The Peace in the Feud in Sixteenth‐ and Seventeenth‐Century France

Hamlet is famously plagued by two conflicting obligations that plunge him into existential torment. Kinship solidarity obliges him to avenge the murder of his father. But the reformations of the sixteenth century placed great emphasis on divine providence. The Bible is clear: vengeance belongs to God alone. Hamlet’s duty to pay blood with blood clashes with his Christian conscience. However, Shakespeare’s Hamlet was not the only one known to contemporaries. The French version of Hamlet, or Amleth, which appears in the fifth volume of Belleforest’sHistoires tragiques, first published in 1570, provided the raw material which Shakespeare’s genius transformed into his timeless drama. Belleforest is much more traditional in his treatment of subject matter. He finds nothing disquieting about revenge. Indeed, in his hands Hamlet acquires an aura of chivalry in his pursuit of honour and glory. Vengeance was a major theme of French Renaissance literature, and Belleforest echoes the commonly held view that ‘if vengeance ever seemed to have the face and form of justice, it is without doubt when the piety and affection that binds us to the memory of our fathers, unjustly murdered, obliges us to seek the means not to leave a treason, or treacherous and outrageous affront unpunished’.1 Hamlet was first performed in an age when, we are told, the noble honour code was undergoing a transformation due to the dissemination of Renaissance concepts of virtue and the more systematic inculcation of Christian moral principles. To historians