Shakespeare's Tragic Justice by Sisson C. J.;

Author:Sisson, C. J.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2017-04-25T04:00:00+00:00

He has already once bidden Horatio to

report me and my cause aright

To the unsatisfied.

And finally, with his dying voice nominating Fortin-bras to succeed him as rightful king, for the third time he charges Horatio to explain to Fortinbras the course he took. It would be merely ludicrous to imagine that what Horatio was to tell the world, and to tell Fortinbras, was that Hamlet was to be excused for not being able to make up his mind sooner. Yet no character in fiction has examined the workings of his own mind more narrowly, and we may not airily assume naïveté or self-deception in this rich endowment of a complex person. What the world was to be told was a matter of greater weight than this, and I do not recall that the answer to this question has yet been fully given. It may perhaps help us to interpret his anxiety if we consider it as a problem of justice.

It is customary to describe Hamlet as a Revenge-Tragedy. It is less frequently realized how closely vengeance and justice are allied in men’s thoughts, though Bacon’s definition of revenge as ‘wild justice’ is now proverbial. And when we quote the sentence, ‘Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord,’ we can hardly imagine that vengeance here means anything but divine justice supreme in the universe. In Greek tragedy the dividing-line is narrow between the judge and the avenger, the δικαστήςs and the διάóóροs, the dispenser of justice and the instrument of justice. Upon Electra’s enquiry in the Choephorae, the Chorus indeed rejects such hair-splitting in favour of the simple lex talionis, life exacted in payment for life, whatever the instrument. But Electra, like Hamlet, requires to be reassured that such vengeance would indeed be the will of Heaven. And Orestes, in the same play, reports the command of Apollo laid upon him to avenge his father Agamemnon upon his slayer Aegisthus.

The theme of justice in vengeance recurs again and again in Shakespeare as elsewhere. It is a most significant difference between the revenge sought by Iago, and that executed by Othello, that Iago makes no pretence to be the instrument of a higher justice. His motives are plainly those recognised by contemporary theology as arising out of the deadly sin of envy. But Othello, moved as he too is by personal wrongs, above all to the Elizabethan demi-god of reputation, is yet upheld by the belief that it is laid upon him to do God’s will upon a source of evil, the more perilous for its beauty. In Julius Caesar, Brutus uses the same image of a sacrifice which Othello invokes, to justify the slaying of Caesar, and Antony at the end distinguishes him honourably from the others who were moved only by envy. Yet Antony is careful in his speeches to the citizens to cancel out Brutus’ explicit claim to them that Caesar died for his offences to Rome, by attributing to all the conspirators the lower motive of ‘private griefs,’ not justice.

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