Fellow Students: Hamlet, Horatio, and the Early Modern University

Author(s): Elizabeth Hanson

Source: Shakespeare Quarterly , Summer 2011, Vol. 62, No. 2, SURVIVING HAMLET
(Summer 2011), pp. 205-229
Published by: Oxford University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23025628

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 Fellow Students: Hamlet, Horatio,
and the Early Modern University
Elizabeth Hanson

Inaccosts
George his Chapman's obscurea poor
dear friend Clarence, play,scholar,
Sir Giles
with Goosecap, Lord Momford
this declaration:

Hence with this book; and now Monsieur Clarence, methinks plain and prose
friendship would be excellent well betwixt us. Come, thus, sir, or rather thus,
come, sir [embracing him]; 'tis time, I trow, that we both lived like one body,
thus, and that both our sides were slit, and concorporate with organs fit to
effect an individual passage even for our very thoughts; suppose we were one
body now, and I charge you believe it, whereof I am the heart and you the liver.
(1.4.58-66)

Momford habitually bandies Latin and philosophy with Clarence, who is prone
to monologues invoking "my master Plato" (3.2.2) and praises Momford alter
nately for hisTearnd mind" and his'noble mind" (11.104, 111). The union of this
educated pair is eventually achieved through Clarences marriage to Momford's
(also learned) niece Eugenia, so that the play, which begins as a parody of the
Troilus and Cressida story to the obvious discredit of all characters, ends in a
fusion of nobility and learning at once celebratory and ironic. I offer this avowal
as a gloss on a more familiar dramatic statement of learned friendship:

Horatio, thou art e'en as just a man

As e'er my conversation cop'd withal....

Nay, do not think I flatter,

For what advancement may I hope from thee
That no revenue hast but thy good spirits
To feed and clothe thee? Why should the poor be flatter d?
No, let the candied tongue lick absurd pomp,
And crook the pregnant hinges of the knee
Where thrift may follow fawning. Dost thou hear?

Thanks to Emily Anglin of Queens University, Kingston, Ontario, for research assistance in the
preparation of this essay.
All quotations from Sir Giles Goosecap are from The Plays of George Chapman, ed, X M. Par
rott (New York: Russell and Russell, 1961), and cited parenthetically in the text.

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 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY

Since my dear soul was mistress of her choice,

And could of men distinguish her election,
Sh'ath seald thee for herself; for thou hast been
As one, in sufFring all, that suffers nothing,
A man that Fortune's buffets and rewards
Hast ta'en with equal thanks; and blest are those
Whose blood and judgment are so well commeddled
That they are not a pipe for Fortunes finger
To sound what stop she please. Give me that man
That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him
In my heart's core, ay, in my heart of heart,
As I do thee. Something too much of this.
(Hamlet, 3.2.54-55, 56-74)2

Despite their different generic contexts, both passages do similar work, reiter
ating commonplaces of amicitia, the humanist doctrine of friendship between
like-minded, virtuous men. In fact, the Chapman passage reads like a parody
of Montaigne's assertion in "Of Friendship" that "in the amitie I speake of
they entermixe and confound themselves one in the other, with so universall a
commixture, that they weare out, and can no more finde the seame that hath
conjoyned them together."3 The lines from Hamlet echo both Montaigne and
Chapman in diction and, in its contrast of true friendship with mere flattery,
Thomas Churchyard's Sparke of Friendship (1588):

If friends bee chosen by election and priuie liking, these open palterers may goe
whistle: for neither they know the boundes of a good minde, nor the blessed
nesse that belongs to friendship .... without reuerence vttered by courtesie,
suing and following for benefite, fauning and speaking fayre (for entertayning
of time) creeping and crouching to keepe that wee haue, and winne that wee
wish, all ciuill order would bee forgotten ... But graunting now, these ceremo
nious fashions and maners, yet the vsers thereof, are no more like friends, than
a Maske and Mommerie (with vizars on their faces) is like a company of graue
Senators, that gouerns a mightie Monarchic.4

2 Quotations from Hamlet are taken from the Arden2 edition, ed. Harold Jenkins (London:
Methuen, 1982), cited parenthetically in the text.
3 The Essays of Michael, Lord of Montaigne, trans. John Florio, ed. Ernest Rhys, 3 vols. (1910;
repr., London: E. P. Dutton, 1942), 1:201.
4 Thomas Churchyard, A Sparke of Friendship and Warme Goodwill... (London, 1588), sig.
Civ. The echo of Churchyard is more pointed in Ql, where Horatio "nothing hath but [his]
good mind." See The First Quarto of "Hamlet" ed. Kathleen O. Irace (Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 1998), 9.36 (all quotations from Ql are taken from this edition). Clarence is described
similarly by Momford as "only a great scholar and all his honours and riches lie in his mind" (Sir
Giles Goosecap, 2.1.69-70).

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 HAMLET, HORATIO, AND THE EARLY MODERN UNIVERSITY 207

But the dramatic passages do not just reiterate the doctrine of friendship; the
situate it as the declaration of a learned noble man to a poor scholar. Moreover
as the over-the-top anatomical explicitness of Momford's declaration und
scores, they suggest that these noblemen are "something too much" in th
desire to bind themselves to their social, if not intellectual, subordinates. T
excessiveness of lord and prince marks their declarations of love and admiratio
less as expressions of a Renaissance ideal than as markers of a problem.
To be sure, Hamlets something too much' is ambiguous. Is his expressi
too ardent or his address too long and Polonius-like, a conventional human
dilation that gets in the way of the business at hand? The availability of bo
interpretations evinces the inextricability of his declarations excessiveness fro
its scholarly situation. If Hamlet shares something of Polonius's prolix sent
tiousness, it is because these two otherwise-dissimilar men share a commo
education, which the play links to the university, where Polonius played Caesa
and Hamlet forged his friendship with Horatio. Hamlet goes to considerab
lengths to establish that Prince Hamlet is a student at Wittenberg; his frie
ship with Horatio is both a sign and an effect of that status. In this respect, t
play and its title character are synecdoches for the gentrification of learning th
transformed the European aristocracy from a martial class to a highly literate
governing one in the early modern period. When Ophelia laments the "no
mind [that] is here o'erthrown! / The courtiers, soldier's, scholars, eye, tongue
sword" (3.1.152-53), we are apt to hear a Renaissance ideologeme, the inv
tion of a social ideal in which each characteristic implies and requires the othe
But in Hamlet the roles invoked here do not sit easily together; while Hamlet
scholar, he utterly lacks the attributes of courtier and soldier. These qualities
assigned instead to Laertes and Fortinbras, respectively, and Hamlet's attempts
at emulation may be seen as a futile attempt to quell the incoherence at the hear
of the ideologeme.
I argue that while Hamlet begins by attempting to assert the congruence of
learning and nobility, it ends by exposing learning's challenge to nobility. The
vehicle for this exposure is the friendship between Hamlet and Horatio.
recent years, Daniel Juan Gil, Lorna Hutson, Michael Neill, David Schalkw
Laurie Shannon, and Alan Stewart have fruitfully explored Renaissance ide
of friendship and their complex interaction with status difference.6 My approac

5 Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ith
Cornell UP, 1981), 76.
Daniel Juan Gil, Before Intimacy: Asocial Sexuality in Early Modern England (Minneapo
U of Minnesota P, 2006); Lorna Hutson, The Usurer's Daughter: Male Friendship and Fic
tions of Women in Sixteenth-Century England (London: Roudedge, 1994); Michael Neill, '
that thou knowest thine': Friendship and Service in Hamlet," in A Companion to Shakespea

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208 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY

is somewhat different, beginning with a social contex

ideas of friendship could be called upon and even e
contradiction between different protocols for orderin
pose that amicitia functioned as a trope for the rela
and status as a resource for identity in the experience
group of men in early modern England. The need for
from the fact that the literacy of the aristocracy was
adding new value to old elites. Rather, it entailed the s
born to modes of discipline and relationship once prin
clergy, whose status would never be defined by birth. I
Bourdieu frames the relationship between learning and

What was at stake in the competition pitting noblem

noblemen of the sword, the robin and book learning
chivalrous education, as well as against the cleric, a ma
robin, but one prevented from hereditarily transferring
leges, was ... a completely new combination [in the] pr
and the legitimation of domination: cultural capital as wi
and the transferability of wealth as well as devotion to p
the nobility.7

What is striking about this formulation is that Bourdieu posits this transforma
tion twice, first between the robin and the noblemen of the sword, and second
between the robin and the clergy. The result is that the robin is a nobleman who
possesses the cleric's learning, but that learning remains fundamentally clerical
in character, a "principle of domination and the legitimation of domination"
quite different from the principles that constitute nobility. The nobleman of the
robe occupies a place both synthetic of and antithetical to clericalism. Bourdieu
locates the learned nobleman in two places at once, suggesting that "The glass
of fashion and the mould of form" (3.1.155) might harbor an ontological
problem—no surprise to audiences of Hamlet. What Bourdieu recounts as
conflict, however, English Renaissance writers represent as love. At the risk of
being reductive, I suggest that Hamlet's desire to "wear" Horatio in his "heart's

Works, vol. 1: The Tragedies, ed. Richard Dutton andjean E. Howard (London: Blackwell, 2003):
319-38; David Schalkwyk, Shakespeare, Love and Service (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008);
Laurie Shannon, Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts (Chicago: U
of Chicago P, 2002); and Alan Stewart, Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern
England (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997). For a historical approach to the issue of friendship
and homoeroticism, see also Alan Bray, "Homosexuality and the Sign of Male Friendship in
Elizabethan England," in Queering the Renaissance, ed. Jonathan Goldberg (Durham: Duke UP,
1994), 40-61; and Alan Bray, The Friend (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003).
Pierre Bourdieu with Monique de Saint Martin, The State Nobility, trans. Lauretta C.
Clough (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996), 378.

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 HAMLET, HORATIO, AND THE EARLY MODERN UNIVERSITY 209

core," like Momford's proposal for "concorporation" with Clarence, figur

"combination" of the noble and the clerical that Bourdieu argues to
in this period. In the embarrassing excess attending these proposals, r
the noblemen's neediness where we would expect their sufficiency, we
problem to which Bourdieu's doubled dialectic inadvertently attests, wher
nobleman confronts his own prestige as the attributes of an Other.
In England, the "new combination in the principles of domination a
legitimation of domination" that Bourdieu represents as the collision
different estates took the form of a transformation in the universities' cultural

function and demographics. Mark Curtis famously characterized the sixteenth

century increase in gentle and noble university attendance as the "invasion"
of the wellborn.8 While subsequent historians argue for a longer, less sudden
transformation, the implications of Curtis's military metaphor remain valid:
that the nobility and gentry were entering an institution that was in some sense
fundamentally alien to them. The result was a remarkable, if temporary, social
heterogeneity. Hamlet, which the first quarto's title page famously informs us
was performed at Oxford and Cambridge,9 is explicitly and extensively engaged
with the university in both its plot and its modes of discourse. And while "Wit
tenberg" obviously does some specific work in terms of underscoring issues in
the play related to the Reformation, the invocation of that university also speaks
to concerns that arise more properly from England's own centers of learning.
As Curtis notes, "That Shakespeare brought Hamlet home from one of the
'studious universities' to wrestle with the soul-searing disorders of his father's
household and kingdom makes him a peculiarly English version of a Danish
prince."10 In the remainder of this essay, I investigate the connection between
the transformation wrought by the universities in the sixteenth century and the
tragedy of Shakespeare's student prince, first through a more extended account
of the relationship between learning and birth in the English universities and
then through an exploration of the difference it makes that Hamlet is escorted
through his tragedy by his poor "fellow-student," Horatio (1.2.177). In situating
Hamlet in this manner, this essay joins with other recent attempts, most notably
by Margreta de Grazia and John Guillory, to restore the play to its own time and

8 Mark H. Curtis, Oxford and Cambridge in Transition, 1558-1642 (Oxford: Oxford UP,
1959), 59.
According to Ql, the play is printed "[a]s it hath beene diuerse times acted by his High
nesse seruants in the Cittie of London: as also in the two Vniuersities of Cambridge and
Oxford, and else-where." See William Shakespeare, The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet Prince of
Denmarke . . . (London: [Valentine Simmes] for Nicholas] L[ing] and John Trundell, 1603).
10 Curtis, 64-65.

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210 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY

to argue that the play is not a presciently modern per

but the exploration of a long-since-reconfigured Rena

i. Disappointing the Poor

Turning from retrospective generalities like Bourdieu's to sixteen

English commentaries on the university one is struck by conte
mentators' clear grasp of the conflict between the social logic of no
clerical form embodied in the universities, even as they advocate in
another for their combination. In Thomas Starkey's Dialogue bet
Lupset (circa 1529), Starkey's fictional Lupset concurs that improve
commonwealth depend on the education of the nobility. At present

Every man pryvatly in hys owne house hathe hys mastur to instr
chyldur in letturys wythout any respecte of other exercyse in oth
perteynyng to nobylyte no les then lernyng & letturys, as in al featy
valry, therefor ther wold be some ordynawce devysyd for the joynyng
bothe togyddur, wych mygh be downe aftur thys maner, lykewyse as w
our unyversytes collegys & commyn placys to nurysch the chyldur of p
in letturys, whereby as you see com myth no smal profyt to the com
so much more we schold have, as hyt were certayn placys appoyntyd f
bryngyng up togyddur of the nobylyte, to the wych I wold the nobul
be compellyd to set forward theyr chyldur & heyrys, that in a nombu
dur they might the bettur profyt, and to thys cumpany I wold have a
rularys certayn of the most vertuse 8C wyse men of the reame, the wy
instruct thys uthe to whome schold come the governance aftur of
commyn wele ... our old fatherys have byn lyberal in byldyng grete a
monasterys for the exercyse of a monastycal lyfe a mong relygyouse m
hath downe much gud to the vertuese lyvyng of chrystyan mynd
exampul I wold that we schold now folow in byldyng placys for the inst
of the nobylyte, or els in chaungyng some of these to that use. ...
lyke as thes monkys 8C relygyouse men ther lyvyng togyddur exercyse
monastycal dyscyplyne Sc lyfe, so they nobylys beyng broughtup
schold lerne there the dyscyplyne of the commyn wele.12

Starkey is confident that the inculcation of high literacy in th

which Erasmus felt it necessary to advocate strenuously is proc
Instead, his concern is with the institutional delivery of aristocrat
Criticizing the current form of education, private tuition in th

11 Margreta de Grazia, "Hamlet" without Hamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge

John Guillory,'"To Please the Wiser Sort': Violence and Philosophy in Hamlet
Psychoanalysis, and Early Modern Culture, ed. Carla Mazzio and Douglas Tre
Roudedge, 2000), 82-109.
12 Thomas Starkey, A Dialogue between Pole and Lupset, ed. X R Mayer (Lo
torical Society, 1989), 124. This edition is a transcription of the manuscript dia

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 HAMLET, HORATIO, AND THE EARLY MODERN UNIVERSITY 211

hold—which served the compelling class needs of affirming noble youth

sons and heirs of their fathers and nurturing of interfamily alliances—he
turns to monasteries and universities, clerical institutions that aggreg
and subject them to a common discipline. Starkey links this common disc
to his political aim, to shape the nobility into a ruling class. However, it
occurs to Starkey that the nobility should simply attend the universities
he claims instead "nourish the children of poor men in letters," an omissio
more striking by the fact that Starkey himself was the son of a Cheshire
family wealthy enough to pay for his education at Magdalen College, Oxf
Rather, his investment in a hereditary nobility as a natural ruling class r
an exclusive institution so that, in apparent contradiction to his celebrati
monastic discipline, the training that institution provides, in and of itsel
never become the basis for membership in that class.
Characterizing the university as the domain of the poor persisted thro
the sixteenth century, although increasingly in the form of protest agai
swelling numbers of wellborn students. William Harrison, in The Descrip
England (1578), complains that the universities' colleges "were erected by
founders at the first only for poor men's sons, whose parents were not a
bring them up unto learning, but now they have the least benefit of the
reason the rich do so encroach upon them."14 This perception undersc
eral never-realized proposals for noblemen's academies intended to def
highborn from the universities. Five years earlier, advancing his proposa
Queene Elizabethes Academy . . . for education of her Maiestes Ward
others the youth of nobility and gentlemen," Sir Humphrey Gilbert
many of Starkey's points and laments with Harrison that "now the y
nobility and gentlemen, taking vp their schollarshippes and fellowshi
disapoincte the poore of their livinges and avauncementes."15 The implica
that the nobility and gentry are recent arrivals at the university—is all th
interesting for not being strictly true. Elizabeth Russell maintains that t
formation charted by Curtis began much earlier, citing among other
the Aularian Statutes (circa 1490) that prohibited residents of the ha
were the predecessors of the colleges from fomenting mayhem by makin
ous comparisons' between their noble birth and the birth of other aularia

13 Starkey, vii.
William Harrison, The Description of England, ed. Georges Edelen (1968; repr
Publications, 1994), 70-71.
Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Queene Elizabethes Achademy (Lansdowne MS 98), Early
Text Society e.s. 8 (London: Early English Text Society, 1898), 10.
Elizabeth Russell/'The Influx of Commoners into the University of Oxford befo
An Optical Illusion?" in English Historical Review 92 (1977): 721-45, esp. 729-30. An
is a student residing in a hall.

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 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY

What this particular piece of evidence suggests is not, as Russell argues, that the
nobility had long attended the universities (although noble sons intended for
the church certainly had) and were a natural fixture there, but that the clerical
culture of the late medieval university depended on the suppression of status
claims that elsewhere were not only permitted but foundational to social order.
Whatever the persistent assertion of the connection between the universi
ties and the poor tells us about demographic realities—and I remain uncertain
about what the precise nature of the connection is—it constitutes a nervous
acknowledgment of the universalizing potential of the clerical form. Insofar
as clerical institutions create their communities through their own disciplines,
rather than their members' heredity, their membership is open ended and their
practices can weaken other modes of social distinction. The "poor" for whom the
universities were supposed to have been founded and of whom Horatio is an
exemplar may have been characterized not by actual economic poverty as much
as by imperviousness to social class: a radical lack of status, either high or low.
At the same time, labeling this lack as poverty construes it as status, subordinat
ing the denizens of the university to other social groups, most importantly, the
gentry and nobility.17
This universalizing potential of clerical forms was limited by celibacy, which
asserted the anomaly of clerics, segregating them from the larger field of social
reproduction and classifying them as a separate "estate." But as Russell notes,
"The distinction between laity and clergy was itself not a matter of great preci
sion [and] the word clergy' had long had a double meaning, as it continued to
have in'benefit of clergy.'"18 After the abolition of the monastic orders and cleri
cal celibacy, the notion of "clergy," in the second, obsolete sense of "those having
learning," was free to transform other social domains.19 Gilbert's proposal, which
attempts to resist this development, evinces a marked distrust of pure learning,
insisting that an academy for gentlemen and nobles must have what would now
be called a vocational, rather than liberal, curriculum. At best, the universities
waste aristocratic time, for "yf they doe not follow learning onely ... there is no
other gentlemanlike qualitie to be attained."20 In the proposed academy, students
would study Latin, Greek, English oratory, and, crucially, arithmetic and geome
try, "which shalbe onely employed to Imbattelinges, fortificacions, and matters of

17 On the problem of social in-distinction in the period, see Christopher Warley, Sonnet
Sequences and Social Distinction in Renaissance England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005).
18 Russell, 722-23.
19 The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., 20 vols. prep. J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner,
(Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989), s.v."clergy, shows this usage persisting into the later seventeenth
century.
20 Gilbert, 10.

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 HAMLET, HORATIO, AND THE EARLY MODERN UNIVERSITY 213

warre, with the practiz of Artillery" and"Cosmographie and Astronomy" ap

"onely to the arte of Navigacion."21 The academy would employ "one L
who shall read the growndes of the common lawes, and shall draw the same
neare as may be, into Maximes ... for the more facile teachinge of his Awd
And also shall sett downe and teache exquisitely the office of a Iustice o
peace and Sheriffe, not medling with plees or cunning poinctes of the l
Gilbert's concern that instruction be limited to particular gentlemanly app
tions of subjects is partly pedagogical, meant to spare gentlemen the arcane
bewildering teaching for which the Inns of Court, in particular, were fam
But Gilbert's correlation of curricular and social restrictions hints at somet
slightly different: the open-ended pursuit of pure learning was not the pr
of men of high status, as it would become, but a force for uncertainty, a pr
disruptive of established modes of social reproduction and classification.23
Neither Starkey's nor Gilberts proposal nor a similar one by Nicholas Bac
was ever enacted, perhaps because the much more exclusive Inns of C
which many gentlemen attended after a couple of years at the university, of
some of the class-specific training that Gilbert advocated; the exploitat
existing institutions was a course of least resistance.24 In any case, gentleme
noblemen, as well as the sons of wealthy merchants and professionals, atte
the university in increasing numbers. Historians have debated the effects o
demographic transformation on university culture. Curtis depicts the univ
as a scene of social struggle where declarations of superior status by increa
numerous young gentlemen were met by repeated (and apparently imp
university decrees defending academic decorum, such as the 1578 Camb
edict, probably by Burghley, chiding the colleges for "suffering ... sundry y
men, being the children of gentlemen and men of wealth, at their coming
... university, to use very costly and disguised manner of apparel and other
unseemly for students in any kind of human learning and thereby not onl

21 Gilbert, 4-5.
22 Gilbert, 6—7.
23 It is instructive to compare Gilbert, who is concerned with the nobility, to London
William Scott, who published An Essay of Drapery, a conduct manual for citizens, in
Scott, who probably attended the Merchant Taylors' School, cautions his reader that
study the liberall Arts, he must doe it superficially; so as not to bee swallowed up of
evidently fearing that this course of study will compromise the citizen's mercantile ident
William Scott, An Essay of Drapery, ed. Sylvia Thrupp (Boston: Baker Library, Harvard
of Business Administration, 1953), 24.
For an extensive account of the various schemes for gentlemen's academies, see Patric
Lee, "Some English Academies: An Experiment in the Education of Renaissance Gentl
History of Education Quarterly 10 (1970): 273-86. Curtis notes that the failure to establis
noble academies distinguishes England from other European countries (64).

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214 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY

be more chargeable to their friends than is convenien

induce others of less ability to change and cast away t
frugality."25 Curtis claims that the outcome of this inv
new social category, "the scholar-gentleman"; for Law
ing of learning as a sign of gentility.26 Rosemary O
counter with assertions of stability.27 The influx of th
on the ongoing work of training clergy because self-s
segregated the upper classes—gentlemen gravitated
halls; special rooms were built to house them, or th
gathered groups of gentlemen into their chambers; fe
students who paid for the privilege of consorting wit
and pensioners (fee-paying students) were waited on b
students who paid their way by working as servants).
of distinction was academic: gentlemen had no need
and could come to university without the rigorous gra
which, as David Riggs has shown, Christopher Mar
win his Parker scholarship to Corpus Christi College, C
university, they might pursue what Richard Holdswor
university students compiled in the 1620s, called studia
of modern literature for "such as come to the Univers
make Scholarship their profession, but only to gett su
for delight and ornament and such as the want where
in breeding."29
However, this historiographic "controversy" is more
the evidence on both sides reveals is a complex interpl
pline and accommodation of status distinction, as well
was a place of cross-status contagion. For instance, wh

25 Charles Henry Cooper, Annals of Cambridge, 4 vols. (Cam

53), 2:360-61; quoted in Curtis, Oxford and Cambridge, 55.
Curtis, 82; and Lawrence Stone, "The Educational Revolut
Past and Present 28 (1964): 41—80, esp. 75.
Rosemary O'Day/'Room at the Top: Oxford and Cambridge
History Today (February 1984): 31-38, and Education and Soci
dations of Education in Early Modern Britain (London: Longm
McConica, "Scholars and Commoners in Renaissance Oxford," i
Lawrence Stone, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1974), 151—
David Riggs, The World of Christopher Marlowe (New York
Richard Holdsworth, "Directions for a Student in the Univ
Development ofJohn Milton, ed. Harris Francis Fletcher, 2 vols.
2:647. The dating of this document, which survives in two diffe
matter of some debate; see John A. Trentman, "The Authorship
the Universitie,'" Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical

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 HAMLET, HORATIO, AND THE EARLY MODERN UNIVERSITY 215

Curtis cites argues that the flashily dressed gentlemen are objects of emu
and goads to extravagance for the less wellborn students, Henry Peacham
Compleat Gentleman, sounding rather like Polonius, warns the gentle stu

Your first care, even with pulling off your Boots, let be the choice of y
acquaintance and company. For as infection in Cities in a time of sickne
is taken by concourse, and negligent running abroad, when those that ke
within, and are wary of themselves, escape with more safety; so it falleth ou
here in the Vniversity.... For the companions of your recreation, consort you
selfe with Gentlemen of your own ranke and quality. . .. To be over free and
familiar with inferiors, argues a basenesse of Spirit, and begetteth contempt
for as one shall here at the first prize himselfe, so let him looke at the same r
for ever after to be valued of others.30

Remarkably, O'Day cites this passage as evidence that social mixing

occur; although were this the case, such a warning would be unnecessary.
omits Peacham's intervening admonition to "entertaine therefore the
tance of men of the soundest reputation for Religion, Life and Learning,
conference and company may bee unto you ... a living and a moving Libra
This advice appears to have been followed at least on occasion. Ac
to McConica, "the wealthier young men at Christ Church took up lod
across the street from the college at Broadgates Hall, presumably to s
themselves from the "poor," degree-pursuing scholars.33 One of these we
young men was Sir Philip Sidney. But another resident of Broadgat
was William Camden, the son of a London painter-stainer, who had c
Oxford three years before Sidney as a chorister-scholar. Camden was resi
Broadgates in the household of Thomas Thornton, who became Sidney
a close friendship developed between the two young men, who exchan
ace's poetry as a token of their esteem.34
It is remarkable that while historians (like the university authoriti
no difficulty imagining that the wellborn aroused a socially destabilizing
in their more humble fellow students—O'Day alludes to "clergymen ...
to ape the gentlemen with whom they studied"—no one considers th

30 Henry Peacham, The Compleat Gentleman (1634), ed. G. S. Gordon (Oxford: Cl

Press, 1906), 39-40.
31 O'Day/'Room," 32.
32 O'Day,"Room," 32,
33 McConica, 162.
On Camden's origins and sojourn at Broadgates Hall, see Anthony a Wood, Atbe
nienses, 3rd ed., 4 vols., (1815; repr., New York: Burt Franklin, 1967), 2:339-40. On t
ship with Sidney, see Katherine Duncan-Jones, Sir Philip Sidney, Courtier Poet (Ne
Yale UP, 1991), 40.

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 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY

status contamination might involve admiration and even desire on the part of
gentlemen for the academic abilities of lower-status men.35 And yet it is hard
to imagine that this did not occur. Thomas Nashe's famous ridicule of Gabriel
Harvey, when he disputed before the Queen at Audley End and "thrust himself
into the thickest ranks of the noblemen and gallantscaptures the futile social
ambitions of the poor scholar.36 But consider Thomas MofFett's hagiographic
account of Sidney at Oxford, where

if perchance he met on the street some learned and pious man, you would
have said that nothing could have been more loving and united than they; for
not by hands alone were they joined, but even by heart's desire .... He was
never seen going to church, to the exercise ground, or to the public assembly
hall (where he frequently employed himself) except as distinguished among
the company of all the learned men. In their presence he maintained such a
gravity, joined with modesty, that one did not know whether the spirit he had
was rather elevated, sublime, and looking away from the world, or courteous,
retiring and humble.3'

Their difference in status makes Harvey pathetic and Sidney affected—but the
desire to get close to the "other" and so acquire his characteristics is identical.
It might be argued that the academic yearnings of gentlemen are less prob
lematic than poor scholars' social and sartorial desires, because the love of learn
ing is equated with virtue, which only enhances the nobility of the already noble,
as MofFett understood. But the disciplinary context of the university meant that
the exercise of such virtue could haul the wellborn into competition with men
of lower status. In particular, the university's chief mode of assessment, the oral
disputation, made intellectual accomplishment, as much as gentlemanly clothes
and manners, visible and performative and potentially the object of an emulating
gaze. Simonds d'Ewes, a gentleman and commoner who left Cambridge in 1619
after two years for the Inns of Court, describes how avidly he and apparently
many others attended such academic performances:

The commencement drawing now near, I was partaker, almost every day of this
month, with the hearing of Clerums and Divinity Acts, besides other scho
lastic exercises, and could therefore spend the less time in my private studies.
And it beginning on Monday, July the 3rd I hastened to the University church
pretty early in the morning, and got a very convenient place, and was partaker

O'Day, Education and Society, 110.

3 Thomas Nashe, Have With You to Saffron Walden, in The Unfortunate Traveller and Other
Works, ed. J. B. Steane (1972; repr., London: Penguin, 1987), 486-501, esp. 489.
37 Thomas MofFet, Nobilis: Or, A View of the Life and Death of a Sidney, ed. Virgil B Heltzel
and Hoyt H. Hudson (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1940), 77-78.

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 HAMLET, HORATIO, AND THE EARLY MODERN UNIVERSITY 217

of the whole day's action. The next day being Tuesday and the conclusion o
the commencement, being not seated so well as yesterday, I lost much of what
I might otherwise have heard.38

But d'Ewes was not merely a gentlemanly spectator of clerical performan

he was assessing a type of activity in which he also engaged. Students n
suing a degree were not required to perform the full course of exercise
d'Ewes notes that "mine own exercises, performed during my stay here
very few, replying only twice in two philosophical acts: the one upon Mr.
ard Salstonstall, in the public schools, it being his bachelor's act; [and]
Mr. Nevill, a fellow-commoner and prime student of St. John's College, in
chapel."39 This passage and d'Ewes's university career are frequently ci
evidence of the different standards applied to the wellborn and poor, d
pursuing scholars. But as O'Day points out, d'Ewes disputed as much a
prescribed by the University statutes for students in the first two years of
given the general seriousness with which he took his studies, his observ
more likely suggests regret that he left the university before he could dis
more.40 Moreover, at least one of his interlocutors was a fellow commoner
status did not preclude him being a "prime student." Richard Salstonstall's
is unidentified, which means that he was either a gentlemen pursuing a de
or a mere scholar permitted to dispute with a student of higher social stat
In other words, this brief reminiscence reveals that gentlemen, if not nob
were expected to participate in public displays of intellectual prowess, poss
in a manner that juxtaposed their abilities to those of men of lesser birth.4

38 James Orchard Halliwell, ed., The Autobiography and Correspondence of Sir Simonds
bart. 2 vols. (London: R, Bendey, 1845), 1:145; quoted in Fletcher, 76.
^ D'Ewes, quoted in Fletcher, 76.
O'Day, Education and Society, 115.
41 I have not succeeded in identifying Richard Salstonstall [sic], although I suspe
he may be connected with the Sir Richard Saltonstall who was Lord Mayor of Lond
1597-98. He is not Sir Richard Saltonstall, son of the latter, who was an early mem
the Massachusetts Bay Company. See Ian W. Archer, "Saltonstall, Sir Richard (1521?-
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004; online ed., 2008),
www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/24580; and Roger Thompson, "Saltonstall, Sir Richar
1586, d. 1661)," Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, http://www.oxforddnb.com
article/24581 (both accessed 12 April 2011).
42 D'Ewes's reminiscences pertain to the 1620s, but nearly sixty years earlier, Sidney w
puting at Oxford, where Richard Carew recalled that "being a scholar of fourteen year's
three years' standing, upon a wrong-conceived opinion touching my sufficiency, I was the
to dispute ex tempore (impar congressus Achilli) with the matchless Sir Ph. Sidney in pre
the Earls of Leicester, Warwick, and other great personages" (quoted in Duncan-Jones, 4
dispute was clearly a show for Sidney's uncles, but it is worth noting that the passage fro
fett's Nobilis, cited above, refers to Sidney frequently employing himself at the public as

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 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY

That these exercises could be humiliating is implied by Holdsworths admo

nition to students to maintain their studies of Latin and oratory, for "without
those you will be bafeld in your disputes, disgraced, & vilified in Publicke
examinations, laught at in speeches & Declamations."43 To be sure, we cannot
take Holdsworths advice as information about actual students. But even limited
participation in disputations would have left some wellborn men aspiring to the
abilities of the scholars from whom they were encouraged to distinguish them
selves socially. Moreover, Holdsworths distinction between studious degree
pursuing scholars and "such as come to the University ... only to gett such learn
ing as may serve for delight and ornament and such as the want whereof would
speake a defect in breeding" insinuates that gentlemanliness is homologous with
learning, something to be acquired by study fueled by the fear of a shameful
exposure.44 As Lawrence Stone argues, "Even for the heirs of the gentry higher
education was more often than not a serious business."45
This "serious business" undoubtedly resulted in some social mobility for
"poor scholars" and some cultural change for the wellborn. But I submit that in
the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, university attendance altered
the relation between the self and its social "others" for poor and wellborn alike,
contaminating distinction with identification and eminence with subordina
tion. When Moffett describes Sidney's encounters with learned men in terms of
love, he recuperates the slippages in identity which academic culture produces
as a finding of the self in another. The possibility of cross-status emulation is
averted in a relationship where the other does not preempt the self, but confirms
and enhances it. In so doing, Moffett aligns the gentleman's encounter with the
clerics with humanist friendship doctrine. For Montaigne, "because it was he,
because it was my selfe," is the best explanation he can offer for the attraction
between himself and his friend.46 In contrast to Montaigne's symmetry and
ontological aplomb, however, Moffett's account of Sidney reveals an unfinished
being for which love is the symptom of incompleteness, as well as the answer
to it. Hamlet can only utter his own proclamation of completed being, "It is I,
Hamlet the Dane" in the context of pure aristocratic emulation, with predictably

halls. Regarding cross-status disputation, Sir Thomas Elyot recommends that for younger chil
dren, "There is no better allective to noble wits than to induce them into a contention with their
inferior companions: they sometime purposely suffering the more noble children to vanquish
and, as it were, giving to them place and sovereignty, though the inferior children have more
learning"; see The Book Named the Governor, ed. S. E. Lehmberg (New York: Dutton, 1962), 17.
43 Fletcher, 637.
44 Fletcher, 647.
45 Stone/ Educational Revolution" 76.
46 Montaigne, 201.

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 HAMLET, HORATIO, AND THE EARLY MODERN UNIVERSITY 219

deconstructive effects. But as we shall see in the next section, Shakespeare situ
ates his prince in the alternative context of academic love, albeit with paradox
results, recuperating a cause of ontological malaise as a resource for distinction

II. Flattering the Poor

In an insightful essay from the early 1960s, Patrick Cruttwell asse

the appeal of Hamlet has always depended on its flattery of intellectua
they are university men at the turn of the seventeenth century or S
critics in the twentieth. This flattery depends on the fact that Haml
dent as well as a prince."47 Cruttwell's point is not merely that Haml
an identity that permits intellectual audiences to identify with him, b
this identity manifests as a certain style of relationship, a "relaxed inf
manner" that begets in the audience members a "delusion of equal
macy, and they have been all the more pleased with this delusion bec
remembered, at moments, whom they were feeling it for."48 Cruttw
ment is rather different from mine: he maintains that audiences fail t
how coldly violent Hamlet is because of his narcissistic seduction of t
audiences who watch Shakespeare. However, his thesis that Hamle
as a university intellectual is linked to cross-status intimacy speaks e
how the designation "student" brought with it an affectively producti
to decorum. I will return to Cruttwell's main point—the way th
identification as a student enables a certain kind of relationship b
play and its audience. Scholarliness is present in the play both as a
rather precise representation and as an ethos in which the audience is
participate. In turn, this doubleness generates the play's principal prob
critics: that audience response to Hamlet can be repeatedly exposed as
to recognize just how specifically aristocratic and even archaic the pla
prince's concerns really are.49 First, however, we need to grasp the m
which university culture and its style of friendship are represented
and serve as metonyms for a crisis of aristocratic identity.
To belabor the obvious: Hamlet is a scholar, in the literal sense
defined by membership in a school or university. This identificat
repeatedly, in Claudius's thwarting of Hamlet's desire to return to W
and Gertrude's "Go not to Wittenberg" and with Horatio's arrival

47 Patrick Cruttwell, "The Morality of Hamlet," in Shakespeare: "Hamlet," A

John Jump (London, Macmillan, 1968), 188.
48 Cruttwell, 193.
49 The most extended and compelling recent exploration of this problem is
"Hamlet" without Hamlet, although Cruttwell makes a related argument.

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 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY

tenberg, where he is greeted by Hamlet as "fellow-student" (1.2,119, 177). It is

stressed in Hamlet's familiar invocation to Horatio of "your philosophy" (Q2)
or'our philosophy" (F) (1.5.175), the subject that distinguished university from
grammar-school study, and in his related ability to chop logic with Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern, his "schoolfellows" (3.4.204).50 There is Hamlet's proneness
to skeptical philosophical disquisition, which John Guillory writes should be
understood less as "revelations of inexhaustible inferiority" than as "a perfor
mance of philosophy," an establishment of a metonymic relationship between
the prince and that intellectual form.51 Guillory repeats Margreta de Grazia's
suggestion that as Hamlet ponders "to be or not to be" he may be reading from
a book—a prop that he prominently uses elsewhere.52 If he is, then I think it is
very likely that it is the same one, a treatise by Gorgias of Leontini, that another
denizen of Wittenberg tosses aside when he "bid[s] on kai me on [on being
and not being] farewell" at the beginning of Dr. Faustus,53 The book not only
displaces Hamlet's interiority with participation in academic discourse; it also
allies him with a stage lineage based on university affiliation rather than status,
as Faustus is "base of stock."54
We are accustomed to treat the repeated invocations of Wittenberg, together
with the purgatorial dwelling of the Ghost, as evidence of the play's engagement
with the philosophical aftermath of the Reformation. But the pairing of the uni
versity's name with "Elsinore" or "Denmark" suggests something simpler: Wit
tenberg, Elsinore, and the king's drinking habits are part of a pattern of Danish
reference.55 "Wittenberg" signifies "the university" in the way that "Elsinore"

50 It seems clear to me that "your" indicates Hamlet's casual familiarity with both Horatio
and philosophy, in the manner of "your water is a sore decayer of your whoreson dead body"
(5.1.165—66), rather than a particular connection between Horatio and philosophy. The famil
iarity is even more pointed, of course, in the Folio reading "our philosophy."
51 Guillory, 96.
52 Margreta de Grazia, "Soliloquies and Wages in the Age of Emergent Consciousness " Tex
tual Practice 9 (1995): 69-72, esp. 73-74.
53 Christopher Marlowe, Dr. Faustus, ed. Roma Gill, 2nd ed. (London: A. & C. Black, 1989),
l,12n for the trail from Al's "Oncaymaeon" to the treatise by Gorgias.
54 Marlowe, Prologue, 1.11.
55 For example, see Gertrude's "Go not to Wittenberg," Claudius's "Be as ourself in Denmark,"
Hamlet's "What in faith make you from Wittenberg, Horatio," and "But what is your affair in
Elsinore" (1.2.119, 122, 164, 174). See George Brandes, William Shakespeare: A Critical Study,
trans. William Archer, 2 vols. (London: William Heinemann, 1898), 1:20-24. Brandes includes
the names of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in this pattern and the references to the kettle
drums and trumpets accompanying the king's carousing, details which he claims Shakespeare
could have gleaned from Will Kemp and Thomas Pope, who had played at Elsinore in 1585.
Brandes also argues that the Lutheran associations of Wittenberg would not have been signifi
cant for a late sixteenth-century English audience.

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 HAMLET, HORATIO, AND THE EARLY MODERN UNIVERSITY 221

means the court." When Wittenberg" is paired with "Elsinore" or "Denm

reminds us that these spaces cannot be occupied at the same time: for
Horatio, and (in Ql) Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, to be in Elsinor
be from Wittenberg. As Hamlet's unsuccessful suit to Claudius in 1.2
clear, "Denmark's a prison" (2.2.243), and Hamlet wants to escape it
university.56 In this way, Hamlet establishes at the outset a geography f
existentially fraught action, situating it in the corrupt and sycophantic c
shadowing the rotten state of Denmark with another space, the universi
whence the prince's nobility of character seems to derive, less ambiguou
haps for modern audiences than for those at the turn of the seventeenth
However, if Wittenberg is an "elsewhere" to Elsinore's claustrophobic
it is also made present at Elsinore in the person of Horatio, whose displa
from university to court is signaled by his reply to Hamlet's query, "Bu
in faith make you from Wittenberg?"—"A truant disposition, good m
(1.2.168—69). And if Horatio instigates the "attractive informality of
that Cruttwell finds so flattering to intellectuals (oddly, Cruttwell igno
tio altogether), his arrival enforces the link between learning and a cert
of relationship. "Horatio, or I do forget myself," cries the prince, to wh
scholar politely replies, "The same, my lord, and your poor servant ever,"
be corrected: "Sir, my good friend, I'll change that name with you"
Unlike the rest of us intellectuals, Horatio is under no "delusion of equal
speaks as do all the other characters, save Gertrude and Claudius, when a
ing Hamlet, with careful deference to a superior. Hamlet shifts the
from courtly politeness to friendship, a difference he expostulates on la
distinguishing his ardent declarations to the "poor" scholar from the
tongue" of courtly flattery.57 The doubleness of discursive register in th
exchange between fellow students permits it and the relationship it sign
read in quite opposite ways. Christopher Warley argues that that firs
ter initiates a version of the master / slave dialectic, in which Hamlet m
for once not to forget himself because Horatio's deference reminds him
princely identity, a service for which Hamlet rewards him with recogni
a "friend." For Warley, the dialectic fails (and Hamlet's tragedy ensues) b
Hamlet cannot ground his own identity on the elusiveness of Horati

56 The initial greeting between Hamlet and Gilderstone and Rossencraft in Q1 simil
"Elsinore" as the place where Hamlet is now, with "Wittenberg" as the place from whi
young men have come (7.220-23).
57 On status in social address in Shakespeare's plays, see Lynne Magnusson, Shake
Social Dialogue (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999). My analysis of Hamlets modes o
is indebted to conversations with Magnusson.
58 Christopher Warley, "Specters of Horatio," ELH 75 (2008): 1023-50, esp. 1031.

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 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY

contrast, Jeffrey Masten invokes amicitia, asserting that in this moment of

"mutual hailing" we can detect the rhetoric of ideal friendship between "persons
of absolute identicality, indistinguishability, and interchangeability."59 There is
no point in adjudicating between these readings, however, since together they
reveal a truth: Horatio's deferential and Hamlets ardently amicable addresses
demand the suppression of a social fact about the relationship.
The importance from my perspective of Warley's recognition, not only of the
social difference between the two men but also of the way in which the relation
ship between the prince and the critically neglected character of Horatio bears
on Hamlet's ontological malaise, is considerable. But Horatio's identity is hardly
elusive. As we are told in the first scene, he is a "scholar." He not only comes from
Wittenberg but, given Hamlet's surprise at seeing him, seems to belong there
in a way that Prince Hamlet, who, as Claudius insists, belongs at court, cannot
despite the signs of scholarship that also hang about him. After all, Horatio
is "poor," as Starkey, Gilbert, and Harrison all thought proper university men
should be. In short, Horatio is a readily recognizable social type. His identity is
elusive only to the extent that it is clerical, his virtues and qualities produced by
mechanisms of distinction other than those of status and family that prevail at
Elsinore.

In this respect, Horatio is also distinguished from those other "schoolfellows,"

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (3.4.204), with whom, in contrast to the warmth
and informality with which he greets Horatio, Hamlet only briefly resorts to
"the beaten way of friendship" (2.2.269—70). He then falls back on "fashion and
ceremony," his order to himself, "let me comply with you in this garb" (368—69),
canceling any leveling implied in the gesture of shaking hands.60 Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern disclose at least a brush with university learning in mount
ing the logical paradox that "the very substance of the ambitious is merely the
shadow of a dream," so that we are meant to infer what Q1 makes explicit, that
they were fellow students (and theatergoers) at Wittenberg with Hamlet. How
ever, their bond with Hamlet is clearly as one between young men of high rank,
having been, as Claudius notes, "of so young days brought up with him" (11).
They are tagged with the term "gentle" or its derivatives five times in the thirty
five lines of their initial interview with Claudius and Gertrude and are obviously
in their element, if not precisely at home, in the court.

59 Jeffrey Masten, "Toward a Queer Address: The Taste of Letters and Early Modern Male
Friendship," GLQ 10 (2004): 367—84, esp. 371.
60 Jenkins's annotation of 2.2.366-69 gives a fuller account of these lines' ambiguity about the
formal and familiar elements of Hamlet's greeting.

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 HAMLET, HORATIO, AND THE EARLY MODERN UNIVERSITY 223

Shakespeare, or possibly the author of the Ur-Hamlet (and here as at so man

other junctures it would be surpassingly valuable to have that text) seems
have done something quite precise in giving Hamlet several university friends.
Belleforest's Histoires Tragiques, the probable source for the precursor play to
Hamlet and thus at least indirectly for Shakespeare's play follows Saxo Gr
maticus in giving the prince a friend who assists him in avoiding the usurper's
snares. In the 1608 English translation, that friend is described as "a gentleman
(that... had been nourished with him)" and who "showne himselfe more aff
tioned to the bringing up he had received with Hamblet, then desirous to pleas
the tirant."62 In Shakespeare's play, the ethical option glimpsed in Belleforest's
narration yields two kinds of "schoolfellows" for the prince. The courtly willin
ness to please the tyrant aligns not only with Belleforest's social characteristics
high rank and boyhood affiliation, but also with university attendance. Ros
crantz and Guildenstern would fit in well with the wellborn sojourners clubbin
together at Broadgates Hall. Loyalty in contrast, is personified in the sustained
companionship of Horatio, whose virtue is equated by Hamlet with the p
erty of the mere scholar. In sealing poor, scholarly Horatio for himself wh
trusting like "adders fang'd" his wellborn schoolfellows (who, interestingly, se
unacquainted with Horatio), Hamlet valorizes one style of student—the kin
to whom contemporary commentators thought the university belonged—at th
expense of the gentlemen come lately to the university.
In distinguishing among his university companions in this manner, Ham
clearly means to distinguish himself in precisely the manner that Sidney soug
to when he chose never to go out in Oxford as Moffett claimed, "except
distinguished among the company of all the learned men." Hamlet's ability
discern the value of an "unvalu d" person such as Horatio demonstrates his own
intellectual and ethical superiority. However, such distinction carries risk, for
is predicated on diminishing a difference in social standing without erasing it.

61 The value of the precursor Hamlet would be particularly great with respect to Horati
designation as "poor" and his association with the university. In Fratricide Punished, a sev
teenth-century German play that draws on Q1 and Q2 and a lost third source, possibly t
Ur-Hamlet, Horatio is a'Triend of high rank." See Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespea
ed. Geoffrey Bullough, 8 vols. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957-75), 7:129. Of t
surviving versions of the story, Shakespeare's is unique in making the prince's companion a po
man and a scholar, rather than someone distinguished by birth—like the prince.
62 Bullough, 7:92. Saxo Grammaticus provides the Hamlet character with a "foster-broth
... who had not ceased to have regard for their common nurture and who esteemed his presen
orders [to kill Amleth] less than the memory of their past fellowship" (Bullough, 7:63).
closeness of this passage to the 1608 Historie of Hamblet leads me to conclude that the lat
offers an accurate translation of Francois de Belleforest's Histoires Tragiques, almost certainly
principal source for the Ur-Hamlet and indirectly for Shakespeare's play.

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 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY

In this respect, Shakespeare makes his student prince overshoot the mark, his
avowal that his heart has sealed his "poor servant" for itself being "something too
much" and therefore distinguishing Hamlet from the man who is not passion's
slave. Indistinguishability is for Hamlet not the precondition of his friendship
with Horatio, as Masten suggests, but its unattainable goal. Virtually every line
that Horatio directs to his "sweet Prince" will remind Hamlet of his status and
the difference between them: "It might, my lord," "Ay, my lord," "Not a jot more,
my lord" (5.1.80, 86, 111). Indeed, Horatio's repeated use of "sweet" to address
Hamlet, which is the object of Masten's analysis, is itself a sign of deference, a
gracious if standard recognition of the value of a superior. In contrast, Hamlet
continually seeks to collapse the distance between himself and his friend. As
Harold Jenkins notes, "Hamlet values in Horatio what he knows to be lacking
in himself."63 But the self-control that Hamlet lacks and Horatio exhibits is
not simply a matter of controlling one's passions, as Jenkins suggests, but a dis
position toward social status. Like his terse subordinates politeness, Horatio's
stoicism, classical in content and self-possessed in affect, is part of his demon
stration of his sure place as a scholar.
Hamlet's something-too-much with respect to Horatio, in contrast, is just
one instance of a refusal to remember his own position, manifested as an attrac
tion to subordinates. Another is his wooing of Ophelia, which Laertes reminds
his sister she must fear because

His greatness weigh'd, his will is not his own.

For he himself is subject to his birth:
He may not, as unvalud persons do,
Carve for himself.
(1.3.16-19)

The justice of Laertes's observation colors either with naivete or heedlessness the
claim to freedom in Hamlet's protestation to Horatio that "Since my dear soul
was mistress of her choice, / And could of men distinguish her election, / Sh'ath
seal'd thee for herself" (3.2.63—65). This comparison is not meant to construe
Hamlet as Edward II, a prince whose unruly passions disgrace his status. Hora
tio lacks Gaveston's ambition, and Hamlet's esteem for his poor, learned, and
self-possessed friend is a credit to him. But while the play enhances the prince's
credit through his ardor for his "fellow-student," it deploys an array of indica
tors—modes of address, the distribution of lines that makes the voluble prince
preeminent and the reticent scholar ancillary, a lexis of nobility and baseness—
that voice the claims of rank as the structuring principle of the play's world.64

63 Jenkins, ed., 3.2.54n (just).

64 Warley, "Specters," provides a detailed account of just how invested both Hamlet and the
play remain in an ethos of a feudal, military nobility. See also Cruttwell.

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 HAMLET, HORATIO, AND THE EARLY MODERN UNIVERSITY 225

And we cannot attend to these claims without registering that the p

attractive informality, so much of a piece with his position as a universit
shades at points into a slight unseemliness.
This unseemliness is complicated by one peculiar feature of Shakes
representation of Hamlet. If the prince shows himself overardent to his
friend, we also need to notice how clerical Hamlet himself is, in how man
ticulars he patterns himself as a poor scholar, rather than as a briefly so
gentleman commoner. First, there is the odd fact that Hamlet is a univer
dent at all. Even if we assume, following a critical tradition that stretche
George Brandes to Guillory, that the character of Hamlet parallels not
a prince, who would have been educated by tutors, but a great noble such
earl of Essex, who not only attended Cambridge but took an M. A., there
the inconvenient problem of Hamlet's age.65 Essex went up to Cambridge
the care of his tutor at the age of twelve and seems to have resided ther
intermittently until sixteen, following a common aristocratic pattern. The
Oxford was eight years old when he matriculated at Queen's College, Cam
some years earlier.66 I follow Jenkins in reading the gravedigger's stateme
his career began the "very day young Hamlet was born" and spans "thirty
(5.1.143, 157) as evidence not that Hamlet is exactly thirty years old,
the gravedigger has had a lifetime of gravedigging that symbolically is a
span of the prince's life. Nevertheless, it seems clear enough that "young H
is not a boy and of an age when a great noble should have long since left
versity for continental travel or a military campaign. In this respect, it is
tive to consider the way that Hamlet's desire to return to "school in Witt
is set against Laertes's return to Paris, where Claudius invites him to "tak
fair hour . . . [and] spend it at [his] will" (1.2.62-63). He exercises an
cratic liberty that may (at least in his father's imagination) extend to "ga
... drinking, fencing, swearing, quarrelling, drabbing" (2.1.25-26), conside
exceeding what university discipline permitted and more appropriate to a
of Hamlet's status. In contrast, Hamlet has been educated to serve as
secretary, with the ability to "write fair," a skill that he accounts "basene
it saves his life (5.2.34). Hamlet's sardonic reply to Rosencrantz about the
of his melancholy—"Sir, I lack advancement" (3.2.331)—is the standard
of graduates in the 1590s. The point of the joke, that Prince Hamlet's pro
are not those of most employment-hungry university men, is made unw

65 On Essex's university career, see Paul E. J. Hammer, "Devereux, Robert, secon

Essex (1565-1601)," Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford UP, 20
ed., October 2008), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/7565 (accessed 12 Apr
66 Alan Nelson, Monstrous Adversary: The Life of Edward De Vere, 17th Earl of Oxf
erpool: Liverpool UP, 2003), 23-25.

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 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY

when Rosencrantz counters that Hamlet "has the voice of the King himself for
[his] succession in Denmark" (11. 332—33). But it is nevertheless an intimate in
joke for the students of the "two Universities of Cambridge and Oxford," where
some version of the play was acted. It depends on their hearing themselves in
the princes words, even as the joke insists on Hamlet's difference from them.
Hamlet's intermittent mimicry of authentic scholars like Horatio, I would
argue, revises Warley's account of the relationship as well: Horatio does not
so much distinguish Hamlet as a nobleman as supplement him as scholar. He
confirms some of the prince's own characteristics, but in a manner that subtly
reminds us that they are not proper to a prince. It is not enough to establish
Hamlet as a learned man that he has returned to Elsinore from Wittenberg
and engages in current philosophical disquisition; he must be adorned with
a companion who possesses, essentially and unremarkably, attributes that the
prince possesses only performatively or indecorously. The poor scholar's authen
ticity shades into authority in the graveyard scene where Hamlet contemplates
"to what base uses we may return" after death and, as Warley acutely observes,
reframes the mortality of which the jester's skull reminds him as "the death of
a class marker" in his query to Horatio, "Dost thou think Alexander looked o'
this fashion i'th'earth?" (5.1.191).67 As Hamlet mourns the deliquescence of
social distinction, he craves Horatio's confirmation of his reflections—"Prithee,
Horatio, tell me one thing" (189)—to which Horatio responds with his terse,
deferential "E'en so ... E'en, so, my lord" (193,195). His refusal to follow Ham
let's train of reasoning, "'Twere to consider too curiously to consider so" (199),
may indicate a lack of intellectual imagination, a characteristic self-control, or
impatience with the entire line of inquiry that makes the subjection of even great
men to the general doom a tragically material conclusion. It hardly matters, since
the point surely is that while both men are capable of philosophical reflection
on universal mortality, only for Prince Hamlet does such philosophy lead to the
specific horror of great men turned to base uses.
Hamlet's investment in these reflections on the social distinction he does so
little to preserve is a reminder of what my focus on Hamlets scholarliness has
tended to occlude—that the plot of Hamlet is utterly aristocratic in its preoc
cupations: a kingly father killed, a mother stained, a throne usurped, and a son
obliged to revenge these wrongs. In fact, the entire academic aspect of Hamlet
I have been excavating—the references to Wittenberg, the invocation and per
formance of philosophy, the beloved poor scholar, the treacherous gentleman
school friends—is superfluous to the play's action. In the sources, the childhood
friend at least assists the prince in thwarting the usurper's attempts to kill him.

67 Warley, "Specters," 1038.

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 HAMLET, HORATIO, AND THE EARLY MODERN UNIVERSITY 227

In Hamlet, Horatio merely confirms that Hamlet knows what he knows, w

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern just deliver a message. It is as though S
speare's play delivers a story feudal in origin and content but adorned with
rhetoric, intellectual preoccupations, social styles, and personnel of the
modern university. To tease out the academic elements of the play, as
done, exposes a fissure in the play's mimesis. Claudius and Horatio may
occupy the rooms of Elsinore, but they belong to different representa
registers. While Claudius is the focus of the action, Horatio, like the huma
disquisitions and performances of philosophy, imparts value to its repr
tion and mediates it to its audience.68 Mediation of the revenge plot is, of co
the assignment that he is at last given. It is worth recalling that Nashe's fa
jab at those who "busy themselves with the endeavours of art, that could s
Latinize their neck-verse if they should need . . . [and who] will affor
whole Hamlets, I should say handfuls of tragical speeches," was address
the Gentlemen Students of both Universities," as apparently was Shakes
play, at least on occasion.69 We might speculate that the academic adorn
of the play that I have detailed here were intended to modernize the old st
but also, to return to Cruttwell's observation, to flatter a certain kind of i
lectual audience—a specifically academic one—and distinguish Shakesp
play from the Hamlets fabricated out of English Seneca that preceded i
comment by Gabriel Harvey, that quintessential academic, that Shakes
"Lucrece & his tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark have it in them, to p
the wiser sort," indicates that the marketing strategy succeeded.70
Hamlet himself straddles this mimetic fissure, at once the stymied prot
nist of the revenge plot and a vehicle for audience flattery. The latter role y
much too scholarly a character, since no prince was a student in the institu

68 The functionality of Horatio may account for some interpretive problems. For e
how can he be Hamlets "fellow-student" and have seen Hamlets father when the latter
with Fortinbras's father, an event that the gravedigger tells us occurred thirty years bef
"that very day that young Hamlet was born" (5.1.142)? Why, in Ophelias mad scene, is H
there to offer his advice to Gertrude, with whom he otherwise appears to be unacquaint
69 Thomas Nashe,"Preface to Greene's Menaphon" in The Unfortunate Traveller and
Works, 474-76, esp. 474,476.
7 Virginia F. Stern, Gabriel Harvey: His Life, Marginalia, and Library (Oxford: Clar
Press, 1979), 127. Harvey's comment distinguishes between "the younger sort," who like
and Adonis, and the "wiser sort," who prefer Hamlet and The Rape of Lucrece, indicatin
Harvey captures distinctions between generations, on the one hand, and "kinds" of Shak
on the other. This general interest in Shakespeare's works by university men is confirmed ev
the invidious comparison of Shakespeare to Spenser in 1 Return from Parnassus, 11.1180
1200—1204; see The Three Parnassus Plays (1598-1601), ed. J. B. Leishman (London: N
and Watson, 1949). From the university students' interest, we can infer that Shakespear
likely have had a reciprocal interest in cultivating them as an audience.

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 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY

ally saturated way that Hamlet is. But we cannot simply shift the ontological
unease the play conveys from Hamlet to Hamlet. As I have sought to show,
neither nobility nor academic culture in early modern England can be under
stood without grasping their uneasy convergence in the transformed university.
This convergence may have been figured through cross-status academic friend
ships like that between Hamlet and Horatio, but could only be experienced as
the internal complications, desires, and recognitions of individuals. There is no
plausible referent for Hamlet, an adult prince longing to return to the university
and the company of poor scholars. Yet an academic audience could register, if
not fully acknowledge, how Hamlet's status as a student contributes to his trag
edy. Behind the assault on nobility that Hamlet could perceive, if not set right,
in the briefness of woman's love, in the bloat king's appetites, in mortality itself
is the academic culture that allows Hamlet to frame this assault as philosophi
cally meaningful.
As both a supplement to the prince and an audience surrogate, Horatio
presents a more complex problem. While some of the audience who could see
themselves in the figure of the scholar with no revenue but his good spirits, the
poor scholar in early modern university culture was a vanishing norm. He was
known through his juxtaposition to, if not intimacy with, men of great birth.
The "gentlemen students of both universities" were more likely to be positioned
like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, self-styled "indifferent children of the earth"
(2.2.227), politely termed "gentle" (33-34) by Gertrude and Claudius, but
of "baser nature" (5.2.60) to Hamlet. In any event, no single social situation at
the close of the sixteenth century could represent the position of the scholar,
nor could that position be easily aligned with or distinguished from nobility.
The social complexity of the university challenged any attempt simply to hold a
mirror up to its nature or its effects.
We should therefore resist any temptation to confuse history with tragedy,
to assume the inevitability of the connection that Shakespeare makes between
Hamlet's hybrid status as a student-prince and the vitiation of nobility. There is
no one generic trajectory for the story of the combination (to return to Bourdieu's
language) of noble and clerical social forms, precisely because the social meaning
of learning in the period is unfixed. Lord Momford makes himself ridiculous in
his exuberant desire to fuse with his friend, but his play concludes with genuine
comic renewal. The scholar Clarence praises his "unworldly friend" whose "noble
mind / By moving precedent to all his kind / ... [could] dying Virtue with new
life refresh" (3.2.111-12, 115), while his patron calls down"honourd Hymen"
to bless "a marriage made for virtue, only virtue" (5.2.378, 310). Even Hamlet
and Horatio at points adumbrate other generic possibilities, as when Hamlet
mocks Osric for Horatio's benefit and the latter sardonically comments,"I knew

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 HAMLET, HORATIO, AND THE EARLY MODERN UNIVERSITY 229

you must be edified by the margin ere you had done" (11. 152—53). The p
and scholar sound like a pair of Jonsonian gallants, mutually establishing
true learning at the expense of a prolix courtier.71 When Bourdieu d
the combination of noble and clerical modes in the early modern per
does so to expose the modern, university-educated ruling class as a tr
tion of the old nobility, produced through schooling that is ostensibly op
all but demonstrably favors the offspring of those already enjoying priv
positions. Thus, the "combination" taking place in the seventeenth centur
ongoing, constitutive contradiction of modernity. Certainly, the comic p
of the early modern academic couple suggests a long and textured future
uneasy combination of learning and birth. Attending to Hamlet, however
understand that combination in a genealogical rather than essential relati
modernity. It invites us to grasp the ambivalent meaning and effects of un
learning when it had begun to shed its clerical character but hereditary p
also still operated in an explicit, distinct, and unapologetic form.

'1 On the intimacy styles of Jonson's gallants, see Lorna Hutson, "Liking Men: Ben J
Closet Opened," ELH 71 (2004): 1065-96.

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