The sources for Tennyson’s great poem Ulysses are almost as, shall we say, polytropic as Homer’s Odysseus.
But one of them, I am convinced, is Hamlet’s soliloquy in Hamlet 4.4, just after he has encountered the army of Fortinbras. In self-reproach at his lack of initiative in taking vengeance on the usurper Claudius, Hamlet says:
How all occasions do inform against me
And spur my dull revenge! What is a man,[1]
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more.
Sure he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability to fust in us unused.[2]
Similarly, as Tennyson’s Ulysses urges himself not to stay put, but instead to get back on the road again, he says:
It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me….
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!
True, where Hamlet compares non-acting man as such to a beast, Ulysses reserves that criticism for the unlearned and non-cosmopolitan Ithacans. They in particular, “a savage race,” are bestial. But Ulysses, too, like Hamlet, fears his own lack of action, which he, like Hamlet, describes as “dull.” Where Hamlet laments that his allows his reason to “fust…unused,” Tennyson has Ulysses substitute the similar-sounding “rust” that does not “shine in use,” obliquely recalling the dagger or sword metaphor in Shakespeare’s “dull revenge.”
Later, Hamlet remarks:
I do not know
Why I yet live to say, “This thing’s to do,”
Sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and means
To do’t.
Tennyson echoes this at the end of his poem:
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
What is the payoff for Tennyson here, in making us view Ulysses through the lens of Hamlet? As I said above, his Ulysses is polytropos, “many-turned”: not just a wily man, but a man of many literary layers. Homer, sure: But what about Dante, who–unlike Homer–gives us Ulysses as a restless traveler (Inferno 26)? And what would Shakespeare add? To the picture of Homer and Dante, it adds a note of existential angst. Now we have Ulysses the melancholic, Ulysses the worrier, Ulysses the dissatisfied, Ulysses the reflective, Ulysses the bored.
Tennyson’s Ulysses is not just a character with a narrative past. He’s also a character with a literary past. This paradoxically makes him a Bronze Age hero whose antecedents come from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
Perhaps appropriately for a trickster like Ulysses, his future is his past.