Hamlet and Lameth

Extract

EXACTLY fifty years ago, J. A. Bryant Jr. tentatively suggested a number of parallels between Shakespeare’s Hamlet and a figure of considerable importance in Christian tradition, the antediluvian patriarch commonly known as Lamech.¹ Bryant was struck by Hamlet’s words in the final scene of the play, convincing Laertes that his killing of Polonius had not been intentional:

Let my disclaiming from a purposed evil

Free me so far in your most generous thoughts,

That I have shot my arrow o’er the house

And hurt my brother.²

Intentionally or not, however, Polonius was killed with a sword. Why, then, does Hamlet employ this curious metaphor of the misdirected arrow? Bryant found Hamlet’s metaphor ‘strangely reminiscent of the legend of Lamech’—according to which, as will be fully elaborated below, Lamech kills his ancestor Cain by unwittingly shooting him with an arrow—but he hesitated in presuming conscious allusion:

There is no clear evidence, of course, that Shakespeare thought of the legend here; but the consonance of that legend with Hamlet as regards the spread of sin, the blindness that precipitates the catastrophe, and the catastrophe that purges is a further indication of the general background against which Shakespeare wrote his play. Like Lamech, Hamlet sees the errors of his own blindness as spreading the corruption which will end in a bloody catastrophe.³

To the best of my knowledge, Bryant’s suggestion has been universally ignored and remains all that Hamlet scholarship has thus far made of Hamlet and Lamech.