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The Myrmidon vs. the Abbess

2023; Michigan State University Press; Volume: 30; Linguagem: Inglês

10.14321/contagion.30.0183

1930-1200

Brian P. Quaranta,

Byzantine Studies and History

This investigation started with a question: Why does Shakespeare hate the Iliad?The question arose after first reading Troilus and Cressida (T&C), Shakespeare's play set during the Trojan War. In his retelling, all claims to glory for Homer's heroes are undermined; a world that is presented by Homer as brutal but honorable is replaced, by Shakespeare, with one that is rife with social and physical disease. As I continued to consider why Shakespeare displayed such hostility toward the Iliad, I found myself recognizing multiple, much more subtle, allusions to the Trojan War in another of his plays set in ancient Greece, The Comedy of Errors (COE). In time, it became apparent that the connection of these two plays with each other, and with the Iliad, was deliberate; through this comparison, Shakespeare rejects the Homeric ethos in favor of a Christian one. A consideration of René Girard's work on Shakespeare helps to bring home the connection between the plays and the concern that they illuminate.In his Theatre of Envy, Girard famously claimed that Shakespeare was consciously familiar with the concepts of mimetic desire and its relationship to collective violence.1 He drew upon T&C and COE for examples: T&C for its explication of the importance of degree, its employment of collective murder, and the association of mimetic contagion with disease,2 and COE primarily for its emphasis on the special role of twins in mimetic theory as exemplars of identical rivals.3 Girard, I believe, is correct that Shakespeare understood the mechanisms and implications of mimetic theory, and he demonstrates how in these plays its consequences play out in a purely pagan world, and then in another in which there is a saving Christian intervention.The intellectual current of Shakespeare's time has been characterized by two primary themes: Reformation and Renaissance. The use of the word reformation, when taken on its own terms, suggests a benign and necessary process. But for an Englishman in the late 16th century, reformation also would have meant violence, displacement, fracture, war, and the disintegration of a once-unified Christendom. This crumbling of the ancient universal catholic church was accompanied by the Renaissance, a term used to refer to the rebirth of interest in, and progressive obsession with, the culture and literature of the ancient Greeks and Romans.4 My argument is that the two plays discussed here can be read as Shakespeare's response to these developments, demonstrating an anxiety over the threat of resurgent pagan values to a troubled Christianity, with T&C's ending standing as a warning of the danger of a return to the scapegoat mechanism, and COE reminding the reader of the power of the Christian alternative.The essay begins with a brief reminder of the depth of the enthusiasm for the classical era that emerged in Europe in the century leading up to, and including, the life of Shakespeare. I then detail the surprising ways in which Shakespeare thoroughly upends expectations in his retelling of the Trojan War story, discrediting the original tale. Next, the similarities of the Comedy of Errors to Troilus and Cressida, and to the Iliad, are documented. Because this area has received little previous scholarly attention, and because it is crucial to the argument, the inversions of the Trojan War in COE are meticulously detailed. Once it has been established that the two plays both respond to the Iliad, Girard's mimetic theory is brought to bear to explain the very different endings of the plays and to reveal Shakespeare's underlying concern about the Homeric ethos.The emerging triumph of the Greco-Roman pagan world over the renaissance mind, and its intrusion into the Christian realm, are evident in the development of visual art in the decades preceding Shakespeare's work. Works by Michelangelo, Raphael, and Giulio Romano, depicting figures from pagan myth and history, were painted on the walls of the center of European Christianity, the Vatican (Figures 1–3).We see in these images, and in countless others from the period, that the influence of classical authors has permeated the era's visual art and penetrated into the very homes of the most powerful officers of the Catholic church. We know for certain that Shakespeare was aware of at least one of these painters; Giulio Romano, the student of Rafael who painted The Fire in the Borgo, is the only contemporary artist mentioned by name in the works of Shakespeare (in The Winter's Tale, V, 4, 92–99).Protestant artists were not immune to this phenomenon; witness the woodcut Martin Luther as Hercules Germanicus, in which Luther is depicted as Hercules, battering churchmen with his club (Figure 4). The image is by Hans Holbein the Younger, a favorite painter of England's King Henry VIII, and an artist of whom Shakespeare would have been well aware.Yet Shakespeare, a defining literary artist of the period, seems to have a mixed view of the ancients. In his Titus Andronicus, he creates a world of such exaggerated wickedness and gratuitous violence that it was, for many years, widely believed that Shakespeare could not have written it.5 Few characters escape with bodies or reputations intact from Julius Caesar or Antony and Cleopatra, and Timon of Athens is famously misanthropic. But his T&C stands out from these others because in this play he borrows from the classical world's most illustrious source, and then mangles it; in T&C, the Iliad is turned on its head.As Risden notes,6 the play is anti-epic. All of the nobility of the Iliad is lost.Helen is a vapid tramp; Agamemnon a figure of widespread mockery; Diomedes a sexual predator. Friendship, as epitomized in the Iliad by the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus, is undermined by the relegation of Patroclus to the role of a “masculine whore” (5.1.10–15).Concerning romance, Shakespeare's treatment is no less savage. M.C. Bradbrook writes that “the high and heroic romance is in every way deflated . . . a poetic ideal was being ironically distorted and defaced.”7 The love affair of Troilus and Cressida lasts all of one night; by the next morning Troilus is more interested in returning to the field than to Cressida's embrace. Cressida, in turn, rapidly succumbs to the boorish advances of Diomedes. By creating a subplot that hints at genuine romance but almost immediately dissolves into disinterest8 and faithlessness, Shakespeare undermines our expectations and creates an anti-romance as well.The Iliad's most important driving forces, glory and honor, are mocked; Hector is not killed in single combat with Achilles, but is murdered, after being tricked into voluntarily disarming himself, by a group of myrmidons (5.9.1–10). Achilles then takes the credit and announces his victory. The flawed but noble hero of the Iliad becomes a coward, liar, and treacherous villain in T&C, without a hint of redemption (Figure 5).By turning the death of Hector into a scandalous murder, Shakespeare suggests that the central, critical event of the Iliad is a fraud. For the modern reader to grasp the magnitude of the change, one must imagine something of the order of a remake of Rocky in which Balboa cheats by wrapping his hands with plaster of Paris and then knocks out Apollo Creed. It is a change that changes everything, and it cannot be missed or left uninterpreted.A reader in search of Shakespeare's mind is often well repaid by searching for differences between his final work and his source material. In the course of writing his anti-Iliad play, Shakespeare consulted epics, including Chapman's Seaven Bookes of the Iliades of Homere,9 Caxton's Recuyell of the Historyes of Troy, and Lydgate's Troy Booke, as well as romances, including Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and Henryson's Testament of Cresseid.10 In each case he debases the source material in a process that Douglas Cole describes as “antimythic.”11 The change in mood from the Iliad appears to be Shakespeare's own invention.12 Of particular note is that none of the sources for the play include the dark and inverting element of the collective murder of Hector.Why, it is worth asking, does Shakespeare portray the Trojan War so differently than Homer, as opposed to his more faithful adaptations of the works of Plutarch? It is true that Girard's scholarship provides many examples of how Shakespeare uses this play to illuminate the fundamentals of mimetic desire, contagion, and scapegoating, which might inevitably lead to a different ending than that of Homer. But this raises a further question: Why does he choose the Trojan War as his background story for this exposure? Why not, instead, select a tale that required less outrageous editing?A different set of questions arises from a close reading of The Comedy of Errors. Although the play was dismissed for centuries as nothing more than a humorous farce,13 recent scholarship has identified strong Christian themes in the text.14 The play is set in Ephesus, in an ambiguous but ancient era; Shakespeare includes references that suggest a pagan context, and another set that suggest a Christian environment. It is unwise to dismiss this as sloppiness. The evidence instead suggests that this pattern is intentional and designed to open a specific question—to what religious and ethical worldview does this play belong?While the references to the New Testament, including specifically Paul's letters and the book of Acts, have been recently well documented,15 there has been little attention to the play's references to Homer's Iliad. While Charles Whitworth, the editor of a recent scholarly edition of the play, does make note of references to Circe and the Sirens,16 this Homeric connection is otherwise unnoticed in scholarship. The Iliad is not mentioned as a source for COE in Bullough's Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare or in Muir's The Sources of Shakespeare's Plays,17 nor in any of the play's other recent editions. Despite this, analysis of the text of COE reveals that Homeric allusions permeate all aspects of the play.Allusions to Homer begin in the opening scene. Egeon, whose very name invokes the sea (Aegean) at the center of the Trojan War, tells the tale of his shipwreck. When his recounting of events is combined with Emilia's later version, the result is a story of a husband and wife who begin in a Greek city (Epidamnus); the wife is subsequently taken away by men on a ship; and the story ends with the wife, separated from her husband, in an Asian city (Ephesus). This quasi-abduction story recalls the Histories of Herodotus. In the opening chapter of this work, Herodotus points out that the seizure of women was the root cause of all historical conflicts between East and West, beginning with the kidnapping of Io from Greece by the Phoenicians, followed by the Greek retaliation in the capture of Europa from Tyre and Medea from Colchis. All of this culminated, finally, in the actions of Paris: Alexander the son of Priam, bearing these events in mind, resolved to procure himself a wife out of Greece by violence. . . . Accordingly he made prize of Helen. (Herodotus, Histories, I.3)19The abduction of women over the sea is therefore intimately associated with the wars of East and West, and Shakespeare was aware of this pattern. In Troilus, the taking of Hesione from Troy by Hercules (2.2.75–79) is mentioned by the Trojans as a causus belli; A Midsummer Night's Dream (MSND) begins with Theseus discussing his upcoming nuptials with Hippolyta, the Queen of the Amazons, whom he had conquered and brought back from her home in Colchis, east of the Black Sea (MSND, I.1.16–20).20In COE, we find the same pattern. Not only has Emilia been taken from Greece to Asia, but a war has subsequently begun between the Greek home city of the husband (Syracuse) and the new Asian home of the wife (Ephesus). This transcontinental conflict again recalls the more ancient examples of Herodotus. Notably, in both COE and the Iliad, the contesting states appear, to the outside observer, so similar that they serve as doubles, a fact noted by Girard and others.21The undifferentiable rival states introduce a major theme of the play. Shakespeare is well known for his use of twins and doubles, but in no other work is this emphasis as strong as it is in COE. Both of the acknowledged source plays, the Menaechmi and Amphitruo of Plautus, feature twins: one set in Menaechmi and two in Amphitruo.23 In considering the Iliad as source material for COE, it is notable that the Iliad has in its cast even more sets of biological twins than Shakespeare's play, including Castor and Pollux, Eteocles and Polynices, Helen and Clytemnestra, Apollo and Artemis, and Helenus and Cassandra (Figure 7). There are also twinlike brothers, including Agamemnon and Menelaus, and Nestor and Periclymenos; classical scholar Douglas Frame has written extensively on the pivotal role of the Indo-European twin myth in the Iliad. 24It has already been established by scholars that in T&C, Shakespeare, despite making so many factual and thematic changes, carried this doubling theme from the Iliad. Anthony Dawson, in his introduction to The New Cambridge edition of T&C, states, “Another way that Shakespeare gives shape to his play is through the many pairings of parallel characters.”25 He mentions Helen and Cressida, both “tokens of war” who take new lovers in new environments; Troilus and Diomedes, who are paired as rivals for Cressida; and the triad of Hector, Achilles, and Ajax, of which Dawson writes: Hector and Achilles are the leading warriors of their respective armies, but Hector's commitment to honour and his determination to fight, while at times foolhardy and vain, contrast with the cowardice and brutality of Achilles, who, when he cannot best his rival sets his Myrmidon dogs on him. Hector is also paired with Ajax, who is himself a surrogate for, and burlesque of, Achilles. Ajax is mostly a fool, but he manages to hold his own against his powerful cousin when the two meet in the ‘friendly’ jousting match in 4.5. And the fact that they are cousins, who embrace as such after their tournament, accentuates the likeness of the two sides. When Hector emphasises the impossibility of separating out the ‘commixtion’ of Greek and Trojan sinews or drops of blood in Ajax (4.5.124–35 ), we are made aware that making such a distinction is impossible not only in Ajax, but in the intermingled blood and desire that underpin the whole conflict, which is in many respects a civil war. (Kindle location 958; emphases mine)Thus, in T&C and COE, we are given two plays that are exceptionally interested in doubles, a characteristic that has inspired Girard to write that they should be studied together, and that the double phenomenon is critical to understanding their relationship.26 My suggestion is that the emphasis on doubling in these two plays arises from the fact that COE and T&C both respond to, and draw heavily from, the same Homeric source.The many sets of twins in the Iliad suggest the importance of character doubling in that epic. However, more important in the Iliad than the literal twins are those who fill that role in a figurative sense, including Ajax and Odysseus,27 Achilles and Ajax,28 Achilles and Patroclus, and most critically, Achilles and Hector. The classicist Eva Brann describes how, at the climactic moment of the story, when Achilles and Hector finally meet face to face, the doubling of the opposed heroes becomes clear: When Hector turns around to confront his pursuer, what is it that Achilles sees? It makes one's hair stand on end to re-envision it in the mind's eye . . . Achilles sees before him Patroclus as he looked when Achilles last bade him goodbye! But there is something more eerie: he is confronting himself, as he looked before his friend's death.29Achilles and Hector are the primary actors, and primary doubles, in the Iliad, and the dramatic unveiling of their mirrored nature provides the epic's dramatic resolution. In that tale, the two warriors meet in individual combat, conducted honorably, with the Greek defeating the Trojan. In Shakespeare's T&C, the two men once again end the tale when they meet in combat, but in this version, neither can gain the upper hand through physical contest. The men are even more twinlike here. The rivalry cannot be resolved until Achilles invokes the mechanism of collective violence, and calls upon his myrmidons,30 so that Hector suffers his murderous defeat.A very similar occurrence—the meeting of the twinned antagonists—concludes the COE, and I suggest that this, once again, is not a coincidence. The resolution of the COE begins when the two twin brothers, Antipholus of Ephesus and Antipholus of Syracuse,31 finally meet face to face in the town square; also, there are multiple references in the play that suggest that “Antipholus” is meant to invoke the image of Achilles.“Antipholus,” as I mentioned, is in fact not one character, but a pair of twins with the same name. A parallel between these twins and Achilles emerges very early in the play. The Antipholus twins each reside in a named structure: one at a house called “Phoenix,” and the other at an inn called “Centaur.”32 Shakespeare names the two residences repeatedly; the Centaur is mentioned seven times, the Phoenix thrice. Since it is not obvious that the names of the inns are necessary to understanding the plot, it is likely that they convey some symbolic significance; it is therefore notable that the two teachers of Achilles were a centaur (named Chiron) and an older man named Phoenix.33,34The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) lists both “house” and “inn” as having educational connotations dating to Shakespeare's lifetime35; the original performance of COE appears to have been at the Inns of Court.36 Thus, the connection between the Centaur Inn and Phoenix House and the process of education would have been a plausible one for Shakespeare's contemporaries to make. The allusion here confirms Antipholus37—a composite “Antipholus,” composed of both twin brothers—as a parallel to Achilles.In Scene 3.1 of COE, Shakespeare stages an incident that seems, on close examination, to function as a funhouse mirror focused on the Trojan War.38 In this scene, the protagonist, Antipholus of Ephesus, lays siege to a locked, fortress-like structure.39 His wife is inside with another man (unbeknownst to him, it is his twin brother Antipholus of Syracuse), and he fears he is being cuckolded. The door of the house is defended not by the twinned rival himself but by the rival's “brother,” Dromio of Syracuse, in a circumstance that parallels the defense of Troy primarily by Hector, while Paris remains inside with his stolen wife (Iliad Book 5). Antipholus E attempts to gain entry through negotiation and through force, but fails, and his wife refuses to come out, resulting in a frustrating stalemate.In a further subtle touch, the grotesque kitchen-maid inside the house is called “Nell” by Dromio in 3.2.110. Nell is a traditional nickname for Helen, and is used by Shakespeare in exactly that fashion in T&C (3.1.50). Also of note is that Antipholus of Ephesus utilizes Dromio—a figure compared frequently to an “ass”40 and once to an actual horse (3.2.86)—as a sort of human battering ram. Shakespeare appears, therefore, to have hinted at the Homeric aspects of this scene through these references to Helen of Troy and the Trojan Horse (or in this case, Trojan Ass). The ironic inversions—Homer's incomparably beautiful Helen replaced by the grotesque Nell, and the majestic horse supplanted by the ignoble ass—undermine the grandeur of Homer's tale.There are other Homeric allusions in COE; most interesting to me are two scenes that appear to suggest comic reinterpretations of the Trojan War itself (3.1, 5.1). There are also multiple shared characteristics between Emilia, the mother of the Antipholi, and Thetis, the mother of Achilles.41As the play nears its conclusion, the collective violence identified by Girard appears ready to manifest itself. Antipholus and Dromio of Ephesus have been identified by the Ephesian townsfolk as insane, and a “conjurer” with the darkly comic name of “Doctor Pinch” is summoned. He declares that the twins are possessed, and orders that they be captured, bound, and taken into isolation. The Ephesian citizens follow his orders and take the chained Antipholus and Dromio away.As a Girardian, I can't help but notice the similarities to the event he described as “The Horrible Miracle of Apollonius of Tyana,” similarities that go beyond the shared concept of “collective violence.” The Life of Apollonius, written by Philostratus, was available in Shakespeare's time in Latin translation. In the episode Girard identifies, the citizens of Ephesus summon Apollonius, a man accused, in his own time (as well as in Shakespeare's) of being a conjurer and practitioner of the black arts, and ask him to relieve them of a plague. Girard suggests this plague is due not to a bacterium but to mimetic contagion. Apollonius then identifies a beggar as the cause of the plague and orders the citizens to stone him. When they do, the beggar is “revealed” to have been possessed by a demon, or a manifestation of a demon, and the plague abates.The two scenes share multiple similarities, but the point of greatest importance here is the location—Ephesus. Scholars have long speculated about why Shakespeare placed this play in Ephesus, since the play's main source, the Plautus comedy Menaechmi, takes place in Epidamnus, not Ephesus. This was a deliberate choice: Shakespeare was clearly aware of the city of Epidamnus, since it is mentioned (as “Epidamium”) in the play's opening dialogue (1.1.42). Scholars have suggested that he moved the action to Ephesus to highlight references to Paul's Letter to the Ephesians, which is certainly possible; but I find the similarity to the Apollonian story very intriguing and a possible reason for the relocation of the play.Shakespeare obviously did not read I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. But he may well have read the story of Apollonius; if Girard is correct that Shakespeare independently discovered the tenets of mimetic theory, there is no reason that he could not have included, in this play that explicates those principles, a parody of that ancient magician and his “horrible miracle.”43As the play winds down, the city is in chaos. Despite being bound and escorted away, Antipholus and Dromio seem to reappear—it is, in fact, their twin brothers—and then seek sanctuary in nearby abbey. The conflicts seem unresolvable; the characters cannot agree even upon the basic facts of who did what. The Duke states that it seems they all have “drunk of Circe's cup” (5.1.270), a comment that places the prevailing unrest squarely in the Homeric world.44The final scene resembles a complete inversion of the Trojan War (and of scene 3:2). The wife of Antipholus of Ephesus, who believes that her husband is hiding in the Abbey, clamors for his return. She gathers a group of allies, including her sister, and prepares to make a forced assault. Then, instead of remaining locked inside, the abbess comes out, bringing with her the contested husband. Homer's story is turned on its head. The doors are opened, and there is reconciliation. All of this is accomplished by a character identified by editors of the play as a “Christian abbess.”45Numbers give important clues regarding the purpose of this scene. Emilia cites the number of years since she lost her children as thirty-three, but Egeon states that the children left him after eighteen years (1.1.125), and then later, in scene 5.1, that it's been seven years since he last saw them, resulting in a total time of twenty-five years.46 Shakespeare was capable of arithmetic, and it seems uncharitable to attribute this difference to a simple mistake. Why, then, the discrepancy? I contend that the meaning of the numbers is not literal, but numerologic, and the failure of the numbers to reconcile is a deliberate technique of emphasis. “Thirty-three years” points to the duration of Christ's life on earth,47 while “seven years” points to the duration of the Trojan War. The Iliad claims the war lasted ten years, but in Caxton's Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, the duration is listed as seven years48 (Bullough, Vol. VI, p. 101), and Shakespeare's Agamemnon repeats that number verbatim in T&C (1.3.13).In taking a numerological, rather than literal, approach to the age of the twins, Shakespeare appropriates a technique from the Old Testament. Biblical scholar Nahum Sarna writes: It is clear that the biblical chronologies of the patriarchal age are not intended to be accurate historical records in our sense of the term . . . The patriarchal year numbers inform us, not about the precise passage of time, which is of relatively minor importance, but about the ideas that animate the biblical narrative . . . The use of numerical symmetry is Scripture's way of conveying the conviction that the formative age of Israel's history was not a series of haphazard incidents, but the beginning of a fulfillment of a grand design. Not blind chance, but the hand of God is at work. (84–85, emphasis mine)49Egeon's “seven years” refers to the length of the Trojan War, and therefore recalls all of the hopelessness, conflict, and tragedy that is inevitable in the pagan world. In COE, sons are torn from their parents, and parents are torn apart (1.1.31–137); husbands and wives engage in emotional and physical conflict (4.4.105); disputes over honor end in drawn swords (5.1.32); and worsening societal chaos ends in collective violence (4.4.110–135; 5.1.33–35; see also Troilus 5.8.5–14). The abbess steps in and announces a Christian alternative. By citing thirty-three years, she invokes the divine intervention of Christ, bringing about redemption (5.1.392) and reunion (5.1.340–346). The use of symbolic numbers points out that the play's many apparent coincidences are not the result of random chance or dramaturgical negligence. They are, instead, the fulfillment of a grand design, always intended, but hidden until the moment of revelation.Multiple lines of comparison therefore support the assertion that COE is a response to the Iliad. This interpretation gains strength by providing a coherent explanation for several otherwise mysterious aspects of the play, including the names “Centaur” and “Phoenix,” and the discrepancy in the reported ages of the twins.50So we now have two plays written by Shakespeare that appear to respond directly to Homer's recounting of the Trojan War. In T&C, the comparison is direct, but the ending of the tale is dramatically altered. In the Iliad, we have honorable single combat, followed by a moving moment of reconciliation between Achilles and Priam, the father of Hector. Then the epic ends. In T&C, the play instead ends with Achilles tricking Hector into disarming, and then having him murdered by his henchmen. The play's final words are uttered by the ignoble Pandarus, who bequeaths onto the audience “his diseases” (5.11.54).In contrast, the COE appears ready to end in collective violence, when Doctor Pinch drags off the captured twins. But the heroes escape, and when the two Antipholi finally meet, there is, as when Achilles sees Hector, the recognition of twinship; but here that recognition is accompanied by reconciliation, not combat. Husband and wife reunite. Past crimes are expunged, and debts forgiven. In the final words, the two Dromios recognize that they are identical, but find in this only pleasure, and compete, not to kill each other, but to honor one another. It is a happy ending, due to the interventions of a Christian abbess and the plan of divine providence.I believe, then, that these two plays, when read from a Girardian perspective, provide evidence that Shakespeare is specifically rejecting the ethos of ancient Greece, in favor of the Christian model, at least in part because he recognizes it as a way to move away from collective violence. This conclusion leads us to an answer to my final question: Why does Shakespeare choose Homer's Iliad, instead of a different ancient text, to so thoroughly undermine through inversion?I think the answer lies in the fact that the Iliad, when considered as a representation of its world, is an utter fraud. It depicts a society in which heroes strive for kleios, or honor, based upon their evidence of arete, or manliness. This arrangement has many flaws, and many come out as losers. But in the Iliad, arete can be demonstrated, and kleios won, even in defeat. Violence can be redeemed in honor, and death and sacrifice can be noble and purposeful.But this is a lie, and the lie of the Iliad comes in its framing. Within the context of the epic cycle of the Trojan War, the Iliad is no more than a snapshot. It begins late, and clips out the apple of discord, the human sacrifice of Iphigenia, the abandonment of the wounded Philoctetes to his suffering. There is no mention of the attempts to avoid the war by Achilles, who disguised himself as a girl, and by Odysseus, a malingerer who faked insanity. And it ends early, with the funeral of Hector. We do not see Achilles murder Thersites, and in turn be killed, from a distance, by the arrow of the cowardly Paris. We are not shown the scheming of Odysseus or the lying of Sinon, or the crushing, by the gods, of Laocoon and his sons. The wooden horse, and the fire that it brought, are trimmed out. We do not see Creusa, the wife of Aeneas, abandoned to the city's flames, or the brutal slaughter of the elderly Priam by Pyrrhus, an event that Shakespeare depicts unsparingly in Hamlet. Homer cuts off his tale before baby Astyanax is thrown from the city wall and his mother is enslaved by his killer. We do not see the pain of Hecuba, as she learns of the murder of her last living son, Polydorus, nor do we see her exact her revenge by murdering the sons of her son's murderer. Homer similarly conceals, with his framing, so many other subsequent murders: of Agammenon and Cassandra by Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, and of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus by Orestes and Electra. The madness and suicide of Ajax, and the human sacrifice of Polyxena—all of this, every form of human misery that can result from treachery and violence, is part of the story of the Trojan War, but concealed from the reader of the Iliad.It is this hypocrisy, then, that I think fuels Shakespeare's particular contempt for The Iliad. Homer's pre-Christian, pagan world is not, in his eyes, a glorious one filled with manly virtue, toward which a renaissance thinker might, in the disintegration of Christendom, legitimately hope to return. It was, instead, a place where violence and plague were inevitable, one that could only be saved by the intervention of the Christian God.