Hamlet & the Gerasene Demoniac: Using Subversive, "Changeling" Words
Sometimes a single word can be politically subversive.
BAPTISTA:
Prince Hamlet claims the wife of the player queen (actually of a poisoned Italian duke) was named "Baptista," an Italian name in an otherwise mostly English play. An actual, historical figure, he claims. But this is not true. "Battista" was the wife of a predecessor of the poisoned duke, not the wife of the poisoned duke himself. [See the long note, p. 507, bottom, in the 1982 Arden Hamlet edited by Jenkins.]
Did Hamlet and Shakespeare mess up the history, or is something else going on here? Something else, I think.
Hamlet makes a point of it to mention her name because she is named after John the Baptist, the prophet mentioned in the gospels who opposed the marriage of Herod Antipas to his brother's divorced wife. Hamlet wants to use this name because, like John the Baptist who opposed an incestuous marriage, Hamlet opposes the incestuous marriage of Claudius and Gertrude. Shakespeare's allusive practice was such that he would sometimes include one word (such as "Baptista" or "lazar-like), and elsewhere in the play, include more echoes taken from the associated Biblical tale (John the Baptist opposing the marriage of Herod Antipas, and Salome dancing pleasingly for Herod; Lazarus and the rich man; etc.).
Claudius had asked Hamlet if there was no offense in the play, such as anything the censors (or England's "Master of the Revels") might think serious enough to cut or consider as grounds for banning the play. Hamlet says no, but he uses stealth, depending on just one word: Baptista.
This is what some call a "meta" moment, an aspect of the play that is self-referential.* To have a moment in a play, in a historical age of censorship, when Hamlet the writer of lines for a play is asked by the king if there is any offense in his play - this raises to greater consciousness some things for Shakespeare's audience about being at a play, written by a playwright, in such an age.
For Shakespeare, Italy was not merely a place on a map: It was the center of the Roman empire and the land of the poet Horace, from which Horatio's name is derived. It was the land of the papacy, the center of the Roman Catholic Church from which Henry VIII and England had broken away so that Henry could obtain his divorce from his first wife. And it was associated with the massacre of the Waldensians of Calabria in 1561, and the tales of violence and revenge such as the Pazzi Conspiracy in 1478, a tale of corruption in high places that reached as high as the papacy, and where two of the assassins were named Francesco and Bernardo, like the names of the sentinels in the first scene of Hamlet (another example of stealthy use of words and names).
Shakespeare has a stake in this: If you write a play that mentions "Baptista" and points to John the Baptist at a time in history when Elizabeth I is dying or recently dead, the reference to Baptista points in part to the incestuous marriage of Henry VIII to his first wife, who he divorced so he could marry his mistress, claiming conveniently that the first marriage was incestuous because Catherine of Aragon was the widow of Henry's older brother, Arthur, who died a few months after the marriage. Elizabeth was the daughter of that mistress of Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, who later became his second wife, married when Anne was already pregnant with Elizabeth.
Maybe it was a safe political risk, given that Elizabeth was aging or dead and many were hoping for a new start. But still, it may have come with risks, to seem to speak ill by implication of the House of Tudor, which was coming to an end or had ended so recently.
[Engraving After Gerard Groenning, Jesus Cures the Possessed Man of Gerasa, From Thesaurus Novi Testamenti elegantissimis iconibus expressus continens historias atque miracula do[mi] ni nostri Iesu Christi. Flemish, 1585, London, British Museum.]
LEGION:
There is a similarly stealthy use of a single word in the gospels of Mark and Luke regarding the Gerasene demoniac: Jesus asks a demoniac what his name is - or the name of the demon possessing him. In Mark and Luke's gospels, the demon says "My name is Legion, for we are many."
Luke 8:26-39 (1599 Geneva Bible) translates it as follows:
26 So they sailed unto the region of the Gadarenes, which is over against Galilee.
27 And as he went out to land, there met him a certain man out of the city, which had devils long time, and he wore no garment, neither abode in house, but in the graves.
28 And when he saw Jesus, he cried out, and fell down before him, and with a loud voice said, What have I to do with thee, Jesus the son of God the most High? I beseech thee torment me not.
29 For he commanded the foul spirit to come out of the man: (for oft times he had caught him: therefore he was bound with chains, and kept in fetters: but he brake the bands, and was carried of the devil into wildernesses.)
30 Then Jesus asked him, saying, What is thy name? and he said, Legion, because many devils were entered into him.
31 And they besought him, that he would not command them to go out into the deep.
32 And there was thereby an herd of many swine feeding on an hill: and the devils besought him, that he would suffer them to enter into them. So he suffered them.
33 Then went the devils out of the man, and entered into the swine: and the herd was carried with violence from a steep down place into the lake, and was choked.
34 When the herdsmen saw what was done, they fled: and when they were departed, they told it in the city and in the country.
35 Then they came out to see what was done, and came to Jesus, and found the man, out of whom the devils were departed, sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed, and in his right mind: and they were afraid.
36 They also which saw it, told them by what means he that was possessed with the devil, was healed.
37 Then the whole multitude of the country about the Gadarenes, besought him that he would depart from them: for they were taken with a great fear: and he went into the ship, and returned.
38 Then the man, out of whom the devils were departed, besought him that he might be with him: but Jesus sent him away, saying,
39 Return into thine own house, and show what great things God hath done to thee. So he went his way, and preached throughout all the city, what great things Jesus had done unto him.
Mark's gospel in the Bishop's Bible translation of Shakespeare's time (Mk 5:1-20) has the line where the demoniac identifies his demon this way in verse 9:
And he asked hym, what is thy name? And he aunswered and sayd vnto hym: my name is legion, for we are many
If the demoniac (and the gospel writers) simply wanted to emphasize "many," they could have used a Greek word that is now used in Christian liturgy in the Sanctus "hosts" (as in "hosts of angels, or armies of angels). The gospels were written in Greek with very few non-greek words. But this word, "Legion," happens to be the word associated with Rome's occupying armies: Roman legions. It's a Latin word that stuck out like a sore thumb to all the original listeners and readers who read the gospel in its original Greek.
If the original listeners are paying attention, the message implied by the insertion of the Latinate word, "Legion," would be this:
The occupying army is oppressive and demonic; they are like swine (whose meat Jews considered unclean and unfit to eat) who deserve to rush over a cliff into the sea to their deaths.
The original audiences of these two gospels may have understood this implication of the story and the word "Legion." But this meaning may have been lost over the ages as people removed from the original Greek and from the oppressions of the Roman occupation of the Biblical holy lands tended to take the story too literally as a rule, instead of as the exception.
So in the story, the word "Legion" is a subversive word on the lips of the demoniac.
But it's also subversive for the writers of the gospels of Mark and Luke to have used that word and placed it on the demoniac's lips.
HOW DOES ALL OF THIS RELATE TO HAMLET?
— IN HAMLET, the prince is mad, and may have been thought possessed by a demon (Horatio and the prince wonder if the ghost is a demon in disguise).
- IN THE TWO GOSPELS, the demoniac is acting mad.
- IN HAMLET, the prince uses the word "Baptista" to name the player queen.
- IN THE GOSPELS, the demoniac uses the word "Legion" to name the demon.
— IN HAMLET, the word "Baptista" is an Italian name, a foreign word in an otherwise mostly English play.
— IN THE GOSPELS, the word "Legion" is a Latinate word, a foreign word in what were originally otherwise almost exclusively Greek gospels.
— IN HAMLET, the word "Baptista" is politically subversive, a word inserted with stealth to imply criticism of the king and queen's incestuous marriage.
— IN THE GOSPELS, the word "Legion" is politically subversive, a word inserted with stealth to imply criticism of the Roman occupation as evil and demonic.
— IN HAMLET, the word "Baptista" refers in a stealthy way to the prophet, John the Baptist.
— IN THE GOSPELS, John the Baptist was not only considered a prophet by some, but also by others considered a kind of madman who wore a hair shirt and lived on locusts and honey.
At a meta*-level:
— IN HAMLET, Shakespeare is also being politically subversive to portray an incestuous king who deserves death, as if passing judgment on the House of Tudor.
— IN THE GOSPELS, the gospel writers are also being politically subversive to portray a demoniac who names his demon with a word associated with the occupying armies of Rome.
STEALTH IS NO SURPRISE IN HAMLET:
Hamlet is a play that is very much about stealth:
- Claudius poisons his brother by stealth;
- Horatio and the sentinels avoid telling Claudius of the ghost and go directly to Hamlet instead;
- Hamlet pretends to be mad, an attempt (or not?) at a kind of stealth;
- Claudius and Polonius spy on Hamlet and Ophelia;
- Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are sent for to spy on Hamlet for the throne;
- Polonius spies on Hamlet and Gertrude's conversation (and is killed because he is found out);
- Hamlet hides the body of Polonius, either to appear mad, or to parody the missing body of Jesus and the empty tomb, or both;
- Claudius and Laertes plan the death of Hamlet but keep it a secret from Gertrude;
- Hamlet steals, forges, and replaces the death letter on the ship to England;
- etc.
So the use of language in stealth for subversive purposes should come as no surprise.
WHY "LEGION" AND "BAPTISTA" ARE "CHANGELING" WORDS
In 5.2.3556, Hamlet speaks to Horatio of the letter he forges on the ship to replace the one from Claudius (ordering his death in England) with a new one of his own that orders the death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. He calls the new letter a "changeling," using the metaphor of infants switched at birth (perhaps by fairies) and raised by different parents. His forged letter is not the letter from Claudius, so Hamlet calls his stealthy and subversive letter a changeling because of how it turns the violence of execution against agents of Claudius.
DOES THIS MEAN THAT SHAKESPEARE INTENDED MAD (POSSESSED?) HAMLET'S USE OF "BAPTISTA" TO BE AN ALLUSION TO THE GOSPELS' DEMONIAC?
Maybe. Shakespeare certainly knew his audience was familiar with the gospel tale, because they were required by law to attend church, and it was read every year, at least twice (once for Mark, once for Luke).
But we should not limit our understanding of Shakespeare's intentions to those things he consciously intended: As the D.H. Lawrence poem begins, "Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me" - poets and playwrights and other artists don't only have conscious intentions, but also many other cultural winds that influence their artistic choices, and of which they may be little aware or able to articulate.
Shakespeare lived in an age of censorship, so to be an artist, one had to be careful with words, and one sometimes resorted to the stealthy use of language, whether or not one consciously recalled that gospel passage when doing so. He probably would have learned stealthy use of language in other ways, undoubtedly, even if he had not been familiar with those gospel readings about the demoniac. Yet those gospel readings were part of the tapestry of his culture, so it's very possible that he understood the gospel passage as a stealthy use of language and, when he wrote Hamlet, the gospel passage in mind.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
* What does "meta" mean in this context?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Quotes from Hamlet are taken from InternetShakespeare, Modern Version, edited by David Bevington.
Quotes from the 1599 Geneva Bible, with modernized spelling, are taken from BibleGateway.com.
Quotes from the Bishops' Bible are taken from StudyBible.
Disclaimer: By noting bible passages in this blog, I am not intending to promote any religion over any other, nor am I attempting to promote religious belief in general. Only to point out how the Bible may have influenced Shakespeare, his plays, and his age.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Thanks for reading!
My current project is a book tentatively titled “Hamlet’s Bible,” about biblical allusions and plot echoes in Hamlet.
Below is a link to a list of some of my top posts (“greatest hits”), including a description of my book project (last item on the list):
https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2019/12/top-20-hamlet-bible-posts.html
I post every week, so please visit as often as you like and consider subscribing.
BAPTISTA:
Prince Hamlet claims the wife of the player queen (actually of a poisoned Italian duke) was named "Baptista," an Italian name in an otherwise mostly English play. An actual, historical figure, he claims. But this is not true. "Battista" was the wife of a predecessor of the poisoned duke, not the wife of the poisoned duke himself. [See the long note, p. 507, bottom, in the 1982 Arden Hamlet edited by Jenkins.]
Did Hamlet and Shakespeare mess up the history, or is something else going on here? Something else, I think.
Hamlet makes a point of it to mention her name because she is named after John the Baptist, the prophet mentioned in the gospels who opposed the marriage of Herod Antipas to his brother's divorced wife. Hamlet wants to use this name because, like John the Baptist who opposed an incestuous marriage, Hamlet opposes the incestuous marriage of Claudius and Gertrude. Shakespeare's allusive practice was such that he would sometimes include one word (such as "Baptista" or "lazar-like), and elsewhere in the play, include more echoes taken from the associated Biblical tale (John the Baptist opposing the marriage of Herod Antipas, and Salome dancing pleasingly for Herod; Lazarus and the rich man; etc.).
Claudius had asked Hamlet if there was no offense in the play, such as anything the censors (or England's "Master of the Revels") might think serious enough to cut or consider as grounds for banning the play. Hamlet says no, but he uses stealth, depending on just one word: Baptista.
This is what some call a "meta" moment, an aspect of the play that is self-referential.* To have a moment in a play, in a historical age of censorship, when Hamlet the writer of lines for a play is asked by the king if there is any offense in his play - this raises to greater consciousness some things for Shakespeare's audience about being at a play, written by a playwright, in such an age.
For Shakespeare, Italy was not merely a place on a map: It was the center of the Roman empire and the land of the poet Horace, from which Horatio's name is derived. It was the land of the papacy, the center of the Roman Catholic Church from which Henry VIII and England had broken away so that Henry could obtain his divorce from his first wife. And it was associated with the massacre of the Waldensians of Calabria in 1561, and the tales of violence and revenge such as the Pazzi Conspiracy in 1478, a tale of corruption in high places that reached as high as the papacy, and where two of the assassins were named Francesco and Bernardo, like the names of the sentinels in the first scene of Hamlet (another example of stealthy use of words and names).
Shakespeare has a stake in this: If you write a play that mentions "Baptista" and points to John the Baptist at a time in history when Elizabeth I is dying or recently dead, the reference to Baptista points in part to the incestuous marriage of Henry VIII to his first wife, who he divorced so he could marry his mistress, claiming conveniently that the first marriage was incestuous because Catherine of Aragon was the widow of Henry's older brother, Arthur, who died a few months after the marriage. Elizabeth was the daughter of that mistress of Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, who later became his second wife, married when Anne was already pregnant with Elizabeth.
Maybe it was a safe political risk, given that Elizabeth was aging or dead and many were hoping for a new start. But still, it may have come with risks, to seem to speak ill by implication of the House of Tudor, which was coming to an end or had ended so recently.
[Engraving After Gerard Groenning, Jesus Cures the Possessed Man of Gerasa, From Thesaurus Novi Testamenti elegantissimis iconibus expressus continens historias atque miracula do[mi] ni nostri Iesu Christi. Flemish, 1585, London, British Museum.]
LEGION:
There is a similarly stealthy use of a single word in the gospels of Mark and Luke regarding the Gerasene demoniac: Jesus asks a demoniac what his name is - or the name of the demon possessing him. In Mark and Luke's gospels, the demon says "My name is Legion, for we are many."
Luke 8:26-39 (1599 Geneva Bible) translates it as follows:
26 So they sailed unto the region of the Gadarenes, which is over against Galilee.
27 And as he went out to land, there met him a certain man out of the city, which had devils long time, and he wore no garment, neither abode in house, but in the graves.
28 And when he saw Jesus, he cried out, and fell down before him, and with a loud voice said, What have I to do with thee, Jesus the son of God the most High? I beseech thee torment me not.
29 For he commanded the foul spirit to come out of the man: (for oft times he had caught him: therefore he was bound with chains, and kept in fetters: but he brake the bands, and was carried of the devil into wildernesses.)
30 Then Jesus asked him, saying, What is thy name? and he said, Legion, because many devils were entered into him.
31 And they besought him, that he would not command them to go out into the deep.
32 And there was thereby an herd of many swine feeding on an hill: and the devils besought him, that he would suffer them to enter into them. So he suffered them.
33 Then went the devils out of the man, and entered into the swine: and the herd was carried with violence from a steep down place into the lake, and was choked.
34 When the herdsmen saw what was done, they fled: and when they were departed, they told it in the city and in the country.
35 Then they came out to see what was done, and came to Jesus, and found the man, out of whom the devils were departed, sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed, and in his right mind: and they were afraid.
36 They also which saw it, told them by what means he that was possessed with the devil, was healed.
37 Then the whole multitude of the country about the Gadarenes, besought him that he would depart from them: for they were taken with a great fear: and he went into the ship, and returned.
38 Then the man, out of whom the devils were departed, besought him that he might be with him: but Jesus sent him away, saying,
39 Return into thine own house, and show what great things God hath done to thee. So he went his way, and preached throughout all the city, what great things Jesus had done unto him.
Mark's gospel in the Bishop's Bible translation of Shakespeare's time (Mk 5:1-20) has the line where the demoniac identifies his demon this way in verse 9:
And he asked hym, what is thy name? And he aunswered and sayd vnto hym: my name is legion, for we are many
If the demoniac (and the gospel writers) simply wanted to emphasize "many," they could have used a Greek word that is now used in Christian liturgy in the Sanctus "hosts" (as in "hosts of angels, or armies of angels). The gospels were written in Greek with very few non-greek words. But this word, "Legion," happens to be the word associated with Rome's occupying armies: Roman legions. It's a Latin word that stuck out like a sore thumb to all the original listeners and readers who read the gospel in its original Greek.
If the original listeners are paying attention, the message implied by the insertion of the Latinate word, "Legion," would be this:
The occupying army is oppressive and demonic; they are like swine (whose meat Jews considered unclean and unfit to eat) who deserve to rush over a cliff into the sea to their deaths.
The original audiences of these two gospels may have understood this implication of the story and the word "Legion." But this meaning may have been lost over the ages as people removed from the original Greek and from the oppressions of the Roman occupation of the Biblical holy lands tended to take the story too literally as a rule, instead of as the exception.
So in the story, the word "Legion" is a subversive word on the lips of the demoniac.
But it's also subversive for the writers of the gospels of Mark and Luke to have used that word and placed it on the demoniac's lips.
HOW DOES ALL OF THIS RELATE TO HAMLET?
— IN HAMLET, the prince is mad, and may have been thought possessed by a demon (Horatio and the prince wonder if the ghost is a demon in disguise).
- IN THE TWO GOSPELS, the demoniac is acting mad.
- IN HAMLET, the prince uses the word "Baptista" to name the player queen.
- IN THE GOSPELS, the demoniac uses the word "Legion" to name the demon.
— IN HAMLET, the word "Baptista" is an Italian name, a foreign word in an otherwise mostly English play.
— IN THE GOSPELS, the word "Legion" is a Latinate word, a foreign word in what were originally otherwise almost exclusively Greek gospels.
— IN HAMLET, the word "Baptista" is politically subversive, a word inserted with stealth to imply criticism of the king and queen's incestuous marriage.
— IN THE GOSPELS, the word "Legion" is politically subversive, a word inserted with stealth to imply criticism of the Roman occupation as evil and demonic.
— IN HAMLET, the word "Baptista" refers in a stealthy way to the prophet, John the Baptist.
— IN THE GOSPELS, John the Baptist was not only considered a prophet by some, but also by others considered a kind of madman who wore a hair shirt and lived on locusts and honey.
At a meta*-level:
— IN HAMLET, Shakespeare is also being politically subversive to portray an incestuous king who deserves death, as if passing judgment on the House of Tudor.
— IN THE GOSPELS, the gospel writers are also being politically subversive to portray a demoniac who names his demon with a word associated with the occupying armies of Rome.
STEALTH IS NO SURPRISE IN HAMLET:
Hamlet is a play that is very much about stealth:
- Claudius poisons his brother by stealth;
- Horatio and the sentinels avoid telling Claudius of the ghost and go directly to Hamlet instead;
- Hamlet pretends to be mad, an attempt (or not?) at a kind of stealth;
- Claudius and Polonius spy on Hamlet and Ophelia;
- Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are sent for to spy on Hamlet for the throne;
- Polonius spies on Hamlet and Gertrude's conversation (and is killed because he is found out);
- Hamlet hides the body of Polonius, either to appear mad, or to parody the missing body of Jesus and the empty tomb, or both;
- Claudius and Laertes plan the death of Hamlet but keep it a secret from Gertrude;
- Hamlet steals, forges, and replaces the death letter on the ship to England;
- etc.
So the use of language in stealth for subversive purposes should come as no surprise.
WHY "LEGION" AND "BAPTISTA" ARE "CHANGELING" WORDS
In 5.2.3556, Hamlet speaks to Horatio of the letter he forges on the ship to replace the one from Claudius (ordering his death in England) with a new one of his own that orders the death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. He calls the new letter a "changeling," using the metaphor of infants switched at birth (perhaps by fairies) and raised by different parents. His forged letter is not the letter from Claudius, so Hamlet calls his stealthy and subversive letter a changeling because of how it turns the violence of execution against agents of Claudius.
DOES THIS MEAN THAT SHAKESPEARE INTENDED MAD (POSSESSED?) HAMLET'S USE OF "BAPTISTA" TO BE AN ALLUSION TO THE GOSPELS' DEMONIAC?
Maybe. Shakespeare certainly knew his audience was familiar with the gospel tale, because they were required by law to attend church, and it was read every year, at least twice (once for Mark, once for Luke).
But we should not limit our understanding of Shakespeare's intentions to those things he consciously intended: As the D.H. Lawrence poem begins, "Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me" - poets and playwrights and other artists don't only have conscious intentions, but also many other cultural winds that influence their artistic choices, and of which they may be little aware or able to articulate.
Shakespeare lived in an age of censorship, so to be an artist, one had to be careful with words, and one sometimes resorted to the stealthy use of language, whether or not one consciously recalled that gospel passage when doing so. He probably would have learned stealthy use of language in other ways, undoubtedly, even if he had not been familiar with those gospel readings about the demoniac. Yet those gospel readings were part of the tapestry of his culture, so it's very possible that he understood the gospel passage as a stealthy use of language and, when he wrote Hamlet, the gospel passage in mind.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
* What does "meta" mean in this context?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Quotes from Hamlet are taken from InternetShakespeare, Modern Version, edited by David Bevington.
Quotes from the 1599 Geneva Bible, with modernized spelling, are taken from BibleGateway.com.
Quotes from the Bishops' Bible are taken from StudyBible.
Disclaimer: By noting bible passages in this blog, I am not intending to promote any religion over any other, nor am I attempting to promote religious belief in general. Only to point out how the Bible may have influenced Shakespeare, his plays, and his age.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Thanks for reading!
My current project is a book tentatively titled “Hamlet’s Bible,” about biblical allusions and plot echoes in Hamlet.
Below is a link to a list of some of my top posts (“greatest hits”), including a description of my book project (last item on the list):
https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2019/12/top-20-hamlet-bible-posts.html
I post every week, so please visit as often as you like and consider subscribing.
Excellent read, Paul. Quite informative and entertaining.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Michael! Sorry it took so long for me to respond. Too many irons in the fire, too many fires going out! But I appreciate it greatly.
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