A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare

by James Shapiro

  Details of Essex’s plot to join forces with King James and Mountjoy can be found in J. Bruce, ed., Correspondence of King James VI of Scotland with Sir Robert Cecil and Others in England During the Reign of Elizabeth, Camden Society 78 (London, 1861) along with “the confessions and other evidence” published in vol. 2 of James Spedding, The Letters and the Life of Francis Bacon. For Fulke Greville, see his Poems and Dramas, ed. Geoffrey Bullough, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1939).

  14. Essays and Soliloquies

  For Saxo, Belleforest, and other sources of Hamlet, see Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare. On the play’s distinctive vocabulary, see Alfred Hart’s pair of essays, “Vocabularies of Shakespeare’s Plays,” Review of English Studies 19 (1943), 128–40, and “The Growth of Shakespeare’s Vocabulary,” Review of English Studies 19 (1943), 242–54, as well as Frank Kermode, Shakespeare’s Language. On hendiadys, I am indebted to George T. Wright’s authoritative “Hendiadys and Hamlet,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 96 (1981), 168–93, and Frank Kermode’s Shakespeare’s Language and Pieces of My Mind (New York, 2003). See Furness’s Variorum Hamlet for responses to the Player’s speech. For the elegy to Burbage and Burbage’s career in general, see Nungezer, Dictionary of Actors. For Wotton’s letter to Donne, see Logan Pearsall Smith, The Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1907).

  Quotations from Cornwallis’s essays are cited from Don Cameron Allen, ed., Essayes, by Sir William Cornwallis, the Younger. On Cornwallis and his essays, see Roger E. Bennett, “Sir William Cornwallis’s Use of Montaigne,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 48 (1933), 1080–1099; Elbert N. S. Thompson, “The Seventeenth-Century English Essay,” University of Iowa Humanistic Studies 3 (1926), especially 3–93; P. B. Whitt, “New Light on Sir Thomas Cornwallis, the Essayist,” Review of English Studies 8 (1932), 155–69; and W. L. MacDonald, “The Earliest English Essayists,” Englische Studien 64 (1929), 20–52. His essays reveal that Cornwallis was a playgoer, and, if anything, Shakespeare had influenced him (though not Hamlet, which was staged after Cornwallis’s first set of essays was already written). One of Cornwallis’s few letters to survive, a verse epistle sent to his “dear friend” John Donne, speaks of his love of theater: “If then for change of hours you seem careless, / Agree with me to lose them at the plays” (The Poems of John Donne, Herbert J. C. Grierson, ed., 2 vols. [Oxford 1912], vol. 2, 171–72). Cornwallis mentions the public theater in his essays and even echoes Shakespeare’s recent Julius Caesar (and quotes its most famous line) in an account where reading and playgoing recollections blur: “Caesar is so much beholding to me that I put him on; and all the time I am reading of him, his happiness is mine, his danger is mine. When I am out of my dream with coming to ‘Et tu Brute’ I should be very sorry this imagination could last no longer” (“Of Life”).

  On Montaigne and his influence on Hamlet, see Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, Essays, trans. John Florio (1603), intro. L. C. Harmer, 3 vols. (1910; London, 1965); Robert Ellrodt, “Self-Consciousness in Montaigne and Shakespeare,” Shakespeare Survey 28 (1975), 37–50; Hugh Grady, Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Montaigne (Oxford, 2002); and Frances A. Yates, John Florio: The Life of an Italian in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge, 1934). For Bacon’s essays, see Michael Kiernan’s excellent introduction to and edition of Sir Francis Bacon, The Essays or Counsels, Civill and Morall (Cambridge, Mass., 1985).

  15. Second Thoughts

  On the rich subject of the textual history of Hamlet, in addition to the various editions that I’ve consulted (cited above, especially Jesús Tronch-Pérez’s Synoptic “Hamlet”), see: George Ian Duthie, The “Bad” Quarto of Hamlet: A Critical Study Published (Q1, 1603): Origins, Form, Intertextualities (Newark, 1992); Kathleen O. Irace, ed., The First Quarto of Hamlet (Cambridge, 1998); Paul Werstine, “The Textual Mystery of Hamlet,” Shakespeare Quarterly 39 (1988), 1–26; and for Shakespeare at work on Hamlet, see Barbara Everett, Young Hamlet: Essays on Shakespeare’s Tragedies (Oxford, 1989) and “Thinking about Hamlet” in the Times Literary Supplement (September 2, 2004), 19–23. It’s possible, though unlikely, that all the touring of Hamlet mentioned on the title page of the 1603 First Quarto was crammed into several months in the spring and summer of 1603, following the death of Queen Elizabeth and the outbreak of plague.

  On Shakespeare’s revision of Hamlet, see John Kerrigan, “Shakespeare as Reviser,” in English Drama to 1710, ed. Christopher Ricks (London, 1971), 255–75; Werstine, “The Textual Mystery of Hamlet”; Wells and Taylor, Textual Companion; Philip Edwards, “The Tragic Balance in Hamlet,” Shakespeare Survey 36 (1983), 43–52; David Ward, “The King and Hamlet,” Shakespeare Quarterly 43 (1992), 280–302; Giorgio Melchiori, “Hamlet: The Acting Version and the Wiser Sort,” in The “Hamlet” First Published, 195–210; R. A. Foakes, Hamlet Versus Lear: Cultural Politics and Shakespeare’s Art (Cambridge, 1993); and the editions of Jenkins, Edwards, Tronch-Pérez, and Hibbard.

  On the special problem of Hamlet’s final soliloquy, see Philip C. McGuire, “Which Fortinbras, Which Hamlet?,” in The “Hamlet” First Published Q1, (1603), ed. Thomas Clayton, 151–78, and Harold Jenkins, “Fortinbras and Laertes and the Composition of Hamlet,” in his Structural Problems in Shakespeare, ed. Ernst Honigmann (London, 2001). Three centuries would pass before an actor playing Hamlet first recited “How all occasions do inform against me” onstage. Shakespeare’s decision to cut this speech set in motion further cuts by other hands. The First Quarto of Hamlet reduced Fortinbras’s role in act 4 to five lines and in the final scene to twenty-two lines. It also eliminated any mention by the dying Hamlet that Fortinbras ought to succeed him. For much of the performance history of Hamlet, Fortinbras disappeared completely. Stripping the play of its frame in this way effectively transformed Hamlet from a politically fraught drama into a riveting Oedipal one. For better or worse, Shakespeare’s revised version had already nudged the play in this direction.

  My reading of Hamlet is generally indebted to J. Dover Wilson, What Happens in “Hamlet” (Cambridge, 1937); Donald Joseph McGinn, Shakespeare’s Influence on the Drama of His Age, Studied in Hamlet (New Brunswick, 1938); John Draper, The Hamlet of Shakespeare’s Audience (1939; New York, 1966); Harley Granville-Barker, Preface to Hamlet (1946; New York, 1957); Harry Levin, The Question of Hamlet (New York, 1959); Roland Mushat Frye, The Renaissance Hamlet (Princeton, 1984); Arthur McGee, The Elizabethan Hamlet (New Haven, 1987); Stuart M. Kurland, “Hamlet and the Scottish Succession?,” Studies in English Literature 34 (1992), 279–300; and Ann Thompson, “The Comedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark,” Shakespeare Quarterly 56 (2003), 93–104. See, too, the essays collected in Mark Thornton Burnett and John Manning, eds., New Essays on Hamlet (New York, 1994); David Scott Kastan, ed., Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” (New York, 1995); and Arthur F. Kinney, ed., Hamlet: New Critical Essays (New York, 2002).

  Epilogue

  The New Year’s gift roll for 1598/1599 can be found in the Folger Library (MS Z.d.17). The gift roll for 1599/1600 has been published in vol. 3 of Nichols, ed., The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth. Rowland Whyte is the source of my information about Essex’s spurned gift. For John Weever’s prophecy, see his Faunus and Melliflora (London, 1600). For Donne’s letter, see Evelyn M. Simpson, A Study of the Prose Works of John Donne (Oxford, 1924; 2nd ed., 1948).

  On Thomas Dekker’s plays this year, see, in addition to Henslowe’s Diary, R. L. Smallwood and Stanley Wells, eds., The Shoemaker’s Holiday (Manchester, 1979). On Ben Jonson in 1599 and his revised epilogue to Every Man Out of His Humour, see Herford and Simpson’s edition of his works; Anne Barton, Ben Jonson, Dramatist (Cambridge, 1984); David Riggs, Ben Jonson: A Life (Cambridge, Mass., 1989); and Ben Jonson, Every Man Out of His Humour, ed. Helen Ostovich (Manchester, 2001). For a discussion of what Dekker and Jonson changed for performances at court, also see Fritz Levy, “The Theatre and the Court in the 1590s,” in The Reign of Elizabeth I, ed. John G
uy, 4–99. For the argument that Henslowe had been planning to build a theater in the northern suburbs even before the Chamberlain’s Men moved to Southwark, see S. P. Cerasano, “Edward Alleyn’s Retirement 1597–1600,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 10 (1998), 99–109. And for an account of Shakespeare’s concentrated dramatic output during the Stuart years, see Leeds Barroll, Politics, Plague, and Shakespeare’s Theater: The Stuart Years (Ithaca, 1991).

  About the Author

  James Shapiro, a professor at Columbia University in New York, is the author of Rival Playwrights, Shakespeare and the Jews, and Oberammergau: The Troubling Story of the World’s Most Famous Passion Play.