Shakespeare

It soon became one of Shakespeare’s most celebrated dramas. It seems to have the singular distinction of being the only play performed, during Shakespeare’s lifetime, at both the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. This was a sea-change in the academic response to contemporary vernacular drama. Before this period plays in English were considered to be below serious consideration. Sir Thomas Bodley banned plays from his new library at Oxford, stating that they were “of very unworthy matters” and that the keeper and underkeepers of the library “should Disdain to seek out … Haply some Plays may be worthy the Keeping: But hardly one in Forty.” 3He was probably correct about the proportion, but Hamlet itself was certainly considered to be “worthy.” There is a reference in 1604, stating that “faith, it should please all, like Prince Hamlet.” 4Three years later, it was performed off the coast of Sierra Leone by a group of seamen. Hamlet was referred to in private, and diplomatic, correspondence. The young John Marston paid the ultimate compliment of copying from it with a remarkably similar revenge tragedy entitled Antonio’s Revenge . It has in fact been suggested that the order of composition should be reversed, and that Shakespeare copied Marston’s play. There is no reason why he should not have been inspired by an ingenious original to produce a compelling masterpiece of his own. He had been doing it all his life.

Yet the origins of Hamlet are much more complicated than that. There was a true and “original” Hamlet on the public stage by 1589, since it is mentioned by Nashe in that year. There was also a version of Hamlet being performed by the combined forces of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and the Admiral’s Men in the summer of 1594 at Newington Butts; this production is confirmed by the notes of Philip Henslowe. At some point between 1598 and 1601, the remark being privately transcribed in a book, Gabriel Harvey referred to Shakespeare and “his tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke.” 5

The complex matter is further complicated by the presence of a printed version of the play, issued in quarto form in 1603. It has generally been described as a “bad” quarto, but at a length of 2,500 lines it is in fact a perfectly good acting version of the long drama marred by stylistic infelicities. The publishers, Nicholas Ling and John Trundell, had known associations with Shakespeare’s plays and with the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, so there is no question of its being a “pirated” edition. On the title page it is described as “By William Shake-speare.”

A second edition was published in the following year and, with twelve hundred extra lines, was advertised as “newly imprinted and enlarged” according to “the true and perfect copy.” In the first version Hamlet is younger, and some of the names are different; Polonius, for example, is called Coram-bis. More importantly, perhaps, in the first version Gertrude becomes convinced of her second husband’s guilt and colludes with her son. The first and shorter drama is an exhilarating and exciting piece of work, in no way inferior as a stage production to the second version. The second version is more rhetorical and deliberate, with much greater attention paid to the text itself.

The most likely explanation for these different versions seems to be that Shakespeare took an old play of Hamlet and fashioned it into new and surprising shape for the performance at Newington Butts in 1594. This is the version printed as the first quarto. Then, at a later stage, he revised it for a new production at the Globe in 1601. This is the second quarto. It should be noted that Shakespeare then seems to have revised Hamlet for a third time, adding and subtracting material for a version that became the Folio edition of the play published in 1623.

The purists insist that the less than perfect text of Hamlet is “corrupted” by actors’ reports or faulty shorthand reporting; and that the second edition was Shakespeare’s attempt to supplant a botched job. Other scholars believe that the first text was a version of Shakespeare’s early work, hasty and jejune as it may sometimes be, and that the second version is evidence of Shakespeare’s habit of revision. One image is of Shakespeare as perfectionist, producing more or less the orthodox canon of the plays as printed in “good” quartos. The other image is of Shakespeare in a continuous state of evolution, moving between early versions and revised versions, short versions and long versions. The latter alternative seems more plausible.

There is one other piece of literature that emerged in 1601. Attached to a volume celebrating “the love and merit of the true-noble knight, Sir John Salisburie” were sets of verses written by “the beste and chiefest of our moderne writers.” Sir John Salisbury had been knighted in the summer of 1601 for his services in helping to suppress the Essex rebellion. Among these verses was Shakespeare’s poem now known as “The Phoenix and Turtle,” as complex and as riddling a piece of work as anything to be found in Hamlet . On a mundane level Shakespeare may have been happy to disassociate himself from the Essex episode, in which Richard II had been so unfortunately imbroiled. But it is also possible that the poem had originally been written in 1586 when Salisbury had married Ursula Stanley, half-sister to Lord Strange.

But the poem itself rises above its immediate circumstances. It is a threnody upon the indivisibility of lovers and the divine union of love:

Beautie, Truth, and Raritie,

Grace in all simplicitie,

Here enclosde, in cinders lie.

It has been treated as an allegorical work or, in more modern terms, as an exercise in “pure” poetry rising unbidden and entire from the depths of Shakespeare’s being, a pearl of great price fashioned instinctively by experience and suffering. In its riddling complexity it bears more than a passing resemblance to the contemporaneous poetry of John Donne. Although Shakespeare sometimes seems more inclined to poetical miscellanies and ancient English ballads, there is no reason why he should not have heard or read Donne’s poetry in manuscript. Donne was known to the Countess of Pembroke. He had been a member of Lincoln’s Inn and had also served with the Earl of Essex; he can be said to have moved in the same London circles as Shakespeare himself. This was also the milieu in which Donne’s poems were circulating in manuscript, and there seem to be echoes of his work both in King Lear and in Two Noble Kinsmen . There are connections between the personages of Shakespeare’s world that are now lost to view.

After the death of his father Shakespeare’s visits to Stratford, in order to see his widowed mother as well as his wife and family, are likely to have become more frequent. It was a slow process of readjustment, or reorientation, that would finally result in his living for long periods of time in his home town. It represents the return of the native, one of the most characteristic passages of human experience. In his later plays, too, Shakespeare celebrates the reunification of families and the reconciliation of old differences. There is one other additional fact to add to this homecoming, which is to be found in Oxford.

The association with Shakespeare and Oxford is not well understood- there are somewhat implausible suggestions that he used the Bodleian Library that was established in 1602-but it is clear enough that he habitually stopped at Oxford on his journeys between London and Stratford. We know this from three separate sources. One was a diary kept by an Oxford antiquary, Thomas Hearne, in which he states that Shakespeare “always spent some time at the Crown tavern in Oxford kept by one Davenant.” Thirty years later Alexander Pope, who could not have known of Hearne’s diary, has the same story to the effect that