This Is Shakespeare
Page 14
It’s clear that Cinna’s death is the consequence of an unfortunate coincidence: it’s because he has the misfortune to share his name with one of the conspirators that he is killed. The plebeians are unwittingly carrying out an act of dramatic hygiene: after all, it is confusing when a play has two characters with the same name. Something similar happens at the end of that contemporaneous play, also from this highly productive year of 1599, with which Julius Caesar may seem otherwise to have almost nothing in common – As You Like It. One dominant theme of this pastoral comedy is the quarrel between the de Boys brothers: Oliver (the older, bad brother) and Orlando (the younger, good one). But early on in the play there is a mention of a middle sibling, Jacques. Something has gone awry here, for the play already has a prominent Jacques, the melancholic courtier who is a member of Duke Senior’s Robin Hoodish court in the forest. When Jacques de Boys finally enters at the end of the play, there is a funny, momentary standoff between him and the other Jacques. The message is a self-conscious one about dramaturgy: one name = one character. And where there are two characters with the same name, one must cede, as the Prince tells Hotspur at the end of 1 Henry IV. There isn’t room in this play for another Henry. So there isn’t room in Julius Caesar for another Cinna. Sometimes when watching a play we don’t actually pick up what characters are called – perhaps because it doesn’t matter, or perhaps because they are being left more shadowy for some purpose. But in Julius Caesar the names are particularly emphatic, in that they are repeatedly spoken aloud. These are already familiar names, and Cinna’s is not the only one that carries a fatal message. Historical awareness means that all the characters in the play suffer from nominative determinism, part of the monumentalizing notoriety of their stories.
If Cinna is killed partly for his name, he is also killed because he is a poet. Shakespeare’s poet is innocent, and when the plebeians claim to tear him ‘for his bad verses’ (3.3.30), there’s no reason to think they know anything about his poetry. In this scene the play suggests that to be a poet is by definition apolitical: the poet is self-evidently a mistaken target. Shakespeare emphasizes Cinna’s occupation more than his sources do. For Julius Caesar he uses an English translation of the Greek essayist and historiographer Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, but his immediate source for this scene seems to be another favourite text, Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The story of the death of the legendary poet Orpheus is a clear parallel to Cinna, as Arthur Golding, in the English translation favoured by Shakespeare, describes how ‘rash / And heady ryot out of frame all reason now did dash, / And frantik outrage reigned.’ Orpheus too was torn to pieces by a mob with ‘with bluddy hands’:
As when a Stag by hungrye hownds is in a morning found,
The which forestall him round about and pull him to the ground.
Even so the prophet they assayle …
So Cinna is a bystander, caught up in events he seems to have no part in. Is that really Shakespeare’s view of the poet? A number of references to poets and poetry in the cluster of plays of this period seem to poke fun at this pursuit, from Orlando’s lame poetry in the forest of Arden in As You Like It and the wish of the foppish French nobleman in Henry V to write a sonnet to his horse, to the ‘halting sonnet of his own pure brain, / Fashioned to Beatrice’ (5.4.487–8) triumphantly produced by the matchmakers at the end of Much Ado About Nothing as the last nail in the coffin of Benedick’s bachelordom. All these poets and poems are gently mocked: poetry is hardly a heroic pursuit. But these images of poetry must also have a self-reflexive quality, an element of the self-portrait. It’s around this period, after all, that Shakespeare’s own name begins to appear on the title pages of his printed plays: his own identity as a named author is being consolidated.
If Shakespeare’s own poetic identity is being cemented around the time of Julius Caesar, the wider social and political role of the poet is also centre stage. If the role of the poet had ever been to be an innocent bystander on the political scene, it was hard to maintain that disengaged fiction in 1599, the year of increased literary censorship known as the Bishops’ Ban. This piece of Elizabethan legislation imposed much stronger censorship of printed material in specified genres. The first was satire, where a number of titles were publicly burned at the heart of the publishing industry, at Stationers’ Hall in St Paul’s Churchyard: works by John Marston, Joseph Hall and Thomas Middleton were among those named, and the entire work of Thomas Nashe and Gabriel Harvey was banned. The second was to restate in stronger terms restrictions on drama: ‘that no plays be printed except they be allowed by such as have authority’. Finally, English history became a proscribed genre, referred to an authority higher than the Archbishop of Canterbury and Bishop of London: ‘that no English histories be printed except they be allowed by some of Her Majesties’ Privy Council’. No doubt this had a direct impact on Shakespeare’s work: moving, after nine plays based on English historical material, to the classical world for Julius Caesar, seems one immediate response. Unusually for a Shakespeare play, we have a pretty close idea of when Julius Caesar was performed because a Swiss tourist called Thomas Platter saw it at the Globe towards the end of September 1599. (He has disappointingly little to say about it except that it was ‘pleasingly performed’ and that at the end ‘they danced together admirably and exceedingly gracefully, according to their custom, two in each group dressed in men’s and two in women’s apparel’ – it’s an interesting coda to the solemnity of the victorious Mark Antony and Octavius Caesar acknowledging Brutus as ‘the noblest Roman of them all’.) Platter’s eyewitness account puts the performed play only a couple of months after the date of the Bishops’ Ban in early summer of 1599. Perhaps, then, the cameo of the poet Cinna is some kind of gesture towards the new climate of poetic censorship. That the first casualty of the post-Caesar regime in the play is a poet – or poetry itself, perhaps – may have had a particular resonance in the climate of literary censorship at the end of the century.
Even though the Cinna scene is so short, then, it seems burdened with trying to say something about the role of the poet in contemporary political life. Even the poet as bystander is brought, resistantly, into politics. And in case we miss it, the play has another go at the same suggestion. It has a second poet, too – a figure called in modern editions with wonderful superfluity, ‘Another Poet’. We’ve already had another Cinna – now we have another poet. Something is going pear-shaped in the second half of the play: just as it all unravels for Brutus and Cassius after the death of Caesar, so too it unravels a bit for Shakespeare. Conspirators and playwright alike are preoccupied by tactics – how to kill the leader, how to write that brilliant ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen’ set-piece oratory – rather than strategy – so what will we do next? Repetitions, perhaps farcical ones in Marx’s sense, abound in the second half of the play, with two versions of Portia’s death, Cassius’ coinciding birthday and death-day, and those two random poets. A figure simply called ‘Poet’ interrupts Brutus and Cassius just at the point when they have reconciled from their quarrel, showing off his vocation in a da-dah rhyming couplet: ‘Love and be friends, as two such men should be, / For I have seen more years, I’m sure, than ye’ (4.2.183–4). Cassius dismisses the ‘jigging fool’ (189) poet scornfully: ‘Ha, ha! How vilely doth this cynic rhyme!’ (185). Another poet, that’s to say, is unnecessarily brought into the play. Like poor old Cinna, he gets no chance to effect anything, or do anything. But if he is so impotent, why is he there at all? Poets keep pushing at the door of this play and that duplication must be saying something about the contested role of poetry in a political play. In a play self-consciously about interpretation, Cinna the poet and his unnamed colleague draw attention to the role of poetry in political conflicts past and present: the aftermaths of both the assassination of Julius Caesar and the declaration of literary censorship in the Bishops’ Ban.
CHAPTER 11
Hamlet
Hamlet is Shakespeare’s most filmed play,
from Laurence Olivier’s claustrophobic black and white Elsinore (1948) to Michael Almereyda’s moodily alienated Ethan Hawke in contemporary corporate New York (2000). Asta Nielsen played a secretly female Hamlet on film in 1921 (Horatio gets a bit of a shock when he inadvertently grabs the dying Hamlet’s breasts and suddenly recalibrates his feelings for his fellow student); the politics of Kashmir shape Vishal Bhardwaj’s adaptation as Haider (2014); and even Disney’s The Lion King (1994) draws on this most famous of stories. One of my favourites is the avant-garde film directed by Celestino Coronado in 1976. Coronado went on to be a significant dancer, choreographer and theatre-maker, but this surreally inventive adaptation of Hamlet, made on a shoestring for his Royal College of Art diploma portfolio, has been unfairly overlooked. Even its casting is provocative. A young Helen Mirren plays both Gertrude and Ophelia. Quentin Crisp is Polonius. And Hamlet is played by twins, David and Anthony Meyer, who also play Laertes. Hamlet’s doubts and uncertainties are magnified into a literally split personality: one Hamlet excoriates Gertrude’s faithfulness while the other tries to suckle her breast, and in the final duel with Laertes it is clear that Hamlet is fighting against a part of himself.
If this all seems a bit of pretentious art-school campery (it is too, and nothing wrong with that), like all worthwhile adaptations it sends us back to the play anew. For there were always two Hamlets in Hamlet. Not quite the cloven prince literalized by the Meyer brothers, but Shakespeare’s play significantly duplicates his Hamlets by giving the dead king and his troubled son the same name. The first Hamlet we hear about in the play is not the young prince but the former monarch, ‘our valiant Hamlet’ (1.1.83). This Hamlet is already slain when the play begins, a dead man who will not lie down: ‘through the ghost of the unquiet father the image of the unliving son looks forth’, as James Joyce put it in Ulysses. The guards on the castle battlements who encounter an apparition ‘In the same figure like the King that’s dead’ (1.1.39) decide that one person in particular needs to know of this. Horatio reassures them:
Let us impart what we have seen tonight
Unto young Hamlet; for upon my life,
This spirit, dumb to us, will speak to him.
(1.1.150–52)
Hamlet, our Hamlet, the Hamlet we imagine the play is named after, is actually ‘young Hamlet’ – Hamlet 2, Hamlet Jr. His name requires a modifier to avoid confusion. He bears the name of a dead man. His very identity is caught up in the past. This apparently incidental decision by Shakespeare, to give father and son a shared name, turns out to open up a retrospective cast to this most modern-seeming of plays.
To call Hamlet a nostalgic play or a play preoccupied by the past may seem perverse, given the many, many ways it has seemed to capture Shakespeare at his most modern. For Sigmund Freud and for Karl Marx, Shakespeare was the textual exemplar for their theories of psychological and economic modernity. Big-hitting philosophers like Lacan, Nietzsche and Adorno have all used Hamlet to theorize modern selfhood, even as T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock declared ‘I am not Prince Hamlet.’ In Shakespeare Our Contemporary, the Polish theatre director Jan Kott imagined a black-sweatered Hamlet reading Sartre and Beckett. Since a bewigged David Garrick played Hamlet to delighted eighteenth-century audiences (everyone wore wigs, so he was effectively in contemporary dress, but Garrick’s had a hidden mechanism to stand Hamlet’s hair upright in fear at the Ghost’s entrance), every age has re-costumed Hamlet himself as a modern individual, from a studenty David Warner in long stripy scarf at Stratford-upon-Avon in the 1960s to David Tennant in jeans and Converse sneakers in 2009. Hamlet’s soliloquies have come to represent the ultimate articulation of a fraught, reflective consciousness: modern man captured in the process of emotional and intellectual formation. We are so used to seeing a Hamlet that anticipates modernity, a play that is more popular and more appreciated four centuries after its composition than it ever was at the time, that it is hard for us to register the ways it is deeply retrospective in tone. But the name Hamlet is key to a more backward-looking play caught up in its own history. For a play that has had so vital an afterlife, that’s to say, Hamlet itself is morbid and memorial, and the name Hamlet registers that pull to the past.
As so often, Shakespeare takes his names from his sources. Although some of the sources for Hamlet are obscure – scholars disagree about a so-called ‘Ur-Hamlet’, a lost earlier version of this play – we do know that Shakespeare read a history of the Danes by Saxo Grammaticus. There he found the story of a prince who feigns madness after his uncle kills his father, who is sent to Britain and who returns to take revenge on the king. And we know that the name Amleth comes from this story, probably via a French translation in the 1570s. If the name Hamlet comes from the play’s sources, one thing that is distinctive about Shakespeare’s naming in the play is the doubling of the name Hamlet for both the dead father and the living son. In none of the sources is the burden of the past, the psychic overlap between the two generations, so stressed as in the play. In Saxo Grammaticus, for instance, Amleth’s father is called Horwendil. Shakespeare repeats the technique to be sure we’ve noticed: Hamlet’s military foil Fortinbras is another avenging son of a heroic dead father who shares the same name. So good, as Gerard Kenny famously sang of New York, they named him twice.
The play’s first Hamlet is a ghost (and perhaps the one the play is really named after). On encountering that ghost for the first time, Hamlet addresses it with his own name: ‘I’ll call thee Hamlet, / King, father, royal Dane. O answer me!’ (1.4.25–6). The ghost jerks the beginning of the play backwards. From the outset, Hamlet is preoccupied with the past. In the tense opening, Marcellus asks ‘has this thing appeared again tonight?’ (1.1.19): that word ‘again’ tells us the ghost is doubly reiterative, symbolizing the recurrent past. Horatio informs us that the ghost represents a more martial Denmark, and a nostalgic world of sledding Polacks and other feats of derring-do. But the later description of the ghost as he lay sleeping in his orchard evokes a kind of biblical golden age. This prelapsarian past is for ever lost by Cain’s murder of his brother Abel, as Claudius acknowledges when he tries unsuccessfully to pray in the middle of the play: ‘It hath the primal eldest curse upon’t, / A brother’s murder’ (3.3.37–8). Old King Hamlet, then, symbolizes the past: familial, political, cultural and temporal. And his appearance pulls Hamlet away from the future and into the past.
In the play’s second scene we see two young men setting off on different courses. Laertes, son of Polonius, requests permission to go to France and is granted it (his father imagines him spending his time ‘drinking, fencing, swearing, /Quarrelling, drabbing [whoring]’ (2.1.26–7)); Hamlet, by contrast, allows himself to be persuaded to stay at home rather than return to university, and in that decision he fixes himself as for ever a child. ‘For your intent / In going back to school in Wittenberg, / It is most retrograde to our desire’ (1.2.112–14). Hamlet’s arrested development is a continued theme. In Gregory Doran’s Royal Shakespeare Company production of 2009 with David Tennant as Hamlet, the ghost’s appearance in Gertrude’s chamber is played as an affectionate family portrait, with parents sitting companionably on the bed and their son arranged happily at their feet, more like a child than a young adult. The ghost’s repeated encouragement to ‘Remember me’ (1.5.91) is a command for his son to join him in the past. The trap is that the play’s own structure has made clear that the past is unreachable, a place beyond the compass of the play, where the murder of the old king took place before the play started.
In sharing a name, father and son cannot be entirely distinguished: young Hamlet cannot form an autonomous identity for himself. This psychological overlap has sometimes been literalized in stage productions: one review of Richard Eyre’s 1980 production at the Royal Court in London described how ‘Jonathan Pryce, in what is effectively his first soliloquy, plays both sides of the conversation between Hamlet and his dead father, adopting for the latter a deep voice wrenched from his stomach’; Laurence Olivie
r also voiced the ghost’s lines in his 1948 film. Such doublings suggest the strong psychic overlap between dead father and troubled son. The repeated names link Hamlet more closely than we often allow to the concerns with political and psychological succession that characterize Shakespeare’s history plays of the 1590s. In many ways Hamlet’s closest canonical neighbour is not the later tragedies of Othello and Macbeth but the earlier 1 Henry IV, another story of a prince trying to escape the burden of a father with whom he shares the same name (and we can see that that play goes to considerable onomastic lengths to hide the fact that the prince – variously dubbed Hal or Harry – is, like his father, ‘Henry’, a name he can only really inherit, like the crown itself, on the death of his father).
So when Claudius tells Hamlet that mourning for his father’s death is unnatural, he is not merely callous. He articulates a quite different worldview, a different understanding of teleology. Claudius looks forward, Hamlet backward. Nature’s ‘common theme / Is death of fathers’ (1.2.103–4), he tells the black-clad prince – ‘you must know your father lost a father; / That father lost, lost his’ (89–90). Stuff happens, time passes, the son outlives the father. Get over it. Move on. Claudius’s pragmatic approach to succession and progress is quite different from the impeded and circular ‘Remember me’ which structures Hamlet’s role in the play. Hamlet’s actions tend towards undoing and negation rather than doing or progress: he breaks off his relationship with Ophelia; he does not return to university; he wants the players to perform an old-fashioned speech ‘if it live in your memory’ (2.2.450–51); his primary attachments are to the dead not the living. The play’s iconic visual moment – Hamlet facing the skull of the jester Yorick – epitomizes a drama, and a psychology, in thrall to the past.