the Renaissance Conflict Between 'Virtu' and Christian Virtue

Most of you will be familiar with Hamlet's great speech. But read it here in a new light. Consider how it may be read as expressive of a struggle within Hamlet between his Christian sense of virtue that does not allow for suicide (or for murder, even in revenge) and what Machiavelli and others wrote of as virtù, the amoral capacity for action, or life force,within each human being that craves expression and development regardless of the moral consequences, despite "what dreams may come,/When we have shuffled off this mortal coil"--that is, in any kind of Judeo-Christian judgment and afterlife.

To be, or not to be, that is the question:

Whether 'tis nobler in themind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

And by opposing, edn them. To die, to sleep--

No more, and by a sleep to say we end

The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to; 'tis a consumation

Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep--

To sleep, perchance to dream--ay, there's the rub,

For in that sleep of death what deams may come,

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

Must give us pause; there's the respect

That makes calamity of so long life:

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,

Th' oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,

The pangs of despis'd love, the law's delay,

The insolence of office, and the spurns

That patient merit of th' unworthy takes,

When he himself might his quietus make

With a bare bodkin; who would fardels bear,

To grunt and sweat under a weary life,

But that the dread of something after death,

The undiscover'd country, from whose bourn

No traveller returns, puzzles the will,

And makes us rather bear those ills we have,

Than fly to others that we know not of?

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,

And thus the native hue of rsolution

Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,

And enterprises of great pitch and moment

With this regard their currents turn awry,

And lose the name of action.

If you've been going through these pages in order, did you notice and think about the phrase "puzzles the will"? Remember Sir Philip Sidney's description of human nature as double, consisting of "an erected wit, but an infected will"? If one ties all this together, then one can see that Hamlet is saying that considerations of Christian morality and God's judgment--"the dread of something after death"--immobilize the "will"--the sense of "virtu," or individual, amoral action--that eggs him on to revenging his father's death by killing his uncle, King Claudius.

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