It isn’t just the words he chose but how he used them that make the language of Hamlet so challenging. Shakespeare clearly wanted audiences to work hard, and one of the ways he made them do so was by employing an odd verbal trick called hendiadys. Though the term may be strange, examples of it—“law and order,” “house and home,” or the Shakespearean “sound and fury”—are familiar enough. Hendiadys literally means “one by means of two,” a single idea conveyed through a pairing of nouns linked by “and.” When conjoined in this way, the nouns begin to oscillate, seeming to qualify each other as much as the term each individually modifies. Whether he is exclaiming “Angels and ministers of grace defend us” (1.4.39), declaring that actors are “the abstract and brief chronicles of the time” (2.2.524), speaking of “the book and volume of my brain” (1.5.103), or complaining of “a fantasy and trick of fame” (4.4.61), Hamlet often speaks in this way. The more you think about hendiadys, the more they induce a kind of mental vertigo. Take for example Hamlet’s description of “the book and volume of my brain.” It’s easy to get the gist of what he’s saying, and the phrase would pass unremarked in the course of a performance. But does he mean “book-like volume” of my mind? Or “big book of my mind”? Part of the problem here is that the words bleed into each other—“volume” of course is another word for “book” but also means “space.” The destabilizing effect of how these words play off each other is slightly and temporarily unnerving. It’s only on reflection, which is of course Hamlet’s problem, that we trip.
It’s very hard to write in hendiadys; almost no other English writer did so very often before or after Shakespeare—and neither did he much before 1599. Something happened in that year—beginning with Henry the Fifth and As You Like It and continuing for five years or so past Hamlet through the great run of plays that included Othello, Measure for Measure, Lear, and Macbeth, after which hendiadys pretty much disappear again—that led Shakespeare to invoke this figure almost compulsively. But nowhere is its presence felt more than in Hamlet, where there are sixty-six of them, or one every sixty lines—and that’s counting conservatively. Othello, with twenty-eight, has the next highest count. There’s a kind of collective desperation to all the hendiadys in Hamlet—a striving for meaning that both recedes and multiplies as well as an acknowledgment of how necessary and impossible it is to suture things together—that suits the mood of the play perfectly.
WHAT THE CHAMBERLAIN’S MEN DID TO THE WOODEN FRAME OF THE Theatre, Shakespeare did to the old play of Hamlet: he tore it from its familiar moorings, salvaged its structure, and reassembled something new. By wrenching this increasingly outdated revenge play into the present, Shakespeare forced his contemporaries to experience what he felt and what his play registers so profoundly: the world had changed. Old certainties were gone, even if new ones had not yet taken hold. The most convincing way of showing this was to ask playgoers to keep both plays in mind at once, to experience a new Hamlet while memories of the old one, ghostlike, still lingered. Audiences at the Globe soon found themselves, like Hamlet, straddling worlds and struggling to reconcile past and present. There was an added benefit, having to do with the play’s difficulty: familiarity with the plot allowed playgoers to lose themselves in the complexity of thought and the inwardness of the characters without losing track of the action.
The desire to mark the end of one kind of drama and the beginning of another carried over into the internal dynamics of Shakespeare’s playing company. Spectators at this Hamlet wouldn’t be distracted by a clown. Tellingly, when “the tragedians of the city” (2.2.328) arrive at Elsinore they are without a clown; even after his departure from the company Kemp was still on Shakespeare’s mind. And Hamlet cannot resist a gratuitous attack on improvisational clowning:
Let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them; for there be of them that will themselves laugh to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh too, though in the meantime some necessary question of the play then to be considered. That’s villainous, and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it.
(3.2.38–45)
While these are Hamlet’s words, judging by the company’s recent history, Shakespeare’s own view was probably not much different. Shakespeare made sure that in Hamlet the last laugh would be on the Kemp-like clown—and he did so by dividing up his role between the new, clownish fool (Robert Armin, who played the Gravedigger), and, surprisingly, the tragic protagonist himself, played by Richard Burbage. In his verbal sparring, his intimate relationship to the audience, his distracting and obscene behavior at the performance of The Mousetrap (where he cracks sexual jokes at Ophelia’s expense and calls himself her “only jig-maker”), and his antic performance for much of the play, Hamlet appropriates much of the traditional comic part.
Only after Hamlet has stopped clowning does Shakespeare introduce Armin, creating for him a role that made much of his singing (he breaks into song four times) as well as his celebrated repartee. And in the Gravedigger’s recollection of Yorick—this “same skull, sir, was, sir, Yorick’s skull, the King’s jester” (5.1.180–81)—Shakespeare also allows Armin a private tribute to Richard Tarlton, the first of the great Elizabethan clowns, who had reputedly chosen the young Armin as his successor. Armin understood what was expected of him. As Gravedigger, he never competes with Hamlet for our affection.
The eighteenth-century biographer Nicholas Rowe reported that the only role he was able to learn that Shakespeare played was “the Ghost in his own Hamlet.” So that when the Ghost tells Hamlet, “Remember me,” it was likely to have been Shakespeare himself who spoke these words to Richard Burbage. Burbage would remember. His success was closely tied to Shakespeare’s. At the beginning of the 1590s he had not yet come into his own and was still being cast in messenger parts. Within a few years, Shakespeare would fashion breakthrough roles for him in Richard III and Romeo, but it was Hamlet that defined Burbage’s greatness for contemporaries. An anonymous eulogist, recalling Burbage shortly after his death in 1619, remembers his finest roles (Hamlet foremost) and speaks with particular fondness of the scene in which Burbage, as Hamlet, leaped into Ophelia’s grave (unless, that is, the passage describes Burbage’s Romeo):
young Hamlet, old Hieronimo,
Kind Lear, the grieved Moor, and more beside
That lived in him have now for ever died.
Oft have I seen him leap into the grave,
Suiting the person which he seemed to have
Of a sad lover with so true an eye
That there, I would have sworn, he meant to die.
The eulogist’s description of Burbage’s style closely corresponds to what Burbage—as Hamlet—himself recommends to the Players: “Suit the action to the word, the word to the action,” and “you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness” (3.2.7–8, 17–18):
How did his speech become him, and his pace,
Suit with his speech, and every action grace
Them both alike, whilst not a word did fall
Without just weight, to ballast it withal.
Shakespeare also wrote Burbage’s response to “Remember me,” lines that double as a private reflection on what the two men hoped to create together at the new playhouse: “Remember thee, / Ay, thou poor ghost, whiles memory holds a seat / In this distracted globe” (1.5.95–97).
Shakespeare’s break with the past was tempered by the ambivalence that had characterized his responses to the death of chivalry, the loss of Arden, and the fading of Catholicism. Even as he was rendering the old style of revenge play obsolete, Shakespeare found room in the play for a last nostalgic glance at it in the dramatic speech that Hamlet “chiefly loved” (2.2.446). The old-fashioned speech describes how Achilles’ son Pyrrhus kills a king and unhesitatingly avenges his father’s death. Hamlet knows the lines by heart and recites them excitedly:
The rugged Pyrrhus, he whose sable arms,
Black as his purpose, did the night
resemble
When he lay couched in th’ ominous horse,
Hath now this dread and black complexion smeared
With heraldy more dismal. Head to foot
Now is he total gules, horridly tricked
With blood of fathers, mothers, daughters, sons,
Baked and impasted with the parching streets,
That lend a tyrannous and a damned light
To their lord’s murder. Roasted in wrath and fire,
And thus o’ersized with coagulate gore,
With eyes like carbuncles, the hellish Pyrrhus
Old grandsire Priam seeks.
(2.2.452–64)
By the end of the seventeenth century, admirers of Shakespeare no longer understood what he was doing here and decided that he was either writing quite badly or lazily recycling old material. The dramatist John Dryden’s verdict was harsh: “Would not a man have thought that the poet had been bound prentice to a wheelwright for his first rant?” A generation or so later, Alexander Pope floated the idea that Hamlet “seems to commend this play to expose the bombast of it”—but even he wasn’t convinced that Shakespeare had written the speech. Not until the late eighteenth century did Edmond Malone first suggest that Shakespeare was trying to sound old-fashioned. You can feel in these lines the hold that this kind of revenge drama once had on Shakespeare as well as his appreciation of a moral clarity that was no longer credible. It’s one of the keys to understanding what makes Hamlet so distinctive: even as he paints over an earlier work of art, Shakespeare allows traces of what’s been whitewashed to remain visible.
In the closing years of Elizabeth’s reign, as in the play, heroic action had become increasingly hard to believe in. And things probably seemed worse than they actually were when Shakespeare was writing Hamlet in the autumn of 1599. Londoners, barely recovered from the murky armada threat and Essex’s ill-fated expedition, felt this plainly enough by mid-November, as noted earlier, when the preacher who had dared to speak “of the misgovernment in Ireland” in “open pulpit” before thousands of spectators at St. Paul’s was silenced. Many thousands more saw it at Whitehall’s tiltyard later that week, where the exclusion of Essex and his Irish knights made this celebration of martial valor seem more artificial than the pasteboard shields the knights carried to the tilt. Shakespeare and others in the capital would have found the degree to which politics was being played out in public unprecedented. So “many scandalous libels” began circulating in “the court, city and country” this autumn that the government felt forced to counter by publicly embarrassing Essex in open hearings of the Star Chamber. Francis Woodward couldn’t believe it and went to see for himself. He writes to Robert Sidney of “throng and press” of Londoners who elbowed him at these proceedings, a crowd “so mighty that I was driven so far back that I could not hear what they said.” Henry Wotton, who followed Essex to Ireland and served as his secretary, wrote to his friend John Donne in London that while it was true that Ireland suffered from “ill affections and ill corruptions,” the English court was suffering from “a stronger disease.” “Courts,” he bitterly concluded, “are upon earth the vainest places.” That’s as much as Wotton dared put on paper: “I will say no more, and yet peradventure I have said a great deal unto you.” Shakespeare, like many others unsettled by the political climate this autumn, probably shared Rowland Whyte’s sense that “it is a world to be, to see the humors of the time.” It was one thing for Shakespeare to have reflected upon the limits of heroic action and the culture of honor in Henry the Fifth and Julius Caesar earlier in the year—plays that couldn’t and wouldn’t be chosen to be performed at court this Christmas for that very reason. It was all the more striking that he would choose such a moment to update a story of a corrupt court (before whom a seditious play is performed), problematic succession, the threat of invasion, and the dangers of a coup.
“NOW I AM ALONE,” HAMLET SAYS WITH RELIEF, AFTER ROSENCRANTZ AND Guildenstern, the Players, and Polonius leave him in act 2. But he’s not: we are still there to hear him “unpack” his “heart with words” (2.2.586) in a way that no character in literature had done before. One of the mysteries of Hamlet is how Shakespeare, who a half year earlier couldn’t quite manage it in Julius Caesar, discovered how to write such compelling soliloquies:
O, that this too too sallied flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew,
Or that the Everlasting had not fixed
His canon ’gainst self-slaughter. O God, God,
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on ’t, ah fie, ’tis an unweeded garden
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely.
(1.2.129–37)
The sense of inwardness that Shakespeare creates by allowing us to hear a character as intelligent as Hamlet wrestle with his thoughts is something that no dramatist had yet achieved. He had written memorable soliloquies from early on in his career, but as powerful as these were, even they fall far short of the intense self-awareness we find in Hamlet’s. The breakthrough is one that Shakespeare might have arrived at sooner or later, but it was given tremendous impetus at the time that he was writing Hamlet by his interest in a new literary form, the essay.
English writers did not discover Montaigne until the late 1590s. In his late thirties, Montaigne had withdrawn from a world torn by religious wars to read, reflect, and write—and had taken the unprecedented step of making himself the subject in a new literary form, the personal essay. The first two volumes of Montaigne’s Essays were published in France in 1580. Shakespeare could easily have turned to the essay at earlier points in his career—his French was good enough to read Montaigne in the original—but he didn’t. Only at the end of the century, a cultural moment marked by a high degree of skepticism and a deepening interest in how subjective experience could be expressed, did Montaigne begin to speak to Shakespeare and other English writers with great immediacy.
The experience of William Cornwallis, the first Englishman to follow closely in Montaigne’s footsteps, suggests not only why conditions were ripe but also what attracted Shakespeare to the essay and how it helped trigger such a change in his soliloquies. At the age of twenty-one, Cornwallis volunteered to fight under Essex in Ireland. He was knighted during the campaign and returned home in the autumn of 1599 world-weary and broke. He turned to writing. A few years earlier he might have found an outlet composing sonnets. Even a year earlier, before the Bishops’ Ban, Cornwallis might have gravitated to satire. Instead, by late 1599, he began writing essays. It’s hard now to imagine a time when essays, like diaries, didn’t exist, when the self was not explored in these ways. But in 1600, when a collection of Cornwallis’s first twenty-five essays appeared in print (another twenty-four came out a year later), even the word “essay” was unfamiliar. Cornwallis freely acknowledged his debt to Montaigne’s Essays, though he admits that his French was so poor he relied on an unnamed translator. He had several to choose from. It might have been John Florio, whose unsurpassed translation, published in 1603, was already under way by 1598. More likely, it was a competitor, one of the “seven or eight of great wit” who Florio claims tried (and failed) to complete a translation. Florio’s assertion—and there is no reason to doubt it—suggests that there was a rush to translate Montaigne at this time.
As it turned out, the English reading public wasn’t quite ready for the personal essay. With the exception of a half dozen or so other essay collections published in the early seventeenth century, the experiment fizzled and essay writing was not to be taken up again in any significant way until the eighteenth century. Because Cornwallis’s Essays remain virtually unread today, a few examples are worth sharing. If his words sound like something Hamlet might have said, it’s because they share with the soliloquies a sense of a mind overwhelmed by conflicts that cannot be resolved. Again and again Cornwallis identifies thes
e obstacles and just as often speaks of his frustration that he cannot reconcile competing claims:
Anger is the mother of injustice, and yet justice must lackey on her errands, fight battles, and give her the victory. I cannot reconcile these together, but even in the behalf of truth and mercy, I will combat against a received tradition. I think nothing but murder should be punished.
A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare Page 34
