Hamlet, after the Player Queen has sworn never to break her vow to not remarry, a hollow vow in light of the real Queen’s adulterous marriage to her slain husband’s brother, the Player King speaks of his sleepiness. The Player Queen prays that no mischance will come between them: “Sleep rock thy brain,/And never come mischance between us twain!” (3.2.233-34). All of this occurs during the play-within-the play, in which Hamlet attempts to engage the conscience of the King. Sleep in Jesuit writings was a metaphor for the sin of religious inconstancy. By breaking their vows, the Player King through sleeping and the Player Queen through her adulterous marriage attempt to avoid mischance, which here means persecution.
Southwell sums it up in Triumphs Over Death: “When the soldier in skirmish seeth his next fellow slain, he thinketh it better to look to himself, than to stand mourning a hapless mischance.” Southwell says that while death is inevitable, we, like “silly birds,” indulge in the weakness of excessive mourning and “counting losses.”
Mischief
Floyd tells Catholics that untimely and accidental death is worse for Protestants on the grounds that they fail to appreciate the subtleties and mysteries of God and instead falsely attribute the accident to God’s wrath. “The Holy Ghost doth acknowledge this kind of Crosses to be the greatest, the worst under the Sunne, yet not so ill unto you the children of the Church, as unto the sonnes of men; I meane them, whose Religion as different from the Catholike is humane, nothing but a denyall of high mysteries contrary to the seeming of flesh and blood: Unto these Humanists, I say, this accident is worse, and causeth greater mischief then unto you.”
In Hamlet during the “dumb show,” or pantomime within the drama, a King and Queen enter, embracing one another in a loving manner. The King falls asleep, and the Queen leaves him. While he is asleep, another man comes in, takes off the King’s crown, kisses it [as in Judas’ kiss of betrayal of Christ], and pours poison in the sleeper’s ears. The Queen returns to find her King dead. Hamlet says, “Marry, this is miching mallecho; it means mischief” (3.2.144). Here, Shakespeare dramatizes apostasy as sleeping (associated by Robert Persons with the sin of conformity to Anglicanism, a betrayal of Christ), which is further equated with hearing “poisonous” words of heretical Protestant doctrine. Hamlet terms this “mischief,” while Floyd says that Protestants—because of their ungodly, man-centered, “humane” beliefs—are more prone to the effects of “mischief.” Furthermore, Floyd cites a scriptural example that succinctly mirrors Hamlet’s theme of poison in the ear: “These calamityes were the cause that he pined away with sorrow to the great griefe of all good men, particularly of Christians; his death being also hastened with poyson given him by Domitian his unnatural brother, whose cruelty he could never overcome with all kind of curtesies, clemencies, and tokens of more than brotherly love.”
What follows the passage in Hamlet is a long soliloquy by the Player King on how the strongest intentions often go awry, weakening one’s will as resolve turns to inaction. “Purpose is but the slave to memory,” he says (3.2.194). Shakespeare dramatizes the exact message of Floyd: turning away from the Church through apostasy only serves to weaken the individual and the cause.
The subject of inappropriately excessive grieving arises in Othello as well. In that play, the Duke says, “To mourn a mischief that is past and gone/Is the next way to draw new mischief on./What cannot be preserved when fortune takes,/Patience her injury a mockery makes./The robbed that smiles, steals something from the thief;/He robs himself, that spends a bootless grief” (1.3.203-208). The lines echo Floyd’s message that prolonged mourning could result in more destruction.
The last scene of Hamlet sums up the message of Floyd that rash action leads to more calamity. The rational Horatio says: “But let this same be presently performed,/Even while men’s minds are wild, lest more mischance/On plots and errors happen” (5.2.393-394).
Other Works
In other works, particularly The Overthrow of theProtestants Pulpit-Babels of English Ministers published in 1612, Floyd writes in language reminiscent of Shakespeare. Floyd was responding in this tract to “The Sermon Preached at the Cross” by the ardently anti-Papist Protestant preacher William Crashaw on February 14, 1607, as well as to Crashaw’s later sermon, The Jesuits Gospell, published in 1610. In his “Cross” sermon, Crashaw compared the Catholic Church to the mystical Babylon and its Tower of Babel, which confounded the languages of men. Floyd reverses the Protestant insult in the title of his tract and compares Protestant-sect pulpits to the confusion of Babel. He opens his rebuttal with a typically Shakespearean pun, substituting the word “babble” for “Babel”; in general, criticism of Puritan prayers before sermons had been called “beeble-babble.” (Shakespeare uses “babble” as a verb or noun in five plays, including “vain bibble babble” in Twelfth Night [4.2.105] and “pibble pabble” in Henry V [4.1.71]). Floyd writes, “If many seduced souls in our (in this respect) unhappy Kingdome, had no more need to read refutations of idle Babels, then any trayned up in true learning can take delight to refute frivolous falsehoods.” Floyd says he had been urged by a member of the Inns of Court, to which his tract is addressed, to refute the “babble” of Crashaw.
His language in The Overthrow is also reminiscent of Romeo and Juliet. In writing of the method of contemplation practiced by the Jesuits, Floyd says that to apprehend something in order to understand it is not to judge it, “as when we apprehend (as S. Augustine did) God as an infinite light, or sea of glory, without bound, in which the world like a sponge floateth, though God be not indeed as we apprehend” (44). Likewise, the Christ-like Juliet (who is called a “lamb” and a “dove” and hails from the east, like the star of Bethlehem followed by the magi) says, “My bounty is as boundless as the sea, my love as deep; the more I give to thee, the more I have, for both are infinite” (2.2.133-135).
Floyd also writes, “If (I say) such were the felicity of our Country, I might to my great comfort have beene excused from the taske of this tedious labour of directing an Answere to this Bachelors [Crashaw’s] Babell, and have saved some peeces of a rich and irrecoverable Jewell to have imployed them in a more gaynefull, and comfortable purchase.” We are reminded of Juliet described as a “rich jewel in an Ethiope’s ear” (1.5.48), while Juliet in the play is associated with Mary- and Gabriel-like figures in her description as a “winged messenger of Heaven” and an “angel.” This metaphor echoes the “toad ugly and venomous,/Wears yet a precious jewel in his head” (As You Like It, 2.2.13-14). Floyd seems quite fond of the metaphor in his repeated use of it: “First, this Treatise may serve for a compendiary answer to a good part of many Protestant books which ever comonly are parsed with these very slanders: That we thinke the Pope to be God; that he can deliver soules out of hell, and the rest, which this Mynister [Crashaw] to make them more vendible doth offer as rare Jewells, and no triviall things.” Floyd invokes the name behind his thought: the notable Protestant preacher John Jewell “to whose name I need add no other Epithete,” confirming his description of “rich jewel” as a pun on Jewell’s name. Floyd notes with sarcasm the untruths about Catholicism—“rich jewels”—spread by Protestant preachers such as Jewell. In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare’s description of the Christ-like Juliet as a “rich jewel in an Ethiope’s ear” is at
