The document discusses the complex relationship between Hamlet and pirates, particularly how Hamlet's experiences shape his actions and intentions after being captured by them. It highlights Hamlet's correspondence with King Claudius, revealing his bravery in revealing his hostile intentions and drawing comparisons between his deception and pirate tactics. The text further explores Shakespeare's critique of societal elites through Hamlet's interactions and his alignment with the pirates, underscoring themes of loyalty and social commentary in his plays.

1. 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?

2. 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).

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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,

7. 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

8. 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

9. 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.

10. 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.

11. 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

12. 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.

13. 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)