Shakespeare alluded in the prologue to Romeo and Juliet to the “two hours’ traffic of our stage.” Ben Jonson was probably closer to the mark when he spoke in Bartholomew Fair of “two hours and a half, and somewhat more.” By any measure, Hamlet uncut was truly, in the play’s own words, a “poem unlimited” (2.2.400). After a decade in the theater, Shakespeare knew how long scripts ran and could cut to size when he wanted to: Julius Caesar (at twenty-five hundred lines) and As You Like It (at twenty-eight hundred) could have gone from study to stage uncut. As they should have: given the culture of playwriting at this time, there was little to be gained by submitting a play far too long to be performed.
The most tempting explanation for Hamlet’s unusual length—that Shakespeare had finally begun to care more about how his words were read than how they were staged—is implausible. Had Shakespeare suddenly become interested in having a play published he could have followed the path just taken by Ben Jonson, who had carefully seen Every Man Out of His Humour into print. Jonson had indicated on the title page that it contained “more than hath been publicly spoken or acted” by the Chamberlain’s Men in late 1599 and declared himself the play’s “author”—both novel claims. There was a strong market for Jonson’s book, and the printed version was a best-seller, going through a remarkable three editions in eight months. But Shakespeare neither pressed for the publication of Hamlet nor cared much for this kind of literary status. And several years would pass before even an unauthorized, pirated version of Hamlet was published.
Shakespeare’s early versions of Hamlet don’t show him to be overly concerned with writing something that could be immediately performed or published. He was letting the writing take him where it would. Alone among contemporary playwrights in 1599, Shakespeare—as shareholder, principal playwright, and part owner of the theater in which his plays were staged—had the freedom to do so. But he would never write so long a version of a play again, and only King Lear would undergo such extensive revision. His fellow sharers may even have given him time off from rehearsing and acting to work on Hamlet, for Shakespeare’s name is conspicuously absent from the list of those who acted in Jonson’s Every Man Out of His Humour this autumn, though it was given pride of place among those who had performed Every Man In His Humour a year earlier.
The differences between the first and second versions of Hamlet reveal a good deal about how Shakespeare wrote and for that reason alone are worth attending to. The revisions also tell a story of Shakespeare’s decision to alter the trajectory of the play and shore up the resolve of its hero. Scholars differ on details, and some remain committed to radically different accounts of the relationship of the surviving versions of Hamlet and of how the play changed. What follows, though necessarily simplified (for to deal with all the vexing issues raised by the play’s multiple versions would take volumes), seems to me to be the most plausible and economical reconstruction of what happened.
Shakespeare finished tinkering with his first version of Hamlet in the waning months of 1599 but wasn’t yet ready to turn it over to his fellow players. When he returned to his finished draft not long after, he revised extensively as he wrote out the play again in a fresh copy. It doesn’t appear that he knew in advance what kinds of changes he would make, and most of the thousand or so alterations are minor and stylistic. This revised Hamlet was still not, as his fellow players might have hoped, a performance-ready script: Shakespeare trimmed only 230 lines (while adding 90 new ones), so that the revisions wouldn’t have reduced the playing time by more than ten minutes. Even in this second version he was still letting the work follow its own course. When he was done with the new draft in the winter of 1600, Shakespeare turned it over to his fellow players; a significant abridgement would still be necessary before it could be performed at the Globe.
Because versions of both Shakespeare’s first and second thoughts survive, it’s possible to follow the process of revision (while recognizing that some of the changes can be attributed to compositors, bookkeepers, scribes, censors, and others through whose hands they passed). Shakespeare tinkered obsessively—far more than his reputation for never blotting a line would suggest. He turned Hamlet’s famous cry, “What’s Hecuba to him, or he to her” into the more sonorous “What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba” (2.2.559). He modernized old-fashioned words and simplified obscure ones so that Gertrude’s description of the drowning Ophelia chanting “snatches of old lauds” is changed to “snatches of old tunes” (4.7.177) and Ophelia’s “virgin crants” becomes “virgin rites” (5.1.232). There are dozens of similar examples.
Seemingly insignificant changes prove to be consequential. The most famous is the substitution of a single word in the opening line of Hamlet’s first soliloquy, which had begun, “O that this too too sallied flesh would melt.” The second time around this appears as “too too solid flesh” (1.2.129). Hamlet’s initial sense of being assaulted or assailed (“sallied” conveys a sense of being sullied or polluted by his mother’s infidelity) is replaced by an anguished desire for nothingness that has less to do with his mother’s behavior than with his own inaction.
The smallest of changes complicate Hamlet’s character. When an armed Hamlet comes upon Claudius at prayer, Shakespeare first had his hero say, “Now I might I do it, but now a is a-praying.” When he returned to this passage he substituted the words “do it pat” for “do it, but”—so that the line now read: “Now I might I do it pat, now he is praying” (3.3.73–74). There is a world of difference. In the earlier version, a more hesitant Hamlet can’t take revenge because Claudius is praying. In the revised version a more opportunistic Hamlet can act precisely because he has caught his adversary off guard but won’t because to do so would mean sending a shriven Claudius to heaven.
A more striking example of revision occurs early on when Hamlet angrily turns on Ophelia:
I have heard of your paintings well enough. God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another; you jig and amble, and you list, you nickname God’s creatures, and make wantonness ignorance.
When Shakespeare reworked these lines he shifted the grounds of Hamlet’s attack and sharpened its staccato rhythm:
I have heard of your prattlings too well enough. God has given you one pace, and you make yourself another; you jig, you amble, and you lisp, and nickname God’s creatures, and make your wantonness your ignorance.
(3.1.141–46)
It’s no longer about how Ophelia looks but how she speaks and moves—prattling and lisping (while “pace” replaces “face,” connecting up with “jig” and “amble”).
Shakespeare also caught himself on the verge of incomprehensibility. In the revised text, for example, Claudius straightforwardly brings act 4, scene 1 to an end, saying:
we’ll call up our wisest friends
To let them know both what we mean to do
And what’s untimely done. O, come away,
My soul is full of discord and dismay.
Had Shakespeare’s earlier version not survived, we could never have guessed that in the middle of this speech Claudius digressed in an impossibly dense metaphor about how “slander flies in a line of fire like a cannon-ball”:
we’ll call up our wisest friends,
And let them know both what we mean to do
And what’s untimely done. [So envious slander]
Whose whisper o’er the world’s diameter,
As level as the cannon to his blank,
Transports his poisoned shot, may miss our name,
And hit the woundless air. O, come away
My soul is full of discord and dismay.
(4.1.38–45)
The sheer number of changes to the earlier version suggest a degree of uncertainty on Shakespeare’s part, as if he were not quite as sure as he had been in Julius Caesar or As You Like It where his characters and plot were heading.
The revisions went smoothly enough until Shakespeare got to act 4, scene 4 and Hamlet’s final soliloquy: “How all occasions
do inform against me / And spur my dull revenge.” Until now the soliloquies had deepened our sense of Hamlet’s character while circling around problems whose complexities resisted resolution—though by the end of each Hamlet manages to find a way forward, hopeful that the right course of action would become clearer. As he prepares to depart for England in act 4, Hamlet comes upon young Fortinbras leading an army through Denmark on the way to Poland “to gain a little patch of ground / That hath in it no profit but the name” (4.4.18–19). Except for the play’s final moments, this is the only time that we see Fortinbras, though we have heard of him periodically. Horatio tells us in the opening scene that “young Fortinbras” of “unimproved mettle, hot and full,” is leading an army of “lawless resolutes” (1.1.95–98) to regain lands that his father had lost to Hamlet’s thirty years earlier. Fear of Fortinbras’s invasion produces “this posthaste and rummage in the land” (1.1.107) and explains why Bernardo and Francisco are standing guard as the play begins. We later learn that Fortinbras’s bedridden uncle, the King of Norway, at Claudius’s urging, has apparently persuaded him to redirect his attack against the Poles. Fortinbras is Hamlet’s foil: a restless young prince chafing under his uncle’s authority and eager to avenge his father.
The chance encounter is the turning point of the play, crystallizing for Hamlet the futility of heroic action. Looking on as Fortinbras’s troops march off to the wars, Hamlet sees the invisible rot at the heart of this martial display:
This is th’impostume of much wealth and peace
That inward breaks, and shows no cause without
Why the man dies.
(4.4.27–29)
His words echo a line in Holinshed’s Chronicles that had stuck with Shakespeare: “sedition,” Holinshed had written, “is the apostume of the realm, which when it breaketh inwardly, putteth the state in great danger of recovery.” There’s no cure for this cancer. It may well be the darkest moment in the play.
The soliloquy that immediately follows returns to ideas Hamlet has long wrestled with. Beastliness has been much on his mind, whether it’s that of Phyrrus, an “Hyrcanian beast” (2.2.451), that “adulterate beast” Claudius (1.5.42), or even his mother: “O God, a beast that wants discourse of reason / Would have mourned longer” (1.2.150–51). Hamlet now unexpectedly reverses himself. “Thinking too precisely” is as beastly as acting impulsively. “What is a man,” he asks, “if his chief good and market of his time / Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more” (4.4.33–35). He can’t shake the idea of his own beastliness, which now seems to him grounded in his cowardly habit of hairsplitting analysis:
Now whether it be
Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple
Of thinking too precisely on th’ event,
(A thought which quartered hath but one part wisdom,
And ever three parts coward), I do not know
Why yet I live to say “this thing’s to do,”
Sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and means
To do’t.
(4.4.39–46)
Hamlet repudiates the very thing that had won us over, his refusal to act unthinkingly. He has discovered that he’s a beast if he acts and a beast if he doesn’t. The example of Fortinbras confirms for him that there can be no right way forward:
Examples gross as earth exhort me;
Witness this army of such mass and charge,
Led by a delicate and tender prince,
Whose spirit, with divine ambition puffed,
Makes mouths at the invisible event,
Exposing what is mortal and unsure,
To all that fortune, death, and danger dare,
Even for an eggshell.
(4.4.46–53)
It’s Hamlet at his most sardonic. Fortinbras is a “gross” example not only in the sense of “obvious” but also “monstrous.” The ironic “delicate” and “tender” are the last adjectives the ruthless Fortinbras calls to mind. Fortinbras is “puffed” with ambition and childlike makes “mouths” or faces at unseen outcomes. He is willing to sacrifice the lives of his followers for nothing, for “an eggshell”—with the hint here of broken eggshells as empty crowns (an image Shakespeare would develop in King Lear).
Hamlet’s conclusion has exasperated critics, and some have refused to take him at his word, insisting that he means the exact opposite of what he says and that we should take his words “not to stir” as a double negative, “not not to stir.” But this is desperate. Hamlet concludes that greatness consists not in refraining to act unless the cause is great but in fighting over any imagined slight:
Rightly to be great,
Is not to stir without great argument,
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
When honor’s at the stake.
(4.4.53–56)
It’s the discredited argument for a culture of honor left in tatters by the events of the previous year. In the aftermath of Essex’s Irish campaign, Elizabethans didn’t need to be reminded what an “army of such mass and charge” leading to the “imminent death of twenty thousand men” amounted to. The relentless pursuit of honor can be used to justify anything. Fortinbras is a perfect example, for he is willing to sacrifice his men for a “fantasy and trick of fame”:
to my shame I see
The imminent death of twenty thousand men,
That for a fantasy and trick of fame,
Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot
Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause,
Which is not tomb enough and continent
To hide the slain.
(4.4.59–65)
It’s a grim, almost savage soliloquy. And the image of Fortinbras marching through Denmark on his way to slaughter Poles can’t help but invite comparison to a scene enacted thirty years earlier when Hamlet’s father had taken the same route to the same end. Were his actions against the Poles any less brutal than Fortinbras’s—and are we to think that these are the “foul crimes” (1.5.12) that still haunt him? Will Fortinbras’s costly campaign be recalled in similar heroic language?
“How all occasions” is a fitting culmination to the sequence of soliloquies that preceded it—but only if we want to see the resolution of the play as dark and existential. Hamlet knows that he has to kill Claudius but cannot justify such an action since the traditional avenger’s appeal to honor rings hollow. This bitter and hard-won knowledge serves as a capstone to earlier, anguished soliloquies. Yet as Shakespeare saw, it derailed the revenge plot. The resolution of the play was now a problem, for it had to be more motivated than the “accidental judgments” and “casual slaughters” Horatio describes (5.2.361). Yet for a resigned Hamlet—capable only of bloody “thoughts” not deeds (4.4.66)—to take revenge after this is to concede that he is no better than Fortinbras. In the final scene, mortally wounded and having killed Claudius, Hamlet hears the “warlike noise” (5.2.349) of Fortinbras’s approaching army and declares, “I do prophesy th’ election lights / On Fortinbras; he has my dying voice” (5.2.355–56). What could possibly justify Hamlet’s urging Fortinbras’s succession? These words are either spoken ironically or are the stoical observation of someone who knows that even Alexander the Great and Caesar return to dust. The entry of Fortinbras backed by his lawless troops confirms that there will be no “election” in Denmark—the country is his for the taking. Hamlet can have no illusions about the fate of Denmark under the rule of an opportunist willing to sacrifice the lives of his own followers. A play that began with hurried defensive preparations to withstand Fortinbras’s troops ends with a capitulation to them, the poisoned bodies of the Danish ruling family sprawled onstage, a fitting image of the “impostume of much wealth and peace, / That inward breaks.”
In allowing his writing to take him where it would in his first draft, Shakespeare had created his greatest protagonist, but the trajectory of Hamlet’s soliloquies had left the resolution of the play incoherent and broken too radically from the conventions of th
e revenge plot that had to sweep both protagonist and play to a satisfying conclusion. Shakespeare now had to choose between the integrity of his character and his plot, and he chose plot. Hamlet’s climactic soliloquy had to be cut. When he revised this scene, Shakespeare eliminated the long soliloquy entirely, along with Hamlet’s words with Fortinbras’s Captain. All that was left to the scene was a perfunctory nine-line exchange between a courteous Fortinbras and the Captain that provided a plausible explanation for why Fortinbras would be in a position to pick up the pieces at the end of the play. One immediate effect of the cut was that in the revised version (in which Hamlet neither sees Fortinbras’s army nor speaks of him so trenchantly), the lines in which Hamlet offers Fortinbras his “dying voice” strike a more upbeat, hopeful note. Their edge is furthered softened by Shakespeare’s decision to return to the opening scene and change Fortinbras’s “lawless resolutes” into the more understandable “landless” ones—the kind of men, younger sons and gentleman volunteers, who had sought their fortune in Ireland.
A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare Page 36