"Plague" in Hamlet 3.1

The word “plague” is used in very interesting ways in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and an examination of each instance in its context in the play as well as the historical context is quite revealing.


[Michael Wolgemut, “Image of Death” from The Nuremberg Chronicle (1493), woodcut with watercolor, 14 7/16 x 10 5/16 inches (courtesy Blanton Museum of Art, the University of Texas at Austin, the Karen G. and Dr. Elgin W. Ware, Jr. Collection)]


LAST WEEK I listed a number of words that may have been associated with highly contagious and deadly diseases, their number of occurrences in Shakespeare’s work overall, and their numbers of occurrences in Hamlet. These words included the following:
Plague; Contagion; Pestilence/Pestilent; Sick; Ill; Pox; Blister; Forehead
(not an exhaustive list).

This week I’ll focus just on the word “plague” in Hamlet, and just on the first of two instances.

Here’s the count again for how often the word appears in Shakespeare’s writing overall, and how often in Hamlet:
Plague: 105 (overall) / 2 (Hamlet: once by Hamlet, once by Claudius)

I also wrote last week: that, because the people in England were required to attend church every Sunday and on significant religious holidays, and because the culture was interested in Bible reading and religious debate, many would have viewed catastrophic disease as punishment or test from God in light of the plagues of Egypt in the Exodus story, the testing of God’s people (mentioned in Psalms, Proverbs, and in the book of Job), and the seven plagues of the end times in Revelations 15-16. (Note: I do not read the bible this way or interpret contemporary events as fulfilling biblical prophesies.)

PLAGUE (as used by Hamlet)
The first time the word “plague” occurs in Hamlet is in the Nunnery scene: In spite of the fact that Polonius apologized to Ophelia for misjudging Hamlet’s intentions toward his daughter, Ophelia strangely returns Hamlet’s love letters, and it seems she does so regretfully. Is she being required to do so by her father? Perhaps. Hamlet says he never wrote her any such letters, which is also strange. Is he denying it as an act of aggression against the hurt of having them returned? Or does he mean that the Ophelia to whom he wrote the letters is in a way not the same Ophelia who is returning them, so subservient to her father’s twisted scheming?

He tells her to get to a nunnery multiple times in this scene, complaining that women drive men to sin, offering a lengthy list of his own faults:

HAMLET: ...Why wouldst thou
be a breeder of sinners? I am myself indifferent honest,
but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better
my mother had not borne me: I am very proud, revengeful,
ambitious, with more offenses at my beck
than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape,
or time to act them in. What should such fellows as I do crawling
between heaven and earth? We are arrant knaves, all; believe none of us.
Go thy ways to a nunnery. (3.1.1776-84)

Many have commented that Hamlet is so distraught by his mother’s hasty remarriage after his father’s death that he blames all women, including Ophelia. This is fodder for Freudians who like to believe that, once his father is dead, Hamlet doesn’t need to have an Oedipal fantasy of killing his father, if only his mother had not remarried, because then he could have her to himself. But this is problematic, because others assume that when Polonius tells Ophelia that he has heard how Hamlet has given her much attention “of late,” this means Hamlet has only been doing so since he came home from school in Wittenberg, only to find that his mother had remarried already, to his uncle. (Perhaps the Freudians would like to think that Hamlet spent time with Ophelia and wrote her letters after his father’s death, but before the remarriage of his mother? This way his feelings for Ophelia when writing the love letters were not yet tainted by his mother’s choice, or by his fear of hell and purgatory, instilled in him by the ghost?)

Hamlet asks Ophelia where her father is, and she lies, saying he is at home. In fact, he is eavesdropping on their conversation, so it’s only metaphorically true: He is figuratively at home in eavesdropping on others.

Hamlet says, “Let the doors be shut upon him, that he may play the fool nowhere but in's own house.” (3.1.1787-8)

Ophelia replies with a statement of alarm and exasperation:
“Oh, help him, you sweet heavens!” (1789).

This is like a prayer, but some would claim not; yet even nonreligious people say things like “God save us” or “Sweet Jesus” in times of distress, and other characters do this in the play as well, including Hamlet.

We might ask: Why does she impulsively ask that heaven help Hamlet at this moment? When he delivers these these lines about her father being shut in at home to play the fool, is Hamlet shouting like a madman?

Or does she ask for heaven’s help for him because
1) her father and the king are acting suspiciously, and
2) she realizes that Hamlet may suspect this, and
3) she knows they are listening, so she realizes that
4) the man she loves may be in even deeper trouble than she first thought?

(I would prefer to read Ophelia in this scene as being very anxious about the eavesdropping and about what she has been asked to do in returning the letters, and also therefore very intelligent in her responses, in spite of being unable to divulge anything openly to Hamlet for fear of opposing her father and the king. She is in a position of unbelievably difficult constraint.)

Next, Hamlet offers Ophelia a kind of curse (which can be read as part of his feigned madness, or as a sincere expression of anger at the woman he loved and in fact still loves). Ophelia again replies briefly with a prayer-like exclamation, and afterwards, Hamlet continues:

HAMLET: If thou dost marry, I'll give thee this plague for thy
dowry: be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow,
thou shalt not escape calumny. Get thee to a nunnery.
Go, farewell. Or if thou wilt needs marry, marry a fool,
for wise men know well enough what monsters you
make of them. To a nunnery go, and quickly too.
Farewell.

OPHELIA: O heavenly powers, restore him!

HAMLET: I have heard of your paintings too, well enough.
God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves
another. You jig, you amble, and you lisp, and nickname
God's creatures, and make your wantonness your ignorance.
Go to, I'll no more on't; it hath made me mad.
I say we will have no more marriages. Those that are married already, all
but one, shall live; the rest shall keep as they are. To a nunnery, go. (3.1.1790-1804)The word "calumny" is not commonly used today, but in general, Hamlet means slander and defamation: He's saying that in the future, people will make up and pass on false accusations about Ophelia regarding her actions and character, certainly an interesting observation regarding Gertrude's account of Ophelia's death as an accident, and the assumption of the gravediggers (and perhaps most scholars) that her death was a suicide.


I have mentioned in past blog posts that in the relationship of Ophelia and Laertes to King Claudius, there seems to be an echo of the relationship of Salome to Herod Antipas: Both Laertes and Ophelia are willing to (figuratively) dance for their king (Ophelia agreeing to by act as bait for Hamlet and for the eavesdropping of Claudius and her father in the nunnery scene, and Laertes by flattering the king (1.2) and later agreeing to help kill Hamlet in the duel (4.5-5.2).

So Hamlet’s line, “ I'll give thee this plague for thy dowry” may seem to be speaking to the Salome in her, who would betray the John the Baptist in Hamlet, who seeks to right the wrongs of the incestuous Herod Antipas figure, Claudius.

It’s clear that Hamlet is using the world “plague” metaphorically when he says, “If thou dost marry, I'll give thee this plague for thy dowry” (1790-1). But we should pause to think about what it may have meant for people of the time to use the word “plague,” even metaphorically, in a curse.

It is said that the Black Plague killed 30-45% of the population of England between 1348 and 1350 alone, but then recurred according to Dr Mike Ibeji, a historian writing for the BBC:

30-45% of the general populace died in the Black Death of 1348-50. But in some villages, 80% or 90% of the population died (and in Kilkenny at least, it seems likely that the death-rate was 100%!). A death-rate of 30% is higher than the total British losses in World War I.

Nor was 1350 the end of it. Plague recurred! It came back in 1361-64, 1368, 1371, 1373-75, 1390, 1405 and continued into the fifteenth century. [...]
By the 1370s, the population of England had been halved and it was not recovering. [...]
The plague returned in a series of periodic local and national epidemics. The plague only finally stopped at the end of the Seventeenth century.

We know that Shakespeare survived the plague as an infant in a year when many in Stratford died. It caused the closing of the theaters in London in 1593, which undoubtedly affected his family's income. Crop failures in times of plague were sometimes due to weather, but also due to shortages of farm labor to plant and harvest crops. So perhaps in these and many other ways, plague had very personal effects on Shakespeare and his family, friends, co-workers, and acquaintances.

Some say that the plague may have taken Shakespeare’s son Hamnet in August of 1596, since deaths in church registries often did not list the cause of death. In 1956, historian W.G. Howson noted:

1596-98. This was one of the greatest epidemics and affected nearly all thenorth of England. The mortality generally was high and probably very much
higher than many of the registers indicate. One gets the impression that in some
parishes the task of recording was too much for the recorders. Certainly in
some large and scattered parishes many corpses never reached the churchyard.
Contemporary estimates of numbers are fantastic and impossible but nevertheless
reveal the sense of catastrophe that this visitation inspired. There are
many gaps in the registers during these years. Some of them are continuations
of gaps that began in the period of an earlier epidemic, that of 1586-88. There
were famine conditions in the northern counties during and preceding the year
1597.

While the impact was especially felt in the north, and while there may have been other causes for Hamnet's death, it’s very possible that Shakespeare’s son may have been among those who died of the disease in 1596. In these and other ways, plague impacted the playwright.

SILENCE? OR CURSING?
There is a line in a David Wilcox song of lost love called “Golden Day” that reads,
“The silence grew around the wound that tore your heart and mine.”

Sometimes, when people are traumatized, they wrap their trauma in silence. Victims of rape often prefer not to speak of their trauma; likewise, veterans with PTSD often refuse to speak of it, assuming rightly that many people will not understand, or do not wish to hear of such dark things. We often feel useless and disarmed in the face of others’ trauma.

But perhaps when a people are continually traumatized, not only by natural disasters and disease, but also by political events and government oppression (as well as occasional outrageous personal offenses), maybe some become inclined to reach for extreme ideas and rhetoric in which to deliver their curses and insults. In anger, people say, “Fuck you!” They may not think this implies a curse that seems to wish for the violent rape of the person insulted, but in a similar way, in extreme circumstances, people resort to extreme rhetoric.

That seems to be the case with Hamlet’s use of “plague” as a metaphor in describing the disaster he wishes upon Ophelia for what she is doing in this scene.
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Quotes from Hamlet are taken from InternetShakespeare, Modern Version, edited by David Bevington.

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.
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Thanks for reading!
My current project is a book tentatively titled “Hamlet’s Bible,” about biblical allusions and plot echoes in Hamlet.

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https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2019/12/top-20-hamlet-bible-posts.html

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