Original Sin

"It was the Fall, then, that was primarily responsible for the tyranny of fortune." --E.M.W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture, New York, Vintage Books, (1964?), p.55.

E.M.W. Tillyard argues that Elizabethans held in mind a picture of a world in which there was a definite moral order. A person seeking revenge would be upsetting that order by attempting to do what is consigned to God alone. Because of this disruption of the natural order, tragic consequences can be expected to occur.

Respect for the understood order of existence plays an important role in drama. As we see from the example of Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, misfortune comes about when people attempted to overreach their assigned place in the great chain of being. Thus they are guilty of reproducing the events of the Fall from the Garden of Eden. Horatio has this lesson in mind when he urges Hamlet not to attempt to look too deeply into the unknowable mysteries of death.

'Twere to consider too curiously, to consider so. (V.i.207)

He seems to have considered the warning of Fulke Greville, the first Lord Brooke.

Sonnet LXXXVIII Man, dreame no more of curious mysteries, As what was here before the world was made, The first Mans life, the state of Paradise, Where heauen is, or hells eternall shade,     For Gods works are like him, all infinite;     And curious search, but craftie sinnes delight.          -- Fulke Greville, Poems and Dramas (ed. Geoffrey Bullough), Edinburgh, Oliver and Boyd, 1938. p.136.

In almost all instances in Elizabethan ethical writing, revenge is cast into the moral terms of original sin; that is to say that it is seen as a human being's attempt to grab a prerogative that is reserved for God alone; the judgment of a person's soul. Throughout the play, we are reminded not only of the story of Cain and Able, but more importantly, of the fall of mankind from the Garden of Eden.