CHAPTER 71

And So in Spite of Death Thou Doest Suruiue

On 8 September 1601, John Shakespeare was buried in the old church at Stratford. His son was undoubtedly present, and walked in procession with the new bailiff Richard Quiney. John Shakespeare was in his seventies but seems to have left no will. By natural right, therefore, Shakespeare inherited the double-house in Henley Street as well as agricultural land belonging to his father. John Shakespeare was in fact more prosperous than is generally assumed. He may have characterised himself as a man of small wealth in the Westminster courts, but the reality was very different. In the following year, Shakespeare began to invest a great deal of money amounting to approximately £500.

He kept the house, where his widowed mother continued to live in the company of her daughter, Joan Hart, and her daughter’s family. Joan Hart had married a local hatter, William Hart, but remained in the family dwelling to look after her mother. Shakespeare seems to have left his mother’s affairs in her hands, since the Harts looked after Mary Shakespeare’s estate upon her death seven years later.

The death of John Shakespeare himself has been considered a defining event in his son’s progress. It has been characteristically associated with the writing of Hamlet, for example, a play that was composed during the obligatory period of mourning. In the first scene the ghost of Hamlet’s father comes back from the flames of purgatory, a wholly Catholic territory, in order to haunt the earth. The available evidence supports the belief that Shakespeare himself played the part of the dead father. It is a suggestive impersonation, adding to the fact that the title of the play invokes the name of his own dead son. In this period fathers and sons are deeply implicated in the workings of his imagination. In this play, too, the inheritance from father to son is riven and brutally distracted. It is also Shakespeare’s longest play, and it has been calculated to require a playing time of four and a half hours—far too long to be performed entire in the sixteenth century, even if the playing time were stretched to the maximum. It suggests that he wished, or was determined, to include all its connections and associations. We must not use the anachronistic vocabulary of obsession or compulsion in this matter. We can only say, with certainty, that there was much for Shakespeare to dramatise.

Richard Burbage played the titular hero. It was a part in which he could excel, and proves to an almost excessive degree that the art of Elizabethan drama was the art of character. There is an allusion to Burbage’s acting of Hamlet in a poem of 1604, which describes how the apparent madness of the prince was signified by Burbage sucking on a pen as if it were a tobacco pipe and drinking from an inkpot as if it were a bottle of ale. It seems to have been a memorable piece of stage “business.” If we were to provide a Jinglelike anatomy of Hamlet’s changing passions, however, it would read something like this. In turn Hamlet displays himself as ironic, sincere, obedient, despairing, disgusted, welcoming, questioning, disgusted, speculative, impetuous, angry, scholarly, antic, jocular, actorish, despairing, of mimic disposition, sarcastic, welcoming, speculative, despairing, exuberant, self-punishing, changeable (very), confused, contemptuous, actorish, courteous, playful, threatening, hesitant, fierce, scornful, rhetorical, bewildered, soul-searching, macabre, furious, mocking, stoical, parodic, and resigned. It has become well known as a part to challenge actors; to play it competently, by general consent, they have to drag into the light parts of their personality they thought they had lost.

Shakespeare was known to be the master of soliloquy long before Hamlet—it was one of his “strengths” that could be called upon in patching up a play such as Sir Thomas More— but in this play he refines his art to the extent that the soliloquy seems to become the index of evolving consciousness. It is no longer a summary of “this is what I am” but, rather, of “this is what I am becoming.” It has been remarked that, in the same period, the growth of literacy was leading to a great extension of letters and private diaries; writing itself encouraged “introspection and reflection.” 1 This throws new light on the often noticed allusions to books in Hamlet.

But can we speak of interiority on the Elizabethan stage, where a whole set of theatrical conventions determined staging and acting? It is perhaps with Hamlet that it first becomes possible to do so. For the first time it is not anachronistic to discuss the “character” of Hamlet even if it remains utterly mysterious, not least to Hamlet himself. Julius Caesar and Henry V live in a world of circumstance and event; they are lodged, as it were, in a real world. Hamlet’s reality, in contrast, is almost entirely self-created. His soliloquies often have a dubious relation to the action of the plot, which is why they can be added or removed in the various versions of the play without any noticeable interruption to the story. Nevertheless Hamlet remains the very pivot of the narrative. Like his creator, his centre is nowhere and his circumference is everywhere.

Hamlet has no reason to exist except as a projection from Shakespeare. He is a master of every mood and subject to none. He is possessed by an extraordinary mental agility and energy. He has many voices, but it is hard to locate any central or defining voice. No one is so free with words and yet so secretive about himself. He is addicted to puns and to word-play, but his obscenities are matched by what Sigmund Freud called his “sexual coldness.” 2 The play is invaded by the theme of duality and doubleness, of appearing to be what you are not. That is why it is also suffused with the spirit of playing. It is not too much to say that Hamlet could only have been written by a consummate actor.

It soon became one of Shakespeare’s most celebrated dramas. It seems to have the singular distinction of being the only play performed, during Shakespeare’s lifetime, at both the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. This was a sea-change in the academic response to contemporary vernacular drama. Before this period plays in English were considered to be below serious consideration. Sir Thomas Bodley banned plays from his new library at Oxford, stating that they were “of very unworthy matters” and that the keeper and underkeepers of the library “should Disdain to seek out … Haply some Plays may be worthy the Keeping: But hardly one in Forty.” 3 He was probably correct about the proportion, but Hamlet itself was certainly considered to be “worthy.” There is a reference in 1604, stating that “faith, it should please all, like Prince Hamlet.” 4 Three years later, it was performed off the coast of Sierra Leone by a group of seamen. Hamlet was referred to in private, and diplomatic, correspondence. The young John Marston paid the ultimate compliment of copying from it with a remarkably similar revenge tragedy entitled Antonio’s Revenge. It has in fact been suggested that the order of composition should be reversed, and that Shakespeare copied Marston’s play. There is no reason why he should not have been inspired by an ingenious original to produce a compelling masterpiece of his own. He had been doing it all his life.

Yet the origins of Hamlet are much more complicated than that. There was a true and “original” Hamlet on the public stage by 1589, since it is mentioned by Nashe in that year. There was also a version of Hamlet being performed by the combined forces of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and the Admiral’s Men in the summer of 1594 at Newington Butts; this production is confirmed by the notes of Philip Henslowe. At some point between 1598 and 1601, the remark being privately transcribed in a book, Gabriel Harvey referred to Shakespeare and “his tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke.”5

The complex matter is further complicated by the presence of a printed version of the play, issued in quarto form in 1603. It has generally been described as a “bad” quarto, but at a length of 2,500 lines it is in fact a perfectly good acting version of the long drama marred by stylistic infelicities. The publishers, Nicholas Ling and John Trundell, had known associations with Shakespeare’s plays and with the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, so there is no question of its being a “pirated” edition. On the title page it is described as “By William Shake-speare.”

A second edition was published in the following year and, with twelve hundred extra lines, was advertised as “newly imprinted and enlarged” according to “the true and perfect copy.” In the first version Hamlet is younger, and some of the names are different; Polonius, for example, is called Coram-bis. More importantly, perhaps, in the first version Gertrude becomes convinced of her second husband’s guilt and colludes with her son. The first and shorter drama is an exhilarating and exciting piece of work, in no way inferior as a stage production to the second version. The second version is more rhetorical and deliberate, with much greater attention paid to the text itself.

The most likely explanation for these different versions seems to be that Shakespeare took an old play of Hamlet and fashioned it into new and surprising shape for the performance at Newington Butts in 1594. This is the version printed as the first quarto. Then, at a later stage, he revised it for a new production at the Globe in 1601. This is the second quarto. It should be noted that Shakespeare then seems to have revised Hamlet for a third time, adding and subtracting material for a version that became the Folio edition of the play published in 1623.

The purists insist that the less than perfect text of Hamlet is “corrupted” by actors’ reports or faulty shorthand reporting; and that the second edition was Shakespeare’s attempt to supplant a botched job. Other scholars believe that the first text was a version of Shakespeare’s early work, hasty and jejune as it may sometimes be, and that the second version is evidence of Shakespeare’s habit of revision. One image is of Shakespeare as perfectionist, producing more or less the orthodox canon of the plays as printed in “good” quartos. The other image is of Shakespeare in a continuous state of evolution, moving between early versions and revised versions, short versions and long versions. The latter alternative seems more plausible.

There is one other piece of literature that emerged in 1601. Attached to a volume celebrating “the love and merit of the true-noble knight, Sir John Salisburie” were sets of verses written by “the beste and chiefest of our moderne writers.” Sir John Salisbury had been knighted in the summer of 1601 for his services in helping to suppress the Essex rebellion. Among these verses was Shakespeare’s poem now known as “The Phoenix and Turtle,” as complex and as riddling a piece of work as anything to be found inHamlet. On a mundane level Shakespeare may have been happy to disassociate himself from the Essex episode, in which Richard II had been so unfortunately imbroiled. But it is also possible that the poem had originally been written in 1586 when Salisbury had married Ursula Stanley, half-sister to Lord Strange.

But the poem itself rises above its immediate circumstances. It is a threnody upon the indivisibility of lovers and the divine union of love:

Beautie, Truth, and Raritie,
Grace in all simplicitie,
Here enclosde, in cinders lie.

It has been treated as an allegorical work or, in more modern terms, as an exercise in “pure” poetry rising unbidden and entire from the depths of Shakespeare’s being, a pearl of great price fashioned instinctively by experience and suffering. In its riddling complexity it bears more than a passing resemblance to the contemporaneous poetry of John Donne. Although Shakespeare sometimes seems more inclined to poetical miscellanies and ancient English ballads, there is no reason why he should not have heard or read Donne’s poetry in manuscript. Donne was known to the Countess of Pembroke. He had been a member of Lincoln’s Inn and had also served with the Earl of Essex; he can be said to have moved in the same London circles as Shakespeare himself. This was also the milieu in which Donne’s poems were circulating in manuscript, and there seem to be echoes of his work both in King Lear and in Two Noble Kinsmen. There are connections between the personages of Shakespeare’s world that are now lost to view.

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