II - B: Delay and Confrontation

Hamlet and the audience are both faced with a dilemma. Who is telling the truth, Claudius or the Ghost? The audience will discover Claudius's guilt if they listen carefully to his asides and soliloquys, which give voice to his inner thoughts and feelings of guilt for his deed. Hamlet must look to more outward signs, which he must discover a way of eliciting.

Our planetary perspective also gives us a similar dilemma? Which character, Claudius or the Ghost, gets which planet, Sol or Saturn? The traditional characterization, in which Sol is positive and Saturn negative, would have Claudius, who appears Solar, be revealed as Saturnian; and the Ghost, who apears in a Saturnian setting, is in fact still calling the shots according to his Solar nature. But the Renaissance modifications of that characterization, influenced by the Corpus Hermeticum and the philosopher Marsilio Ficino, present a more ambiguous view, one in which the assignments could be just the opposite.

It is to the resolution of these issues that we now turn.

The play presents the Ghost from two perspectives. Hamlet, awed by the Ghost's words, sees him as telling the truth, and Claudius a devil in disguise, a Saturnian assassin of his late father. But his friend Horatio says that the apparition might be a demon in disguise. Hamlet has a dilemma, which at this point the audience shares. And there is also another issue, which he does not articulate, that of what he is to do, even if the Ghost is not lying.

Hamlet’s immediate response to the Ghost is in two parts. First, he makes the Ghost into an object of humor and thereby reduces its stature in his eyes. This occurs when he is swearing his companions to secrecy after the Ghost's departure:

HAMLET. Never make known what you have seen.
HORATIO and MARCELLUS. My lord, we will not.
HAMLET. Nay, but swear't.
HORATIO. In faith, my lord, not I.
MARCELLUS. Nor I, my lord, in faith.
HAMLET. Upon my sword.
MARCELLUS. We have sworn, my lord, already.
GHOST. (Cries under the stage) Swear.
HAMLET. Ah ha, boy, say'st thou so? Art thou there, truepenny?
Come on, you hear this fellow in the cellerage.
Consent to Swear.
HORATIO. Propose the oath, my lord.
HAMLET. Never to speak of this that you have seen.
Swear by my sword.
GHOST. Swear. [They swear.]
HAMLET. Hic et Ubique? Then we'll shift our ground.
Come hither, gentlemen,
And lay your hands again upon my sword.
Swear by my sword
Never to speak of this that you have heard.
GHOST. Swear by his sword. [They swear.]
HAMLET. Well said, old mole. Canst work i' th' earth so fast?
A worthy pioner! Once more remove, good friends.
HORATIO. O day and night, but this is wondrous strange. (1.5.149ff)

It certainly is "wondrous strange." First Hamlet is overly serious, making his friends swear over and over. Then the Ghost joins him, under the stage, shifting position each time. And Hamlet calls him "boy," "truepenny," "this fellow in the cellerage," and "old mole." Humor has reduced the Ghost in stature, and Hamlet is ready for the second part of his response.

As a good modern hero, he decides that he needs more evidence before he can act. He will pretend to be mad, putting on what he calls an “antic disposition,” in other words, act like a maniac, stalling for time in hopes of catching Claudius off guard. And his friends are not to let on that they know he is faking.

Shakespeare’s sources also use this attack. The original hero, Amleth, speaks in words that sound like nonsense to the characters he is addressing, yet for the audience these same words not only make sense but speak the truth, a truth which the protagonist would be a fool to say plainly. Much of the protagonist’s charm derives from his assumed madness; Shakespeare continues this tradition.

But Shakespeare's Hamlet is only half faking his madness. The melancholia is of a type that, as Ficino says, “harms wisdom and judgment, because when that humor is kindled and burns, it characteristically makes people excited and frenzied, which melancholy the Greeks call mania and we madness” (Three Books on Life, p. 117). At one time his face shows abject despair (Slide 105a, an 1839 sketch by Delacroix); at another, it cannot hide deep distrust and anger (Slide 105b, Hamlet portrayed by the 19th century actor Robert Forbes-Johnston).


Hamlet is not fully in control of his words and actions; they come too naturally to be fake. His shifts from introversion to extroversion, partly controlled and partly not, are extremely difficult for actors to enact in a plausible way; actors—and audiences as well—tend to favor one or the other. But this very inconsistency, even disunity, makes the character all the more interesting.

While stalling for time, Hamlet torments himself often for being so circumspect (Slides 106 and 107, both Derek Jacobi), plunging him into more despair.




Why can’t he just do it? Audiences and critics sometimes agree and see a weakness is his character—he is the intellectual who sees both sides of every question and so cannot act. This point of view has sunk into the general consciousness so much that it is even in cartoons, for example one that appeared on the internet recently, as a joke for the day (Slide 108, from a “daily joke” page on the Internet).

"To be or not to be? That is the question." Listen to the beginning of Hamlet's soliloquy:

HAMLET. To be, or not to be, that is the question: Whether ‘tis nobler, in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles And by opposing end them…(III.i.56ff)

On the one hand, he could kill Claudius, one way of ending the slings and arrows. On the other, he could kill himself, "with a bare bodkin," as he goes on to say. The two choices come from his despair on one side and his mania on the other.

In part, his hesitation comes from his melancholy, as Ficino and others had characterized it. The Saturnian melancholic, Mercury affectbed by Saturn, is so immersed in ideas and thoughts, a Saturnian eternal world, that he is not in this here-and-now world of action

Hamlet's hesitation is that of the eternal reluctant to enter a world of error and transience that is not his and will never be anything other than it is. As Jung pointed out, some of the early Gnostics imagined Christ in such a position, retreating to his eternal cross after a first attempt to enlighten the fallen world, even before Adam and Eve. The 2nd century heretic-hunter Irenaeus wrote of Christ in the Fullness looking down upon the fallen Achamoth:

Christ dwelling on high took pity upon her; and having extended himself through and beyond Stauros, he imparted a figure to her, but merely as respected substance, and not so as to convey intelligence. Having effected this, he withdrew his influence, and returned, leaving Achamoth to herself...Having then obtained a form...and being immediately deserted by that Logos who had been invisibly present with her--that is, by Christ--she strained herself to discover that light which had forsaken her, but could not effect her purpose... (http://www.gnosis.org/library/advh1.htm)

Christ is shown here as reluctant to stay in the world in which Achamoth, the predecessor of Eve, has fallen. Since this book had been republished many times in the 16th century, starting with Erasmus's edition, it is possible that the author and some of the audience knew this text.

But there is another, less metaphysical source for Hamlet's hesttation: it is simply part of a considered way of acting that was newly articulated in the Renaissance. His self-reproaches are a voice from the Middle Ages, which Hamlet himself, who is of the new age, cannot accept.

In the Renaissance, waiting before acting was considered a virtue. A highly-regarded adage, from ancient Rome, was Festina Lente, Hasten Slowly. In planetary terms, be quick like Mercury, and slow like Saturn. The saying derived from Aristotle, who advised his students to deliberate slowly, but then act quickly. Erasmus had re-introduced it and explained it fully in the beginning of the 1508 edition of his popular work, the Adagia (English edition 1991). Numerous art works and emblems took up the theme, including Erasmus’s publisher, who put a dolphin and an anchor on the title page of Erasmus’s book as his own logo (Slide 109a, 1508).


Another example (Slide 109b, illustration to a symbolic romance called the Hypnerotomachia [The Strife of Love in a Dream], 1499) shows a maiden with a wing in one hand and a tortoise in the other. Her leg on the side with the wing is planted firmly on the floor, while the one on the side with the tortoise is raised as though in motion.

In a third example (Slide 110, school of Mantegna, late 15th century), Wisdom holds back a youth from seizing Occasion. Wisdom’s feet are planted on a stationary block, while Occasion moves on a rolling sphere.

Other examples are both more famous and less clear-cut. One, by Botticelli, shows Minerva, goddess of wisdom, putting one hand to the forehead of a centaur, while with the other she holds a sentry’s halberd (Slide 111, c. 1482).


The implication is that she is restraining him from action, like a sentry barring entrance to a domain. The hand to the forehead suggests that she wants him to use his head rather than his instincts. Some interpreters say that the message is to renounce the aggressive and sexual instincts in favor of intellectual and spiritual pursuits. Otherwise the centaur would not have such a pained expression on his face. However the similarity to Slide 39 suggests she might simply be demanding that he think before he acts, so that he acts wisely. For someone who is half horse, or the hot-blooded young aristocrat whose wedding present this painting was, that may be painful enough.

Another example, mentioned by Wind, is a portrait by Titian of Alfonso d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, standing next to a cannon (Slide 112, a copy perhaps by Rubens of the lost original, 1523-34). The cannon, along with other newly invented weapons, became an image for Festina Lente because it shoots out lead, usually associated with slowness, very quickly.

This last example crops up in one of Shakespeare’s early plays (Wind 1958). In Love’s Labour’s Lost, one minor character, a pedantic scholar, tells another to bring a third person to him “festinately hither.” I am not aware of any other time this word “festinately” has been used in literature. The other pedant, not to be outdone by the first scholar’s erudition, says he will be as quick as lead. The first objects, and then the second takes his time, by way of more paradoxical statements, explaining what he means, that he will be as quick as lead coming out of a cannon. I think this interchange shows fairly conclusively that Shakespeare, as well as some of his audience, was well aware of the saying Festina Lente.

As our play develops, it will be seen that deliberating slowly, waiting for the right time, and then acting quickly is just what Hamlet does. Once he has made up his mind, and has the right moment, he acts. Unfortunately, as we shall see, the first time he acts, he kills the wrong man by mistake. But he certainly does not hesitate.

Actually, finding the right moment is harder than Hamlet articulates. He cannot just take his revenge whenever he knows who is guilty and the opportunity presents itself. He does recognize the problem about killing a man at his prayers, when he might just ascend to heaven, his sins forgiven by a merciful god. Then he would escape the suffering that the poor Ghost got, after indulging in the sin of gluttony.

But there is also the problem of the thing’s looking right. Shakespeare had written a whole series of History Plays, based on recent English history—recent but still an age away, in the Middle Ages--about the futility of vengeance-taking as such. One act of vengeance begets another, in an increasingly barbaric spiral downwards. To avoid this spiral, the act must look justified to all sides, by a set of rules common to them all. Giving the person a fair trial would be the best option. If that is not possible, then some other clear justification must be found. For example, the person confesses without any external compulsion to do so. Or someone else confesses, with no selfish motive or external compulsion. Or he is publicly caught in the act of committing another similar crime, perhaps to cover up the first one. Nothing in the play suggests that Hamlet himself sees this difficulty in so many words. But he very much acts as though he does. And the playwright certainly would have, in order to make his avenger sympathetic and acceptable to his rather sophisticated audience.

One place where this issue is expressed is the scene in which Hamlet asks the players to recite a scene from a play about the Trojan War. He starts it out, from memory. In it the Greek hero Pyhrrus kills numerous unprepared Trojans and looks for Priam, King of Troy, so as to kill him. Hamlet remembers that Pyrrhus paused briefly before bringing his sword down. Identifying with Pyhrrus, he wants to feel the scene. He starts it out:

...Roasted in wrath and fire, And thus o’ersized with coagulate gore,
With eyes like carbuncle, the hellish Pyrrhus
Old grandsire Priam seeks…(2.2.457ff.)

He is already loading the example against himself, with such a develish description of the king-murderer. After the moment Hamlet was looking for, where Pyhrrus hesitates, the player keeps going, and describes Hecuba's grief at her husband's death. Euripides' portrayal of it in his play Hecuba, which Shakespeare could have known in Erasmus's Latin translation, is one of the most emotional moments in Greek tragedy. At the end of the recitation, Hamlet, as one himself consumed by grief, is identifying with Hecuba. Considering that his mother probably would be grief-stricken if Hamlet killed an apparently innocent Claudius, this is not a result that helps his resolve.

Titian did another painting that states succinctly just what Shakespeare had to have Hamlet do. Titian even inscribed the moral on the painting, so there would be no mistaking it. This is The Allegory of Time Governed by Prudence (Slide 113, c. 1565). The head of an aged man faces left, looking back on his past; the head of a young man faces right, looking into the future; and the head of a man in his middle years faces straight ahead, facing the present.

Below the heads are three animal heads, a wolf’s facing left, a dog’s facing right, and a lion’s facing straight ahead. The hungry wolf is interpreted as devouring the past; the dog sniffs out the future, as he would prey on a hunt; the lion faces the present courageously. The motto is this: “From the past the man of the present acts prudently so as not to imperil the future” (“Ex praeterito praesens prudenter agit ni futur – actione deturpet”). How to kill Claudius without imperilling the future, his, his mother's, and Denmark's? Such is the demand his Renaissance values put on Hamlet’s mission.

To give him time, Hamlet’s “antic disposition” is in part a ruse, Hamlet as Mercury engaging in “machinations of evil cunning,” as the Poimandres puts it. It is also, as we have already seen, his way of confronting what he hates in the other characters, their planetary vices, without imperiling himself in the process. His style of speaking is then partly intentional, partly not, as he invariably overdramatizes himself.

Hamlet resolves upon a typically Mercurial scheme.. He will put on a play enacting something similar to Old Hamlet’s murder. He hopes that Claudius will reveal his guilt on his face. It is another of his "machinations," along with the craziness. It is a not very devilish plot; he conducts it not with arms but with words, Hamlet's favorite weapon, in hopes of exposing a killer's guilt.

During the play Hamlet gets so worked up that he virtually spells out his theory about the Old King’s death to everyone, including the implied murderer. Claudius becomes upset, stops the play, and storms out (Slide 114, chromograph by Harold Copping, 1897).

From the look on Claudius's face, Hamlet is convinced of his guilt, but Claudius makes it appear to the others that he was simply offended by Hamlet’s obvious insinuations. As his mother tells him when they are alone, "Thou hast thy father much offended" (3,4,8). Moreover, Claudius now knows exactly why Hamlet is preoccupied. Claudius has to get rid of Hamlet, but secretly, so that his mother and the people of Denmark do not know what he is doing. One image from a Renaissance source conveys the sense of this episode, the “Sol” card in a popular 15th century tarrocchi deck. Hamlet has played the archetypal role of Phaeton, the boy whose rash attempt at leading his father Helios’s chariot led to disaster (Slide 115, “Sol” card from the “Tarocchi of Mantegna,” c. 1470).

Hamlet’s mother sends a message that she wants to speak with him. Convinced now of Claudius’s guilt, he relishes the opportunity to enlighten his mother. On the way, Hamlet encounters Claudius praying. He considers killing him then and there (Slide 116, Delacroix lithograph, 1844), but decides that the occasion is not right. Having said his prayers, Claudius



might just be admitted to Heaven by a merciful God. Ironically, Claudius himself feels that Heaven is rejecting him as long as he keeps his ill-gotten gains. His soliloquy here is the longer of two speeches in which Claudius clearly articulates his guilt--not to Hamlet, but to the audience.

Some might say Hamlet was inventing an excuse. But it is also an example of Festina lente, restraint when you are hurrying. Killing him in church did not look right, it would not keep the audience’s sympathies with his hero, nor the court's with Hamlet.

Hamlet still has much sulphur in him, which he spews forth in sarcastic, vitriolic rhetoric, more for his own amusement than to enlighten others. He is doing what he did before with the Ghost, making him an object of humor(Slide 117). We have already looked at the beginning of this speech for its humorous approach to the body of Polonius. This time I want to look at how it mocks the lust for power.

CLAUDIUS. Where’s Polonius?
HAMLET. At supper.
CLAUDIUS. At supper! Where?
HAMLET. Not where he eats, but where he is eaten. A certain convocation of politic worms are e’en at him. Your worm is your only emperor for diet; we fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots. Your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service—two dishes, but to one table. That’s the end.
CLAUDIUS. Alas, alas. (IV.iii.17ff)

Becoming a king or even an emperor is a worthless achievement, because we all are food for worms in the end. Shakespeare is adapting a saying in John Florio’s translation of Montaigne, then in manuscript (Florio was Italian-- one person who could have helped Shakespeare with his Italian). Montaigne says, “The heart and might of a mighty and triumphant emperor, is but the breakfast of a seely little worm.” Shakespeare has added the bit about the “politic worms” and their “diet” as a reference to the Diet of Worms, where Luther made his stand against the Holy Roman Emperor. By Shakespeare's time, this mighty Emperor, Charles V, had been reduced to impotence by a simple monk. So much for kingship.

All of this passes by Claudius, of course. Hamlet is treating him the way he used to treat Polonius. All Claudius knows is that Hamlet has to go. His killing of Polonius is a convenient excuse for sending him away, to England allegedly until things quiet down. In fact he has written instructions that the king of England is to quietly execute Hamlet.

In the meantime, he has slowly transformed from a waffling intellectual into a warrior wreaking destruction. He has tossed his mother around, killed Polonius, and may kill again. He is in the sphere of Mars. Yet he also disdains power and prestige for himself. That is Claudius's way, not his. He has already defeated the power of Sol's "domineering arrogance" over his soul.

A final example of the absurdity of ambition and the world, the world of Sol, confronts Hamlet as he is about to embark for England. He sees the Norwegian army marching past, on their way to wage war against Poland. Told that they were going to secure a small piece of well-defended Polish territory, he reflects on the meaning of what he sees. For the sake of illusory glory, “a fantasy and trick of fame” (IV.iv.61), twenty thousand men would “go to their graves like beds” (IV.iv.62) for a piece of land not big enough to hold all those who die there.

I think it is this reflection of Hamlet's that Nietzsche is commenting on in The Birth of Tragedy, where he sees Hamlet as an example of "the Dionysian man," the one who, like the chorus of a Greek tragedy, sees life in its contradictory aspects:

This is something the Dionysian man shares with Hamlet: both have truly seen to the essence of things, they have understood, and action nauseates them; for their action can change nothing in the eternal essence of things, they consider it ludicrous or shameful that they should be expected to restore order to the chaotic world. Understanding kills action, action depends on a veil of illusion—this is what Hamlet teaches us, not the stock interpretation of Hamlet as a John-a-dreams who, from too much reflection, from an excess of possibilities, so to speak, fails to act…Aware of truth from a single glimpse of it, all one can see now is the horror and absurdity of existence:…it nauseates him. (Kaufman trans., p. 60) 

This sense of nausea permeated the first half of the play. Denmark is "an unweeded garden, things rank and gross possess it merely." The ghost has given him the hidden aspect of this appearance, the criminality of the past. We can generalize from the Ghost's revelation: murder underlies our very existence: we survive by the slaughter of others, and every tribe owes its territory to conquest and destruction of those who lived there before them.

And yet we are the "paragon of the animals," creatures of reason and imagination. We have the obligation to change things, however unfair and painful it may be. As Hamlet has already lamented:

The time is out of joint. O cursed spite,
That ever I was born to set it right.

Hamlet ends his reflection on the soldiers marching off to die in Poland by being inspired by them. These soldiers disdain death. They assume they will not be among the unlucky. And if they do die, it is for a righteous cause. They confront death as a challenge. This attitude is well portayed in a portrait by the Dutch painter Frans Hals, in the early 17th century (Slide 118):

For Hamlet such a figure, even though absurd, becomes an inspiration. If Fortinbras's soldiers can face down death, so can he, even though he will probably lose his life as well, and in the eternal of things nothing will be changed by his action. Hamlet embraces the absurd in all its nauseating reality. “My thoughts be bloody or be nothing else,” he resolves (Iv.iv.66).

This, it seems to me, is coming close to the kind of resolution that Kiekegaard imagined Abraham having in contemplating his sacrifice of his beloved Isaac. In making this point Kierkegaard uses another story, of a knight who knows that he will never attain the happiness of being with his only love, the goal of his whole existence, and in this resignation holds onto her image in his mind instead. He contrasts that knight with another, the knight of faith:

He makes exactly the same movements as the other knight, infinitely renounces claim to the love that is the content of his life, he is reconciled in pain; but then occurs the prodigy, he makes another movement more wonderful than all, for he says, “I believe nevertheless that I shall get her, in virtue, that is, of the absurd, in virtue of the fact that in God all things are possible.” (Lowrie translation p. 57)

Similarly, Abraham has renounced all hope that he will avoid sacrificing Isaac. How could it be just a test of faith? That God would perpetrate such a cruel joke is out of the question. Even God's promise that he will make Abraham's descendants his chosen people does not help. If God could give him one son, he can give him another. Yet nevertheless he believes, despite its absurdity, that he will get Isaac, that very son himself, back--in God all things are possible.

Hamlet, it seems to me, is not quite to this point. He sees the absurdity. But he has no faith that God is with him. He is not a "knight of faith" because he has no faith that God will give him all that he desires: not only killing Claudius, but that it will make a difference in the eternal scheme of things. He is not Luther, who can say "Here I stand, I can do no other" and have faith that this gesture will do anything more than get him killed. He is at this point Kierkegaard's "knight of infinite resignation." He is Abraham in despair at having to obey God's command.

Durer did a famous image of the soldier riding to his deathly destination, It is generally referred to as "Knight, Death, and Devil." He himself called it simply The Rider (Slide 119a, 1513).


A lone Knight rides along a road. Skull-like rocks litter the road. Death with his hourglass converses with the soldier (Slide 119b, below).

The hideous figure behind the knight is a one-tusked, snout-nosed Devil (Slide 119c).

According to Panofsky and others, this knight is the image of the "warrior for Christ" as portrayed in Erasmus's Enchiridion. The Knight has put Satan behind him, on this view, and marches confidently toward victory. But this Devil is following as though a foot-soldier in the Knight’s service, a situation Durer had portrayed in a similar set of images (Slide 120, Knight and Lansquenet, woodcut, 1497).

Moreover, Erasmus was not thinking of an actual soldier. He was writing about a Christian attitude towards life, a virtuous, simple, and humble life, radiant with the glow of the inner Christ. Durer's soldier, I think, is something else.

Hamlet would recognize the Knight's Devil. Standing in the Knight’s shadow, he is the one who wreaks havoc while the knight does his heroic deeds. He is the other side of the coin, so to speak. Death, too, has another role besides that of a fear to overcome. Death is the Knight’s companion because the Knight and he are in the same business. He and the Devil love the Knight for his great deeds that cost many lives. The Knight knows all this and keeps going. Is he looking forward to the fray? Or is he grim? His expression is hard to read.

The paradox has no been lost on Hamlet. Twenty thousand men “go to their graves like beds” (IV.iv.62) . Hamlet's cause has more in its favor than this attack on Poland, which is for "a trick of fame." Yet it is just as morally bankrupt. Erasmus said in his Enchiridion, widely read in England, that Christ teaches not to take personal vengeance, to turn the other cheek in fact, and meet hatred with love. Vengeance is the Devil's road. In an elective monarchy such as Denmark's, only the exposure of Claudius's crimes before the electors would be permissible.

Yet Hamlet plods on: “My thoughts be bloody or be nothing else.” (4.4..66). Shakespeare, like Durer, is portraying the knight who fights the fight at hand, the one he has been assigned, with all the means at his disposal, to what ends, horrible and good, he knows not.

Although much has been written about Durer's engraving, I know of no better commentary than that of Nietzsche, in his Birth of Tragedy:

We seek in vain for a single vigorous branching root, a patch of fertile and healthy soil, nowhere is there anything but dust, sand, petrification, drought. The disconsolate and isolated man could find no better symbol for this than the knight with death and the devil, as Durer drew him for us: the armored knight with the stern, cold gaze, who must pursue his dreadful path undaunted by his terrible companions, yet hopeless, alone with horse and hound... (Kaufman translation, p. 123)

There is nothing in the scene to give hope, nor can there be. The description echoes Kierkegaard's account of the Knight of Infinite Resignation in Fear and Trembling, who knows beyond all doubt that he will not win the maiden of his dreams, yet continues on as though he will. It is Abraham who despairs of all hope as he prepares his most beloved son Isaac for the slaughter.

Another detail in Durer’s engraving is noteworthy. Scurrying between the horse’s hooves is a lizard-like creature (Slide 119d):
.
What the creature is may be seen if we compare it with alchemical engravings. It is a salamander, who was said to thrive on fire (Slide 121, Emblem 11 of “Lambsprinck,” De lapide philosophico, 1625) and emerge stronger than before.

My speculation is that the alchemists chose the salamander because in Latin the first three letters of its name, Salamandra, are the same as the word for salt, “sal.” This word “sal” is also one letter away from the word for the sun, “sol.” The alchemists observed that heating a salt, e.g. iron sulfate, released its sulphur, also called “the sun within the earth,” for useful purposes as well as purifying its metal, e.g. iron. Thus while the salt, the salamander, dies, its blood, sulphur in solution, remains, the text accompanying the emblem relates. And its blood gives it immortal life. It also “drives away all disease in the bodies of metals, of men, and of beasts” (“Lambsprinck,” as quoted from http://www.levity.com/alchemy/lambtext.html). The analogy with Christ is plain enough. However the salamander is going the other way. There is no healing for him, and perhaps no immortality. It is the same for Hamlet as he sails for England with the two spies, Rosenkranz and Guildenstern, for company.

Image sources, Delay and Confrontation.
105. (a) www.english.emory.edu/classes/Shakespeare_Illustrated/dh.html. (b) Forbes-Robertson, I can't locate source.
106. http://arlenestage.homestead.com/JacobiHamlet.html.
107. http://arlenestage.homestead.com/JacobiHamlet.html.
108. www.aperfectworld.org/cartoons/hamlet.gif.
109. (a) Wind, Pagan Mysteries of the Renaissance, Plate 52. (b) Wind, Plate 54.
110. Wind, Plate 53.
111. www.artcyclopedia.com/images/Pallas-and-the-Centaur.jpg.
112. http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/giorgio.vasari/titian/titian12.jpg.
113. http://cgfa.sunsite.dk/titian/titian31.jpg.
114. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Harold_Copping-_Hamlet_PlayScene_1897.jpg.
115. Innes, The Tarot, p. 53.
116. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Claudius_at_Prayer_Hamlet_3-3_Delacroix_1844.JPG.
117. http://arlenestage.homestead.com/JacobiHamlet.html.
118. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Frans_Hals,_Young_Man_with_a_Skull_(Vanitas).JPG.
119a-d. http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Sparta/5414/diable.jpg.
120. Durer, Complete Engravings, Etching, Woodblocks, and Drawings, p. 72.
121. de Rola, The Golden Game, 194.