(from “Of Patience”)
About nothing do I suffer greater conflicts in myself than about enduring wrongs.
(from “Of Patience”)
There have been great contentions about my mind and my body about this argument of life. They are both very obstinate in their desires, and I cannot blame them, for which so-ever prevails deprives the other of the greatest authority. My soul extols contemplation and persuades me that way; my body understands not that language but is all for action. He tells me that it is unproper, being of the world not to love so, and that I am born to my country, to whom, embracing this contemplative life, I am unprofitable. The other wants not reasons forcible and celestial. It hath been my continual labor to work a reconciliation between them, for I could not perfect any course by reason of this division. Earth and Heaven cannot be made one; therefore, impossible to join them together.
(from “Of Life”)
He that says of me only, “He lives well,” speaks too sparingly of me, for I live to better my mind and cure my body of his innate diseases. I must choose the active course; my birth commands me to that.
(from “Of Life and the Fashions of Life”)
It is the mind that can distil the whole world, all ages, all acts, all human knowledges within the little, little compass of a brain; and yet with the force of that little treasure command, dispose, censure, and determine states, actions, kingdoms, war, overthrows, and all the acts and actors busied upon our human theater.
(from “Of Advice”)
Copies of his essays were passed from hand to hand, and Cornwallis probably read his work aloud to admirers, much as Shakespeare had shared his sonnets with his “private friends.” Most of Cornwallis’s essays are under two thousand words long, an ideal length to recite. The 1600 edition of Cornwallis’s Essays was small enough to fit in a palm or slip into a pocket so that readers could carry the essays around and reflect on their ideas.
Cornwallis likened his essays to a kind of sketch, akin to “a scrivener trying his pen before he ingrosseth his work”—the kind of essay writing that Dr. Johnson would later define as “a loose sally of the mind, an irregular indigested piece.” In this respect, his essays mark a leap forward from the ten essays Francis Bacon published in 1597, the first in English. Though Bacon borrowed Montaigne’s title (he had probably been introduced to the Frenchman’s work through his brother Anthony Bacon, who had corresponded with Montaigne), his early essays are typically impersonal and aphoristic. While they are sharply drawn, Bacon’s early essays aren’t especially personal nor do they exhibit the play of mind or the improvisational qualities of Cornwallis, let alone Montaigne, and wouldn’t, until, over the next several decades, Bacon radically changed his approach and overhauled them. Until that point, if he hadn’t called them essays, we probably wouldn’t either.
Ironic, self-critical, conversational, Cornwallis’s essays have a strongly autobiographical tilt, even when they rely on generalizations to render heartfelt feelings. The disillusioning Irish campaign and the dark politics at court that autumn hang like a cloud over his thoughts. He may have sailed for Ireland with great assurance, but, like John Harington and other veterans of the campaign, upon his return a healthy skepticism was in order. I dwell at such length on this largely forgotten writer to emphasize that Shakespeare didn’t invent a new sensibility in Hamlet; rather, he gave voice to what he and others saw and felt around them—which is why Hamlet resonated so powerfully with audiences from the moment it was first staged.
Cornwallis’s loss of bearings is painfully realized in moments like the conclusion to the essay “Of Resolution,” where he writes: “I am myself still, though the world were turned with the wrong side out.” Observations like this suggest the strength of the affinity between the new sensibility that Cornwallis struggles to articulate and the kind that Shakespeare fully realizes in Hamlet’s soliloquies. These soliloquies, which are not even hinted at in Shakespeare’s sources, aren’t needed to advance the story. If anything, like the Choruses to Henry the Fifth, they compete with and retard the action. But they define the play. As tempting as it is to imagine that Shakespeare came across Cornwallis’s essays before writing Hamlet, it’s unlikely; they were writing at the same time. At best, Shakespeare might have heard about them or seen a few that were in circulation.
If a newcomer like Cornwallis had access to Montaigne in 1599, even in translation, Shakespeare, who seems to have been able to get his hands on all kinds of work in manuscript, could easily have come across essays by Montaigne or his imitators. He had surely looked into Montaigne by the time he wrote Hamlet—the intuition of critics stretching back to the 1830s on this question should be trusted—but he didn’t need to paraphrase him or pillage his essays for ideas. Nor did he need to read that “the taste of goods or evils doth greatly depend on the opinion we have of them” in order to write that “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so” (Folio, 2.2.250). There was more than enough skepticism and uncertainty to go around in England in the final years of Elizabeth’s reign and in 1599 in particular; it did not have to be imported from France.
Shakespeare cared less about appropriating Montaigne’s language or philosophy than in exploring how essays—with their assertions, contradictions, reversals, and abrupt shifts in subject matter and even confidence—captured a mind at work (“It is myself I portray,” Montaigne had famously declared). Other dramatists, including John Webster and John Marston, soon turned their attention to the essay as well. The extent of Montaigne’s influence in the early years of the seventeenth century was so great that Ben Jonson has a character in Volpone joke that English writers were stealing from a popular poet “almost as much as from Montaigne” (3.4.87–90).
Like sonnets and plays, essays straddled the spoken and the written, existing somewhere between private meditations and performance scripts. In redefining the relationship between speaker and audience, the essay also suggested to Shakespeare an intimacy between speaker and hearer that no other form, not even the sonnet, offered. Except, perhaps, the soliloquy. Probably more than any other character in literature, Hamlet needs to talk. But there is nobody in whom he can confide. When Marlowe and Jonson were confronted with this problem each provided straight men with whom their heroes can banter (Marlowe’s Barabas has his Ithamore and Faustus his Mephostophiles, while Jonson’s Volpone has his Mosca, Subtle his Face, and so on). In contrast, be it Brutus or Henry V, Shakespeare’s heroes are loners. Hamlet is an extreme case. His old friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are spies and viewed with suspicion. Horatio is deeply loyal but likes the sound of his own words a bit too much and never seems to understand him (you can sense Hamlet’s exasperation with his friend when he tells him that there “are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy”(1.5.166–67). Given Gertrude’s dependence on Claudius, she cannot be trusted either. And there’s no hope of unburdening himself to his terrifying father, back from Purgatory.
Hamlet’s relationship with Ophelia is more complicated. There was a time before the action of the play begins when he had confided in her; his bundle of love letters to her testifies to that. But Shakespeare undermines this trust by almost cruelly introducing one of these intimate letters into the play—with its hyperbolic address to “the celestial and my soul’s idol, the most beautified Ophelia”—and, to make matters worse, has Polonius read it aloud:
Doubt that the stars are fire,
Doubt that the sun doth move,
Doubt truth to be a liar,
But never doubt I love.
(2.2.116–19)
It’s mortifying to hear this lame verse recited and it underscores the dangers of baring one’s soul, because Ophelia, in “duty and obedience” (2.2.107), has betrayed Hamlet by turning these letters over to her father. As John Harington, sensitive to surveillance, wrote at the time: “Who will write, when his letters shall be opened by the way and construed at pleasure, or rather displeasure
?”
The scene returns us to the world of As You Like It, where an immature Orlando first found an outlet in wretched poetry. Like Orlando, “young Hamlet” (1.1.170), as he’s called early on in the play, grows out of it. We’re offered a brief and uncomfortable glimpse of a Hamlet who has not yet been shocked into complexity—and the soliloquy that shortly follows confirms that a chasm has opened up between the Hamlet who loved Ophelia and the one we now see. The Ptolemaic science on which Hamlet’s protestations are grounded, as Shakespeare knew, was already discredited by the Copernican revolution: the stars aren’t fire, the sun doesn’t revolve around the earth. In such a universe, truth may well turn out to be a liar. Ophelia really does have good grounds to doubt—that is, suspect—that Hamlet never loved her. We can see why Hamlet doesn’t want his love letters back—and why he can no longer unburden himself to Ophelia. We are all that’s left. Maybe the great secret of the soliloquies is not their inwardness so much as their outwardness, their essaylike capacity to draw us into an intimate relationship with the speaker and see the world through his eyes.
When the dying Hamlet insists that Horatio live on to “tell my story” (5.2.348), Horatio’s words underscore much he has failed to grasp about his friend, relative to what we now know:
So shall you hear
Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,
Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters,
Of deaths put on by cunning and for no cause,
And, in this upshot, purposes mistook
Fallen on th’ inventors’ heads. All this can I
Truly deliver.
(5.2.380–86)
The same could as easily be said of Titus Andronicus. Horatio can be excused for how much he has missed; unlike us, he has not been privy to Hamlet’s soliloquies, the part of the play—rather than the carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts one finds in any number of contemporary revenge plays—that has kept it on the boards without interruption for more than four hundred years.
The resemblances between the essay and the soliloquy extend beyond the world-weariness or depth of self-revelation found in each. Shakespeare had been struggling for much of the previous decade to find his way into tragedy. Very early on in his career he had grasped how both comedy and history worked; the nine comedies and nine history plays he had written or collaborated on by late 1599 feel like brilliant variations played by a master who deeply understood these forms and was intent on extending the range of possibilities inherent in them. In comparison, tragedy had largely resisted Shakespeare. His sporadic attempts in this vein—the early and melodramatic revenge tragedy Titus Andronicus and the love tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, though both extraordinarily popular—had not led him much closer to the heart of tragedy.
When he returned to the genre for the third time in Julius Caesar, Shakespeare found himself on the verge of the kind of drama that would preoccupy him for the next six years. He had glimpsed it in the great pair of soliloquies he had written for Brutus, both the one in which he reflects on how “between the acting of a dreadful thing / And the first motion, all the interim is / Like a phantasma or a hideous dream” (2.1.63–64) and the one that begins “It must be by his death. And for my part / I know no personal cause to spurn at him, / But for the general. He would be crowned” (2.1.10–12). These soliloquies not only allow us to observe a character thinking aloud, but also and crucially enable us to overhear a great moral struggle—precisely what we never heard when Juliet, Richard III, or even Falstaff had addressed us directly. In Julius Caesar, Shakespeare had discovered the potential of writing tragedy constructed on the fault line of irresolvable ethical conflict. But after Brutus’s early soliloquies he retreated from embodying this conflict within the consciousness of a single protagonist, allowing it instead to play out in the tragic collision of Brutus and Caesar—and in the second half of the play subsumes their conflict within the larger design of a revenge plot in which the conspirators turn against themselves the very swords they had used to kill Caesar.
Elizabethan drama had its roots in a morality tradition in which the struggle between the forces of good and evil had been externalized, literally played out by opposing characters onstage. Vestiges of this homiletic tradition were still visible in the appearance of the good and bad angels who vie for the protagonist’s soul in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. It’s more or less the same structure, though drained of its theological content, that informs plays as diverse as The Third Part of Henry the Sixth (with its warring houses of York and Lancaster), Titus Andronicus (which can’t quite decide if the externalized struggle is between Goths and Romans or warring factions within Rome), and Romeo and Juliet (where Montagues and Capulets clash tragically). The plays that Shakespeare worked on in 1599 all show signs of a struggle to move beyond this dynamic, to forge a new kind of drama by resisting the tendency to handle conflict in conventional ways. In Henry the Fifth, Shakespeare had broken with the model of his dramatic sources—as well as his own earlier histories—by making the alternation of the Chorus and the action rather than the rivalry of King Henry and the French Dauphin the main source of conflict. And in As You Like It he had refused to resort to comedy’s traditional blocking figures, locating the obstacle to the love of Orlando and Rosalind not in a parent or rival lover, but in Orlando’s need to learn what love is.
With Hamlet, a play poised midway between a religious past and a secular future, Shakespeare finally found a dramatically compelling way to internalize contesting forces: the essaylike soliloquy proved to be the perfect vehicle for Hamlet’s efforts to confront issues that, like Brutus’s, defied easy resolution. And he further complicated Hamlet’s struggle by placing it in a larger world of unresolved post-Reformation social, religious, and political conflicts, which is why the play is so often taken as the ultimate expression of its age. As puzzled readers of the play have long acknowledged, we’re denied information crucial to understanding whether or how Hamlet should act: Is he or his uncle the rightful heir to the Danish throne? Is Gertrude’s remarriage too hasty—and is she committing incest by marrying her dead husband’s brother? Is Ophelia’s death a suicide?
Within this maze, Shakespeare forces Hamlet to wrestle with a series of ethical problems that he must resolve before he can act—and it is this, more than overintellectualizing (as Coleridge had it) an Oedipal complex (as Freud urged) that accounts for Hamlet’s delay. The soliloquies restlessly return to these conflicts, which climax in, “To be or not to be”: in a world that feels so “weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,” is it better to live or die? And is the fear of what awaits him in the next world enough to offset the urge to commit suicide? Is the Ghost come from purgatory to warn him or should he see this visitation in a Protestant light (for Protestants didn’t believe in purgatory) as a devil who will exploit his melancholy and “abuses me to damn me”? (2.2.603). Is revenge a human or a divine prerogative? Is it right to kill Claudius at his prayers, even if this means sending his shriven soul to heaven? When, if ever, is killing a tyrant justified—and does the failure to do so invite damnation?
In locating the conflict of the play within his protagonist, Shakespeare transformed forever the traditional revenge play in which that conflict had until now been externalized, fought out between the hero and powerful adversaries, and in which a hero (like the Amleth of Shakespeare’s sources) had to delay for practical, self-protective reasons. This was one of the great breakthroughs in his career. Yet in revising his first draft of Hamlet—as we shall see in the chapter that follows—Shakespeare discovered that he had pressed his experiment too far and belatedly recognized that there were unforeseen dangers in locating too much of the conflict in Hamlet’s consciousness. The lesson learned, Shakespeare revised until he got the balance right. He had at last found a path into tragedy, one that soon led him into the divided souls of Othello and Macbeth. The innovation inspired by the essaylike soliloquy opened the way as well into the world of his dark and brilliant Jacobean problem comedies Measur
e for Measure and All’s Well That End’s Well, which turn not on comedy’s familiar obstacles but rather on the wrenching internalized struggle of characters like Isabella and Bertram.
– 15 –
Second Thoughts
Of the many remarkable things about Hamlet, perhaps the most extraordinary is its length. At roughly four thousand lines, the Second Quarto—the closest thing we have to what Shakespeare wrote in late 1599—could not have been performed uncut at the Globe. Nor could his revised version of the play, a couple of hundred lines shorter, that eventually appeared in the First Folio. Though the Elizabethan stage dispensed with time-consuming intermissions and changes in scenery, these versions of Hamlet would still have taken four hours to perform; even at top speed, actors couldn’t rattle off much more than a thousand lines of verse in an hour. With outdoor performances at the Globe beginning at two in the afternoon and the sun setting in late winter and early autumn around five o’clock, an uncut Hamlet staged in February or October would have left the actors stumbling about in the fading light by the Gravedigger scene; the fencing match, fought in the dark, could have been lethal.
A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare Page 35
