Though he was still young (only thirty-six years old), he had in the course of a decade achieved extraordinary things in three major genres—comedy, history, and tragedy—with plays that are each in their way so perfect that it would have been difficult to imagine going beyond them. Indeed, in the years that followed he made no attempt to surpass the two parts of Henry IV and Henry V, as if he understood that he had done what he was capable of doing in the history play. And though he shortly was to write the stupendous Twelfth Night, he did not in the genre of comedy actually go beyond what he had created in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, and As You Like It. Hamlet turned out to inaugurate a creative frenzy that also brought forth Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus, but a well-informed contemporary theatergoer in 1600 had no reason to expect that Shakespeare had not already demonstrated what he could do in tragedy as well. Among the more than twenty plays he had written were Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, and Julius Caesar. Indeed, these were not his only tragedies; three of the plays that modern editors (following the editors of the first folio) now classify as histories—the third part of Henry VI, Richard III, and Richard II—were published during his lifetime as tragedies.
The distinction between tragedy and history was not an important one for Shakespeare, or indeed for many of his playwriting contemporaries: the underlying structure of most of human history, with its endless pattern of rise and fall, seemed to him tragic, and conversely tragedy as he conceived it was rooted in history. For that matter, as The Merchant of Venice amply shows, his sense of comedy was laced through with pain, loss, and the threat of death, and his sense of tragedy had room for clowning and laughter. Literary theorists of the time urged strict adherence to the rules of decorum that derived from Aristotle: they vehemently opposed what Sir Philip Sidney called the mingling of kings and clowns. Writing in 1579, when Shakespeare was still a schoolboy, Sidney wrote a mocking description of a typical English play, with its loose, wildly free-form plot. The description, meant to make readers groan, turns out to anticipate precisely what Shakespeare would do brilliantly throughout his career. At one moment, Sidney snorted in derision, three ladies walk across the stage, and you are supposed to imagine them gathering flowers; by and by four actors appear with swords and bucklers, and you are expected to see the clash of two great armies; then comes news of a shipwreck, and you are to blame if you do not take the stage for a perilous rock. “You shall have Asia of one side, and Afric of the other, and so many other under-kingdoms, that the player, when he cometh in, must ever begin with telling where he is, or else the tale will not be conceived.”
What Sidney and others wanted was something altogether more orderly. The stage, they argued, should always represent but one place; the time represented should at most be a single day; and exalted emotions aroused by tragedy should never be tainted with the “scornful tickling” and lewd laughter of comedy. These are strictures, derived from Aristotle, that Shakespeare, along with his fellow professional playwrights, routinely violated.
The indifference to the boundaries that obsessed learned critics in England and on the Continent helps to explain something baffling about Shakespeare’s whole career, and particularly about its first decade: the absence of any clear or logical pattern of artistic development. Editions of the collected works that organize them neatly into groups—first the comedies one after another, followed by the histories, the tragedies, and finally the romances—completely misrepresent what actually happened. Attempts to organize the works according to an orderly progression of Shakespeare’s soul—from lighthearted youth to a serious engagement with power to a melancholy brooding about mortality and finally to the wise serenity of old age—are similarly misleading. This is someone who had A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet on his desk (and in his imagination) at the same moment, and who perceived that the joyous laughter of the one could be almost effortlessly transformed into the tears of the other. This is someone who climaxes his witty, lighthearted comedy of upper-class courtship, Love’s Labour’s Lost, with news that the princess’s father has suddenly died, so that all the impending marriages must be put on hold. This is someone who gets his audience to laugh at the ghastly Richard III assessing the team of murderers he has hired to kill his brother:
Your eyes drop millstones when fools’ eyes fall tears.
I like you, lads.
(1.3.351–2)
And finally, this is someone who in successive plays written in the years directly before Hamlet shifted ground from the civil wars of late medieval England to the Sicilian courtship of Beatrice and Benedick to the battle of Agincourt to the assassination of Julius Caesar to a pastoral romance in the Forest of Arden. Each of these plays has its own distinct vision, and yet, strangely, each also has room for what it would at first glance seem to exclude.
IF SHAKESPEARE HAD died in 1600, it would have been difficult to think that anything was missing from his achievement and still more difficult to think that anything yet unrealized was brewing in his work. But Hamlet makes clear that Shakespeare had been quietly, steadily developing a special technical skill. This development may have been entirely deliberate, the consequence of a clear, ongoing professional design, or it may have been more haphazard and opportunistic. The achievement was, in any case, gradual: not a sudden, definitive discovery or a grandiose invention, but the subtle refinement of a particular set of representational techniques. By the turn of the century Shakespeare was poised to make an epochal breakthrough. He had perfected the means to represent inwardness.
What the audience sees and hears is always in some sense or other public utterance—the words that the characters say to one another or, in occasional asides and soliloquies, directly to the onlookers. Playwrights can pretend, of course, that the audience is overhearing a kind of internal monologue, but it is difficult to keep such monologues from sounding stagy. Richard III, written around 1592, is hugely energetic and powerful, with a marvelous, unforgettable main character, but when that character, alone at night, reveals what is going on inside of him, he sounds oddly wooden and artificial:
It is now dead midnight.
Cold fearful drops stand on my trembling flesh.
What do I fear? Myself? There’s none else by.
Richard loves Richard; that is, I am I.
Is there a murderer here? No. Yes, I am.
Then fly! What, from myself? Great reason. Why?
Lest I revenge. Myself upon myself?
Alack, I love myself. Wherefore? For any good
That I myself have done unto myself?
O no, alas, I rather hate myself
For hateful deeds committed by myself.
I am a villain. Yet I lie: I am not.
(5.5.134–45)
Shakespeare is following his chronicle source, which states that Richard could not sleep on the eve of his death, because he felt unwonted pricks of conscience. But though it has a staccato vigor, the soliloquy, as a way of sketching inner conflict, is schematic and mechanical, as if within the character onstage there was simply another tiny stage on which puppets were performing a Punch-and-Judy show.
In Richard II, written some three years later, there is a comparable moment that marks Shakespeare’s burgeoning skills. Deposed and imprisoned by his cousin Bolingbroke, the ruined king, shortly before his murder, looks within himself:
I have been studying how I may compare
This prison where I live unto the world;
And for because the world is populous,
And here is not a creature but myself,
I cannot do it. Yet I’ll hammer it out.
My brain I’ll prove the female to my soul,
My soul the father, and these two beget
A generation of still-breeding thoughts.
(5.5.1–8)
Much of the difference between the two passages has to do with the very different characters: the one a murderous tyrant full of manic energy, t
he other a spoiled, narcissistic, self-destructive poet. But the turn from one character to the other is itself significant; it signals Shakespeare’s growing interest in the hidden processes of interiority. Locked in a windowless room, Richard II watches himself think, struggling to forge a metaphoric link between his prison and the world, reaching a dead end, and then forcing his imagination to renew the effort: “Yet I’ll hammer it out.” The world, crowded with people, is not, as he himself recognizes, remotely comparable to the solitude of his prison cell, but Richard wills himself to generate—out of what he pictures as the intercourse of his brain and soul—an imaginary populace. What he hammers out is a kind of inner theater, akin to that already found in Richard III’s soliloquy but with a vastly increased complexity, subtlety, and, above all, self-consciousness. Now the character himself is fully aware that he has constructed such a theater, and he teases out the bleak implications of the imaginary world he has struggled to create:
Thus play I in one person many people,
And none contented. Sometimes am I king;
Then treason makes me wish myself a beggar,
And so I am. Then crushing penury
Persuades me I was better when a king.
Then am I kinged again, and by and by
Think that I am unkinged by Bolingbroke,
And straight am nothing. But whate’er I be,
Nor I, nor any man that but man is,
With nothing shall be pleased till he be eased
With being nothing.
(5.5.31–41)
Richard II characteristically rehearses the drama of his fall from kingship as a fall into nothingness and then fashions his experience of lost identity—“whate’er I be”—into an intricate poem of despair.
Written in 1595, Richard II marked a major advance in the playwright’s ability to represent inwardness, but Julius Caesar, written four years later, shows that, not content with what he had mastered, Shakespeare subtly experimented with new techniques. Alone, pacing in his orchard in the middle of night, Brutus begins to speak:
It must be by his death. And for my part
I know no personal cause to spurn at him,
But for the general. He would be crowned.
How that might change his nature, there’s the question.
It is the bright day that brings forth the adder,
And that craves wary walking. Crown him: that!
(2.1.10–15)
This soliloquy is far less fluid, less an elegant and self-conscious poetic meditation, than the prison soliloquy of Richard II. But it has something new: the unmistakable marks of actual thinking. Richard speaks of hammering it out, but the words he utters are already highly polished. Brutus’s words by contrast seem to flow immediately from the still inchoate to-ing and fro-ing of his wavering mind, as he grapples with a set of momentous questions: How should he respond to Mark Antony’s wish to crown the ambitious Caesar? How can he balance his own personal friendship with Caesar against what he construes to be the general good? How might Caesar, who has thus far served that general good, change his nature and turn dangerous if he is crowned? “It must be by his death”—without prelude, the audience is launched into the midst of Brutus’s obsessive brooding. It is impossible to know if he is weighing a proposition, trying out a decision, reiterating words that someone else has spoken. He does not need to mention whose death he is contemplating, nor does he need to make clear—for it is already part of his thought—that it will be by assassination.
Brutus is speaking to himself, and his words have the peculiar shorthand of the brain at work. “Crown him: that!”—the exclamation is barely comprehensible, except as a burst of anger provoked by a phantasmic image passing at that instant through the speaker’s mind. The spectators are pulled in eerily close, watching firsthand the forming of a fatal resolution—a determination to assassinate Caesar—that will change the world. A few moments later, Brutus, intensely self-aware, describes for himself the molten state of consciousness in which he finds himself:
Between the acting of a dreadful thing
And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasma or a hideous dream.
The genius and the mortal instruments
Are then in counsel, and the state of man,
Like to a little kingdom, suffers then
The nature of an insurrection.
(2.1.63–69)
Was it at this moment, in 1599, that Shakespeare first conceived of the possibility of writing about a character suspended, for virtually the whole length of a play, in this strange interim? Brutus himself is not such a character; by the middle of Julius Caesar, he has done the dreadful thing, the killing of his mentor and friend—possibly his own father—and the remainder of the play teases out the fatal consequences of his act.
If Shakespeare did not grasp it at once, then certainly by the following year he understood perfectly that there was a character, already popular on the Elizabethan stage, whose life he could depict as one long phantasma or hideous dream. That character, the prince of the inward insurrection, was Hamlet.
Even in its earliest known medieval telling, Hamlet’s saga was the story of the long interval between the first motion—the initial impulse or design—and the acting of the dreadful thing. In Saxo the Grammarian’s account, King Horwendil (the equivalent of Shakespeare’s old King Hamlet) is killed by his envious brother Feng (the equivalent of Claudius) not secretly but in plain view. The brother has a thin cover story—he says that Horwendil had been brutally abusing his gentle wife, Gerutha—but the reality is that the ruthless Feng is powerful enough to seize his brother’s crown, his realm, and his wife and get away with it. The only potential obstacle is Horwendil’s young son Amleth, for everyone in this pre-Christian world of treachery and vengeance understood that a son must avenge his father’s murder. Amleth is still a child and no danger to anyone, but when he grows up, his obligation will be clear. The murderous Feng understands this strict social code as well, of course, and, if the boy does not quickly come up with a stratagem, his life is worth nothing. In order to survive long enough to take his just revenge, Amleth feigns madness, persuading his uncle that he cannot ever pose a threat. Flinging dirt and slime on himself, he sits by the fire, listlessly whittling away at small sticks and turning them into barbed hooks. Though the wary Feng repeatedly sets traps to try to discern some hidden sparks of intelligence behind his nephew’s apparent idiocy, Amleth cunningly avoids detection. He bides his time and makes plans. Mocked as a fool, treated with contempt and derision, he eventually succeeds in burning to death Feng’s entire retinue and in running his uncle through with a sword. He summons an assembly of nobles, explains why he has done what he has done, and is enthusiastically acclaimed as the new king. “Many could have been seen marvelling how he had concealed so subtle a plan over so long a space of time.”
Amleth thus spends years in the interim state that Brutus can barely endure for a few days. Shakespeare had developed the means to represent the psychological reality of such a condition—something that neither Saxo nor his followers even dreamed of being able to do. He saw that the Hamlet story, ripe for revision, would enable him to make a play about what it is like to live inwardly in the queasy interval between a murderous design and its fulfillment. The problem, however, is that the theater is not particularly tolerant of long gestation periods: to represent the child Hamlet feigning idiocy for years in order to reach the age at which he could act would be exceedingly difficult to render dramatically compelling. The obvious solution, probably already reached in the lost play, is to start the action at the point at which Hamlet has come of age and is ready to undertake his act of revenge.
Thomas Lodge’s allusion to the ghost that cried so miserably, like an oyster-wife, “Hamlet, revenge!” suggests that this lost play also added a key character to the story: the spirit of Hamlet’s murdered father. Perhaps that ghost only appeared to give the audience a shiver of fear—that is how Th
omas Kyd had used a ghost in his greatest success, The Spanish Tragedy—but it is equally possible that Kyd (or whoever wrote the lost Hamlet), rather than Shakespeare, first introduced a crucial change in the plot that made the ghost’s appearance much more than decorative. In Saxo the Grammarian’s Hamlet story, as in the popular tale by Belleforest, no ghost appears. There is no need for a ghost, for the murder is public knowledge, as is the son’s obligation to take revenge. But when he set out to write his version of the Hamlet story, either following Kyd’s lead or on his own, Shakespeare made the murder a secret. Everyone in Denmark believes that old Hamlet was fatally stung by a serpent. The ghost appears in order to tell the terrible truth:
The serpent that did sting thy father’s life
Now wears his crown.
(1.5.39–40)
Shakespeare’s play begins just before the ghost reveals the murder to Hamlet and ends just after Hamlet exacts his revenge. Hence the decisive change in the plot—from a public killing known to everyone to a secret murder revealed to Hamlet alone by the ghost of the murdered man—enabled the playwright to focus almost the entire tragedy on the consciousness of the hero suspended between his “first motion” and “the acting of a dreadful thing.” But something in the plot has to account for this suspension. After all, Hamlet is no longer, in this revised version, a child who needs to play for time, and the murderer has no reason to suspect that Hamlet has or can ever acquire any inkling of his crime. Far from keeping his distance from his nephew (or setting subtle tests for him), Claudius refuses to let Hamlet return to university, calls him “Our chiefest courtier, cousin, and our son” (1.2.117), and declares that he is next in succession to the throne. Once the ghost of his father has disclosed the actual cause of death—“Murder most foul, as in the best it is, / But this most foul, strange, and unnatural”—Hamlet, who has full access to the unguarded Claudius, is in the perfect position to act immediately. And such an instantaneous response is precisely what Hamlet himself anticipates:
Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare Page 33