A 'Sea of Troubles' and a 'Pilgrimage Uncertain' / Dial Of Princes as the Source for Hamlet's Soliloquy

Abstract

SCHOLARS have known since the nineteenth century that William Shakespeare often made free use of the images and phrases found in Thomas North's translation of Plutarch's Lives. As George Wyndham wrote in the preface to North's magnum opus: ‘Shakespeare … not only copies North's picture, he also uses North's palette.’1 Wyndham then showed that many passages, like Shakespeare's description of Cleopatra's voyage up the Cydnus and Volumnia's climactic speech to Coriolanus, overflow with phrases taken directly from Plutarch's Lives. Shakespeare also appears to have studied North's translation of Dial of Princes (1557) by Antonio de Guevara and turned to its speculations on death when penning Hamlet's famous soliloquy. Chapters XLVIII–LII and LVII of Dial of Princes devote themselves almost exclusively to meditations on mortality, but the most relevant passages are: (i) the successive discussions of death by Secundus and Seneca (chapter XLVII); (ii) Panutius's oration to the dying Marcus Aurelius (chapters L, LI); and (iii) Aurelius's response to these mortal reflections just before he died (chapter LVII). Scholars who peruse these sections will not only find precisely the same philosophical viewpoint as that expressed by Hamlet, they are likely to read many comments that seem eerily familiar. For example, in chapter XLVII, Secundus refers to death as a ‘kind of sleeping …, a pilgrimage uncertain’ and, in the next paragraph, Seneca observes, ‘for of all those which are dead none returned.’2 This is reminiscent of Hamlet's notable description of death as a kind of sleeping and an ‘undiscover’d country, from whose bourn / No traveler returns (3.1.79–80).3 Similarly, while Panutius, in chapter LI, describes death as way to escape ‘the assaults of life and broils of fortune’,4 Hamlet, of course, refers to it as a way to escape ‘the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’. Dial of Princes also includes the phrases ‘sea of troubles’, ‘of so long life’, and, in one sentence, places forms of the words sleep, perchance, and dream in proximity. The following table provides a list of a few of the resemblances between the soliloquy and Dial of Princes (emphasis occasionally added):