troubledTiber chafing with her shores,/Caesar said to me, dar’st thou Cassius now/Leap in with me into this angry flood,/And swim to yonder point? Upon the word,/Accoutred as I was, I plunged in,/And bade him follow; so indeed he did./The torrent roared, and we did buffet it/With lusty sinews, throwing it aside,/And stemming it with hearts of controversy … And this man/Is now become a god, and Cassius is/A wretched creature … I did mark/How he did shake” (1.2.101-121) (boldface type added).
The passage also subtly evokes the message and wording of Psalm 46, which famously includes the words “shake” and “spear” exactly 46 words from its beginning and 46 words from its end in the King James Authorized Version of the Bible. “Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed,/And though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea;/Though the waters thereof roarand be troubled,/Though the mountains shake with the swelling thereof… Come behold the works of the Lord,/What desolations he hath made in the earth./He maketh wars to cease unto the end of the earth;/He breaketh the bow, and cutteth the spear in sunder;/He burneth the chariot in the fire.”
The play’s evocation of Psalm 46, and its message of trust in the protection and providence of God at a time of imminent danger and trial, highlights the urgings of Floyd to trust in the designs of God, rather than those of temporal rulers. In effect, Julius Caesar subtly communicates the Jesuit message—resist the monarchy and endure persecution in this life in order to guarantee the salvation of your soul in the next—to Catholics in the audience. As the psalm attests, God will deliver the oppressed and punish the oppressors.
In Hamlet, an allusion to John Floyd is also evident through the word “flood” and in a passage that alludes to Richard Topcliffe, the agent of Queen Elizabeth who personally singled out the Jesuit Robert Southwell for unusually brutal torture.
Horatio, in speaking of the ghost of Hamlet’s father and whether it should be feared, asks, “What if it tempt you toward the flood, my lord,/or to the dreadful summit of the cliff/That beetles o’er his base into the sea,/And there assume some other horrible form,/Which might deprive your sovereignty of reason/And draw you into madness? Think of it./The very place puts toys of desperation,/Without more motive, into every brain/That looks so many fathoms to the sea/And hears it roar beneath” (1.4.69-78).
Horatio’s comments present to the Catholic recusant the dilemma of conscience: if you follow Floyd’s urgings to embrace the Catholic Church and Christ, you may find yourself a prisoner of the torturer Richard Topcliffe. Hamlet says the ghost cannot destroy his soul, which is immortal, and he will therefore not fear the ghost. There is nothing to fear, the play says, as the soul is immortal and cannot be destroyed by any human torturer. Horatio clearly equates “madness” with following Floyd and the ideals of Ignatius, depriving one of “reason.” In Ignatian spirituality, one mystically experiences God through perception, rather than reason, while Queen Elizabeth consistently said her monarchy was based on reason. Point-of-view must be considered here. Horatio is a rationalist associated with the Reformation, while Hamlet shrugs off torture and death and implies, according to the Jesuit message, that it is better to save one’s soul, given that the soul is immortal.
In 1623, Floyd would recall the thoughts behind Hamlet in penning A Word of Comfort to his co-religionists. This tract was written in the wake of a tragic accident that killed some 90 persons in London’s Blackfriars district on October 26. While the theology of Floyd’s tract and Hamlet also somewhat parallel that of TheTriumphs Over Death written by Robert Southwell, the similarity of the wording of Floyd and Shakespeare is more extensive and noticeable. The language used by Shakespeare and Southwell is vastly more similar than the language used by Floyd and Southwell. In other words, Shakespeare in terms of diction follows Southwell, but Floyd follows Shakespeare. For example, a common theme of Southwell in Triumphs and of Shakespeare in Hamlet centers on the need to prepare for death: “the readiness is all” (5.2.223), Hamlet says. Southwell says Philip Howard’s deceased sister, the subject of his prose piece, serves as a model for Catholics to emulate in how “mildly she accepted the check of fortune—fallen upon her without desert.” If one lives a pious life, and thereby has properly prepared for death, death constitutes a “return into a most blissful country.” In Hamlet, death introduces the “undiscovered country,” a place of uncertainty if one has turned away from Christ during earthly life.
In Floyd’s Word of Comfort, the author draws on language from Hamlet, allowing us to understand the play’s practical message: one must maintain presence of mind and not engage in excessive grieving over those who have been slain, but instead accept untimely death with patience and calmness in the realization of divine providence. Otherwise, excessive mourning will weaken the Catholic and the cause, strengthen the Protestant enemy, and lead to more misfortune. Hamlet, through his excessive mourning and rash judgments, which lead continuously throughout the play to accidental death, dramatizes the essential message of Floyd and Southwell: to act in a rash manner is counterproductive. In the final lines of the play, the character Fortinbras says of the slain bodies, “Such a sight as this/Becomes the field, but here shows much amiss” (5.2.402-403). In other words, while such a sight properly suits the battlefield in the contest between Christ and Satan, as delineated by Ignatius of Loyola, it shows that the battle has been fought improperly. Hamlet, the dedicated warrior for Christ, has devoted his will to serving God, although the course of his action, which goes against the Jesuit message to persevere in silence and hope of God, has failed and, as the Jesuit message predicts, led to more disaster.
In penning his tract of 1623, Floyd recalled a subtle theme in Hamlet on the workings of divine providence in the human world. Although the Blackfriars calamity resulted from a collapsed floor at the home of the French ambassador, where an audience had gathered to hear a sermon by the Jesuit Robert Drury, the accident was nevertheless termed the “fatal vesper” and the “doleful even-song” and attributed by Protestants to God’s punishment of Catholics. Protestants also lost no time in pointing out that it occurred in the new-style calendar on November 5, the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot. Floyd sought in his lengthy tract not only to comfort survivors and the families of victims but to refute those whom he believed had misinterpreted the designs of God, wrongfully shed tears over the accidental nature of the disaster, complained of the severity of God’s judgments against his own flock, and resigned themselves to the absence of God in the world. He refuted these “four” concerns with “four” arguments: comfort offered by scripture, biblical examples of patience and fortitude, comparison of more devastating accidents suffered by Catholic adversaries, and the revelation of God’s purposes in permitting such a calamity. Hamlet is described as sometimes walking “four hours together here in the lobby” (2.2.159), while at the end of Hamlet, Fortinbras orders “four” captains to “bear Hamlet like a soldier to the stage” (5.2.397).
A primary theme of Hamlet centers on the notion of “accident” and “misfortune” in the human world in relation to the mystery of God, and the appropriate response of victims of persecution to such disaster. Hamlet can be seen as a didactic message to lay Catholics: the events of our lives no matter how filled with grief and sorrow are directed by divine providence, and one must show fortitude and obedience through patience and perseverance. Floyd cites the biblical examples of Job and Tobias as examples of the patience needed by recusants; in Shakespeare the Papist, the Jesuit scholar Peter Milward says that “we may find the anguish of Hamlet proceeding straight from the Book of Job, as if he has just been reading this book on entering the lobby.”
More than two decades after Hamlet was published, Floyd outlined with seeming ease Hamlet’s theme of misfortune, while using the exact diction of Shakespeare. Floyd argued that excessive grief over misfortune indicates weakness, and any show of weakness puts Catholics at the mercy of their enemies.
