Shakespeare: A Life

by Park Honan

  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.

  The Prince's world

  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 miserably 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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  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 n
ature 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