Is Hamlet's Jephthah remark in part about Cecil & the Bond of Association?

Shakespeare's Hamlet has numerous words, phrases, and allusions that seem to have been more familiar to its original audiences in Shakespeare's lifetime than they are to ours. This includes not only references to hunting and falconry ("a hawk from a handsaw") and classical literature and mythology (Priam, Didi, Pyrrhus), but also numerous Biblical allusions.

One of the more explicit Biblical allusions in Hamlet is when prince Hamlet implies that Polonius is like Jephthah, whose tale is told in the 11th and 12th chapters of the book of Judges. Jephthah is the son of a prostitute and is treated like an outsider, but he has a reputation of being an excellent warrior. When the Israelites need him to fight the Ammonites, Jephthah promises God that, if God helps him achieve victory, he will sacrifice to God the first thing to cross his threshold. When he returns victorious from battle, it is his daughter who first crosses his threshold. Preaching during the English Reformation used Jephthah as an example of a man who made a rash vow, a bad vow he never should have made in the first place, but having made it, a vow he should not have fulfilled.

It may not be immediately apparent how Polonius is a sort of Jephthah-figure to Hamlet in a more superficial way: Polonius is not a warrior, and we have no evidence in the play that his mother was a prostitute. He dies before his daughter in the play. So if we take the details of the play and of Jephthah too literally, it may seem they don't match up.

Mark Alexander has summarized many of the arguments about how character of Polonius may be based on William Cecil, with Laertes based on Thomas Cecil, Reynaldo on Robert Cecil, and Ophelia on Anne Cecil. He also addresses how these speculations play into arguments by "Stratfordians" who believe Shakespeare's plays were written by William Shakespeare, and "Oxfordians" who believe the plays were written by Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford.

I tend to be uninterested in arguments about authorship, but Mark Alexander's essay on Polonius and Cecil are helpful. (I am uninterested in the debate on authorship because it always seems reductive to me, reducing rich literature to what seems like gossip about various historical figures, drawing attention away from the richness of the texts themselves.)

For purposes of this blog post, I am more interested in the fact that William Cecil was instrumental in designing the Bond of Association as a vow to avenge a possible assassination of Elizabeth: This connection between Cecil and a bad vow helps to illuminate a possible connection between Jephthah and Polonius, if we accept that Polonius was viewed by early audiences as a kind of stand-in for William Cecil.

[Jephthah's Daughter c. 1560-80. Oil on panel. RCIN 406897. King's Closet, Windsor Castle. Royal Collection Trust.] 
 
It may seem at first that when Hamlet sings to Polonius part of a song about Jephthah, or recites to him some lyrics from such a song, that this comes out of the blue, an allusion unrelated to the main events of the play.

But if we consider Polonius as based on William Cecil, and Cecil as one of the main architects of the Bond of Association (as a bad vow and revenge vow), then Hamlet's comparison of Polonius to Jephthah makes more sense.

The importance of considering the Bond in understanding Hamlet is not a new idea: See the Encyclopedia.com article on Hamlet:

Hamlet is torn between the conflicting concepts of vengeance as honorable and murder as sin, a struggle that Renaissance society was grappling with as well. A law called the Bond of Association of 1584, for example, legalized revenge against anyone who attempted to overthrow or malign the queen. Yet when the Earl of Essex was killed under that law for attempting to overthrow the government, society in general condemned his execution, as did Shakespeare. Hamlet’s ongoing indecision reflects the society’s debates about the legitimacy of vengeance and humane treatment of wrongdoers and seems to suggest that there are elements of merit and dishonor in both.

- This doesn't connect Polonius with Cecil and Cecil with the Bond of Association, but it makes the more general connection between the Bond and Hamlet.

A Google search reveals that even quizlet.com has a flash card related to Hamlet that mentions the Bond of Association:

See also the 1995 book, Inscribing the Time: Shakespeare and the End of Elizabethan England,
by Eric S. Mallin. From page 146:

Queen Elizabeth's 1584 Bond of Association. The original bond was the Tudor privy council's crafty response to the seemingly endless Catholic plots against Queen Elizabeth's life, which were almost exclusively aimed at replacing her with Mary Stuart. The document enlisted its signers—presumably the Protestant aristocracy, but perhaps also ordinary, obedient citizens—to pledge "their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honors . . . to pursue implacably anyone who might attempt to assassinate Elizabeth or remotely benefit by such an attempt" (McManaway, "Elizabeth, Essex, and James," 220).

This may not seem obvious at first, because the idea of Polonius being based on William Cecil is something outside the play, something in the political and historical context of the early audiences and not the text itself. And while the early audiences may have viewed Polonius as a satire of Cecil, we are now quite removed from that original historical context, so the connection doesn't seem to come naturally. But this is true of many references in the play to things that the original audiences may have understood, but which require a bit of explaining, including allusions to classical literature, the Bible, and more.

As I noted in a previous blog post, Isaac Asimov believes that perhaps Hamlet was eavesdropping and knows that Polonius and Claudius are planning to use Ophelia as bait for their own eavesdropping on Hamlet, and that this in part explains Hamlet's use of the Jephthah metaphor: Polonius would sacrifice his own daughter in his efforts to please the king.

JEPHTHAH-POLONIUS CONNECTIONS
Jephthah is ambitious in promising God he will sacrifice to him the first thing (or living thing?) that crosses his threshold, if God grants him victory in battle. 

Jephthah is victorious, and his daughter is the first to cross his threshold upon his return. (Most biblical scholars think Jephthah sacrificed his daughter, as in human sacrifice, as in Abraham and Isaac, but there is no angel to stay the hand of Jephthah. A few think she commits her life to perpetual virginity - I'm not convinced).

Polonius is ambitious in what he is willing to do for Claudius and Gertrude.

Polonius is too ambitious in what he commits to the king, or withholds from his daughter (Hamlet's attention), or in what actions for the king he includes his daughter (eavesdropping on Hamlet, using her as bait), just as Jephthah is too ambitious in what he commits to God.

It seems in this way that Polonius withholds his daughter from Hamlet, perhaps not only for fear she may become pregnant, but also assuming she is unworthy of marriage to the prince, and unwilling to offend his employers by assuming his daughter is worthy of such a match (after all, they are not only his employers, but also his king and queen).

The actions of Polonius in dedication to his king (including spying on Hamlet in Gertrude's closet) represent not only his ambition, but also the foolish risks he is willing to take. this risk not only leads to his own death, but also to the death of his daughter. (Still a bit of a stretch; Polonius, unlike Jephthah, dies before his daughter.)

A RASH VOW OF POLONIUS
In Act II, scene 2, Polonius tells Claudius and Gertrude that Hamlet has been driven mad because of losing Ophelia. Polonius is confident in this.

Claudius asks Gertrude if she thinks that's true, she says it might be so, and Polonius makes a rash vow: He says that, if it proves otherwise, his monarchs can take "this from this" (meaning his head from his shoulders). He promises them that they may kill him if he is wrong. (And yes, he is wrong: Hamlet is mad probably much more from having seen what seems to be the ghost of his father from purgatory, than from lost love.)

Is this the rash, Jephthah-like vow Polonius makes? Is it more about his own life than about his daughter's? Perhaps. But there is no evidence in the text that Hamlet was eavesdropping on this conversation and heard Polonius make this vow, so unless we assume that an eavesdropping Hamlet was part of original productions, but (as was often the case) the stage directions omit mention of it, then Hamlet may be thinking of Polonius as a Jephthah for other reasons than this vow, and the playwright may be using Hamlet's mention of Jephthah to suggest more parallels than those of which Hamlet is himself aware.

Otherwise, more simply, Jephthah has a daughter who dies due to her father's foolish actions, as does Polonius. The audience can consider this, but Hamlet can't foretell the future, can't know that Ophelia will go mad and die while he is later on a ship toward England, but later returning on a pirate ship. Hamlet connects his Jephthah reference quickly to Jephthah's daughter, so if we prefer to think that the Jephthah reference is merely Hamlet's commentary on Polonius, Hamlet may have some vague idea that the actions and promises of Polonius to the throne may prove harmful to his daughter, as they did in the case of Jephthah.

Why does the Bond of Association matter when considering Polonius, Cecil, and Hamlet?
Shakespeare's Hamlet is a play about a vow of revenge that Prince Hamlet makes to (what he believes is) the ghost of his father, the former king. The Bond of Association was a vow of revenge in the event of an attempted or successful assassination of Elizabeth.

But besides being concerned about fulfilling his vow to the ghost, Hamlet is also concerned about the afterlife, whether his actions lead him to heaven or hell. In 3.1. during his "To be or not to be" speech, Hamlet says,

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
[....] Who would these fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death-
The undiscover'd country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns- puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?

He doesn't yet know his eternal fate, but he knows his actions may determine it. He has vowed revenge to the ghost, yet he knows that the church teaches against revenge. People in Shakespeare's time must have felt a similar conflict - "The time  is out of joint," as Hamlet says in 1.5 - because the church preached against revenge, and Elizabeth was the head of the English church, and yet Elizabeth had agreed to a revenge vow in the form of the Bond of Association. Hamlet in 1.2 says he knows not "seems" - his is not concerned with mere appearances, but with sincerity and truth. The English monarch and her key advisors were supposedly Christian, at least in appearance, but in their vows of revenge, they seemed insincere and unchristian.

CONNECT THE DOTS
The answer to the question of what Jephthah has to do with Polonius and Hamlet lies not just in the imaginative world of the play, but even more in William Cecil, on whom the character of Polonius was based, and in the vow of revenge killing that he designed, and that Elizabeth authorized.

The English church and many writers of the time used the story of Jephthah to demonstrate that there are bad vows which should not be made, or if made, would be wrong to fulfill: Jephthah was wrong to make his vow to God, and wrong to assume such a bad vow had to be fulfilled, they said.

This would imply that perhaps William Cecil had designed a bad (or sinful?) vow when he and Walsingham created the Bond of Association, and that perhaps it should not have been fulfilled, had the need arisen. It was in essence a vow of revenge, the very kind of vow that Hamlet makes to the ghost, and then later has his doubts about: "What dreams may come" in the "undiscovered country" after death, if one does not obey scripture's command to leave vengeance to God, and kills in revenge? Or if one fails to avenge a father's death?

If the ghost is a demon in disguise, and the fulfilling of a vow to the ghost leads Hamlet to damnation (as Hamlet thinks may be, before the play-within-the-play, the mousetrap), then it would seem the fulfilling of the Bond of Association would lead to damnation as well.

Because so many have assumed that Polonius is based on Cecil, and because Cecil was a main writer of the Bond, it may be that this is the missing piece (as others have noted): Connecting Polonius to Cecil and the Bond makes more sense when Hamlet implies that Polonius is a Jephthah: Hamlet may be speaking as much or more to the ghost of Cecil (who had died in 1598, and whose son Robert inherited his job and title) as he is to Polonius.

To be sure, one can still enjoy the play a great deal without knowing this, or without understanding all the allusions to Biblical passages and classical myths, or to hunting and falconry, and more. But it does help, to understand the allusions.

IF WE KNEW NOW WHAT THEY KNEW THEN
All of this also demonstrates that there is a great deal about the lives and world of Shakespeare and his first audiences that we usually don't know upon first reading or seeing the plays, only some of which might be reconstructed from wider reading and learning - but also a great deal of which may always be lost to time.

We often assume that allusions in plays like Shakespeare's Hamlet are meant to offer some direct illumination regarding the play's characters and plot. But in the case of Hamlet's Jephthah reference to Polonius, what if that allusion is as much, or more, about William Cecil and the Bond of Association, with its (foolish? sinful?) revenge vow, as it is about Polonius and his daughter?

Many sources mention Polonius and Cecil. Others mention Hamlet's vows and the Bond of Association. Many mention Jephthah. But as these are all related, it helps to connect all of them.
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Hamlet quotes: All quotes from Hamlet are taken from the Modern (spelling), Editor's Version at InternetShakespeare via the University of Victoria in Canada. They are often first identified by way of the advanced search feature at OpenSourceShakespeare.org.

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RECENT BLOG POSTS ABOUT POLONIUS & JEPHTHAH:

October 6, 2020: Power-Broker Polonius, Ungenerous Jephthah
https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2020/10/powerbroker-polonius-ungenerous-jephthah.html

November 24, 2020: Is Hamlet's Jephthah remark in part about Cecil & the Bond of Association?
https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2020/11/hamlet-jephthah-cecil-bond-assn.html

December 1, 2020: Polonius, Apuleius, Golden Ass, Arras, & Hidden Lovers
https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2020/12/polonius-apuleius-golden-ass-arras.html

December 8, 2020: William Cecil: Top Among 12 Polonius Satire/inspiration Candidates
https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2020/12/william-cecil-top-among-12-polonius.html

December 15, 2020: Jephthah-Figures in Hamlet: Ambitious, Desperate, Traumatized Outsiders?
https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2020/12/jephthah-polonius-cecil-ambitious.html

December 22, 2020: Jephthah, Cecil, & Three Instruments in Hamlet
https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2020/12/jephthah-cecil-three-instruments-in.html

December 29, 2020: J.G. McManaway: Ophelia & Jephtha's Daughter
https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2020/12/jg-mcmanaway-ophelia-jephthas-daughter.html

January 5, 2021:  What Art Might Remind Us About Jephthah, Polonius, & Ophelia
https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2021/01/what-art-might-remind-us-about-jephthah.html

January 12, 2021: Jephthah & Polonius: What’s prostitution got to do with it?
https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2021/01/jephthah-polonius-whats-prostitution.html

January 19, 2021: What's Jephthah to Hecuba, or She to Him?
https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2021/01/whats-jephthah-to-hecuba-or-she-to-him.html
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Disclaimer: If and when I quote or paraphrase bible passages in many of my blog posts, I do not intend 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.

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

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