upon the smallest incident. Sorrow and mourning over the executions of Jesuits and lay Catholics—the “slain of our country”—Floyd urges, should be redirected toward mourning ignorance and impiety so that adversaries do not gain the advantage. Sonnet 67 expresses this message succinctly: “That sin by him advantage should achieve/And lace itself with his society.” In other words, the heretics will take advantage of any occasion to denigrate, or “disgrace,” Catholics.
In a further example of “grace” and “ignorance” found together in Hamlet, Hamlet says, “Angels and ministers of grace defend us!/Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damned,/Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell,/Be thy intents wicked or charitable,/Thou com’st in such a questionable shape/That I will speak to thee./I’ll call thee Hamlet,/King, father, royal Dane. O, answer me!/Let me not burst in ignorance” (1.4.39-46).
Crown of Patience as Silence
Floyd writes: “From his [God’s] goodness expect, in devout silence, the like reward of your constancy, not only a crowne of patience in the next world, but also increase of temporal comfort in the present.” Southwell, from whom Floyd obviously draws, also encourages English Catholics to remain constant, avoid attendance of Anglican services, and bear their suffering with patience. This was the official message of Robert Persons.
In The Triumphs Over Death, Southwell writes: “Without perseverance, neither does the champion obtain the conquest, nor the conqueror his crown. The accomplishing of virtue is the virtue of courage; she is the nurse to our merits; and the mediatrice to our need. She is the sister of patience, the daughter of constancy, and the lover of peace… In silence and hope shall be our strength.”
Hamlet’s final words are, “The rest is silence” (5.2.359). Earlier in the play, Polonius urges Gertrude to upbraid Hamlet for causing trouble, while Polonius says he will stand nearby and remain silent: “I’ll silent me even here” (3.4.4). Polonius though does not remain silent but makes a noise. Hamlet then realizes someone is hiding in Gertrude’s closet and stabs him through the drawn curtain; importantly, Polonius is killed when he breaks his silence.
Earlier, in pondering the Jesuit message to bear persecution with patience, Hamlet says: “To be, or not to be: that is the question:/Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer/The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,/Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,/And by opposing end them” (3.1.56-60). He also speaks of the mistreatment that constant persons must bear with patience: “The insolence of office, and the spurns/That patient merit of th’unworthy takes,/When he himself might his quietus make/With a bare bodkin?” (3.1.74-76). Later, Gertrude urges her son to calm his troubled mind: “O gentle son,/Upon the heat and flame of thy distemper/Sprinkle cool patience” (3.4.123-25).
In the famous graveyard scene, Hamlet substitutes the word “crowner” for coroner. The gravedigger, who determines whether Ophelia has committed suicide or accidentally drowned, and whether she should receive a Christian burial, dramatizes Floyd’s point that limiting grief and “crowning” oneself with patience will fend off one’s enemies and thereby death. Shakespeare has the gravedigger announce the “point”: to drown one’s self (literally in tears) is an act of suicide. Such an act is not deserving of a Christian burial, according to the “crowner,” because engaging in excessive grief concerns itself with worldly vanities and self-love which the Ignatian servant must discard; instead, he must adopt “indifference” to the vanities of the world as a way to focus solely on Christ. “Ay marry, is’t—crowner’s quest law,” says the Clown (gravedigger), who continues to dig graves until the end of the world, essentially for those who fail to persevere and trust in God. An unnamed character says, “The crowner hath sate on her, and finds it a Christian burial” (5.1.4). In other words, Ophelia is a servant of Christ.
Sonnet 58 also urges one to express a calm temper in grief and suffering: “And patience, tame to sufferance, bide each cheek.” The sonnet is likely numbered according to 1558, the year in which Elizabeth I took office. Through the silent communication of number symbolism, the sonnet urges patience amidst Queen-sanctioned persecution.
Providence
Floyd writes: “Heere by God’s holy Word we are informed that such is his providence in this life, that an house or roome may fall, no lesse upon the just, as they are hearing his heavenly Doctrine, then upon the Wicked, as they are blaspheming his blessed Name. Why doth Fayth complayne or wonder at this course of God’s providence which he hath set down to himselfe in his Word, and which hath been still his ordinary since the world?” Here, Floyd says the course of life has been controlled by God since the beginning of time. Later, Floyd points to the example of Tobias from the Apocrypha, who was struck blind: “A strange and miserable accident scarce ever heard of before sent (as it might seem) by the hand of God’s providence upon him even in his most fervent exercise of Religion.” He also writes, “The stroke of chance, as it is in truth, so is it taken by the instinct of nature, as the stroke of God’s special providence, and hand.” Several pages later, he writes, “A Sparrow (though not worth a farthing) falles not to the ground without the heavenly Father; and could men desirous of saving truth for whom Christ dyed, fall with the sound therof in their eare, without the Heavenly Father working in their soules?”
Hamlet says: “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,/Rough-hew them how we will” (5.2.10-11). And, “We defy augury. There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow” (5.2.220-21) (cf. Matthew 10.29, “Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? And one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father.”) Hamlet says that despite his intuition he may lose a fencing match to Laertes, he does not want to avoid the match and possible death in the belief that God controls the events of life, even the fall of a sparrow from its nest. Our lives defy prediction, he says; things happen exactly as they should, and what is important is being spiritually prepared.
Earlier, Shakespeare writes, “Alas, how shall this bloody deed be answered?/It will be laid to us, whose providence [foresight]/Should have kept short, restrained, and out of haunt/This mad young man. But so much was our love/We would not understand what was most fit,/But, like the owner of a foul disease,/To keep it from divulging, let it feed/Even on the pith of life” (4.1.16-23). Claudius, in discussing the murder of Polonius by Hamlet, says Hamlet would have murdered Claudius had he been hiding behind the curtain. He predicts that he will be blamed for not having had the foresight to restrain and confine the “mad” young man. Claudius, falsely believing in his own power over death, and thinking his own life has been spared by “chance,” fails to recognize that “providence” belongs to God and not to man.
Mischance
Floyd writes: “There is not any greater affliction unto Gods servants in this life, nor any more sharpe corrasive unto their hart, then the happening of strange & dreadfull mischances, that carry a shew of his anger agaynst their Religion, wherby the enemies therof harden their soules as stone, agaynst it.” He says there is no greater wound than to hear Protestants attribute dreadful accidents to God’s anger against
