ABSTRACT
Let’s start at the ending. Having avenged his father’s death, bid farewell to his dying mother, exchanged mutual pardons with his rival Laertes, and acknowledged the dumbstruck members of the Danish court that have witnessed this grim sequence of slaughter, Hamlet finally turns towards his companion Horatio – not to bid him farewell, but to command him to a funeral duty: ‘Horatio, I am dead, / Thou livest. Report me and my cause aright / To the unsatisfied’ (5.2. 320-22).1 With the courtier’s cries of ‘Treason!’ still ringing in the hall, Hamlet here summons his remaining strength with an eye to his position in posterity, taking pains to secure the correct transmission of his motive in killing Claudius; knowledge of Claudius’s guilt will excuse Hamlet’s act, and posthumously transform his apparent treason into patriotic heroism and filial duty. Shockingly, Horatio refuses his dying wish:
Horatio. Never believe it; I am more an antique Roman than a Dane. Here’s yet some liquor left. (5.2. 321-3)
What ensues is a violent struggle for the remaining cup of poison, with Hamlet angrily rejecting his friend’s pledge: ‘As th’art a man, / Give me the cup. Let go! By heaven, I’ll ha’t!’ (5.2. 324-5). Having forbidden this suicide attempt, Hamlet renews his command that Horatio live on to transmit his story and protect his name from the wounding accusation of treason. What does this remark ‘I am more an antique Roman than a Dane’ mean, exactly? As an assertion of crossidentification, what model of Romanness does it presume to be already familiar to the play’s English audience? I would like to provide an exploded view of the tensions, and pretensions, which Horatio’s temporary assertion of Roman status, and Hamlet’s responding confirmation of Horatio’s masculinity, together bring into view. My gambit is that in this single line, Shakespeare seems to crystallize early
modern attitudes about the exemplary masculinity of patrician Roman self-killing, and, furthermore, by placing this assertion in the mouth of the ‘scholar’ Horatio, Shakespeare here neatly flags early modern English literary culture’s anxious, over-determined relationship to the exemplarity of Senecan tragedy and Stoic philosophical discourse. Going beyond mere citation, by following the assertion of a suicidal, patrician ‘Romanness’ with a counter-assertion of a stable masculinity constituted through patience, survival, and endurance, Hamlet’s reaction to Horatio marks a Christian response to the challenge of classical exemplarity at a uniquely important pivot point in the tragic structure of the play as a whole.2
