My previous post, keyed to Ernest Hemingway and Henry James, was about the making of decisions, and this new one is related to it. Through examples from Shakespeare and Frederick Douglass, I’ll try to explain what the relationship is.
It’s often said about Hamlet that the episode at sea—his experience aboard the ship carrying him and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to England and his encounter with the pirates—changes him. When he returns to Denmark in Act IV, he’s different, enlightened, in possession of new insight about himself and his place in the world: “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will.” And soon thereafter: “The readiness is all.” But it’s more complicated than that. We don’t really know what happened because Shakespeare doesn’t show us. We hear about it after it has occurred.
In V.1., in the graveyard, Hamlet and Horatio speak with the clowns (as they are called) about death and burial and observe the funeral procession for Ophelia. Grief-stricken and angry at one another, Hamlet and Laertes exchange blows in her grave and are separated by the King and Queen. Hamlet and Horatio exit and then reenter in the middle of a conversation:
HAMLET
So much for this, sir. Now shall you see the other.
You do remember all the circumstance?
HORATIO
Remember it, my lord!
HAMLET
Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting
That would not let me sleep. Methought I lay
Worse than the mutines in the bilboes. Rashly—
And praised be rashness for it; let us know,
Our indiscretion sometime serves us well
When our deep plots do pall, and that should teach us
There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will—
HORATIO
That is most certain.
Hamlet doesn’t explain in this flashback what the “fighting” in him was about. Was it rage at Claudius, anguish about his mother, guilt and regret for the murder of Polonius, sorrow at the loss of his beloved Ophelia, or frustration at his failure to fulfill the promise of revenge he had made to the Ghost? Hamlet reports to Horatio that he went to where Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were sleeping, found the King’s message ordering his execution, and composed a new message commanding that they should be killed instead. That’s what Hamlet did. But why? What impelled him to do this?
He says first that it was “rashness,” and then that it was “indiscretion.” “Rashness”: characterized by or proceeding from the absence of deliberation or caution; speaking or acting with undue haste or disregard for consequences; imprudently involving or incurring risk. “Indiscretion”: the lack of careful restraint; an imprudent action at variance with accepted morality or convention. We might wonder what the distinction is between these terms, but Hamlet moves quickly to the lesson he contends his action reveals.
Hamlet gives the name “divinity” to what it was that saved him; he doesn’t elucidate or interpret it. Is it the Christian God he has in mind, or a godlike force, some kind of sacred catalyst? We’re not told. Hamlet says his experience taught him that it’s not what we ourselves choose to do that makes the difference. It’s divine intervention, a supernatural surprise. We might not have been aware of its presence, but later we perceive that it must have transpired in us because of the gratifying results.
It feels good to Hamlet to believe this, and we feel good about it too. But in truth, he’s just making a guess, expressing a hope. He could have stayed where he was and continued to toss and turn. Does rashness tell us why he got up? Is indiscretion more accurate? Did a benign presence motivate Hamlet? Maybe so, but there’s no way to be certain whether that was the case or not.
I’m reminded of a passage in Frederick Douglass’s Narrative, chapter 10. The slave-breaker Covey has repeatedly brutalized and beaten him. Then one day, this happened:
Mr. Covey entered the stable with a long rope; and just as I was half out of the loft, he caught hold of my legs, and was about tying me. As soon as I found what he was up to, I gave a sudden spring, and as I did so, he holding to my legs, I was brought sprawling on the stable floor. Mr. Covey seemed now to think he had me, and could do what he pleased; but at this moment—from whence came the spirit I don’t know—I resolved to fight; and, suiting my action to the resolution, I seized Covey hard by the throat.
Douglass describes his fight with Covey in vivid detail and emphasizes the unprecedented conception of himself that his resistance instilled in him. He doesn’t know the source for this imperative to act. A “spirit” came to Douglass, an animating or vital principle, an impulse to do what he had never done before. What generated the spirit? How did this happen, and why? There’s no knowing the answers to these questions.
The prompting that came to Hamlet and Douglass is something they can’t wholly identify or comprehend. They didn’t deliberate in their situations about what they should do. Ensconced in one mental space, they suddenly were in another.
We, too, might look back and ask: why did we do what we did? We could maintain it was divinity or spirit, but that doesn’t offer much clarity, and it may not be true. What was there, if something was, is elusive and enigmatic, an amazing and baffling unknown.
An action for which there is a source that might be invoked or gestured toward but that can’t be fathomed: this is a theme that other writers have dramatized, from the hero of John Milton’s Samson Agonistes, who feels “Some rousing motions in me which dispose / To something extraordinary my thoughts,” to the speaker in Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” who chooses one road rather than another while acknowledging that both were “really about the same.”
There are similar stories told by S. T. Coleridge, in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”; Fyodor Dostoyevsky, in Notes from Underground and Crime and Punishment; André Gide, in Lafcadio’s Adventures; and Albert Camus, in The Stranger. William James considers the perplexities of how and why we are prompted to action in his account of “the will” in The Principles of Psychology; and in On Revolution and The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt examines acts of rebellion that emerge spontaneously, the phenomenon of groups mobilizing all at once.
The decisions that made us the persons we are, the conversions, the transformations: when we try to explain them, we search for words we’ll never find. Language is a resource that equips us to negotiate whatever reality is. But it can’t perform the task we keep assigning to it, which is making visible what we cannot see. The question Why cannot be answered: we only can reach rough-hewn approximations, having faith in something that may or may not be there, in a perpetual cadence of desire and doubt.
There’s no end to the seeking, and that’s because there’s no solving the mystery we’re in the middle of. Is there a connection between what we did and why? We want to believe there is.
William E. Cain is Mary Jewett Gaiser Professor of English at Wellesley College, where he enjoys teaching courses on Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and other American writers. His recent publications include essays on Edith Wharton and Ernest Hemingway.
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