Vergil in Hamlet; Act II, scene ii (Week of 3/30/09)

A significant part of Act II that we didn't have a chance to discuss in class this week is the monologue delivered by the First Player in scene ii, lines 480-530, in which Aeneas relates to his lover, Dido (the queen of Carthage), the story of the murder of Priam. Hamlet calls for this speech because (as you may have already detected) the story of the king of Troy's murder at the hands of Pyrrhus, the son of Achilles, seems to point to the desire for violent revenge against Claudius that Hamlet bears. (The section that the First Player performs here comes from Vergil's epic poem, the Aeneid.)

For this blog, I'm going to pull a few lines from this longish section of the scene to present my reading of how the allusions to Greek and Roman mythology that Shakespeare includes here might relate to the action of his play.

The first thing that sticks out to me is the epic pause that Vergil creates the moment after Pyrrhus cuts Priam down. As he raises his sword above the king of Troy, the sound of the fall of the city, which has been badly burned by the Greeks when they invaded, causes him to stop in mid action:

Then senseless Ilium, | Seeming to feel this blow, with flaming top | Stoops to his base, and with a hideous crash | Takes prisoner Pyrrhus' ear. For, lo! his sword, | Which was declining on the milky head | of reverend Priam, seemed i' the air to stick (lines 486-491)

This makes me think of what I see as Hamlet's principal problem in the play: hesitation and the inability to act. Just as Pyrrhus is frozen at the moment when he seeks vengeance for his father's death, so does Hamlet at many points throughout the play seem unable to act. What I find significant here too is the fact that it is the sound of the physical fall of Troy that rings in Pyrrhus' ear and causes this hesitation. Might this not be true of Hamlet in a way? Does he 'hear' his own kingdom of Denmark falling in around him (perhaps echoing in the voice of his father's Ghost)? If Hamlet kills Claudius, does he fear the burden of ruling Denmark himself?

Immediately following this excerpt, you'll notice an epic simile from lines 495-504. Here Vergil compares Pyrrhus' pause to "A silence in the heavens" that proceeds a great storm. What a powerful way to build suspense! Pyrrhus' wrath is all the more heightened by this moment and when he does strike Priam, "never did the Cyclops' hammers fall | On Mars's armor, forged for proof eterne, | With less remorse than Pyrrhus' bleeding sword | Now falls on Priam." By including this excerpt in his play, Shakespeare seems to signal the violence and the wrath with which Hamlet hopes to exact revenge on Claudius. To me, the words of Vergil convey the internal rage that Hamlet feels towards Claudius, yet we must wait three more acts before Hamlet himself takes any action. Through this monologue, I think we are meant the feel the intensity of Hamlet's imagined revenge as it is suppressed by his inability to act on these emotions.

One more section from this passage that I'd like to examine further is the depiction of Hecuba, the mythological queen of Troy, who breaks from her silent grief and erupts in a scream at the sight of her mutilated husband:

When she saw Pyrrhus make malicious sport | In mincing with his sword her husband's limbs, | The instant burst of clamor that she made | (Unless things mortal move them not at all) | Would have made milch the burning eyes of heaven | And passion in the gods. (lines 525-530)

Here Hecuba seems to represent Queen Gertrude. What interests me most about this passage is Hecuba's silence. As we will see in Act III when Hamlet confronts his mother in her bed chamber about her marriage to Claudius, she will refuse to give any spoken indication that she knows of Claudius' treachery towards his brother. By including this section from Vergil, Shakespeare seems to indicate that it will take action on the part of Hamlet to remove this spell of silence from his mother. The madness that is represented in Hecuba's disheveled run around the ruins of Troy (lines 517-524) is also provocative in that it points towards the psychological torment that will be (or may currently be) part of Gertrude's atonement for her sins against her husband (old king Hamlet).