A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare

by James Shapiro

  A book that laments this change, and which Shakespeare drew on when writing Hamlet, was George Silver’s Paradoxes of Defence, dedicated to Essex and published in early 1599. In it, Silver is nostalgic for the lost world epitomized by the kind of combat old Hamlet and Fortinbras had engaged in: “Our forefathers were wise, though our age account them foolish, valiant though we repute them cowards: they found out the true defense for their bodies in short weapons by their wisdom, they defended themselves and subdued their enemies, with those weapons with their valor.” Silver adds that “we, like degenerate sons, have forsaken our forefathers’ virtues with their weapons and have lusted like men sick of a strange ague, after the strange vices and devices of Italian, French, and Spanish fencers.” Notably, it’s a Frenchman’s praise of Laertes’ swordsmanship that gives Claudius the idea of having Laertes fence with Hamlet.

  As recently as As You Like It, Shakespeare had lampooned the culture of the challenge in Touchstone’s comic routine about how to quarrel without ever coming to blows: “I have had four quarrels and like to have fought one” (5.4.46). In Hamlet, we get a different version of Touchstone’s “Retort Courteous” in the affected language Osric uses to describe the impending fencing match. So that Hamlet is told that his rival, Laertes, is “full of most excellent differences, of very soft society, and great showing; indeed, to speak feelingly of him, he is the card or calendar of gentry.” Chivalry and honor are reduced in the Danish court to jargon and an elaborate bet: Hamlet is told that a Frenchified Laertes had wagered “six Barbary horses against six French swords, their assigns, and three liberal-conceited carriages—that’s the French bet against the Danish” (5.2.160–64). Acting as if one still lived in the world of Hamlet’s heroic father—where it was possible to win fame through martial feats—was no longer possible. But how to act in the world that had replaced it was not yet clear, and part of Hamlet’s dilemma.

  The gap between exploits in the field and merely playing soldier would also have been unmistakable to Elizabethans at this year’s annual Accession Day joust, held once again at Whitehall in November. Those who had fought in Ireland from the beginning to the end of the campaign, some bearing the scars of battle, were excluded from joining the lists this year, including Essex himself, who a year earlier had been chief challenger. Only two men who had served in Ireland (and who had returned by midsummer) were among the combatants at Whitehall and both had jousted the previous year: Essex’s sworn enemy, Lord Grey, and Henry Carey, now Sir Henry, who had also been knighted by Essex in Ireland and who remained devoted to him. Their nonfatal encounter—for Grey and Carey were paired with each other in the tilts—would no doubt have been closely watched by friend and foe alike in the crowd outside Whitehall. But what, in the end, “was most memorable” about the tournament, according to Rowland Whyte, speaks worlds about how martial display had become subordinated to theater and conspicuous display: a minor court figure, Lord Compton, had appeared “like a fisherman, with six men clad in motley, his caparisons all of net, having caught a frog.” To those in the crowd returning from the wars—officers and soldiers alike—this Accession Day show must have confirmed for them, if further proof was needed, that things had degenerated, that the world had changed, and changed quickly.

  In Hamlet, Shakespeare once again found himself drawn to the epochal, to moments of profound shifts, of endings that were also beginnings. It was such a rupture that he had in mind when he wrote in The Winter’s Tale of “Heavy matters, heavy matters!… Thou met’st with things dying, I with things newborn” (3.3.109–11). Born into a world in which the old religion had been replaced by the new, and like everybody else, living in nervous anticipation of the imminent end of Elizabeth’s reign and the Tudor dynasty, Shakespeare’s sensitivity to moments of epochal change was both extraordinary and understandable. In Hamlet he perfectly captures such a moment, conveying what it means to live in the bewildering space between familiar past and murky future.

  AS LONG AS ESSEX’S FATE REMAINED UNRESOLVED, NOTHING WAS RESOLVED: “All men’s eyes and ears,” Rowland Whyte writes, “are open to what it will please Her Majesty to determine.” Until Elizabeth made up her mind, Essex remained under house arrest, cut off from his friends and even his newly delivered wife. Yet it wasn’t entirely clear what, if anything, Essex had done wrong. Many outside the orbit of the court were confused. One of them, the aged poet Thomas Churchyard, who had celebrated Essex’s departure and had been laboring in his absence on a companion poem honoring his return, entering “The Welcome Home of the Earl of Essex” in the Stationers’ Register on October 1. His ill-timed poem was never printed, and the manuscript almost surely consigned to the dustheap.

  Adding to the confusion and tension in the city, Essex’s gallant followers were abandoning Ireland and flooding London: “This town is full of them, to the great discontentment of her Majesty.” The public theaters appear to have been one of their haunts and Shakespeare probably spotted at the Globe some of these gentleman volunteers, for according to Rowland Whyte, “Lord Southampton and Lord Rutland came not to Court…. They pass away the time in London merely in going to plays every day.”

  We don’t know what old plays they might have seen at the Globe in October or early November. It would turn out to have been a dangerous coincidence had the Chamberlain’s Men staged Shakespeare’s Third Part of Henry the Sixth, which included a scene in which supporters of Edward, who was under house arrest, succeed in a daring rescue attempt “to set him free from his captivity” (4.5.12). For in early November, Essex’s friends, fearing that he was to be delivered to the Tower of London, contemplated a similar scheme. According to Sir Charles Danvers, the plan, spearheaded by Essex’s close friends Southampton and Mountjoy, was “either by procuring him means to escape privately into France, or by the assistance of his friends into Wales, or by possessing the Court with his friends to bring himself again to her Majesty’s presence.” This last and violent act would have been treasonous.

  Danvers adds that these ideas had been “rather thought upon, than ever well digested,” until around mid-November, when he met with Southampton, his brother Henry Danvers, and Mountjoy, and Essex’s friends resolved that if he were in danger of being carried to the Tower, the best plan was “to make a private escape.” Somehow, Southampton got this message through to Essex, offering that he and Henry Danvers would go into exile with him. And Danvers said that if they chose to leave him behind, he would “sell all that I had, to my shirt,” to maintain Essex abroad. But Essex categorically refused to flee, saying that “if they could think of no better a course for him than a poor flight, he would rather run any danger than lead the life of a fugitive.” Southampton later remembered things a bit differently, and claimed to have opposed the plot and stopped it “not three hours before it should have been attempted.”

  Even some of Essex’s more loyal supporters found the recent turn of events terrifying and thought Essex himself mad. John Harington, now Sir John, who had just a few months earlier written how he had been “summoned by honor to this Irish action,” now saw things differently: “ambition thwarted in its career, doth speedily lead on to madness. Herein I am strengthened by what I learn in my Lord of Essex, who shifteth from sorrow and repentance to rage and rebellion so suddenly, as well proveth him devoid of good reason or right mind.” In their last conversation back in Ireland, Harington adds, Essex “uttered strange words bordering on such strange designs, that made me hasten forth and leave his presence. Thank heaven! I am safe at home, and if I go in such troubles again, I deserve the gallows for a meddling fool.”

  Politically, then, the fall of 1599 proved not much less unsettling than the summer of the “Invisible Armada” had been. Essex was disgraced, but what was to be done with him, and what “strange designs” might he and his desperate faction undertake—or lure the King of Scots into joining? The political uncertainty that autumn was the stuff of Shakespearean drama: libels posted in the streets and scrawled on the walls at
court, censorship, surveillance, intercepted letters, and wild rumors. If the testimony of Francis Bacon is to be believed, the politics and libels reached the playhouses: “About that time there did fly about in London streets and theaters, diverse seditious libels, and Paul’s and ordinaries were full of bold and factious discourses, whereby not only many of her Majesty’s faithful and zealous councilors and servants were taxed, but withal the hard estate of Ireland was imputed to any thing rather than unto the true cause (the Earl’s defaults).”

  Others, like Fulke Greville, were convinced that these libels were circulated not by Essex’s supporters but by his enemies, a Machiavellian move intended to further discredit Essex: “His enemies took audacity to cast libels abroad in his name against the state, made by themselves; set paper upon posts, to bring his innocent friends in question. His power, by Jesuitical craft of rumor, they made infinite; and his ambition, more than equal to it. His letters to private men were read openly, by the piercing eye of an attorney’s office, which warrants the construction of every line in the worst sense against the writer.” Who then was responsible in late December, when, Rowland Whyte reports, it was discovered “at court upon the very white walls, much villainy hath been written against Sir Robert Cecil”?

  As the year came to a close the Essex faction grew increasingly desperate. With Essex unwilling to go into exile, there was one card left to play, the Scottish one. Sometime over the past summer Essex’s friend Lord Mountjoy had sent Henry Lee to the King of Scots to reassure him that despite rumors to the contrary, Essex had no personal designs upon the throne of England—and in fact “would endure no succession” but James’s. Around Christmastime 1599 (a date later confirmed by Henry Cuffe, Essex’s secretary), a new plan was hatched. After being chosen by Elizabeth to succeed Essex as lord lieutenant in Ireland, Mountjoy sent Henry Lee back to Scotland, this time to say that if the King of Scots “would enter into the cause at that time, my Lord Mountjoy would leave the kingdom of Ireland defensively guarded, and with four or five thousand men assist that enterprise which, with the party that my Lord of Essex would be able to make, were thought sufficient to bring that to pass which was intended”—the rehabilitation of Essex, the downfall of his rivals at court, and the assurance of James’s succession in England. Southampton also wrote to James committing himself to the plan.

  Essex’s friends were counting on the King of Scots’ impatience to claim the English throne. It wasn’t clear to Sir Charles Danvers (who later confessed details of this plot) whether James would actually enter hostilely into England—nor is it clear how the Scottish King treated this overture. Still, the combined threat of a foreign army making maneuvers on the English border, combined with an insurrection by English troops landed in Wales and a local uprising in London would have been Elizabeth’s and Cecil’s worst nightmare. By the time that Lee—whose activities in Scotland were closely monitored—returned from Scotland, Mountjoy had already shipped off to Ireland. Lee was committed by the authorities to prison in the Gatehouse. Essex himself didn’t lose hope in this scheme, even sending Southampton to Mountjoy in Ireland “to move him to bring over those former intended forces into Wales,” and from there “to proceed to the accomplishment of the former design.” Southampton said that Danvers was convinced that the forces Mountjoy would bring from Ireland were sufficient—they didn’t need to count on the equivocating James. Mountjoy at this point refused, telling Southampton to drop the idea; with James remaining uncommitted to the plan, it was no longer about the succession, merely Essex’s private ambition.

  It’s extremely unlikely that more than a handful conspirators knew anything about this plot at the time or even later when it was confessed to the authorities—so the fact that Hamlet contains both an abortive coup (by Laertes’ faction, who burst in on Claudius) and a neighboring foreign prince at the head of an army (led by Fortinbras, who claims the Danish throne in the end) is sheer coincidence. But it was a time when such things could be imagined—and by some even plotted. Hamlet, composed during these months, feels indelibly stamped by the deeply unsettling mood of the time. The play offered no temporary respite; the atmosphere in which Elizabethans found themselves at performances of Hamlet was uncomfortably familiar. Shakespeare was as good as his word in Hamlet that the “purpose of playing” was to show “the very age and body of the time his form and pressure” (3.2.20–24). An anxious Rowland Whyte could have easily been speaking of Claudius’s court when he wrote to Sir Robert Sidney this fall that “there is such observing and prying into men’s actions that I hold them happy and blessed that live away.” “As God help me,” Whyte warns, “it is a very dangerous time here.”

  – 14 –

  Essays and Soliloquies

  In terms of plot Hamlet is Shakespeare’s least original play. He lifted the story from a now lost revenge tragedy of the 1580s, also called Hamlet, which by the end of that decade was already feeling shopworn. In 1589, in an attack on Elizabethan tragedies that overindulged in Senecan rant, Thomas Nashe singled out Hamlet as a notable offender—“English Seneca read by candlelight yields many good sentences, as ‘Blood is a beggar’ and so forth, and if you entreat him fair in a frosty morning he will afford you whole Hamlets, I should say handfuls, of tragical speeches.” Nashe also hints that Thomas Kyd, author of the wildly popular revenge play The Spanish Tragedy, had written Hamlet as well.

  This Hamlet was on the boards, then, when Shakespeare first arrived in London. He would get to know it intimately, for by the mid-1590s the play had entered the repertory of the newly formed Chamberlain’s Men. On June 9, 1594, Shakespeare, Burbage, and Kemp were probably in the cast that performed it at Newington Butts, a theater located a mile south of London Bridge, which the Chamberlain’s Men were temporarily sharing with their rivals, the Admiral’s Men. If box-office receipts are any indication, the play continued to show its age: fewer customers paid to see Hamlet than did to see other old revenge plays staged the previous week, Shakespeare’s own Titus Andronicus and Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta. When the Chamberlain’s Men moved to the Theatre, they brought the play with them. By now the Ghost’s haunting cry for revenge had become a byword. Three years before Shakespeare sat down to write his own Hamlet, Thomas Lodge spoke familiarly of one who “walks for the most part in black under the cover of gravity, and looks as pale as the vizard of the Ghost who cried so miserably at the Theatre like an oyster wife, ‘Hamlet, revenge!’ ” Shakespeare would have had many years to reflect upon what he might do with the old play.

  Long before this Hamlet was staged, the contours of the story were fixed, having been in place since the twelfth century when Saxo Grammaticus wrote of the legendary Danish revenger Amleth. His saga was printed in Latin in 1514. Little in it is new to those familiar with the plot of Shakespeare’s play. His uncle kills Amleth’s father (after he had defeated the King of Norway in solo combat) and then marries Amleth’s mother. The murder is no secret and to avert suspicion about his plans to avenge his father’s death, young Amleth acts mad and speaks nonsense. A beautiful young woman is sent to discover his intentions. Later, while speaking with his mother in her chamber, Amleth is spied on by the king’s adviser—whom he kills and dismembers. His uncle then packs Amleth off to Britain to have him executed, accompanied by two retainers, but Amleth intercepts their instructions and substitutes their names for his own. He returns to Denmark and avenges his father’s death by killing his uncle. In Saxo’s version Amleth survives and is made king. The codes of honor and revenge are clear, and Amleth triumphs because of his patience, his intelligence, and his ability to act decisively when he sees his chance.

  Standing between Saxo’s story and the old play of Hamlet is a French retelling by François de Belleforest, the long-winded Histoires Tragiques, first published in 1570. Shakespeare may not have read Saxo, but he was familiar with Belleforest, who introduced a few new wrinkles. The most notable is the change in Hamlet’s mother’s part. In Belleforest, she has an adulterous affair with
her brother-in-law before he murders her husband. And later, she is converted to Hamlet’s cause, keeps his secret, and supports him in his efforts to regain the throne. Belleforest also speaks of the young revenger as melancholy. The Ghost, the play within a play, the feigned madness, and the hero’s death—familiar features of the revenge drama of the late 1580s—are all likely to have been introduced by the anonymous author of the lost Elizabethan Hamlet. Of all the characters, only Fortinbras, who threatens invasion at the outset and succeeds to the throne at the end, is probably Shakespeare’s invention.

  There are many ways of being original. Inventing a plot from scratch is only one of them and never held much appeal for Shakespeare. Aside from the soliloquies, much of Shakespeare’s creativity went into the play’s verbal texture. In writing Hamlet, Shakespeare found himself using and inventing more words than he had ever done before. His vocabulary, even when compared to those of other great dramatists, was already exceptional. The roughly four thousand lines in the play ended up requiring nearly the same number of different words (for comparison’s sake, Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and The Jew of Malta each used only about half that number). Even the 14,000 or so different words or compounds that Shakespeare had already employed in his plays (by the end of his career that figure would reach about 18,000) proved insufficient. According to Alfred Hart, who painstakingly counted when and how Shakespeare introduced each word into his work, Shakespeare introduced around 600 words in Hamlet that he had never used before, two-thirds of which he would never use again. This is an extraordinary number (King Lear, with 350, is the only one that comes close; in the spare Julius Caesar only 70 words appear that Shakespeare had not previously used). Hamlet, then, didn’t sound like anything playgoers had ever heard before and must at times have been taxing to follow, for by Hart’s count there are 170 words or phrases that Shakespeare coined or employed in new ways while writing the play.