilis and leprosy, which were generally regarded as unfortunate but individual afflictions. With its gigantic demographic impact, plague literally turned ailments of the self into ailments of the state. Such a transformation nicely describes the arc of Hamlet 's plot: the ravaged individual bears a disturbance from which the political sphere cannot remain shielded and from which it will not soon recover. The plague so radically disrupts the individual subject, so many individual subjects, that the entire culture comes to grief. We should not be amazed to find that the notion of epidemic sickness, once admitted into the kingdom of the text, behaves like the plague itself, escaping positional confines, moving centrifugally across difference among characters, meaning centripetally toward a core of impacted indeterminacy.

The plague's extensive presence in the text cannot be decoded in any formulaic way, and this difficulty has implications for a political reading. In the symbolic convergence of Hamlet and Claudius, the play complexly reproduces the historical encroachment, circa 1603, of the plague upon monarchy. But the posited allegorical identifications are contradictory and counter to topical expectation, revealing the trouble that Shakespearean theater has with its contemporary gestures. Certainly Claudius, the founding poisoner, must be read as the pestilent usurper, who introduces toxicity into the realm and displaces the man who could be the rightful heir. But his is also a notably orderly succession, a tidy statecraft, no matter how it was maneuvered. The deep disorders of the nation arise more from Hamlet's (and the Ghost's) frustrations than from Claudius's usurpation. It is the prince's actions that provide occasion for what historically was the plague's business: wreaking monarchdislodging havoc and spreading "superfluous death" through the land. To the extent that pestilence configured both tyranny and insurrection, it is Hamlet who embodies the drama's primary plaguy force. We ought not to regard Claudius's original guilt as more severe than Hamlet's originary —that is, generative—criminality. Indeed, Claudius's rule would likely have been admirably coherent if left to its course. It is true that there would not have been much of a play if Hamlet had failed to oppose the suspected usurper. But the prince's remedies, his political actions, exacerbate the national illness.^[68]

Claudius's own allusions to sickness, particularly to Hamlet as his sickness, multiply after the prince gives disease free play by opening the Pandora's box of theatrical indeterminacy with Gonzago . The king admits, while equating the prince with infirmity, that his own epistemological lack caused Polonius's death: "We would not vnderstand what was most fit, / But like the owner of a louie disease / To keepe it from divulging, let it feede / Euen on the pith of life: where is he gone?" (K1). The answer should by this point be obvious: Hamlet has been absorbed like a virus into the very body of the monarch; he's begun to turn Claudius into a Ghost ("the King is not with the body," Hamlet reminds Guildenstern), begun to efface him: "The King is a thing . . . Of nothing." Certainly, the monarch feels his mortal body invaded; Claudius says Hamlet rages "like the Hectique in my blood." But the sickness is not easily purged, and Claudius realizes that a cure will come hard: "This suddaine sending him away must seeme / Deliberate pause[;] diseases desperat growne, / By desperat applyance are relieu'd / Or not at all" (K2). Hamlet's de facto role as a vector or carrier of infection undergoes a marvelous transformation: the hero (as in Roger Fenton's idea of the divine word) becomes infection, tainting the already tainted world, further corrupting the monarchy. It is only through luck, through special providence, that this disease is diverted from England; the shipborne infection (a common cause of plague dispersal) finds its way back to Denmark.

Some intertextual evidence supports this view of Hamlet's diseased and kinglike disruptiveness. It has been shown that a probable source for several of the play's political concerns is Philippe du Plessis-Mornay's Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos (1579), a Huguenot meditation on the responsibilities of the citizen to resist monarchical tyranny. This text lays some of the groundwork for Shakespeare's representation of Denmark through its unusual imagery of the tyrant's physical corruption of the body politic. However, if du Plessis-Mornay's descriptions of tyranny have influenced Shakespeare's portrayals in Hamlet , they have done so in surprising, inverted ways. Du Plessis-Mornay asserts: "Tyranny is like a raging fever. At the beginning it is easy to cure but difficult to detect; afterwards, it is easy to recognize but very difficult to cure."^[69] But it is Hamlet who enacts this fever, "raging like the Hectique" in Claudius's blood. Shakespeare offers a reversal of the expected roles of tyrant and tyrannized, where the man customarily regarded as despotic—the usurper, the regicide—feels instead harried and harmed. Claudius's other comment about diseases that must be relieved by des-

perate appliance may also have its precursor in du Plessis-Mornay: Hamlet has clearly become a difficult germ to cure. True, the king has committed "a brothers murther," which has "the primall eldest curse vppont" (J1); yet in clear and compelling terms—and not just to Claudius—the prince is the nation's contamination, the imbalancing virus. Once we regard Hamlet as the infecting agent in the Danish political body, it will not seem odd that in du Plessis-Mornay's terms, Hamlet, not Claudius, best fits the definition of the tyrant:

But if a prince persistently subverts the commonwealth, if he brazenly perverts the law, if he shows that pledges, covenants, justice, and religion mean nothing to him . . . he is properly a tyrant. And by this name . . . he is branded an enemy of God and man.
                                                                                                                                                                                                                         ( Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos , 190)

Although Claudius perverted the law, Hamlet subverts the commonwealth in both a more widespread and a more spectacular fashion. The prince's steep moral descent reveals just how little "covenants, justice, and religion" mean to him. His willful damning of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern completes his earlier pleasure at the thought of ensnaring the king in some act that would foreclose his—Claudius's, that is—salvation.

The multiple contaminations introduced during Gonzago dissolve any illusion that Hamlet merely uncovers the sickness that he in fact so maniacally produces.^[70] Shakespeare's affinity for balance and complementarity generates a hero who becomes morally comparable, through his own infectiousness, to the villain of the piece; although patently victimized, Hamlet develops into a brazen subverter of religious principle and human place.^[71] The prince's transgressions are often underscored by spurious self-justifications, the most conspicuous of which comes after his callous butchering of Polonius: he piously intones, "Heauen hath pleasd it so / To punish me with this, and this with me, / That I must be their scourge and minister" (J4–J4v). This back-construction is a soulless apology for his own misdirected (but not unintended) violence. However, a scourge always resists intelligibility as a minister, and vice versa. In the Renaissance, bubonic plague was universally described as just such a divine scourge against human sinfulness. Yet these descriptions, which labored desperately for redemptive meaning, could not rationalize the epidemic.^[72] The supposed divine provenance of the disease insufficiently explains the ruthless ruin of the blameless, the neutral, and the reprobate.

Hamlet, for all his linguistic scourging, cannot convincingly posit

moral causes for his actions. He has no interest in ministering to those he will punish or in leading them to repentance; the closest he comes is when he resolves to speak daggers to his mother, a resolution which results in one accidental murder, a second ghostly visitation—and no commitment whatsoever from Gertrude to keep away from Claudius's bed. Like the bubonic plague, Hamlet becomes a tyrant whose destructive efficacy overtakes his ethical rationale. He claims divine sanction for his cruelest acts: describing how he has delivered Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their unshriven deaths, he says, "Why euen in that was heauen ordinant" (N1v). Compared to the prince, Claudius should earn our respect: he never claims to act in anyone's interest but his own.

Hamlet's affliction of Claudius effects a plaguy convergence of king and adversary on the level of grammatical as well as theatrical referent.^[73] One familiar example comes in a soliloquy missing from Q1, "How all occasions doe informe against me. . . ." Hamlet here questions his own apparently flaccid response to powerful stimuli: "How stand I then/ That haue a father kild, a mother staind" (K3v). Hamlet seems to confess, in grammatically ambiguous terms, the precise crimes Claudius has committed. The words as they stand in the second quarto do bear some figurative truth: Hamlet must have imaginatively killed off his father (i.e., at least come to regard him as dead) in order to undertake the necessary reality of revenge; and he must mentally stain his mother to sully his intended victim, Claudius, and to sustain his own resolve. But the lines are chiefly significant because they bespeak the play's now fully articulated convergence of the hero and the villain.

That convergence began in Hamlet's consciousness well before this moment—perhaps as early as his request from the player for a speech about Pyrrhus:

One speech in't I chiefely loued, t'was Aeneas talke to Dido, & there about of it especially when he speakes of Priams slaughter, if it liue in your memory begin at this line, let me see, let me see, the rugged Pirhus like Th'ircanian beast, tis not so, it beginnes with Pirrhus , the rugged Pirrhus , he whose sable Armes. . .
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              (F3–F3v)

What is Hamlet correcting from his false start to the tale Aeneas tells, and what does he misremember? Somehow "Th'ircanian beast" slips into Hamlet's consciousness as a modifier for "Pirrhus," and he realizes he has gotten something wrong—but not entirely wrong. In the Aeneid , Dido accuses Aeneas of treacherously abandoning her; significantly, she uses the language Hamlet misapplied to Pyrrhus: "Traitor, no goddess

was ever your mother . . . No, your parent was Mount Caucasus . . . and tigers of Hyrcania nursed you."^[74] A congeries of subterranean pressures alters Hamlet's memory of the passage, and these pressures figure his unspoken, troubled identification with the Trojan hero and with heroism in general.^[75] For Dido's original reproof bubbles to the surface of Hamlet's lexical memory. It may recall to him, first, the already intense cognizance of Gertrude's nondivinity (especially in comparison to the "Hyperion" king): "no goddess was ever your mother." This awareness emerges again well into the player's speech when Hamlet impatiently asks the actor to "say on, come to Hecuba," as if requesting a proper, corrective model of spousal mourning.^[76] In making the error, Hamlet may also be recording his subconscious preparation to perform Aeneas's signature infidelity—the rejection of a loving woman (Dido/Ophelia) for the sake of a heroic duty to which the whole cosmos has seemingly conscripted him. Finally, and most important, Hamlet's comparison of Pyrrhus to "th'ircanian beast" subtly restates one of the drama's basic assumptions: in a protagonist's least attractive or rational moments, he may be indistinguishable from a villain. Because not Pyrrhus but Aeneas is (allusively speaking) the original Hyrcanian beast, Hamlet's conspicuous misremembering actually remembers a classical precedent for confusing the heroic and the criminal, the new law and the outlaw. His identifications are delicate gyroscopes pulled by the contradictions of the revenge plot.

During Gonzago , Hamlet comes to understand, however ironically, his increasing similarity to Claudius: "Tis a knauish peece of worke, but what of that? your Maiestie, and wee that haue free soules, it touches vs not . . . This is one Lucianus , nephew to the King" (H2v). Later, as he prepares to accept the swordfight challenge, the prince reasserts his royal similitude: "I am constant to my purposes, they followe the Kings pleasure, if his fitnes speakes, mine is ready" (N3). In soul, in pleasure and fitness, Hamlet can equate himself to his uncle; but the specifically political ironies of the equation escape him. He finds himself in the familiar emulous bind of Troilus and Cressida : to destroy the rival always involves becoming the rival, assuming the other's place and identity. For Hamlet, similitude implies replacement. Hurled toward a likeness he must demolish—the analogy of kingship—the prince must sooner or later confront the responsibility of monarchy, a responsibility that would certainly fall upon him should he survive and be able to justify his revenge agenda (which would likely become suspect in the event of his survival). Hamlet's push toward revenge may well obscure other desires;

try as it might, the play cannot easily separate the substance of ambition from the farrago of motives for retribution.

The drama goes out of its way to avoid addressing this latent entanglement: for the heir apparent to murder the king signifies a succession. Does Hamlet come to resemble Claudius in order to destroy and replace him? Or must he destroy the king as a consequence of this resemblance, because the stage world is no longer big enough for both of them? The death of Claudius, we are meant to think, looms as the telos of all Hamlet's actions, but a key unspoken event inevitably awaits the king's death: the ascension of the next king. Most readers tend not to regard the prince as interested in politics per se. But Hamlet's darker purpose may be unknown to him, boring and familiar as it has been through history—a motivational cliché. Hamlet's revenge marks the final stage of an insurrection: his job is to dislodge the power he imitates.

Claudius, for one, is always vigilant about Hamlet's growing encroachment on his prerogative. In the midst of his self-absolving conversation with Laertes, the king receives the letter announcing Hamlet's return to Denmark—Claudius's first news that Hamlet is alive: "High and mighty, you shall know I am set naked on your kingdom[;] to morrow shall I begge leaue to see your kingly eyes, when I shal first asking you pardon, there-vnto recount the occasion of my suddaine returne" (L3v). The note seems to disavow political ambition; its mock-obsequiousness underscores the apparent differences in rank between the man within power and the one without. Claudius sharply reads through the phony formalities to dissect Hamlet's intentions:

Neither the letter to the king nor Claudius's response appears in the first quarto. The Folio reading is the choice of almost all modern editors, and it alters this passage considerably with a single word; but the reading is redundant and evacuates the considerable political implications of the speech: "if he be now returned/As checking at his voyage." Harold Jenkins in the Arden edition glosses "checking" as "shying, stopping suddenly in mid-course." The Folio reading oddly erases Claudius's suspicions about Hamlet's return, and it removes the identification between

the two characters which Claudius in Q2 goes out of his way to notice. It is in the second quarto of 1604, the text adjacent to and replete with anxiety about disease and the succession, that the grappling over political place becomes clearest. Claudius says that if Hamlet means to give up the kingly role, then the prince will be vulnerable and must fall (die, descend in status). In other words, Hamlet's heralded return smacks of royal presumptions—and suggests to Claudius the frightening possibility, unmitigated (or even exacerbated) by Hamlet's rhetoric of obeisance, that the prince probably means to claim his royal rights. There is good reason for Claudius to imagine so; since Hamlet is alive, he has obviously defeated and likely discovered the plot against him. His return represents the most fraught convergence yet between the adversaries: a convergence not in soul or character, but in political position. However, Claudius says, if Hamlet does not prosecute his own kingship, if he means what he says in the letter and will not undertake the monarchy, then he can be victimized.

Claudius proves prescient, and Hamlet does not undertake to claim the monarchy he approaches. In the course of his eccentric insurrection, of his strange boldness mixed with stoic, pre-swordfight passivity, Hamlet abdicates the heroic: he deposes himself, not from the possibility of successful and glorious private revenge (already a heavily problematized notion in the Renaissance), but from the monarchy that would likely befall him pursuant to the act. Hamlet's abdication of heroism occurs in a gradual and roundabout way through the drama: he edges around, pesters, weakens, and finally kills the king, but he also carefully forestalls his own access to power. He o'errules kingship to a peace, to his own peace, but only once his exclusion from it proves irreversible. It cannot be coincidence that Hamlet's single attempt at regicide comes after he learns he has been poisoned and has "not halfe an houres life" left in him. Hamlet's imminent doom opens a decorous sliver of subversion in which the long-awaited revenge can occur, because the immense political consequences of the crime against the state can be evaded: his revenge, like the Ghost's, is virtually posthumous. Even so, as the prince breathes his last, he feels it necessary to ask Horatio to "report me and my cause aright / To the vnsatisfied."^[77] The belatedness of the regicide, its very-last-minute character, should not be read as a failure of Hamlet's will. Rather, it must be seen as his will, an ingrained ideological sympathy with and obedience to historical conditions.

No matter how villainous the king or sympathetic the avenger, a staged regicide always had a certain electricity about it. The second

quarto of Hamlet , contemporaneous with a deadly epidemic which ravaged the succession process, would have been supercharged in this regard. Elsinore's poisonous contagion upends kingship and reanimates the image of a regime pestered by disease. The surprise, of course, is that the disease is the hero. In Q2, a profound nervousness about the absence of monarchy competes with a parallel worry about an abscess in monarchy; these tensile anxieties pressure Hamlet's every act, his every deliberation. Well-founded fears about an ungoverned nation frame the text; "Long liue the King" is the play's (ironic) third line. And at the end, even after Claudius's villainy has been revealed and Laertes cries "the King, the Kings to blame" (O1), the play cannot quite loose its grip on the idea of a stable regime. For Hamlet's unthinking assault on the ruler causes the whole court to cry out in horrified voice, full with the memory of a gap in kingship: "Treason, treason."^[78]