by Emma Smith
Since at least Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), the idea that Hamlet cannot make progress in the play has been understood psychoanalytically. Freud’s own view of Hamlet as a repressed and ‘hysterical subject’ who ‘is able to do anything but take vengeance upon the man who did away with his father and has taken his father’s place with his mother – the man who shows him in realization the repressed desires of his own childhood’ gives one influential account of why the play’s action is impeded: the so-called Oedipus complex. But there are other ways, also, to see this less as an individual or personal property of Hamlet himself, and more as a cultural one, bound up with the specific moment of Hamlet’s own composition.
Part of the charge of this play written around 1600 must have been the issue of succession. Elizabeth I was approaching seventy, and childless. Most people in England could not remember another monarch, but the question of who would succeed her preoccupied late Elizabethan society and theatre, as discussed in the chapter on Richard II. It is particularly explored on stage in history plays, and Hamlet has some particular affinities with this genre. Shakespeare’s history plays interweave patrilineal and fraternal rivalries within the family and state, marginalizing women and rehearsing versions of regime change. Seen in this context, Hamlet exists as a belated history play, and a rather apocalyptic one. Mysteriously, Hamlet himself, despite being evidently old enough, does not inherit the throne on his father’s death. The play itself does not adequately explain why he is supplanted by his uncle, but in a cultural atmosphere in which succession was such a hot topic, it’s hard to imagine that this puzzling element would have gone unnoticed. What unfolds is the self-destruction of a royal dynasty, leaving the kingdom to fall into foreign hands: one nightmare scenario for England at the end of Elizabeth’s long reign. Fortinbras marches on Denmark and is able, suavely, and without shedding a single drop of his own soldiers’ blood, to enter the throne room and take over. He does so on account of a past political claim: ‘I have some rights of memory in this kingdom’ (5.2.343). We saw in Richard III how little creative investment that play put into its eventual victor, Richard’s nemesis Richmond: he wins the battle for the kingdom but barely figures in the battle for the play. We might say something similar of Fortinbras, a figure often, and rather easily, cut from Hamlet, and one in whom it is hard to take much interest. The future is hardly presented in Hamlet as something to look forward to. As an image of late Elizabethan political anxieties, it’s a bleak ending.
Like Elizabethan culture more widely, the play prefers to look backwards rather than forwards: to dare to think forwards, to a time post-Elizabeth, was a crime. Connected to this backward-looking is the issue of religion. One big question about Hamlet focuses on what a Catholic ghost talking about a Catholic purgatory is doing in an apparently Protestant play. After the religious turmoil of the middle years of the 1550s, Elizabeth’s accession marked the establishment of Protestantism as the religion of England: Catholicism was outlawed and driven underground. Two particular doctrinal differences are often used to focus the theological disagreements between Catholicism and Protestantism. The first is the question of transubstantiation and the physical presence of Christ in the Eucharist. The second is more obviously stage-worthy: the presence, provenance and reliability of ghosts. In Hamlet, the ghost’s description of his imprisonment ‘confined to fast in fires/Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature / Are burnt and purged away’ (1.5.11–13) describes the outlawed theology of purgatory, just as the ghost’s very presence is anathema to Protestant doctrine, which could not allow that anyone returned from the dead. Horatio, alumnus of a distinctly Protestant university in Wittenberg, a place indelibly associated with Martin Luther’s radical challenge to the Catholic Church in 1517, expresses more orthodox reformed views. He questions what the ghost intends, warning Hamlet not to follow: it ‘might deprive your sovereignty of reason/And draw you into madness’ (1.4.54–5). Shakespeare’s own religious allegiances have been the source of much inconclusive speculation: we know little about the playwright’s own allegiances, but we do know that his father was fined for not attending church (often the sign of Catholic adherence). Perhaps Hamlet, too, is a Protestant son haunted by the ghost of a Catholic father, as the critic Stephen Greenblatt has memorably explored in his book Hamlet in Purgatory. Hamlet certainly represents a peculiarly generational predicament for children of the Reformation overshadowed by the Catholic past. The murder of old Hamlet isn’t a religious allegory for doctrinal upheaval. That’s not really how Shakespeare’s imagination works, unlike, say, his contemporary Edmund Spenser, whose epic poem The Faerie Queene (1590) begins with the knight Redcrosse encountering the beautiful pure Una, or the true Church, menaced by the monstrous Error, or ignorance or misinformation, and fiendishly impersonated by the scarlet woman Duessa, signifying Catholicism. These ciphers for big ideas are a long way from Shakespearean forms of characterization and circumstantial detail. Nevertheless, something of Hamlet’s nostalgia might be attributed to this specific kind of religious retrospection at the end of the sixteenth century.
One final component of the play’s thoroughgoing nostalgia is theatrical. Hamlet draws extensively on one of the Elizabethan theatre’s great blockbusters, Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy: the name Horatio, the appearance of the ghost, the image of a woman running mad, the murder in a garden, and the device of the play within the play all come wholesale from this popular revenge predecessor. We are used to seeing Shakespeare as a creative alchemist turning his sources into treasure, and to appreciating Hamlet as one of the undisputed masterpieces of world literature. But these are later assessments: in 1600, Shakespeare’s relationship to his predecessors was less effortlessly superior. Kyd’s play was more popular than Shakespeare’s. The Spanish Tragedy haunts Hamlet: even the word ‘stalking’, used of the ghost in the opening scene, is one strongly associated with the particular stage aura of Edward Alleyn. Alleyn was the chief tragedian with the rival company, the Admiral’s Men, and played Kyd’s central character, Hieronimo. Since Freud it’s been hard to ignore the Oedipal theme in considering Hamlet’s own relationship with his parents; thinking about the overbearing theatrical ‘father’ Thomas Kyd pushes that issue onto Hamlet’s relationship with its literary parents.
The play’s theatrical nostalgia also looks back further, to the pre-history of the London theatres that were newcomers to the Elizabethan entertainment scene. The court drama of the mid-sixteenth century typically separated out a dumbshow of the action from a formal verse presentation. A play such as Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville’s Gorboduc, performed before Queen Elizabeth in 1561, does exactly that: action is mimed and described in stage directions at the beginning of each act, and then the speeches are declaimed. We can see this influence on the dramaturgy of the inset play ‘The Murder of Gonzago’. In Hamlet the travelling players come to Elsinore and Hamlet shows himself a connoisseur of their performances. They recall together the lost heroics of Troy and they enact a close parallel to old Hamlet’s description of his own murder. An extended stage direction spells out in considerable detail the mimed stage action: ‘The dumb show enters. Enter a King and Queen very lovingly, the Queen embracing him. She kneels and makes show of protestation unto him. He takes her up and declines his head upon her neck. He lays him down upon a bank of flowers’ (3.2.129). The description continues with the king’s poisoning, and the poisoner’s wooing of the queen, who ‘seems loath and unwilling a while, but in the end accepts his love’. The play then repeats this mimed action, this time verbally. This dramaturgical split between saying and doing is rather apt for the whole play of Hamlet, in which the relationship between speech and action is so famously fraught. More immediately relevant to the issue of retrospection is that the players preserve, in theatrical amber, an older form of drama. In Kenneth Branagh’s 1996 film of the play, these professional players are cameo roles for older actors: in a kind of backlist homage to the cinematic and theatrical
past, John Gielgud, Judi Dench and Charlton Heston are among the recognizable faces. Branagh offers a modern equivalent for the nostalgia in Hamlet for older forms of staging, and a particular elevated and stilted language. The past of old Hamlet and Yorick, or of Priam and Hecuba, or of Kyd and Alleyn: Hamlet keeps reinforcing the notion that things were better in the past.
Succession politics, religious upheaval and technological change in the theatre, then, add up to a cumulative nostalgia. Reading the play in this way helps us to see Hamlet as a symptom of its own historical moment rather than, as is more usual, thinking about it solipsistically as the anticipation of ours. Hamlet’s name connects him to the past: it hobbles him from moving forwards and condemns him to a life shaped by verbs prefixed by ‘re-’: remembering, revenging, repeating. The echoing name Hamlet activates a wider sequence of echoes from which the play’s nominal hero struggles to free himself.
One last point. What, then, are we to make of connections between Hamlet’s name and something more obviously intrinsic to Shakespeare’s own individual biography – the idea that Hamlet’s name might actually recall Shakespeare’s own young son Hamnet? Shakespeare’s twins Hamnet and Judith, born in 1585, were named after their neighbours (and probably godparents) Hamnet and Judith Sadler. Scholars have noted that when Hamnet Sadler is mentioned in Shakespeare’s will, his name is spelt ‘Hamlett’. Hamnet Shakespeare died in 1596, aged eleven. Freud made the connection with Hamnet with considerable certainty, suggesting that Hamlet was written under the double bereavement of Shakespeare’s own father (who died in 1601) and son. In his approach, as in much else of his work on Shakespeare, Freud is heir to Victorian notions of biographical criticism. The nineteenth century had invented a narrative of Shakespeare’s plays that was closely mapped against his perceived emotional life, so that the turn from comedies to tragedies was a consequence of his own darkening mood (probably, some speculated, caused by that minx, the Dark Lady of the Sonnets). The character of Prospero in The Tempest became a self-portrait. As a corollary, nineteenth-century biographical scholarship also produced the so-called authorship controversy – a feeling that Shakespeare’s life could not adequately explain the plays and created an interpretative dissonance which logically precluded Shakespeare from having written Shakespeare (a view Freud also espoused). Shakespearean biography continues to fascinate us as we try to invent an emotional life for Shakespeare as a back projection from the plays.
So can authorial biography help us with Hamlet? Clearly this is a play preoccupied by grief and by mourning, a play that looks backwards to something painfully unrecoverable. The idea that Hamlet’s name registers Hamnet encourages us to see that lost something as personal, rather than a general mood at the end of the sixteenth century. The gains of this reading are twofold. First, it authenticates the play’s emotional landscape by connecting it to familial grief, and secondly, it helps to humanize Shakespeare, whose apparent abandonment of his young family in Stratford as he pursued his career in London has long been a problem for sympathetic biographers. We do not have any actual evidence of whether Shakespeare even attended Hamnet’s funeral in Stratford on 11 August 1596, but the useful idea that his grief produced a literary masterpiece goes some way to excusing him from any accusation of paternal neglect. Both Hamlet the play and Shakespeare the writer, that’s to say, derive a kind of benefit from the association of Hamnet with Hamlet.
But there is counter-evidence too. From his earliest plays, long before the death of Hamnet, Shakespeare envisages the bond between father and son as crucial. One of his first history plays, 3 Henry VI, distils the horrors of civil war in a specific tableau described in its first printed edition: ‘Enter a Son that hath killed his Father, at one door: and a Father that hath killed his Son at another door’. Shakespeare’s most famous depiction of grief for a lost child comes from King John, where Constance laments her son Arthur:
Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,
Remembers me of all his gracious parts,
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form;
Then have I reason to be fond of grief.
(3.4.93–8)
We are so invested in the phantom of Shakespeare’s emotional biography that many critics date King John to 1596 or later, solely because they think this speech could only have been written after Hamnet’s death (compelling evidence about the play proves it was written earlier). Shakespeare the imaginative writer can access grief without the immediate stimulus of Hamnet’s death. To elide Hamlet and Hamnet may be to underestimate the inventive, creative powers of the dramatist on the one hand, and to overestimate the claims of confessional emotional writing on the other. Shakespeare doesn’t, I think, write autobiography, much as we might wish him to. Hamlet gets its emotional punch from the context of late Elizabethan culture, not from the inner landscape of its author. That public context is what has allowed us to reinvent the play so insistently ever since.
CHAPTER 12
Twelfth Night
‘If music be the food of love, play on’ (1.1.1). The opening line of Twelfth Night, or, What You Will makes clear that this is a play all about desire. The central protagonists all yearn, deliciously, for the unattainable. Orsino desires Olivia, Olivia desires Cesario; Malvolio desires Olivia, Olivia desires Sebastian; Orsino desires Cesario; Viola desires Orsino. This chapter on the play approaches these networks of desire via an apparently minor character, Antonio, to help reveal how Twelfth Night works and what we might understand by its teasing subtitle ‘What You Will’. As with the blurred skull in Hans Holbein’s anamorphic sixteenth-century painting The Ambassadors, a sidelong look at Twelfth Night brings the play’s themes into three-dimensional focus. Viewing the play from an angle helps us to see how Shakespeare crafts his plays for the theatre, how he engages with conventions about comedy, and how potential meanings of Twelfth Night shift over time.
We first meet Antonio at the beginning of the play’s second act, where he and his companion Sebastian look like the convenient final jigsaw pieces needed for its comic resolution. What’s happened so far is that we have met the lovesick Count Orsino, who is languorously in love with being in love, rather like the passionate speaker in an Elizabethan sonnet, whom we suspect would actually run a mile if the idealized object of his affections stepped off her pedestal and gave him the eye. Olivia disdains him, ostensibly because she is in extended mourning for her dead father and brother. We have also encountered a shipwrecked woman – let’s call her Viola, although if we were watching the play we wouldn’t know what to call her (of which more later) – whose brother has been drowned, and who has decided to enter Orsino’s service in male disguise. Her male persona, Cesario, has been such a hit with Orsino that he has sent this new servant to woo Olivia on his behalf, but as Cesario reveals to us, he/she is in a difficult position since he/she is actually in love with Orsino himself/herself. The encounter with Olivia complicates things further, as she is clearly attracted to the messenger’s assured confidence. In addition to this love triangle, the play has established the tensions within Olivia’s household: her strict steward Malvolio has clashed with her fool Feste, and it is clear that her drunken uncle Sir Toby Belch, his friend and her would-be suitor Sir Andrew Aguecheek, and her sassy waiting woman Maria, are a riotous comedic problem waiting to happen.
So into this play world – part yearning, part mourning, part wassailing – comes Sebastian, Viola’s twin brother, supposed drowned in the shipwreck. It’s easy to see why Shakespeare would introduce Sebastian at this point. He is the reassurance of a comic conclusion, a fourth eligibly single character who will enable the triangle of Orsino–Cesario–Olivia to reconcile into two romantic pairs. He is also the embodiment of the fictional Cesario who will enable Viola to return to herself. After all, Viola’s assumption of male dress in the play is rather under-motivated: it is an odd decision for a yo
ung noblewoman, shipwrecked on a shore where she knows by reputation a prominent local man, not to send a message saying ‘bring blankets and hot soup to the beach’, and instead to decide to dress herself in male clothes and present herself as his servant. Such commonsensical exceptions to Shakespeare’s plotting are often unhelpful, since his plays are not always, or only, realistic, and, importantly, characters often serve their plots rather than the other way around (see the chapter on Measure for Measure for more on this idea). Viola has to dress as a man because otherwise there would be no play: it’s the enabling condition for everything else that follows.
But there is also a more compelling psychological explanation for Viola’s behaviour. In becoming her dead brother, she keeps him alive, as she tells us later at the end of Act 3:
I my brother know
Yet living in my glass. Even such and so
In favour was my brother, and he went
Still in this fashion, colour, ornament,
For him I imitate.
(3.4.371–5)
If comedy is about the triumph of vitality over mortality, and about life rather than death, which is the proper business of tragedy, then Viola’s doublet and hose is the very life-support system for comedy.
Sebastian, then, is a necessary introduction for the plot – but, since his only purpose is to wait to be substituted effectively for someone he looks like (his twin sister), it is important that he be as individually underdeveloped as is possible. He isn’t really allowed to be a character, because that would disrupt the comic ending. He’s effectively a duplicate, but of the ‘right’ sex. That makes the question of his companion, Antonio, more puzzling. Since Antonio’s role in the play is in relation to Sebastian, he is therefore in a difficult position, as it is their relationship that undermines the attempt to retain Sebastian’s character as a blank sheet. It is Antonio who prevents Sebastian from being simply the spare male twin who pitches up to resolve the play’s romantic entanglements, and he does that by complicating, rather than resolving, its erotic muddle.