Elizabethan and Jacobean theatres in England, roughly the period between 1558 and 1640, took its disagreements quite seriously and often resolved those disagreements without shying away from blood, gore and scattered body parts on the stage. In fact, the drama, crucial to the plot driven plays whether as tragedies or comedies, comes from a conflict of ideas or interests. So if we are looking for a place to start finding a quarrel or dispute in the plays of the period we wouldn’t have to look too far. Whether it is playwrights like Shakespeare, Marlowe and Kyd from the early years of Queen Elizabeth’s reign or those who wrote till a little after King James’ death, such as Jonson, Webster and Ford – one thing that is to be found in plenty is all manner of disagreements put into play and worked towards a happy or unhappy resolution.

For instance, Jonson’s well known comedy The Alchemist (1610) begins with an onstage quarrel between two of its three main protagonists: Subtle, the alchemist and Face, his procurer, as Dol Common, the third protagonist, a prostitute turned business partner, attempts to make peace between them. The very first stage direction reads:

Enter Face, in a captain’s uniform, with his sword drawn, and

Subtle with a vial, quarrelling, and followed by Dol Common.

 

What follows is a hilarious though serious argument as Face asks for an equal partnership in their new venture to fool rich folks out of their money by selling them magical charms. As Face threatens to strike with his sword, Subtle retorts, ‘I fart at thee.’ Face only begins by reminding Subtle of his beggared state at Pie Corner where Face found him starving, in barely enough clothing to cover his ‘no-buttocks’. If this is just the beginning of their exchange of insults then readers can imagine where it goes from here.

Mistress Dol’s role in resolving the quarrel is also worth noticing. She begins by appealing to their civility and ends by snatching Face’s sword, dashing Subtle’s vial of chemicals, and making greater noise than the two combined. She gets them both to agree to a ‘venture tripartite’ where all three will be equal partners of the spoils. ‘Fall to your couples again, and cozen kindly, /And heartily, and lovingly, as you should, […] Or, by this hand, I shall grow factious too, And take my part, and quit you,’ she threatens that the cozening and cheating will require them to be kind and considerate to each other.

So the play starts, and it is safe to assume that this partnership will last through the length of the play for as long as the fraud holds up. This quarrel that Jonson exploits for its comic potential also reveals the form of quarrelling: it requires two or more people; it requires a point of disagreement; it requires that each party be convinced in their claim or point of view; it requires a willingness to take verbal or physical action to uphold that claim and it takes interested or disinterested third parties who might get drawn into the quarrel to escalate or end it.

Since quarrels, disagreements, disputes and confrontation make up the very stuff of the drama of this period, it is useful to ask whether they come with a formula that is tried and tested to please and provoke the audience. If we consider that it does, that quarrels have a form especially in their dramatic representation, then the playwrights’ skill in setting up and playing with the terms of the formula in a way that matches or overwhelms audience expectation indicates the success of the play and the skill of the playwright. Shakespeare’s skill is celebrated precisely for how he sets up and transforms the form of the genres he works with.

 

Shakespeare’s plays, and also his sonnets and long poems, employ the parameters of the form he is working with such that the readers or playgoers feel they are treading familiar ground till suddenly they find that they are not, that one or other element of the formula has been changed and with it the experience of the audience. For instance, the idea of revenge – premeditated action motivated by a sense of being wronged in a situation of disagreement – can probably be identified as a major plot motivator both in tragedies and comedies of the time. Revenge plots and avengers have recognizable characteristics and a set path of action. For instance, if you have had your father or your children killed then it is your moral duty to kill the murderer as an acceptable enactment of justice for your kin. Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy (1587) is one such in the genre, reputed to have inspired Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1609) where a father avenges his son’s death.

So when one reads Hamlet where in the very first Act Hamlet finds out about his father’s murder from his father’s ghost and receives the injunction to kill Claudius, the murderer who happens to be the new king and also his uncle that his mother has newly married, the audience knows that the plot is about how Hamlet will get his revenge. And Hamlet does get his revenge in the end, but before he gets there he thinks through and calls into doubt every aspect of this required revenge so that by the time we get to it in Act 5, the contours of the revenge tragedy have been altered for the audience.

 

While the surface disputes of the play are easy enough to spot – Hamlet’s obvious disagreements with his mother or his friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, his difference of opinion with Polonius, not to mention Claudius, his uncomfortable exchanges with Ophelia – the disagreement most worth exploring is the one he has with himself, the one that fills him with self-loathing. To explain this aspect of Hamlet, the avengers of the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage hold fewer clues than Shakespeare’s own sonnet sequence, where the formula for disagreement was already changed to prepare the ground that a character like Hamlet would walk.

Not unlike the genre of the revenge tragedy, Shakespeare did quite the visible about-turn with his sequence of 154 sonnets (1609), not only with the sonnet form that lives on to this day as the Shakespearean sonnet, but also in content and address that marks a visible departure from that of the sonnet sequences popular in his time. While Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella (1591) and Spenser’s Amoretti (1594), for instance, take on the vagaries of love and courtship between a man and a woman where the point of love is marriage, Shakespeare turns to the unrequited love of a man, then to the sometimes reciprocated love of a married woman, and the plot really thickens when the fair youth of his love and the black lady of his desires much prefer each other’s company over his and together leave him in the lurch for some time.

That matters will turn disagreeable in the sonnet sequence is hardly a surprise. But for the purpose at hand what really distinguishes the sonnets as companion reading to Hamlet, apart from the suggestion that the two works were composed around the same time, is the way in which the poetic voice of the sonnets develops in its inward gaze and scrutiny so that the articulation of experience changes and becomes less predictable.

 

The note of disagreement from which the sonnets originate is one where, according to one theory at least, a fair youth sees no point in his aristocratic family’s agenda to settle him into domesticity. The poet, according to the same theory, is contracted by the family to make the young man agreeable to marriage. This results in the first seventeen sonnets of the sequence that are referred to as the procreation sonnets. Broadly speaking the argument is a straight forward appeal to the young man’s vanity and is the common ploy in most of these seventeen: you are young and gorgeous, but youth and beauty are temporary so the only way to preserve yourself is by marrying and producing a child. From the increased agitation in the poetic voice and the increasing direness of the consequence in each sonnet the reader gets a sense for how adamant the fair youth is in his position. What changes from sonnet 1 to 17 is actually the poet’s own mind about this project as he falls in love with the young man and acknowledges it in sonnet 18.

 

Sonnet 1 begins with gentle flattery – ‘From fairest creatures we desire increase,/That thereby beauty’s rose may never die’ – and concludes with just the hint of adverse consequence should he refuse to comply – ‘Pity the world, or else this glutton be,/to eat the world’s due, by the grave and thee.’ The choice is between doing the world a favour and being called a glutton. Compare this to sonnet 9 in which the couplet is barely able to contain the mounting irritation of not getting through: ‘No love towards others in that bosom sits/That on himself such murd’rous shame commits.’ And by sonnet 14, the poet is prophesying both death and doom that this young man, who just won’t listen, is about to cause: ‘Or else of thee this I prognosticate,/Thy end is truth’s and beauty’s doom and date.’

But having delivered the ultimatum of apocalypse in sonnet 14, the poet finds he has not only pushed the youth into a corner from which he may not retrieve himself, the attack has become unrelentingly ad hominem. In sonnet 15 the poet backs off a bit, takes the blame of decay away from the volition of the young man and places it squarely on the idea of time. It is not youth that is wasteful but time: ‘[…] but wasteful time debateth decay/to change your day of youth to unsullied night.’ The couplet of sonnet 15 moves away from the predictable death and gloom of the previous sonnets altogether to something new, something surprising, ‘And all in war with time for love of you/As he takes from you, I engraft you new.’

Somewhere along the way, the procreation sonnets begin to turn attention to the act of writing as life-giving to both express love and preserve the beloved much like children might. With it the premise of the subject of disagreement also changes. In sonnet 16, the subject of disagreement shifts to ‘this bloody tyrant, time.’ Between sonnets 15, 16 and 17 the destruction of time is countered by the very lines that the poet is writing ‘the lines of life that life repair’ though he worries that his verse is ‘but as a tomb.’ It is only in the famous sonnet 18 that he accepts his love for the young man and sees his verse not as memorializing like a grave or tomb but as immortalizing: ‘So long as men can breathe and eyes can see/So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.’

If only the sonnet sequence ended on this happy note. Sonnet 20 goes on to acknowledge that his love of the young man will necessarily be shared: ‘But since she [Nature] pricked thee out for women’s pleasure/Mine be thy love, thy love’s use their treasure.’ This becomes the beginning of a complicated love triangle that brings pleasure, heartbreak and ruin in equal measure and splits apart any semblance of an assured sense of right and wrong or heaven and hell: ‘All this the world well knows, yet none knows well/To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell’ (129).

 

Shakespeare’s sonnets are as much about love and its quarrels as those of his contemporaries writing about love, except that his sonnets go beyond the usual euphoria or pining over unrequited love into the messiness, darkness and disagreeableness of the business of loving that is harder to acknowledge. This scrutiny of one’s inner life that produces experiences and emotions that dispute the expected outer showing of one’s self carries over from the sonnets to Hamlet’s soliloquies. The first time Hamlet gets a moment alone to think aloud after his return to Denmark for his father’s funeral, he cries out in loathing and disgust: ‘O’ that this too sullied flesh would melt/Thaw and resolve itself into a dew. /Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d/His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter. O God! God!’

But what is the reason for this loathing of the flesh? The imageries of ‘things rank and gross in nature’ taking over the ‘unweeded garden’ bring us to the reason for his visceral disgust: ‘She married – O most wicked speed! To post/with such dexterity to incestuous sheets!’ To Prince Hamlet, his mother marrying his uncle overshadows the death of his father and possibly his own succession to the throne. But he hushes himself to keep his tongue. He does not quite have the words to outwardly say how he feels. Soon after, he is led to the castle’s ramparts by his friend Horatio where he meets his father’s ghost and learns of his father’s murder in which his mother had abetted his uncle’s hand.

 

With the knowledge of his father’s murder Hamlet is expected to have no care but for the swiftness of revenge and justice; however, Hamlet finds his concerns complicated by his own self that is divided on the action he must take. He finds that he’d sooner consider self-slaughter than fly to his revenge. The contemplation of suicide is the explicit subject of his fourth and celebrated soliloquy where he asks, ‘To be or not be: […]/Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer […] Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, /and by opposing end them?’ If it is possible to make one’s peace with a ‘bare bodkin’ and simply die, why would one bother with all the troubles of the world?

As he worries that the unknown afterlife might be worse than the living life, he diagnoses that any resolution to act is ‘sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.’ Hamlet’s primary disagreement is with his own self, as he finds himself loathing his mother’s marriage that propriety demands he say and do nothing about; but propriety also demands that he kill his uncle for murdering his father which he is unable to do anything about because he actually thinks about things.

Even as there is little in the state of Denmark that agrees with Hamlet while he sulks and mopes about, delaying revenge, the audience would recognize the plot of the revenge tragedy. In fact, the play even has a swift revenger who lunges with the sword the minute he learns of the murder of his kin – Laertes, Polonius’ son and Ophelia’s brother, but who is restrained by King Claudius for a bigger plot, one that Claudius hopes will secure him against Hamlet.

 

In its resolution, the play brings together several elements and props expected in revenge tragedies – counter-conspiracies, poison, dueling and a heap of dead bodies. But between the incipit and the resolution, Hamlet thinks through every requirement that the outward form of his quarrel demands and berates himself in soliloquy after soliloquy for not being able to embody the revenge as it is expected of him. In Act 2, after he sees an actor play grief with such genuine passion in a fictional situation, he is led to question his own ability to do so even when the reality of his life is calling him to it: ‘Yet I, /A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak, /Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause, /And can say nothing.’

If the play has all the elements that the genre of the revenge tragedy requires what do the gut wrenching soliloquies do for the character of Hamlet and the play? Why must Hamlet feel unequal to the task before getting it done? Hamlet, the melancholic university student given to self-doubt, is able to complicate the narrative ease of resolutions in revenge tragedies, not unlike the poetic voice of the sonnet sequence which lays bare the darkness of love. The irony is that for as long as Hamlet berates himself for his ‘large discourse,’ ‘God like reason’ and the ability to ‘think precisely,’ and for dwelling on his disagreements expansively, he is unable to commit murder no matter how deep his distress and resentment cuts; however, it is also precisely his ability to think that will bring him to a place which makes action look spontaneous, passionate and without much thought.

In his final soliloquy in Act 4, Hamlet thinks up a spur for the resolution of his quarrel with Claudius, after he discovers Claudius’ plot for his own murder:

‘How all occasions do inform against me

And spur my dull revenge!

[…]

Rightly to be great

Is not to stir without great argument,

But greatly to find quarrel in a straw.’

 

The cogitating revenger has to think himself to a point where to resolve a quarrel he must go to the place which the impulsive revenger, greatly moved by hurt and injustice seems to automatically inhabit. That greatness of action is motivated by great cause is a well rehearsed idea for Hamlet and for his audience. What is new is what he says next, greatness is in ‘…greatly to find quarrel in a straw.’

Quarrels are formulated. While some may accept the hand-me-down forms of quarrels and wear the formula like a costume, others realize that the form of the quarrel may elevate the status of a straw; a great quarrel is not about the cause of the quarrel but the form that it takes. Hamlet gives his own example: he has great cause, ‘a father killed, a mother stained’, but he has let it all sleep, whereas earlier he had seen an actor seem so genuine in fiction – by passionately acting the episode of Queen Hecuba’s grief on seeing her husband King Priam slaughtered – ‘his whole functioning suiting to the norms of his conceit.’

Here the word conceit refers to the actor’s ability to embody a figure of speech, a metaphor, a likeness to the form of grief that is indistinguishable as mere form. Hamlet, the thinker, loathe to fit into forms, realizes that his form and function are in a state of existential disagreement and that is what he needs to mend. In the last line of his last soliloquy he resolves: ‘O, from this time forth/My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!’

It is as if Hamlet needed to articulate to himself that he had to put on the revenger’s costume and play the part even if he wasn’t acting another’s story but putting into action his own. It is worth noting that there are no more hair-splitting soliloquies after Act 4 Scene 4, as he thinks bloody thoughts and ends up in the heap of dead bodies at the end of Act 5. So what does this genre challenging revenge tragedy tell us about the form of disagreements and its uses? One conclusion is that quarrels, even if they have a form that looks generic with a function of moving the plot forward, such as in a revenge plot, when they are performed on stage even the most formulaic disagreements can become uniquely individualizing in their experience.

 

The experience of disagreement, and its articulation to whatever degree of intensity – ranging from a shouting match to full-scale war – requires each participant to invest and articulate a self as distinct from others. This is not a feature of Hamlet alone. If we return for a moment to Jonson’s Alchemist and to Face and Subtle’s quarrel, just from the names of the protagonists we can tell that the play uses the convention of stock-types for its characters, but even here all the information that Face and Subtle pull out to accuse each other or defend themselves serves the function of introducing them in their distinct representation to the audience.

In other words, quarrels are uniquely self-identifying and individualizing experiences even if the cause or the form of the quarrel is nothing unusual. Just as there is nothing unusual about jealousy being a cause for disagreement between lovers, but still the narrative of the circumstance of love and the self-representation of a jealous enough lover can produce a sonnet sequence as distinct as that of Shakespeare’s.

 

Perhaps the point is also not that these experiences are unique in absolute terms but that these feel uniquely individualizing in the narrative produced around them. The status of exception and crisis that mark disagreements also ensure that these are seen as disruptions to the seamless continuities of life. A disagreement gets in the way of business as usual in Face, Subtle and Dol Common’s day; it gets Hamlet’s father killed and pulls Hamlet out of university; it keeps the lover and his beloved from enjoying being in love. But equally it is these moments of disruption and crisis which force individualization and a sense of being uniquely put upon, that restructure and re-construe life post-disagreement, at least for those that live to tell the tale in times of peace.

Between Jonson’s comedic appropriation of quarrelling, the shifting grounds of agreeability in love in Shakespeare’s sonnets, and the unravelling of revenge as resolution in Hamlet, the lasting common straw is perhaps one of Hamlet’s own realization that one can make a great quarrel of just about anything so long as one can find for it an appropriate form to first inhabit and then exceed.