Edition: HamletTales, Customs, and Learning
Adultery
Para1The charge of adultery against Gertrude and Claudius is coupled with the accusations
of incest and murder. At A1 Sc5, the Ghost inveighs against Claudius as
that incestuous, that adulterate beast(5). At A1 Sc5, the Ghost insists Hamlet not allow
the royal bed of Denmarkto be
a couch for luxury i.e., lechery and damnèd incest(5). At A3 Sc4, Hamlet indirectly questions his mother as to whether she could do such a thing
As kill a king, and marry with his brother(4). Her answer,
As kill a king?may suggest to him that she is at least not guilty of conspiring in the murder of her husband (A3 Sc4 Sp23).
Para2Once Hamlet Senior is dead, to be sure, Gertrude’s marriage to Claudius is, technically,
not adultery, but the audience is left to wonder whether an adulterous relationship
may have existed before the murder. Whereas the Ghost insists that Claudius’s intent
was adulterous, he instructs Hamlet to
leave her Gertrude to heaven / And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge / To prick and sting her,suggesting that the Ghost is willing to give her the benefit of the doubt (5). The play may leave the question unanswered, even if Hamlet’s reconciliation with his mother at the end may imply that he agrees with his dead father about her and forgives her.
Astronomy and Cosmology
Para3Renaissance poets, including Shakespeare and Milton, used the Ptolemaic earth-centered
universe as the basis for their imaginings about heavenly bodies, even though the
hypothesis of a solar system had been advanced by Copernicus in 1543. That idea was
not supported by experimental evidence until the discoveries of Galileo in the early
seventeenth century, and even then the idea was acutely controversial and condemned
by The Catholic Church.
Para4Ptolemaic astronomy is the basis for Hamlet’s love verse to Ophelia when he writes,
Doubt thou the stars are fire, / Doubt that the sun doth move, / Doubt truth to be a liar, / But never doubt I love(2). To doubt that the sun moves about the earth, he seems to say, is an impossibility equivalent to doubting my love for you. The idea that the stars are fire is also Ptolemaic.
Para5Ptolemy was a Greco-Egyptian astronomer and astrologer of Alexandria, Egypt, in the
second century CE, whose geocentric model of the universe prevailed as the orthodox
view until well into the Renaissance.
Para6In his scheme, the sun, the moon, the planets, and the fixed stars all circled around
the earth in their assigned orbits. Difficulties with the system, such as the occasional
retrograde movement especially of the outer planets, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, were
rationalized by the imposition of epicycles on the cyclical movements of these heavenly
bodies. Claudius, at A4 Sc7, compares his dependency on Gertrude as like
the starthat
moves not but in his sphere(7). Hamlet ironically expresses his amazement at the hyperbole of Laertes, who
Conjures the wand’ring stars i.e., the planets, and makes them stand,(i.e., remain stationary in their celestial paths) (1).
Bodkin, Rapier, Dagger, and Poniard
Para7A bare bodkin is an unsheathed dagger. A bodkin can also be a pointed instrument used
for piercing holes in cloth, etc. (OED bodkin, n.2), or a pin-shaped ornament used by women to fasten up the hair (n.3). Hamlet, in his
to be, or not to besoliloquy (A3 Sc1 Sp19 ff), ponders how he might settle his accounts at the end of his life with
a bare bodkin(1).
Branding Prostitutes
Para9Henry VIII’s government threatened, in 1513 and later in 1537, to brand prostitutes
and brothel keepers on the face as a badge of shame. At various times prostitutes
might be forbidden to wear aprons (tokens of marital respectability), or might have
their heads shaved, or their ears clipped, or their noses slit. These laws seem to
have been only fitfully enforced.
Para10The idea of imposing tokens of shame is of ancient lineage. Under Roman law, at one
time, prostitutes were forced to wear the toga mulierbris.
Hamlet, arraigning his mother of unfaithfulness and immodesty, inveighs against a
deed like adultery that
takes off the rose / From the fair forehead of an innocent love / And sets a blister there(4).
Laertes, returning in fury to Denmark after the death of his father, exclaims that
a failure on his part to revenge that death
proclaims me bastard, / Cries ‘Cuckold!ʼ to my father, brands the harlot / Even here between the chaste unsmirchèd brow / Of my true mother(5).
See also
Cuckoldry.
Cosmetics
Para11Shakespeare frequently echoes a common complaint in the literature of his day against
cosmetics. They are
paintings,as Hamlet avers at A3 Sc1, used by women to disguise their true appearance with artifice (A3 Sc1 Sp41).
God hath given you one face,he angrily declares to Ophelia,
and you make yourselves another(2).
Para12Similarly, they
nickname God’s creatures,imposing false names on the beasts and fowl created and named by God in his great act of creation described in Genesis chapters 1 and 2.
Cuckoldry
Para14Husbands whose wives cheated on them were known as cuckolds. They were supposedly
branded as such by a horn on the forehead, suspected by the wronged husband to be
all too plain for all to see, even though the horns were invisible.
Para15The term seems to have been derived from the cuckoo, a bird supposedly unfaithful
in mating. Some cuckoos do deposit their eggs in other birds’s nests. The cry of the
cuckoo was regarded as a satirical reproach to husbands unable to keep their wives
faithful to them. The image is vividly present in Othello.
Para16In Hamlet, the protagonist inveighs bitterly against marriage to Ophelia when she has returned
his love tokens to him.
marry a fool,he upbraids her,
for wise men know well enough what monsters you make of them(2). The monsters here are cuckolds.
Para17See also
Branding Prostitutes,and A4 Sc5 in Hamlet, where Laertes, returning in fury to Denmark after the death of his father, proclaims that failure on his part to revenge Polonius’s death
proclaims me bastard, / Cries ‘Cuckold!ʼ to my father(5).
Duelling
See
Quarrel, the.
Elective Monarchy
Para18The Denmark of this play appears to follow the pattern of an elective monarchy, in
which, on the death of a king, a successor is chosen by a select group of electors.
The Holy Roman Empire in the late Middle Ages and Early Modern period used this practice;
so does the papacy of today.
Para19The electors in Hamlet are never named, but presumably Polonius would have been of their number. Hamlet
seems to refer clearly to such a practice when he complains to Horatio that the hated
uncle, Claudius, has
Popped in between th’election and my hopes(2). As son of his dead royal father, Hamlet justly resents the fact that he has been supplanted by his uncle while he, Hamlet, was out of the kingdom; Hamlet is not mollified to hear Claudius name him
the most immediate to our throne(2). Thus, even though the Danish throne appears to be elective, the idea of inherited rule seems to have had some considerable weight in deliberations on the succession.
Para20Rosencrantz and Guildenstern wonder if Hamlet’s erratic behavior has been induced
by his disappointment over the succession. When they ask him about this, Hamlet twits
them by suggesting disingenuously that his
cause of distemperis owing to the fact that
I lack advancement.Rosencrantz is taken in by this reply.
How can that be,he shoots back,
when you have the voice of the King himself for your succession in Denmark?(A3 Sc2 Sp117–A3 Sc2 Sp119). The two compliant courtiers evidently cannot understand how a royal person who once enjoyed the title of crown prince and presumed heir to the former King Hamlet might now be impatient with thought that he should be content to wait for the death of his uncle before being permitted to mount the throne.
Para21Hamlet’s last act, as he lies dying, is to
prophesythat
th’election lights / On Fortinbras(2).
He has my dying voice,Hamlet adds, thereby ensuring, we must suppose, that his announcement has the same final and complete authority that Claudius had earlier attempted to muster when he proclaimed Hamlet
the most immediate to our throne(2). Who could venture to challenge Hamlet’s royal edict? Especially since no living alternative presents itself. This is Hamlet’s one act as King, if, as we can well suppose, the kingship passes from Claudius to him for a flickering moment. It is at least partly because Hamlet dies as
King Hamletthat he is to be accorded
The soldiers’s music and the rites of war(2).
Folded Arms
Para22When Hamlet instructs Horatio and the guard not to give away their secret knowledge
of the Ghosts’s visitations and of Hamlet’s
antic disposition,he does so by bidding them to be careful about what even their silent gestures might tell (5). They are not to act
With arms encumbered thus, or this headshake(5). Gestures speak as loudly as words, sometimes more so.
Para23Elsewhere, too, in Shakespeare and other Renaissance writers, folded arms are eloquent
linguistic signifiers of love sickness, as in Love’s Labor’s Lost, where Berowne wryly characterizes Cupid as
Regent of Loue-rimes, Lord of folded armes(3.1, TLN 947). By extension, the folding of arms in A1 Sc5 of Hamlet might well be a way of hinting to the observer that Hamlet is preoccupied with love melancholy.
Ghosts
Para24Ghost lore is especially vivid in Hamlet. The Ghost of Hamlet’s dead father acts in a number of noteworthy ways. When he appears
to the soldiers on watch and then to Horatio and Hamlet in A1 Sc1, A1 Sc4, and A1 Sc5, he wears the armor and headgear of the dead King, complete with a
beaveror visor that is up so that his face is visible (A1 Sc2 Sp55–A1 Sc2 Sp55).
Para25He makes his visitations in the mid of night, and must return to his ghostly dwelling
place before daybreak; the scent of
the morning’s air(5) and the
glow-wormshowing
the matin to be nearare signals that his time is up (5).
The cock crowsat 1, as a notice of the approach of day. The Ghost refuses to speak to anyone until Hamlet joins the watch in order to talk with him. In this matter the scene appears to reflect a commonly held belief that ghosts could not speak until spoken to; see A1 Sc4 (TLN 632) and the note.
Para26The Ghost cannot be struck or harmed by the soldiers with their partisans or long-handled
and broad-bladed spears; he is
as the air, invulnerable(1). He
stalksat 1, when Horatio attempts to talk with the Ghost; since Horatio is a
scholar(1), the soldiers reckon that he can do this, by which they presumably mean that as a scholar he must know Latin, a language necessary for so perilous and potentially demonic an assignment. Yet, the Ghost will not speak with Horatio either; what he has to say is for Hamlet’s ears only (1 ff).
Para27Often in production, Horatio and then Hamlet hold up a sword, with its hilt in the
form of a cross, to ward off evil. The Ghost is able to move quickly from place to
place, or indeed to seem to be everywhere at once: as Hamlet says, in Latin,
Hic et ubique? (“Here and everywhere”) at 5.Para28The effect of the Ghost’s visitation is so intense and graphic that it convinces the
skeptical Horatio that the Ghost is real; indeed, Horatio overcoming his skepticism
seems calculated to convince the audience that they are too looking at a real ghost.
Para29Whether ghosts were real or not was a much debated topic at the time the play was
written. King James IV of Scotland, soon to become King James I of England as well,
argued for the existence of demons and witches in his Demonology (1597) in reply to the skeptical arguments of Reginald Scot in The Discovery of Witchcraft (1584). The earlier Malleus Maleficarum or Hammer of the Witches (1486) offered instruction on how to identify witches and other evil spirits. Soon after
writing Hamlet, Shakespeare made use of Samuel Harsnett’s Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures (1603) as a source for the names of various devils like
Flibbertigibbet,
Modo,
Mahu,and
Smulkinin King Lear.
Para30In Hamlet, the Ghost is certainly real in dramatic terms: he appears before the audience, he
converses with his son, and he tells a powerful story of how he was murdered. But
even if real, is this an evil or a beneficent spirit? Hamlet himself voices his concern
that the spirit that he has seen
May be the devil, and the devil hath power / T’assume a pleasing shape(2), especially in the overraught and melancholic state of Hamlet’s mind, so that the question is one of real immediacy, but Hamlet is ultimately convinced, like his friend Horatio, that the Ghost is real and is telling a true story.
Para31The validity of that story is repeatedly tested, most of all by the play within the
play staged before the King, Queen and Court, where Claudius’s evidently guilty response
convinces Hamlet beyond any doubt:
I’ll take the Ghost’s word for a thousand pound,he says to Horatio, and Horatio agrees (A3 Sc2 Sp90–A3 Sc2 Sp91). As if that were not proof enough, we then hear the King in an attempt at prayer confessing fully to having committed
A brother’s murder(3).
Para32Since this crime is so fully confirmed, the Ghost’s account of the murder also comes
across as entirely plausible: how he was sleeping in his orchard as was his custom
of an afternoon, and how Claudius then stole upon him with
juice of cursèd hebona in a vial(5 ff), which the murderer then poured into the sleeping King’s ear.
Para33We learn further, without any contradiction as to the truth of the account, that the
Ghost is now
Doomed for a certain term to walk the night, / And for the day confined to fast in fires, / Till the foul crimesdone in his
days of nature / Are burnt and purged away(5). The Ghost does not name Purgatory, but this account, and the phrase
burnt and purged away,plainly point to the Catholic doctrine of purgatory (described more fully in a separate account under
Purgatory). The foul crimes for which the Ghost is in purgatory are most probably the sins that all humans practice: being proud, angry, gluttonous, and the like, and for which the now-dead King could not receive pardon and remission of his sins through last rites administered by the church, since he died suddenly without receiving that inestimable gift. Lacking that pardon, but guilty apparently only of pardonable sins rather than unpardonable
deadlyones, this Ghost must now do penance in purgatory
for a certain term.The effects of this are unspeakably horrifying, more than most human sensibilities can stand to hear, but they are at least limited in term.
Para34When the Ghost appears to Hamlet and Hamlet’s mother in A3 Sc4, he does not wear armor, at least according to the First Quarto text of the play,
where he enters
in his nightgown(4).
Para35He then, in all the early texts, speaks only to Hamlet and is seen and heard only
by him, despite the Queen’s puzzled and alarmed presence throughout this encounter.
This circumstance naturally breeds a skeptical response on her part that her son is
mad, but once again this skepticism seems introduced into the play to show an audience
how it can overcome any doubts it may still harbor about the reality of the Ghost.
Hamlet persuades his mother, and us, that he is sane. Evidently, then, ghosts can
accomplish this sort of selective visitation; examples in Renaissance ghost lore are
not hard to find.
Para36The Ghost’s reasons for behaving as he does are in a sense humanly plausible: he is
deeply disappointed in his former wife’s disloyalty to him and to his memory, and
accordingly he has nothing to say to her. He wants simply to remind Hamlet that the
duty of revenge is yet unfulfilled, and that Hamlet has seemingly disobeyed his father’s
instruction to
leave her Gertrude to heaven / And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge / To prick and sting her(5). Actually, it can be argued that Hamlet is doing precisely that. He has vowed that he will
speak daggers to her, but use none(2), intending not to harm her but to help her come to a realization of what she is doing by cohabiting with Claudius.
Para37It can be argued too that Hamlet succeeds with his mother. Hamlet asks her not to
give away his secret that the madness is a cover for his own safety, whereupon she
deliberately misinforms the King by saying that her son is
Mad as the sea and wind when both contend / Which is the mightier(1). Then, in the play’s final scene, she disobeys her husband by drinking the wine that ends her life.
Para38For all these reasons, the case seems plausible that the Ghost is really the Ghost
of the dead King Hamlet and that what he says about the murder is true.
Para39Throughout, the Ghost seemingly enters and exits through regular stage doors rather
than the trap door that the Globe Theater presumably featured in the stage floor.
Explicitly, the Ghost makes his last departure
out at the portal(4). No lighting effects were possible on the Globe stage for performance in the afternoon in an open-air arena theater; the scariness of the Ghost’s appearances, especially in A1 Sc1, A1 Sc4, and A1 Sc5, had to be achieved through costuming and gestures, and above all through Shakespeare’s powerfully poetic language. Was the audience to believe that they were seeing a real ghost? This is hard to say, but surely the intent was to make the business as scary as possible. The Ghost is theatrically real; he is there for the purposes of the play.
Para40The Ghost in Hamlet owes much to Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (1582 or later), and, through Kyd, to the tragedies of Seneca.
See
Senecaand
Trap Door.
Hair Standing On End
The Queen, astonished at Hamlet’s alarming appearance when, so far as she can tell,
he is bending his eye on vacancy and is holding discourse
with th’incorporal air,notes that his
bedded hair, like life in excrements,is starting up and standing on end (A3 Sc4 Sp39).
The description matches that of the Ghost at 1.5, who informs Hamlet that if he were
to be told the full horrors of purgatory, even the
lightest word / Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, / Make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres, / Thy knotted and combinèd locks to part, / And each particular hair to stand on end / Like quills upon the fretful porpentine(5).
The famous eighteenth-century actor David Garrick wore a trick wig that would enable
him to make his hair stand on end at the appropriate moment.
Hospitality
The affording of hospitality to strangers is an ancient and very sacred obligation,
strongly embedded in Homer’s Odyssey, for instance, and significant in Hamlet when Horatio, on the battlements, says of the Ghost’s appearance,
Oh, day and night, but this is wondrous strange,to which Hamlet replies,
And therefore as a stranger give it welcome(A1 Sc5 Sp59–5).
The idea is proverbial:
Give the stranger welcome(Dent S914.1).
Humors, the Theory of the Four
Para41Hippocratic medicine, as formulated especially by Galen of Pergamon (130–200 CE),
proposed that the human body contained four essential humors: blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm. The right balance of these four was
essential to maintaining good health.
Para42An overbalance of one of these individual humors would produce, respectively, a temperament
that was sanguine, or choleric, or melancholic, or phlegmatic. The sanguine temperament
was hot and moist, choleric hot and dry, melancholic cold and dry, phlegmatic cold
and moist.
Sanguine was associated with air, choleric with fire, melancholic with earth, and
phlegmatic with water.
A sanguine person tended to be lively, carefree, easygoing, talkative, outgoing, and
sociable; a choleric person might be impulsive, aggressive, angry, restless, touchy,
and excitable; a melancholic person might be unsociable, reserved, pessimistic, moody,
despondent, depressed, anxious, and rigid; a phlegmatic person tended to be controlled,
passive, careful, thoughtful, and even-tempered.
Sanguine and choleric both tended to be extroverted; whereas, melancholic and phlegmatic
were introverted.
Sanguine was associated with springtime and infancy, choleric with summer and youth,
melancholic with autumn and full maturity, phlegmatic with winter and old age.
The heart predominated in the sanguine, the liver or gall bladder in the choleric,
the spleen in the melancholic, and the brain in the phlegmatic.
Medical practice for centuries relied on purging the body to rid it of humoral imbalance,
by bleeding or by inducing vomiting or evacuation of the bowels—a treatment that could
prove fatal.
Incest, Incestuous
Para43As Claude Lévi-Strauss has argued in his The Elementary Structures of Kinship, 1969 (Structures élémentaires de la parenté, 1949), incest is not an invariable taboo but one that takes various forms in different
cultures. In Egypt in Cleopatra’s time, for example, brothers and sisters of the royal
family not infrequently married.
Para44Judaeo-Christian tradition, on the other hand, forbade a man to marry his brother’s
wife, as proscribed by Leviticus 18:16:
Thou shalt not discover the shame of thy brother’s wife(along with the same forbidding of sexual contact with father, mother, father’s wife, sister, daughter-in-law, aunt, uncle, sister-in-law, etc.), and Leviticus 20:21:
So the man that taketh his brother’s wife, committeth filthiness.The Anglican Book of Common Prayer in sixteenth-century England adopted this rule for The Church of England. Henry VIII’s marriage with Katharine of Aragon, the widow of Henry’s dead older brother Arthur, was hotly contested. Rome’s refusal to accept the marriage as legitimate led eventually to England’s Reformation break with Rome.
Para45The marriage of Claudius and Gertrude in Hamlet violates the Leviticus rule. Although this action is imagined to take place in Denmark
in former times, the negative attitude of the Protestant English church toward marriage
with a deceased brother’s wife seems to have been carried over into Shakespeare’s
play, at least in the view of Hamlet and of his father’s Ghost, both of whom repeatedly
condemn the marriage as incestuous. See 2, 5, 5, 3, and 2.
Para46Oedipus’s unknowing marriage, in Sophocles’s play, to his deceased father’s wife is
clearly incestuous, since Jocasta is Oedipus’s mother.
Para47The distress over the marriage of Claudius and Gertrude in Hamlet is similar to the brouhaha over marriage with a deceased wife’s sister that intermittently
tied British Parliaments into knots from 1835 to 1907. The Queen of the Fairies in
Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe (1882) announces balefully that Strephon is to descend on Parliament and to
prick that annual blister, / Marriage with deceased wife’s sister.(See Cynthia Fansler Behrman,
The Annual Blister: A Sidelight on Victorial Social and Parliamentary History.)
Para48Marriage of a man with his deceased brother’s wife, or with his deceased wife’s sister,
is not likely to excite much controversy today, but we must understand that feelings
on the subject could at times run high. The problem in the nineteenth century, among
those who supported the ban on marriage with a deceased wife’s sister, was that many
an unmarried sister lived at that time with her married sister and that sister’s husband,
providing supposedly a temptation for the man if he tired of his marriage, to do away
with his wife in favor of the sister, or similarly a temptation for the unmarried
sister to do away with her married sister in order to gain a husband.
Para49The mirror-image situation in Hamlet, of marriage with a deceased brother’s wife, has led to a similar temptation: Claudius
has murdered his brother in part to obtain his brother’s wife. When looked at in this
perspective—and that is certainly the way Hamlet and his father look at the matter—the
word incestuous begins to resonate with powerful emotions. Hamlet is outraged by his mother’s precipitous
marriage with her dead husband’s brother, a union that Hamlet and his father both
brand as incestuous, and for similarly intense feelings.
The Book of Common Prayer lists the relationships,
Degrees of Separation,which were considered too close to permit of marriage (
Table of Kindred and Affinity,320).
Leprosy
Para50The Ghost in A1 Sc5 describes as
lazarlikethe horrible
tetterthat covered his body as a result of having been poisoned by the
leperous distilmentpoured in his ears (5). The Gospel according to St. John 11 describes how Lazarus
had lain in his grave four days,so that his corpse was stinking. The adjective lazarlike in A1 Sc5 makes clear the connection between lazar and leprosy (5).
Lepra in Latin means “scaly”.
The disfiguring disease was much feared in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, leading
to the establishment of leper houses and colonies.
Melancholy
Para51Hamlet lends verbal support to those critics who take him to be suffering from melancholy
when he worries that the devil may be able to catch him at a fatal disadvantage
Out of my weakness and my melancholy.The devil, he knows, is
very potent with such spirits(2). Claudius is thus not wrong when he diagnoses Hamlet’s erratic behavior as lacking form
a littlebut still not
like madness.
There’s something in his soul / O’er which his melancholy sits on brood,Claudius concludes (1).
Para52Conversely, Polonius has complacently come to the conclusion that Hamlet is afflicted
by a sadness and eventually a madness as a result of his overtures of love having been repulsed by Ophelia at her father’s
bidding (A2 Sc2 Sp28). Polonius believes that his powers of observation are drawn from his own experience:
truly, in my youth I suffered much extremity for love, very near this(2). His definition of madness is so reductive as to invite satirical laughter.
Mad call I it,he pontificates,
for to define true madness, / What is’t but to be nothing else but mad?(2).
Para53Gertrude has no doubt of what is troubling her son:
I doubt it is no other but the main,she says to her new husband,
His father’s death, and our o’erhasty marriage(A2 Sc2 Sp15).
Para54Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have their own view, based similarly on their own personal
experiences: Hamlet is immensely frustrated by finding that he is stymied in his desire
for political power and title. Hamlet, sensing this in them, twits them with the idea.
Sir, I lack advancement,he says to Rosencrantz, eliciting from that young man the ingenuous reply that Hamlet had hoped to encourage:
How can that be, when you have the voice of the King himself for your succession in Denmark?(A3 Sc2 Sp118–A3 Sc2 Sp119).
Para55All of these responses presumably contain some element of truth, but are simplistic
to the point of gross distortion. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern play on Hamlet as one
might play on a recorder, he insists, without understanding how vastly more complex
the analysis is of any human being. Hamlet’s act of madness does of course complicate
the distinction between melancholy and madness. As Polonius observes,
Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t(2).
How pregnant sometimes his replies are! A happiness that often madness hits on, which reason and sanity could not so prosperously be delivered of(2). Rosencrantz and Guildenstern suspect
a crafty madnessthrough which Hamlet keeps aloof from them (1).
Para56Claudius is closest of all in sensing that Hamlet’s act of madness is a cover for
something far more dangerous to the King, and he is perfectly adept at using Hamlet’s
presumed madness to the King’s advantage: he can banish a person whose behavior is
threatening to the crown.
Madness in great ones must not unwatched go,he avers, as he pronounces his plan to send Hamlet to England or to some sort of confinement (1). This is especially critical after the play within the play, when the King informs Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that it does not stand
safe with us / To let his madness range(3).
Para57To his mother, on the other hand, Hamlet is careful to insist that his behavior is
not in fact mad. When she tries to attribute his talking to his father’s spirit, which
she has not been able to hear and to madness, to
the very coinage of your brain,he protests,
Mother, for love of grace, / Lay not that flattering unction to your soul / That not your trespass but my madness speaks(A3 Sc4 Sp47–4).
Para58It can be argued that as a theatrical convention, actual madness is conveyed in Renaissance
drama by the inability of the affected person to realize with whom she or he is speaking.
The protagonist in King Lear, after he has said to Kent and the Fool,
My wits begin to turn(Lr 9.63), offers a notable instance. He solemnly addresses the disguised Edgar and the Fool as
most learned justiceand
sapient sir(Lr 13.16–17), calling on them to act as judges at the trial of Lear’s daughters. He thereupon arraigns a footstool as if she were in fact his daughter Goneril (Lr 13.39). Meantime, Edgar knowingly uses the disguise of poor Tom o’ Bedlam to avoid arrest and execution at the hands of his father, repeatedly assuring us as the audience that he is aware of what he is doing.
Para59This stage distinction between actual loss of sanity and pretended madness applies
no less well in Hamlet to Ophelia and Hamlet, even if we grant that Hamlet’s melancholy is at times so deep
as to prompt very aberrant behavior.
Para60Hamlet’s use of madness as a disguise owes something in literary and historical terms
to Lucius Junius Brutus, legendary founder of Rome, who used a disguise of madness
to throw off his enemies, the Tarquins.
No Hat Upon His Head
Gentlemen customarily wore hats indoors. Compare, for example, Hamlet’s teasing of
Osric about doffing his hat in A5 Sc2:
Put your bonnet to his right use. ’Tis for the head(2).
Hamlet’s appearance to Ophelia in her
closetor private chamber with
No hat upon his headis as bizarre to Ophelia and her father as his ungartered stockings that have tumbled about his ankles (A2 Sc1 Sp30).
Out of the Air
The open air was widely regarded as toxic and dangerous, especially for those who
were not well.
When Hamlet, assuming a pose of madness to confuse Polonius, is bid by that old man
to
walk out of the air,Hamlet replies,
Into my grave,prompting Polonius to reflect to himself that
Indeed, that’s out of the air. How pregnant sometimes his replies are!(2–2). The air is associated with death and burial.
Compare to the following:
Twelfth Night,
Methought she purged the air of pestilence(TN 1.1.19), and
lest the device take air and taint(TN 3.4.110).
2 Henry VI,
He shall not breathe infection in this air(2H6 11.275), and
Breathe foul contagious darkness in the air(2H6 13.8).
Macbeth,
Hover through the fog and filthy air(Mac 1.1.10), and
Infected be the air whereon they ride(Mac 4.1.137).
Pelican
The female pelican was credited, in medieval and Renaissance bestiaries, with great
capacity in caring for her young, to the point of plucking blood from her own breast
to feed her young when other sustenance was unavailable. For this reason the bird
became a symbol of the great sacrifice that Christ made in his Passion of dying for
humankind.
Queen Elizabeth made the pelican a symbol of her self-devotion to her country.
In Hamlet, Laertes alludes to this myth by way of explaining to the King how he differentiates
his friends from his enemies:
To his his dead father’s good friends thus wide I’ll ope my arms, / And, like the kind life-rend’ring pelican, / Repast them with my blood(A4 Sc5 Sp47).
Pigeon-Livered
Pigeons, because of their mild demeanor and soft voices, were associated with marital
amity and, more negatively, with cowardice.
The theory of the four humors assumed that the livers of pigeons secreted no gall
or bile, the bitter tasting dark-green-to-yellowish fluid thought to produce rancor,
bitterness, and arrogance resulting in the dry and hot
humorof choler.
Hamlet, in soliloquy at A2 Sc2, frets that he must be
pigeon-liveredsince he is not proceeding more expeditiously to carry out his father’s commandment of revenge (2).
See also
Quintessencein Religion and Philosophy.
Pioneers, Mines, and Countermines
Para61When Hamlet playfully refers to his father’s spirit, calling from the
celleragebeneath the main stage and moving from spot to spot, as like an
old molethat can
work i’ th’ earth so fast,and hence a
worthy pioneer(A1 Sc5 Sp58), he alludes to the practice of digging mines and countermines in Elizabethan warfare.
Para62Pioneers were foot soldiers of low rank who were assigned the burdensome and dirty
task of digging mines or tunnels, often at a siege of a city or castle. Such tunnels
could be dug under the enemy’s emplacements to blow them up suddenly or to gain access
to the place being assaulted. Countermines could be dug as a defensive measure, offering
one side the means of intercepting the mines of the enemy with their own mines.
Para63Hamlet explicitly invokes the mentioned practice when he assures his mother that he
will outwit Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in their attempt to escort him to England;
he will
delve one yard below their mines, / And blow them at the moon(4). Here, Hamlet describes the strategy of countermining. In doing so he also uses the term
enginer,or engineer, meaning one who devises engines of war such as mines and bombs. For Hamlet,
’tis sport to have the enginer / Hoised with his own petard(4), i.e., blown up by the very explosive devices he has created and deployed. Hamlet sees himself and Claudius as two canny contestants each warily trying to outwit the other.
Poison
The Italians, in the Renaissance, were credited with having devised ingenious means
of murder through poisoning.
The Ghost describes in exquisite detail how he was murdered by his brother: stealing
upon his sleeping victim in his orchard in the afternoon, pouring
hebonainto
the porches of my ears,and thus causing the
leperous distillmentto course through
The natural gates and alleys of the bodyas
swift as quicksilver,curding
The thin and wholesome blooduntil
a most
vile and loathsome
tetter barked aboutHamlet Senior’s
smooth body(5).
In other Renaissance plays as well, by Thomas Middleton and others, we encounter such
ingenious devices as a painted portrait smeared invisibly with poison so that Isabella,
long-suffering wife of the Duke of Bracciano, will die when she kisses a portrait
of him in an act of devotion (John Webster’s The White Devil).
Not much is known about the hebona that is mentioned in Hamlet. It may be related to henbane or black henbane or stinking nightshade, Hyoscayamus
niger, a poisonous plant used sometimes in combination with mandrake and deadly nightshade.
It is likely that hen originally meant “death”.
In Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, Barabas refers to
the juice of hebon,along with the draft of poison that killed Alexander, the
Borgia’s winethat poisoned a pope,
the blood of Hydra, Lerna’s bane,
poisons of the Styygian pool,and other dire concoctions (Marlowe 3.4.97–102).
Quarrel, the
Quarreling among gentlemen was governed by a system of punctilious etiquette in the
Renaissance, and indeed earlier as well. An insult had to be answered by a challenge,
usually to a duel, and a challenge had to be accepted.
Touchstone, in As You Like It, satirizes seven stages of quarreling, from the
Retort Courteousand the
Quip Modestto the
Lie with Circumstanceand the
Lie Direct(AYL 5.4.64–73).
Polonius, in Hamlet, presumes that his son Laertes, in Paris, knows how to conduct himself in matters
of
drinking, fencing, swearing, / Quarreling, drabbing(1). All are allowable and even admirable in young men of spirit so long as those behaviors are not carried to excess.
In soliloquy, Hamlet berates himself for cowardice by imagining how he would respond
to a challenge:
Am I a coward? / Who calls me villain? Breaks my pate across? / Plucks off my beard and blows it in my face? / Tweaks me by the nose? Gives me the lie i’th’ throat / As deep as to the lungs? Who does me this […] ?(2).
Hamlet cringes at the very thought of mildly accepting such insults, all of them deeply
personal affronts that no gentleman could endure without challenging the offender
to a duel.
The matter comes up again in A5 Sc2 when Osric conveys to Hamlet a challenge to a gentlemanly duel from Laertes. Hamlet
does not consider saying No a possible response, even when Horatio urges him to reconsider if his mind misgives
him (A5 Sc2 Sp81–A5 Sc2 Sp90).
Duels might be fought with rapier and dagger, such as those mentioned by Osric at
2, or the foils employed at 2. Foils were light fencing swords, usually with a circular guard to protect the hand
and a flexible blade tapered to a point that could be blunted with a button; a foil
lacking such a blunted point was said to be
Unbated(2).
The word foil could also refer to a thin metal background used to set off and enhance the brilliance
of a jewel or similar valuable object.
When Hamlet says to Laertes,
I’ll be your foil, Laertes(2), he punningly and self-deprecatingly suggests that he will show Laertes to advantage by proving to be less skillful than he in fencing.
Revenge
Para66Revenge was presumably well known and practiced in prehistoric times. By the time
it emerges in history and in literary accounts, it appears to have its own well-established
rules and traditions of a code with its own ethical dimensions. The murder of a family
member must be avenged by a relative of the deceased against the family or clan that
committed the murder, in the code of an eye for an eye.
Para67Principled objection to the code of revenge is no less insistent. Confucian wisdom
warns,
Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.Marcus Aurelius insists that
The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury.John Ford writes that
Revenge is its own executioner.Mahatma Gandhi’s view is that
An eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind.A major problem always is that since an act of revenge will trigger an opposite act of revenge by the aggrieved clan or family, feuding can go on indefinitely.
Para68Revenge is a staple of fifth-century BCE Greek tragedy. In Aeschylus’s The Oresteia, Clytemnestra revenges her husband’s sacrifice of their daughter Iphigeneia by slaughtering
him, whereupon the duty of revenging this death falls on their son Orestes, who does
indeed kill his mother, but with the support finally of Apollo. When the matter is
brought to trial, Athene decides the case in favor of Orestes, while at the same time
offering the vengeful Eumenides an honorable place in Athenian culture. The ending
thus implicitly endorses Athens’s jury system in place of the older code of revenge,
which seemed to offer no hope of ending. The revengeful conflict of an earlier generation
between Atreus and his brother Thyestes had its roots in the tragic history of the
house of Pelops, son of Tantalus, whose father killed him and served his flesh to
the gods in a banquet, thereby motivating the gods to punish this presumption.
Para69Shakespeare vividly portrays the disastrous reciprocity of revenge in his Titus Andronicus (1589–1592), in which Titus himself is finally driven to the vengeance against his enemies with
which the play ends. This play owed its inspiration in part to Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (early 1580s), a hugely successful revenge tragedy that seems to have done much to inspire a whole
generation of revenge plays.
Para70A lost play called Hamlet appears to have been written and performed in the early 1590s. And Shakespeare’s
own Hamlet, written around 1600, is clearly a revenge tragedy, and yet it significantly departs
from the pattern seen in others of the genre in that Hamlet acts at last not out of
cunning revenge but in the unforeseen circumstances of a fatal duel after he has decided
to let Providence steer his course.
Para71In The Merchant of Venice, Shylock defends his right to do execution on Antonio according to his bond by saying,
of his Christian persecutors,
if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?(MV 3.1.49–50). This argument is countered by Portia’s insistence that
The quality of mercy is not strained(MV 4.1.178 ff), so that the desire for vengeance is not vindicated in this problematic romantic comedy. But other plays on the London Renaissance stage do make dramatic capital out of revenge, even if it is sometimes finally punished: The Revenger’s Tragedy, The Atheist’s Tragedy, Women Beware Women, etc.
Para72The word
revengeoccurs frequently in Hamlet. The Ghost tells his son that he is bound to
revengewhen he has heard the Ghost’s tale of him being murdered and dwelling now in purgatory (A1 Sc5 Sp8). Hamlet replies that he yearns passionately to
sweep to my revenge(5). Also, in soliloquy, after hearing the recital of the death of Priam and the sorrow of Hecuba, Hamlet speaks of himself as
Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell(2). He then acknowledges his own nature to be
very proud, revengeful(1).
Para73When the play-within-the-play of
The Murder of Gonzagois about to begin, Hamlet prompts the actor playing the murderer Lucianus by saying,
Come, the croaking raven doth bellow for revenge(2).
Para74When Hamlet has an opportunity to kill Claudius at prayer, he hesitates for fear that
he might send the man’s soul to heaven:
And so am I revenged(3).
Para75In his soliloquy prompted by what he has learned of Fortinbras’s forthright actions
in Poland, Hamlet laments of himself,
How all occasions do inform against me, / And spur by dull revenge!(4).
Para76The word is important to Laertes too, as when he vows to the King:
Let come what comes, only I’ll be revenged / Most throughly for my father(5). Of his sister’s madness, Laertes comments,
Hadst thou thy wits, and didst persuade revenge, / It could not move thus(5). He vows that
my revenge will come(7), and speaks of it again when he is about to duel with Hamlet (2). Laertes remains committed to revenge until he learns too late that he has been led into a trap by the King. Hamlet meantime has learned how deeply the idea of revenge is riddled by paradoxes and impossible contradictions.
Sanctuary
Para77The church could provide sanctuary for persons seeking to escape arrest and prosecution
for alleged criminal offenses. When Laertes angrily declares that he will show his
resolution to revenge his father’s death by undertaking
To cut his Hamlet’s throat i’th’ church,Claudius replies that
No place, indeed, should murder sanctuarize(A4 Sc7 Sp31–7).
Para78Compare this to Richard III, where the Duke of Buckingham manages to bully the Lord Cardinal into denying sanctuary
to the young King Edward V and his brother Richard on the grounds of their being underage
(R3 3.1.44–56).
Saint Valentines Day
Para79This day, known also as the feast of Saint Valentine and observed on February 14,
is named after Saint Valentine who, according to legend, was imprisoned for performing
weddings for soldiers, who were not allowed to marry. While in prison he healed the
daughter of his jailer, Asterius, to whom he purported wrote a letter signed
Your Valentine,as a farewell before he was executed.
The day has been associated with romantic love since the fourteenth century.
Ophelia is thinking of this legend when she sings of
Saint Valentine’s Daywhen the singer longs
To be your Valentine(5).
Snakes and Serpents
At A1 Sc5, The Ghost’s description of
The serpent that did sting thy father’s lifereflects a common supposition that snakes and serpents attacked their prey by stinging, rather than by biting and injecting venom through the tooth (5).
The iconography of snakes and serpents recalls the role of the serpent in the book
of Genesis, chapter 3, who tempts Eve to eat of the forbidden fruit.
Claudius, in the view of his dead brother’s Ghost, is such a serpent.
Springes to Catch Woodcocks
Woodcocks, popular game birds, were notorious in legend for being gullible and hence
easily caught in a springe or trap. The reputation for gullibility may have been owing to their brown-mottled
coloration that provided a superb camouflage for hiding in leaf litter. A springe
is a noose or snare for catching small game.
Polonius, when he speaks of
springes to catch woodcocks(3), means that Hamlet is laying a trap for Ophelia in order to rob her of her virginity.
Prosopography
Bryan Valdes
David Bevington
David Bevington was the Phyllis Fay Horton Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus
in the Humanities at the University of Chicago. His books include From
Mankindto Marlowe (1962), Tudor Drama and Politics (1968), Action Is Eloquence (1985), Shakespeare: The Seven Ages of Human Experience (2005), This Wide and Universal Theater: Shakespeare in Performance, Then and Now (2007), Shakespeare’s Ideas (2008), Shakespeare and Biography (2010), and Murder Most Foul: Hamlet Through the Ages (2011). He was the editor of Medieval Drama (1975), The Bantam Shakespeare, and The Complete Works of Shakespeare. The latter was published in a seventh edition in 2014. He was a senior editor of the Revels Student Editions, the Revels Plays, The Norton Anthology of Renaissance Drama, and The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson (2012). Professor Bevington passed away on August 2, 2019.
Donald Bailey
Eric Rasmussen
Eric Rasmussen is Regents Teaching Professor and Foundation Professor of English at
the University of Nevada. He is co-editor with Sir Jonathan Bate of the RSC William Shakespeare Complete Works and general editor, with Paul Werstine, of the New Variorum Shakespeare. He has received the Falstaff Award from PlayShakespeare.com for Best Shakespearean Book of the Year in 2007, 2012, and 2013.
James D. Mardock
James Mardock is Associate Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Associate
General Editor for the Internet Shakespeare Editions, and a dramaturge for the Lake
Tahoe Shakespeare Festival and Reno Little Theater. In addition to editing quarto
and folio Henry V for the ISE, he has published essays on Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and other Renaissance
literature in The Seventeenth Century, Ben Jonson Journal, Borrowers and Lenders, and contributed to the collections Representing the Plague in Early Modern England (Routledge 2010) and Shakespeare Beyond Doubt (Cambridge 2013). His book Our Scene is London (Routledge 2008) examines Jonson’s representation of urban space as an element in
his strategy of self-definition. With Kathryn McPherson, he edited Stages of Engagement (Duquesne 2013), a collection of essays on drama in post-Reformation England, and
he is currently at work on a monograph on Calvinism and metatheatrical awareness in
early modern English drama.
Janelle Jenstad
Janelle Jenstad is a Professor of English at the University of Victoria, Director
of The Map of Early Modern London, and Director of Linked Early Modern Drama Online. With Jennifer Roberts-Smith and Mark Beatrice Kaethler, she co-edited Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media: Old Words, New Tools (Routledge). She has edited John Stow’s A Survey of London (1598 text) for MoEML and is currently editing The Merchant of Venice (with Stephen Wittek) and Heywood’s 2 If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody for DRE. Her articles have appeared in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Elizabethan Theatre, Early Modern Literary Studies, Shakespeare Bulletin, Renaissance and Reformation, and The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. She contributed chapters to Approaches to Teaching Othello (MLA); Teaching Early Modern Literature from the Archives (MLA); Institutional Culture in Early Modern England (Brill); Shakespeare, Language, and the Stage (Arden); Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate); New Directions in the Geohumanities (Routledge); Early Modern Studies and the Digital Turn (Iter); Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers (Indiana); Making Things and Drawing Boundaries (Minnesota); Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study: Audiences, Authors, and Digital Technologies (Routledge); and Civic Performance: Pageantry and Entertainments in Early Modern London (Routledge). For more details, see janellejenstad.com.
Jasmeen Boparai
Joey Takeda
Joey Takeda is LEMDO’s Consulting Programmer and Designer, a role he assumed in 2020
after three years as the Lead Developer on LEMDO.
Kate LeBere
Project Manager, 2020–2021. Assistant Project Manager, 2019–2020. Textual Remediator
and Encoder, 2019–2021. Kate LeBere completed her BA (Hons.) in History and English
at the University of Victoria in 2020. During her degree she published papers in The Corvette (2018), The Albatross (2019), and PLVS VLTRA (2020) and presented at the English Undergraduate Conference (2019), Qualicum History
Conference (2020), and the Digital Humanities Summer Institute’s Project Management
in the Humanities Conference (2021). While her primary research focus was sixteenth
and seventeenth century England, she completed her honours thesis on Soviet ballet
during the Russian Cultural Revolution. She is currently a student at the University
of British Columbia’s iSchool, working on her masters in library and information science.
Martin Holmes
Martin Holmes has worked as a developer in the UVic’s Humanities Computing and Media
Centre for over two decades, and has been involved with dozens of Digital Humanities
projects. He has served on the TEI Technical Council and as Managing Editor of the
Journal of the TEI. He took over from Joey Takeda as lead developer on LEMDO in 2020.
He is a collaborator on the SSHRC Partnership Grant led by Janelle Jenstad.
Michael Best
Michael Best is Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, BC. He is the Founding
Editor of the Internet Shakespeare Editions, of which he was the Coordinating Editor
until 2017. In print, he has published editions of works of Elizabethan magic and
huswifery, a collection of letters from the Australian goldfields, and Shakespeare on the Art of Love (2008). He contributed regular columns for the Shakespeare Newsletter on
Electronic Shakespeares,and has written many articles and chapters for both print and online books and journals, principally on questions raised by the new medium in the editing and publication of texts. He has delivered papers and plenary lectures on electronic media and the Internet Shakespeare Editions at conferences in Canada, the USA, the UK, Spain, Australia, and Japan.
Navarra Houldin
Training and Documentation Lead 2025–present. LEMDO project manager 2022–2025. Textual
remediator 2021–present. Navarra Houldin (they/them) completed their BA with a major
in history and minor in Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. Their primary
research was on gender and sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America. They
are continuing their education through an MA program in Gender and Social Justice
Studies at the University of Alberta where they will specialize in Digital Humanities.
Rae S. Rostron
Rae is studying a BA in English Literature at Durham University. She is particularly
interested in representations of grief and trauma in literature and is currently researching
femicide in the novel. Rae has interned for Creative Media Agency (NYC) and is an
acting student researcher for King College London’s Psychology Department exploring
loneliness in students.
Tracey El Hajj
Junior Programmer 2019–2020. Research Associate 2020–2021. Tracey received her PhD
from the Department of English at the University of Victoria in the field of Science
and Technology Studies. Her research focuses on the algorhythmics of networked communications. She was a 2019–2020 President’s Fellow in Research-Enriched
Teaching at UVic, where she taught an advanced course on
Artificial Intelligence and Everyday Life.Tracey was also a member of the Map of Early Modern London team, between 2018 and 2021. Between 2020 and 2021, she was a fellow in residence at the Praxis Studio for Comparative Media Studies, where she investigated the relationships between artificial intelligence, creativity, health, and justice. As of July 2021, Tracey has moved into the alt-ac world for a term position, while also teaching in the English Department at the University of Victoria.
William Shakespeare
Bibliography
Behrman, Cynthia Fansler.
The Annual Blister: A Sidelight on Victorian Social and Parliamentary History.Victorian Studies 11.4 (1968): 483–502.
Bourus, Terri, ed. The Winter’s Tale. By William Shakespeare. The New Oxford Shakespeare. Ed. Gary Taylor, John Jowett, Terri Bourus, and Gabriel Egan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. 2893–2973. WSB aaag2304.
Connor, Francis X., ed. As You Like It. By William Shakespeare. The New Oxford Shakespeare. Ed. Gary Taylor, John Jowett, Terri Bourus, and Gabriel Egan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. 1689–1755. WSB aaag2304.
Connor, Francis X., ed. The Tragedy of Coriolanus. By William Shakespeare. The New Oxford Shakespeare. Ed. Gary Taylor, John Jowett, Terri Bourus, and Gabriel Egan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. 2723–2813. WSB aaag2304.
Gilbert, W.S., and Sullivan, Arthur. Iolanthe. 1882.
Harsnett, Samuel. A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures. London: James Roberts, 1603. STC 12880. ESTC S120922.
James VI and I. Daemonologie, in forme of a dialogue, diuided into three bookes. Edinburgh: Robert Waldgrave, 1597. STC 14364. ESTC S107574.
Jowett, John, ed. King Lear and his Three Daughters.
By William Shakespeare. The New Oxford Shakespeare. Ed.
Gary Taylor, John
Jowett, Terri Bourus, and
Gabriel Egan.
Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2016.
2347–2433. WSB aaag2304.
Jowett, John, ed. The Tragedy of Macbeth. By
William Shakespeare and
Thomas Middleton. The New Oxford Shakespeare. Ed.
Gary Taylor, John
Jowett, Terri Bourus, and
Gabriel Egan.
Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2016.
2501–2565. WSB aaag2304.
Jowett, John, ed. The Tragedy of Richard the Third.
By William Shakespeare. The New Oxford Shakespeare. Ed.
Gary Taylor, John
Jowett, Terri Bourus, and
Gabriel Egan.
Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2016.
543–638. WSB aaag2304.
Kramer, Heinrich. Malleus maleficarum. Speyer: Peter Drach, 1486–1487.
Loughnane, Rory, ed. The Comical History of the Merchant of Venice; or, The Jew of Venice. By William Shakespeare. The New Oxford Shakespeare. Ed. Gary Taylor, John Jowett, Terri Bourus, and Gabriel Egan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. 1207–1273. WSB aaag2304.
Loughnane, Rory, ed. The Second Part of Henry the Sixth; or, The First Part of the Contention. By William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe. The New Oxford Shakespeare. Ed. Gary Taylor, John Jowett, Terri Bourus, and Gabriel Egan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. 251–330. WSB aaag2304.
Loughnane, Rory, ed. Twelfth Night; or, What you Will. By William Shakespeare. The New Oxford Shakespeare. Ed. Gary Taylor, John Jowett, Terri Bourus, and Gabriel Egan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. 1827–1889. WSB aaag2304.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Les structures élémentaires de la parenté. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1949.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Trans. James Harle Bell, John Richard von Sturmer, and Rodney Needham. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1969.
Marlowe, Christopher. The Jew of Malta. Ed. N.W. Bawcutt. Revels Plays. Manchester: Manchester University Press; rpt. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1978.
OED: The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.
Pruitt, Anna, ed. The Tragedy of King Richard the Second. By William Shakespeare. The New Oxford Shakespeare. Ed. Gary Taylor, John Jowett, Terri Bourus, and Gabriel Egan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. 847–922. WSB aaag2304.
Shakespeare, William. The most lamentable Romaine tragedie of
Titus Andronicus.
London: John
Danter, 1594. STC 22328. ESTC S106004. DEEP 171.
The Book of Common Prayer. Oxford: University Press for the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1901.
Webster, John. The white divel, or, The Tragedy of Paulo Giordano Vrsini, Duke of Brachiano, With
The Life and Death of Vittoria Corombona the famous Venetian Curtizan. London: Printed by Nicholas Okes for Thomas Archer, 1612. STC 25178. Greg 306a. ESTC S111501. DEEP 583.
Orgography
Internet Shakespeare Editions (ISE1)
The Internet Shakespeare Editions (ISE) was a major digital humanities project created
by Emeritus Professor Michael Best at the University of Victoria. The ISE server was retired in 2018 but a final staticized HTML version of the Internet Shakespeare Editions project is still hosted at UVic.
LEMDO Team (LEMD1)
The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project
director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators,
encoders, and remediating editors.
University of Victoria (UVIC1)
https://www.uvic.ca/Metadata
| Authority title | Tales, Customs, and Learning |
| Type of text | Critical |
| Publisher | University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform |
| Series | New Internet Shakespeare Editions |
| Source |
File was created by Navarra Houldin. Content was pulled from the larger emdHam_Encyclopedia file, which has now been
divided into four seperate files
(including this one). Content was originally written for the Internet Shakespeare
Editions platform by David Bevington with the help of Jasmeen Boparai. It was transformed from IML, the SGML markup language of the Internet Shakespeare
Editions platform, by the LEMDO Team.
|
| Editorial declaration | n/a |
| Edition | Released with the New Internet Shakespeare Editions 1.0 |
| Sponsor(s) |
Internet Shakespeare EditionsThe Internet Shakespeare Editions (ISE) was a major digital humanities project created
by Emeritus Professor Michael Best at the University of Victoria. The ISE server was retired in 2018 but a final staticized HTML version of the Internet Shakespeare Editions project is still hosted at UVic.
New Internet Shakespeare EditionsThe Coordinating Editors of the NISE are Brett Greatley-Hirsch, Janelle Jenstad, James
Mardock, and Sarah Neville.
|
| Encoding description | Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines |
| Document status | IML-TEI_INP |
| Funder(s) | Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada |
| License/availability |