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Hamlet and Fortinbras
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
The tragic history of the royal house of Denmark opens with an episode which seems today, on any rational basis, absurd. Horatio tells Marcellus and Bernardo on the castle terrace at midnight that the elder Fortinbras, King of Norway, challenged Hamlet's father to single combat, agreeing to forfeit all his lands if vanquished, and that the Danish king put up an equal stake. In the ensuing encounter Fortinbras was slain. The elder Hamlet thus appears as a reckless champion, risking life and lands on personal valor, rather than as a careful guardian of his domain. Nowadays, if we give this a thought, we are likely to dismiss it as an odd custom, familiar from Viking days and the time when knighthood was in flower. It is indeed one of the archaic features of the old tale of Amleth which survived into Shakespeare's pages, but it still had, in the Elizabethan age, a validity which is not always realized. Although it is only a small piece in the great tapestry of Hamlet, it will repay, I think, some special examination.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1946
References
1 J. M. Robertson, The Problem of “Hamlet” (London, 1919), 49 ff.
2 There is a curious remark in Amleth's speech to the Danes after the murder of his uncle, in which he refers to him as “ostant au pays de Dannemarch un successeur legitime, pour en saisir quelque voleur estranger,” but for this I can find no explanation.
For Belleforest I use the convenient text of Gollancz, Sources of Hamlet (London, 1926). The extract just quoted is on page 268. The Elizabethan translation of Belleforest, the Hystorie of Hamblet (1608), is printed by Gollancz opposite the French text. The same volume contains Elton's rendering of Saxo, The First Nine Books of the Danish History of Saxo Grammaticus (London, 1894), opposite the Latin. Elton used the edition of Holder (Strassburg, 1886); Gollancz printed from the editio princeps, 1514.
I assume that Shakespeare worked mainly from the lost Hamlet play, and that this was the work of Thomas Kyd. He may also have gone directly to Belleforest. In referring to Kyd I use the edition by F. S. Boas, Works of Thomas Kyd (Oxford, 1901). It is hardly necessary to say that the much-discussed German piece, Der Bestrafte Brudermord, is conveniently accessible in a careful English translation in the second volume of the Furness Variorum. Quotations from Shakespeare in this article follow the text of Kittredge, Complete Works (Boston, etc., 1936), which is the same as in his single-volume edition of the play (1939).
In these days of increasing expense of printing, I have restricted notes and bibliography as much as I can. I have tried to give credit wherever it is conspicuously due, but in view of the very great amount of comment on Hamlet this must have its limits. Some matters here treated are discussed in two earlier articles of mine in the PMLA: “Hamlet and the Mouse-Trap,” liv (1939), 709-735; “Hamlet's Sea-Voyage,” lix (1944), 45-70.
3 Gollancz, 94. It would be easy to put together an imposing bibliography of works dealing with the judicial duel, but it seems better to refer to only two sources: for the earlier period to Hoops's Reallexicon der germanischen Altertumskunde, article “Zweikampf” (iv, 595 ff.) by R. Hübner and K. Lehmann; for the later period to F. Carl Riedel, Crime and Punishment in the Old French Romances (N.Y., 1939), especially 33 ff. Bibliography will be found in each of these; Riedel (181-186) gives much that bears upon Germanic conditions. For the situation under Elizabeth, see the article by A. Forbes Sieveking, “Fencing and Duelling” in Shakespeare's England (Oxford, 1916); ii, 389 ff., bibliography 406 f.
4 Gollancz, 95.
5 Cleasby and Vigfusson, Icelandic-English Dictionary (1874), p. 280.
6 Elton, 101 ff.; 131 f. Neither of these is in Gollancz, since neither is part of the Hamlet story.
7 “If we have to have war, why can't we be as intelligent as they were back in the old days when each army chose its best swordsman and the two rival champions met in a clearing and battled to the death, with victory in the whole war going to the army whose champion won?” Robert St. John, From the Land of Silent People (N.Y., 1943), p. 282.
8 Elton, p. 104.
9 Elton, p. 103.
10 “… it was only by statute of George III [1818] that the judicial combat was finally put an end to as a form of legal procedure.” Shakespeare's England, ii, 404, note.
11 Encyclopedia Britannica (1926), viii, 797.
12 Shakespeare's England, ii, 404, note.
13 Contrast, for example, E. K. Chambers, ed. Hamlet (Boston, 1904), p. 125, with G. L. Kittredge, ed. Hamlet (Boston, 1939), p. 133.
14 Cf. E. C. Wilson, England's Elizabeth (Cambridge, Mass., 1939), p. 58.
15 A. W. Ward, A History of English Dramatic Literature (London, 1899), ii, 679, gives instances of such dramas. “Need we deny reading to ‘citizens and ‘prentices, the groundlings’? … I find the Elizabethan drama incomprehensible on such an assumption.” C. J. Sisson, Mod. Lang. Rev., xxxix (1944), 205.
16 Henry W. Wells, Elizabethan and Jacobean Playwrights (N.Y. 1939), p. 254.
17 For example, Kittredge, noting “the utterly comic fashion in which Hamlet disposes of the representatives of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern” [Brudermord, iv, i], remarks that “one can only hope that the author of the Ur-Hamlet is not chargeable with this device.” (ed. Hamlet, xi) But others have thought that it is certainly due to him. Parrott and Craig, in their edition of Hamlet (Princeton, 1938), held that this scene was due ultimately to Kyd, and that the pirate business was Shakespeare's deliberate alteration, probably suggested by the capture of Caesar by pirates in Plutarch. (p. 12) I pointed out (PMLA, lix, 53 ff.) that while this is entirely possible, the scene may not have come from Kyd, but have been written in by a reviser. Professor Parrott has recently reaffirmed his belief. (“Hamlet's Sea-Voyage—Bandits or Pirates? A Reply to Professor Lawrence,” Shaks. Association Bulletin, xix, April, 1944, 51-59.) His judgment is authoritative. But I cannot refrain from pointing out that where features in this scene do not suggest Kyd's work, he gets out of the difficulty by comfortably attributing them to the Teviser. Thus I suggested that Hamlet's remark that he will return to Denmark “by post” sounds more like the eighteenth century than the sixteenth. Mr. Parrott replies that this “may represent an addition by the reviser to take the place of an excised scene in the Ur-Hamlet which showed the Prince on his way home.” (p. 55) But that there was such a scene in Kyd's play, or that it was excised and this substituted, is pure hypothesis. Again, I observed that while the two villains on the island are called “bandits,” they are in another scene (m, x) called “attendants” (Diener), which may indicate two different writers. Mr. Parrott replies that the words “Bandit” and “Banditen” are “probably due to the reviser or even to a German copyist.” (p. 55) This seems to me argument to fit a theory. He thinks that Kyd would have found the sea-fight and the boarding of the pirate ship “difficult, if not impossible to present upon the Elizabethan stage.” (p. 56) But if Shakespeare could manage this by having it reported, why not Kyd? “And, further,” says Mr. Parrott, “if we accept Professor Lawrence's suggestion and attribute the intervention of the pirates to Kyd [I did not suggest that we make this attribution, but that it is a possibility to be considered], we must go on to suppose that the German reviser cancelled it and composed in its place the effective scene on the island so wholly in Kyd's style. This, frankly, seems quite impossible.” (p. 56) It does not seem to me at all impossible that some adapter, with his head full of Kyd, could have written this wretched stuff, and substituted it, in order to make the play more amusing, as was undoubtedly done elsewhere, by introducing a comic incident. “The source of this incident has been traced to Hans Sachs, and this scene may therefore be the work of the German author. The story was probably current; a variation of it occurs in Baron Munchausen, which draws most of its material from old German sources.” (H. D. Gray, Philol. Quarterly, vii [1928], 267) Professor Gray does not regard the question as settled, however; he notes that “the general tone of the incident is not impossible to the author of the Pedrigano [sic] sub-story in The Spanish Tragedy.” The fundamental issue is how far one may draw definite conclusions from the Brudermord. All that I maintain is that we should be cautious; probabilities may easily assume the color of facts.
18 Loc. cit., liii.
19 Under the circumstances, it is not surprising that the proper name Fortinbras has nothing Scandinavian about it. The best guess seems to be that it was taken from, or suggested by, some French prose romance, probably one of the late prose redactions. The list of proper names of the chansons de geste by Ernest Langlois, the most extensive onomasticon of mediæval romantic literature, does not show it, though this does contain Sanson Fortin. I am indebted to Professor C. H. Livingston of Bowdoin College for assistance on this point. Latham's suggestion (Athenaeum, 27 July, 1872, quoted by Furness, Variorum, i, 14) that Fortinbras is “a corrupt French form, equivalent to Fierumbras or Fierabras” seems likely enough, but his effort to equate it with Iarnsídha [sic], “a name actually applied to one of the old Norse Sea-kings,” does not seem worth serious consideration.
20 Reconstruction of a Lost Play,“ PQ, vii (1928), 254-274, esp. 261 ff.) It is said, without details or a reference, that ”in the last chapter of Belleforest the relationship of Hamlet and Fortinbras is mentioned.“ (263) I do not understand this; I cannot find in Belleforest any mention of Young Fortinbras whatever. Old Fortinbras, of course, appears as Collere. The odd remark in Amleth's speech after the burning of the hall, already referred to above, to the effect that Fengon gave the succession to the crown to ”quelque voleur estranger,“ certainly does not establish a relationship between Hamlet and Fortinbras.
A good deal is also made by Mr. Gray of the fact that the Ghost appears in armor. But he does not tell us why, if Shakespeare changed his mind about the armed vengeance, he again emphasized the armor in the second scene, in Hamlet's interview with Marcellus and Bernardo. (i, ii, 200, 226, 230, 255) Hamlet's comment seems sufficient explanation:
My father's spirit—in arms? All is not well.
I doubt some foul play.
The armor seems to mean merely that some wickedness is afoot that requires violent redress, not necessarily by war. A man put on armor for protection against any kind of bodily danger. “Foul play,” nowadays sometimes “specifically implying murder” (Webster's New International Dictionary, sub foul), has no such necessary implication in Shakespeare; it means any kind of underhand business. Prospero tells Miranda that thus were they banished from Milan. “By foul play … were we heav'd thence.” Of course Hamlet does not yet know of his uncle's crime when he uses the phrase.
21 Elton, p. 128, note; cf. also 104.
22 Op. cit., 297.
23 Introduction to Hamlet, quoted by Furness, Variorum, ii, 28. For a recent statement to the same general effect, see J. Q. Adams, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Boston and N. Y., 1929, 294-295. “Shakespeare had an important reason for creating [Fortinbras]; in his anxiety to make us understand the hero … he devised Fortinbras as a ‘foil’ to Hamlet.” Dr. Adams also emphasizes the points of resemblance between the two men. Whether Shakespeare or Kyd “created” Fortinbras is of course a question.
24 xii ff.
25 See Tucker Brooke, “Hamlet's Third Soliloquy,” SP, xiv (1917), 117-122; S. A. Tannenbaum, “Hamlet Prepares for Action,” ibid., 237-242.
26 Art and Artifice in Shakespeare (Cambridge, Eng., 1933), pp. 94-95. Chapter v of this book seems to me the clearest and most concise statement of his views in regard to Hamlet. He has very courteously, in private letters, given me further information, but I do not think I ought to draw upon those here.
27 PMLA, lix (1944), 65 ff.
28 Gollancz, pp. 116-117.
29 Aanti Arne and Stith Thompson, The Types of the Folk-Tale, in FF Communications, Vol. xxv, No. 74 (Helsinki, 1928), p. 184. Axel Olrik brilliantly demonstrated the importance of märchen in Saxo's pages.
30 For an analysis of this, see “Hamlet's Sea-Voyage,” PMLA, lix (1944), esp. 49 ff. Some repetition here of the arguments in that article appears unavoidable.
31 Gollancz, p. 194.
32 A. J. A. Waldock, Hamlet, a Study in Critical Method (Cambridge [England], 1931), p. 95. As I have not this book at hand, I am obliged to depend upon recollections, and upon Raven's bibliography for the quotation.
33 xxxv.
34 Boas, lxxxvii.
35 “Hamlet, the Prince or the Poem?” Proceedings of the British Academy, xxviii (1942), 15 ff. There will be general agreement with Mr. Lewis, however, that “those critics who solve the whole Hamlet problem by calling Hamlet a bad play” are not to be taken too seriously. As an illustration, he cites Mr. T. S. Eliot's dictum that the tragedy is “most certainly an artistic failure.” At this point the wise words attributed to Sir Thomas Hanmer (1736) may be pondered with profit. “We should be very cautious in finding fault with men of such an exalted genius as our author certainly was, lest we should blame them when in reality the fault lies in our own slow conception.”
36 In an excellent study, The Shape of Books to Come (New York, 1944), p. 129.
37 Halvdan Koht, The Life of Ibsen (New York, 1931), ii, 167.