Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

by Stephen Greenblatt

  Haste, haste me to know it, that with wings as swift

  As meditation or the thoughts of love

  May sweep to my revenge.

  (1.5.29–37)

  The play should be over by the end of the first act. But Hamlet emphatically does not sweep to his revenge. As soon as the ghost vanishes, he tells the sentries and his friend Horatio that he intends “To put an antic disposition on” (1.5.173), that is, to pretend to be mad. The behavior makes perfect sense in the old version of the story, where it is a ruse to deflect suspicion and to buy time. The emblem of that time, and the proof of the avenger’s brilliant, long-term planning, are the wooden hooks that the boy Amleth, apparently deranged, endlessly whittles away on with his little knife. These are the means that, at the tale’s climax, Amleth uses to secure a net over the sleeping courtiers, before he sets the hall on fire. What had looked like mere distraction turns out to be brilliantly strategic. But in Shakespeare’s version, Hamlet’s feigned madness is no longer coherently tactical. Shakespeare in effect wrecked the compelling and coherent plot with which his sources conveniently provided him. And out of the wreckage he constructed what most modern audiences would regard as the best play he had ever written.

  Far from offering a cover, the antic disposition leads the murderer to set close watch upon Hamlet, to turn to his counselor Polonius for advice, to discuss the problem with Gertrude, to observe Ophelia carefully, to send for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to spy upon their friend. Instead of leading the court to ignore him, Hamlet’s madness becomes the object of everyone’s endless speculation. And strangely enough, the speculation sweeps Hamlet along with it:

  I have of late—but wherefore I know not—lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercise; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory. This most excellent canopy the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire—why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. 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? (2.2.287–98)

  “But wherefore I know not”—Hamlet, entirely aware that he is speaking to court spies, does not breathe a word of his father’s ghost, but then it is not at all clear that the ghost is actually responsible for his profound depression. Already in the first scene in which he appears, before he has encountered the ghost, he is voicing to himself, as the innermost secret of his heart, virtually the identical disillusionment he discloses to the oily Rosencrantz and Guildenstern:

  O God, O God,

  How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable

  Seem to me all the uses of this world!

  Fie on’t, ah fie, fie! ’Tis an unweeded garden

  That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature

  Possess it merely.

  (1.2.132–37)

  His father’s death and his mother’s hasty remarriage, public events and not secret revelations, have driven him to thoughts of “self-slaughter.”

  Hamlet’s show of madness, then, seems a cover for something like madness. Indeed, he never seems more genuinely insane than at the moment, in his mother’s closet, in which he insists that he is perfectly sane and warns his mother not to disclose his strategy. “What shall I do?” cries the frightened queen. “Not this, by no means, that I bid you do,” answers Hamlet, jumbling together his injunction with his obsessive fantasies:

  Let the bloat King tempt you again to bed,

  Pinch wanton on your cheek, call you his mouse,

  And let him for a pair of reechy kisses,

  Or paddling in your neck with his damned fingers,

  Make you to ravel all this matter out,

  That I essentially am not in madness,

  But mad in craft.

  (3.4.164–72)

  Gertrude may be saying exactly what she believes when she tells Claudius a few moments later that Hamlet is “Mad as the sea and wind when both contend / Which is the mightier” (4.1.6–7).

  By excising the rationale for Hamlet’s madness, Shakespeare made it the central focus of the entire tragedy. The play’s key moment of psychological revelation—the moment that virtually everyone remembers—is not the hero’s plotting of revenge, not even his repeated, passionate self-reproach for inaction, but rather his contemplation of suicide: “To be, or not to be; that is the question.” This suicidal urge has nothing to do with the ghost—indeed, Hamlet has so far forgotten the apparition as to speak of death as “The undiscovered country from whose bourn / No traveller returns” (3.1.58, 81–82)—but rather has to do with a soul sickness brought on by one of “the thousand natural shocks / That flesh is heir to.”

  Hamlet marks a sufficient enough break in Shakespeare’s career as to suggest some more personal cause for his daring transformation both of his sources and of his whole way of writing. A simple index of this transformation is the astonishing rush of new words, words that he had never used before in some twenty-one plays and in two long poems. There are, scholars have calculated, more than six hundred of these words, many of them not only new to Shakespeare but also new to the written record of the English language. This linguistic explosion seems to come not from a broadened vision of the world but from some shock or series of shocks to his whole life. If Hamlet was written not in 1600 but in early 1601, then, as some scholars believe, one shock might have been the insurrection—to use Brutus’s word, in Julius Caesar—that led to the execution of the Earl of Essex and, more important, to the imprisonment of Shakespeare’s patron, friend, and possible lover, the Earl of Southampton. Accompanied by Southampton, Essex, who had long been the queen’s cosseted favorite, had gone off to Ireland in 1599 as the general of an expeditionary force designed to crush a rebellion led by the Earl of Tyrone. The enterprise, like so many others in Ireland, had failed miserably in the face of staunch Irish resistance, and late that year, suddenly and without the queen’s permission, Essex returned to London. Placed under house arrest and enraged by the queen’s refusal to readmit him to favor, the proud and impetuous earl assembled his friends and attempted to stage an armed putsch—the official purpose was to defend his life and save the queen from her evil counselors, Cecil and Ralegh. The London crowd refused to back the rising, and it was quickly over. The outcome of the trial was a foregone conclusion. On February 25, 1601, three strokes of the ax separated Essex’s head from his shoulders. The execution of several of his principal supporters and friends followed in short order.

  Shakespeare had every reason to be shaken by the upheaval. It was not only a matter of the possible loss of Southampton, who, though ultimately spared, seemed in early 1601 likely to be executed along with Essex. For the playwright personally and for his company, a set of decisions that they had made in the years leading up to the insurrection could have led to disaster. In late 1596 or early 1597, Shakespeare had elected, by using the name Oldcastle for the fat knight in Henry IV, whom he eventually and under pressure renamed Falstaff, to risk offending William Brook, the seventh Lord Cobham, who traced his descent from the historical Oldcastle. Brook was not the wisest choice of an antagonist, for at the time or very soon after, he was appointed lord chamberlain, the post ultimately responsible for overseeing the licensing of plays. But he was the known enemy of Essex and Southampton, and it was presumably for this reason that Shakespeare felt licensed, like the fool in one of his plays, to take a jibe at him.

  Then in 1599, quite uncharacteristically, Shakespeare introduced a direct topical reference into one of his plays. Near the close of Henry V, the Chorus, conjuring up the scene of the king’s triumphal return to London after the battle of Agincourt, abruptly turns to contemporary events. “How London doth pour out her citizens,” the Chorus exclaims.

  As, by a
lower but high-loving likelihood,

  Were now the General of our gracious Empress—

  Bringing rebellion broachèd on his sword,

  How many would the peaceful city quit

  To welcome him!

  (5.0.24, 29–34)

  “A lower but high-loving likelihood”: even with the note of prudential caution and calculation, the Chorus’s lines were a gesture of support for Essex, a gesture soon followed by something much more dangerous. Several days before the rising, a few of the conspirators called on Shakespeare’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, and asked to “have the play of the deposing and killing of King Richard II to be played the Saturday next.” The representatives of the company—and it seems likely that Shakespeare, along with Augustine Phillips and a few other veteran players, was among them—protested that the play was too old to make a profit. The conspirators offered to subsidize the performance with an extra payment of forty shillings, a substantial sum, and the play was accordingly performed.

  The strategy, it seems, was to plant the idea of a successful rebellion in the minds of the London crowd and perhaps also to shore up the plotters’ own courage. This at least is how, in the wake of the arrests, the authorities regarded the special performance, and this is how the queen herself seems to have understood it. “I am Richard II,” she fumed. “Know ye not that?” The Lord Chamberlain’s Men had ventured onto exceedingly dangerous ground—two of the key conspirators were questioned about the performance, as if it might have been an integral part of the plot—but somehow Augustine Phillips, who spoke on behalf of the company, managed to persuade the magistrates that the players knew nothing about the intended rising. “They had their forty shillings more than their ordinary for it,” he testified, “and so played it accordingly.”

  These events, which took place in February 1601, would certainly have alarmed Shakespeare. The brush with disaster might have led a more timid playwright to be cautious: he could have set aside the tragedy and quickly turned to another, more innocuous project. Instead, with the same eye for box-office receipts that governed the negotiation over Richard II, his company performed Hamlet, a highly political play about betrayal and assassination, a play that includes a remarkable scene of an armed popular insurrection breaking into the royal sanctuary past the guards and threatening the life of the king. Of course, the insurrection, led by Laertes, does not succeed, and Claudius’s exquisite piece of hypocrisy eerily mimes the official line about Queen Elizabeth:

  There’s such a divinity doth hedge a king

  That treason can but peep to what it would,

  Acts little of his will.

  (4.5.120–22)

  These scenes would have been enough to excite a London audience shaken by the events of 1601, but they do not actually constitute a direct reference to them, and they could be easily explained away. After all, political upheaval, betrayal, and assassination were Shakespeare’s theatrical stock-in-trade—witness Richard III, Julius Caesar, Richard II, Henry V, and so on. Essex and the imprisonment of Southampton must have preyed on Shakespeare’s mind, but it is difficult to attribute anything in Hamlet specifically to these events, and it is particularly difficult to attribute what is startling and innovative about the play to them. Though the links to the insurrection are intriguing, some version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet was, in all likelihood, being performed before Essex took his fateful steps. Shakespeare may have ventured to add some lines or scenes to heighten the connection between the play and contemporary events, but the key elements of the play must already have been in place, as suggested by a marginal note that Gabriel Harvey (the Cambridge academic entangled in disputes with Nashe and Greene) jotted down in his copy of Chaucer. “The Earl of Essex much commends Albion’s England,” Harvey writes, in an account of contemporary literary fashions, and then continues, “The younger sort takes much delight in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis; but his Lucrece and his Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark have it in them to please the wiser sort.” The present tense suggests that Essex was alive when Harvey penned the first clear reference to Shakespeare’s tragedy.

  Something deeper must have been at work in Shakespeare, then, something powerful enough to call forth the unprecedented representation of tormented inwardness. “To be, or not to be”: as audiences and readers have long instinctively understood, these suicidal thoughts, provoked by the death of a loved one, lie at the heart of Shakespeare’s tragedy. They may well have been the core of the playwright’s own inward disturbance. The Shakespeares had named their twins, Judith and Hamnet, after their Stratford neighbors Judith and Hamnet Sadler. The latter appears in Stratford records as both Hamnet and Hamlet Sadler; in the loose orthography of the time, the names were virtually interchangeable. Even if the decision to redo the old tragedy were a strictly commercial one, the coincidence of the names—the act of writing his own son’s name again and again—may well have reopened a deep wound, a wound that had never properly healed.

  But, of course, in Hamlet, it is the death not of a son but of a father that provokes the hero’s spiritual crisis. If the tragedy swelled up from Shakespeare’s own life—if it can be traced back to the death of Hamnet—something must have made the playwright link the loss of his child to the imagined loss of his father. I say “imagined” because Shakespeare’s father was buried in Holy Trinity Churchyard on September 8, 1601: the handwriting may have been on the wall, but he was almost certainly still alive when the tragedy was written and first performed. How did the father’s death become bound up so closely in Shakespeare’s imagination with the son’s?

  Shakespeare undoubtedly returned to Stratford in 1596 for his son’s funeral. The minister, as the regulations required, would have met the corpse at the entry to the churchyard and accompanied it to the grave. Shakespeare must have stood there and listened to the words of the prescribed Protestant burial service. While the earth was thrown onto the body—perhaps by the father himself, perhaps by friends—the minister intoned the words, “Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God of his great mercy to take unto himself the soul of our dear brother here departed, we therefore commit his body to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life.”

  Did Shakespeare find this simple, eloquent service adequate, or was he tormented with a sense that something was missing? “What ceremony else?” cries Laertes, by the grave of his sister Ophelia; “What ceremony else?” (5.1.205, 207). Ophelia’s funeral rites have been curtailed because she is suspected of the sin of suicide, and Laertes is both shallow and rash. But the question he repeatedly asks echoes throughout Hamlet, and it articulates a concern that extends beyond the boundaries of the play. Within living memory, the whole relationship between the living and the dead had been changed. In Lancashire, if not closer to home, Shakespeare could have seen the remnants of the old Catholic practice: candles burning night and day, crosses everywhere, bells tolling constantly, close relatives wailing and crossing themselves, neighbors visiting the corpse and saying over it a Paternoster or a De Profundis, alms and food distributed in memory of the dead, priests paid to say Masses to ease the soul’s perilous passage through purgatory. All of this had come under attack; everything had been scaled back or eliminated outright. Above all, it was now illegal to pray for the dead.

  The first Protestant prayer books had retained the old formula: “I commend thy soul to God the father almighty, and thy body to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” But vigilant reformers felt that these words had too much of the old Catholic faith hidden within them, and so a simple change was made: “We therefore commit his body to the ground. . . .” The dead person is no longer directly addressed, as if he retained some contact with the living. The small revision makes a large point: the dead are completely dead. No prayers can help them; no messages can be sent to them or received from them. Hamnet was beyond reach.

  Catholics believed that after death, while
wicked souls went directly to hell and saintly souls to heaven, the great majority of the faithful, neither completely good nor completely bad, went to purgatory. Purgatory was a vast prison house under the earth where souls would suffer torments until they had paid for the sins they had committed during life. (Some thought there was an entry to it in Ireland, through a cave in the county of Donegal discovered by Saint Patrick.) These sins were not so wicked as to entail an eternity of woe, but they had left a stain that needed to be burned away before the soul could enter heaven. All of the souls in purgatory, without exception, were saved and would eventually ascend to bliss. That was the good news. The bad news was that purgatorial sufferings, painted on church walls and described in hallucinatory detail by preachers, were horrible. One instant of fiery pain in the afterlife was worse, churchmen taught, than the worst pain a person could suffer in life. Indeed, the torments of souls imprisoned in purgatory were identical, except in their duration, to the torments of the damned in hell. And this duration, though limited, was not inconsiderable. One Spanish theologian calculated that an average Christian would have to spend approximately one to two thousand years in purgatory.