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Chapter Two

The Demonizing of Revenge

If thou didst ever thy dear father love—

…

Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder.

—William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark

In the present age … we are inclined to think that civilized people are not given to hatred and to an anger so intense that it generates the desire for revenge.

—Jeffrie Murphy, Forgiveness and Mercy

The first quotation, spoken by the ghost of Hamlet’s father at the initial meeting between the prince and the ghost, was written around 1600, the second in 1988. In less than 400 years, the beliefs, in Western culture at least, that surround the taking of revenge have metamorphosed from viewing revenge as a natural and necessary component of love and the requisite mark of kinship to an all-out condemnation of revenge as unfit for “civilized people.” What happened in the interim? Revenge had a nearly sacrosanct place in early conceptions of justice. What changed the popular opinion concerning revenge from recognizing it as a mark of honor to judging it a desperate and illegal act?

The willingness of people to abdicate the right to take personal revenge was contingent upon the strength of the central authority. The people’s obedience also depended on the sovereign’s willingness and ability to take on revenge as a state responsibility. By the twelfth century, in most places in the Western world, the state had grown strong enough to fully usurp the right to take vengeance. Private revenge became extralegal as the state claimed a monopoly on legal violence. Homicide ceased to be a private wrong calling for familial response in the form of a death or compensation, but rather became a capital offense, a crime against the state as well as the individual or family. Centralized in this way, revenge became what is commonly called retribution, that is, revenge enacted by the state.¹ Additionally, the state acting in a person’s behalf—taking on one’s violent act, so to speak—became synonymous with justice. To get justice meant getting the state to punish the wrongdoer.

The degree of private restraint, nonetheless, was always proportional to the strength of the sovereign. The strong arm of the law alone, however, could not convince people to give up what they had regarded as a sacred privilege and duty. The story of the state’s usurpation includes great resistance from people accustomed to righting their own private wrongs. Because revenge was deeply connected to a sense of kinship, family loyalty, and courage, other more subtle maneuvers were necessary to complete the transfer.

While the pollution doctrine might provide the state with a rationale to justify its participation in punishment, that rationale alone cannot eliminate the desire for private revenge that has been so deeply part of human culture. Paulina does not argue against the state’s right to prosecute, but she does insist that her own needs be taken into account. When she asks Gerardo (standing in for the official state as head of the government commission), “What about my good?” Gerardo has no reply except to ask for her sacrifice. How else can he respond? In the legal system he serves, Paulina’s “good” has no standing. Paulina issues another unanswerable challenge: “Why is it always people like me who always have to sacrifice, who have to concede when concessions are needed, biting my tongue, why?” Clearly, it would be more convenient for the state if Paulina and others like her remained silent, bit their tongues and held their peace. Paulina’s cooperative silence would be guaranteed if her desire for revenge were somehow eliminated. She is expected to suppress her own emotional requirements, her desire and need for some revenge. From the perspective of a less-than-stable state, Paulina should not only allow the government to determine crimes and punishments, she should also be willing to “put the past behind” if that is what the state requires of her.

As emerging states began to centralize their power and monopolize revenge, another development became necessary so that people would not readily reclaim their ancient right. This development was the removal of emotion from state punishment and the purgation of the victim’s desire for punishment. States needed to insure that even the desire for revenge would be unacceptable. One of the most effective devices for this suppression and silencing was shame, the instructing of each citizen to be ashamed of any citizen, including himself or herself, who might give importance to a desire for revenge. Citizens were taught to believe that they could seek justice (dispassionate state punishment) but not revenge, severing any original nexus that the two might have shared. The situation in Western Europe, particularly in England from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, provides an example of the cultural strategies employed to change the perception of revenge. Religion, philosophy, and literature were enlisted to convince people to keep the urge for personal revenge restrained. Wherever people gathered—in churches, theaters, and educational institutions—they encountered some sort of argument, subtle or otherwise, against personal revenge.

In their sermons and religious writings, ministers and theologians reinterpreted the biblical practice and approval of revenge depicted in both the New and Old Testaments. No longer was the emphasis on God’s wrathful vengeance, on his “sword steeped in blood.” Instead theologians roundly denounced revengers and predicted damnation for anyone who took revenge into his or her own hands; the revenger “strips himselfe of Gods protection.”² Elizabethan England was described as a New Jerusalem, in which “there is now no thirsting for reuenge. The law of Retribution is disanuld amongst them…. An eie no longer for an eie; a tooth no longer for a tooth.”³ Influential theologian Joseph Butler (in an interesting foreshadowing of Nietzsche) preached that revenge, which stems from resentment, is contrary to religion and that while “every man naturally feels an indignation upon seeing instances of villainy and baseness,”⁴ at the same time “indulgence of revenge”⁵ has the tendency to propagate itself and thus must not be engaged in “by any one who considers mankind as a community or family, and himself a member of it.”⁶

Much of the popular drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries set up a similar stark contrast between revenge and justice, often with bloody depictions of revenge and equally bloody portrayals of its consequences. A culture bent on suppressing destructive revenge impulses had to encourage the emergence of stories that contrasted revenge with justice, stories that created the cautionary cultural narrative arguing that revenge and justice are mutually exclusive and, thus excluded, the desire for revenge is shameful and requires suppression. In seeking an extinction of the passion for revenge, the extremes of vengeful behavior were presented, with revenge often portrayed as being sought for trivial wrongs and in excess. Popular dramas portrayed revenge as an agonizing burden that invariably pushed even good people into madness with cataclysmic results. If the notion of revenge entered a hero’s life, it would inevitably “warp his character [and] drive him to insanity.”⁷

Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (1589) was the “most prodigious success of any drama produced and printed between 1580 and 1642.”⁸ In The Spanish Tragedy, Kyd portrays a variety of revengers: the noble but paralyzed Hieronimo who must avenge his murdered son, as well as the malicious Balthazar and Lorenzo, who kill for selfish reasons and trivial wrongs. The actions of all the revengers, good and evil, bring down the state and result in multiple deaths. At the close of the play, the Ghost of Don Andrea, a slain warrior, speaks to a character called Revenge and delineates, with gruesome pleasure, the multiple revenge murders that have occurred:

I, now my hopes have end in their effects,

When blood and sorrow finnish my desires:

Horatio murdered in his Fathers bower,

Vilde Serberine by Pedringano slaine,

False Pedringano hangd by quaint device,

Faire Isabella by her selfe misdone,

Prince Balthazar by Bel-imperia stabd,

The Duke of Castile and his wicked Sonne,

Both done to death by olde Hieronimo.

My Bel-imperia falne as Dido fell,

And good Hieronimo slaine by himselfe:

I these were spectacles to please my soule.⁹

Nine deaths and the end of the possibility of peace between Spain and Portugal are the fruits of the drive for revenge. In The Spanish Tragedy and in many of the plays that the English audiences attended for several generations, “The act of revenge does not correct an imbalance and restore order … with the even exchange of an eye for an eye, tooth for tooth. Revenge is itself an act of excess.”¹⁰ In The Spanish Tragedy, revenge does not restore a balance; it destroys the possibility of one.

The perverse nature of revenge appears in another popular drama of the time, John Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge (ca. 1601). The evil Piero opens the play covered in blood having just murdered Andrugio because many years earlier Andrugio was his rival for the hand of Maria, who had chosen Andrugio. Piero brags, “I am great in blood, / Unequal’d in revenge”¹¹ and plots even more bloody acts. Andrugio’s son, Antonio, bid by the ghost of his father to avenge his murder, acts, it would seem, out of an ancient sense of duty, honor, and justice. But those values become perverted as Antonio, as part of the revenge, murders Piero’s completely innocent son Julio as Julio begs for his life—“Pray you do not hurt me.”¹² The motive for revenge begins in duty and transforms into excess and cruelty.

A study of over twenty revenge plays produced in England between 1562 and 1607 concludes that in most of them revenge is “unmistakably condemned,”¹³ and the plays constitute an intense propaganda campaign against revenge because of the establishment’s fear of the civil disorder that could result from private revenge.¹⁴ By the mid-seventeenth century, revenge had few advocates, and bloody acts of revenge in dramas were put into the hands of villains, buttressing a general and unceasing propaganda against revenge.¹⁵

By the eighteenth century, the original connection between personal revenge and state punishment had become obscured to the extent that the focus of any rationale for the state’s right to punish bypassed the victim and focused on the duty of the sovereign and the moral status of the perpetrator. The philosophical stances of Kant and Hegel toward punishment capture the prevalent mood of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In Kant’s work, for example, punishment by the state is deontological, the absolute right and duty of the state. The law concerning punishment is one of Kant’s categorical imperatives. The state has a duty to punish and for a sovereign to fail to punish, to grant clemency, is itself an act of injustice: “woe to him who rummages around in the winding path of a theory of happiness looking for advantage to be gained by releasing the criminal from punishment or by reducing the amount of it.”¹⁶ A victim’s personal emotions, regarded as “brute forces” by Kant, have no place in punishment, either for severity or mercy. Human beings may be forgiving (placabilitas), but being forgiving should not be confused with tolerating wrongs, “for then a human being would be throwing away his rights and letting others trample on them, and so would violate his duty to himself.”¹⁷

Hegel developed Kant’s advocacy of the deontological nature of punishment by refining the idea of balancing that was originally found in feelings about revenge: “crime … contains within itself its own nullification, and this appears in the form of punishment.”¹⁸ Rather than the “absurdity” of “specific equality” required by lex talionis (“so that one can even imagine the miscreant as one-eyed or toothless”), Hegel argued that punishment should result in an “inner equality”—the negating of the original negative (crime): “punishment is merely a manifestation of the crime, i.e. it is one half which is naturally presupposed by the other.”¹⁹ Hegel shifted the focus to the wrongdoer by arguing that offenders had the right to be punished, that punishing those who do wrong treats them as responsible moral agents making free choices: “In so far as the punishment … is seen as embodying the criminal’s own right, the criminal is honoured as a rational being” (original italics).²⁰ In addition, punishment should be derived from the criminal’s own act, so that he is not “regarded simply as a harmful animal which must be rendered harmless,” but as a rational being.²¹ Hegel emphasized the personal/impersonal distinction between revenge and retribution and also distinguished the two as immoral and moral respectively: “What is at first sight objectionable about retribution is that it looks like something immoral, like revenge, and may thus be interpreted as a personal matter.”²² For Hegel, state punishment was justified not because it satisfied the victim but because it treated the criminal with dignity.

While Kant’s and Hegel’s theories remain the bedrock for contemporary retributive theories of punishment that argue for treating criminals as responsible moral agents,²³ it was Nietzsche’s introduction of the notion of ressentiment that thoroughly condemned the kinds of emotions that would desire revenge. Ressentiment is not merely the anger and resentment that would result from a personal injury. It includes a litany of negative emotions: hate, envy, ill will, suspicion, rancor, revenge, hostility, prejudice, and greed. Saying we want revenge, then, categorizes us as the kind of people who surrender to these primitive urges, and the “emotions that give rise to retributive judgments are always pathological.”²⁴ Wanting revenge, even in the form of state retribution, dooms us, in Nietzsche’s judgment, to be creatures of ressentiment. A good justice system for him does not incorporate such emotions in an Aeschylean vision but shuts them down and stops the “senseless raging of ressentiment.”²⁵ This shutting down is accomplished by disallowing a role for the victim, by providing other compensations for victims, and by using the law to define and restrict what penalties might be exacted. Above all, such a justice system “trains” the minds and perceptions of victims away from any personal feeling about an injury:

But the most decisive thing the higher power does and forces through against the predominance of counter- and after-feelings … is the establishment of the law, the imperative declaration of what in general is to count in its eyes as permitted, as just, what as forbidden, as unjust: after it has established the law, it treats infringements and arbitrary actions of individuals or entire groups as wanton acts against the law, as rebellion against the highest power itself, thereby diverting the feeling of its subjects away from the most immediate injury caused by such wanton acts and thus achieving in the long run the opposite of what all revenge wants, which sees only the viewpoint of the injured one, allows only it to count—from now on the eye is trained for an ever more impersonal appraisal of deeds, even the eye of the injured one himself, (original italics)²⁶

Nietzsche disparages any tendency “to hallow revenge under the name of justice” (original italics).²⁷ Distinctions, nuances, or subtleties between the just anger felt by an Aeschylean Orestes against a real wrong committed against oneself or one’s kin and the crazed anger and other negative emotions that lead to excessive, illegal acts of revenge have fallen under the weight of Enlightenment philosophy. In a series of maneuvers, the original relationship between revenge and justice and the victim’s emotional response to a harm have disappeared and been replaced by ressentiment. In the law of punishment, “reasonable emotion” and “just anger” are oxymorons.

By the time the nineteenth century closed, in some of the most widely read literature of the age, Dickens portrayed the “corrosive powers”²⁸ of revenge and retribution, mirroring the trend in jurisprudence that had begun to abandon retribution as a justification for punishment. This trend gave retributivist theories of punishment the same moral taint that attached to revenge in Elizabethan times. While it is difficult, if not impossible, to generalize about the various theories of punishment that were vigorously debated, the debate was largely between deontology and consequentialism. Many strong retributivists gave in to Darwinian ideas that in some ways echoed the pollution doctrine and maintained that “the good of the social organism” was the morally superior justification for punishment rather than a personal, vindictive need for revenge.²⁹ Any state “responsibility” to victims had entirely disappeared and was, in fact, a disreputable notion.

The twentieth century ushered in a reluctance to acknowledge revenge as a human need, and even the reformed Kantian-Hegelian retributivist position became suspect in intellectual circles.³⁰ The desire for revenge and for using the state as a mechanism for retribution met with increasing disapproval, being seen as a “wilful substitution of passion for reason as a guide of conduct, and a kind of passion which, in the form of private revenge, civilised society has agreed to condemn.”³¹ Retribution became a “polite name for revenge … vindictive, inhumane, barbarous, and immoral.”³² Backward-looking retributive theories of punishment were displaced by forward-looking utilitarian and consequentialist rationales that justified punishment largely as deterrence and rehabilitation, and perhaps to deter those who, in the absence of state retribution, would enact private revenge.³³ Those opposed to retributivism argued also that the incommensurability of harms made it impossible to inflict an appropriate punishment in the name of retribution, adhering, it seems, to the ancient lex talionis as an impossible necessity.³⁴ For a variety of reasons, retributivism was “destroyed by criticism,”³⁵ was “no longer the dominant objective of the criminal law,”³⁶ and, in the words of a leading hornbook, was “the least accepted [justification for punishment] today by theorists.”³⁷ The sacred personal right that was reluctantly transferred to the state has become the natural right of the state; the victim has disappeared. Jeffrie Murphy sums up the contemporary attitude toward retributive theories of punishment: “In the present age, most of us do not feel comfortable talking about the criminal law in such terms, for we are inclined to think that civilized people are not given to hatred and to an anger so intense that it generates the desire for revenge…. We prefer to talk highmindedly of our reluctantly advocating punishment of criminals perhaps because social utility or justice demands it and tend to think that it is only primitives who would actually hate criminals and want them to suffer to appease an anger or outrage that is felt toward them” (original italics).³⁸

What the Athena of Aeschylus’ Oresteia recognizes and honors in the Furies is lost, and we see this plainly in the character of the lawyer Gerardo in Death and the Maiden. Fury and passion have no appropriate place in a legal system. Gerardo’s position is the rational voice of civilization that has held, at least since Elizabethan times, that vengeance is personally fruitless, socially destructive, and aligned with madness, if not symptomatic of it. To Gerardo, Paulina’s emotional need for something from the state is at best selfish and misguided, at worst deranged. “Imagine what would happen if everyone acted like you did. You satisfy your personal passion … the whole transition to democracy can go screw itself.” Miranda buttresses Gerardo’s rationality with “Isn’t it time we stopped?” Paulina’s newly recovered voice is that of passion, reason’s alleged opposite, that requires, indeed demands, some sort of balancing to recover the natural order destroyed by her torture. “What about my good?” The two “goods,” societal order and personal emotional need for redress, are deemed antithetical, with our contemporary notion “justice” squarely on the side of societal order and the repression of the emotions of resentment and hatred that lead to revenge. Additionally, any original sense of the meaning of retribution as giving something back to the victim has disappeared; retribution has come to mean punishment directed at the perpetrator. The state punishes because the perpetrator deserves it.³⁹

This transfer to the state advocated by theologians, philosophers, and dramatists assumes a strong central state capable and willing to act on a victim’s behalf. Yet interwoven with these staunch positions against revenge, we find more layered and ambiguous positions about revenge. For some, the presence and possibility of private revenge remained an imminent possibility, especially if the state failed in its duty to enact an appropriate rebalancing. Machiavelli wrote that while the power to avenge ought properly to be vested in those with the requisite authority, that authority must lead to action: “if an individual is grievously offended either by the public or by a private person, and does not receive due satisfaction, he will, if he lives in a republic, seek to avenge himself, even if it lead to the ruin of that republic.”⁴⁰ While Francis Bacon deplored revenge, writing in a much-quoted line “Revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more man’s nature was to it, the more ought law weed it out,”⁴¹ he also tempered his harsh judgment of revenge by adding in a less quoted line “The most tolerable sort of revenge is for those wrongs which there is no law to remedy.”⁴² An influential Elizabethan writer maintained that private revenge was appropriate “when violence is offered, and the Magistrate is absent…. In this case, God puts the sword into the priuate mans hands.”⁴³ These writers supported the view that the state was the appropriate enactor of punishment for a wrong, but if the state failed to act, an individual was justified in taking revenge. Despite the predominant cultural voice that condemned revenge, there existed another countervoice that insisted that the desire for revenge was not per se evil and even tolerated revenge under some circumstances. Such writers arguably attempted to restore the collapsed distinction between just feelings of resentment and barbarous emotions run amok.

Some, in fact, saw the desire for revenge as a noble and worthwhile emotion. Adam Smith, who, unlike Kant and Hegel, promoted the guidance of the emotions as being critical to good judgment,⁴⁴ found resentment and hatred against someone who has wronged us to be a necessary part of human nature. He, nonetheless, qualified those instances in which the urge for revenge is appropriate: “if we yield to the dictates of revenge, it is with reluctance, from necessity, and in consequence of great and repeated provocations. When resentment is guarded and qualified in this manner, it may be admitted to be even generous and noble.”⁴⁵ Smith sees anger and resentment, as long as they are legitimately provoked, as part of the underpinnings of a moral community, as safeguards against wrongdoing “to protect the weak, to curb the violent, and to chastise the guilty.”⁴⁶ Smith’s position on revenge draws its imagery from Senecan revenge tragedies:

His blood [one slain], we think, calls aloud for vengeance. The very ashes of the dead seem to be disturbed at the thought that his injuries are to pass unrevenged. The horrors which are supposed to haunt the bed of the murderer, the ghosts which, superstition imagines, rise from their graves to demand vengeance on those who brought them to an untimely end, all take their origin from this natural sympathy with the imaginary resentment of the slain…. Nature … has in this manner stamped upon the human heart … an immediate and instinctive approbation of the sacred and necessary law of retaliation.⁴⁷

For Smith, there is something natural in humankind that needs some kind of revenge, something “stamped upon the human heart” that requires a state with laws and procedures that can fulfill the “sacred and necessary law of retaliation.”⁴⁸

Carlyle, who deplored reformers arguing for humane prisons, declined euphemistic language and openly defended the urge for revenge: “‘Revenge,’ my friends! revenge, and the natural hatred of scoundrels, and the ineradicable tendency to revancher oneself upon them and pay them what they have merited: this is forevermore intrinsically a correct, and even a divine feeling in the mind of every man. Only the excess of it is diabolical; the essence I say is manlike, and even godlike.”⁴⁹ Similarly, the Victorian jurist James Fitzjames Stephen resisted the move into viewing punishment as for deterrence alone and insisted that the desire for revenge was natural to “healthily constituted minds.”⁵⁰ A good criminal justice system recognizes this need and should be “an emphatic assertion of the principle that the feeling of hatred and the desire for vengeance … are important elements of human nature which ought … to be satisfied in a regular and legal manner.”⁵¹

Even these more nuanced positions, though, finally are exhortative rather than seriously prescriptive: that is, these writers, in their efforts to create a perfect society and ideal justice, speak to the state, not to its citizens, warning those in power to enact justice for the citizens, or else. They do not realistically confront what should occur if the state actually does nothing. They do not envisage a weak, impotent state that cannot judge and punish. They imagine an ideal strong state that has the capacity to be vigilant in exacting punishment. Because they seemingly cannot conceive of a state that cannot or will not act, they naturally do not provide any alternative to violence if the state does so fail.

Perhaps the best portrayal of this ambivalent feeling about revenge and the failure of the state can be seen in Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet, in which he dramatizes the complex nature of revenge and the conflicted, if underground, attitude toward it. Like other playwrights of his time, Shakespeare was obsessed by revenge, his representations evolving from the barbaric excesses of Titus Andronicus (1594) to Prospero’s abandonment of revenge in favor of reconciliation in The Tempest (1623). In Hamlet, his greatest and most complex play, Shakespeare depicts his intellectual prince as hesitant to take revenge yet obsessed with the need to do so. Using the conventional Senecan symbols of revenge tragedy—a ghost, madness, delay, hesitation, a play- within-a-play, the failure of the law, uncertainty, multiple murders, and the avenger’s death⁵²—Shakespeare creates a complicated hero whose inner psyche contains both the ancient duty to take revenge and the modern repulsion toward it.⁵³

In the characters of the ghost and Laertes, Shakespeare represents, in different ways, the idea central to heroic societies that taking revenge is requisite to a loving relationship. The ghost of Hamlet’s father demands, “If thou didst ever thy dear father love … / Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder.”⁵⁴ The naturalness and even appropriateness of revenge is woven throughout the play in that line and others such as, “If thou hast nature in thee, bear it [the murder] not.”⁵⁵ King Hamlet, a good and noble man unjustly betrayed and murdered (we “shall not look upon his like again”)⁵⁶ speaks these lines, not a murderous villain in a Kydian treatment. Because they are spoken by someone we are supposed to admire, we are instructed to take this sentiment seriously and, like Hamlet, to turn it over in our mind. This ghost does not demand the excess characteristic to contemporaneous dramatic versions of revenge that left the stages littered with corpses of the innocent and guilty alike. Instead he admonishes Hamlet to restrain himself (“Taint not thy mind”),⁵⁷ and limit his bloody revenge to Claudius alone. Speaking of Gertrude, he advises, “Leave her to heaven.”⁵⁸ The convention of the ghost demanding revenge, borrowed from Seneca⁵⁹ and familiar to revenge dramas of Shakespeare’s time, is a variation of the Furies of Aeschylus, creatures from another world insisting that the unjustly murdered be avenged. The dignified and honorable ghost of King Hamlet approaches the image sought by Aeschylus of the Furies at Wisdom’s side, a far more complex and ambiguous image than the polarized revenge and justice, passion and reason, of lesser plays. As Charles and Elaine Hallett note, “The Ghost in Hamlet … symbolizes that justice which is naturally intuited by the individual psyche.”⁶⁰

In Laertes, Shakespeare personifies the ancient, uncomplicated response to a wrong committed against a family; Laertes sees his course clearly. Hamlet has killed Laertes’s father, Polonius, and driven his sister, Ophelia, to madness and suicide; Laertes will have his revenge. His course is so direct that he is easily used by Claudius for Claudius’s own, less nobly inspired, ends. Claudius pointedly questions, even goads, Laertes: “Laertes, was your father dear to you? / Or are you like a painting of a sorrow, / A face without a heart?”⁶¹ If Laertes really loved his father, in Claudius’s schemed version, he must act. If he does not act, it is evidence he did not love his father. In the understanding of the old dispensation, love for a slain family member requires bloody revenge. Moreover, in Claudius’s view (which aligns him with the revenge-seeking villains of contemporaneous plays), “Revenge should have no bounds.”⁶²

On the other hand, Shakespeare, influenced by Elizabethan ethical teaching that insistently condemned revenge,⁶³ endows Hamlet with a more modern resistance to private revenge.⁶⁴ At first Hamlet reacts to his father’s demand for revenge with predictable emotion: “I, with wings as swift / As meditation or the thoughts of love, / May sweep to my revenge.”⁶⁵ He hesitates to sweep, of course, and his hesitance causes him to despise himself: “O, vengeance! / Why, what an ass am I! This most brave, / That I, the son of a dear father murdered, / Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell, / Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words.”⁶⁶ Hamlet believes that replacing action with ruminating language is weak and unmanly. Despite his private eloquence in the famous soliloquies, Hamlet is suspicious of language. He cannot unpack his heart with words to anyone (except the audience); when he speaks to other characters in the play, he feigns madness and dissembles. He actually disavows the possibility of speaking and requires the others who have seen the ghost also to be silent, to “still your fingers on your lips.”⁶⁷

Hamlet, educated at a German university, embodies the competing drives: the ancient impulse to avenge a loved one’s murder and the more civilized realization that private revenge-seeking destroys a society. Hamlet’s rational Wittenberg-student self wars against his more instinctive and passionate Danish self. He desires fully the appropriate and measured familial revenge his father demands: an eye for an eye, a death for a death. At the same time, he has the more modern understanding of the destructiveness of private revenge and the threat it poses to the stability of the state. Like Orestes, he is trapped between conflicting impulses, between two “goods,” but no Athena, no dea ex machina, appears to resolve his dilemma. Instead, for him, “Denmark’s a prison.”⁶⁸

Like some scenes in the Iliad and the conclusion of the Oresteia, Hamlet portrays the internal contradictions of the human psyche: the need to avenge a loved one and the knowledge that such vengeance leads to destruction and suffering. If Hamlet acts as his father desires, Denmark is threatened. And he cannot turn to the state to enact his revenge, because Claudius, the murderer, is the state. The central authority cannot play its assigned role, and when such a failure occurs, even the most civilized and educated among us may be driven to private revenge: “Man seems to take justice into his own hands when God or secular authorities fail.”⁶⁹ The ghost of Hamlet’s father, like the Furies of the Oresteia, has been driven underground only to emerge when he has no vengeance.

It is the ghost’s parting words, “Remember me,”⁷⁰ that most obsess Hamlet. After the ghost departs, Hamlet repeats the words until they become a kind of litany:

Remember thee?

Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat

In this distracted globe. Remember thee?

Yea from the table of my memory

I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records,

All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past

That youth and observation copied there,

And thy commandment all alone will live

Within the book and volume of my brain,

Unmixed with baser matter. Yes, by heaven!….

“Remember me.”

I have sworn’t.⁷¹

Violent revenge collapses into “remember.” How is Hamlet to remember his father? His Wittenberg education has told him that violent revenge is wrong but has given him nothing to take its place if the state cannot or will not act for him. Hamlet struggles to imagine an alternative, and he fails.

Yet it seems to me that the play itself provides an overlooked alternative in its final act. Like The Spanish Tragedy and other similar but lesser plays, in the final scene of Hamlet the stage is covered with bodies of the guilty and innocent alike. Eight deaths occur—Polonius, Ophelia, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Gertrude, Claudius, Laertes, and Hamlet are all dead by the time the play ends. But before he dies, Hamlet entreats his friend Horatio “To tell my story”:

O God, Horatio, what a wounded name,

Things standing thus unknown, shall live behind me!

If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,

Absent thee from felicity for awhile,

And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,

To tell my story.⁷²

Hamlet has never spoken truth to power; he has instead “put an antic disposition on.”⁷³ He has forgone any opportunity to remember his father with language. And he has been unable to react with the comparable violence demanded by the old order; he never does decide to take revenge. The multiple killings at the end of the play occur only because Hamlet agrees to a contest with Laertes. It is Laertes’s undifferentiated need for bloody revenge that causes the stage to be littered with bodies and the state destroyed, in true revenge drama style. Indeed, Claudius, the crafty goader, and Laertes, the hot-headed revenge seeker, are stock revenge drama characters. Only at the end of the play, with the new state present in the character of Fortinbras, will the true story be told. Hamlet’s final words give his “dying voice”⁷⁴ to Fortinbras, and Horatio asks that he may “speak to th’ yet unknowing world / How these things came about.”⁷⁵ Hamlet does not ask Horatio for revenge; he asks him to tell the story.

In this final scene (too often cut from performances), this great play suggests that telling the story can end the cycle of revenge and bring a stop to the senseless deaths that we, the audience, have witnessed. Within the play, the words “if thou didst ever thy dear father love— / Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder” become transformed into “If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart … tell my story.” Once the story is told (as indeed it has been told to us as we watch the play), the new state, embodied in Fortinbras, can move forward. But that progress requires a witness, a Horatio, to tell the misdeeds of the corrupt state under Claudius. It is not an easy task: “in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain” (italics added).

Is, then, this kind of storytelling an alternative for contemporary democracies that also “fail” to enact retribution in traditional ways, Denmark-like states in which, for one reason or another, violence for violence is not a suitable response? Can a new state effectively remember the past without violence? Can it “speak to th’ yet unknowing world how these things came about”?