Hamlet: The Resolved Prince

The torments of conscience, the fear of death, the paralysis of resolution and the terrible consequences of treachery: Shakespeare’s Hamlet enters a world already explored in remarkable detail by Lewes Lewkenor.

The stings and terrors of a guilty conscience

One of the most arresting passages in Lewkenor’s Estate of English Fugitives (1595) concerns the renegade soldier William Pigot.

Pigot had betrayed his country and his former military loyalties in the hope of obtaining advancement and financial reward from Spain. His expectations were disappointed. Returning from Spain, he found himself tormented by guilt and deprived of the rewards for which he had sacrificed his honour.
Lewkenor describes his condition:

In the mean time, Pigot’s heart being stricken dead with the coldness of the entertainment he had in Spain, and now returning homewards, on the one side quite frustrated of all his expectations and hopes, and on the other side pursued with the stings and terrors of a guilty conscience, yet cheered up himself with thinking on the comfort of his wife’s youth and affections, and withal of the money that he had left in her keeping.

Lewes Lewkenor, The Estate of English Fugitives (1595), account of Pigot; spelling modernised.

Pigot is pursued by the stings and terrors of conscience. His heart is stricken dead. His hopes are destroyed. He looks towards his wife for consolation, only to discover that she too has betrayed him.
Lewkenor continues that Pigot found:

his lodgings ransacked, his coffers empty, and himself at once overwhelmed with such a heap of scorn and misery

The soldier who had betrayed his country discovers that he has been betrayed in his own household.
Lewkenor writes that Pigot had:

sold his loyalty to his prince and country, his faith to his colonel … and finally his own person, as likewise he would have done his soul, if he could have found a Chapman.

“But being upon his return to Tournai encountered with the news of his wife’s disloyalty, and withal, which grieved him most, finding his lodgings ransacked, his coffers empty, and himself at once overwhelmed with such a heap of scorn and misery, I leave you to imagine the patience and quietness wherewith his mind entertained these tidings, being (as before I told you) one that merely for money (as for religion he knew not what it meant) had sold his loyalty to his prince and country, his faith to his colonel, to whom in so many duties he was tied, and finally his own person, as likewise he would have done his soul, if he could have found a chapman.”

Lewkenor, The Estate of English Fugitives, Pigot’s return to Tournai; spelling modernised. A “chapman” is a buyer or merchant.

The passage moves through conscience, despair, the contemplation of death and the possibility of renewed action. It offers an extraordinary introduction to the moral and psychological world of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Lewkenor in full flight

The importance of Pigot’s story becomes clearer when Lewkenor is allowed to speak at greater length:

Sure I am, that if by the body’s gestures a man may judge of the mind’s unquiet perturbations, there was never any wretch more violently overthrown with the extremity of an inward affliction and despair; yet did he not for all this wholly forsake and abandon himself, but rather determined to turn, as the proverb is, every stone, and to attempt fortune once anew, thereby either to redress the miseries of his estate, or at the least, if the worst should fall, to end his life.

Here Lewkenor assembles a concentration of language and ideas: guilty conscience, inward affliction and despair, Fortune, the possibility of ending life and the determination to act.
He then describes Pigot’s final decision:

resolved himself by a new treachery to amend his old, and withal his fortune, if it were possible

The Estate of English Fugitives, account of Pigot.

The attempt to escape the consequences of one crime leads directly towards another. Shakespeare explores this pattern through Claudius, whose original murder generates further deception and another attempt at murder.

To be, or not to be

Hamlet’s most celebrated soliloquy begins:

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.

Hamlet, Act III, scene i.

The resemblance between Hamlet’s slings and arrows and Lewkenor’s stings and terrors is immediately striking. But the comparison extends beyond those phrases.
Lewkenor’s account of Pigot, read alongside The Resolved Gentleman (1594), contains a sequence of ideas that follows the movement of Hamlet’s soliloquy.
Both writers begin with suffering and the endurance of misfortune. Both invoke Fortune as a power capable of overwhelming human ambition. Both describe the miseries of life and the possibility of ending them through death.
Both turn towards the fear of what follows death, place conscience at the centre of the problem and arrive at the question of resolution: whether thought will produce action or prevent it.

The sea of miseries

Hamlet speaks of taking arms against:

a sea of troubles

Lewkenor employs the corresponding image:

sea of miseries

“So that the chiefest labour must be, to win the steadfast favour of one of these great men: which whoso undertaketh, good God, with what a sea of miseries shall he find himself environed. For though he miss the almost inevitable danger of factions and partialities, wherein many have made shipwreck of their estate, in being by the one sharply persecuted, and by the other but weakly defended: yet such is the number of malicious parasites, that wait upon the fortune of great Lords; such the multitude of flatterers, deceivers, supplanters, underminers, espials, and such like vermin, that attend upon their court and table, all covering their villainous pretences, under the mask of virtue, fidelity, and officious duty.”

Lewkenor, The Resolved Gentleman (1594), prefatory address; excerpt ending within the sentence, spelling modernised.

The metaphor belongs to a body of writing in which human life becomes a dangerous voyage through uncertainty and misfortune.
In The Resolved Gentleman, the traveller confronts the inevitability of death and the limits of worldly ambition. The journey becomes a moral education in the instability of Fortune.
Hamlet’s soliloquy likewise imagines existence as an overwhelming accumulation of troubles against which the individual struggles.

Scorn and contumely

Hamlet asks who would endure:

the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely

Lewkenor writes of one who:

can indure an usage so scornful and contumelious

Both passages concern the endurance of humiliation and injury. Shakespeare’s scorns stand beside Lewkenor’s scornful; contumely corresponds to contumelious.
The words occur within closely related arguments about suffering and the limits of human patience.

Who would fardels bear?

Hamlet continues:

Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life

The word fardel means a bundle or burden. Lewkenor describes men travelling:

with their fardles upon their necks

Elsewhere in The Estate of English Fugitives, he tells the comic story of an English Catholic who travelled to Jerusalem and returned carrying candles and earth from the Mount of Olives upon his back.
In both writers the burden is physical as well as metaphorical. Hamlet imagines the individual carrying the accumulated weight of existence; Lewkenor’s travellers carry their burdens across Europe.
The image connects bodily hardship with the larger moral weight of human experience.

The undiscovered country

Hamlet turns towards the terror of death:

the dread of something after death,
The undiscover’d country from whose bourn
No traveller returns

The governing subject of Lewkenor’s Resolved Gentleman is the journey towards mortality. He describes death as:

the exceeding dangerous horror of an inevitable passage

Elsewhere he calls it:

this deadly point and sorrowful passage

Human life becomes a journey whose final destination cannot be avoided. Shakespeare gives that moral journey the image of an undiscovered country.
The traveller who has crossed seas, mountains and kingdoms must finally confront the frontier of death and the uncertainty of what follows it.

Conscience and resolution

Hamlet’s soliloquy reaches its conclusion:

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.

Resolution is the governing theme of The Resolved Gentleman. Lewkenor counsels:

a magnanimous resolution, to die constantly, and with patience

His traveller becomes:

resolved to prove the unavoidable adventure, let life or death ensue

Understanding warns:

I wish you not to be unresolute, or long in preparing.

The relationship is particularly revealing. Lewkenor asks how contemplation of death can produce the courage necessary to act. Hamlet asks why contemplation of death destroys that courage.
In The Resolved Gentleman, knowledge of mortality should produce resolution. In Hamlet’s soliloquy, consciousness of mortality produces hesitation. The opposition is almost exact.

The conscience of the king

The comparison extends beyond the soliloquy. Lewkenor writes that Pigot’s inward torment could be recognised through outward behaviour:

if by the body’s gestures a man may judge of the mind’s unquiet perturbations

Hamlet turns that proposition into a theatrical experiment. He arranges a performance depicting a murder resembling the killing of his father and intends to watch Claudius:

I’ll observe his looks;
I’ll tent him to the quick.

He concludes:

The play’s the thing
Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.

Hamlet, Act II, scene ii.

Hidden crime produces guilty conscience; conscience produces inward disturbance; disturbance becomes visible through gesture. An observer reads the body and infers concealed guilt.
When Claudius rises from the performance and calls for light, Hamlet believes that his experiment has succeeded.

Crime breeds further crime

Lewkenor’s Pigot responds to his ruined fortunes by attempting another act of treachery. Claudius follows a similar course.

His attempt at prayer reveals that he cannot surrender the rewards of his original crime:

My crown, mine own ambition, and my queen.

Hamlet, Act III, scene iii.

Rather than abandon them, he arranges for Hamlet to be sent to England with instructions for his execution. The old crime generates a new murderous design.
In both narratives, recognition of wrongdoing fails to bring repentance. The guilty man attempts to escape the consequences of his conduct through further wrongdoing.
The decisive question is whether he possesses the resolution to abandon the rewards of crime.

Cain: the first murderer

The murder of a brother lies at the centre of Hamlet. Claudius has killed King Hamlet and seized his crown and queen.

When he attempts to pray, he recognises the biblical nature of his crime:

O, my offence is rank, it smells to heaven;
It hath the primal eldest curse upon’t,
A brother’s murder.

Hamlet, Act III, scene iii.

In the historical examples appended to The Resolved Gentleman, Lewkenor begins with Cain, describing how envy led him to murder Abel. Cain:

was the first that embrewed his hands with human blood

Cain stands at the beginning of Lewkenor’s account of human violence, ambition and wrongdoing. Shakespeare gives the same biblical crime a central position in the tragedy.
The association returns in the graveyard, where Hamlet imagines:

Cain’s jawbone, that did the first murder!

Hamlet, Act V, scene i.

Cain connects the torment of guilty conscience with the universal destiny of the grave.

The Universal Sepulchre of mankind

One of the most extraordinary passages in The Resolved Gentleman describes a visit to an immense burial ground. Memory conducts the traveller into:

a great immense and spacious plain, called the Universal Sepulchre of mankind

“Memory, having with attention heard my speeches: I will not, said she smilingly, entertain you with long discourses, but giving you the best advice I may, let you with your eyes behold the certain event of this most dangerous enterprise, in which you are engaged. And opening therewith a postern gate, she placed me in a great immense and spacious plain, called the Universal Sepulchre of mankind, open and discovered on every side, without either rock or mountain, so that there was no limit nor restraint to the eye, but that it might boldly and frankly throw his view so far, as the sharpness thereof could pierce or discern: and as the plain was infinite, so was the number of graves and monuments.”

Lewkenor, The Resolved Gentleman, Memory’s account of the burial ground; spelling modernised.

The remains of humanity lie together, stripped of the distinctions that governed life. Lewkenor assembles a catalogue of social opposites:

Popes and parish Clarkes, Cardinals and Carters, Bishops and Beggars

He continues:

Emperors and slaves, Kings and Ploughmen, Lords and vagabonds

Every degree of society appears, from the highest religious and political authorities to the poorest labourers. Death has destroyed the distinctions of wealth, office and rank.
People who would never have regarded themselves as equals in life can no longer be distinguished.

One skull cannot be known from another

Lewkenor describes the bones lying together:

Their bones, being confusedly put together, of such likeness, that one was not to be known from another.

“There were Popes and parish Clerks, Cardinals and Carters, Bishops and Beggars, Patriarchs and Pedlars, though before time in degree unequal, yet now to the worms alike, who found no difference in their flesh. Their bones, being confusedly put together, of such likeness, that one was not to be known from another. Emperors and slaves, Kings and Ploughmen, Lords and vagabonds, Law-givers and Louts, were there all under Death’s clapnet. None of them escaped, nor ever shall thence bring news to the world, of the good or evil entertainment he there received. Retired Virgins, new professed Nuns, and aged Abbesses, virtuous Matrons, and wanton Courtesans, all had there yielded up their lives to Death’s commandment.”

Lewkenor, The Resolved Gentleman, Universal Sepulchre passage; spelling modernised, marginal notes omitted.

That sentence provides a remarkable introduction to Shakespeare’s graveyard. The gravedigger throws skulls from the earth while singing, apparently indifferent to the identities of the dead.
Hamlet attempts to recover those identities through imagination:

Why may not that be the skull of a lawyer?

He imagines the man’s arguments, accomplishments and ownership of property, then asks what has become of them.
Another skull might have belonged to a courtier, a politician or a landowner. Their former identities have vanished.
Lewkenor states that one set of bones cannot be known from another. Shakespeare makes Hamlet attempt precisely that task: recovering the distinctions death has erased.

Great folk and ordinary Christians

Before Hamlet enters, the gravediggers discuss whether Ophelia should receive Christian burial. One remarks:

Will you ha’ the truth on’t? If this had not been a gentlewoman, she should have been buried out o’ Christian burial.

The gravedigger answers:

And the more pity that great folk should have countenance in this world to drown or hang themselves more than their even-Christian.

Hamlet, Act V, scene i. Read the scene.

The exchange exposes privilege operating even in death. The rules applied to ordinary people are not always applied to the aristocracy.
Lewkenor’s Universal Sepulchre presents the equality of the physical remains: popes beside parish clerks, cardinals beside carters, emperors beside slaves.
Shakespeare places the two ideas in dramatic tension. Burial customs preserve rank while the contents of the grave erase it.

The peasant and the courtier

Hamlet remarks:

The toe of the peasant comes so near the heel of the courtier, he galls his kibe.

The image compresses the distance between high and low until the peasant physically treads upon the courtier.
Lewkenor’s catalogue performs the same operation through social opposites: emperors and slaves, kings and ploughmen, lords and vagabonds.
The gravedigger accomplishes that levelling through labour. His spade makes no distinction between the bones of a prince and those of a beggar.

Sceptres and mattocks

Lewkenor condenses the meditation into a maxim:

Death, enemy to nature, equalleth sceptres with mattocks, and king with beggars.

The sceptre represents royal authority; the mattock is a labourer’s tool. The contrast belongs to the older literature of mortality, and Lewkenor develops it through his Universal Sepulchre.
In Shakespeare’s graveyard, the implement becomes part of the stage action. A prince stands beside a working gravedigger as the earth yields the remains of those who once occupied every station in society.
The moral image becomes an encounter between living characters, tools and human remains.

Alexander the Great

Hamlet’s reflections move from anonymous skulls to the greatest figures of classical history. He asks Horatio:

Dost thou think Alexander looked o’ this fashion i’ the earth?

Horatio answers that he did. Hamlet imagines Alexander’s body decaying into dust and becoming clay. The conqueror is reduced to the same material as every other person.
Alexander is among the historical examples through which Lewkenor examines Fortune, ambition and mortality in The Resolved Gentleman. His victories cannot preserve him from death.
In both works, the scale of Alexander’s achievement makes his physical end more striking.

Imperious Caesar

Hamlet continues with Julius Caesar:

Imperious Caesar, dead and turn’d to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.

The ruler whose power transformed Rome may serve as common building material. Military conquest and historical fame cannot alter the body’s fate.
Caesar also occupies an important place in Lewkenor’s historical material. The Resolved Gentleman recounts his career, assassination and the consequences of his death.
Alexander and Caesar complete a shared movement: social identities are enumerated, high and low are juxtaposed, human remains become indistinguishable and the greatest conquerors are reduced to common matter.

Yorick and the vanished personality

Yorick’s skull gives Hamlet’s reflections a personal dimension. The earlier skulls belonged to imagined lawyers, courtiers and politicians; Yorick was a man he knew.

Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy.

Hamlet recalls being carried on Yorick’s back and remembers the lips that once entertained the court with laughter. The familiar face has become a skull.
The Universal Sepulchre presents humanity collectively. Shakespeare gives the lesson intimate force through the memory of one person.
Yorick represents a vanished human relationship as well as the certainty of death.

From the graveyard to Providence

The graveyard brings Hamlet face to face with the physical certainty of death. Earlier he feared the undiscovered country; now he handles human remains and contemplates the reduction of great men to dust.

His final resolution will come through accepting mortality. This is also the lesson of The Resolved Gentleman: the traveller must confront death without surrendering to despair.
The graveyard prepares Hamlet for the understanding he reaches before the duel.

Unwitting couriers

One of the most extraordinary episodes in Hamlet concerns a royal letter carrying a sentence of death.

Claudius sends Hamlet to England with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. They carry a sealed commission instructing the English authorities to execute the prince.
During the voyage Hamlet discovers the commission, opens it and reads its contents. He writes a replacement ordering the deaths of its bearers, seals it with his father’s signet and returns it to the unsuspecting couriers.
The two men deliver the instrument of their own destruction.
The fate of three people depends upon the interception, alteration and authentication of a written command. Documentary procedure becomes dramatic action; a letter becomes a weapon.

Samuel Lewkenor and the Hesketh affair

The political world of Lewes Lewkenor and his brother Samuel supplies a historical context for the lethal document.

In 1593 Richard Hesketh approached Ferdinando Stanley, fifth Earl of Derby, commonly known as Lord Strange, with a proposal concerning his claim to the English throne.
The affair involved Catholic exiles, political agents and correspondence moving between England and the Continent. Hesketh’s activities attracted the attention of the intelligence authorities and ended with his execution.
Samuel Lewkenor appears in the correspondence surrounding Hesketh’s papers. A contemporary report identifies “one Mr. Samuel Lukenor, a very proper gentleman” and describes him as “an Essex man”. His presence places Lewes’s brother within the intelligence environment of the affair.
The family connection places the investigation within a political world where messengers, letters and apparently authentic instructions could determine whether a man lived or died.
Shakespeare gives that machinery its dramatic reversal in Hamlet’s journey to England.

Lord Strange and the players

Ferdinando Stanley was also patron of Lord Strange’s Men, one of the leading theatrical companies of the early 1590s.

Its players and repertory belonged to the theatrical environment from which Shakespeare’s later company emerged.
The Hesketh affair brings political succession and intelligence operations into the history of a nobleman whose patronage was central to the professional theatre.
Samuel’s intelligence work supplies one route into that history; Strange’s players supply another. In Hamlet, the players themselves become instruments for exposing concealed political crime.

The letters of Mary Queen of Scots

Elizabethan intelligence provides another comparison. In 1586 Mary Queen of Scots was implicated in the Babington conspiracy, which sought Elizabeth’s removal and Mary’s accession.

The conspirators used a clandestine correspondence carried through a beer-barrel channel. Elizabeth’s intelligence officers had compromised it.
Messages were intercepted, deciphered and copied, then allowed to continue so that the writers believed their communications remained secure.
Mary’s correspondence became central to the evidence against her. Her trial was followed by her execution in February 1587.

The beer barrel and the graveyard

The comparison becomes especially suggestive when the final acts are read in sequence.

In the graveyard Hamlet imagines Alexander’s dust serving to:

stop a beer-barrel

In the following scene he recounts the interception and replacement of the commission ordering his death.
The two scenes bring a beer barrel into proximity with the manipulation of a fatal document. The operation against Mary had joined those objects and procedures in contemporary political history.
The graveyard image works as a meditation upon mortality. Its conjunction with intercepted, rewritten and resealed correspondence supplies a further point for comparison within the political history surrounding the Lewkenor family.

Letters that kill

In the Babington correspondence and Hamlet’s English commission, control of a document depends upon concealing the intervention from those using the channel.

The letter must appear authentic. Its seal must be accepted. Its carriers must remain unaware that its contents have been examined or altered.
In the play, the receiving authority treats the substituted document as a legitimate royal command. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern become unwitting couriers of their own death warrants.
Hamlet has learned to act within the political machinery surrounding him. He reads the threat, produces a substitute and turns the forms of royal authority against Claudius’s design.

Not near my conscience

When Hamlet explains the deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to Horatio, he declares:

They are not near my conscience.

Hamlet, Act V, scene ii.

Earlier, conscience inhibited action. Now Hamlet has arranged two deaths and dismisses responsibility for their fate.
He argues that the courtiers willingly placed themselves between powerful adversaries by becoming instruments of Claudius’s design.
The prince who feared that conscience made cowards of everyone has become capable of immediate and lethal action.

Argall: marriage, bereavement and the graveyard

The gravedigger’s comic reasoning offers a further verbal connection with Lewkenor’s family. The first quarto of 1603 uses “Ergo”; the second quarto, dated 1604 in some copies and 1605 in others, gives the form “argall”.

“For here lies the point: if I drown myself wittingly, it argues an act, and an act hath three branches—it is to act, to do, to perform. Argal, she drowned herself wittingly.”

Hamlet, V.i; spelling and punctuation modernised.

“Argal” comically distorts the Latin ergo, meaning “therefore”. The surname Argall also entered Lewkenor’s immediate household when he married Katherine Bocking, widow of Thomas Argall, in June 1605.

That marriage followed the death of Beatrice de Rota. Lewkenor’s letter to Robert Kyrton preserves his grief:

“Good Mr Kyrton, I have endured many sharp strokes of affliction since I saw you last, never since that time in manner stirring from the bedside of my dearest wife, who, having long languished in the great extremity of utmost painful sickness, is now called to God this last Monday, released from the woeful sadness of this false world and assumed into the blessed society of his holy angels.”

Lewkenor to Robert Kyrton, “From my sorrowful house in Red Church Street”, 13 March 1604/5; spelling and punctuation modernised. In modern year numbering, the date is March 1605.

Katherine herself died later that year. John Chamberlain reported:

“Sir Lewes Lewkenor hath buried his new young lady that was Argalle’s widow … and Sir Francis Manners his Lady Bevill, both of the small pox, which hath reigned and raged here this summer exceedingly.”

John Chamberlain to Ralph Winwood, September 1605; spelling modernised, omission marked.

The surname gives the proposed allusion its biographical interest, while the gravedigger’s subject brings law, death and burial together. The publication chronology matters: Katherine’s September 1605 death cannot simply be assumed to have caused a reading already associated with the 1604–05 quarto. Her death was attributed to smallpox; the drowning belongs to Ophelia’s story.

Explore Lewkenor’s family circle →

The anonymous History of Hamblet

The anonymous English Hystory of Hamblet, published in 1608, derives from François de Belleforest’s account of the Danish prince.

The English translator employs a language of worldly instability, suffering and human frailty. The opening refers to:

the vain and frail pleasures of this world

Lewkenor’s Resolved Gentleman had described:

the vain and deceitful instability of this most wretched and miserable world

The paired adjectives and expanded moral abstractions resemble a characteristic habit of Lewkenor’s prose.
The attribution question is whether the anonymous translator’s independent additions repeatedly exhibit those habits. Since the surviving English translation appeared after Shakespeare’s play, its chronology must form part of that comparison.
The passage supplies another point of contact between the older Hamlet narrative and the language of Fortune, mortality and resolution.

Divine Providence and readiness

The final movement returns to the philosophical problem with which the investigation began.

In The Resolved Gentleman, whether a man will be granted time to prepare for death:

only knoweth the Divine providence

Understanding warns against remaining:

unresolute, or long in preparing

Death may come so suddenly that preparation is impossible. Lewkenor concludes:

The best therefore is to have a watchful eye, and to be ever redy.

Before the final duel, Hamlet answers Horatio’s concern:

There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.

He continues:

If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all.

Hamlet, Act V, scene ii.

The reasoning is closely related. Divine Providence governs the unknowable hour; death may arrive suddenly; preparation must not be delayed.
Hamlet relinquishes the demand for certainty. Readiness becomes his answer to what lies beyond human control.

The traveller asks Understanding how he should prepare for his final combat. The reply makes preparation urgent because the time of death cannot be known:

“Yet because there must be a preparation; and meanwhile, between this and the time of my Combat, I pray you tell me how I should behave and exercise myself, to be the better able to withstand the dreadful approach of my Death-bringing enemy.”

“Nay, quoth he, whether there shall be any meanwhile, or time of preparation given you, that only knoweth the Divine providence: for, you may chance to be summoned, even while you are now speaking. Therefore, I wish you not to be unresolute, or long in preparing, but to put yourself presently in readiness, seeing the thing, that by delay you do put in hazard, is no less than the eternal weal, or woe of your soul: which is, either to be glorified with blissful and ever-during joys, or else to be condemned to the rageful never-ceasing torments of hell fire.”

“Woe be unto them, that making hereof but a scoff and jest, do hazard so great a treasure as their soul, upon so hard a jump, as to delay preparation in so important a matter, especially the time and suddenness thereof being so uncertain.”

Lewkenor, The Resolved Gentleman (1594), Understanding’s counsel before the combat; spelling and punctuation modernised.

The advice proceeds from the uncertainty of the hour to the necessity of immediate readiness. Hamlet’s answer to Horatio before the final duel turns upon the same questions of Providence, timing and preparation:

“There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all.”

Hamlet, V.ii.

Hamlet relinquishes the demand for certainty. In Lewkenor’s moral allegory, readiness concerns the eternal fate of the soul; in the tragedy, Hamlet accepts the uncertain hour before entering the duel. The comparison is clearest when the reasoning is read in full.

The Resolved Prince

Lewkenor’s title supplies an unexpectedly appropriate description of Hamlet’s development.

The Resolved Gentleman follows a traveller learning to confront death. Its purpose is to turn fear and uncertainty towards resolution.
Hamlet begins unable to reconcile himself to life, death or action. Thought overwhelms his capacity to act; conscience weakens resolution; the undiscovered country makes death terrifying.
He learns to recognise concealed intentions, test guilty conscience, act upon a dangerous document and confront the physical reality of mortality.
Finally, he accepts the uncertainty of the hour. Providence determines when; readiness is all.
Lewkenor’s traveller becomes:

resolved to prove the unavoidable adventure, let life or death ensue

The irresolute prince has reached the condition sought by the Resolved Gentleman.

The cumulative Hamlet case

The investigation follows a sequence extending beyond individual verbal parallels.

Suffering becomes physical assault. Conscience becomes torment. Hidden guilt betrays itself through bodily disturbance. One crime generates another. The grave destroys social identity. Thought weakens resolution, while Providence and readiness finally answer uncertainty.
The Resolved Gentleman gives these questions the form of moral allegory. The Estate of English Fugitives gives them the form of political biography. Hamlet gives them the form of tragedy.
Alongside those comparisons stands the historical world of the Lewkenor family: intelligence operations, intercepted correspondence, succession conspiracies, dangerous messengers and the professional theatre.
Together these strands connect the play’s language and dramatic action with Lewkenor’s published writing and the political circumstances of his family.

Continue:
Measure for Measure — Vienna and the Administration of Justice →

Sources and Further Reading

Sources and Further Reading

Expanded passages checked against the EEBO–TCP transcriptions: The Resolved Gentleman, A04989 and The Estate of English Fugitives, A05412. Spelling and punctuation modernised; marginal notes omitted from running prose.

Lewes Lewkenor, The Resolved Gentleman (1594), including the historical examples, Universal Sepulchre, Divine Providence and counsel concerning readiness. Quotations are given with spelling modernised.

Lewes Lewkenor, The Estate of English Fugitives (1595), including Pigot’s story, guilty conscience, the travellers’ burdens and the account of the traveller returning from Jerusalem.

Correspondence and intelligence papers concerning Richard Hesketh, Samuel Lewkenor and Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange.

The Babington correspondence and the intercepted letters of Mary Queen of Scots, 1586.

François de Belleforest, the history of Amleth; the anonymous English Hystory of Hamblet (1608).

William Shakespeare, Hamlet, particularly Acts II–V and the quarto variants of the graveyard scene. Read Hamlet at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

William Corbett, The Master of the Ceremonies, 18 October 2026, chapter “Hamlet: The Resolved Prince”.

Illustrations: the second quarto title page; The Estate of English Fugitives title page; Albrecht Dürer, Knight, Death, and the Devil; the play scene after Daniel Maclise; Eugène Delacroix, Hamlet and Horatio in the Graveyard; Nicholas Hilliard’s miniature of Mary Queen of Scots. Individual image records are linked in the captions.

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