Essay On Demonstrating Power In Hamlet
Performance as a means of Demonstrating Power in Politics
In this essay, I shall explain how Shakespeare displays performance as a technique used to demonstrate power (as opposed to gaining power) through metatheatricality and literal performance in The Tempest, and again with ‘The Mousetrap’ in Hamlet. I will also compare this with the 2nd Earl of Rochester’s (John Wilmot) self-performance in playing the role as a libertine in order to demonstrate his own power and success. This theme of self-performance will be further demonstrated with an extract from The Diary of Samuel Pepys and the lawmakers of his day. I will explain how demonstrating power is the main goal for the series of politicians quoted in this essay, as an intimidation (or defense) …show more content…
mechanism .
In The Tempest, Prospero uses the grandiose wedding masque to display his magical prowess and supreme command over his servant, Ariel, and to intimidate Miranda’s fiancé, Ferdinand. Whilst he claims that the masque is his ‘promise/And they expect it from [him]’ (4.1.41-42), Cohen rebutts:
‘Given Prospero’s insistence on ruling Ferdinand -- especially where Ferdinand’s libidinal impulses are concerned -- the masque does not appear to be a filial obligation. It seems to be more of an agrarian tour de force, a reminder of Prospero’s immense power. Indeed one can hardly imagine a more domineering and intimidating future father-in-law.’ (2012 p. 15)
Prospero’s performance as director of the masque reinforces the idea that he is controller of the whole play. In fact, Prospero seems to direct the entire play from the outset. For example: He engineers the storm which brings the ship containing King Alonso and the others to shore: ‘Hast thou, spirit,/Performed to point the tempest that I bade thee?’ (1.2.194-195), Prospero puts the other characters to sleep when they are not needed in his pre-written plot (such as 1.2.185-187), and he sends Ariel to enchant the sailors when he does not want them wandering around the island (2.1.184-185). But Prospero’s dominating masque causes him to take his eye off of the bigger picture somewhat, as he forgets ‘that foul conspiracy/Of the beast Caliban and his confederates/Against [his] life’ (4.1.139-141). The contrast between Prospero’s magic and his attention span undermines his performance somewhat, but his ability to control those around him when he focuses on it, such as when he ‘asserts that he has amazed the nobles to the point of distraction in order to gain power over them [in 3.3.88-90]’ (Cohen pp. 14-15) is an affirmatory reminder of his magical skills.
In Hamlet, we see a piece of metatheatre comparable to the wedding masque in the form of ‘The Mousetrap’. Hamlet’s goal with the play is similar to Prospero’s: to intimidate Claudius into confessing, or at the very least into giving some kind of sign that he was the one who murdered Hamlet’s father, but also to bait Gertrude in front of the whole court:
She outfaces the mockery as best she may. They glance aside at her from the watching of the play, scandalized, suppressing their smiles. They glance, apprehensively, at the King; what has he to say to the outrage? He is caught between the obligation to resent it and the need to keep calm under the deadlier and secret accusation (Granville-Barker 2007 p. 94).
As O’Neill puts it, ‘Hamlet’s first act against the king is performed by actors’ (p. 125). This intimidation is driven by Hamlet’s enigmatic comments to the rest of the audience, for example: ‘Wormwood, wormwood’ (3.2.168), and: ‘they do but jest, poison in jest’ (3.2.220). This power-play consists of Hamlet trying to worry Claudius, and to assert a kind of Oedipal dominance over Claudius and his mother, Gertrude.
Hamlet also demonstrates elements of self-performance throughout the play in order to display power:
Hamlet, we find, is interested in theater. In the encounter that Ophelia describes, Hamlet, his clothing in disarray, holds her at arm’s length and puts his hand to his brow. He is mocking his own role as jilted lover. Her throwing him over thrusts him into a dramatic role, which he chooses to play in the comic mode. (O’Neill p. 126)
Does playing comically grant Hamlet power in this situation? Certainly, mocking and comedy can serve to display power, as will be shown later with reference to Rochester. In the 2009 Doran Royal Shakespeare Company television production of Hamlet, with David Tennant and Patrick Stewart, we see Hamlet realising as he speaks to Ophelia that he is being watched by Claudius and Polonius, and so his savage mockery of the poor girl is a performance to the couple watching him. It is regrettable that Hamlet should have to resort to hurting Ophelia, but to be successful in his quest to avenge his father, Hamlet believes that he must display an aura of power through performance -- and it works:
There’s something in his soul O’er which his melancholy sits on brood; [...] This something-settled matter in his heart, Whereon his brain’s still beating puts him thus From fashion of himself.
(3.1.165-176)
Hamlet has achieved his goal of appearing dangerous to the king. Claudius is fearful of what Hamlet has in store for him, and seeks to send him away. By displaying his powerful intellect, performing, he has become a dramatic warrior against the king.
But it is not only the eyes of Polonius and Claudius watching the exchange which Hamlet seeks to impress with his dominance of Ophelia; Titlestad envisions Hamlet as a ‘populist politician’ who must ‘express the savagery of which [he] is capable [...] must crackle with personality and get a cackle from the mob [the audience in the theatre], for whom disrespect is fun’ (Titlestad 2013 p. 44). Hamlet is an actor at heart, caring only to follow the script which the ghost of his father has provided for him: ‘Honor calls for him to make a show’. Performing ‘to create a favorable appearance in the eyes of others [in essence, the ‘mob’]’ (O’Neill p. 126) is the only way which Hamlet can achieve his end-goal, and he knows that utilising his power as future King of Denmark will be key to his …show more content…
success.
We also see these political assertions of power, and pre-emptive defense when Rochester utilises his poetic wit to show that he is capable of effectively diminishing, through insulting diatribes, any other courtier who seeks to attack his reputation. By writing offensive poetry the Earl was demonstrating his intellectual, sexual, and political capabilities. In ‘The Disabled Debauchee’, Rochester imparts a piece of wisdom, claiming:
So, when my days of impotence approach, And I’m by pox and wine’s unlucky chance
Forced from the pleasing billows of debauch On the dull shore of lazy temperance, [...] Past joys have more than paid what I endure. (l. 16-24)
Donaldson explains that the allusion in the poem is ‘that the rake’s life is indeed the best, and that the final stages of life are not as gloomy as they are said to be’ (1987 p. 34). I argue that this is an attack on other members of the court who struggle to cope with maintaining orthodoxy during the last years of their life, and so become bitter and unhappy. Rochester is displaying through this writing how wonderful his life is, and seeks to convince those around him that to attack him for his lifestyle would be foolish, as it is clear that his life is famously enjoyable. This is a powerful message, and to perform it would take a mischievous, ironic, sarcastic, humorous approach, which he seems to be capable of.
Hamlet’s self-performance is directly comparable to the Earl of Rochester performing the role of libertine in order to demonstrate power and success in the courts of King Charles II. Titlestad argues that Hamlet ‘trap[s]’ the audience in the middle of his Act 2 soliloquy: ‘Am I a coward?’ (2.2):
Imagine this said directly at the audience as if in conversation. Imagine, further, that some exhibitionist among the groundlings near the stage, where Hamlet is standing at the edge haranguing the crowd, puts up his hand and shouts “Yes!”, to the jubilation of his mates standing round him. The answer is written in the text: “Ha, ‘zounds, I should take it, for it cannot be/But I am pigeon-livered, and lack gall/To make oppression bitter…” (2.2.528-30) This is said directly, individually, at the joker who has tried to interrupt the performance, in a person to person exchange with a member of the audience. Imagine that the speech is planned for this eventuality. (p. 45)
This is a technique that it is also easy to imagine Rochester employing, it surprises and mocks an audience member in exchange for the humanisation and popularisation of the political speaker (Hamlet or Rochester). Also, Edelman points out that a live audience would negatively affect Claudius during ‘The Mousetrap’ (1994 pp. 16-17), and we can extrapolate that this would be a planning of Hamlet’s -- to literally trap Claudius and his mother before the court in ‘The Mousetrap’. Jeremy Collier criticised the playwrights’ ‘smuttiness of expression; their swearing, profaneness…their abuse of the clergy; their making their top-characters libertines, and giving them success in their debauchery’ (1698 p. 1) in plays of the time in a collection of essays entitled A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage, but is it so hard to understand that ‘bold, decisive, resourceful and often impulsive actions’ (Titlestad p. 46) are popular with the hard-working and poverty-stricken working class Elizabethan?
In the same period as Rochester, Samuel Pepys was also writing his diary, recording the extraordinary brashness of knights and members of the king’s court. On July 1st, 1663, Pepys wrote:
Mr. Batten telling us of a late triall of Sir Charles Sydly the other day, before my Lord Chief Justice Foster and the whole bench, for his debauchery a little while since at Oxford Kate’s, coming in open day into the Balcone [of a tavern] and showed his nakedness, … and abusing of scripture and as it were from thence preaching a mountebank sermon from the pulpit, saying that there he had to sell such a powder as should make all the cunts in town run after him, 1000 people standing underneath to see and hear him, and that being done he took a glass of wine [and washed his penis in it] and then drank it off (Pepys, Gyford 1663)
Sedley’s drunken performance on the balcony of a tavern places him literally above the thousand people watching him from below. He is performing to the crowd in an effort to display his dominance by the sheer obscene act of washing his penis in a glass of wine, and the blasphemy of preaching a sermon unclothed. Supposedly, though not surprisingly, this sparked outrage among the viewers below (Linanne pp. 24-25). Rochester, one of his friends who was part of the infamous ‘Merry Gang’ of the court of Charles II (Milne 2014 p. 59), names Sedley in ‘An Allusion to Horace’:
Sidley has that prevailing gentle Art,
That can with a resistlesse Charme impart,
The loosest wishes to the Chastest Heart,
Raise such a Conflict, kindle such a ffire
Betwixt declineing Virtue, and desire,
Till the poor Vanquisht Maid, dissolves away,
In Dreames all Night, in Sighs, and Teares, all Day. (pp. 327-328, Rochester, Thormählen)
The characterisation of Sedley as a lady’s man by Rochester emphasises the role that Sedley was aiming to play, documented in Pepys’ diary, an energetic antithesis to the everyday, normal, politician.
As in Hamlet, Sedley recognises that to become the ‘populist politician’ (Titlestad 2013) he must address the mob and try to impress them with wit or humour -- however, he seems to fail in this as he was fined ‘5000l [£500]’ (Pepys, Gyford 1663), and it is hard to believe that anybody would relate to seeing somebody perform obscene acts and bragging whilst holding (presumably) expensive wine. It is interesting that throughout this essay it has been found that it is people involved in politics who seek to perform to display their power the most. Prospero is a banished ruler, Hamlet is a prince who seeks to avenge his father, Rochester is a member of the court, and Pepys writes of Sedley who was a Member of Parliament at the time, and later became Speaker of the House of
Commons. We can conclude that the performances in this period share this characteristic show of power which is displayed. From Prospero’s wedding masque being used to scare Ferdinand, Hamlet’s similar ‘Mousetrap’ used to intimidate Claudius, to Rochester’s ‘The Disabled Debauchee’ used resembling a silverback gorilla beating its chest to display its physical prowess, and Pepys backing this up with his non-fictional diary accounts of politicians working to do the same with their intellect and wealth. All display power to maintain what they believe to be their rightful political position.
In this essay, I shall explain how Shakespeare displays performance as a technique used to demonstrate power (as opposed to gaining power) through metatheatricality and literal performance in The Tempest, and again with ‘The Mousetrap’ in Hamlet. I will also compare this with the 2nd Earl of Rochester’s (John Wilmot) self-performance in playing the role as a libertine in order to demonstrate his own power and success. This theme of self-performance will be further demonstrated with an extract from The Diary of Samuel Pepys and the lawmakers of his day. I will explain how demonstrating power is the main goal for the series of politicians quoted in this essay, as an intimidation (or defense) …show more content…
mechanism .
In The Tempest, Prospero uses the grandiose wedding masque to display his magical prowess and supreme command over his servant, Ariel, and to intimidate Miranda’s fiancé, Ferdinand. Whilst he claims that the masque is his ‘promise/And they expect it from [him]’ (4.1.41-42), Cohen rebutts:
‘Given Prospero’s insistence on ruling Ferdinand -- especially where Ferdinand’s libidinal impulses are concerned -- the masque does not appear to be a filial obligation. It seems to be more of an agrarian tour de force, a reminder of Prospero’s immense power. Indeed one can hardly imagine a more domineering and intimidating future father-in-law.’ (2012 p. 15)
Prospero’s performance as director of the masque reinforces the idea that he is controller of the whole play. In fact, Prospero seems to direct the entire play from the outset. For example: He engineers the storm which brings the ship containing King Alonso and the others to shore: ‘Hast thou, spirit,/Performed to point the tempest that I bade thee?’ (1.2.194-195), Prospero puts the other characters to sleep when they are not needed in his pre-written plot (such as 1.2.185-187), and he sends Ariel to enchant the sailors when he does not want them wandering around the island (2.1.184-185). But Prospero’s dominating masque causes him to take his eye off of the bigger picture somewhat, as he forgets ‘that foul conspiracy/Of the beast Caliban and his confederates/Against [his] life’ (4.1.139-141). The contrast between Prospero’s magic and his attention span undermines his performance somewhat, but his ability to control those around him when he focuses on it, such as when he ‘asserts that he has amazed the nobles to the point of distraction in order to gain power over them [in 3.3.88-90]’ (Cohen pp. 14-15) is an affirmatory reminder of his magical skills.
In Hamlet, we see a piece of metatheatre comparable to the wedding masque in the form of ‘The Mousetrap’. Hamlet’s goal with the play is similar to Prospero’s: to intimidate Claudius into confessing, or at the very least into giving some kind of sign that he was the one who murdered Hamlet’s father, but also to bait Gertrude in front of the whole court:
She outfaces the mockery as best she may. They glance aside at her from the watching of the play, scandalized, suppressing their smiles. They glance, apprehensively, at the King; what has he to say to the outrage? He is caught between the obligation to resent it and the need to keep calm under the deadlier and secret accusation (Granville-Barker 2007 p. 94).
As O’Neill puts it, ‘Hamlet’s first act against the king is performed by actors’ (p. 125). This intimidation is driven by Hamlet’s enigmatic comments to the rest of the audience, for example: ‘Wormwood, wormwood’ (3.2.168), and: ‘they do but jest, poison in jest’ (3.2.220). This power-play consists of Hamlet trying to worry Claudius, and to assert a kind of Oedipal dominance over Claudius and his mother, Gertrude.
Hamlet also demonstrates elements of self-performance throughout the play in order to display power:
Hamlet, we find, is interested in theater. In the encounter that Ophelia describes, Hamlet, his clothing in disarray, holds her at arm’s length and puts his hand to his brow. He is mocking his own role as jilted lover. Her throwing him over thrusts him into a dramatic role, which he chooses to play in the comic mode. (O’Neill p. 126)
Does playing comically grant Hamlet power in this situation? Certainly, mocking and comedy can serve to display power, as will be shown later with reference to Rochester. In the 2009 Doran Royal Shakespeare Company television production of Hamlet, with David Tennant and Patrick Stewart, we see Hamlet realising as he speaks to Ophelia that he is being watched by Claudius and Polonius, and so his savage mockery of the poor girl is a performance to the couple watching him. It is regrettable that Hamlet should have to resort to hurting Ophelia, but to be successful in his quest to avenge his father, Hamlet believes that he must display an aura of power through performance -- and it works:
There’s something in his soul O’er which his melancholy sits on brood; [...] This something-settled matter in his heart, Whereon his brain’s still beating puts him thus From fashion of himself.
(3.1.165-176)
Hamlet has achieved his goal of appearing dangerous to the king. Claudius is fearful of what Hamlet has in store for him, and seeks to send him away. By displaying his powerful intellect, performing, he has become a dramatic warrior against the king.
But it is not only the eyes of Polonius and Claudius watching the exchange which Hamlet seeks to impress with his dominance of Ophelia; Titlestad envisions Hamlet as a ‘populist politician’ who must ‘express the savagery of which [he] is capable [...] must crackle with personality and get a cackle from the mob [the audience in the theatre], for whom disrespect is fun’ (Titlestad 2013 p. 44). Hamlet is an actor at heart, caring only to follow the script which the ghost of his father has provided for him: ‘Honor calls for him to make a show’. Performing ‘to create a favorable appearance in the eyes of others [in essence, the ‘mob’]’ (O’Neill p. 126) is the only way which Hamlet can achieve his end-goal, and he knows that utilising his power as future King of Denmark will be key to his …show more content…
success.
We also see these political assertions of power, and pre-emptive defense when Rochester utilises his poetic wit to show that he is capable of effectively diminishing, through insulting diatribes, any other courtier who seeks to attack his reputation. By writing offensive poetry the Earl was demonstrating his intellectual, sexual, and political capabilities. In ‘The Disabled Debauchee’, Rochester imparts a piece of wisdom, claiming:
So, when my days of impotence approach, And I’m by pox and wine’s unlucky chance
Forced from the pleasing billows of debauch On the dull shore of lazy temperance, [...] Past joys have more than paid what I endure. (l. 16-24)
Donaldson explains that the allusion in the poem is ‘that the rake’s life is indeed the best, and that the final stages of life are not as gloomy as they are said to be’ (1987 p. 34). I argue that this is an attack on other members of the court who struggle to cope with maintaining orthodoxy during the last years of their life, and so become bitter and unhappy. Rochester is displaying through this writing how wonderful his life is, and seeks to convince those around him that to attack him for his lifestyle would be foolish, as it is clear that his life is famously enjoyable. This is a powerful message, and to perform it would take a mischievous, ironic, sarcastic, humorous approach, which he seems to be capable of.
Hamlet’s self-performance is directly comparable to the Earl of Rochester performing the role of libertine in order to demonstrate power and success in the courts of King Charles II. Titlestad argues that Hamlet ‘trap[s]’ the audience in the middle of his Act 2 soliloquy: ‘Am I a coward?’ (2.2):
Imagine this said directly at the audience as if in conversation. Imagine, further, that some exhibitionist among the groundlings near the stage, where Hamlet is standing at the edge haranguing the crowd, puts up his hand and shouts “Yes!”, to the jubilation of his mates standing round him. The answer is written in the text: “Ha, ‘zounds, I should take it, for it cannot be/But I am pigeon-livered, and lack gall/To make oppression bitter…” (2.2.528-30) This is said directly, individually, at the joker who has tried to interrupt the performance, in a person to person exchange with a member of the audience. Imagine that the speech is planned for this eventuality. (p. 45)
This is a technique that it is also easy to imagine Rochester employing, it surprises and mocks an audience member in exchange for the humanisation and popularisation of the political speaker (Hamlet or Rochester). Also, Edelman points out that a live audience would negatively affect Claudius during ‘The Mousetrap’ (1994 pp. 16-17), and we can extrapolate that this would be a planning of Hamlet’s -- to literally trap Claudius and his mother before the court in ‘The Mousetrap’. Jeremy Collier criticised the playwrights’ ‘smuttiness of expression; their swearing, profaneness…their abuse of the clergy; their making their top-characters libertines, and giving them success in their debauchery’ (1698 p. 1) in plays of the time in a collection of essays entitled A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage, but is it so hard to understand that ‘bold, decisive, resourceful and often impulsive actions’ (Titlestad p. 46) are popular with the hard-working and poverty-stricken working class Elizabethan?
In the same period as Rochester, Samuel Pepys was also writing his diary, recording the extraordinary brashness of knights and members of the king’s court. On July 1st, 1663, Pepys wrote:
Mr. Batten telling us of a late triall of Sir Charles Sydly the other day, before my Lord Chief Justice Foster and the whole bench, for his debauchery a little while since at Oxford Kate’s, coming in open day into the Balcone [of a tavern] and showed his nakedness, … and abusing of scripture and as it were from thence preaching a mountebank sermon from the pulpit, saying that there he had to sell such a powder as should make all the cunts in town run after him, 1000 people standing underneath to see and hear him, and that being done he took a glass of wine [and washed his penis in it] and then drank it off (Pepys, Gyford 1663)
Sedley’s drunken performance on the balcony of a tavern places him literally above the thousand people watching him from below. He is performing to the crowd in an effort to display his dominance by the sheer obscene act of washing his penis in a glass of wine, and the blasphemy of preaching a sermon unclothed. Supposedly, though not surprisingly, this sparked outrage among the viewers below (Linanne pp. 24-25). Rochester, one of his friends who was part of the infamous ‘Merry Gang’ of the court of Charles II (Milne 2014 p. 59), names Sedley in ‘An Allusion to Horace’:
Sidley has that prevailing gentle Art,
That can with a resistlesse Charme impart,
The loosest wishes to the Chastest Heart,
Raise such a Conflict, kindle such a ffire
Betwixt declineing Virtue, and desire,
Till the poor Vanquisht Maid, dissolves away,
In Dreames all Night, in Sighs, and Teares, all Day. (pp. 327-328, Rochester, Thormählen)
The characterisation of Sedley as a lady’s man by Rochester emphasises the role that Sedley was aiming to play, documented in Pepys’ diary, an energetic antithesis to the everyday, normal, politician.
As in Hamlet, Sedley recognises that to become the ‘populist politician’ (Titlestad 2013) he must address the mob and try to impress them with wit or humour -- however, he seems to fail in this as he was fined ‘5000l [£500]’ (Pepys, Gyford 1663), and it is hard to believe that anybody would relate to seeing somebody perform obscene acts and bragging whilst holding (presumably) expensive wine. It is interesting that throughout this essay it has been found that it is people involved in politics who seek to perform to display their power the most. Prospero is a banished ruler, Hamlet is a prince who seeks to avenge his father, Rochester is a member of the court, and Pepys writes of Sedley who was a Member of Parliament at the time, and later became Speaker of the House of
Commons. We can conclude that the performances in this period share this characteristic show of power which is displayed. From Prospero’s wedding masque being used to scare Ferdinand, Hamlet’s similar ‘Mousetrap’ used to intimidate Claudius, to Rochester’s ‘The Disabled Debauchee’ used resembling a silverback gorilla beating its chest to display its physical prowess, and Pepys backing this up with his non-fictional diary accounts of politicians working to do the same with their intellect and wealth. All display power to maintain what they believe to be their rightful political position.