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character of Hamlet, akin to a regeneration of self, that takes place in the fifth act.
First, some of the obvious bric-a-brac from the reformist camp. Why, for example, the
heavy-handed name dropping about "Wittenberg," which puts a frame around the first
soliloquy? As the doctrinal seat of Lutheranism, the voice of Wittenberg sounded far and
wide, arousing admiration in dissidents and loathing in the faithful. Claudius, the classic
usurper struggling to legitimize illegitimacy, was particularly vulnerable to these
heresies, of which rebellion against tyrants was one result. 6 He could therefore be
especially concerned about the return of his unpredictable and moody stepson to a place
of such notoriously rampant sedition: "For your intent / In going back to school in
Wittenberg, / It is most retrograde to our desire" (1.2.112). The queen, Gertrude, echoes
the king, though perhaps for less weighty motives: "I pray thee stay with us, go not to
Wittenberg" (1.2.119). Immediately following the subsequent soliloquy ("O that this too
too sallied flesh would melt" [1.2.129ff.]), Hamlet twice asks Horatio about Wittenberg:
"And what make you from Wittenberg" (1.2.164); and "But what, in faith, make you from
Wittenberg?" (1.2.168). Hamlet's eagerness, his insistence, suggests Wittenberg's
attraction to him, as though it possessed
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some power, spiritual or intellectual, lost at Elsinore. Wittenberg seems some kind of
Eden, an unfallen world, a forest of Arden, in contrast with the rottenness of Denmark,
which is "a prison" at best.
The "student prince," as S. F. Johnson aptly named him, 7 it could be argued, has even
been touched by the teachings of Philipp Melanchthon at Wittenberg, who in praise of
astronomy linked the study of nature with praise of the Creator:
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To recognize God the Creator from the order of the heavenly motions and
of His entire work, that is true and useful divination. . . . In the sky, God
has represented the likeness of certain things in the church. 8
Hamlet's own musings about "this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it
appeareth nothing to me" (2.2.301-2) suggest either a profound skepticism akin to
Montaigne's Pyrrhonian suspense of judgment, or even covert nonbelief. Hamlet's
sophomoric verse epistle to Ophelia, "Doubt thou the stars are fire, / Doubt that the sun
doth move" (2.2.116ff.), though often read. as supportive of the old Ptolemaic world
view, may echo the theories about Copernicus at Wittenberg. In the late sixteenth
century, Caspar Peucer, Melanchthon's son-in-law and disciple, was actually lecturing
there on this and other recondite topics. 9
That zeal for the "Philippists" at Wittenberg and the new vision of truth that they stood
for also coincides with Hamlet's own positions against other forms of power. His "inky
cloak" and "suits of solemn black" have quite rightly been attributed to melancholy chic,
of the variety flaunted in a contemporary portrait of John Donne. As well, however, the
costume accords with puritanical taste, perhaps that of a Zeal-of-the-Land Busy in
Jonson's Bartholomew Fair, who was glad to "prophesy the destruction of fairs and May-
games, wakes and whitsun-ales, and doth sigh and groan for the reformation of these
abuses" (BF
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4.6.91). If this comparison with Busy seems misplaced, then Petruchio and Malvolio may
better serve to reveal attitudes not entirely dissimilar from Hemlet's: the former his
suspicion of outward show ("For 'tis the mind that makes the body rich," he tells Kate
[Shr. 4.3.172]); and Malvolio with his horror of fleshly pleasures ("You must amend your
drunkenness," he admonishes Sir Toby [TN 2.5.73]). Ascetic tendencies such as these
contain their own ideological codes. For example, Hamlet, as well as sharing, Petruchio's
disdain for external finery, also shares Malvolio's contempt for drunkards. When Hamlet
and Horatio overhear the "heavy-headed revel" of Claudius's ritual carousing (1.4-17),
Hamlet warns his school friend that he may be forced to "drink deep" in conformity to the
deplorable social customs at Elsinore.
A case also can be made that Hamlet's apparent misogyny stems as much from a Pauline
understanding of women as from any "psychological" quirk. Hamlet knows full well the
meaning of the "expense of spirit in a waste of shame" (Sonnet 129), as his nausea for
Ophelia shows: "You jig and amble, and you [lisp], you nickname God's creatures and
make your wantonness [your] ignorance" (3.1.144-46); or his disgust with Gertrude's
middleaged concupiscence: "Let the bloat king tempt you again to bed, / Pinch wanton on
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