pendent world; or to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and incertain thought
Imagine howling: ’tis too horrible!
The weariest and most loathed worldly life
That age, ache, penury and imprisonment
Can lay on nature is a paradise
To what we fear of death.
Paradise, purgatory or hell – the possibilities are simply too awesome and too terrifying for anyone but living saints or fanatics to face. And in the single most famous speech in the Shakespearean canon, Hamlet agrees with Claudio – the impossibility of knowing what comes after life terrifies all men. For Catholics, and indeed for many Protestants, the terrors of hell are so vivid, even after the paintings of damnation in the churches have been whitewashed over by the reformers, that they literally freeze action, in this case the possibilities of revenge or suicide. Daily life in early modern Britain could be, by our standards, almost intolerably harsh. Hunger, cold, danger, terrible illness and the constant threat of being expelled from the community were all regular ripples in the sea of troubles that was daily life. Just getting out, escaping, finally resting – what a wonderful prospect. Except, in a God-haunted world, it wasn’t.
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? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover’d country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.
What is central to Shakespeare’s tragic imagination is the understanding that, even without the fear of damnation, there is no way out – merely a universe of grey meaninglessness, which hems in the human life from either side. This is what the sinner and murderer Macbeth finally comes to believe in another of the tragedies:
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
The arguments about whether Shakespeare was a secret Roman Catholic, struggling to disguise himself all his life, will go on. Most of the time, at least, he seems like a Christian who believes – unlike Christopher Marlowe – that divine judgement awaits a world of sinners. In that he’s a man of his time; what makes him a poet for all time is his inability to reconcile himself to the rites and consolations of any particular religious form. Here, human experience remains scarier and more thrilling than even the Bible admits.
For Shakespeare, the great escape from Thanatos was, inevitably, Eros. Again and again he presents love as the only answer to the great challenge of death and oblivion. The love of the other can quieten, if it cannot quite cancel, the remorseless and deadly passage of time, as his sublime thirtieth sonnet sings:
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,
And weep afresh love’s long since cancelled woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanished sight:
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restor’d and sorrows end.
In his thirty-third sonnet, Shakespeare goes further. Love is one with nature. It has the power of creation itself:
Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye,
Kissing
