The Renaissance Drama of Knowledge by Gatti Hilary;

Author:Gatti, Hilary; [Gatti, Hilary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

And Cartari’s Minerva following, as he informs his reader, an ancient Athenian precedent, is shown with a small symbolic sphinx surmounting her helmet (see Plate 1, p.9).11 The relevance of such silences, either chosen or imposed, can only be appreciated by a consideration of the corresponding danger of words: ‘Be silent, then, for danger is in words’.12 Dr Faustus, talking to the Wittemberg scholars as he prepares himself for his final act of magic, the conjuring up of the shadow of Helen of Troy, is concerned above all to warn them of the dangers involved for those who choose the new ‘metaphysics of magitians’. But Faustus himself will be the first to disregard his own warning. For as soon as he sees the shape of Helen before him, he bursts out with the famous eulogy of her overpowering beauty: ‘Was this the face that launched a thousand ships,/And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?/O Helen, make me immortal with a kiss’. And Faustus had undoubtedly been right to sense the danger inherent in words, for no sooner does he express his sense of a divinity and immortality to be found within the human form, and to be possessed through an ardent act of love, than he is admonished by the Old Man, the guardian of Christian orthodoxy and order, that thus he has lost his soul, and condemned himself for ever to the torments of hell.13

Hamlet, speaking to his Wittemberg student-friend Horatio and his companions, is equally insistent on the necessity for a close silence: ‘Swear by my sword/Never to speak of this that you have heard’.14 For he has just been communing with the Ghost of his dead father on the castle ramparts, and already he knows that the message that Ghost has brought to him will threaten him and his friends with death. And so once again Hamlet urges his companions to silence before leaving the haunted castle battlements: ‘And still your fingers on your lips, I pray’.15

Given the presence of the Ghost, we may consider the silence referred to here as in part a Hermetic silence (the jealous reservation among a few selected adepts of occult or mystical secrets); but it is also, and much more, a ‘politic’ silence, dictated by the sense common to both Faustus and Hamlet of living in a distorted and deceptive world where a search for human beauty and truth becomes inevitably a suspect and dangerous activity. Such a realization is reached by the eloquent and at times garrulous Faustus only towards the end of his tragic story, but it dominates Hamlet’s sense of his world from the opening scenes of the play. And precisely because he starts from such a realization, Shakespeare operates a radical change of emphasis in his fable, at the same time as he establishes close links between his hero and Marlowe’s Faustus. For although Hamlet’s intellectual powers are clearly projected towards enquiries into new and unexplored areas of truth which are reminiscent of Faustus (‘There are more

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