--And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.--
Why is Hamlet so uncharitable? Is contempt the fruit of his education at Wittenberg?
Googling the terms "Hamlet contemptuous" produces:
"Ziegler finds a sufficing cause for Hamlet's contemptuous treatment of the poor maiden, in her privately visiting him unattended by a ..."
'Hamlet' depicts the popular Elizabethan viewpoint and treatment of women which is palpably clear from Hamlet's contemptuous and ...
In other words, I am making a substantial connection between Hamlet's contemptuous comment on Polonius' lack of authenticity and the assertions of ...
Hamlet contemptuously explains the uproar as merely accompaniment to King Claudius's drunken toasts ("pledges") over Rhenish wine. ...
Some critics have called Hamlet here callous, unfeeling, heartless; he " dismisses [Polonius] in a few contemptuous words as a man would brush away a fly . ...
Praise implies that "dexterity" (157) is a desirable attribute that Hamlet would like to exhibit himself, so why is his tone still contemptuous? Hamlet is ...
Hamlet, scornfully contemptuous of the two courtiers, calls Rosencrantz a " sponge", and is outraged that they dare demand an answer from him: "what ...
This is the situation depicted in the first act of Hamlet. ..... as to whom Hamlet's contemptuous description of him as a king of shreds and patches can be ...
In the yard stood the spectators who chose to pay less, the ones whom Hamlet contemptuously called "groundlings." For a roof they had only the sky, ...
******************************
Hamlet’s contempt for others seems linked to his 'judgment'. Yet he appears to judge others in very simplified, almost bookish ways - meddler (Polonius), tyrant (Claudius), adultress (Gertrude), virgin/whore (Ophelia), flatterers (RandG), fop (Osric).
Contempt and love are inimicable passions.
*******************************
Bertram, in _All's Well_, describes Contempt's 'scornful perspective':
"Where the impression of mine eye infixing,
Contempt his scornful perspective did lend me,
Which warp'd the line of every other favour;
Scorn'd a fair colour, or express'd it stolen;
Extended or contracted all proportions:
To a most hideous object: ..."
A contemptuous perspective deforms the object it views. Likewise, Hamlet's judgements of events are clouded by his satirical perspective and his attempts to adopt a classical moral severity - he cannot see past the follies and vices of the world and believes himself to be destined to reform them.
And yet his inability to achieve the moral rigour of the ancients leads him to despise himself, as well.
Hamlet:
I do repent; but heaven hath pleas'd it so
To punish me with this, and this with me,
That I must be their SCOURGE and MINISTER.
I will bestow him, and will answer well
The death I gave him. So again good night.
I must be CRUEL only to be kind.
Thus bad begins and worse remains behind.
Hamlet Act 3, scene 4, 173–179
*****************************************
'cruel only to be kind'
(Paradoxically, a 'cruel' virtue?)
Hamlet's contempt is accompanied by an astonishing cruelty to others - which he considers necessary for the purging of Denmark. He is cruel to his mother and to Ophelia, and he shows no mercy to Polonius or Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. With R and G his lack of mercy extends to eternity, as he specifically requests that they not be permitted shriving time - to save their souls.
cruel
adj 1: lacking or showing kindness or compassion or mercy [syn: unkind]
2: (of persons or their actions) able or disposed to inflict
pain or suffering; "a barbarous crime"; "brutal beatings";
"cruel tortures"; "Stalin's roughshod treatment of the
kulaks"; "a savage slap"; "vicious kicks" [syn: barbarous,
brutal, fell, roughshod, savage, vicious]
3: (of weapons or instruments) causing suffering and pain;
"brutal instruments of torture"; "cruel weapons of war"
[syn: brutal]
4: (of circumstances; especially weather) causing suffering;
"brutal weather"; "northern winters can be cruel"; "a
cruel world"; "a harsh climate; "a rigorous climate";
"unkind winters" [syn: brutal, harsh, rigorous, unkind]
***************************************
Hamlet does not appear to value the 'modern' virtues of tolerance and compassion, and seems to imitate a classical ideal of transcendant heroic virtue. His moral severity and his tendency to self-isolate renders him immune to the renaissance atmosphere of the court at Elsinore even before he learns of the murder of his father. The manners of the court are not in accord with his 'scholarly' melancholic, stoic humour.
What is the thought process that makes Hamlet associate his shockingly violent father with transcendant and god-like moral virtue? Why does he describe the dead king in such an extravagant and immodest manner?
HAMLET
Look here, upon this picture, and on this,
The counterfeit presentment of two brothers.
See, what a grace was seated on this brow;
Hyperion's curls; the front of Jove himself;
An eye like Mars, to threaten and command;
A station like the herald Mercury
New-lighted on a heaven-kissing hill;
A combination and a form indeed,
Where every god did seem to set his seal,
To give the world assurance of a man:
******************************
In the theatre, it was Ben Jonson who was at the forefront of the movement to revive classical mores and manners. In another of the 'Poetomachia' plays, _Cynthia's Revels_, Ben Jonson's character Criticus/Crites contemptuously mocked the foolish 'courtesy' and sociability of the courtiers in a speech that could have come straight from the mouth of Hamlet:
O vanity,
How are thy painted beauties doted on,
By light, and empty Idots! how pursu'd
With open and extended Appetite!
How they do sweat, and run themselves from breath,
Rais'd on their Toes, to catch thy airy Forms,
Still turning giddy, till they reel like Drunkards,
That buy the merry madness of one hour,
With the long irksomness of following time!
O how despis'd and base a thing is a Man,
If he not strive t'erect his groveling Thoughts
Above the strain of Flesh! But how more cheap,
When, even his best and understanding Part,
(The crown and strength of all his Faculties)
Floats like a dead drownd Body, on the STREAM
Of vulgar HUMOUR, mixt with common'st dregs?
***************************************
Edward de Vere/ Amorphus:
Is _Hamlet_ the courtier Edward de Vere's criticism of contemporary efforts to revive the classical ideal of heroic moral virtue, and of its attendant violence and social upheaval?
Like the armed ghost in _Hamlet_, do these ancient classical texts make their appearance on the relatively peaceful Elizabethan scene, with their war-mongering anachronistic mores - sowing confusion, violence and death? Is the 'knowledge' to be found in these texts as difficult to interpret and act upon as that transmitted by the ghost?
Will the recovery and imitation of these ancient values import confusion, division and death into English society?
***************************************
In _Hamlet_ , Shakespeare satirizes contemporary attempts (eg. Jonson, Chapman, Sidney circle) to reform society along classical lines, making many of the same observations that were made by Montaigne in his essay _ On Cruelty_. In his attempts to emulate ancient Roman manners and enforce them in a modern Denmark, Hamlet experiences a kind of madness - a classical Quixote driven mad by ancient texts.
(Gertrude - He's fat, and scant of breath.)
***********************************
Montaigne: the Virtues of Modernity.
David Lewis Schaefer
Holy Cross College
“The Good, the Beautiful, and the Useful: Montaigne’s Transvaluation of Values. “The American Political Science Review 73(March 1979):139–154.
Scholars have failed to appreciate the Essays of Montaigne (1533–1592) as a major work in the political philosophy of modernity. They neglect the political dimension of the Essays in the erroneous belief that Montaigne’s thought is too unsystematic to expound a consistent political teaching. The popular interpretation of the Essays sees Montaigne’s evolution from respect for classical learning and stoic virtue, through a “skeptical crisis,” to an “Epicurean” attitude of tolerant hedonism.
Schaefer challenges the dominant interpretation of Montaigne by analyzing his subtle criticism of classical “heroic” moral virtue, especially concentrating on Montaigne’s essay “Of Cruelty” (Essays II, XI). The seeming disunity of that essay actually conceals a carefully worked out political thought. Montaigne’s political intention is to challenge the classical understanding of morality and virtue and to replace it with a less demanding and more humane view of humanity. Montaigne seeks to revolutionize our understanding of morality and its relationship to politics. He would replace the classical morality based on “beauty” (requiring man to strive for some rigorous “divine” nature) by one of “utility” (requiring man to see his needs as similar to those of natural animals). This “transvaluation of values” is part of the foundations of “bourgeois” morality which characterizes modern liberal regimes. Montaigne’s moral-political teaching has led to the “secularist, egalitarian politics of modernity.”
Montaigne’s “On Cruelty” is an extensive critique of classical morality in its questioning of the nobility of Cato’s masochistic love of painful virtue, its horror at the cruelty practiced by Roman tyrants, its objection to the practice of torture by church and state authorities, and its encouragement of gentleness to fellow humans and even towards other animals. Montaigne’s disparages the heroic classical virtue whose aim of surpassing God turns man’s heart into a cruel, callous sensibility. It is more salutary to recognize mankind’s kinship to the beasts and to practice kindly terrestrial virtues. People admire the cruel virtue of Cato because of its “beauty,” which leads humanity to elevate itself self-destructively above the animal to the godlike. *But is this other-worldly “beauty” of the soul the proper criteria for judging human conduct?* Judgments of heavenly beauty are less reliable than judgments of earthly, human utility.
The root of these irrational and unscientific deficiencies in political life stems from classical morality’s perverse identification of the good with the (trans-human) beautiful and its equally perverse disjunction between the good and the useful. By contrast: Montaigne approves the humanly useful as just, honorable, and good. He rejects the morality and political philosophy “that demands the entire subordination of the private interest to the alleged public good, and that in fact results in the sacrifices of other people’s interests to those of the wicked.” Man’s virtue should be useful to his earthly interests and enjoyment of the present pleasures of life. His transvaluation of values would approve of tolerance, moderation, honesty, compassion, the abhorrence of cruelty, and a disinclination to meddle in other persons’ affairs. He preaches “selfishness” and indulgence in the bodily pleasures that privatize human beings and prevent them from aspiring beyond our natural concerns and utility.
*************************************
Jonson, _Timber_
Non nova res livor. - ENVY is no new thing, nor was it born only in our times. The ages past have brought it forth, and the coming ages will. So long as there are men fit for it, quorum odium virtute relictâ placet, it will never be wanting. It is a barbarous envy, to take from those men's virtues which, because thou canst not arrive at, thou impotently despairest to imitate. Is it a crime in me that I know that which others had not yet known but from me? or that I am the author of many things which never would have come in thy thought but that I taught them? It is new but a foolish way you have found out, that whom you cannot equal or come near in doing, you would destroy or ruin with evil speaking; as if you had bound both your wits and natures 'prentices to slander, and then came forth the best artificers when you could form the foulest calumnies.
**************************************
Courtier and Scholar as Opposites:
Author: Earle, John, 1601?-1665.
Title: Micro-cosmographie, or, A peece of the world discovered in essayes and characters.
Date: 1628
21. A downe right Sholler.
IS one that has much learning in the Ore, vn|wrought and vntryde, which time and experience fashions and refines. He is good mettall in the inside, though rough & vnscour'd without, and therefore ha|ted of the Courtier, that is quite contrarie. The timehas got a veine of making him ridiculous, and men laugh at him by tradition, and no vnluckie absurdity, but is put vpon his profes|sion, and done like a Schol|ler. But his fault is onely this, that his mind is some|what much taken vp with his mind, and his thoughts not loaden with any car|riage besides. Hee has not put on the quaint Garbe of the Age, which is now become a mans Totall. He has not humbled his Me|ditations to the industrie of Complement, not afflicted his braine in an elaborate legge. His body is not set vpon nice Pinnes, to bee turning and flexible for e|uery motion, but his scrape is homely, and his nod worse. He cannot kisse his hand and cry Madame, nor talke idly enough to beare her company. His smacking of a Gentle-wo|man is somewhat too sa|uory, and he mistakes her nose for her lippe. A very Woodcock would puzzle him in caruing, and hee wants the logicke of a Ca|pon. He has not the glib fa|culty of sliding ouer a tale, but his words come squea|mishly out of his mouth, and the laughter common|ly before the iest. He names this word Colledge too of|ten, and his discourse beats too much on the Vniuersi|ty. The perplexity of man|nerlinesse will not let him feed, and he is sharpe set at an Argument when hee should cut his meate. He is discarded for a gamester at all games but one and thir|ty, and at tables he reaches not beyond doublets. His fingers are not long and drawn out to handle a Fid|dle, but his fist is clunch't with the habite of dispu|ting. He ascends a Horse somwhat sinisterly, though not on the left side, and they both goe iogging in griefe together. He is ex|ceedingly censur'd by the Innes a Court men, for that hainous Vice being out of fashion. Hee cannot speake to a Dogge in his owne Dialect, and vnder|stands Greeke better then the language of a Falconer. Hee has beene vsed to a darke roome, and darke Clothes, and his eyes daz|zle at a Sattin Doublet. The Hermitage of his Stu|dy, has made him somwhat vncouth in the world, and men make him worse by staring on him. Thus is he silly and ridiculous, and it continues with him for some quarter of a yeare, out of the Vniuersitie. But practise him a little in men, and brush him ore with good companie, and hee shall out-ballance those glisterers as much as a so|lid substance do's a feather, or Gold Gold-lace.
