by Park Honan
Family love is at the play's centre -- but what is bizarre mixes with the ordinary. A sensitive son, idealizing his dead father, confronts his usurping and fratricidal uncle and incestuous adulterous mother.
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Shakespeare gives the son inwardness and intellect, so the Ghost's return is the more shattering, and adds two more avengers in Fortinbras and Laertes. The Danish court is not excessively evil. Claudius is not horrendous, and his crime is more excusable than the two murders linked with the poet's house at Stratford. Regicide -- despite what children heard at school -- was little more than an extension of medieval politics. As a villain, Claudius is miserably aware of his guilt, honest with himself, as regretful as he is fearful. Gertrude's sensuality hardly destroys her conscience, and Polonius, Ophelia, and Laertes further establish a sense of domestic ordinariness.
In radically normalizing his materials, the author is able to draw on the complicating pressures of Elizabethan domestic life. He appears to write from inside his own experience of a family's bonding, and pathos arises from his hero's idealization of a prior normalcy. Shakespeare's parents were both alive when he wrote the play, and involved in its 'unrivalled imaginative power' is his ability to show, from within, the pressure of a family's emotional ties. He returned home at long intervals to see his parents, siblings, wife, and children, and carried them off in memory. Tangibly lost to him, they were imaginatively present. Hamlet involves an awareness of mortal loss known in every family, but here death freezes the instant of loss, so that the hero has no consolation, nothing he can hope for in Gertrude or Ophelia. Before his interview with the Ghost, he responds to his uncle's words about 'my cousin' and 'my son' in a line that famously typifies him: 'A little more than kin, and less than kind' (I. ii. 65). The puns reflect despair over relationships gone askew. The world he would retain is akin to that of a privileged Tudor child, or of security, promise, and Christian mystery, and it is shadowily evident in Act I. The Ghost returns from purgatory and flees at the cock's crowing, or Marcellus notes the potency of Christ's returns at the season 'wherein our saviour's birth is celebrated.' (I. i. 140). Metaphysical reality here impinges on the diurnal, but even in Act I metaphysical truth is obscure and uncertain, and this uncertainty is a keynote in Hamlet's questions.
Fratricide had begun with Cain in Genesis, and the Wittenberg scholar must meet evil and death. But why turn avenger himself?
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Crediting filial love as an imperative, Shakespeare suggests a Prince whose past experience might be, after all, wholly that of well-being. News of his father's murder does not make Hamlet a brooding melancholic, but reveals him as mobile, alert, taking on 'antic' behaviour as a player of roles. Like the poet of the Sonnets, Hamlet knows almost too many half-truths; he eschews ideologies and finds his way through humanist grammar-school paradoxes step by step. He offers commonplaces as if no one had ever heard of them, although his soliloquies, in their fresh associative immediacy, enlist Renaissance thought to make it his own. The soliloquies show off his extreme anguish and, importantly, do not transform it, but keep terrible pain and the mind that endures it in view. Astonishingly, universal ideas become the registers of Hamlet's suffering, just as the beauty of his language is an index of his mind. Shakespeare exerts the utmost intellectual pressure here, but what is unusual is that he can project ideas with such intensity within the frame of Hamlet's own obsessions and feelings.
The Prince focuses on the antithesis between the brother kings-his brutal, sensual uncle, and gentle, loving father -- and this may be a part of the play's dramatic and moral structure, as Harold Jenkins argues. But Hamlet is concerned with more than mankind's divided nature. Insulting and cruel to Ophelia, he exults in shifting part of the blame for his father's murder to Gertrude. 'Have you eyes?' he demands of his mother in the closet scene in which King Hamlet is a ghostly paragon and Claudius is evoked as a depraved beast,
Eyes without feeling, feeling without sight,
Ears without hands or eyes, smelling sans all,
Or but a sickly part of one true sense
Could not so mope. 9
These lines, from the Second Quarto, appear later to have been deleted by the author, as if he had seen an excess in the Prince's railing at Gertrude's organs of sense. That is what is likely; but even if someone else excised them Shakespeare here is artistically faulty, involved, self-indulgent in putting down Gertrude. Far from making dramas out of thin air, he worked out tensions; he responded to closely felt memories, to hard, static, grievous pressures, and even to cold bitter-
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ness. Which is to say that he was like the rest of us, given the hopes, regrets, and despairs in every psyche. But Hamlet might suggest that Shakespeare's dynamic had much more to do with his mother than his father, and that Mary Shakespeare was involved with his deep understanding and his artistic faults, his exalting of Juliet or Rosalind, his odd failure with two different Portias, perhaps his blunder with Jessica, and with the curious misogyny evident in the Sonnets. Despite his heroines, Shakespeare is very much at ease with feelings that ascribe blame and evil to women. Also in Hamlet his belief in psychological interdependence is interesting, for inwardly the hero goes to great lengths to emend his image of his mother to ready himself for death. In the process he awakes to a nightmare of Tudor problems, so far hinted at but barely explored in Richard II, and these are almost free of theological bias and have practical concerns at their root. If the medieval outlook is lost, how is one to judge one's existence or reconcile conflicts in one's nature? Does sensual appetite condemn the mind? Is it right that conscience should make one endorse a just cause whatever the penalty? Is it worth one's life to oppose social injustice or outlandish personal wrong, and if unusual struggle and strategy are warranted how can one foresee the results of one's actions?
Delving into such corners of modern thought, the Prince exhibits other interests with the players. 'Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you -- trippingly on the tongue', he says among two or three of the well-tried actors. 'Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently . . .'. Whatever its use to a wellweathered troupe, such advice reflects ironically on its royal speaker's ungentle behaviour. The Prince's most famous speech on acting echoes Ben Jonson's Asper, who in Every Man Out of his Humour aims to offer a mirror in which to see 'the time's deformity I Anatomiz'd in every nerve and sinew'. 'Suit the action to the word, the word to the action', Hamlet rephrases that neo-classical wisdom,
with this special observance: that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature. For anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is to hold as 'twere the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.
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He adds that all this should not be 'overdone or come tardy off '. Understandably taken aback, the First Player hopes 'we have reformed that indifferently' already in his troupe. 'O', says Hamlet undeterred, 'reform it altogether'. 10
He is obtuse with the actors, but committed to their craft, and here Shakespeare appears to take a wry view of the contemporary theatre. Holding out for restraint and naturalism, the Prince, in effect, seems to point up skills of the Chamberlain's men, who are more disciplined than the Admiral's, and more lifelike -- and life-sized -- than boy troupes. Hamlet's advice contrasts with his agony of wavering in killing the king, and one implication may be that his own character is more elusive than the best conventions of acting will show.
Burbage, even so, succeeded in the Prince's great part. Hamlet had an immense, lasting success: it established its author as the age's foremost tragedian. The play was heard on land and at sea. Within a few years, Captain Keeling's men on the Dragon acted it off the coast of Sierra Leone. Sir Thomas Smith in a mission to Boris Godunov at Moscow compared events there to Hamlet, and young John Poulett cited the author when picturing French sports in
a letter from Paris to his uncle Sir Francis Vincent: 'men seeme in them as actors in a Tragedye, and my thinkes I could play Shackesbeare in relating'. 11 Nothing supports (and yet nothing contradicts) the First Quarto's claim in 1603 that Hamlet was acted 'in the two Universities of Cambridge and Oxford' -- it could have been staged, for example, at private houses in these towns.
'The younger sort', wrote Gabriel Harvey gravely, on a blank halfpage of his copy of Speght Chaucer around 1601, 'takes much delight in Shakespeares Venus, & Adonis: but his Lucrece, & his tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke, have it in them, to please the wiser sort.' 12
The tragic play that followed this success was Troilus and Cressida, though it belongs far less certainly to the genre of tragedy. There is a modern hypothesis that Shakespeare wrote Troilus for a law Inn. That chance is reinforced, though weakly, by the claim of two stationers, Richard Bonian and Henry Walley, in 1609, that it was then a 'new play' and 'never clapper-clawed with the palms of the vulgar'. Early that year, they had advertised it as a work already performed for London's
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public at the Globe. 13 Little else suggests that Troilus was meant only for lawyers. By 1602 (when we think it was written) Shakespeare's troupe had cause for anxiety: George Carey, Lord Hunsdon was too ill to attend the Privy Council: they had no patron at Whitehall. On his appointment as Lord Chamberlain in 1597, they had again become the Lord Chamberlain's Servants, but his illness and the Queen's decline put them in jeopardy. Still, none of that accounts for Shakespeare's acid view of the Trojan War, his assault on valour and idealism, or his picturing of a faithless Cressida and a bitterly disillusioned Troilus.
He had, however, steeped himself in a war about which Tudor writers were cynical. In Homer and in Ovid as well as in Robert Henryson's Testament of Cresseid and perhaps in Chaucer Troilus and Criseyde among other sources, he had found older versions of the tale. Some three Trojan War plays were staged in the 1590s -- and Chettle and Dekker had written a ' Troyelles & cresseda' for Henslowe in 1599. A year before that, George Chapman had dedicated Seaven Bookes of the Iliades of Homere to the Earl of Essex, while lauding the Greek hero -- Achilles -- as one in whose 'unmatched vertues shyne the dignities of the soule, and the whole excellence of royall humanitie'. 14
Unlikely to have responded to Chapman quite as Keats did, Shakespeare shows Achilles as lazy, corrupt, and murderous, but none of his drama's portraits -- not even Ajax's -- is 'original' in being free from all Tudor precedent. Its figures had already been judged in legend, and cynicism here is in keeping with recent debate over the Iliad and, lately, with the theatre's satiric pessimism. Jonson Poetaster has an armed Prologue, to which Troilus's own Prologue figure responds, since he calls himself.
A Prologue armed -- but not in confidence Of author's pen or actor's voice . . .
(lines 23-4)
Shakespeare is less satirical in the play than intrigued by his materials, by war's reality, problems of mixed viewpoints, and history's forcing of roles on its actors.
The situation of the long, futile Trojan War gives him a chance to explore paradoxes of our human faculties -- particularly those of intuition and romantic faith on the one hand, and of logic and intellectual
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reasoning on the other. 'Intelligence here is a primary quality', notes Wilson Knight in The Wheel of Fire, in one of the most discerning essays on the play: 'fools are jeered at for their blunt wits, wise men display their prolix wisdom, the lover analyses the metaphysical implications of his love.' 15 The play is freshly analytic, but with long roots in Shakespeare's developing views of history and temperament. As early as Lucrece he had referred to 'sly Ulysses', and here Ulysses is at once foxy and flawed. More icily drawn than heroes of the romantic comedies, Troilus is more to blame for love's failure than Cressida, who is not prone to self-deception. The play relates to several of the genres and implies a fine, innovative critique of tragic form -- but it is very doubtful that this brilliant experiment was really a particular success in its time on any stage in London, whether private or public.
Investments
In these years there were sad changes at Stratford, where mortality divided the poet a little more from his past. His father had died, and John Shakespeare was laid to rest at Holy Trinity on 8 September 1601. He made no surviving legal will, but his eldest son inherited the two Henley Street houses.
Did the amiable glover -- in old age -- have a loose tongue? Someone, after all, had spoken to Adrian Quiney of the poet's wish to buy 'some odd yardland or other at Shottery'. That had been a delicate topic, involving, perhaps, no more than a half-formed plan of John Shakespeare's son to invest spare cash. But Sturley and old Adrian had both hoped to persuade John's very affluent son -- an actor and theatrepoet with money in his pocket -- to forget the Shottery yardlands, and to help himself and the Corporation by buying a share in the tithes. Sturley refers to the poet as an unwitting soul who can be guided, but it is not clear that the glover's son was eager to be told what to do with his cash. Having bought New Place, Shakespeare waited four and a half years and until after his father died before making another large outlay -- despite his rising profits as a Globe 'housekeeper' and at a time when Hamlet (by around 1601) would have been one of the Globe's chief drawing cards.
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As he acquired funds, he apparently took pains to guard himself against those too ready to advise; in fact, he did not invest in Shottery, and for a few years bided his time. John Shakespeare's tongue, if it did cause trouble, may have been less embarrassing than the council's kindly fondness for anybody with spare cash. In any case, grief for his father may possibly have outweighed any sense Shakespeare had of the old glover's failings. Grief can elude the Public Record Office, but two poems that he wrote at about this time with their strong elegiac strain may indirectly reflect his sense of loss. It is well to add that their composition dates are unsettled. A Lover's Complaint, a narrative in the plaintive vein of Samuel Daniel and the 1590s, may have been written in 16o2 or soon after. It takes up themes of seduction and betrayal from the viewpoint of a young woman whose tone is one of elegiac weariness. Her seducer is a clever, interesting version of a young Tarquin bent on self-apology, though the portrait is offset by almost unchanging, leaden effects of her sorrow.
The Phoenix and Turtle, a lyric he never entitled, appeared in the year of his father's death. It was printed along with verses by Jonson, Chapman, and Marston in a collection by Robert Chester, entitled Love's Martyr. or, Rosalin's Complaint. Allegorically shadowing the Truth of Love, in the constant Fate of the Phoenix and Turtle. The volume is dedicated to Sir John Salusbury, who in 1586 had married Ursula Halsall, born Stanley, the illegitimate daughter of the fourth Earl of Derby. Ursula and her husband had two children, a daughter Jane born in 1587, and a son Henry in 1589. Using motifs of the Phoenix and the Turtle Dove, Chester's poets appear to celebrate the Salusburys.
Shakespeare writes a requiem on the death of pure love. Alluding to the burial rite, he imagines troops of birds mourning for the Phoenix and Turtle Dove, who had loved ideally:
Hearts remote yet not asunder,
Distance and no space was seen
'Twixt this turtle and his queen:
But in them it were a wonder.
(lines 29-32) 16
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Oddly his rhyme 'asunder-wonder' also appears in the light song 'Shall I die?' -- which in recent times Gary Taylor, rather unconvincingly and in the face of much disbelief, holds to be Shakespeare's. Here in one stanza, a lady's cleavage is in view:
Pretty bare, past compare,
Parts those plots which besots
still asunder.
It is meet naught but sweet
Should come near that so rare
'tis a wonder.
(lines 71-6)
Light love, light verse -- and this is only a flying trapeze in rhyme. 'Shall I die?' was first assigned to Shakespeare in a miscellany collected, and donated to the Bod
leian, by Richard Rawlinson ( 16891755), in which most of the attributions are reliable. The light song's authorship is in doubt, but further arguments for it might be made, and I think it could very well be by Shakespeare. Missing exercises, not necessarily of any greater weight, must lie behind his most exquisite lyrics, or the 'Threnos' for his Phoenix and Dove:
Beauty, truth, and rarity,
Grace in all simplicity,
Here enclosed in cinders lie.
(lines 53-5)
Investments followed in the year after his father died. In 1602 he made two purchases without being on hand to confirm them. Across from his gardens on the far side of Chapel Lane was land belonging to the manor of Rowington, then held by the dowager Countess of Warwick, lady of the manor. A transfer of copyhold title to the dramatist was arranged; but when her deputy, Walter Getley, came to the manor court on 28 September to surrender the deed, no one was there to be granted it. Four years later, the matter was still irregular. A cottage and garden were on this quarter-acre, and yet a survey of the manor leaves a blank space for the date of the court at which Shakespeare was
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admitted to tenancy -- no record that he had bothered with that formality could be found. 17
His brother Gilbert helped at another time. On 1 May 1602, Shakespeare bought for £320 from the wealthy Combes, William Gilbert of Warwick and his nephew John, of Stratford, about 107 acres in open fields north and east of the town in what was then called Old Stratford. Gilbert took receipt of the deed, and Humphrey Mainwaring, Anthony Nash and his brother John, and others witnessed it. The poet's acres lay in nineteen scattered strips of land, or furlongs, which were irregularly shaped. The names of the furlongs and their exact locales were lost when the land was enclosed, but the names interestingly came to light as recently as 1994. *