Hamlet Greek Tragedy

George Washington University
Latinized Greek Drama in Shakespeare's Writing of "Hamlet"

Author(s): Louise Schleiner
Source: Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 1 (Spring, 1990), pp. 29-48
Published by: Folger Shakespeare Library in association with George Washington
University
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2870800
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Latinized Greek Drama in
Shakespeare's Writing of Hamlet
LOUISE SCHLEINER
HEN CLASSICISTS SUCH AS MURRAY, KITTO, AND POOLE have compa

Greek and Shakespearean tragedy, they have not claimed influence b
traced coincidental parallels.1 Shakespeareans have generally thought t
since Shakespeare read relatively little Greek and since the tragedies (w
were especially difficult texts) were not yet available in English, he mus
have known them.2 But there were, besides Greek texts of the plays, L
translations of and commentaries upon them, which often included pl
summaries. I propose the possible mediated influence of Aeschylus' Orest
and Euripides' Orestes4 on Hamlet, probably through such Latin translati
1 See Gilbert Murray, Hamlet and Orestes: A Study in Traditional Types (London: Oxf
Univ. Press, 1914); H.D.F. Kitto, Form and Meaning in Drama: A Study of Six Greek Plays
of Hamlet (London: Methuen, 1956); and Adrian Poole, Tragedy: Shakespeare and the G
Example (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987). Murray, in a chapter from the above book, repr
in his The Classical Tradition in Poetry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1
proposed similarities between Orestes and Hamlet "as characters," deriving these from
heroes' similar origins in myths of chthonic deities; in that light he also noted the parallel be
the Aeschylean and Shakespearean graveyard scenes. Kitto studied similarities between Or
and Hamlet even more extensively.
2 The only published English version was the locasta of George Gascoigne and Fra
Kinwelmersh, translated from the Italian Phoenissae by Lodovico Dolce, which claimed to
translation from Euripides; for a fairly recent declaration that Shakespeare could not have kn
Greek drama, see G. K. Hunter, Dramatic Identities and Cultural Tradition: Studies in Sh
speare and his Contemporaries (Liverpool: Liverpool Univ. Press, 1978), p. 179: "The G
drama (except for Euripides in some of his aspects) was necessarily inaccessible t
Elizabethans. .."
3 Many copies of the various editions of Aeschylus were owned and some annotated
by the 1590s (Monique Mund-Dopchie, La survie d'Eschyle d la Renaissanc
traductions, commentaires et imitations [Louvain: Peeters, 1984], pp. 205 ff.; Aeschyl
history may also be checked in J. A. Gruys, The Early Printed Editions (1518-1664) o
[Nieuwkoop: B. de Graaf, 1981]). The Aldine Aeschyli Tragoediae sex (Venice, 1
very inaccurate first text. Adrien Turnebe's edition (Paris, 1552), one commonly
sixteenth-century English scholars, continued' the Aldine two-play, truncated ver
Oresteia, though otherwise it improved on the Oresteia text through conjectural eme
use of the Greek scholia. (On some other of Aeschylus' plays it was better still, as
collated Aldus with MS. Parisinus graecus 2789.) The first accurate edition, with th
Oresteia (i.e., the full Agememnon and the Choephori recognized as a separate
Aeschyli Tragoediae VII, Pier Vettori, ed. (Geneva, 1557).
4 Greek scholars could read Euripides in any of several editions, the best being that
Canter (Louvain, 1571), according to Kjeld Matthiessen (Studien zur Textuberli
Hekabe des Euripides [Heidelberg: Universitatsverlag, 1974], pp. 20-22).
5 Emrys Jones has argued similarly that Titus Andronicus and Julius Caesar were i
respectively, by Erasmus's widely known Latin versions of Euripides' Hecuba and
Aulis (The Origins of Shakespeare [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977], pp. 85-118).
30 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY
and through a pair of English plays of 1599 entitled Agam

Furies. After following that trail, I will conclude by cons
such an attenuated link through intertextual study, us
Kristeva. Hamlet is a fine test case for intertextualit
playground of the writerly psyche. The larger project of
figuring out something about how Shakespeare brough
tragedy in the Greek spirit after a lapse of some two
As for his source habits, we know from Boas, Whita
recently Miola, and other scholars that Shakespeare w
English translations and redactions, dramatic or other,6 n
by such recent source scholars as Emrys Jones and G.
instead his remembered Latin school learning and sk
materials from diverse sources.7 For example, Shakes
Pyrrhus and Hecuba in Hamlet seems to draw primari
of the medieval Troy book and on Marlowe's Dido,
though he might well also have been remembering his
2 of the Aeneid. Further, Shakespeare took classical ma
ies with entries on ancient lore9 and from rhetorical handbooks such as
Richard Rainolde's Foundacion of Rhetorike (1563), which treats, for in-
stance, the story of Niobe (cited in Hamlet) by way of showing how to devise
a lament from Niobe's perspective.
Whatever Shakespeare's competence with Greek and Latin may have been
(respect for his learning is fashionable again), I am convinced that at least
some passages of Euripides' Orestes and Aeschylus' Oresteia (in the latter
namely the graveyard and matricide scenes of the Libation Bearers) by some
means influenced Hamlet. The concrete theatrical similarities between the
Shakespearean and Aeschylean graveyard scenes and between the roles of
Horatio and Pylades (in both Aeschylus and Euripides) are in my view too
close to be coincidental. Furthermore, the churchyard scene of Hamlet does
not occur in any of the play's known sources or analogues: if it was not a sheer
invention-and Shakespeare very seldom sheerly invented anything in the
way of plot-it has some source not yet identified.
Collins argued for numerous phrase echoings of the Latinized Greek dramatists in Shakespeare
(Studies in Shakespeare [London: Constable, 1904], pp. 40 ff.).
6 Robert S. Miola observes that "Shakespeare relied on Englished classics throughout his
career" and that another "major source of classical learning" for him was "the various reference
books of the Renaissance" (Shakespeare's Rome [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983],
pp. 4-5). See also Frederick S. Boas, "Aspects of Shakespeare's Reading" and "Aspects of
Classical Legend and History in Shakespeare," Queen Elizabeth in Drama and Related Studies
(London: Allen & Unwin, 1950); Virgil K. Whitaker, Shakespeare's Use of Learning: An Inquiry
into the Growth of his Mind and Art (San Marino, Cal.: The Huntington Library, 1953); and
Geoffrey Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols. (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957-75).
7 See Emrys Jones and G. K. Hunter; also T. W. Baldwin, William Shakspere's Small Latine
& Lesse Greeke, 2 vols. (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1944).
8 Caxton and Marlowe are obvious references in this context of a supposed, imitated (possibly
parodied) old-fashioned play of "rugged Pyrrhus" that Hamlet says he has seen. See Raoul
Lefevre, The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, trans. William Caxton, ed. H. Oskar Sommer,
2 vols. (London: Nutt, 1894).
9 For example, Thomas Cooper's Dictionarium (1565) of English and Latin included entries
on classical personages; it was based on Sir Thomas Elyot's Bibliotheca, printed in 1538,
enlarged by Cooper in 1552 and 1559. Another possible influence was the English rendering,
Dares and Dictys' Trojan War, in Verse (1555).
LATINIZED GREEK DRAMA IN SHAKESPEARE'S HAMLET 31
The published Latin Aeschylus translation (Basel, 1555) was that of Je

de Saint-Ravy (Sanravius) of Montpellier, a student exercise that, thoug
unpolished and sometimes inaccurate, was widely disseminated in the l
sixteenth century.10 Reading Greek tragedies in Latin was common:11 He
Estienne, the printer/publisher who produced the landmark Vettori Aeschylu
edition of 1557, also published in 1567 a much-read anthology of Latin
translations of selected plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, d
by notable scholars including Erasmus, Buchanan, and Camerarius the
Elder;12 and many other humanists also translated plays into Latin, among
them Isaac Casaubon, who in his commentary on Strabo (1587) promised a
"magnum opus" of Aeschylus with Latin translations, of which he apparently
completed only a few.13 In 1614 the Parisian printer Pierre de la Roviere
published an extensive dual-language (Greek-Latin) set of late sixteenth-
century translations by various hands-including Euripides' plays (with
Melanchthon's Latin, misattributed to Willem Canter14) and the Saint-Ravy
Oresteia, with sporadic corrections to its Latin-in a Greek-Latin anthology,
a copy of which Ben Jonson owned.15
10 loannes Sanravius, Aeschyli poetae vetustissimi tragoediae sex, . . . e Greco in Latinum

sermonem . . . ad verbum conversae (Basel, 1555). Mund-Dopchie mentions the broad dissem-
ination of Saint-Ravy's book (p. 84). Without being able to list exhaustively, I find copies at the
British Library (1067.e.3; and 11335.aa.43,4), Cambridge University Library, Leiden (UB, 676
F 28.), Berlin (SB Vg. 1850), Wolfenbuettel (Wf 115 Poet. [2]), Munich (Mue SB A.gr.a. 61),
Wroclaw (BU 8. E. 41,1), and Vienna (NB 35. H.111).
11 Euripides in Latin was even more readily available than Aeschylus, in Latin texts including
Rudolf Collinus (pseud. Dorotheus Camillus), Euripidis . . . tragoediae XVIII nunc primum . . .
per D. Camillum & Latio donatae (Basel, 1541), and the reformer Philip Melanchthon's
Euripidis tragoediae, quae hodie extant, omnes. (Basel, 1558; Frankfurt, 1562). Greek-Latin
editions included Gasparo Stiblino, Euripides in Latinum sermonem conversus, adjecto e regione
textu Graeco: cum annotationibus et praefationibus (Basel, 1562); and H. Commelinus, Euri-
pidis tragoediae XIX. Accedit nunc recens vigesimae, . . . Latinam interpretationem, the latter
with Melanchthon's Latin version as revised by Aemilius Portus (Heidelberg, 1597). Plot
summaries could be read, along with sets of "flowers" and "sentences" from given plays, in
Michael Leandro's Aristologia Euripidea Graecolatina (Basel, 1559), and famous "sentences"
in John Stobaeus, Sententiae ex thesauris Graecorum delectae, with Latin translation by C.
Gesner (Zirich, 1543, and later editions). These were sometimes reprinted in books of Latinized
Greek drama, e.g., Georgio Ratallero, Euripidis Poetae Tragici Tres Tragoediae'. . . De Gracis
olim Latino carmine conversa (Antwerp: Plantini, 1581). For more on Euripidean Renaissance
textual history (unfortunately not yet treated in the ongoing Index Aureliensis; catalogus librorum
sedecimo saeculo impressorum nor the Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum [see n. 33,
below]), see Gruys; Matthiessen; and Rudolf Hirsch, "The Printing Tradition of Aeschylus,
Euripides, Sophocles, and Aristophanes," Gutenberg Jahrbuch, 39 (1964), 138-46.
12 Henri Estienne, Tragoediae selectae Aeschyli, Sophoclis, Euripidis. Cum duplici interpre-
tatione Latina, una ad verbum, altera carmine (Geneva, 1567). If the Latin translations had
existed only in dual-language editions, we might think they were used strictly as aids for the
reading of Greek. But the existence of many straight Latin editions and anthologies indicates that
educated people did at times simply read the Latin versions for pleasure and profit; Rudolph
Hirsch expresses the same view (p. 139).
13 A Prometheus Bound and an interlinear Agamemnon have been found in materials that
survived Casaubon's last years as a Protestant refugee in England (see Mund-Dopchie, pp.
346 ff.).
14 See Gruys, pp. 114-16.
15 David McPherson, "Ben Jonson's Library and Marginalia: An Annotated Catalogue,"
Studies in Philology, 71 (1974), 1-106, esp. p. 57. Most of Saint-Ravy's Aeschylus versions
(including his Oresteia) were republished in this anthology of Latinized Greek works, by Pierre
de la Roviere, Poetae Graeci veteres, tragici, comici, lyrici, epigrammatarii. . . . Graece et
Latine in unum redacti corpus (Paris, 1614).
Since Jonson and Shakespeare were fellow play

lain's Men in 1599, roughly the year before the wr
Jonson let acquaintances use his books, we can sp
that Shakespeare might have read or learned abo
(though of course that would not have been his
Jonson's library show that Latinized Greek
Shakespeare's sphere of possible sources, though
anything about Shakespeare; for one thing, our rec
from complete, partly because of a fire in 1623
When bankrupt, as he told Drummond, Jonso
would sometimes later reacquire copies; thus, th
text of Aeschylus is too late to have influenced
read or even owned the Latin Aeschylus much ea
did own a two-volume 1581 Latin Euripides, as w
to the McPherson catalogue of his library now
Woudhuysen.17 Thus we know that Jonson in so
and Euripides in Latin, though whether both in
also owned the Greek Scholia in septem Euripidi
including the commentary on Orestes, about w
with him.18
While Jonson's library included at least four G
Latin (one being the Scholia just mentioned), sug
directly read Greek, he owned far more double-c
reflecting scholars' common habit of keeping Lat
reading Greek.19 Besides the 1614 text of Saint
based on the Parisian 1552 deficient Greek text of
(see n. 3, above), Jonson also owned a 1581 v
ancient authors by Turnebe.20 Through the late
in England, where French humanist texts predomin
below]), Turnebe's edition of Aeschylus with it
teia, along with Latin translations based on var
"Aeschylus" for many readers who did not h
Jonson's ownership of a Turnebe commentary
16 See G. B. Harrison, Shakespeare at Work: 1592-1603

Press, 1933).
17 I am indebted to Mr. Woudhuysen for giving me this piece of information. Other new work
on Jonson's library is reported in Robert C. Evans, "Ben Jonson's Library and Marginalia: New
Evidence from the Folger Collection," Philological Quarterly, 66 (1987), 521-28.
18 Selden recounts how he went to Jonson's books to check a passage in the Scholia on
Euripides' Orestes; Jonson helped him to a better reading of the knotty passage. That incident
presumably occurred later than the time of Hamlet's writing in roughly 1600 (Selden would have
been a teenager then) but illustrates Jonson's knowledge of Orestes and his willingness to help
acquaintances with classical texts.
19 Jonson and Chapman were in this respect not typical of their time, since according to M. C.
Bradbrook, "knowledge of the Greeks came at second hand to almost everyone in England"
(George Chapman [Harlowe: Longman, 1977], p. 27).
20 Jonson's book was A. Turnebi Adversariorum tomi III (Basel, 1581).
21 For example, Jacopo Corbinelli, tutor in the 1560s to the Duc d'Alengon (Queen Elizabeth's
suitor), owned a copy of Turnebe's edition which he extensively annotated and indexed, and from
which he did some translations (Mund-Dopchie, pp. 74-77). Other late-century translators who
used Turnebe's text were Jean Bienn6, Simeon Dubois (Bosius), Gian-Vicenzo Pinelli, and
Matthias Grbic (Garbitius) of Tiibingen, whose "Prometheus Latinus" was the most admired
Latin Aeschylus text of the late century, widely known through Estienne's anthology.
suggests that he may have been one such reader. For other playwrights
less Greek than Jonson, the Saint-Ravy Latin Oresteia (based on the truncat
Turnebe text) would even more probably have been their primary contact w
the Oresteia.
Jonson, after killing a fellow actor in a duel, had briefly left the Admiral's
Men to write for Shakespeare's company, the Chamberlain's, in late 1598 and
1599,22 the period from which he probably gained his famous impression of
Shakespeare's "small Latine and lesse Greeke." Though usually writing for
rival companies,23 Shakespeare and Jonson were friends enough for Jonson
later to write his famous eulogy and for mutual acquaintances to remember
their friendship.24 Jonson took great pride in his learning and was consulted
on scholarly matters, as in the case of John Selden. And we know that already
in 1598 he was working on an unidentified "tragedy" for the Admiral's Men
(see below), had collaborated on other tragedies that he later suppressed, and
was known as the best classical scholar among the playwrights.
The point of these details about Jonson is that even if Shakespeare himself
may not have read a whole play of Euripides in Latin nor the whole two-play
Oresteia of Saint-Ravy's Latin Aeschylus, certainly one or more of the busier
Latinist adapters among his fellow playwrights (such as Jonson, John Mar-
ston, George Chapman, or even some lesser light like Thomas Dekker) could
well have done so, and through them or their work, if not through
Shakespeare's own reading, the plays could have come to his attention.25
Chapman, the translator of Homer, was among Southampton's patronage
group at the same time as Shakespeare26 and possibly collaborated with him
on various plays in the early 1590s (see n. 23, above). Chapman, in
translating Homer, Hesiod, Epictetus, and Plutarch, worked, as Jonson did,
partly from the Latin side of the pages.27 For Troilus and Cressida, probably
written in 1600 shortly before the writing of Hamlet, Shakespeare did not
content himself with medieval sources of Greek material but drew from
22 See Harrison, pp. 153-54. Later Jonson's writing was usually free-lance-not under
contract to any company (Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth, Ben Jonson [Boston:
Twayne, 1979], p. 29).
23 For a summary of the "war of the theaters," see Summers and Pebworth, pp. 59-61. For
broader discussion of the inter-company allusions involving Shakespeare and the Admiral's Men
(Jonson's usual company), see Andrew Gurr, "Who Strutted and Bellowed?" Shakespeare
Studies, 16 (1963), 95-102, and Playgoing in Shakespeare's London (Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 1987), pp. 156-57. Arthur Acheson in Shakespeare, Chapman, and Sir Thomas
More (1931; rpt. New York: AMS Press, 1970), p. 89, proposed other inter-company allusions
to playwrights and actors, identifying Jonson, Marston, Chapman, and Dekker in figures of Henry
V. More recently, Andrew Gurr also identifie's Ancient Pistol as Edward Alleyn in "Intertextu-
ality at Windsor," SQ, 38 (1987), 192-93.
24 According to an acquaintance's report in the early seventeenth century, Shakespeare as
godfather at the christening of one of Jonson's children teased Jonson about his constant practice
of translating from Latin, by proposing to give the baby a dozen "latten" spoons for the father
to "translate" (S. Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life [New York:
Oxford Univ. Press, 1977], p. 257).
25 Murray makes this suggestion, pp. 17-18.
26 Both would have had access to Southampton's library. See Charlotte Spivack, George
Chapman (New York: Twayne, 1967), pp. 15-16.
27 For Chapman the point is thoroughly demonstrated in Franck Schoell, Etudes sur
L'Humanisme Continental en Angleterre a la Fin de la Renaissance (Paris: Librairie Ancienne
Honor6 Champion, 1926); see pp. 66-76, 115-31, and 150-66. Schoell also discusses the
preponderance in England of French over other continental texts (pp. 132 ff.).
Chapman's partial 1598 translation of the Iliad into Englis

while writing Hamlet, he could have drawn not only on med
on the plays of Aeschylus and Euripides available in Latin t
perhaps reading through passages that interested him,
necessary to my case to assume that he did. (According to
was quite enough of a grammar school Latinist to have don
the Latin of these texts is relatively simple.)
Dekker, for his part, boasted that he was not among the uned
who worked only from sources in English, ridiculing such i
and bragging of his own reading of, among other authors,
O you booksellers (that are factors to the liberal sciences) over wh
drones do daily fly humming, let Homer, Hesiod, Euripides a
mad-Greeks with a band of the Latins lie like musket shot in their
Goths and Getes set upon you in your paper fortifications. It is
upon whose mouth they dare not venture; none but the English
parts.29
THE TWIN PLAYS OF 1599 AND THE TRUNCATED, TWO-PLAY ORESTEIA
But what reason is there, beyond the clear possibility, to think that someone
in the London theatre of the late 1590s was reading the Oresteia and
Euripides' Orestes in Latin if not in Greek? When Jonson left the Admiral's
Men for the Chamberlain's in late 1598, he left behind at least one unfinished
manuscript for which he had already received partial payment, a planned
"plot" of a "tragedy of Bengemene's," as Henslowe's Diary describes it,
upon which plot Chapman, after Jonson left, continued the work and wrote
two acts (payment also recorded);30 given the standard practice of collabo-
ration and of not wasting items paid for, someone would in all probability
have finished and staged any such materials Jonson had left in the company's
possession. (Chapman, Marston, Dekker, and others continued to write for
them through the next few years.) A few months after Jonson's departure, the
Admiral's Men produced, among several plays on classical themes, a pair not
now extant called Agamemnon and Orestes Furious or Orestes' Furies (as
Harrison records the title), listed in Henslowe as by Thomas Dekker and
Henry Chettle.31 Dekker, whom Jonson later satirized as a plagiarist and mere
"play-dresser" of old authors (Poetaster, 5.3.185-204, 272-76, and 492-
93), commonly collaborated with Marston and Jonson in play writing, before,
during, and after Jonson's brief stint with the Chamberlain's Men in 1599.
The plots for these now lost companion plays, Agamemnon and Orestes'
Furies-whose titles exactly match those of the Turnebe/Saint-Ravy two-play
28 See Harrison, pp. 219-28.

29 Thomas Dekker, The Wonderful Year . . . and Selected Writings, ed. E. D. Pendry
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1968), pp. 29-30.
30 Henslowe's Diary, R. A. Foakes and R. T. Rickert, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.
Press, 1961), pp. 85, 100; see also E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols. (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1923), Vol. 2, 167, 169. Chambers questions Chapman's work on Jonson's plot
(p. 167), but the payment is clearly recorded.
31 Henslowe's Diary, pp. 119, 121. Although some scholars suggest that the 1599 Agamemnon
and Orestes Furies are a single play, these entries in Henslowe suggest otherwise. See also
Chambers, Vol. 2, 169, n. 7. Harrison notes that "a spate of plays on classical stories" was
performed by various companies in 1598-99 (p. 219).
Oresteia ("Agamemnon" and "Eumenides")-must have been based on

someone's reading of Greek tragedies; they cannot have been based, as had
earlier English theatrical treatments of Atrean materials,32 on Seneca and the
medieval Troy book: Seneca treated the legends only up to the death of
Agamemnon, and the Troy book only up to Orestes' revenge and supposed
marriage, not including his madness. Orestes' Furies, its title states, treated
Orestes' madness and conflict with the furies, exactly the matter of the
Eumenides and of Euripides' Orestes. In default of any other known detailed
source for a whole play specifically on this subject, it is likely that the
collaborative authors of these two plays were working from their own or
someone else's reading of the Saint-Ravy Latin two-play Oresteia and taking
some cues also from Euripides' handling of roughly the same story material.
Again, remember that Saint-Ravy's was the only available Latin version of
the Oresteia.
Consider what readers of Saint-Ravy (or of the Turnebe Greek text behind
it) found: a much truncated Agamemnon coalesced with the near-complete
Libation Bearers into one play called "Agamemnon," and then the complete
Eumenides. One can get an idea of these twin plays by looking at Saint-Ravy's
incipits and explicits,33 but let me summarize. The "Agamemnon" opens with
32 See John Studley's translation of Agamemnon (1563) in Seneca's Tragedies, Translated by

Neville, Heywood, and Studley, Eric C. Baade, ed. (London: Macmillan, 1969); and John
Puckering's morality play Horestes (1567; Oxford: Malone Society Reprints, r962). The latter
is clearly based on the Troy book. A play of Agamemnon and Vlisses, done at court in 1584.and
not extant, presumably also derived from the Roman and medieval Trojan war materials.
33 Saint-Ravy's beginnings and endings (incipits and explicits), first for his "argument" or
summary and second for his text of Agamemnon/Libation Bearers (the two plays presented as one
"Agamemnon"), are as follows (my translation appears below the Latin; I thank Rhonda Blair
for help with it):
Incipit Argumentum Aeschyli Agamemnonis. Agamemnon ad Ilium proficiscens, Clytem-

nestrae, si depopulatus Ilium esset, dicit illa die se face significaturum..
Explicit [Choephori]. Dauliea nominefingens, priusquam Aegisthus eum interroget, cuias
sit, ilium humi mortuum prosternit, celeri circumveniens ense, ipsamque matrem, reginam
Clytemnestram.
Here begins the Argument of the Agamemnon of Aeschylus. Agamemnon, traveling to

Ilium, tells Clytemnestra that when Ilium has been laid waste, on that day [he will tell] this
through signal torches. ...
Here it ends. Aegisthus asks him [Orestes], earlier feigning the name of Dauliea, where he
is from; he fells him dead to the ground, quickly with his sword also besetting the mother,
Queen Clytemnestra.
Incipit. (Qui praefatur non [sic] est custos constitutus ab Aegistho). A Diis quidem
liberationem peto laborum I Custodiae annuae, diu vero dormiebam / Supra tectum
Atridarum canis instar ... {"Cassandra. Heuheu nuptiae Paridis perniciosae I Amicis,
heu potus patrius Scamandri. I Tunc enim circa tuas ripas misera crescebam alimentis."
The text then goes without interruption into Choephori, lines 10 ff.
"Orestes. Quam rem video, quae tandem haec caterva, I Et mulierum vestibus Ornata, cui
calamitati assimilabo? . . ."}
Explicit. Nunc vero rursus tertius venit unde servator aut fatum dicam, I Ubi videlicet
perficiet, ubi desinet / Sopitus furor detrimenti?
Here begins the text. (Preface-speaker who is the watchman appointed by Aegisthus). Of
the gods, indeed, I ask relief from these toils of a nodding watchman, truly for long years
sleeping upon the Atreides' roof like a dog ....
{The text ends its portion of the actual Agamemnon with lines 1156-59 thereof. "Cassan-
the rooftop scene we know, with the guard seeing the astonis
signal that the warrior king has conquered Troy, after wh
proclaims the news to the chorus of elders; these 310 line
full opening scene. This is immediately followed in the Tu
Ravy renderings by Cassandra's horrified visionary account
Agamemnon by his wife and her consort within the p
1067-1159 of the actual Agamemnon). The plot then jumps
of a break to the third scene of this "Agamemnon"-in fa
graveyard scene of the Choephori (Libation Bearers)-with
king's son communing with the dead father's spirit an
mourners, and vowing revenge. In an Elizabethan rendition
would probably have occupied roughly Acts 1 and 2. The r
of Prince Orestes' planning and execution of his revenge s
himself and, by the advantage of surprise, to kill his cousin/s
mother, in the end proclaiming his conquest. Such, I sugge
the Admiral's Agamemnon of 1599, with its companion pla
then portraying generally the matter of the Eumenides: Or
mad by nightmarish female furies until the gods, throug
scene, restore his sanity and let him assume his father's k
That playwrights sometimes watched their rivals' plays is we
their parodies of each other, and in Shakespeare's case-if w
Hamlet, 3.2, Hamlet speaks for Shakespeare-is distinc
Hamlet's instructions to the players, citing bad acting pra
both heard of and "myself seen."34 It is possible that a f
speare in the Admiral's audience saw promising matter in
non," as well as distinct parallels to a revenge play that w
Ur-Hamlet: in both, we assume, a father's murder by an
relative and adulterous wife is recounted in a visionary w
communing with the father's spirit, vows revenge, which
rest of the play carrying out.
Besides the textual and theatrical linkage I have so far tr
truncated Latin Oresteia and the twin "Agamemnon-Eum
1599, we have interpretive reasons to pursue the question of p
Orestes and Hamlet. The Greek subtext to Hamlet, if such i
help account for the rebirth of full-fledged tragedy after tw
dra. Alas for the nuptials of Paris, deadly to friends, alas for our father
Scamander. Once truly along your wretched riverbanks I [too] took su
The text then goes without interruption into Choephori, lines 10 ff.
"Orestes. What business do I see, in which now this company [is eng
ornately clothed, with whom I am linked in my misfortunes?"}
Here ends the text [of "Agamemnon," actually AgamemnonlChoepho
third repetition [i.e., third storm of divine presence] comes, namely the
I say the doom, where will it finish, that is, where will it leave the d
asleep?
These excerpts are taken from Vera Lachmann, "Aeschylus," in the Catalogus Translationum
et Commentariorum: Mediaeval and Renaissance Latin Translations and Commentaries, Paul O.
Kristeller and F. Edward Cranz, eds., 4 vols. to date (Washington, D.C.: Catholic Univ. Press,
1960-86).
34 Citations from Hamlet here and subsequently are from The Riverside Shakespeare, G.
Blakemore Evans et al., eds. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). To avoid confusion with my own
use of square brackets within quoted material, I have silently deleted Evans's square brackets.
it will also clarify Horatio's role and correct our own century's overem
on oedipal qualities in Hamlet.
For Shakespeare's Hamlet is much more a version-even a purposive
revision-of Orestes than of Oedipus. Hamlet is at no risk of marrying or
having sex with his mother. He is at considerable risk of killing her. "Taint
not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive / Against thy mother aught," the ghost
has warned him-"Leave her to heaven" (1.5.85-86). Yet as he prepares for
the climactic closet scene (the analogue of Orestes' matricidal scene), he feels
he could "drink hot blood"; he vows to "speak daggers" and must urge
himself to "use none," nor ever to let "The soul of Nero enter this firm
bosom," nor to carry the planned tongue-lashing of his mother into a deed
that "the day would quake to look on" (3.2.390-96). When he proposes to
show his mother her "inmost part," he acts in so threatening a manner that
she takes him literally and cries out, "What wilt thou do? Thou wilt not
murder me?" (3.4.20-22), whereupon the hidden Polonius calls for help, and
Hamlet's matricidal urge is deflected into the gut of that substitute father fig-
ure, who has meddlingly identified himself with the conspiring king and his
cause; and when later in the scene Hamlet again seems about to turn his rage
on his mother instead of his stepfather/uncle, the ghost reappears, this time
visible only to him, to reiterate for him Shakespeare's definitive revision of
his Orestean urge to kill his mother-i.e., that it be directed only to the male
murderer rather than to the mother: protecting the mother, the ghost directs
Hamlet to "step between her and her fighting soul. . . . Speak to her,
Hamlet" (11. 113-15). The scene preserves this revision of matricide against
intense psychic pressure, releasing some of it through the sword thrust into the
body of Polonius. It is interesting that Shakespeare himself, according to
tradition, played this controlling, fatherly revisionist ghost on the stage.
I suggest that the revisionist idea for an Orestean yet after all non-matricidal
avenger son came from the following passage of Euripides' Orestes, spoken
by the hero in a lucid interval between fits of mouth-foaming madness and
torment by the furies:
I think now
if I had asked my dead father at the time [i.e., at the grave]
if I should kill her, he would have begged me,
gone down on his knees before me, and pleaded,
implored me not to take my mother's life.
(Orestes, 11. 287-91)35
Two PARALLELS TO THE GREEK: HORATIO-PYLADES AND

THE CHURCHYARD-GRAVEYARD
The general parallel between Orestes and Hamlet as legendary heroes is that
they are initiates of death, moral judges and punishers of their mothers, and
avengers of their fathers. But along with these broad similarities, there are in
Hamlet also more specific theatrical parallels, which Shakespeare could not
have derived from Roman and medieval sources, and which indeed distinctly
35 Here and subsequently for Orestes, I cite the English translation by William Arrowsmith in
Volume 4 of The Complete Greek Tragedies (4 vols., David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, eds.
[Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1958]).
do not accord with the Troy-book account. Let us consider m

two non-Greek sources of Orestean material from which he i
worked in various plays, namely the English translations of S
above), which certainly influenced Elizabethan tragedy (even
as used to be thought), and the Recuyell of the Historyes of
book, translated by Caxton from the fifteenth-century Fr
Lefevre and deriving ultimately from the late classical writers k
Phrygius and Dictys Cretensis.
Seneca's Agamemnon, like that of Aeschylus in its correct t
Clytemnestra's murder of Agamemnon and establishment of
cousin, her lover and fellow murderer, Aegisthus. The E
Agamemnon does glancingly reach forward into the Orestes stor
with Orestes' sister, Electra, fiercely denouncing her mother;36
of the play's verse "Argument" that mention Orestes' later r
Studley's added concluding speech by Eurybates, which again
revenge to come. In other words, in the English Senecan
Shakespeare could have heard Orestes mentioned as a matricid
the play actually treats the story only up to Clytemnest
Agamemnon.
In Caxton, by contrast, Orestes' matricide is recounted in considerable
detail but in a version quite different from that in Greek drama. The Orestes
account is intertwined in Caxton with the story of Pyrrhus and his revenge for
his father, Achilles, through the slaying of King Priam at the household altar;
it occurs in the last thirty-five pages of Caxton's book, which states near the
end that of these matters "dyuerce men haue made dyuerce bookes whiche in
all poyntes acorde not" because some are told from the Trojan perspective,
some from the Greek.37 The motives for the Troy book's intertwining of the
Pyrrhus and Orestes stories seem to be 1) their common theme of a son's
revenge for his father, and 2) their mutual culmination in an episode where
Pyrrhus abducts Orestes' wife, Hermione, whereupon Orestes kills him.
Shakespeare, as he constructed the player's high-flown revenge-tragedy
speeches on Pyrrhus and Hecuba that so fascinate Hamlet, was parodying or
at least alluding to earlier revenge tragedy and perhaps also parodying the
Admiral's bombastic lead tragedian, Edward Alleyn, for whom Chapman,
Jonson, Marston, and Dekker were still writing, and who would, one as-
sumes, have played Orestes in the 1599 twin plays.38 As source of the
supposed "rugged Pyrrhus" play with its "total gules" and "coagulate
gore," Shakespeare doubtless had in mind Caxton's account of Pyrrhus
slaying "kynge pryant tofore the hyghe awter whiche was all bebledd of his
blood"39 with the intermingled Orestes story. Caxton's "Horestes" returns
to Mycenae for his revenge not incognito and with a single companion, as in
Aeschylus, but at the head of a sizable army. Furthermore, he shows no signs
of ambivalence when exacting his revenge.
36 Bullough, in his Hamlet volume (Vol. 7, 25), cites this point as background for the
"Orestean" quality in Hamlet.
37 Sommer, Vol. 2, 701 (cited in n. 8, above).
38 See Acheson, passim (cited in n. 23, above).
39 Sommer, Vol. 2, 667; in the 1596 edition (The Auncient Historie of the Destruction of
Troy. . ., trans. W. Caxton, newly corrected by William Feston [London: Thomas Creede,
1596]) the line reads: "Pirrhus . . slew there the king Priamus before the high altar, which was
all be-bled with his bloud" (p. 575).
In the morn Horestes dide his moder Clitemestra be brought to fore hym
naked her handes bounden/ And assone as he sawe her/ he ran vpon her with h
naked swerd/ and cutte of her two pappes/ and after slewe her with his handes/ a
maad her to be drawen to the feldes for the houndes to ete and deuowre and to the
byrdes. After he dyde do dispoylle egistus and do drawe hym thurgh the cyte. And
after dide do hange hym on a forke. .. . / Thus vengid horestes the deth of the
good kynge Agamenon his fader.
(Sommer, Vol. 2, 685-86)
This sadistic Orestes is the extremest version of the hero that Hamlet must
revise if he is not to "taint [his] mind." The Greek Orestes that, as I believe,
Shakespeare saw in the Admiral's 1599 Agamemnon is more human and
natural. Faced with his mother's gesturing appeal to the breasts that nourished
him, he does not chop them off but hesitates, turns to his dear friend Pylades,
and asks if he should really kill her. Pylades affirms the divine command of
revenge. In the whole Choephori he speaks only the few words uttered at this
point (the part was technically a mute one), so that his one statement must
have had an electrifying effect; and he supplies throughout the Choephori, by
his supportive presence and collaboration, male sanction and support for the
supposedly necessary killing. Horatio is the same figure for Hamlet, exclaim-
ing a determinate sanction, "Why, what a king is this!" as Hamlet, after his
declaredly providential escape from Claudius' death order, lists his reasons
why the revenge killing cannot possibly be wrong and asks for Horatio's
approval (5.2.62 ff.). The Caxton account has no such moment of the friend's
crucial support-Pylades is mentioned only briefly and has no significant role.
Likewise the second important, concrete parallel, the graveyard scene, is
not in Caxton, nor in Studley's English Senecan Agamemnon, nor indeed in
any of the recognized sources of Hamlet (Belleforest's hero returns from
England to his own ostensible funeral feast in the great hall, but there is no
graveyard). For Caxton's Orestes with his army, there is no occasion for the
incognito graveyard eavesdropping scene that is so powerful in both The
Libation Bearers and Hamlet. When Hamlet and Horatio meditate on death,
hear an approaching party of mourners, then "couch" behind cover to
eavesdrop on the rituals at the tomb of an unquiet soul (for Ophelia, like
Agamemnon, was not "peace-parted" and got only "maimed rites"
[5.1.238, 219]), the scene breathes the very air of the opening scene of the
Choephori (in effect the third scene in the Saint-Ravy Latin Agamemnon),
where Orestes and Pylades, having meditated upon the dead king, hear a
procession approaching and duck behind cover to eavesdrop on the mourners
trying to give rest to the troubled dead.
Having seen that the two parallels cannot derive from the Roman/medieval
version of the Orestes story but rather, if they do relate to Orestes, instead
reflect Greek drama, let us scrutinize them more closely for further evidence
and for the light they shed on Hamlet-first Horatio as a modern Pylades, then
the graveyard scenes. The role of Horatio has often been noted for its
inconsistency: two concepts of the role seem not to have been completely
blended. In one speech Horatio reminisces about how Hamlet's father looked
in life, and in several scenes he functions as a long-time attendant at the
Danish court: for example, he is familiar to the guards, who consult with him
about the ghost before Hamlet is told of it. This "Danish courtier old
acquaintance of Hamlet" is his entire and consistent role in the analogue play,
Fratricide Punished, to which scholars have sometimes looked for indications
of what may have been in Shakespeare's immediate s

Hamlet of the 1580s.40 But in Shakespeare's play Horat
portrayed as a visitor to Elsinore, a foreign fellow stu
Wittenberg, who, for instance, must have Danish drin
to him and in the graveyard scene must be told who
Laertes, a very noble youth" [5.1.224]). This comment
was not at Elsinore during the many times when Laert
but we have already seen Horatio familiar at court at
Why is Horatio so inconsistent, sometimes being a vi
of Hamlet, at other times an habitue of the Danish court
could see it as a case of mere untidiness in delineating
as a busy Shakespeare sometimes left standing. But I
explanation: Shakespeare had superimposed upon the d
Ur-Hamlet the concept of Pylades, dear foreigner-compan
his youth abroad, touchstone of justice and male frien
supporter of the Orestean hero with his dreadful comm
his own mother's evil and the usurping step-father whom
to take power.41
Hamlet's sudden glowing praise of Horatio, as the s
himself and a paragon of stoical equanimity in the fac
always seem oddly gratuitous-nothing in the play exp
know nothing of any buffets Horatio has suffered. Th
especially Hamlet's embarrassed ending of it-"Someth
(3.2.74)-are strongly reminiscent of Orestes' declarat
Pylades in Euripides' play:
Nothing in this world

is better than a friend. For one good friend
I would not take in trade either power or money
or all the people of Argos ....
You shared the risks with me, and once again,
good friend, you give me my revenge
and all your help.
But I say no more,
lest I embarrass you by praising you
so much.
(Orestes, 11. 1155-63)42
40 Whether the Bestrafte Brudermord (Fratricide Punished) derived from the Ur-Hamlet or
from Shakespeare's Hamlet has been much disputed. In his introductory article for Hamlet in The
Riverside Shakespeare (p. 1136), Frank Kermode takes the former view; A. P. Stabler, in "The
Source of the German Hamlet" (Shakespeare Studies, 5 [1969], 97-105), made a strong case for
the Ur-Hamlet as its source. At any rate Fratricide Punished is a close analogue of Shakespeare's
Hamlet.
41 The Pyladean Horatio argued here accords quite well with the account of Horatio in Harold
Bloom's Ruin the Sacred Truths (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1987) as the character
who by loving Hamlet supplies a link between him and the audience; Hamlet otherwise, as a
character who "represents by negation," would lose his "universality of appeal" (p. 61). To
note a much earlier forerunner of my view, the Orestes and Pylades of Euripides' Elektra were
seen as models for Hamlet and Horatio by an eighteenth-century commentator, Thomas Davies
("Hamlet," Dramatic Miscellanies, 3 vols. [2nd ed.; London, 1784], Vol. 3, 1-152).
42 Grene and Lattimore, Vol. 4, 258. Hereafter, passages will be cited simply by line number.
Euripides' Pylades has inspired this effusion (known in sixteenth-ce

commonplace books [see n. 11, above]) with such statements and act
the following:
Now let the people jeer!

I'll lead you through the city, proud and unashamed.
What is my friendship worth unless I prove it now
in your time of trouble?
(11. 800-3)
And in the same vein, in a sweeping moment of suicidal devotion, he also

declares he will die with his friend: "Wait! / Stop, Orestes. I have one
reproach to make. / How could you think that I would want to live / once you
were dead?" (11. 1068-71). Horatio we know does the same and, again like
Pylades, is persuaded by his friend to live on. He is indeed "more an antique"
friend than a Dane.
These free verse renderings have no Elizabethan ring, but imagine the
above encomium to Pylades for his friendship, with its concluding note of
embarrassed withdrawal, done in Chapman's or Dekker's blank verse in the
1599 Agamemnon after having been translated from, say, Melanchthon's
Latin, the most reprinted version and probably the one (of two possibilities)
that Ben Jonson had in his 1581 Latin Euripides.43
ORESTES Ah, nihil est praestantius quam certus amicus.

Non opes, non regnum: ac stultum est
Multitudinem esse compensationem generosi amici.
Nam tu . . .propre aderas mihi in periculis,
Et nunc rursus das mihi ultionem hostium,
Et non abes. Sed desinam te laudare, Quia
Etiam hoc est molestum, nimium laudari.44
[ORESTES Oh nothing is more excellent than an unwavering friend.
Not wealth nor sovereignty: it is foolish [to think]
That a whole people might be worth one generous friend.
For you . . .helped me in my dangers,
And now again you give me revenge on my enemies
43 As Henry Woudhuysen informs me, the book is listed as Jonson's in an old bookseller's
catalogue and described as a two-volume Latin Euripides of Basel, 1581. Though I have not
found record of a 1581 edition, it was presumably a later issue of one of the two available straight
Latin editions, both originally published in Basel, translated by Rudolf Collinus (pseud.
Dorotheus Camillus, 1541 and 1550) and by Philip Melanchthon (1558 and 1562). (A third
translation by Gasparo Stiblino appeared in a Greek-Latin edition also published in Basel, 1562.)
Melanchthon's is the likely one for a reissue by 1581 as it seems to have been the most admired
of these versions, being republished at least five times: besides in the two editions just noted, in
the dual-language editions of H. Commelinus (Heidelberg, 1597, with revisions to the Latin by
Aemilius Portus), of P. Estienne (1602), and of P. de la Roviere (1614). Because Estienne's book
misattributes to Willem Canter the Melanchthon translation it contains, one can find claims that
there were four Latin translations of the complete Euripides (e.g., J. Churton Collins and F. L.
Lucas, Euripides and his Influence [New York: Cooper Square, 1963], p. 107), when apparently
there were only three-Collinus, Stiblino, and Melanchthon (see Gruys [cited in n. 3, above], pp.
114-16). Of course there were other translations of individual plays by various hands.
44 Euripidis Tragoediae, Quae Hodie extant, trans. Philip Melanchthon (2nd ed.; Frankfurt,
1562), pp. 126-27. The Elektra is given there in Stiblino's translation.
And are with me. But I will cease praising you,

For it is offensive to be praised too much.]45
Let us wax fanciful and think how Dekker and Chettle migh
Oh what in all man's life can be more worth
Than friend secure-nor gold nor prince's might:
What fool would think a kingdom of such merit!
For thou . . . hast giv'n me aid in all my terrors,
And yet again dost foster my revenge,
Fast at my side, unbending. But now enough;
Such talk perchance offends thy noble ear.
"Nimis," shrugs Hamlet, drawing back into manly reserve-"something too

much of this." (A kindred strategy for preserving manliness is seen when the
image of his mother's breast is evoked through a fancied displacement of the
thought of it onto the effeminate "waterfly," Osric-" 'A did comply, sir,
with [i.e., address] his dug before 'a suck'd it" [5.2.187-88]; Hamlet scorns
Osric and thereby keeps up the shield of toughness briefly dropped in the
effusion to Horatio.)
My hypotheses about Pylades-Horatio and the churchyard scene are as
follows. Early on in writing the play, Shakespeare drafted the scenes where
Horatio is the Pyladean foreigner-must have Danish customs explained to
him, reminisces about Wittenberg, and so forth. As the writing proceeded,
Shakespeare was working scene for scene from the Ur-Hamlet and had
sometimes to assign Horatio the habitue kind of functions. The churchyard
scene, like the "foreigner" aspect of Horatio, is, so far as anyone has known,
an invention of Shakespeare's: the two features do not occur in Belleforest's
tale of Amleth, the source of the Ur-Hamlet, nor in Saxo Grammaticus, nor
in Fratricide Punished. If these two features did appear in some source or
analogue, it would be likely that they were in Shakespeare's immediate
source, the Ur-Hamlet. In fact, we have no evidence that they appeared
anywhere in versions of the Hamlet story before Shakespeare.
The churchyard scene in the First Quarto is more Orestean than in the
Second Quarto and the Folio: where Hamlet had in the First Quarto been
directed to leap into the grave after Laertes to contend whose love for Ophelia
was greater, in the Second Quarto and Folio this stage direction is omitted.
But even in Q2 and F, Hamlet is strikingly like Orestes (of The Libation
Bearers) in stepping out of his initial concealment at the grave to renew his
bond with a beloved woman and joining in the intense graveside communion
with the dead. In all the early printed texts, Hamlet's avenger-double,
Laertes, leaps into the grave to join a beloved sister in the realm of death to
45 The English translation here is my own. If one prefers to note the Latin translation that might
have been Jonson's of 1581, Rudolf Collinus' (pseud. Dorotheus Camillus) in Euripidis
Tragicorum omnium principis . . . Tragoediae XVIII. Latine . . . editae (2nd ed.; Basel, 1550)
at f5v-f6, it renders the passage very similarly:
ORESTES papae, non est quicquam melius quam amicus certus.
Non divitiae, non regnum. stulta porro quaedam.
Multitudo, permutatio est generosi & boni amici.
Tu enim . . . propre aderas periclitans mecum:
Nunc porro iterum cum dederis mihi hostium vindictam,
Et non eminus es. sed desinam te laudare. nam
Molestia quaedam etiam in hoc est, laudari nimis.
which murderous avengers are consecrated. Compare this moment of d

for mutual entombment and embrace of the sister's corpse ("Hold off the e
a while, / Till I have caught her once more in mine arms" [5.1.249-50])
the Euripidean Orestes and Electra embracing, thinking they are about to d
ORESTES With all my love

I hold you in my arms.
What shame on earth
can touch me any more?
Oh, my sister,
these loving words, this last sweet embrace
is all that we shall ever know in life
of marriage and children!
ELECTRA If only one sword
could kill us both! If we could only share
one coffin together.
(Orestes, 11. 1046-54)
ORESTES REDIVIVUS
But, you say, all this about the churchyard scene is somehow like the
Orestes plays and yet not like them. Hamlet is here, after all, the murderer,
whose killing of Polonius must be avenged by Laertes, no longer himself
sheerly an aggrieved son seeking revenge, as Orestes was in the graveyard
scene. Indeed Hamlet is both aggrieved son and murderer, as Orestes soon
became. Hamlet has become such before he accomplishes his revenge;
Orestes becomes so only after taking revenge. Thus the furies can be loosed
upon Hamlet in advance, as in the closet scene he terrifies his mother and has
a vision of the ghost (now visible only to him), then crazily hides Polonius's
body and frightens the king with morbid ravings. Hamlet, in the midst of
haranguing his mother, upon seeing the ghost cries out, "Save me, and hover
o'er me with your wings, / You heavenly guards!" (3.4.103-4), just as at a
similar fearsome moment of struggling to bring an essential ally over to his
side, Euripides' Orestes had begged, "Imagine that my dead father in his
grave / listens to me now, that his spirit is hovering / over you, that he himself
is speaking" (11. 675-77).
Of course Hamlet is both at once-aggrieved son of a murdered man and in
turn a new murderer, keeping up the perpetuity of killings that the revenge
code entails, yet desperately trying not to fall into its maelstrom of evil.46
Hamlet knows early what the Aeschylean Orestes knew only after being
hounded by the furies through an extra play until he was finally cleansed and
subsumed in the Athenian rule of law: that while punishment of powerful
evildoers must occur, woe be unto the avenger, especially if he is tied to the
guilty one by blood kinship. Shakespeare, who would, I propose, have known
the Oresteia as two Latinized plays, collapses it in effect into one play,making
Hamlet late in Act 3 a version of what Orestes was at the start of the
Eumenides. Hamlet's action is the hero's search for a way to do justice, to
46 David Scott Kastan, in " 'His semblable is his mirror': Hamlet and the Imitation of
Revenge," SS, 19 (1987), 111-24, stresses Hamlet's perception of the moral nullity of the
revenger's position, since he commits the act he denounces.
scourge away evil, but to do it without himself becom

mother's blood, as Orestes became. This is Shakespeare
revisionist transposition of the Greek story-not of So
and not the Troy book, but Aeschylus and Euripides: fo
have no such graveyard scene (Sophocles' Orestes does b
hair at the tomb, but finds no mourners), no such sanction
crucial to the hero's effort to preserve selfhood, and n
matricidal desire. It is Aeschylus whose graveyard
responding to, and Euripides whose Pylades has suppli
clues for Horatio, along with the note of the Aeschylean P
sanctioning statement in the matricide scene.
Hamlet, as he confronts his task and tries to cut his
strongest resources of intelligence. His infamous delays, fo
and frustration, are not a retardation of the action; they a
is not simply to kill the king but to find a way, while kill
away the mother's evil without becoming the haunted
Like a deft moral surgeon, Hamlet will try to cut awa
grained spots" in her spiritual innards, yet save her lif
ignorance of whether she was fully complicitous in his
in his mind, she becomes redeemable (in the First Quarto s
full innocence); in Belleforest she had been adulterous
can bring her over to his side and thereby turn his avengi
the dugs that nurtured him; he can "comply with" the
them, can turn the sword away from the source of his ow
he will physically fall victim to the vendetta cycle, affect
peace and die the "sweet prince" whom angels sing to r
peace through the gods' imposition of the rule of law, indi
to male or female malefactors. Hamlet recovers it throu
"just" male identity coming from his "soul mate" or s
enabling him to cancel the force of the mysteriously o
degree of guilt is never clarified) by absorbing her into hi
is the essential male other self and supporter in this ef
mother, in revisionist parallelism/contrast to Pylades,
other self in Orestes' quest to kill the mother.
The next time you watch or read Hamlet, test the air of
and see if it doesn't bring distinctly to mind a proces
"libation bearers," their black robes swinging in sync
two young men jumping behind a nearby tomb to eave
themselves as the doubled hero joins in a fierce commu
And see if you note, when that loving second self,
Hamlet's side as he works up his courage to kill, a glint
In sum, it is quite plausible that Shakespeare saw the 1
Orestes' Furies, in all probability a redaction of the two-pl
among readers of Latin; he might even have become intere
through scenes or passages of the Choephori (which was co
text47 of the supposed Agamemnon) and of Euripides' O
Hamlet, he would have wanted to learn how other authors
told of Orestes: he must have recalled Caxton's intermin
47 That is, it was complete except for the permanently lost opening
and Orestes father-revenge stories, important to Hamlet in the Pyrrh

material of the First Player scene, and perhaps Caxton's statement that writ
left different versions of these events. Shakespeare could well have turned,
we know he did in using Chapman's Homer for Troilus and Cressida, to
Greek sources within reach. It is commonly said that in Hamlet he reinvent
full-fledged tragedy in the Greek spirit, a claim many find justified, co
ering the limitations of Roman tragedy, medieval de casibus tragedy,
earlier Renaissance tragedy of various stripes. His timing may not have
accidental. Hamlet may have been one of the many responses to the r
covery of the ancients.
EPILOGUE: INTERTEXTUALITY AND CASES OF ATTENUATED INFLUENCE
Intertextuality is a broader concept than influence, with a different basis,

but it must encompass and re-theorize influence. Let us consider briefly what
a theory of intertextuality might show about the present instance. I have of
course not fully proved the case but only demonstrated a strong likelihood;
even so, we can agree that such cases of influence at two removes do occur,
even if the argument presented here were judged not to represent one. Let us
take it as a hypothetical instance.
Harold Bloom's theory of "misreading,"48 the only intertextuality concept
widely known in Anglo-American scholarship, would not apply here: it
concerns relationships in which a younger writer is unquestionably a devotee
of an older one. The former is seen as an oedipal son, attacking and, as it
were, from within the father-writer's own psychic sphere misreading, rewrit-
ing, "transuming" his materials. But a father wrapped in a layer of some-
times stiff and imperfect Renaissance Latin, beneath a possible further layer
of cobbled up, collaborative dramatic redaction, seems rather well buffered
from oedipal attack, the more especially if he is two fathers. Bloom himself
has recently moved away from his misreading theory,49 and in his latest book,
speaking of Milton but making a point applicable to any use of his model, he
notes that criticism has not yet found an accurate vocabulary for describing
precisely how Paradise Lost "transumes" its materials.50
For a more accurate vocabulary I look to Julia Kristeva, whose intertex-
tuality, or "transposition" theory (as she prefers to say), proposes that we
investigate writers' dealings not with father-writers but with "textual sys-
tems" of various scopes and functions, systems that writers have recognized
in their reading and listening and have reiterated or reworked.51 (Bloom's
"transumption" equals her "transposition.")
48 See Harold Bloom, A map of misreading (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1975). One could
object to terming Bloom's theory "intertextuality," but it shares several central objectives with
continental intertextuality.
49 See Harold Bloom, Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism (New York: Oxford Univ.
Press, 1982), p. 44: "I have begun to question severely my own use for criticism of the Freudian
'family romance'."
50 Ruin the Sacred Truths, p. 96.
51 Kristeva's definition of intertextuality, for which she prefers the term "transposition," is
this: "the signifying process' ability to pass from one sign system to another, to exchange and
permutate them. . . . Transposition . . . implies the abandonment of a former sign system, the
passage to a second via an instinctual intermediary common to the two systems, and the
articulation of the new system with its new representability" (Revolution in Poetic Language [La
Revolution du langage poetique, 1974], trans. Margaret Waller [New York: Columbia Univ.
The following analysis, illustrating only one sort of intertextu

a sketch of the "textual system" I believe I have turned up h
generic but an infra-generic one, on the scale of a motif (Kriste
works at the level of genre in applying her model). The ana
a total departure from the above, more traditional discussion
correlate with it on several points: e.g., on the centrali
matricidal urge to the genesis of Hamlet, on the importance
Ophelia's brother-sister love as defining the Orestean space
which Hamlet steps, and on the iconic/performative nature of t
scene parallel (motion from hiding at the grave site). On th
"system" seems to have a visual or iconic feature, verba
discoursive52 motion through the represented motion of t
friends (hero and double) out of concealment into focus at a
beloved dead person is to be communed with, that is,
communion with the beloved dead. Such an iconic dimension
in a "system" transmitted in part through stage performanc
As for the general story pattern here, older scholarship wo
it indeed a motif (say, that of father-revenge by a son), but
abstract concept would include no record at all of the transmitt
"moment" just mentioned. Motif study cuts interesting trails th
history, but has no particular explanatory power: how a given w
a certain motif, whether some usages are of a different order f
many other questions are beyond its ken. A workable intertextu
the processes by which writers interact with the various kinds
their subtexts, and what in particular those were. (Kristev
includes concepts-of the "semiotic function" and of th
whereby intertextual patterns can be shown interacting with br
of sociocultural change, but pursuit here of that dimension of h
far outrun our available space; it would begin by noting tha
a female power sphere [of a deserted wartime wife], sympat
and given system-level status in Aeschylus, becomes in Sha
turally conditioned revision emptied and subsumed into
sphere.53)
Kristeva conceives of a textual system as a construct consisting of partic-
ular, determinate enunciative and denotative positions, the two between
themselves defining a "space" of meaning.54 The "enunciative position" is
that perspective from which a textual system is enunciated (not necessarily to
Press, 1984], p. 60). For another model of intertextuality, which has been profitably applied to
Milton, see Claes Schaar, The Full Voic'd Quire Below: Vertical Context Systems in "Paradise
Lost" (Berlings, Arloev: C.W.K. Gleerup, 1982). Schaar's concept of "vertical context
systems" focuses on the functioning of allusions and submerged allusions within texts, thus
defining a kind of intertextual stylistics.
52 "Discoursive" means here "of the nature of discourse," in the semiotic sense of a discourse
as a generated construction, to be described.
53 I thank my colleague Frederic Schwarzbach for this entirely apt observation.
54 The concepts used here are presented, among other places, in Kristeva's "From One Identity
to an Other" ("D'une identite l'autre") in Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to
Literature and Art, trans. Thomas Gora et al. (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1980), and in
"The System and the Speaking Subject," The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York:
Columbia Univ. Press, 1986), pp. 24-33; for more detail, see Revolution in Poetic Language,
especially chaps. 1, 2, and 5-8.
be equated with the narrator or speaker), while the "denotative positi

that which the enunciation addresses or denotes, whether or not there lies
behind it a referent (as in poetic discourse there may not). Merely imitative
writers, whom Kristeva terms "rhetoricians," reiterate such a system un-
changed, while strong writers or "stylists," by contrast, appropriate it
revisionistically, that is by redefining one or both of the terms just noted
(enunciative and denotative positions) in some directly oppositional way or
ways. Incidentally, this point correlates with Bloom's idea of oedipal oppo-
sition of son to father-writer, but it offers more analytical precision as well as
eliminating the sexism of the Freudian model.
In the above terms, let us hypothesize the outlines of the textual system
occurring in the Greek dramatic treatments of the Orestes legend that Shake-
speare "revised": its enunciative position is that of father-right, the enun-
ciation then consisting of an expropriation-or "exposition" (Kristeva's
model centers on positionality)-of that right of domination onto and through
a revalorized father-substitute, the doubled son, in the latter's purging of the
denotative position, which is that of the ruling family, thymically invested as
familial/tribal probity, a probity that has been contaminated by female
usurpation. Putting the case another way, the "space" of meaning created
between these mutually inter-oriented positions (enunciative and denotative)
is the decayed or spoiled mother-space or sphere of female assertion, which
must be purged-in the original Greek articulation purged through killing of
the guilty mother, causer of the decay.
As noted, an iconic aspect of the textual system is the two young men's
motion out from concealment (their choreographed joint motion emblematizes
their functioning, at the level of discoursive structure, as one, doubled son);
they move into communion with the beloved dead father and the father-
dominated sister (in Shakespeare's revision the latter replaces the former in
the grave.)55 This physical motion actorializes56 part of the discoursive
motion from the enunciative position toward the denotative one, namely the
installation, through acceptance at the foreseen place, of the father-right of
domination being expropriated onto the doubled avenger son. Through the
churchyard scene Hamlet acquires his competence.
Shakespeare's revision of the earlier version of this textual system keeps
the same enunciative position and the same discoursive motion from it: the
father's right of domination enunciating itself through expropriation onto the
doubled son in a self-regenerative vengeance command; but Shakespeare
distinctly revises the contested denotative position, that of familial/tribal
probity, by reversing its gender seme: to that of not female usurpation but
male usurpation-not wife rivalry but brother rivalry. He thereby creates
instead of mother-guilt, ineluctably to be purged at a dreadful psychic price
to the hero, a space of male guilt that can displace the mother's guilt, leaving
her to be recaptured, cleansed, subsumed into the father/new-father enunci-
ative position and thus redefining the hero's "space" of meaning (i.e., the
place for the discoursive motion) as the killing of the mother-possessing,
55 Ophelia, in a feature of Hamlet that this analysis explains, is just as father-dominated as

Electra ever was; her response, though, in the revisionist pattern, is submission (to the father)
and consent to death, rather than aggression (against the father's foes) and consent to death.
56 For the definition of this term, see A. J. Greimas and J. Court6s, Semiotics and Language:
An Analytical Dictionary, trans. Larry Crist et al. (Bloomington: Univ. of Indiana Press, 1982).
mother-contaminating rival. The hero's acquisition or w

mother with her dark measure of guilt means that Gertrude,
can be present and absorbed at the scene of communion w
Clytemnestra had not dared to show her face there. The
means that the hero himself will die along with the mother,
and the male rival's deaths purging away those "black an
within her-and within the state of Denmark.
To locate within the text the definitive indication of Shakespeare's revision
(vis a vis the Greek model-system), we look to the closet scene, analogue of
the Orestean matricidal encounter, where, as we saw above, against the
intense desire to kill the mother the scene yet accomplishes the revision
through diverting the hero's homicidal urge to the suitably tagged male target,
the meddling, deluded Polonius, who has thoroughly identified himself with
Claudius's cause. "But howsoever thou pursuest this act ... Let not thy soul
contrive against thy mother aught": the father-ghost's proscription has
defined the new, revisionist articulation of the system. Thus does a strong
writer work oppositionally upon arresting materials that come to hand.
Such a textual system as this-both the original and its revision-would
obviously not inhere exclusively in any particular text nor function as aurally
identifiable echoing of word or phrase; it exists rather at the level of the
paraphrasable, the translatable, since it consists of definable semantic cate-
gories, such as the classeme maleness-femaleness and other kinds of oppo-
sitions: appropriation-rejection, euphoric-dysphoric deixis, and so on. This is
not to say that just anyone can be Shakespeare; the workings of a strong poet's
generation of particular poetic language, seen in Kristevan terms, would make
another epilogue.
In conclusion, I suggest that the analysis of these two textual systems-the
older one and Shakespeare's revisionist rearticulation of it-because of their
particular terms and transactions, can permit us an observation on the human
potential for tragedy. For Kristeva proposes that the strong writer (i.e., the
revisionist, socioculturally definitive writer) is such exactly by virtue of being
able to draw upon psychosomatic energies that, taken together, she calls the
semiotic function. These energies are the impulses traceable to an ongoing
submerged self or "subject in process" within each person, a subject that
represents a survival of drives, energies, and relational categories from the
pre-oedipal stage of life, before self-differentiation from the mother, ener-
gies, then, that are related to identifications with one's mother. The Orestes
and Oedipus legends cannot help but impinge upon the realm and business of
this "semiotic function." In other words, in such legends or myths as these,
where the hero's pain is precisely that he is compelled to strike, both in love
and in hate, at the contextual matrix of his own original selfhood-in such
tales the semiotic metalanguage and the natural mythic language startlingly
converge. Might it be that the psychic region delineated by this convergence
is the breeding ground of tragedy? If so, then we will not be surprised that in
Hamlet, as we have twice tracked him here, Shakespeare rediscovered that
territory.

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George Washington University

Latinized Greek Drama in Shakespeare's Writing of "Hamlet"

HEN CLASSICISTS SUCH AS MURRAY, KITTO, AND POOLE have compa

and through a pair of English plays of 1599 entitled Agam

The published Latin Aeschylus translation (Basel, 1555) was that of Je

10 loannes Sanravius, Aeschyli poetae vetustissimi tragoediae sex, . . . e Greco in Latinum

Since Jonson and Shakespeare were fellow play

16 See G. B. Harrison, Shakespeare at Work: 1592-1603

Chapman's partial 1598 translation of the Iliad into Englis

THE TWIN PLAYS OF 1599 AND THE TRUNCATED, TWO-PLAY ORESTEIA

28 See Harrison, pp. 219-28.

Oresteia ("Agamemnon" and "Eumenides")-must have been based on

32 See John Studley's translation of Agamemnon (1563) in Seneca's Tragedies, Translated by

Incipit Argumentum Aeschyli Agamemnonis. Agamemnon ad Ilium proficiscens, Clytem-

Here begins the Argument of the Agamemnon of Aeschylus. Agamemnon, traveling to

Two PARALLELS TO THE GREEK: HORATIO-PYLADES AND

do not accord with the Troy-book account. Let us consider m

of what may have been in Shakespeare's immediate s

Nothing in this world

Euripides' Pylades has inspired this effusion (known in sixteenth-ce

Now let the people jeer!

And in the same vein, in a sweeping moment of suicidal devotion, he also

ORESTES Ah, nihil est praestantius quam certus amicus.

And are with me. But I will cease praising you,

"Nimis," shrugs Hamlet, drawing back into manly reserve-"something too

which murderous avengers are consecrated. Compare this moment of d

ORESTES With all my love

scourge away evil, but to do it without himself becom

and Orestes father-revenge stories, important to Hamlet in the Pyrrh

EPILOGUE: INTERTEXTUALITY AND CASES OF ATTENUATED INFLUENCE

Intertextuality is a broader concept than influence, with a different basis,

The following analysis, illustrating only one sort of intertextu

be equated with the narrator or speaker), while the "denotative positi

55 Ophelia, in a feature of Hamlet that this analysis explains, is just as father-dominated as

mother-contaminating rival. The hero's acquisition or w

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