Two Late-Elizabethan Plays with Royal Incest & Jonah Themes

[1]

THE THEME OF SCANDALOUS ROYAL INCEST was to people of that late Elizabethan times something like the themes of resource wars and government lies about weapons of mass destruction after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003: The blockbuster film, Avatar, was released in December of 2009, about earthlings fighting a resource war for an energy source against the native population of a distant planet. About five months later, in May of 2010, Disney released the film, Prince of Persia, which was rightly criticized for casting too many Caucasian actors as the main characters and not enough of Middle Eastern descent; but a notable aspect of the plot involved lies about weapons of mass destruction possessed by a country that Persia would invade. The folly of corrupt government was on people’s minds, and therefore became a topic of popular entertainment.


[2]

IN THE LAST DECADE of the life of Elizabeth I, there were two very popular plays with a theme of incestuous royalty. Both of these plays also utilized aspects of the Biblical tale of Jonah, the prophet who is swallowed by a fish; one play was more explicit about Jonah, the other more implicit.

The first of these two plays was A Looking Glass for London and England, and the second was Shakespeare’s Hamlet.*

Looking Glass ends happily, with the king saved from an incestuous marriage by a lightning bolt, and repenting after a visit from the prophet Jonah.

Hamlet is a tragedy that ends badly for the king who is killed by the prince; the prophetic soul whose sea-voyage echoes that of Jonah is also Prince Hamlet.

The people of England knew that Elizabeth had no heir, and so the House of Tudor was coming to an end, a house that had been marked in part by the scandal of Henry VIII’s divorce from his first wife, Catherine of Aragon. Katherine had briefly been married to Henry’s brother Arthur, the heir apparent, but Arthur died; Catharine claimed they had never consummated the marriage and they received special papal dispensation to marry, but Henry later doubted Catherine after they could not produce a thriving male heir. The divorce led to England’s break with Rome, and a great deal of civil strife, public executions, government spying and repression, as well as the dissolving of all Roman Catholic monasteries and convents in England.

Many English and Protestant scholars after the reformation assumed that England’s break from Rome was necessary, good, and welcomed by all right-thinking people, assumed to be the vast majority, and resisted by only a few treasonous citizens whose main allegiances were more with Rome than with England. But in more recent decades, scholars have increasingly recognized that England in the early decades after the reformation was officially Protestant, but its population was still mostly Catholic in habits, thinking, and loyalties, but often conforming outwardly only to comply with laws and stay out of trouble.

A Looking Glass for London and England was a morality play, a form that had been going out of style by the time Shakespeare began to write for the stage. At first glance, one might think that it was designed to flatter government and church officials: It was about a king saved from an incestuous marriage, after all, and Henry VIII had claimed that he needed the divorce Rome would not give him because he wanted to repent of his first marriage, which he claimed was incestuous: So in the play, the king is saved, just as England was saved. What a great way to get the play to gain the approval of the censors (or the Master of Revels): Make it appear to say nice things about an English king of recent memory.

But Looking Glass also had personal morality issues, adulterous royalty taking lovers, which also happened to resemble some of the vices of Henry VIII. As in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, there is a murder by poison. Looking Glass also has the prophet Jonah as a key character, including aspects of the Biblical tale’s plot.

The play was performed late in the life of Elizabeth, who was called “The Virgin Queen,” but rumored to have taken lovers. Yet without any explicitly objectionable content, a morality play like this may have been viewed to be safe entertainment to keep the masses occupied and distracted, encouraging them to hope and dream of a future king who might live up to the title of “Christian king.”

ARISTOTLE’S POETICS understood that the purpose of drama as not only to entertain, but also to arouse fear and pity, and through catharsis, perhaps to transform people. Speech-Act theory has a similar understanding, that speech (or the performance of a play) not only conveys information, but strives to accomplish something, perhaps through entertaining, evoking pity, fear, and catharsis.

Hamlet understands this power of speech and drama when he says, "the play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king" (2.2.1645). Thomas Lodge and Robert Greene, the writers of Looking Glass, understood it as well, attempting to hold a mirror up to Londoners wherein their collective conscience might be caught.

SO WE MIGHT WONDER: What happened between the writing and performance of Looking Glass and Shakespeare’s Hamlet that made a play about incestuous royalty seem fitting as a tragedy, and that made Shakespeare take the the Jonah story, which had been so obvious and explicit in Looking Glass, and make it masterfully implicit instead?

Certainly one thing that happened is that by the time the second quarto was published in 1604, Elizabeth had died in the previous year, so England knew a royal house had come to an end. A tragedy in which the royalty are all killed, replaced by Fortinbras, a prince from the north, sounded like what had happened to England: The father of Fortinbras had been killed by King Hamlet, and the mother of James I had been beheaded under the reign of Elizabeth.

But another thing that seems to have happened is that Shakespeare internalized the Jonah tale, if he had not done so already before seeing Looking Glass. They say that dialectics begin at a superficial level, as we begin to learn the basics of an idea (or story). But over time, we wrestle more deeply with the ideas, and they may begin to change us and to offer up new insights. I have quoted Lewis Hyde’s idea of a “Labor of Gratitude” as an example of this. The story of Jacob wrestling with angels is another example perhaps of a way to speak about inner dialectics.

But the Jonah tale itself is about inner dialectics and transformation: Jonah tries to run from his prophetic destiny, but eventually has to face the fact that escape is impossible. In the belly of the fish, he has a transformation.

How exactly is Prince Hamlet’s sea-voyage like that of Jonah? I’ve written on this before, but wanted to explore it in a fresh way in light of A Looking Glass for London and England. But here are some expanded notes on the Jonah echoes implied in Hamlet's sea-voyage:

JONAH is called to be a prophet but resists; his story has perhaps eight key features that parallel Hamlet’s:
1. Jonah is called to be a prophet to Nineveh, but flees westward across the Mediterranean toward Tarshish.
Hamlet has a “prophetic soul” (1.5.728) but is sent on a boat (also westward) to England, away from his prophetic destiny.
2. While Jonah is asleep, a storm threatens the safety of all in the boat.
For Hamlet, the storm rages in his heart (“a kind of fighting / That would not let me sleep,” 5.2.3503-4), his premonition about the letter.
3. Jonah volunteers to be thrown overboard to appease the gods and save the others.
Hamlet (still thinking bloody thoughts?) volunteers to leave his boat (“in the grapple I boarded them,” 4.6.2990-1) to engage with the pirates in the ship that overtakes them.
4. Jonah and Hamlet change mode of transportation mid-sea, Jonah swallowed by a fish, Hamlet by a pirate ship (2991-2).
5. Jonah spends three days and nights in the belly of the fish and has a change of heart.
Hamlet also has a change of heart focused not on a vengeful father and a god pleased to punish (3.4.2548-51), but on a merciful Providence (4.6.2993).
6. Praying in the belly of the fish, Jonah notes that “They that wait upon lying vanities, forsake their own mercy” (Jonah 2:8);
in Hamlet’s Denmark, Claudius is the vain liar who refuses to give up all he has gained by killing his brother, and so refuses to be merciful to others and forsakes the mercy of heaven (3.3.2314-42).
7. Ending his prayer in the fish’s belly, Jonah says he will sacrifice and pay what he has vowed;
Hamlet sacrifices by accepting the duel (“Let be”) in spite of warnings from Horatio (5.2.3658-73.1), and pays with his life for the accidental murder of Polonius, as he said in the closet scene that he would (“I will […] answer well / The death I gave him,” 3.4.2552-3).
8. The fish and pirate ship return Jonah and Hamlet, respectively, to where they can fulfill their destinies.

The correlations between Hamlet and Jonah are too many, and the contrast with the Hamlet source tales too great, to claim this was simply an accident of the playwright(s) (Shakespeare’s Hamlet and perhaps the Ur-Hamlet as well).

Hamlet could have been killed in England or by the pirates, but instead his life was spared, not by his crafting of the forged letter but by things beyond his control.

When someone spares or saves your life, it is like a gift: You would have been dead, but instead, your life has been handed back to you. It is as if Hamlet’s slate has been wiped clean of debts to his father. In his letter to Claudius, the returned Hamlet describes himself as naked (4.7.3054, 3062) and alone (3062): essentially, reborn. He speaks no more of ghosts or fathers, only “my King” (5.2.3568). **

IT IS REMARKABLE THAT IN HAMLET, THERE IS NO EXPLICIT JONAH to call the royal couple to repentance as in Looking Glass. Instead, Prince Hamlet is the prophetic soul who tries to catch his mother and uncle’s conscience in the play-within-the-play. His mother eventually accepts his call to repentance, but Claudius does not. The play is dark in that Hamlet also kills Polonius by accident at the very time he is trying to wring his mother’s heart and convince her of the errors of her ways. Hamlet is descending into evil at the very point where he invites his mother to turn from it, only to turn from it later himself after being saved by Providence and pirates. And ironically, Hamlet objects most to his mother's second marriage before his Jonah-like sea-voyage; his conversion at sea does not move him in the direction of being more the angry prophet-figure, calling others to repentance, but rather, away from it and toward acceptance of divine will.

So what was Shakespeare’s Hamlet trying to accomplish with its audience, in his own time, with this Jonah theme, with a prince as the flawed Jonah-figure, both prophet and executioner of the unrepentant, murderous usurper-king? Was it an admission that even the best of royals will be flawed, and will have to make life-and-death decisions, getting some of them wrong? Did the play encourage its audience to hope for a king of queen who, in spite of flaws, might be as willing to wrestle with angels of light and darkness, as Hamlet did?

Christian typology viewed Jonah's time in the belly of the fish as prefiguring or foreshadowing Jesus' three days in the tomb, something that came to be known as "the sign of Jonah." People in Shakespeare's time knew this very well from the gospels, and because they were required to attend church every Sunday.

Did Shakespeare want a prince, princess, king or queen, who would wrestle with God and become more like Christ?

And how were Shakespeare's goals and methods—and their implications—different from those of Looking Glass? For one thing, we might note that the prospective queen or incestuous royal bride in Looking Glass is killed by a lightning bolt. She's marginalized, erased.

In Hamlet, as I've written before, it seems Gertrude may feel sorrow for her sins and undergo a kind of implied conversion or repentance before drinking from the poison cup. Instead of being erased, the queen is the one who is saved (in the eyes of a transcendent God, perhaps), and the king is the one who refuses to repent....

What do you think?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
[1] Jonah engraving: ca.1585 Made by Anto. Wierix after Maerten de Vos. Anthony (or Anton II) Wierix (1553-1619)

[2] Avatar, 2009, ‎20th Century Fox directed by James Cameron.
 Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, 2010, Disney, directed by Mike Newell.

* Shakespeare's Hamlet was preceded by a lost play scholars have long called the Ur-Hamlet, by an unknown author, but which some presume to have been written by Thomas Kyd, which Shakespeare may have adapted].

** 8-point Jonah-Hamlet-sea-voyage comparison list taken from a paper I prepared for a seminar at the 2020 Shakespeare Association of America conference in Denver, Colorado this coming April.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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.