Captain Jack Sparrow and Prince Hamlet, two pirates of note

Not a whit, we defy augury; 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. Since no man knows aught of what he leaves,

what is't to leave betimes? Let be.

Of all the people on the ship bound for England, only Hamlet is taken prisoner by the pirates.

He promises to do a good turn for the pirates in return for them sending some letters from him to

King Claudius. They deliver the letters via Horatio and one, the one to the King, is read aloud. It

is a threatening letter (“you shall know I am set naked on your kingdom”) with a mocking tone

and addressed sarcastically to “high and mighty” King Claudius:

Messenger. Letters, my lord, from Hamlet:

This to your Majesty; this to the Queen.

Claudius. From Hamlet? Who brought them?

Messenger. Sailors, my lord, they say; I saw them not.

They were given me by Claudio; he receiv'd them

Of him that brought them.

Claudius. Laertes, you shall hear them.

Leave us.

[Exit Messenger.]

[Reads]'High and Mighty,-You shall know I am set naked on your

kingdom. To-morrow shall I beg leave to see your kingly eyes;

when I shall (first asking your pardon thereunto) recount the

occasion of my sudden and more strange return. 'HAMLET.'

What should this mean? Are all the rest come back?

Or is it some abuse, and no such thing?

Laertes: Know you the hand?

Claudius: 'Tis Hamlet's character. 'Naked!'

And in a postscript here, he says 'alone.'

Can you advise me?

Laertes: I am lost in it, my lord. But let him come!

It warms the very sickness in my heart

That I shall live and tell him to his teeth,

'Thus didest thou.' (IV.vii.37-57)

The king is naturally dismayed by this letter and very soon devises a plot to kill Hamlet.

Moreover, Hamlet’s intentions with his letter, the open announcement of hostilities after long,

careful and studied hiding of his real feelings, may be compared to the way that pirates, using the

ruse de guerre, often only hoisted their true colors, the pirate flag, after approaching the prey

with false colors hoisted1

How has Hamlet now achieved the bravery and courage to announce his intentions to attack

his enemy? One motivation may clearly be, of course, that he has recently learned that King

Claudius had secretly ordered his execution through letters sent with Rosencrantz and

Guildenstern, who were accompanying him. But a second motivation may be that he has been

inspired by his recent association with real pirates. For the very day after he learned of Claudius’

plan to kill him, the ship Hamlet was traveling on was attacked by pirates. The audience does not

see the action directly but learns of it in a letter from Hamlet to Horatio:

[reads the letter] 'Horatio, when thou shalt have overlook'd

this, give these fellows some means to the King. They have

letters for him. Ere we were two days old at sea, a pirate of

very warlike appointment gave us chase. Finding ourselves too

slow of sail, we put on a compelled valour, and in the grapple I

boarded them. On the instant they got clear of our ship; so I

alone became their prisoner. They have dealt with me like thieves

1 Sometimes, pirates used the ruse de guerre to trick victims into allowing the pirate

ship to come so close to the prey that she could not successfully defend herself once the

pirates revealed their true colors. They hoisted the same nation’s flag, or that of an ally,

as the prey. Le Sieur du Chastelet des Boys, a traveler aboard a Dutch ship in the 1600s,

found himself in the midst of an attack by Barbary corsairs. When he sighted six Dutch

ships coming to the rescue, his relief was immeasurable until “the Dutch flags

disappeared and the masts and poop were simultaneously shaded by flags of taffeta of

all colors, enriched and embroidered with stars, crescents, suns, crossed swords and

other devices.” (Pirates, 87) Konstam, Angus. Pirates 1660-1730. Oxford: Osprey, 1998.

http://www.cindyvallar.com/tactics.html (accessed November 23, 2014).

of mercy; but they knew what they did: I am to do a good turn for

them. Let the King have the letters I have sent, and repair thou

to me with as much speed as thou wouldst fly death. I have words

to speak in thine ear will make thee dumb; yet are they much too

light for the bore of the matter. These good fellows will bring

thee where I am. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern hold their course

for England. Of them I have much to tell thee. Farewell.

'He that thou knowest thine, HAMLET.'

Come, I will give you way for these your letters,

And do't the speedier that you may direct me

To him from whom you brought them. Exeunt. (IV.vi.13-30)

“T’is Hamlet’s character”, says Claudius, and though he may be referring to handwriting

(“know you the hand?” asks Laertes), there is another meaning too: this is the real Hamlet and

moreover, this is the real Shakespeare, whose secret artistic life as a fighter against fossil fuels

and the damage they would do, the damage they were already doing to England in the 1600s,

was chronicled in this autobiographical play.2

The romantic and swashbuckling story is strange indeed, but it needs to be told, and it starts

with the sequence in Romeo and Juliet, where Romeo and Juliet, when they are together,

illustrate, in their solitary scenes isolated from interaction with other characters, the history of

mankind’s interaction with the sun as an energy source and more than that, with the sun as a

religious or sacred object. It is all part of Shakespeare’s desire to be closer, in his art, to nature,

as close as he could be, to approach the Divine Truth as Giordano Bruno, his hero, described

Actaeon approaching the naked Diana bathing in the forest stream in Gli Eroici Furori. Coal and

mankind were and are simply part of nature, and they concerned Shakespeare from a social and

environmental point of view.

Claudius, as the coal economy, is the “kingdom” that Hamlet----or Shakespeare----

visualizes himself setting himself upon, using, of course, his writing as his tactical weapon. Here,

let me pause and comment, personally, (it is unorthodox for literary critics to comment

personally, but nearly everything about my critical endeavors is unorthodox so I have little to

lose), ‘poor Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’. It really isn’t fair for Hamlet, so much above them in

brains and cleverness, to do what he does to them, just as it isn’t really fair (in my opinion) for

2 Please see my article “‘Stand and Unfold Yourself ’: Prince Hamlet Unmasked”

published in Tsukuba Area Studies Journal March 2014 and my talk “Who is Prince

Hamlet” presented at Shakespeare 450, sponsored by Shakespeare Societé Français, in

April, 2014, for more information on the allegory in the play.

Shakespeare to do to some of the remunerated critics and scholars who have just been doing their

jobs for centuries, that is, trying to explain what Hamlet was all about, what he does to them,

which is to sort of send their ideas off, as Captain Jack Sparrow might tip his hat sarcastically to

his enemies, to oblivion3. Hillary Gatti gets to the root of the situation when she refers to

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as “paid spies”4 who, unlike Horatio, have not kept themselves

“financially independent of the prevailing power-complex”5. That is to say, it is market forces

which determine whether a market exists for the products of someone’s labor and when an

economic market ceases to exist, for material reasons such as fossil fuel depletion, then some

products of that discontinued market would also go out of date.6

The allegory makes it very clear. Hamlet uses his writing very deviously and tricks not only

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, but also the English king, who puts these two men to death. He

starts his narrative, explaining all to Horatio, and it will be noted that Hamlet uses seaman’s

terminology (“mutines” and “bilboes”), matching the theme of the sea and the episode of the

pirates that occurs the day after he writes the devious commission, and as I will show later, this is

because, in his heart, Shakespeare seems to have been a sort of “pirate of a playwright”, sailing

under false colors until the very end, when his true colors were hoisted and revealed. (I cannot

resist citing the passage from an actual pirate attack of the 1600s, a Dutch ship was the prey of

Barbary pirates, where the ruse de guerre was employed since the visual description of the colors

uncannily and serendipitously captures what Shakespeare may have had in mind as an artist

devoted to heliocentrism):

The Dutch flags disappeared and the masts and poop were simultaneously shaded by

flags of taffeta of all colors, enriched and embroidered with stars, crescents, suns,

crossed swords and other devices.7

He actually admits---and even explains--- how devious he has been in his writing (“Folded

the writ up in the form of th' other, Subscrib'd it, gave't th' impression, plac'd it safely, The

changeling never known”). It is good to read the whole account of that night, as he explains it to

3 Obviously not soon…. 4 Hillary Gatti, The Renaissance Drama of Knowledge. Page 155 5 Same as above. 6 Michael Bristol, Big-time Shakespeare: “In my view, Shakespeare’s authority is linked

to the capacity of his works to represent the complexity of social time and value in the

successor cultures of early modern England. One of the crucial features of these

successor cultures is the way individuals and institutions must constantly adapt to the

exigencies of a market economy. Our extended historical dialogue with Shakespeare’s

works has been one of the important ways to articulate values more durable than those

which circulate in current markets.” (Big-time Shakespeare, page xii.) 7 Pirates, please see footnote 1. (Pirates, 87) Konstam, Angus. Pirates 1660-1730.

Oxford: Osprey, 1998.

Horatio, from the start:

Hamlet: Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting

That would not let me sleep. (Methought) I lay

Worse than the mutines in the bilboes, Rashly---

And praised by rashness for it---let us know

Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well

When our deep plots do pall, and that should learn us

There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,

Rough-hew them how we will.

Horatio: That is most certain.

Hamlet: Up from my cabin,

My sea-gown scarf'd about me, in the dark

Grop'd I to find out them; had my desire,

Finger'd their packet, and in fine withdrew

To mine own room again; making so bold

(My fears forgetting manners) to unseal

Their grand commission; where I found, Horatio

(O royal knavery!), an exact command,

Larded with many several sorts of reasons,

Importing Denmark's health, and England's too,

With, hoo! such bugs and goblins in my life-

That, on the supervise, no leisure bated,

No, not to stay the finding of the axe,

My head should be struck off.

Horatio: Is't possible?

Hamlet: Here's the commission; read it at more leisure.

But wilt thou bear me how I did proceed?

Horatio: I beseech you.

Hamlet: Being thus benetted round with villanies,

Or I could make a prologue to my brains,

They had begun the play. I sat me down;

Devis'd a new commission; wrote it fair.

I once did hold it, as our statists do,

A baseness to write fair, and labour'd much

How to forget that learning; but, sir, now

It did me yeoman's service. Wilt thou know

Th' effect of what I wrote?

Horatio: Ay, good my lord.

Hamlet: An earnest conjuration from the King,

As England was his faithful tributary,

As love between them like the palm might flourish,

As peace should still her wheaten garland wear

And stand a comma 'tween their amities,

And many such-like as's of great charge,

That, on the view and knowing of these contents,

Without debatement further, more or less,

He should the bearers put to sudden death,

Not shriving time allow'd.

Horatio: How was this seal'd?

Hamlet: Why, even in that was heaven ordinant.

I had my father's signet in my purse,

Which was the model of that Danish seal;

Folded the writ up in the form of th' other,

Subscrib'd it, gave't th' impression, plac'd it safely,

The changeling never known. Now, the next day

Was our sea-fight; and what to this was sequent

Thou know'st already.

Horatio: So Guildenstern and Rosencrantz go to't.

Hamlet: Why, man, they did make love to this employment!

They are not near my conscience; their defeat

Does by their own insinuation grow.

'Tis dangerous when the baser nature comes

Between the pass and fell incensed points

Of mighty opposites.

Horatio: Why, what a king is this!

Hamlet: Does it not, thinks't thee, stand me now upon-

He that hath kill'd my king, and whor'd my mother;

Popp'd in between th' election and my hopes;

Thrown out his angle for my proper life,

And with such coz'nage- is't not perfect conscience

To quit him with this arm? And is't not to be damn'd

To let this canker of our nature come

In further evil? (V.ii.4-70)

To perform his ruse, he takes on a disguise or costume, (“my sea-gown scarfed about me”);

it is an absolutely necessary step for a performer, as all performers know. And later, narrating the

incident, it will be noted that Hamlet has a sardonic and insubordinate streak and he is not afraid

to mock authority. His dismissive and contemptuous summary of standard elite and

ruling-class/royal language or rhetoric (“As love between them like the palm might flourish, As

peace should still her wheaten garland wear/ And stand a comma 'tween their amities, And many

such-like as's of great charge”), which he can easily write very well and convincingly when he

feels like it, is, when read as a part of the allegory of Shakespeare’s artistic life, a warning about

where his true loyalties in society always lay: not necessarily with the elites. He was excellent at

producing elite rhetorical flourishes and “high and mighty” language, but his purposes were not

to extol elite power.

There has been a great deal of critical angst spent on dwelling on Hamlet’s “antic

disposition”---‘is Hamlet really mad or just pretending?’ and so forth----- but it is very clear that

he drops his antic disposition when he is out of earshot of the elites (except for Horatio), that is

to say, the court. Hamlet talks comfortably and naturally to gravediggers and players, rough

people from the lower social strata. Around them, he loses the “antic disposition”, the icy manner,

the insolence and his impudence that he naturally assumes when he talks to any of the members

of the court. Besides gravediggers and players, one more set of rough low-class people he meets

and seems to befriend (though, living outside the law they are arguably even more rough and low

than the grave-diggers and players), are the pirates he is captured by on his way to England.

Hamlet calls them “thieves of mercy” and also refers to them as “good fellows”.

But, after all, can pirates really be “good fellows”? Could Prince Hamlet possibly be

correct when he says that some pirates, not all, perhaps, but some, are “good fellows”? Not

knowing any pirates personally, I turned to popular culture in the form of the Disney franchise

Pirates of the Caribbean, to see if it could be so. More to the point, I turned to this extremely

popular, highly-grossing depiction of pirates in the movies to see if popular culture, by definition

not aimed at the elites, could give us a hint at what Shakespeare, a man who seems to have

secretly scorned the elite powers of his day, meant by his characterization of pirates as “good

fellows”. My gambit worked, actually, since I found the Pirates of the Caribbean movies have

much in common with Hamlet.

The most fertile area to examine is the similarities between the central character Captain

Jack Sparrow and Prince Hamlet. I have already mentioned the rather cruel-tip-of-the-hat-to-the

–enemies motif. It underlines the most important similarity between both of the fictional

characters: their lack of respect for authority figures. At the same time, neither of these heroes is

rebellious or stupid in a way to bring danger onto himself until it is time to really fight. For

example, in the fourth installment of the Pirates of the Caribbean series, On Stranger Tides,

when a member of King George’s court asks “You are Jack Sparrow, aren’t you?”, Jack Sparrow

responds, with perfect timing, “There is a ‘Captain’ in there somewhere.” It is in the same vein

that Hamlet answers Claudius’ question, “How is it that the clouds still hang on you?” (I.ii.66)

with the retort, “Not so, my lord, I am too much in the sun.” (I.ii.67) These clever and tricky

responses walk a fine line by subversively revealing the respondent as not at all cowed or awed

by power, yet substantively the answers are unobjectionable and can be seen as merely harmless

quibbles.

Moreover, Hamlet and Captain Jack Sparrow, as ‘trickster’ figures or ‘fool’ figures or

‘court jester figures’ perpetually retain the verbal power to leap outside the frame of the current

discourse, change the subject radically and craftily throw open new windows to new ontological

structures when it is suitable for them to do so. Here are Jack Sparrow and Angelica in On

Stranger Tides:

Angelica: Not for me, for my father. I am truly the daughter of Blackbeard.

Sparrow: You’ve fallen for your own con, love.

Angelica: No, he is my father. The lies I told you were really the truth.

Sparrow: You lied to me by telling me the truth?

Angelica: Yes.

Sparrow: That’s very good. May I use that?

Angelica: I’m sure you will anyway.

Angelica, as a matched pair with Sparrow, is a sort of female version of him, in on the game,

and she does not fall victim to his rhetorical skill but deftly counters with her own gambit (“I’m

sure you will anyway”). However, in Hamlet, Polonius, a true pedant, is not so lucky:

Polonius: How does my good Lord Hamlet?

Hamlet: Well, God-a-mercy.

Polonius: Do you know me, my lord?

Hamlet: Excellent well, you are a fishmonger.

Polonius: Not I, my lord.

Hamlet: Then I would you were so honest a man.

Polonius: Honest, my lord?

Hamlet: Ay sir, to be honest, as this world goes, is to be one man pick’d out of ten thousand.

Polonius: That’s very true, my lord.

Hamlet: For if the sun breed maggots in a dead dog, being a good kissing carrion----have

you a daughter? (II.ii.171-182)

The respective stories make it clear that both Jack Sparrow and Hamlet are dispossessed.

Jack Sparrow has lost his ship the Black Pearl, while Hamlet has lost his father and his claim to

the throne. Describing Prince Hamlet, Hillary Gatti could just as well be describing Jack Sparrow,

“Hamlet remains without anything that he can call his own, dispossessed, just like the court

Fools. Only his wit and his intelligence and his wit remain for him to use as weapons to protect

himself in a world he perceives as profoundly corrupt and false.”8 The Pirates of the Caribbean

8 Hillary Gatti, Essays on Giordano Bruno, “Bruno and Shakespeare: Hamlet”, page

148.

movies have totally corrupt and hateful antagonists: from Beckett in World’s End who admits

that he will go back on his word in order to win, and who keeps showing his materialistic and

base side with his favorite tag line “it’s just good business”, to Blackbeard in On Stranger Tides,

who would sacrifice his daughter’s life for his own gain.

On the topic of wit and intelligence as the only weapons available to someone who has

nothing left, it is necessary to bring in the theme of the court jester and expand upon it a bit.

Hillary Gatti points to an underlying Jupiter/Momus dynamic in Hamlet. This dynamic, with

respect to Jack Sparrow (and to some extent Captain Barbossa, Elizabeth Swann, William Turner

and other pirates who are also ‘good fellows’) vis a vis authority figures, is also present in

Pirates of the Caribbean. The dynamic is the interesting thing; the court jester, though of a low

social position and materially not wealthy or powerful (i.e. dispossessed, an outsider, etc.) has a

real and useful social role to play:

Hamlet’s role within the new court of Elsinore can be usefully compared

with that of Momus in the court of Jove in Bruno’s Lo Spaccio della bestia

trionfante (The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast), written and published in

London in 1584. This is the fourth of the Italian dialogues written by Bruno in

London, and it narrates the story of a macroscopic, universal reform undertaken

through the transformation of signs of the zodiac from bestial vices into

reformed virtues; the entire operation being carried out by a Jove who considers

himself an absolute prince, both in a political and a religious sense. Bruno,

however, reminds his readers that even Jove, like all things that are a part of the

material world, remains subject to the laws of vicissitude, suggesting that he is

far from infallible, as he wishes to be considered. In order to underline this point,

Bruno sees him as being accompanied through his long and meticulously

organized reform by the suggestions of an ironic and satirical Momus, who gets

dangerously close to appearing as the real hero of the story. Momus, in the

classical world, was known as the god of satire, and was expelled from Olympus

because of his witty and caustic tongue….In the Spaccio, Bruno claims that

Momus’s role in Jupiter’s celestial Court to that of a fool in a court of his time: a

voice which “often presents more of factual truth to the ear of the prince than all

the rest of the Court together, and for which generally, not daring to speak, they

speak in the form of a game and in that way to change the course of events.”9

The dynamic here at this time in our history is basically at heart a material one, not just

becoming visible through people, their stories, or performers but existing as one notable example

of Brunian material vicissitudes: the enormous stored but finite reserves of fossil fuel energy in

contrast with the steady sun. I have covered elsewhere, in my talk at Shakespeare 450 sponsored

by the Societé Français Shakespeare, for example, how Hamlet is about Shakespeare’s

visualization of his role, through many centuries, as a subversive solar-energy loving artist

within a long fossil fuel-based power regime. Now I will spring on you another shock: Pirates of

the Caribbean: At World’s End also seeks, subtly and in a coded, careful way, to engage with its

audience on this same topic. A “heathen” nature goddess named Calypso (the goddess of the sea)

is bound up in the form of a human woman. Captain Barbossa, instead of Jack Sparrow, explains

to the Nine Pirate Lords:

There be a third course. We must free Calypso. In another age, at this very

spot, the Brethren Council captured the sea goddess and bound her in her bones.

That was a mistake. Oh, we tamed the sea for ourselves, aye, but opened the

door for Beckett and his ilk. Better were the days when mastery of the seas

came not from bargains struck with eldritch creatures but from the sweat of a

man’s brow and the strength of his back alone. You all know this to be true. We

must free Calypso.

The British colonial regime in their red coats and gold buttons, with their tea cups and

powdered wigs, their elegant furniture, material wealth, haughty and formal manners,

hierarchical power structure, and symbolized by the lethal and treacherous Beckett, is here made

to stand in for the whole Western colonial/industrial project, one that was founded on coal and

9 Gatti Essays on Giordano Bruno, pages 148-9.

oil10, two resources which were in extreme abundance in England (and later the United States,

the main successor culture to the British Colonial Empire). The writers of the screenplay seem to

be basically familiar with the issue, but they carefully hide the rather frightening beast behind a

curtain and describe it in an indirect way, with “the sweat of a man’s brow and the strength of his

back alone” standing in for the past world where the internal combustion engine was not in

evidence.

But it would be utter folly to claim that Shakespeare or the Disney Corporation, who owns

the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, are Marxist revolutionaries. It was indeed Karl Marx who

pointed out the fact of the metabolic rift, which later scholars have described accurately, in my

opinion, as the (temporary, since the rift will close one day) material basis for economic activity

based mainly on fossil fuels. However, the purpose of popular cultural products such as Hamlet

or Pirates of the Caribbean is not to rouse people to planet-saving action; these cultural products

are more like spies, agents, the subtle forward movements of information-gatherers in a cosmos

where humans need all the information they can get. As Hamlet promises Horatio: “I am to do a

good turn for them (the pirates). Let the King have the letters I have sent.” And we are indeed,

the pirates.

10 Barbara Freese, Coal a Human History. “Clearly, though, the industrial revolution

could never have taken the shape it took without coal.” .(page 69)