Most agree Lodge is probably ridiculing the same work of “English Seneca” playing in 1589, a play that by 1596 seems to have become a cliché of hammy melodrama, and not Shakespeare’s Hamlet, in any case not the version we know.
For one thing, the phrase “Hamlet, revenge!” just doesn’t appear in any of the three Hamlet texts that have survived. And the consensus has it that the ur-Hamlet of “Hamlet, revenge!” could not have been written by Shakespeare but rather by some older, cruder playwright, whom the consensus, epitomized by Harold Jenkins, supposes to be Thomas Kyd.
But Eric Sams will not have it. Whacking away with Ockham’s razor, Sams asks, “Why invent another playwright to have written the ur-Hamlet?” Why not suppose it was Shakespeare’s own early draft, one he later revised? Why not suppose it might not be lost at all but rather preserved in some form in the Bad Quarto?
But the most fascinating aspect of Sams’s case for Shakespeare as the early starter and author of the ur-Hamlet is the way he puts the case in the context of what he calls “the war against Shakespeare,” the little-noted, barely remembered campaign against the fledgling Bard by his early rivals, the university wits, a group of Oxford- and Cambridge-educated poets and dramatists including Christopher Marlowe, Robert Greene, Thomas Lodge, Thomas Nashe and George Peele. The university wits sneered at Shakespeare as “an upstart crowe plumed in our feathers” (as Greene put it), a late-arriving plagiarist who cribbed his style and plots from his university-educated betters.
The university wits of today, Sams believes, the elite academics, are denigrating Shakespeare in essentially the same way: by saying Shakespeare didn’t conceive the character of Hamlet, he only punched up someone else’s old play. The same with Lear, Henry V, Pericles: all old plays he punched up. The history plays, give or take a Falstaff—all old chronicles or old chronicle plays he punched up. The attitude, taken to the extreme, is at the heart of the so-called anti-Stratfordian theories of Shakespeare: no middle-class glover’s boy from Stratford without a university education could have dreamt up any of Shakespeare’s plays on his own. It had to be an aristocrat, a university wit like the Earl of Oxford, Bacon or Marlowe.
It occurred to me to ask Sams whether his own war against the academic Shakespeare establishment—the university wits of today—recapitulates the war between Shakespeare and the university wits of his day.
“Well, it is true,” Sams tells me, “that I did quite well at Cambridge [in modern languages] and I was disappointed I was not asked to stay on.”
“To teach?”
“Yes, well, and so I became a civil servant, and I think my later work benefited. Civil servants think differently from [academic] dons in that they realize what you think about, what you decide, actually matters. As a don, nobody gets richer or poorer, sicker or better, depending on your opinion. Nobody’s life changes. In addition, while civil servants hate to be wrong, unlike dons they are able to admit they’ve made mistakes.”
In point of fact, I never heard Sams admit to making a mistake about Shakespeare. But he’d probably have said that it’s not from any unwillingness to do so—it’s just that it hadn’t happened yet. But he does admit there are instances of dons who can admit mistakes. In fact, he tells me, one reason he admired Ann Thompson, the editor of the Arden 3 Hamlet, is that after he wrote a scathing review of a paper she’d written about The Taming of the Shrew, she wrote a note to Sams admitting he was right on some point—at least that’s how he tells it. So clearly, Sams does appreciate a don who can admit error; he just rarely succumbs to it himself.
Sams can be charmingly self-aware of his own obsessiveness. He goes off into a digression on a recent vindication he received in a decades-old controversy in German musicology, a field he’d left in the early eighties to take up Shakespeare controversies. He’d long contended, Sams tells me, from examination of Schubert’s scores and fragmentary biographical evidence, that the great German composer was syphilitic. “And only recently records have been found in a German archive of Schubert’s stay in a sanitarium that show diagnosis and treatment of him as ‘syphilitische.’ And now everyone acknowledges it. My fate is for half my life to be called an idiot, and then when everyone agrees, to be called unoriginal.”
He runs through a litany of recent vindications or claimed vindications in Shakespearean controversies.
“It’s now at least become acceptable to mention the name Eric Sams in scholarly publications,” he says. He cites the new Arden edition of Pericles which gives Sams—and others—credit for being among the first to argue that Shakespeare wrote an early draft of Pericles—long considered a 1609 “Late Romance”—some twenty years earlier, as one of his earliest works. It’s something the poet Dryden had first suggested in the seventeenth century, though, pace Sams, it is still not widely accepted.
He cites the remarkable tide of opinion among North American scholars (as opposed to “the entrenched English establishment”) that has come to question the evidence (or actually, the lack of it) for the “memorial reconstruction” hypothesis. And he calls attention to the work of the gifted dramaturgical scholar Steven Urkowitz of New York’s City College, who has made a persistent case for the esthetic and dramatic merit of the long-disparaged Bad Quarto of Hamlet. Urkowitz—who was a principal ally in Gary Taylor’s war to split Lear into original and revised versions—argues that one can see a consistent three-stage pattern of Shakespearean revision in the progression from the 1603 Bad Quarto to the 1604 Good Quarto to the 1623 Folio version of Hamlet.
And Sams is particularly pleased that he “won” a debate with Donald Foster, the “Funeral Elegy” promoter.
Sams debated Foster at the University of Virginia over the question of Edmund Ironside, an item of Shakespearean apocrypha that Sams believes is a genuine early play of Shakespeare, one which Foster and his computer database reject.
When Sams says he “won,” he means he won the vote of the audience that day: the academic consensus has so far resisted Sams’s hammering on the Ironside question. Although he is now getting credit for his obsessive championing of another play in the Shakespearean apocrypha, Edward III, which is now included in respected Complete Works editions such as The Riverside Shakespeare as having “at least some” scenes written by Shakespeare.
It occurred to me that what Sams’s various crusades have in common is the impulse to restore to Shakespeare’s credit works that academics believe are “beneath” the Bard such as the ur-Hamlet, the Bad Quarto Hamlet, the Bad Quartos of his history plays and less artful apocryphal works such as Edward III and Edmund Ironside. The academic/university wits’ version of Shakespeare tends to see him as at once more sophisticated and less original. More sophisticated in the sense that he cannot be associated with the clumsiness of the Bad Quartos; his talent scarcely seemed to evolve from such crude origins, but rather burst full blown upon the scene. On the other hand, less original because his sophistication depends on the artful transformation of other playwrights’ earlier versions of Hamlet, the history plays, Pericles, etc. They—other playwrights—wrote his first drafts, so to speak.
I thought of Sams’s remark about himself: half his life called an idiot, and then unoriginal. The university wits similarly disparaged Shakespeare for his lack of originality.
In one of our last conversations, I’d asked Sams whether there was something more to the relationship between the “war over Shakespeare” in the 1590s and his own battle with the university wits in the 1990s. It’s easy to see he identifies his own enemies in academia with the university wits who looked down their noses at Shakespeare as an outsider, a mere actor who became a playwright by punching up others’ old plots. But did Sams also feel a kind of emotional identification with Shakespeare beyond their common enemies?
“I hadn’t thought of it that way,” he says, “until now. I won’t deny it’s possible. The difference may be that his opponents back then, the university wits, were undeniably intelligent in their own right.” Always with th
e barb.
Originality, of course, is not, in itself, an unequivocal virtue, and is often an overrated one. Does it make a difference to our notion of Shakespeare as an artist if he did or didn’t write the ur-Hamlet? It doesn’t necessarily make him a better artist if he did, but the question is not academic, so to speak; at the very least, it would be an indication that he was a different kind of artist, and we might divine something of the fathomless mysteries of Hamlet by examining the changes if it was Shakespeare rewriting his own work.
I am unpersuaded by Sams’s belief that the Bad Quarto is an early Shakespearean draft. Yes, there is little evidence for the memorial reconstruction hypothesis, but reading the Bad Quarto, the early-draft hypothesis feels wrong. And Ockham’s razor doesn’t (as many mistake it to do) always mandate the simplest solution. When it says “entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity,” that doesn’t identify necessity as simplicity; there are times when necessity (the way things happen to be) requires complexity. But Sams’s case for Shakespeare as author of the ur-Hamlet seems stronger than his Bad Quarto arguments and has begun to gain support even within the academy he loathes.
Two days after my visit to Sams in Ockham’s Surrey, I was surprised to find Ann Thompson, coeditor of the new Arden Hamlet, a scholar firmly ensconced in the mainstream of Shakespeare studies, make a remarkable acknowledgment of the force of Sams’s case.
“I can’t figure out quite why people are so determined to say it’s by someone else,” Professor Thompson says of the ur-Hamlet in her office at King’s College, London, a stone’s throw away from the Thames, “or why it can’t be by Shakespeare as Eric Sams says in his book with that modest title, The Real Shakespeare,” she says with an indulgent chuckle over Sams’s immodest title claim.
“But nobody else is saying that. At the moment I don’t see why Shakespeare couldn’t have authored a version of Hamlet earlier than in 1599 and I don’t see why everyone is determined to say it’s impossible.”
She doesn’t go as far as Sams to say that the Bad Quarto is therefore necessarily a version of the ur-Hamlet, but her willingness to entertain a case Sams has been pressing virtually alone for so long is an indication of the unusual equanimity Ms. Thompson displays in navigating the entrenchments of the Hamlet battlefield: a lack of investment in excluding dissent, a lack of determination to be seen as always having the right answer at all times in matters where the evidence may be insufficient for the typically masculine need to assert possession of correct answers.
It raises a question about Hamlet editors that struck me in the aftermath of my encounters with Ann Thompson, whose Arden edition might be called the Hamlet of the near future, and with Bernice Kliman, editor in chief of the Modern Language Association’s new Variorum Hamlet, which might be called the Hamlet of the distant future. In many ways the future shape of Hamlet is in the hands of these two women, and in certain ways the play and the prince might be the better for it.
CORDELIA’S PLUNGE AND OPHELIA’S FLAMES
Ann Thompson has a haunting, lovely memory of her first transformative experience of Shakespeare. It was not something she volunteered. Despite the powerful voice she now has in Shakespeare studies, she is extraordinarily soft-spoken and self-effacing in person, constitutionally shy it seems. Someone who frequently seems to want to erase whatever statement she ventures with a charming but self-deprecating chuckle.
When I told her I’d been asking a number of Shakespeare scholars and directors to tell me what their first transformative experience of Shakespeare had been, she did recall a moment that may have set her on the path that would place in her hands the shape of the Hamlet of the new millennium.
“As a teenager we had been taken as part of a school trip to an outdoor performance of Lear on the Cornish coast,” she said. A locale that evokes Lear’s Dover cliffs, site of one of the most deeply moving scenes in all Shakespeare: the scene in Lear in which the blinded Gloucester, desperately seeking solace in suicide, asks his disguised son and guide Edgar to lead him to the cliff’s edge so he can hurl himself to his death. In one of the most spectacularly showy passages in all Shakespeare, Edgar tricks his father into thinking he is on the very edge of the Dover precipice by conjuring up a dazzling fictive description of the dizzying prospect of the drop to the shore below. And it was there at Dover that the befuddled Gloucester, after the “miracle” of his recovery from the imagined cliff leap, encounters the flower-bedecked figure of the deposed King Lear, recovering from the madness on the heath.
But what struck Ann Thompson most powerfully about seeing Lear staged in that setting, she told me that afternoon in London, was the disappearance of Cordelia. “I’m not sure why, but I was fascinated to see the actress playing Cordelia, after she came off stage in the first act; it was outdoors in the round so you could observe the actors before and after their entrances and exits. Now you know Cordelia has nothing to do between that exit in the first act and her reappearance two hours or so later at the end of the fourth act. And so I watched her emerge from the backstage in a bathing suit, go down to the shore and plunge into the water for a swim before returning to put on Cordelia’s royal robes for her entry in act four. That fascinated me, I don’t know why, but it did.”
She’s not sure why the memory stayed with her but it’s possible to speculate: it’s almost an allegory of her own subsequent career in Shakespeare studies. In the first act of Lear Cordelia is a figure of a kind of principled shyness in her defiant refusal to give lip service to the ritual love test her father demands before he divides the kingdom among his daughters. Exiled for her silence she leaves the play, goes off across the Channel to plunge into a new life as the bride of the French king.
In Ann Thompson’s first encounter with Lear, the actress playing Cordelia steps out of her role as the silent/silenced young girl, plunges into the ocean and reemerges as a powerful, healing woman when she steps back into the play.
Similarly one might say, in her own career, Ann Thompson began as a shy young scholar who has plunged into the ocean, the turbulent “sea of troubles” that is Hamlet studies after four centuries. A “site of contestation” as the Theorists like to say, a place where “ignorant armies clash by night.” Here “arrogant armies” might be more appropriate—all those armies of (mainly) men, each of whom insists that his theory of Hamlet and “Shakespeare’s intentions” for Hamlet is the only correct approach.
Ann Thompson signaled her characteristically more open-minded and tentative approach to these rigidities with her willingness to entertain Eric Sams’s heretical conjectures on Shakespeare’s authorship of the ur-Hamlet—and her countervailing unwillingness to accept Sams’s certainty on that point, nor his corollary, that the Bad Quarto was the lost ur-Hamlet.
Her characteristic attitude emerged even more explicitly in her discussion of Hamlet’s last soliloquy, Hamlet’s last words and the issue of the “O-groans.”
“It’s not always true that a revision is going to be for the better,” she was saying apropos the Shakespeare-as-Reviser partisans. Many of whom, she believes, feel compelled to argue not just that Shakespeare revised Hamlet from the Quarto to the Folio but that the later version in almost every way is the better version.
“Once the Oxford editors decided they wanted to base their Hamlet on the Folio rather than the Quarto on the theory that the Folio is Shakespeare’s revision, you see them arguing of course it was the correct decision to cut the ‘How all occasions do inform against me …’ soliloquy. They find all sorts of reasons why it doesn’t belong, why the play is better without it.”
In other words, they’re smuggling in, beneath the cloak of their cutting-edge Shakespeare-the-Reviser theories, old-fashioned bardolatry: the Bard can do no wrong, he always gets it right, always makes it better when he revises.
When I asked her what she thought of the O-groans, the final four O’s Hamlet is called upon to utter in the Folio after “The rest is silence,” she was equally open-minded about the al
ternatives. She cited Harold Jenkins’s conjecture that they were “playhouse interpolations” by a hammy actor, but then added that this didn’t necessarily (as Jenkins believed) disqualify them from consideration:
“Perhaps one can imagine Shakespeare having gone through a period of rehearsal or having seen the thing [meaning Hamlet’s swan song] performed and then tinkered with it afterwards and thinking ‘Burbage did rather a good dying groan, I’ll put that down to remind me.’ You could imagine that,” she says.
“Publishing all three texts allows us to do that, to display the possibilities. If you’re going to publish one text you’re driven to excluding things. Therefore you have to persuade yourself the readings you’ve chosen are authentic and superior. What the three texts allow us to do is to say, ’These are the differences, these are the passages that are in one text and not the others. We can say there are arguments for, reasons for the differences but we don’t have to attribute all difference to a single factor or theory. What I’ve been finding is that we can be more inclusive. You know, the eighteenth-century editors I’ve been studying in the Folger were tolerant of these differences. Recent editors have become obsessed with the idea ‘I have to have a theory of the text and everything else follows from my theory.’ ”
It was at this point I couldn’t resist asking her about a phrase that had occurred to me: “American feminists have a phrase—‘Male Answer Syndrome’—for the tendency of men to insist they’ve always got things figured out. I wonder if your willingness to entertain conflicting theories, this inclusiveness the three-text solution offers, comes from a feminist perspective?”
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