CHAPTER 10
Speaking with the Dead
SOMETIME IN THE spring or summer of 1596 Shakespeare may have received word that his only son, Hamnet, eleven years old, was ill. It is possible he understood and responded at once, or he may have been distracted by affairs in London. There was much to preoccupy him. On July 22 the lord chamberlain, Henry Carey, the queen’s powerful cousin and the patron of Shakespeare’s company, died. The lord chamberlainship went to Lord Cobham, but the players were kept by Carey’s son George, Lord Hunsdon. (When Cobham died within less than a year, the post of lord chamberlain went to George Carey, so that the company, after only a brief interval of being known as the Lord Hunsdon’s Men, once again became the Lord Chamberlain’s Men.) The death of their patron and the flurry of uncertainty must have been disconcerting for the players, and their disquiet was no doubt intensified by renewed calls by preachers and civic officials for the closing of the theaters in order to protect London’s moral and physical health. Performances were banned in all city inns, and it is possible that during the summer of 1596 the city authorities managed to obtain an order temporarily closing down all the playhouses. Such a closure—known as an inhibition—would help to explain why some members of Shakespeare’s company were on the road that summer, performing at Faversham (in Kent) and other places.
Shakespeare may have accompanied his fellow actors on tour, or he may well have stayed back in London to work on one or another of the plays he must have been writing for the company at this time: King John, 1 Henry IV, or The Merchant of Venice. Whether in London or on tour he would at best have only been able to receive news intermittently from Stratford, but at some point in the summer he must have learned that Hamnet’s condition had worsened and that it was necessary to drop everything and hurry home. By the time he reached Stratford the eleven-year-old boy—whom, apart from brief returns, Shakespeare had in effect abandoned in his infancy—may already have died. On August 11, the father presumably saw his son buried at Holy Trinity Church: the clerk duly noted in the burial register, “Hamnet filius William Shakspere.”
Unlike Ben Jonson and others who wrote grief-stricken poems about the loss of beloved children, Shakespeare published no elegies and left no direct record of his paternal feelings. The whole enterprise of acquiring the coat of arms must at one point have had something to do with his expectations for his son and heir, and Shakespeare’s last will and testament displays a strong interest in passing along his property to his male descendants; but these are signs too formal and conventional perhaps to tell us about his inward state. It is sometimes said that parents in Shakespeare’s time could not afford to invest too much love and hope in any one child. One out of three children died by the age of ten, and overall mortality rates were by our standards exceedingly high.
Death was a familiar spectacle; it took place at home, not out of sight. When Shakespeare was fourteen, his seven-year-old sister Anne died, and there must have been many other occasions for him to witness the death of children. But did familiarity breed detachment? The private diary of a contemporary doctor, recently deciphered, shows that desperate spouses and parents, inconsolable with grief, were constantly coming to him for treatment. Human emotions are not rationally coordinated with actuarial figures. Some Elizabethan parents may have learned to withhold affection or to protect themselves from misery, but by no means all did.
In the four years following Hamnet’s death, the playwright, as many have pointed out, wrote some of his sunniest comedies: The Merry Wives of Windsor, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It. But the plays of these years were by no means uniformly cheerful, and at moments they seem to reflect an experience of deep personal loss. In King John, probably written in 1596, just after the boy was laid to rest, Shakespeare depicted a mother so frantic at the loss of her son that she is driven to thoughts of suicide. Observing her, a clerical bystander remarks that she is mad, but she insists that she is perfectly sane: “I am not mad; I would to God I were” (3.4.48). Reason, she says, and not madness, has put the thoughts of suicide in her head, for it is her reason that tenaciously keeps hold of the image of her child. When she is accused of perversely insisting on her grief, she replies with an eloquent simplicity that breaks free from the tangled plot:
Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,
Remembers me of all his gracious parts,
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form.
(3.4.93–97)
If there is no secure link between these lines and the death of Hamnet, there is, at the very least, no reason to think that Shakespeare simply buried his son and moved on unscathed. He might have brooded inwardly and obsessively, even as he was making audiences laugh at Falstaff in love or at the wit contests of Beatrice and Benedick. Nor is it implausible that it took years for the trauma of his son’s death fully to erupt in Shakespeare’s work.
In a very late play, there may be a trace of Shakespeare’s periodic visits to Stratford at the time when his son was still alive. “Are you so fond of your young prince as we / Do seem to be of ours?” one friend asks another. “If at home, sir,” is the reply,
He’s all my exercise, my mirth, my matter;
Now my sworn friend, and then mine enemy;
My parasite, my soldier, statesman, all.
He makes a July’s day short as December,
And with his varying childness cures in me
Thoughts that would thick my blood.
(1.2.165–72)
“If at home, sir”: the words fit the play, but they also fit the playwright. Perhaps, reflecting upon what might have kept thick blood, that is, melancholy, at bay, Shakespeare found himself thinking back to his son. The play in which these lines appear, The Winter’s Tale, features a precocious little boy who languishes and dies when his madly jealous father turns against his mother.
Whether in the wake of Hamnet’s death Shakespeare was suicidal or serene, he threw himself into his work. The later 1590s was an amazingly busy and productive period in his life, with a succession of brilliant plays, frequent performances at court and in the public theaters, and growing celebrity and wealth. As a sharer in his company, Shakespeare was probably directly involved in all aspects of its daily affairs, including the increasingly acrimonious conflict with Giles Allen, the owner of the land in Shoreditch on which the Theater, where the Lord Chamberlain’s Men chiefly performed, had been built. The lease that James Burbage and his partner had taken back in 1576 was about to expire, and Allen refused to renew it, at least on terms that Burbage’s sons, who had taken over the protracted negotiation upon the death of their father, could accept.
Finally, the talks broke off, and the Theater was closed. In some desperation, the company began to perform at the nearby Curtain, but the venue was not nearly so successful, and revenues evidently began to fall off. To raise money, they did something that playing companies generally resisted: they sold off four of their most popular playbooks, Richard III, Richard II, 1 Henry IV, and Love’s Labour’s Lost, to an enterprising publisher who brought them out in quarto editions. No doubt the ready cash was of some help, but it must have seemed less like a solution than an ominous step in a direction that would eventually lead to selling off their costumes and disbanding altogether.
The real solution was a daring one. On the snowy night of December 28, 1598, in a season cold enough to make the Thames freeze over, the players came together in Shoreditch. They carried lanterns and bore arms—in the words of one deposition, “swords, daggers, bills, axes and such like.” The small company, aided perhaps by a few hired thugs, may not immediately strike one as a formidable force, but as actors were all trained in wielding weapons and as London had no regular police force, they were adequate for the enterprise. They posted guards around the perimeter, and then together with a dozen workmen, they proceeded to dismantle the Theater. In the m
orning light they loaded the heavy timbers on wagons and began the work of carting them across the river to a site they had secured not far from the Rose Theatre, in Southwark. The landlord, Allen, was apoplectic and sued for trespass, but the legal situation was a complex one, for the Burbages’ lease stipulated a right to retrieve any structures they had built on Allen’s land. The deed, in any event, was done, though it is difficult to understand how it was accomplished in a single night in the darkness.
Over the next months the gifted carpenter Peter Streete cleverly recycled the pieces of the old playhouse and fashioned a splendid new theater. A many-sided wooden polygon, roughly one hundred feet across, with a huge platform stage jutting into the pit and three galleries, it could hold over three thousand spectators, an astonishing figure for a city London’s size and a tribute to the actors’ immense power to project complex words and emotions. (Today’s Globe, on the Bankside, has about half the capacity.) A small group of investors, Shakespeare among them, had financed the ambitious enterprise. For their motto they chose the phrase Totus mundus agit histrionem, roughly, “The whole world plays the actor,” and for their sign they apparently had an image of Hercules bearing the world on his shoulders. They called their new playhouse the Globe.
By virtue of his investment, Shakespeare was now more than a sharer in the playing company. By the terms of the contract signed on February 21, 1599, he owned a tenth of the Globe, as did four of his fellow actors, John Heminges, Thomas Pope, Augustine Phillips, and Will Kempe. Kempe, the company’s popular clown, famous for his antic dancing and his obscene songs, had an immediate falling-out with his partners; he sold his share and went off, making a sour joke about those he called “Shakerags.” The company was temporarily without a clown—it took some time to find the subtle, dwarfish Robert Armin—and Shakespeare’s next play, Julius Caesar, was notably without a juicy part for a fool.
Shakespeare moved to Southwark, to be near the Globe, which was ready by June, a stunningly rapid turnaround. One might have expected them to open with a light crowd-pleaser, but the Lord Chamberlain’s Men chose to inaugurate their new theater with Julius Caesar, a tragedy apt for a public still intensely anxious about the threat of an assassination attempt against their queen. A Swiss tourist to London, Thomas Platter, went to see it and wrote home one of the few contemporary eyewitness accounts of a Shakespeare performance: “On the 21st of September after lunch, about two o’clock, I crossed the water with my party, and we saw the tragedy of the first emperor Julius Caesar acted very prettily in the house with the thatched roof, with about fifteen characters.” At the play’s end, Platter notes, “according to their custom, they danced with exceeding elegance, two each in men’s and two in women’s clothes, wonderfully together.” With Julius Caesar and the other strong plays in the company’s repertoire, the Globe was launched, so successfully indeed that in six months’ time their rivals at the nearby Rose Theatre packed up and headed across the river, to a new theater in Cripplegate, called the Fortune.
Driving the competition out of the immediate neighborhood did not mean an end to commercial competition altogether. On the contrary, by the end of 1599, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were engaged in an increasingly intense theatrical struggle with a newly revived private company, the Children of Paul’s, followed the next year by another repertory company, the Children of the Chapel at Blackfriars. The fact that the players were boys did not lessen the seriousness of their challenge: these were sophisticated, sharp-witted, highly accomplished companies with a very strong audience appeal. In his next play Shakespeare provided a glimpse of the competition. Why has the company of players come all the way to Elsinore, Hamlet asks; surely their reputation and profit were both greater in the city. Rosencrantz explains that their audience has drastically fallen off: “there is, sir, an eyrie of children, little eyases,” that is, young hawks; “These are now the fashion” (2.2.326, 328). When he sat down to write Hamlet, Shakespeare was looking over his shoulder at the children’s companies and pretending to worry—not altogether comically—that they would put his troupe out of business.
Writing a play about Hamlet, in or around 1600, may not have been Shakespeare’s own idea. At least one play, now lost, about the Danish prince who avenges his father’s murder had already been performed on the English stage, successfully enough to be casually alluded to by contemporary writers, as if everyone had seen it or at least knew about it. Back in 1589 it was a play on Hamlet that figured in Nashe’s ridicule of the rude upstart (probably Thomas Kyd) who never attended university but still had the impudence to set himself up as a playwright: “if you entreat him fair in a frosty morning, he will afford you whole Hamlets, I should say handfuls of tragical speeches.” And seven years later another one of the university wits, Thomas Lodge, echoed the mocking tone when he referred to a devil who looked “as pale as the Vizard of the ghost which cried so miserably at the Theatre, like an oyster-wife, ‘Hamlet, revenge!’” Either the play was still onstage—an exceptionally long run in the Elizabethan theater—or it had been recently revived, or it had simply become proverbial for somewhat vulgar theatrical intensity. Lodge and Nashe thought that their readers would effortlessly conjure up the story.
Someone in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, with an eye on revenues, may simply have suggested to Shakespeare that the time might be ripe for a new, improved version of Hamlet. For that matter, with his high stakes in the company’s profits, Shakespeare was singularly alert to whatever attracted London crowds, and he had by now long experience in dusting off old plays and making them startlingly new. The likely author of the earlier play, Thomas Kyd, was no obstacle: possibly broken by the torture inflicted upon him when he was interrogated about his roommate Marlowe, he had died back in 1594, at the age of thirty-six. In any case, neither Shakespeare nor his contemporaries were squeamish about stealing from one another.
Shakespeare had certainly seen the earlier Hamlet play, probably on several occasions. He may well have acted in it, in which case he would have had in his possession the roll of paper strips, glued together, on which his part and the cues for his entries and exits were written. Elizabethan actors generally had access only to their particular roll—from whence we get the term “role”—and not to the script as a whole; it was too expensive to copy it out in its entirety, and the playing companies were wary about allowing their scripts to circulate widely. They might on special occasions make copies for favored patrons, and in times of financial necessity they would sometimes sell plays to printers. But they wanted the public principally to encounter plays in the playhouse, not in the study. (Of course, keeping the scripts out of print greatly increased the likelihood that they would eventually be lost—as the early version of Hamlet and many others were—but that was no concern of the companies.)
Whether or not he had access to the script of the Hamlet play, Shakespeare had to an astounding degree something that virtually every actor at the time had to possess: an acute memory. Everything he encountered, even tangentially and in passing, seems to have stayed with him and remained available to him years later. Scraps of conversation, official proclamations, long-winded sermons, remarks overheard in the tavern or on the street, insults exchanged by carters and fishwives, a few pages that he could only have glanced at idly in a bookseller’s shop—all was somehow stored away in his brain, in files that his imagination could open up at will. His memory was not perfect—he made mistakes, confused one place for another, transposed names, and the like—but the imperfections only demonstrate that there was nothing compulsive or mechanical about his remarkable gift. His memory was an immense creative resource.
When he set to work on his new tragedy, then, Shakespeare likely had the old play about Hamlet by heart, or as much of it as he chose to remember. It is impossible to determine, in this case, whether he sat down with books open before him—as he clearly did, for example, when writing Antony and Cleopatra—or relied on his memory, but he had also certainly read one and probably more
than one version of the old Danish tale of murder and revenge. At the very least, judging from the play he wrote, he carefully read the story as narrated in French by François de Belleforest, whose collection of tragic tales was a publishing phenomenon in the late sixteenth century. (It went through at least ten editions.) Belleforest had taken the Hamlet story from a chronicle of Denmark compiled in Latin in the late twelfth century by a Dane known as Saxo the Grammarian. And Saxo in turn was recycling written and oral legends that reached back for centuries before him. Here then, as so often throughout his career, Shakespeare was working with known materials—a well-established story, a familiar cast of characters, a set of predictable excitements.
Shakespeare was himself a known quantity. It would have been reasonable for anyone who had followed his career to conclude by 1600 that he had already fully mapped the capacious boundaries of his imaginative kingdom. It must have seemed likely that he would continue as a professional playwright to repeat in imaginative ways what he had already brilliantly accomplished, but it would have seemed scarcely probable that he could find new continents to explore. No one, probably not Shakespeare himself, could have predicted that something astonishing was about to happen.