Shakespeare: A Life (48 page)

Still, Hamlet was meticulously planned. Its ease of style disguises
the real intensity of the author's intellectual effort. His
sonnet-writing offered one answer, at least, to what has been called
the most taxing problem in writing a revenge tragedy, or how to fill
in the long interval between the commission of the crime which calls for
vengeance, and the carrying out of revenge in Act V. In some sonnets,
Shakespeare explores paradoxes almost too refined for the stage, as
when he puts morality to the test in Sonnet 121. Is it better to act
brutishly, or only to be thought vile by others? "Tis better to be
vile than vile esteemed', he begins in a densely complex lyric, which
stands morality on its head. Hamlet's revenge framework gives scope to a
hero of sonnet-like nuances of thought and self-awareness, or to a
Renaissance man with a 'courtier's, soldier's, scholar's eye, tongue,
sword', in Ophelia's view, who is disposed to fully contemplated
action.
⁶
The effect, however, is to displace the revenge theme itself with
emphasis on the hero, the Danish court, and issues of power politics.

But if Hamlet is activated by a political power-struggle, this is not
what sets the work apart. Critics have drawn attention not only to the
work's political nature but to how 'interchangeably diversified', as
Dr Johnson once put it, the scenes are in content and feeling. 'It
would be hard to think of anything less like a classical tragedy',
writes one of Hamlet's modern editors, G. R. Hibbard. 'In it the
Elizabethan tendency to all-inclusiveness is pushed to the limit by a
playwright who is fully conscious that he is doing just that.' One
topic impinges upon another, and yet there is a fertile duality in the
organized treatment of Elsinore, and that is what most consistently
distinguishes Shakespeare's attitude to a Danish milieu. He may not
have travelled in Denmark, but his fellow actors Will Kempe, George
Bryan, and Thomas Pope had acted in 1585 and 1586 at Elsinore or the
Danish Helsingor (which is the name of a township and not of a
castle). The medieval castle of Krogen, a damp and ruinous fortress,
had then been transformed into the Renaissance palace of Kronborg,
full of costly furnishings and graced with colour and light: its
renewal was being celebrated.
⁷
The English actors saw King Frederik II's new, affluent Denmark on
the very wave of its emergence from medieval constraints. Denmark's
cultural atmosphere, then, was unique, memorable,

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and not unrelated to the course of English history and Shakespeare's
life in the Jacobean age ahead. It was Frederik's daughter Anna who
married Scotland's James VI, and, as his consort, later became England's
Queen. Her brother King Christian IV did even more than his father to
modernize Danish society with an army of builders and painters. At
Helsingor, Shakespeare's actors had seen a distinctive example of the
northern Renaissance.

What, if
anything, he really heard of the actors' visit is unknown. He used in
Hamlet a report of 'swinish' Danes of dull, drunken excess, which he
found in Nashe Pierce Penilesse. Nashe, it is true, fails to note
either the grandeur of Kronborg or the enterprise of its master. But
Hamlet, in taking up the theme of the dual nature of man, implies that
this duality is also to be found in a physical locale. One infers that
the poet had heard something more than a report of 'swinish' Elsinore,
and, in any case, he drew what he could from actors; in some of its
aspects, the play might nearly be a veiled tribute to the power of
British actors abroad. He designed Hamlet in part as a drama about
feigning, about acting and theatrical techniques. We do not see
Claudius's killing of King Hamlet, but observe such a murder twice
performed on a 'stage' in Act III. Hamlet behaves like a stage actor to
save himself. Theatre jokes relieve the tragic action, but also
anticipate it, as when Polonius avows that he was once thought to be a
'good actor' at university. 'And what did you enact?' asks the
Prince.

POLONIUS. I did enact Julius Caesar. I was killed i'th' Capitol. Brutus killed me.

HAMLET. It was a brute part of him to kill so capital a calf there.

(III. ii. 99-102)

The joke seems to be that Heminges has played Caesar and then
Polonius, to the Brutus and Hamlet of his colleague Burbage. Killed
once by Burbage, poor Heminges will die again. Lunging at the arras,
the Prince runs Polonius through -- and a mild joke on actors' roles
anticipates Hamlet's acting a truly 'brute part'.
⁸

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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