30 Great Myths about Shakespeare (15 page)

Hamnet died in August 1596; Shakespeare's uncle, Henry, died in December that year. Did Shakespeare wait five years to exorcise his grief in writing? A complication (or simplification) is added (as Freud foregrounds in the quotation above) in that Shakespeare's father died in September 1601 (after all,
Hamlet
is about the death of a father not a son, unlike its great Elizabethan prototype
The Spanish Tragedy
, which focuses on a father's grief for his son). Grief was part of Shakespeare's creative repertory at the turn of the century. In
Twelfth Night
(written in 1601) Viola mourns her lost (twin) brother. She disguises herself not just as a male but as her brother—a sartorial embodiment of a recognized stage of mourning in which the bereaved takes on the character(istics) of the lost person. “There's something deep in the psychology of a twin, when the other twin dies, which would make her want to keep that twin alive by acting out his life as well as her own” observed the theater director John Caird when he directed the play for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1983–4.
²
The psychology is not, as it happens, confined to twins (it was identified by Freud as a classic component of grief), but they provide a striking visual illustration of it. In Shakespeare grieving twins are mistaken for each other not because (or not just because) they are twins but because mourners temporarily incorporate the lost one in themselves. “I am all the daughters of my father's house, / And all the brothers too” says Viola (2.4.120–1). When Sebastian is restored to Viola in Act 5, his return marks the conclusion of her mourning; it also marks the conclusion of her cross-dressing. As John Caird observes, “The brother turns up, which means she doesn't have to be a boy anymore.”
³
Although the play doesn't give up the frisson of Viola's sexually ambiguous persona that easily, and she ends the play still dressed, and addressed, as Cesario, it is significant that we get, for the first time in the play's dialogue, a name for the female twin: until this point no one, including the audience, has known what to call her.

Although
Twelfth Night
and
Hamlet
can be seen to have personal resonance for Shakespeare, it is important to remember that death and grief were never far away from anyone in Elizabethan England. Ben Jonson lost his first son, Benjamin, aged 7, in the plague of 1603; his second son, Joseph, died the same year, probably from the same cause. His first daughter, Mary, had died a few years before at only 6 months. Jonson wrote poems for the deaths of Benjamin and Mary. Shakespeare had lost no children when he wrote
3 Henry VI
or
King John
but he could imagine such loss. In
3 Henry VI
(included in the
Oxford Shakespeare
under the title
Richard Duke of York
, as in its 1595 publication), Queen Margaret, the “she-wolf of France,” kills the Duke of York's youngest son, Rutland, and taunts York with her latest atrocity. York's grief moves even his enemies to compassion. Northumberland says:

Beshrew me, but his passions move me so

That hardly can I check my eyes from tears

…

Had he been slaughter-man to all my kin,

I should not, for my life, but weep with him,

To see how inly sorrow gripes [grieves] his soul

(1.4.151–2, 170–3)

Margaret later experiences her own scene of grief in Act 5 when she, in turn, loses her son, Prince Edward. And the play's most famous stage direction describes the chiastic mourning of Act 2:
Enter a Sonne that hath kill'd his Father, at one doore: and a Father that hath kill'd his Sonne at another doore
(Folio TLN 1189–91).

In
King John
Constance laments the loss of her young son, Prince Arthur. In this speech she defends her right to grieve, explaining the emotion's psychological function:

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;

Then, have I reason to be fond of grief?

(3.4.93–8)

The logic she uses here (that grieving fills the emotional void of bereavement) is the logic expressed as far back as St Augustine, the fourth-century bishop who, in the
Confessions
, depicts his tears of grief as occupying the space of his friend: “Tears alone were sweet to me, for in my heart's desire they had taken the place of my dearest friend.”
⁴
Thus grief is a constant Shakespeare topos from his earliest plays, independent of his personal circumstances.

Christopher Rush's novel
Will
(2007) illustrates this beautifully when, in the pun of the title, Will Shakespeare dictates his will to his lawyer. “Death,” says Shakespeare, is what he does best. A childhood fascination with that biblical traveler from the undiscovered country (“Why did no one ask him, ‘Lazarus, what's it like—being dead?’”); the metaphoric death of his teenage relationship with Anne Hathaway; his observation that the primary qualification for a University wit is “the ability to die young” (Thomas Watson “went down in '92”); literary experimentation (his interest in
Hamlet
is not that of revenge tragedy, “putting one person to death but an interest in death itself”). “I do deaths, you see. And I can do the deaths of children. ‘Their lips were four red roses on a stalk’…—that sort of thing.”
⁵

The temptation to speculate on a Hamlet who is Hamnet goes hand in hand with—or is reinforced by—a related possibility, that of Ophelia's drowning being an event close to Shakespeare both geographically (in Warwickshire) and emotionally (in his family). Critics have long known of the drowning in December 1579 of a young woman, Katherine Hamlett. She drowned in the River Avon at a part of the river, in Tiddington, which was known for “its overhanging willows and coronet weeds.”
⁶
Although her death had the appearance of suicide, her family, understandably keen to have a Christian burial, maintained it was an accident caused when she tried to fill her milk-pail with water from the river. The drowning, the willow and weeds, and the debate about suicide parallel the circumstances of Ophelia's death; the surname provides an additional point of contact. In June 2011 Steven Gunn, a historian studying coroners' records in early modern England, came across a report on the death of the 2½-year old Jane Shaxpere, who drowned while picking marigolds at Upton millpond in 1569. Whether she was related to William Shakespeare or not, it is possible that Shakespeare knew of the story, and the marigold-picking Jane may have developed into the herb-gathering Ophelia. But the media interest in Gunn's discovery (the infant Jane Shaxpere, invariably accompanied by a reproduction of John Everett Millais' pre-Raphaelite painting
Ophelia
, completely overshadowed all Gunn's other archival work) suggests something more: that we
want
Shakespeare's characters to derive from real events, perhaps because we want to get hold of their inspiration and peg it to something recognizable—like the death of a son.

If Hamlet does not derive his name from Hamnet or his grief from Shakespeare's loss of his son, where does his name come from? In writing
Hamlet
, as in all his plays, Shakespeare worked from source material (dramatic, poetic, prose, classical, contemporary, written, oral). In this case, as so often, Shakespeare's source material was multiple. The plot derives from Danish legend, where the avenging hero is called Amlothi. This story, written down in Latin in manuscript in the thirteenth century by Saxo Grammaticus, was printed (in Latin) in 1514 and translated into French in 1576 in François Belleforest's
Histoires tragiques
. Within a decade this story had been dramatized on the English stage. By 1589 Thomas Nashe could speak of it as being cliched: “whole Hamlets, I should say handfuls of tragic speeches” (Epistle to Robert Greene's
Menaphon
). Thomas Kyd is believed to have written the
Hamlet
play which was the forerunner of Shakespeare's version. (A play in which a son mourns a father would be an obvious partner piece to his
Spanish Tragedy
, in which a father mourns a son.) The theater manager Philip Henslowe was still recording performances of a
Hamlet
play in June 1594. In all these English versions the hero's name is Hamlet.

Shakespeare sometimes changed the names he found in his sources. (In the source of
All's Well That Ends Well
, Boccaccio's
Decameron
, the heroine is called Giletta; Shakespeare rechristens her Helen. He may have changed the name Rosader, the hero of the source for
As You Like It
, into Orlando in part to avoid confusion in abbreviated speech prefixes with the heroine, Rosalind.) In
Hamlet
, he retains the hero's name. He may have done so because of its closeness to his personal circumstances. But to assume that he did so is to take us into the territory of Myth 18, with its impulse to read the sonnets as autobiographical.
Hamlet
is a play full of grief; but there is no need to assume that this derives from grief in Shakespeare's life (although it may coincide with it). Proximity of emotion there is, just as there is proximity in the names of hero and author's son. But proximity is not the same as identity; we cannot call “snap!”

The play we are discussing explores this very conundrum. When Marcellus asks Horatio to agree that the ghost they have seen is indeed like the deceased King of Denmark, Horatio provides reassurance in an image that is not as straightforward as it sounds:

Marcellus:
Is it not like the King?

Horatio:
As thou art to thyself.

(1.1.57–8)

But Marcellus cannot be
like
himself because he
is
himself. Similes work by making a temporary connection between two things that are actually dissimilar. And
Hamlet
is full of linguistic tricks that constantly ask us to be suspicious of conflationary maneuvers. In marrying his sister-in-law, for instance, Claudius conflates relationships: he makes Gertrude an aunt-mother, himself an uncle-father, Hamlet a nephew-son. Hamlet resists such conflationary procedures by puns—he is “too much i'th'sun/son” (1.2.67), his stepfather is a “little more than kin and less than kind” (1.2.65)—which try to separate the new semantic and emotional relationships. This is a play whose hero constantly defies attempts to turn two separate things into one single entity. It is an example we should perhaps heed.

Notes

¹
 Sigmund Freud,
The Interpretation of Dreams
, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: George Allen & Unwin/Hogarth Press, 1965), p. 299.

²
 John Caird, in Michael Billington (ed.),
Directors' Approaches to “Twelfth Night”
(London: Nick Hern Books, 1990), p. 40.

³
 Ibid.

⁴
 Augustine,
Confessions
, ed. R.S. Pine-Coffin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), p. 76.

⁵
 Christopher Rush,
Will
(London: Beautiful Books, 2007), p. 10.

⁶
 Peter Ackroyd,
Shakespeare: The Biography
(London: Vintage, 2006), p. 82.

The opening of Laurence Olivier's film
Henry V
(1944) sees a high-angle pan across the Elizabethan city of London and an implausibly blue River Thames, coming to rest at the thatched Globe theater. We see the audience gathering for the performance of the play. The sequence shows us men and women in dull-colored clothing taking their seats in the galleries and milling around the yard, with flashes of color when a pair of finely dressed women, to whom the men doff their hats, enter. Two small boys play, and a nobleman, with feathered hat and fashionably slashed two-tone doublet, passes through the crowds of artisans, apprentices, and citizens, crossing with a woman selling oranges from a basket. The implication of all this is clear: the Globe had a socially mixed audience; Shakespeare's plays appealed to nobleman and commoner alike; men and women attended the theater in large, easy-going numbers, and presumably enjoyed different aspects of the play being performed.

Figure 4
An audience today at the reconstructed Shakespeare's Globe in London, watching
Henry VIII
in 2010. Photo: Pete le May.

Reproduced by kind permission of Shakespeare's Globe.

Olivier took this view of the Globe from a significant book published by Alfred Harbage a few years before his film. In
Shakespeare's Audience
, Harbage trawled contemporary documents to demonstrate that audiences in the period were “a cross section of the London population,” although “youth may have predominated somewhat over age, male over female, the worldly over the pious.”
¹
Both Harbage and Olivier had an agenda in promoting this view of the early modern theater. For Harbage, the contrast was between the theater of the Elizabethan period and of his own time, which was too socially narrow and therefore could not produce a modern Shakespeare: “if an accidental collision at the Globe would have brought us face to face with a grocer, an accidental collision in a theater today would bring us face to face with a schoolteacher.”
²
For Olivier, the significance of the Globe's cross-section of London society was ideologically aligned with his overall propaganda purpose in his wartime film. All indications of rivalry and treachery are cut from the play—Olivier's Henry does not, as Shakespeare's does, threaten the besieged citizens of Harfleur with rape and slaughter, nor do his own noblemen take French gold to betray him—to produce an unproblematically triumphant film (what the director Trevor Nunn would later call “the National Anthem in five acts”
³
). In the same way his representation of the Globe audience locates the play as addressing—and constructing—an idealized, united, classless Englishness. As Ann Jennalie Cook noted, in a study revising Harbage and Olivier's view—her title,
The Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare's London 1576–1642
, says it all—this is a sentimental view. Her analysis suggests that actually playhouse spectators “came chiefly from the upper levels of the social order,” noting that in addition to the relatively modest cost of entrance, money for conveyance across the Thames plus the afternoon leisure time to attend the theater made it a more elite pursuit than Harbage had allowed.