Hilary Gatti on Bruno and Shakespeare: Hamlet / The Historical Context
From Chapter 7
BRUNO AND SHAKESPEARE: HAMLET
The Historical Context
By HILARY GATTI
[...] Those who wish to underline Shakespeare’s position in the course of British history between the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth, when Hamlet was written and acted for the first time (1600–1601), often explain this dramatic change of mood by pointing to the final years of the long and fertile reign of Queen Elizabeth I, which would soon, in 1603, give way to the beginning of the more unpopular and conflictual story of the Stuart dynasty. For it seems difficult to deny that Shakespeare was possessed of an almost prophetic vision when, in the first decade of the seventeenth century, he elaborated his remarkable sequence of tragic stories of failed princes, who drag with them in their personal disaster the whole kingdom over which they should have reigned (King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra). Such tragedies surely have something to do with the coronation of James VI of Scotland as James I of England, once Elizabeth had indicated him, in extremis, as heir to her throne. For it would be James’s son, Charles I, who would eventually plunge England into a civil war that would radically change the course of British history.
On the other hand, justice is not done to Shakespeare’s work if it is considered as enclosed within a historical context limited to British affairs. For, from the outset, his plays show signs of a broader stance, which takes into account both in historical-political and in more general cultural terms the late Renaissance world of the Europe in which he lived. Moreover in the early years of the new century, European history as a whole appears far from serene, tensed as it is within the radical polarization of the conflict between the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, accompanied by the progressive weakening of the Holy Roman Empire. [...]
A growing hostility toward a British monarchy that was becoming ever more absolute would lead to a rapid strengthening of the Protestant and Parliamentarian areas of the bourgeoisie and common people who, in 1640, challenged the power of Charles I and, proposing the Parliament as the most valid center of political power, lay the bases of the modern British state.
At the root of this growing situation of unease, both in a European and in a British context, lay an increasingly dramatic conflict between the principles of authority and of liberty, evident already in the early years of the century. In the light of this situation, the tragedy of the young and cultured prince of Denmark (the most “philosophical” of Shakespeare’s dramatic heroes, as Coleridge would note), who is deprived of his throne and with it of his liberty by his crafty uncle, murderer of Hamlet’s father to become all too soon the lover of his mother, appears as a remarkable anticipation of the crises of violence, corruption, and alienation that will soon plunge the entire continent of Europe into one of the darkest periods of its long history. In the light of this wider historical picture, some few but significant voices in the critical discussion of Hamlet, which begin to be raised at the end of the nineteenth century, have noted an interesting coincidence of dates between the composition of Shakespeare’s first fully mature tragedy in 1600–1601 and the death at the stake of Giordano Bruno on February 17, 1600, in Campo dei Fiori in Rome.
[...] Giordano Bruno’s dramatic life story included, as is well known, a stay in England from the spring of 1583 to the autumn of 1585 that was neither peaceful nor untroubled. We know from his own testimony that after the publication in London in 1584 of his first philosophical dialogue in Italian, La cena de le ceneri (The Ash Wednesday Supper), which proposes the new post-Copernican and infinite cosmology that Bruno had already tried unsuccessfully to talk about in Oxford, he had to take refuge in the French Embassy in London because he was considered a revolutionary who was attempting to subvert “a whole city, a whole province, a whole kingdom.”
The verbal revenge that he developed in his Italian dialogues was bitter and at times violent in its castigation of English culture as a patient refusing to be treated by a foreign doctor who was attempting to apply remedies unknown to the natives. Bruno was merciless in his satire both of the “obtuse” academics and of the “uncouth” populace of England, but he remained constant in his admiration of England’s principal figure of a Renaissance courtier, Sir Philip Sidney, to whom he dedicated (141)
two of those dialogues, as well as of Queen Elizabeth herself. In his own words, he considered her:
superior to all the kings of this world, for she is second to none of the sceptered princes for her judgement, her wisdom, her advice and her government. As for her knowledge of the arts, her notions of science, her intelligence and expertise in the use of those European languages which are spoken by the erudite and the ignorant, there is no doubt that she compares favourably with all the other princes of our time.
Considered by him as a new Astraea, as she was frequently called by admirers both British and foreign, Bruno’s public admiration of the English Queen was held against him during his long trial at the hands of the Roman Catholic Inquisition. [...]
The date of Bruno’s stay in England, in the first half of the 1580s, renders extremely improbable a personal meeting with Shakespeare, who seems not to have arrived in London before the end of the decade, or even possibly at the beginning of the 1590s. Nor can we be certain that Shakespeare had a firsthand knowledge of Bruno’s philosophical dialogues, published in London but written in a notoriously difficult Italian and not translated until more recent centuries. He would probably have had fewer problems with the Latin works, found in the libraries of some of the cultured aristocrats of the period, protectors of the arts as well as the sciences, such as the ninth earl of Northumberland. One of the major figures of the Elizabethan court, Northumberland was very soon imprisoned for high treason in the Tower of London by James I, who suspected him of participation in the Gunpowder Plot, although most modern scholars consider the trial to have been stacked unfairly against him. It is documented that Northumberland was reading Bruno’s works, of which he held a major collection in his private library.
Bruno’s stay in London thus seems to have left a mark on some of the most cultured people in England at that time. (142)
[...] A convincing basis for a knowledge of Bruno on the part of Shakespeare, probably mediated through John Florio, thus undoubtedly exists. This seems indeed likely in view of Bruno’s tragic story and his audacious ideas, which caused him to enter (Hamlet-like) into dramatic conflict with both the cultural and the religious authorities of his time. Given the inflexible dominion of those authorities at the end of the sixteenth century, Bruno’s thought often found violently polemical forms of expression in his works. His use of dialogue, which was so popular with the poets and philosophers of the Renaissance, was far from being purely rhetorical. It indicated a profound dissatisfaction with a culture that was often founded on rigidly dogmatic parameters. Bruno’s theater of ideas thus becomes a drama of universal proportions: “these are dialogues,” he wrote in the dedicatory letter to Sir Philip Sidney of the fourth of his Italian works written and published in London, the Spaccio della bestia trionfante (The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast), “and in them the speakers raise their voices in relation to the speeches of many others, who also have things to say, putting forward their point of view with as much energy and conviction as possible.” [...]
[...] "The possibility that Shakespeare knew and made use of his knowledge of Bruno [...], and perhaps above all, for an idea of the solitary drama involved in thinking philosophically (and it is precisely here that the connection with Hamlet appears most convincing) has been advanced since the second half of the nineteenth century.[...] (145)
[...] The fact that the proposal linking the name of Shakespeare to that of Bruno was put forward at that time of rising libertarian sentiment has not always been propitious to a serious study of the phenomenon. For some years, the problem remained at the center of an intense discussion. Ultimately, however, it was condemned by a number of prestigious commentators[...] and [...]almost died out. [...] (145)
[...]The Bruno–Shakespeare discussion has become a historical curiosity, of which many Shakespearean scholars of today are no longer even aware. The following pages raise the subject of this relationship once again [...], concentrating on a theme central to the work of both Bruno and Shakespeare: [...] a deeply lacerated and violent world that they both often define in terms of “madness.” (146)
By HILARY GATTI
FROM
Essays on Giordano Bruno
Princeton University Press
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7rmc2.12
Hilary Gatti, neé Cox, was born and educated in GB. She married and started to live in Italy in 1961. From 1964-1969 she taught English at the State University of Milan and then moved to Rome where she became Associate Professor of English Literature in the Philosophy Faculty of the University of Rome "La Sapienza". She retired from teaching in 2007. She has been an Honorary Fellow of University College, London, and The University of Aukland (NZ), and was a Member of the School of Historical Studies of The Princeton Institute of Advanced Study in 2006. She has published widely on Renaissance literature and philosophy. Her most recent publication is a new edition and translation of Giordano Bruno's Ash Wednesday Supper: Toronto University Press in the Lorenzo da Ponte Library Series.
IMAGES: Hillary Gatti profile pic from Academia.com. Fair use.
Book cover image from https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9781400836932/html
Fair use.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Disclaimer: If and when I quote or paraphrase bible passages or mention religion in many of my blog posts, I do not intend to promote any religion over another, nor am I attempting to promote religious belief in general; only to explore how the Bible and religion 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, and occasionally more than once a week, so please visit as often as you like, and consider subscribing.
You can subscribe from the menu in the upper left, and also find there a menu to translate to languages other than English.
BRUNO AND SHAKESPEARE: HAMLET
The Historical Context
By HILARY GATTI
On the other hand, justice is not done to Shakespeare’s work if it is considered as enclosed within a historical context limited to British affairs. For, from the outset, his plays show signs of a broader stance, which takes into account both in historical-political and in more general cultural terms the late Renaissance world of the Europe in which he lived. Moreover in the early years of the new century, European history as a whole appears far from serene, tensed as it is within the radical polarization of the conflict between the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, accompanied by the progressive weakening of the Holy Roman Empire. [...]
A growing hostility toward a British monarchy that was becoming ever more absolute would lead to a rapid strengthening of the Protestant and Parliamentarian areas of the bourgeoisie and common people who, in 1640, challenged the power of Charles I and, proposing the Parliament as the most valid center of political power, lay the bases of the modern British state.
At the root of this growing situation of unease, both in a European and in a British context, lay an increasingly dramatic conflict between the principles of authority and of liberty, evident already in the early years of the century. In the light of this situation, the tragedy of the young and cultured prince of Denmark (the most “philosophical” of Shakespeare’s dramatic heroes, as Coleridge would note), who is deprived of his throne and with it of his liberty by his crafty uncle, murderer of Hamlet’s father to become all too soon the lover of his mother, appears as a remarkable anticipation of the crises of violence, corruption, and alienation that will soon plunge the entire continent of Europe into one of the darkest periods of its long history. In the light of this wider historical picture, some few but significant voices in the critical discussion of Hamlet, which begin to be raised at the end of the nineteenth century, have noted an interesting coincidence of dates between the composition of Shakespeare’s first fully mature tragedy in 1600–1601 and the death at the stake of Giordano Bruno on February 17, 1600, in Campo dei Fiori in Rome.
[...] Giordano Bruno’s dramatic life story included, as is well known, a stay in England from the spring of 1583 to the autumn of 1585 that was neither peaceful nor untroubled. We know from his own testimony that after the publication in London in 1584 of his first philosophical dialogue in Italian, La cena de le ceneri (The Ash Wednesday Supper), which proposes the new post-Copernican and infinite cosmology that Bruno had already tried unsuccessfully to talk about in Oxford, he had to take refuge in the French Embassy in London because he was considered a revolutionary who was attempting to subvert “a whole city, a whole province, a whole kingdom.”
The verbal revenge that he developed in his Italian dialogues was bitter and at times violent in its castigation of English culture as a patient refusing to be treated by a foreign doctor who was attempting to apply remedies unknown to the natives. Bruno was merciless in his satire both of the “obtuse” academics and of the “uncouth” populace of England, but he remained constant in his admiration of England’s principal figure of a Renaissance courtier, Sir Philip Sidney, to whom he dedicated (141)
two of those dialogues, as well as of Queen Elizabeth herself. In his own words, he considered her:
superior to all the kings of this world, for she is second to none of the sceptered princes for her judgement, her wisdom, her advice and her government. As for her knowledge of the arts, her notions of science, her intelligence and expertise in the use of those European languages which are spoken by the erudite and the ignorant, there is no doubt that she compares favourably with all the other princes of our time.
Considered by him as a new Astraea, as she was frequently called by admirers both British and foreign, Bruno’s public admiration of the English Queen was held against him during his long trial at the hands of the Roman Catholic Inquisition. [...]
The date of Bruno’s stay in England, in the first half of the 1580s, renders extremely improbable a personal meeting with Shakespeare, who seems not to have arrived in London before the end of the decade, or even possibly at the beginning of the 1590s. Nor can we be certain that Shakespeare had a firsthand knowledge of Bruno’s philosophical dialogues, published in London but written in a notoriously difficult Italian and not translated until more recent centuries. He would probably have had fewer problems with the Latin works, found in the libraries of some of the cultured aristocrats of the period, protectors of the arts as well as the sciences, such as the ninth earl of Northumberland. One of the major figures of the Elizabethan court, Northumberland was very soon imprisoned for high treason in the Tower of London by James I, who suspected him of participation in the Gunpowder Plot, although most modern scholars consider the trial to have been stacked unfairly against him. It is documented that Northumberland was reading Bruno’s works, of which he held a major collection in his private library.
Bruno’s stay in London thus seems to have left a mark on some of the most cultured people in England at that time. (142)
[...] A convincing basis for a knowledge of Bruno on the part of Shakespeare, probably mediated through John Florio, thus undoubtedly exists. This seems indeed likely in view of Bruno’s tragic story and his audacious ideas, which caused him to enter (Hamlet-like) into dramatic conflict with both the cultural and the religious authorities of his time. Given the inflexible dominion of those authorities at the end of the sixteenth century, Bruno’s thought often found violently polemical forms of expression in his works. His use of dialogue, which was so popular with the poets and philosophers of the Renaissance, was far from being purely rhetorical. It indicated a profound dissatisfaction with a culture that was often founded on rigidly dogmatic parameters. Bruno’s theater of ideas thus becomes a drama of universal proportions: “these are dialogues,” he wrote in the dedicatory letter to Sir Philip Sidney of the fourth of his Italian works written and published in London, the Spaccio della bestia trionfante (The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast), “and in them the speakers raise their voices in relation to the speeches of many others, who also have things to say, putting forward their point of view with as much energy and conviction as possible.” [...]
[...] "The possibility that Shakespeare knew and made use of his knowledge of Bruno [...], and perhaps above all, for an idea of the solitary drama involved in thinking philosophically (and it is precisely here that the connection with Hamlet appears most convincing) has been advanced since the second half of the nineteenth century.[...] (145)
[...] The fact that the proposal linking the name of Shakespeare to that of Bruno was put forward at that time of rising libertarian sentiment has not always been propitious to a serious study of the phenomenon. For some years, the problem remained at the center of an intense discussion. Ultimately, however, it was condemned by a number of prestigious commentators[...] and [...]almost died out. [...] (145)
[...]The Bruno–Shakespeare discussion has become a historical curiosity, of which many Shakespearean scholars of today are no longer even aware. The following pages raise the subject of this relationship once again [...], concentrating on a theme central to the work of both Bruno and Shakespeare: [...] a deeply lacerated and violent world that they both often define in terms of “madness.” (146)
By HILARY GATTI
FROM
Essays on Giordano Bruno
Princeton University Press
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7rmc2.12
Hilary Gatti, neé Cox, was born and educated in GB. She married and started to live in Italy in 1961. From 1964-1969 she taught English at the State University of Milan and then moved to Rome where she became Associate Professor of English Literature in the Philosophy Faculty of the University of Rome "La Sapienza". She retired from teaching in 2007. She has been an Honorary Fellow of University College, London, and The University of Aukland (NZ), and was a Member of the School of Historical Studies of The Princeton Institute of Advanced Study in 2006. She has published widely on Renaissance literature and philosophy. Her most recent publication is a new edition and translation of Giordano Bruno's Ash Wednesday Supper: Toronto University Press in the Lorenzo da Ponte Library Series.
IMAGES: Hillary Gatti profile pic from Academia.com. Fair use.
Book cover image from https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9781400836932/html
Fair use.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Disclaimer: If and when I quote or paraphrase bible passages or mention religion in many of my blog posts, I do not intend to promote any religion over another, nor am I attempting to promote religious belief in general; only to explore how the Bible and religion 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, and occasionally more than once a week, so please visit as often as you like, and consider subscribing.
You can subscribe from the menu in the upper left, and also find there a menu to translate to languages other than English.
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