Shakespeare: A Life (47 page)

What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in
faculty, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how
like an angel, in apprehension how like a god-the beauty of the world,
the paragon of animals! And yet to me what is this quintessence of
dust?

Was't Hamlet wronged Laertes? Never Hamlet.
If Hamlet from himself be ta'en away,
And when he's not himself does wrong Laertes,
Then Hamlet does it not, Hamlet denies it.
Who does it then?

( Prince Hamlet)

B
itter,
icy weather and deluges of snow appear to have helped screen the
workers who dismantled the Theater, but for actors intensely cold
weather had drawbacks. Thick ice had begun to cover English rivers in
December and January. Alpine glaciers soon crushed houses near
Chamonix, marking the start of colder spells all over Europe, and
winters, as a rule, were to be hard for the rest of Shakespeare's
lifetime.
¹
There is no sign that he regretted stark winters, but freezing
weather brings no cheer and heralds bleak revelations in his new play:
''Tis bitter cold, | And I am sick at heart', says Francisco, in its
first scene, and later Hamlet remarks: 'The air bites shrewdly, it is
very cold.'

Inured as they were to
the cold, the gentry might not choose to cross the Thames in biting
winds to sit in dark, icy galleries. Moreover, actors had cause for
concern as rivalry sharpened in London, especially after mere children
-- skilful boys -- began to put on plays again in

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indoor theatres. Late in 1599, a tiny ball playhouse reopened at St
Paul's grammar school, and its Children of Paul's put on two works by
the caustic Marston -- his satirical romance Antonio and Mellida, and
its tragic sequel Antonio's Revenge. Marston advertised his theatre's
luxury by claiming that here, from about 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. in a room
lit by candles, tapers, and torches, one need not fear being 'pasted
to the barmy Jacket of a Beer-brewer'.
²
Next year, to get a profit from the cavernous Blackfriars, Richard
Burbage leased its room to Henry Evans, a young Welsh scrivener
befriended by Sebastian Westcott, a former manager of Paul's Children.
Evans revived a second boy's troupe, the Children of the Chapel, who
enlisted the help of Ben Jonson -- one result was that Marston,
Jonson, and Dekker began a slanging match (the Poetomachia, or Poets
War) in which the common public stages came under attack.

Bold, warring poets drew the public's attention to two troupes of
child actors. How did Shakespeare respond to that rivalry? The boy
troupes have a bearing on his sudden, stunning feat of following
Julius Caesar with Hamlet. It has been said (obviously with Greek
dramas in mind) that Hamlet is the first great tragedy to be written in
two thousand years. To quarrel with that view is perhaps only to
quarrel with the relative term, 'great'. Hamlet is of a higher order of
art than any drama before it; and, indeed, arguably only three plays
written after it are of its uniquely high order: King Lear, Macbeth,
and Othello. (If other plays from any time
are
to be thought
their equals one would have to turn, not to Aeschylus or Sophocles,
surely, but to Shakespeare.) As remarkable as the first play is, its
text is still unsettled. Hamlet exists in three contrasting versions
-- a so-called 'bad quarto' text of 1603, said to be reconstructed
from actors' memories of the play; a 'good quarto' of 1604-5 based
largely on an authorial manuscript; and the Folio text of 1623 which
appears to show revisions. If Shakespeare wrote Hamlet around
1599-1600, he may have made 'false starts'. Then or later he revised
his work; and scholars mention possible, troubled connections between
his likely revisions and his attitudes to Paul's Children or the
Children of the Chapel.
³

Even in the play's First Quarto, Prince Hamlet hears of the plight of

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touring actors victimized by mere boys. Having lost their regular audience, the actors are forced to tour -

For the principall publicke audience that Came to them, are turned to
[patronising] private playes, And to the humour of children. (sig.
E3)

That may be a poor
version of what Shakespeare actually wrote, but it reflects a real
situation. As a novelty in London, Paul's Children sharply competed
with the Chamberlain's Servants by 1600, and the passage, with little
irony, suggests a poet's bare, uneasy complaint, a worry that may
underlie the glancing wit of Hamlet. Lately the Globe had revived the
finances of the poet's troupe, and Burbage, Heminges, and others had
reason for confidence. Yet none of them would have been foolish to
worry over child actors. London had not seen expert boy players in ten
years, and the new groups were lively, well-trained, bold, and
fashionable. Their offerings, in fact, were shrewdly diversified, but
Paul's Children, with their clear, innocent, bell-like voices,
excelled in giving laughable shocks in plays with modern settings,
just as they did in singing.

There is
nothing about a children's troupe in the Second Quarto. But Hamlet's
Folio text reports on raw, obnoxious imps. Here there is a tranquil,
amused reaction to boy actors who would steal audiences. 'Do they grow
rusty?' Prince Hamlet asks about the adult actors as they reach
Claudius's castle. 'Nay, their endeavour keeps in the wonted pace',
replies Rosencrantz with a delicious courtly joke,

But there is, sir, an eyrie of children, little eyases [baby hawks],
that cry out on the top of question and are most tyrannically clapped
for't. These are now the fashion, and so berattle the common stages --
so they call them -- that many wearing rapiers are afraid of
goose-quills, and dare scarce come thither. (II. ii. 338-45)

This is even funnier if Rosencrantz refers to the Chapel boys at
Blackfriars who acted under the dizzy height of a vaulted roof
thirty-two feet above floor level, or reaching some eighty-five feet
at the immense roof-ridge. The boys as 'little eyases' are only wee,
scrawny hawks in a

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high nest or eyrie. Such chirpers and squeakers, noisy nestlings, are
applauded at the moment, but are doomed if their rash satire should
stir up those 'wearing rapiers'.

In
fact, both of London's children's companies at last offended the Privy
Council and faced closure. Hamlet himself worries over the little
eyases. 'What, are they children?' he asks Rosencrantz, with hunger
for theatrical gossip and details,

Who maintains 'em? How are they escoted? Will they pursue the quality
no longer than they can sing? Will they not say afterwards, if they
should grow themselves to common players -- as it is like most will,
if their means are not better -- their writers do them wrong to make
them exclaim against their own succession? (II. ii. 346-52)

Rosencrantz, always
au courant,
remarks that acting companies nowadays only buy plays in which the
children's writers and public actors attack one another. 'Is't
possible?' asks Hamlet in disbelief, and now both Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern are helpful:

GUILDENSTERN. O, there has been much throwing about of brains.

HAMLET. Do the boys carry it away?

ROSENCRANTZ. Ay, that they do, my lord, Hercules and his load too.

(II. ii. 359-63)

Hercules shouldering the world was the Globe theatre's painted sign.
If Shakespeare implies that the boys will carry away the Globe's
audience, he leaves it to fated, shallow courtiers to express that
worry.

Yet there had been some
'throwing about of brains' in the Poets' War, and there can be no
doubt that Shakespeare attended to it with care. Just how did a Poets'
War, involving child actors in the late 1590s, come about? Its
origins are uncertain, but theatre men were aware of Ben Jonson's
prickly combativeness. As early as Every Man Out of his Humour, Jonson
had mocked a pedantic or fustian excess in Marston's vocabulary.
Although Marston play Histriomastix implicitly sides with Jonson in
attacking tameness in the public theatres, Jonson, to his horror, saw
himself mocked in Marston's inane philosopher Chrisoganus. Both dramas
must have been staged by 1600 -- by which time the war was
unstoppable. With Marston's advice or

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co-authorship, Thomas Dekker next entered the fray with the slapdash, anti-Jonsonian
Satiromastix,
acted privately by Paul's boys and publicly at the Globe. Jonson,
suitably goaded, caricatured his enemies with witty elegance in
Cynthia's Revels and in Poetaster, in the last of which he expresses
his views about satire in the wry, long-suffering figure of Horace.
Cambridge students, meanwhile, followed the war with glee and noted it
in their play The Second Part of The Returne from Parnassus: 'O that
Ben Jonson
is a pestilent fellow, he brought up
Horace
giving the Poets a pill, but our fellow Shakespeare hath given him a purge that made him beray his credit'.
⁴
This reference is odd enough to have troubled commentators, who
explain it variously. Late in Elizabeth's reign, theatre-goers (and
far-away students) might care to know who wrote a drama, but they were
better informed about troupes and playhouses. The students perhaps
thought that the 'purge' Shakespeare had given Jonson was
Satiromastix, since it was acted by the Chamberlain's group, unless
they confused Twelfth Night, or What You Will (one of his two dramas
that have subtitles) with Marston's play What You Will.

Shakespeare coolly kept out of the Poets' War, at any rate, though he
jokingly included a few of Jonson's traits in the Ajax of Troilus and
Cressida. He was well alert to it, and, indirectly at least, it
affected the content and direction of his own writing, if only by
throwing him back upon his deeper intellectual and emotional
strengths. In one sense the war was trivial and trumped up, with
aspects of a publicity campaign welcome to all involved and, indeed,
what we sometimes call a 'War of the Theatres' hardly reflected a
conflict of repertoires. The boys put on moral plays, love comedies,
or works with pastoral, mythological, or contemporary settings just as
the adult troupes did.

But implicit
from the start, although with earlier roots, and fully developed by
the time Jonson created the character of Horace, was a genuine Poets'
War, or what Dekker called a 'Poetomachia' -- and its underlying issue
was art's public responsibility. Jonson, in 'comical satires',
appeared to be an independent, patrician critic no matter whom he
wrote for; but he was lately using the freedom of a boys' coterie
theatre to expose social hypocrisy. George Chapman had shown a fine
moral, lofty detachment as early as 1596 in The BlindBeggar of
Alexandria

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Beggar of Alexandria, and he, too, began to write for the Chapel
Children. Dekker sided with the public theatres, but Marston and
Jonson-despite their tiff -- saw those theatres as symptoms of modern
vapidity and enervation.

Though not
under direct attack in the debate, Shakespeare is implicitly a mild if
not quite outmoded fixture of the public arena. In nerve and gaiety,
the coterie dramatists were appealing to courtly society, to
cosmopolitan circles, to the well-educated and sophisticated. The
public stages might be viewed as timid -- for example in their
glorifying of sturdy English citizens, in The Merry Wives, or in their
endless fuss over patriotism, as in Henry IV or Henry V, or in their
reserved, cautious, but basically uncritical view of legal institutions
as in plays from The Comedy of Errors through even The Merchant to
Much Ado. What was the yellow-topped Globe, then, but a crowdpleasing
venue for plebeian commonplaces, or the defence of hierarchy and public
authority?

Some of the new wits
suggested a freer enquiry, a new morality. In Marston Antonio's
Revenge, the hero is an aloof, proud stoic of high intellect who with
utter indifference to worldly vanities evades death. Here revenge is
nearly a good in itself. But coincidentally or not, at about the time
of Marston's work, Shakespeare had begun to write with peculiar intent
an unusual revenge play of his own.

In one way Hamlet was not a new departure for a poet capable of
radically transforming existing dramas. In this case, he was able to
draw on a work that was presumably not his own but which the
Chamberlain's men performed, or the now-missing Hamlet -- a revenge play
with a ghost -- which his colleagues had staged at Burbage's Theater
before it apparently went briefly to Newington. It may have been by
Kyd, but, again, its author is unknown. It was a noisy if not a
tumultuous and ungainly work, conjured up in an allusion in Lodge Wit's
Misery ( 1596) to one who 'looks as pale as the Visard of the ghost
which cried so misera
bly
at the Theator like an oister wife, Hamlet, revenge'.
⁵
Shakespeare had at least one other ready-made play in

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mind. In Kyd The Spanish Tragedy, he found a kind of kitchen cupboard
full of 'revenge' motifs and devices, which must have gathered
interest for him after he had discovered in Belleforest Histoires
tragiques ( 1570), the revamped tale of a lively avenger, Amleth, who
had earlier appeared in Saxo's twelfth-century Historiae Danicae.

Also, his new play relates to the theatrical present. Hamlet responds
to a mood, noticeable by 1599, entailing the charge that the 'public'
stages are crowd-pleasing, unintelligent and lacking in audacity. The
tragedy's complex and intelligent hero, its fresh and subtle word-play,
brilliantly evoked setting and new treatment of the revenge motif,
refined and elegant soliloquies, and philosophical richness all
advertise the sophistication of the Globe's public stage. The play has
humour to match the satire of new 'wits', and no trace of insular
narrowness. The hero is a scholar of Wittenberg -- the university of
Luther and Faustus -- and the action involves not only Denmark and
Germany, but Norway, France, England, Poland, even a king's 'Switzers'
and (in its atmosphere of intrigue and lechery) a popular notion of
Italy. Yet this tragedy is far more than an advertisement for the
Globe or a response to a commercial situation.

With its wealth of meanings, ambiguities, high-handed contradictions
and supreme and troubling beauty, Hamlet is nearly a chaos. It takes
enormous risks as a work for the popular theatre and an easily baffled
public. Julius Caesar -- by comparison -- is neatly wellmannered,
almost timid, and lacking anything like this work's exuberance. The
confident writing in Hamlet suggests a poet whose best insights and
observations are all before him. Suddenly, his whole experience of
life is relevant, or the Muses have made it so: indeed Hamlet is often
felt to be an all-accommodating, 'personal' expression of its author,
and editors point to a few oddities. The Folio and Second Quarto
texts together show that Shakespeare wrote too many lines for the
work, or enough to keep actors on stage for four or five hours. If the
Second Quarto is based on his 'foul papers' (or working MS) as
editors believe, the MS may have been a mess of inserts, cross-outs,
and badly aligned or missing speech-headings. A compositor in setting
the Second Quarto resorted to the inferior but printed First Quarto to
make sense of what he saw.

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