h
Haberdasher. He presents Katherine with a hat, which Petruccio rejects, The Taming of the Shrew 4.3.62–85.
Anne Button
Hacket, Marian. See Hostess.
Hackett family. James Henry Hackett (1800–71) was an American actor-manager, whose Falstaff was acclaimed for its symmetry of intellect and sensuality in America (1828) and England (1833). A keen student of Shakespeare, Hackett wrote detailed descriptive notes of Edmund *Kean’s Richard III (pub. 1959). By his second wife, the English-born actress Catharine Lee Sugg (1797–1848), Hackett had a son, James Keteltas (1869–1926), who played leading Shakespearian roles under *Daly and collaborated with Joseph Urban in a scenically significant revival of Othello (1914).
Richard Foulkes
Hagberg, Karl August (1810–64), Swedish scholar and Shakespeare translator. Initially a classicist and translator of Aristophanes, he produced the first Swedish translation of the complete plays of Shakespeare (1847–51). Remarkable for its imaginative transmission of Shakespeare’s language, it remains a national classic.
Inga-Stina Ewbank
Hakluyt, Richard (?1552–1616), English clergyman and geographer who attempted to fan the flames of colonial ambition with his travel-writing, in particular The Principal Navigations, Voyages and Discoveries of the English Nation…published in 1589 and expanded into three volumes (1598–1600). Shakespeare’s familiarity with this work is suggested by some of the exotic details of Othello’s travel narratives, while Twelfth Night refers to ‘the new Map, with the augmentation of the Indies’, included in the second edition (3.2.74–5).
Jane Kingsley-Smith
Hal. *Oldcastle/Falstaff’s name for Prince Harry in the Henry IV plays.
Anne Button
Hales, John (1584–1656), English scholar. Gildon (1694) and Rowe (1709) report an old debate at Eton, on Shakespeare’s superiority to the Ancients. Contestants included Sir John Suckling, William Davenant, Endymion Porter, Hales himself, and Ben Jonson. Gildon makes Hales the initiator; Rowe, Ben Jonson. Whatever the cause, Shakespeare’s reputation triumphed.
Tom Matheson
Hall, Arthur. See Homer.
Hall, Elizabeth (1608–70), Shakespeare’s last descendant, daughter of his eldest child Susanna *Shakespeare and her physician husband John *Hall. Eight at the time of Shakespeare’s death, she was left most of his silver in his *will. After her mother’s death she inherited a lot more of her grandfather’s estate, and lived in *New Place for a while with her first husband, Thomas *Nash. After Nash’s death she remarried John Bernard (d. 1674) and moved to Northamptonshire. In her will she bequeathed Shakespeare’s *Birthplace to her cousin George Hart, and New Place to her husband, whose heirs sold it.
Michael Dobson
Hall, John (c. 1575–1635), Shakespeare’s son-in-law, born in Bedfordshire and (like his father Dr William Hall) a physician. He graduated from Queens’ College, Cambridge, in 1593–4 and took his MA in 1597. Though he is not known to have taken a medical degree, he may have studied medicine in France, perhaps at Montpellier. He settled in Stratford at some unknown date, and his father’s assistant Matthew Morris appears to have followed him; his master bequeathed him £4 and all his astrology and astronomy books in 1607 so that he could teach these skills to John.
John Hall married Susanna *Shakespeare on 5 June 1607. Her father gave her 107 acres (43 ha) of land in *Old Stratford when the marriage was arranged. They may have lived in the house in Old Town now known as *Hall’s Croft. Their only child *Elizabeth was baptized on 21 February 1608. In 1613 their marriage was afflicted by scandal; Susanna sued John *Lane for defamation after he had stated that she suffered from a venereal infection adulterously contracted. Hall was an executor of Shakespeare’s will, for which he was granted probate in London on 22 June 1616. New Place was the family home at least from the time of Shakespeare’s death in 1616 until Hall died on 25 November 1635. His gravestone in the chancel of Stratford church carries a flattering Latin epitaph.
Hall enjoyed considerable fame as a physician in and beyond Warwickshire, and treated a wide range of patients, some humble, some distinguished, including the Earl of Warwick, the Earl and Countess of Northampton, and the poet Michael *Drayton. Although he was a Protestant with Puritan leanings, he did not refuse to treat members of the many recusant families living in the area. In 1626 Charles I, on his coronation, offered him, and many others, a knighthood as a money-raising ruse. Hall refused, paying a fine of £10 instead. After twice refusing to serve as a burgess because of the demands of his practice, he accepted election to the town council in 1632; in that year one of his patients complained bitterly that the magistrates ought not ‘to lay this burden upon you whose profession is to be most abroad and cannot be effected by an apprentice as theirs may’. His period of office was turbulent, and he was fined for missing sessions. In January 1633 he was rebuked for making ‘abusive speeches’ against the bailiff, and in October was expelled for ‘the breach of orders wilfully and sundry other misdemeanours contrary to the duty of a burgess…and for his continual disturbances at our halls’. In 1635 he and his friend the Puritan vicar Thomas Wilson sued the corporation on the grounds that, though Hall had sold his lease of the tithes to the corporation for at least £100 less than they were worth in the hope of boosting the vicar’s salary, it had been reduced, and also that they had failed to maintain the schoolmaster’s salary. He took an active part in the affairs of the church, to which he presented a carved pulpit in 1629, and was churchwarden in 1628–9.
Hall died, a wealthy man, in 1635. By an oral will dictated to his son-in-law Thomas *Nash, he left property and money to his wife and daughter and his ‘study of books’ to Nash, with permission to burn his manuscripts ‘or else do with them what you please’. His widow sold two of his manuscripts, ‘both intended for the press’, to James Cooke, a Warwick surgeon, who translated parts of them from Latin and in 1657 published Hall’s Select Observations on English Bodies. It records many picturesque case histories, including those of Hall’s wife and daughter, but not his father-in-law. One of the manuscripts, owned successively by David Garrick and Edmond *Malone, is now in the British Library; the whereabouts of the other—if it survives—is unknown. It has often been stated that the notebooks record no cases before 1617, but although this is the earliest date explicitly mentioned, some of the case studies pre-date it. Nevertheless, if the other manuscript were to turn up it might tell us more about the illnesses of Shakespeare’s family, and perhaps even of Shakespeare himself.
Stanley Wells
Hall, Joseph (1574–1656), satirist and later Bishop of Exeter and Norwich. Hall’s Virgidemarium (1597, 1598) alludes to Edward *Alleyn playing Tamburlaine (book I, third satire), arguably an influence on Ulysses’ description of Patroclus as ‘a strutting player, whose conceit | Lies in his hamstring’ in Troilus and Cressida (1.3.153–4).
Cathy Shrank
Hall, Sir Peter (b. 1930), English director and manager, founder of the *Royal Shakespeare Company. After literary study at Cambridge, Hall worked in Oxford and London before directing Cymbeline (1957) and Coriolanus (1959) at Stratford, the latter starring *Olivier. In 1960 he assumed the management of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, which he renamed the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, and his changes were revolutionary. By the next year he had formed the Royal Shakespeare Company along European ensemble lines, with actors, directors, and designers on multi-year contracts, and had opened the Aldwych theatre as a London home. He also bid for dramatically increased government subsidy, expanded the mandate to include new plays, and encouraged radical revisions like Peter Brook’s King Lear of 1962. He was surprisingly effective with all of his projects and soon the RSC was producing some of the most exciting theatre in the world. Hall’s own directing was central to the new enterprise, particularly The Wars of the Roses (1963–4), the history plays from Richard II to Richard III performed in seven parts in celebration of Shakespeare’s quatercentenary. Adapted with John Barton and influenced by Brecht as well as by Jan Kott’s view of the histories as a cycle of unending bloodshed, the productions abandoned ideas of royal elegance for rough-hewn leather, clanging metal, and a sense of the horror and futility of war. Hall’s Hamlet of 1965, with the young David Warner as a contemporary, conversational student, struck a chord for a generation. Hall resigned as director of the RSC in 1968 to pursue opportunities in opera and contemporary plays but was soon invited to replace Olivier as director of the National Theatre, a post he held for fifteen years from 1973, despite difficulties with the new building and declining subsidies. Knighted in 1977, he directed some ten Shakespeare plays at the National, the most notable including Coriolanus (1984) and a trilogy of the last plays (Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest) as his farewell in 1988. He founded the Peter Hall Company that year, directing a series of high-profile productions at the Old Vic and elsewhere including The Merchant of Venice (1989), Hamlet (1994), and King Lear (1997). He returned to Stratford for All’s Well That Ends Well (1992). Increasingly concerned with a conservative approach to verse-speaking, in 2007 he became director emeritus of a new, indoor neo-Elizabethan theatre, the Rose, at Kingston-upon-Thames.
Dennis Kennedy
Halle, Edward (c. 1498–1547), lawyer and historian to Henry VIII. Halle’s admiration for the Tudor monarchy inspired him to compose The Union of the Two Noble and Illustrious Families of Lancaster and York, in which Henry Richmond ends the cycle of bloodshed caused by the murders of Richard II and Henry VI. Published posthumously by Richard Grafton in 1548, the Union was to form the basis for various works of English chronicle history, in particular *Holinshed’s Chronicles. It was particularly renowned for its emphasis on the horrors of civil war and the inevitability of divine retribution, and for its portrayal of characters such as Richard II and Joan of Arc. The Union’s influence upon Shakespeare is most apparent in the Henry VI plays.
Jane Kingsley-Smith
Halliday, F(rank) E(rnest) (1903–82), English schoolmaster. Author and compiler of A Shakespeare Companion (1952, rev. edn. 1964), an alphabetical guide to every aspect of Shakespeare; Shakespeare: A Pictorial Record (1956); and Shakespeare in his Age (1960). Sometimes disparaged as popularizations, such compendia, if accurate and adequately documented, serve an educational function.
Tom Matheson
Halliwell-Phillipps, James Orchard (1820–89), English scholar. A founding member of the Shakespeare Society (1840), he published a Life of Shakespeare in 1848; an edition in fifteen volumes (1853–61); and from 1850 onwards a series of Stratford archives and legal documents, many of them collected into his Outlines for the Life of Shakespeare (1881). A scholar of great determination, not seeking controversy, his career was nevertheless marked by public scandal: as a young man, he was accused of stealing rare books and manuscripts from Trinity College, Cambridge; in his maturity he was hounded by his father-in-law Sir Thomas Phillipps for the theft and mutilation of one of two extant copies of the first quarto of Hamlet; his old age was marred by disputes with the New Shakespeare Society, the Birthplace Trustees, and the corporation of Stratford—the town which furnished him with most of his genuine and important biographical discoveries.
Tom Matheson
Hall’s Croft is a timber-framed house in Old Town, Stratford-upon-Avon, named after John *Hall, believed, on the evidence of an early 19th-century statement, to have lived there from the time of his marriage to Shakespeare’s elder daughter Susanna in 1607 until 1616, when, on Shakespeare’s death, he and his family moved into *New Place. The oldest part of the present structure, the Hall and Parlour, with a range of small rooms behind, dates from the early 17th century. This was an addition to an existing building, which was later reconstructed, probably towards the end of the 17th century. Around 1630, some fifteen years after Hall and his wife had moved to New Place, a free-standing kitchen was built at the rear, probably replacing an earlier building. Then, some 20 years later, the two separate structures were linked together by a new staircase hall. For many years the building continued in use as the residence of town gentry and then, from the late 18th century until around 1850, of professional men, mainly solicitors and doctors. It was then converted into a private school. In 1913 it was sold to an American, Josephine Macleod, who took up residence there with her sister Betty Leggett, the widow of a millionaire founder of a New York grocery business. Together they carried out considerable restoration work. Betty died in 1931 and in 1943 Josephine made the house over to her niece, the Countess of Sandwich. Her daughter sold the house to the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in 1949. Following restoration, it was opened to the public in 1951.
Robert Bearman
Hallström, Per (1866–1960), Swedish novelist, dramatist, and poet. His translation of the complete plays of Shakespeare, 1922–31, was the first to challenge the classic Swedish translation by *Hagberg. It contains remarkable poetry but has proved less speakable and actable.
Inga-Stina Ewbank
Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, See centre section.
Hamlet Studies was founded by R. W. Desai, its editor, in 1979. It is the only journal devoted exclusively to a single work by Shakespeare and publishes articles, notes, book and theatre reviews, and occasional digests of articles on Hamlet in other publications.
Susan Brock
Hamlett, Katherine (d. 1579), spinster of Tiddington, close to Stratford, drowned in the Avon on 17 December 1579. The coroner’s jury concluded that she died accidentally while ‘going with a milk pail to draw water at the River Avon’, but *Fripp, stimulated by her surname, speculated that she committed suicide and that the story of Ophelia ‘was fashioned out of the Poet’s youthful recollections’ of her death.
Stanley Wells
Hamlet Travestie. See burlesques and travesties of Shakespeare’s plays.
Hampton Court was developed by Cardinal Wolsey, who presented it to Henry VIII in 1525. Henry further developed the site, particularly the Great Hall which can be regarded as the oldest surviving English playhouse. The King’s Men played at Hampton Court, over Christmas 1603/4, for *James I and Queen Anne with over 30 plays being performed that Christmas.
Simon Blatherwick
Hands, Terry (b. 1941), English director. In 1964, Hands co-founded the Everyman Theatre, Liverpool, serving as artistic director until 1966 when he became artistic director of the *Royal Shakespeare Company’s touring troupe, Theatre-Go-Round. He served as associate director for the RSC (1967–77) and consultant director at the *Comédie-Française (1975–80). In 1978, he was made co-artistic director of the RSC with Trevor *Nunn. When Nunn left in 1986, Hands became sole artistic director and chief executive director. Although his directing has been criticized as overly concept driven, he received considerable praise for directing Shakespeare’s history plays, most of which featured Alan *Howard. He has also had great success directing comedies, such as Much Ado About Nothing (1982) and Love’s Labour’s Lost (1990). In 1997, Hands became artistic director of the fledgling Theatr Clywd, hoping to turn it into a National Theatre for Wales. In 2000, he directed Kelsey Grammer’s Broadway debut as Macbeth.
Bradley Ryner
handwriting. The only extant examples of Shakespeare’s handwriting are six *signatures on legal documents, the two brief monosyllables ‘By me’ on his *will, and the three pages he contributed to the Sir Thomas More manuscript. The idiosyncrasies of Shakespeare’s handwriting have been analysed in minute detail by palaeographers. In three of the signatures, Shakespeare places an ornamental dot within the final loop of the ‘W’. Another characteristically Shakespearian letter formation is the ‘p’ in the Blackfriars Gatehouse mortgage deed of 1613, in which a descender is followed by a cross-stroke and then a third stroke to finish off the top of the loop; the same formation appears in the three instances of ‘peace’ in line 50 of the More fragment.
Shakespeare’s unusual open ‘a’ with a horizontal spur at the back appears in a signature from 1612 as well as in the More manuscript. This practice of leaving the ‘a’ open at the top like a ‘u’ may help explain the frequency of a : u misreadings in texts set into type from Shakespeare’s foul papers: ‘Gertrad’ for *‘Gertrude’, ‘sallies’ for ‘sullies’, ‘rain’ for ‘ruin’, and ‘quietas’ for ‘quietus’ in the second *quarto of Hamlet. Similarly, Shakespeare’s habit of writing lower-case ‘e’ with the loop reversed may lie behind the many e : d misreadings in the printed texts of his plays, such as ‘didst’ for ‘diest’ in Q2 Hamlet.
Eric Rasmussen
hangings. See death; hell; stage decoration, Elizabethan.
Hanmer, Sir Thomas (1677–1746), Speaker of the House of Commons. After retiring from Parliament, Hanmer produced an opulent edition of Shakespeare published by the Clarendon Press at Oxford (1744). Hanmer’s editorial method was lax (he took his text from Alexander *Pope’s earlier edition and made no attempt to collate it with other texts), but the edition itself was lavishly produced, with illustrations and a costly binding. Although William Warburton attacked Hanmer’s lack of historical and textual accuracy, the sales of Hanmer’s edition soared while Warburton’s rival edition was remaindered. Pope ridicules Hanmer in The Dunciad 4 (11. 105–18).
Jean Marsden
Harbage, Alfred (1901–76), American academic, author of influential studies of Shakespeare’s Audience (1941) and Shakespeare and the Rival Traditions (1952); editor of Annals of English Drama 975–1700 (1940, rev. S. Schoenbaum, 1964), and of the single-play series the Pelican Shakespeare (1956–67), and its collection as The Complete Works (1969).
Tom Matheson
Hardy, Robert (b. 1925), English actor. In 1949, Hardy joined the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre where he played Banquo (1949), Oberon (1959), and Edmund (1959). Since then he has made a speciality of ‘quality’ television costume drama, his roles including Coriolanus in The Spread of the Eagle (1963), Hal/Henry V in An Age of Kings (1960), and Leicester in Elizabeth R (1971).
Bradley Ryner
Harfleur, Governor of. See Governor of Harfleur.
Harington, Sir John (1561–1612), Queen Elizabeth’s godson. Harington was a court favourite commended for his witty epigrams. He became one of Essex’s entourage and followed the Earl to Ireland, though he took no part in the rebellion which finally led to the Earl’s execution. After Elizabeth’s death, Harington remained at court as tutor to Prince Henry. His literary works include a collection of miscellaneous verse called Nugae antiquae, not published until 1769, and, most importantly, a celebrated translation of Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, published in 1591, which he claimed had been commissioned by Elizabeth herself. Shakespeare probably knew Ariosto’s romance through Harington’s translation.
Jane Kingsley-Smith
‘Hark, hark, the lark’, an aubade (dawn song), sung by a musician in Cymbeline 2.3.19. An anonymous MS setting from Shakespeare’s time or not long after has been attributed to Robert *Johnson, in which case it may have been used in an early production. The best-known setting since is *Schubert’s ‘Standchen’ (1826), with translation by *Schlegel.
Jeremy Barlow
Harlequin’s Invasion: A Christmas Gambol (1759), a Shakespearian entertainment devised by *Garrick and the first pantomime to feature a speaking Harlequin, celebrated military victories against the French, promoted English culture, featured a replica of *Scheemakers’s monument, and concluded with the singing of ‘Heart of Oak’, Garrick’s popular, patriotic song.
Catherine Alexander
Harlequin Student; or, The Fall of Pantomime, with the Restoration of the Drama, by Henry Giffard, possibly *Garrick’s London debut, was performed at Goodman’s Fields in 1741. It concluded with a speech by Jupiter promoting Shakespeare above ‘Foreign Mimes’ and the display of a replica of *Scheemakers’s *Westminster abbey monument.
Catherine Alexander
harp, an important instrument in Shakespeare’s time, but with little surviving repertoire since playing depended on extemporization and memory. It was smaller than the modern concert harp; tone might be altered to produce a buzzing sound with ‘brays’, metal pins brought just into contact with the strings near the tuning pegs.
Jeremy Barlow
Harris, Frank (James Thomas) (1856–1931), Irish journalist. Harris believed he had discovered the man behind the dramatic mask: first in ‘The True Shakespeare’ (Saturday Review, Mar. 1898); later The Man Shakespeare and his Tragic Life Story (1909) became a popular sensation by interpreting the plays as the intimate autobiography of a turbulent soul. In The Women of Shakespeare (1911), Harris recreates four influential women: his mother, his wife, his mistress, and his daughter Judith. Harris’s play Shakespeare and his Love (1904) disputes unsuccessfully the imaginative right to Mistress Mary Fitton with Bernard Shaw’s The Dark Lady of the Sonnets (1910).
Tom Matheson
Harris, Henry (c. 1634–1704), a prominent actor (and perhaps scene-painter) with Davenant’s Duke’s Company, he played Horatio to Betterton’s Hamlet in 1661, Romeo in 1662, then a range of comic and serious roles including Andrew Aguecheek and a praised Wolsey. In 1671 he became joint manager of Dorset Garden theatre with Betterton.
Catherine Alexander
Harrison, George Bagshawe (1894–1991), English academic. Author of Shakespeare: The Man and his Stage (1923), and Shakespeare under Elizabeth (1933), which speculates on the black prostitute Lucy Negro as a possible Dark Lady. His widely diffused Penguin editions of each play (1937–59) were based on the Folio text, but with only limited annotation.
Tom Matheson
Harrison, William (1534–93), English clergyman and historian, author of An Historical Description of the Island of Britain. This work was published as part of *Holinshed’s Chronicles in 1577 and again, in expanded form, in the Chronicles of 1587. Shakespeare may have turned to Harrison’s account of pre-Christian Britain for King Lear.
Jane Kingsley-Smith
Harry, Prince. See Henry IV Parts 1 and 2; Henry V.
Harsnett, Samuel (1561–1631), Protestant chaplain and polemicist who served in 1599 as licenser for books, responsible for censoring seditious material. By authorizing a history which celebrated *Essex at the height of the Irish debacle, Harsnett was threatened with imprisonment but managed to avoid that fate. In the same year he published his Discovery of the Fraudulent Practices of John Darnel, followed by a longer study, A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures, in 1603. Both exposed the Catholic practice of exorcism as a pernicious trick closely related to those deceptions practised on the contemporary stage. That Shakespeare knew the Declaration is made clear by King Lear. Deep structural and symbolic parallels have been perceived between the two. More obviously, Edgar’s physical ‘mortification’ as Poor Tom and much of what he says to create the impression of madness derive from the description of those who are equally fraudulent in Harsnett’s tract. The Declaration’s influence may also have extended to Pericles and The Tempest.
Jane Kingsley-Smith
Hart, William (d. 1616), Shakespeare’s brother-in-law, husband of Joan *Shakespeare. Their marriage is not found in the Stratford register, and he is first recorded in the entry for the baptism of his son, also William, on 28 August 1600. At the christening of his second son and at his burial on 17 April 1616—a week before Shakespeare died—he is identified as a hatter.
Stanley Wells
Harvard, John (1607–38), founder of Harvard University; son of Robert Harvard, a Londoner who in 1605 married Katherine Rogers in Stratford. They lived in Southwark near the Globe. In 1596 her father Thomas, a prosperous butcher, had rebuilt his house in the High Street, Stratford, with splendid carved-wood decorations. Now known as Harvard House, it is administered by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.
Stanley Wells
Harvey, in 1 Henry IV, is one of *Oldcastle’s (Falstaff’s) companions. Harvey was Shakespeare’s first name for Bardolph, changed at the same time as Oldcastle’s name was changed to Falstaff and Rossill (*Russell) to Peto.
Anne Button
Harvey, Gabriel (c. 1550–1631), poet, pamphleteer, and controversial Cambridge academic. In 1580 he published his correspondence with Edmund *Spenser, Three Proper, and Witty, Familiar Letters, which discusses their experimental efforts to compose English verse in classical metres. Later he became embroiled in a literary quarrel with Thomas *Nashe, who goaded him into writing Pierce’s Supererogation (1593), stuffed with intriguing critical assessments of contemporary writers. The quarrel ended when both men (with several others) had their works publicly burned by the Church in 1599. Harvey scribbled valuable notes all over the books in his vast library. Some of these pertain to Shakespeare.
Robert Maslen
Harvey, Sir John Martin (1863–1944), English actor-manager who, after fourteen years with *Irving (1882–96), established himself independently. He gradually introduced Shakespeare into his repertoire: Hamlet (1904), less dominated by the Prince than was usual; a surprisingly debonair and picturesque Richard III; The Taming of the Shrew as Petruchio to his wife Nina de Silva’s (1869–1949) Katherine, with Sly present throughout and the scenery changed in the audience’s view; and a patriotic Henry V in the Elizabethan manner in 1916.
Richard Foulkes
Harvey, Sir William (d. 1642), courtier. Harvey in 1598 married the third Earl of *Southampton’s widowed mother. He has been linked hypothetically with ‘Mr W. H.’ in the dedication to Shakespeares Sonnets (1609), and with ‘W Har’, who in Epicedium (1594) alludes to Shakespeare’s Lucrece.
Park Honan
Hastings, Lord. (1) In Richard Duke of York (3 Henry VI) he is one of Edward IV’s supporters, helping him escape Warwick (4.7.82). In Richard III he refuses to help Richard seize the throne (3.2), is accused by him of protecting the ‘witch’ Jane Shore, and executed (3.4). His ghost appears at *Bosworth. He is based on William, Lord Hastings (c. 1430–83). (2) One of the rebel leaders in 2 Henry IV, he is sent to execution with the Archbishop of York and Mowbray by Prince John, 4.1. He is based on Sir Ralph Hastings (d. 1405).
Anne Button
Hastings, Sir Ralph. See Hastings, Lord.
Hathaway, Anne (?1555–1623), Shakespeare’s wife, daughter of Richard Hathaway (d. 1581), whose father John held land and a house called Hewlands (see Anne Hathaway’s Cottage) in Shottery, near Stratford, in 1556. One of seven children, she was born in 1555 or 1556, judging by the inscription on the brass marking her grave, which says that she was ‘of the age of 67 years’ at her death on 6 August 1623. Her father left her 10 marks to be paid on her marriage. Her brother Bartholomew succeeded to his father’s copyhold when their mother died, in 1599. In 1610 he paid £200 to buy the house and other property outright. He left them to his son John in 1621, naming John *Hall as overseer of his will; the house belonged to his descendants until 1838.
A record of Shakespeare’s courtship may survive in the wordplay of his Sonnet 145, which ends:
‘I hate’ from hate away she threw,
And saved my life, saying ‘not you.’
On 27 November 1582 the Bishop of Worcester licensed marriage ‘inter Wm Shaxpere et Annam whateley de Temple grafton’. That ‘whateley’ is a simple error is suggested by a bond of 28 November, in the large sum of £40, by which Fulk Sandells and John Rychardson of Stratford exempted the Bishop from liability if there was any irregularity in a marriage between ‘william Shagspere’ and ‘Anne hathwey of Stratford in the Dioces of worcester maiden.’ Sandells had been overseer of Richard Hathaway’s will, and Rychardson a witness. As a minor, Shakespeare could not marry without his father’s consent; presumably Sandells and Rychardson had to testify, among other things, that he had it.
The licence gave permission to marry after one asking of the banns, which were forbidden from Advent Sunday (2 December in 1582) to 13 January. This is presumably because Anne was pregnant: their first child, *Susanna, was baptized on 26 May 1583. The marriage licence suggests that Anne may have been living at Temple Grafton, though the bond describes her as of Stratford. The marriage is not recorded in the Stratford register, but could have been solemnized at one of the neighbouring villages, Temple Grafton, Bishopton, or *Luddington, for none of which the records survive. Twins, *Hamnet and *Judith, were baptized in Stratford on 2 February 1585. In 1601 Anne was mentioned in the will of *Thomas Whittington as holding money on his behalf.
The Shakespeares’ first house of their own appears to have been *New Place, which William bought in 1597. Shakespeare must have spent much time in London, though his many recorded business transactions in Stratford-upon-Avon and the neighbourhood suggest that he frequently returned to the area, and he seems to have lived there permanently in his last years. He does not mention Anne by name in his *will, though he left her ‘my second best bed with the furniture’. She would have been legally entitled to a share in her husband’s estate, along with the right, which she seems to have exercised, to continue to live in New Place. A late 17th-century legend says that she and her daughters wished to be buried in her husband’s grave (see Dowdall, John). Her gravestone lies next to his, and immediately below his monument, in the chancel of Stratford-upon-Avon church. A brass plate carries an inscription written perhaps by her son-in-law John *Hall:
Heere lyeth interred the body of Anne wife of William Shakespeare who departed this life the 6th day of August 1623 being of the age of 67 yeares:
Vbera, tu mater, tu lac, vitamque dedisti:
Vae mihi: pro tanto munere saxa dabo?
Quam mallem amoueat lapidem bonus Angelus orem!
Exeat, ut Christi corpus, imago tua.
Sed nil vota valent; venias cito, Christe! resurget
Clausa licet tumulo mater et astra petet.
Translated, these Latin elegiacs mean:
Breasts, O mother, milk and life thou didst give. Woe is me—for so great a boon shall I give stones? How much rather would I pray that the good angel should move the stone so that, like Christ’s body, thine image might come forth! But my prayers are unavailing. Come quickly, Christ, that my mother, though shut within this tomb, may rise again and seek the stars.
We have no direct information other than that given here about the relationship between Shakespeare and his wife. Schoenbaum, in his Compact Documentary Life (not in the original), reproduces a drawing, dated 1708, by Sir Nathaniel Curzon purporting to be of ‘Shakespear’s Consort’ which is preserved in a copy of the *Third Folio, and the *forgeries of William Henry Ireland include a love letter from her husband.
Stanley Wells
Hauptmann, Gerhart (1862–1946), German dramatist. Despite the naturalism of his early plays, Hauptmann was constantly involved with Shakespeare. He adapted The Tempest in his play Indipohdi (1921), arranged Hamlet for the Dresden stage (1927), wrote a play on the hero’s student life (Hamlet in Wittenberg, 1936) and the novel Im Wirbel der Berufung (1936) about a Hamlet performance that also alluded to Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister.
Werner Habicht
hautboy, or shawm, a loud double reed wind instrument and ancestor of the oboe; ‘hautboys’ occurs as a stage direction for scenes of banqueting and entertainment, e.g. Timon of Athens 1.2.opening.
Jeremy Barlow
Hawkes, Terence (1932–2014), British Shakespeare scholar. Considered the father of *presentism in Shakespeare studies, Hawkes was at the forefront in the UK from the 1970s onwards of a more theoretical approach to the critical study of Shakespeare. A wider burgeoning intellectual climate, heavily influenced by French philosophies of language, sought to challenge all orthodoxies and assumptions about literary study, from the role of reading down to the structural makeup of language itself. Hawkes’s 1977 book Structuralism and Semiotics was a direct contribution to this, though within Shakespeare studies his earlier work, Shakespeare’s Talking Animals (1973), anticipated the presentist literary criticism with which he was to become chiefly associated. He and others began to move away from *New Criticism’s attempts to describe universal human experience towards an understanding of literature as something intensely political, a site of cultural contestation that can never offer stability of meaning. He pointed out in often caustically witty and creative prose that our readings of Shakespeare’s plays happen through the anachronistic lens of the here and now, and the ‘meaning’ we derive is always conditioned by our own culturally and historically accrued perspectives and ideologies. He sought to pop the bubbles of attempts—lazy and diligent alike—to appropriate Shakespeare for cultural capital or political causes, as well as notions that we could somehow peel away the intervening years to get at an historically pure, ‘original’ experience of Shakespeare, either on page or stage. Hawkes’s seminal study remains That Shakespeherian Rag: Essays on a Critical Process (1986)—the title alluding to a line in T. S. *Eliot’s The Waste Land—widely regarded as a brilliant and daring Rubicon moment in Shakespeare studies in the last half-century. He also wrote Meaning by Shakespeare (1992) and general edited the ‘New Accents’ series, which gave rise to three volumes of the influential Alternative Shakespeares. He worked at Cardiff for most of his career, and the national identity of his adopted country became a continued preoccupation throughout his many other articles and book chapters, such as ‘Bryn Glas’ (1997) and ‘Aberdaugleddyf’ (2000). He general edited the ‘Accents on Shakespeare’ series, promoting the ongoing advancement of a variety of theoretical approaches to Shakespeare, to which he contributed Shakespeare in the Present (2002).
Will Sharpe
Hawkins, William (1722–1801), English clergyman and poet. As professor of poetry at Oxford, he delivered the first-ever series of lectures devoted to Shakespeare (in Latin, 1751–6). He also wrote a strongly nationalistic adaptation of Cymbeline (1759) in which he attempted to make the play more modern and thus more ‘rational’.
Jean Marsden
hay (hey), dancers interweaving by passing each other alternately to left and to right. References in Love’s Labour’s Lost 5.1.147 and in Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness suggest that the hay was considered a dance in its own right, as well as a choreographic device.
Jeremy Barlow
Haydn, Franz Josef (1732–1809), Austrian composer. His only known Shakespeare setting is the canzonetta ‘She never told her love’ (1795) from Twelfth Night. The incidental music for King Lear (1806) attributed to Haydn is almost certainly the work of others (possibly K. D. Stegmann or Josef von Blumenthal).
Irena Cholij
Hayman, Francis (1708–76), English painter and illustrator. After early success as a scene painter, Hayman established a remunerative practice as a portrait painter. His living sitters included David *Garrick and Mrs *Pritchard, and he also executed a full-length retrospective portrait of Shakespeare, sometimes known as the ‘Willett portrait’, now in the *RSC Collection and Gallery. In 1741, Hayman was commissioned by entrepreneur Jonathan Tyers to decorate the supper-boxes at Vauxhall Gardens with pastoral and dramatic subjects: the results included scenes from King Lear, Hamlet, Henry V, and The Tempest. Hayman also produced designs for Thomas Hanmer’s edition of Shakespeare plays, published in 1744, and for Charles Jennen’s unfinished edition, abandoned in 1770.
Catherine Tite
Hayward, Sir John (?1564–1627), author of the First Part of the Life and Reign of Henry the Fourth, published, with a dedication to the Earl of Essex, in 1599. In 1600, Hayward was imprisoned for his work, which Shakespeare may have seen in manuscript and used as a source for Henry IV.
Cathy Shrank
Hazlitt, William (1778–1830), English critic. Together with A. W. *Schlegel and Samuel Taylor *Coleridge, one of the key figures in *Romantic Shakespearian criticism. His Characters of Shakespear’s Plays (1817), strongly influenced by the 1815 English translation of Schlegel’s lectures, was the first inexpensive play-by-play survey aimed at a wide readership. As in much criticism of the period, there is an emphasis on the interpretation of the leading roles in the plays, but by ‘characters’ the title means ‘distinctive traits’—Hazlitt’s aim was to sketch pen-portraits of the unique ‘characteristics’ of each play. His own prose style plays a part in some of the richest characterizations: the essay on Coriolanus is abrasive, that on Macbeth antithetical, on Hamlet inward-looking.
Hazlitt is most notable as a reader of the tragedies, though he also included an influential contrast between Shakespeare and Ben *Jonson in his Lectures on the English Comic Writers (1819). Like the other Romantics, he identified especially with the Prince of Denmark (‘It is we who are Hamlet’). His disquisition on the politics of Coriolanus (‘The language of poetry naturally falls in with the language of power’) led to a fierce dispute with the Tory critic William Gifford. Hazlitt wrote venomously of the hypocrisy of the powerful, and liked minor characters who showed up their betters: Barnardine in Measure for Measure ‘is a fine antithesis to the morality and the hypocrisy of the other characters in the play’.
Hazlitt’s abiding principle was ‘sympathy’, the idea of the artist’s capacity to transcend egotism: ‘The striking peculiarity of Shakspeare’s mind was its generic quality, its power of communication with all other minds—so that it contained a universe of thought and feeling within itself, and had no one peculiar bias…His genius shone equally on the evil and on the good, on the wise and the foolish, the monarch and the beggar.’ John *Keats heard Hazlitt speak to this effect in Lectures on the English Poets (1818) and went on to develop his theory of the poet as a chameleon who delights as much in an Iago as an Imogen.
Hazlitt was a passionate theatre-goer, although he was infuriated by the practice of adapting Shakespeare’s text and by the weakness of the minor players in the star-based theatrical economy of early 19th-century London. He was generous in his praise of those actors who embodied the art of sympathetic impersonation, notably Sarah *Siddons for her Lady Macbeth, John Philip *Kemble for his Coriolanus, Eliza *O’Neill for her Juliet, and Edmund *Kean for a succession of roles, beginning with Shylock and Richard III. He described Kean’s performance as Othello in the third act as ‘the finest piece of acting that was ever seen’, but admired his Iago almost as much. Hazlitt, who collected his theatrical notices in A View of the English Stage (1818), was Kean’s greatest apologist; his reviews played a major part in the actor’s rise to celebrity following his 1814 Drury Lane debut.
Jonathan Bate
headless line, a line of iambic verse that is missing an initial unstressed syllable, sometimes implying a degree of abruptness: ‘Stay, the King hath thrown his warder down’ (Richard II 1.3.118). Not to be confused with otherwise normal iambic lines that begin with a trochaic foot: ‘Near to the King in blood, and near in love’ (Richard II 3.1.17)
George T. Wright
‘Heart’s Ease’, a popular song or tune referred to by Peter in Romeo and Juliet 4.4.128. *Two broadside ballad tunes survive.
Jeremy Barlow
heavens. Early playhouses such as the Theatre and the Curtain had no substantial cover over the stage, only a turret-like tiring house with perhaps a short pentice extension. By 1595 the Rose was fitted with a full cover which provided protection for the actors’ (and soon after, the onstage spectators’) costumes, and all subsequent playhouses copied this innovation. The underside of the cover, the heavens, was brightly painted with astral bodies and figures from classical mythology and from the zodiac on a background of marbling. Shakespeare’s characters commonly allude to the heavens: in Titus Andronicus 4.3 Titus and Marcus fire arrows towards it, Othello swears by ‘yon marble heaven’ (3.3.463), Timon of Athens speaks of ‘the marbled mansion all above’ (4.3.192), Hamlet finds no pleasure in ‘this brave o’erhanging, this majestical | roof fretted with golden fire’ (2.2.302–3), and in Cymbeline Giacomo commits to memory the detail that ‘The roof o’ th’ chamber | With golden cherubins is fretted’ (2.4.87–8).
Gabriel Egan
Hecate, originally a Greek divinity, had evolved into the ruler of demons and *witches by Shakespeare’s day. She appears in Macbeth 3.5 and 4.1. Many scholars have seen her lines as interpolations, probably by Thomas *Middleton.
Anne Button
Hector, the Trojan champion in Troilus and Cressida, is killed treacherously by Achilles’ Myrmidons, 5.9. He is based on medieval interpretations of the character from *Homer’s Iliad.
Anne Button
‘Hector’. See Armado, Don Adriano de.
Heine, Heinrich (1797–1856). German poet, whose romantic inspiration is often undercut by irony, wordplay, and satire. His essay Die romantische Schule (1836) criticized earlier Romantic views of Shakespeare. In Shakespeares Mädchen und Frauen (’Shakespeare’s maidens and women’, 1939) his digressive texts accompany a gallery of engraved portraits and also contain a vindication of Shylock. His satirical long poems Deutschland: Ein Wintermärchen (1844) and Atta Troll: Ein Sommernachtstraum (1847) have Shakespearian subtitles; the latter also alludes to Shakespeare himself.
Werner Habicht
Helen. (1) According to Homeric legend, her abduction by Paris caused the Trojan War. She appears in Troilus and Cressida, 3.1. (2) The heroine of All’s Well That Ends Well, an orphan under the protection of the Countess of Roussillon, who falls unrequitedly in love with Bertram, but wins him through her relentless resourcefulness. Editors often prefer ‘Helena’, though she is called Helen except in stage directions (and once, in 1.1). (3) She is Innogen’s lady-in-waiting, Cymbeline 2.2.
Anne Button
Helena. (1) Her love for Demetrius in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is eventually requited, thanks to fairy magic. (2) All’s Well That Ends Well. See Helen.
Anne Button
Helenus, one of Priam’s sons, is a Trojan warrior and priest in Troilus and Cressida.
Anne Button
Helicanus, a lord of Tyre, is offered the crown, Pericles 8, but defers accepting it out of loyalty to the missing Pericles.
Anne Button
hell. The area underneath the stage, often used to represent the underworld. Hellish characters could emerge through a trapdoor set in the stage or, if the underside of the stage was not boarded in, through the hangings which concealed the understage area. Occasionally an actor or musician might perform from within the hell, as when the Ghost of Hamlet’s father cries ‘Swear’ from under the stage (1.5.151) and when ‘Music of the hautboys is under the stage’ in Antony and Cleopatra (4.3.10).
Gabriel Egan
Helpmann, Sir Robert (1909–96), Australian actor and all-round man of the theatre. With some experience as a dancer in his native land he joined Sadler’s Wells Ballet in London, excelling in character parts. At the Old Vic in 1937 he played Oberon in a lavish Midsummer Night’s Dream and in 1942 choreographed a surrealist ballet Hamlet to a scenario by his lover Michael *Benthall under whose direction he often acted. He played Hamlet for the Old Vic in 1944 and in Stratford in 1945, where he also played a foxy King John and a malevolent Shylock but was frustrated in his desire to add the shrew Katherine. During Benthall’s long, successful directorship of the Old Vic he both appeared in and directed plays by Shakespeare and also played Shylock, Petruchio, and Angelo in an Australian tour with Katharine Hepburn as co-star. After Benthall’s death in 1974 he ran the Australian National Ballet. A cruelly accurate mimic, he seems to have been more feared than loved by his fellows.
Michael Jamieson
Heminges, John (1566–1630), actor (Strange’s Men by 1593, *Chamberlain’s/King’s Men 1596–1630), and business manager for the King’s Men. Heminges was about to become free of his apprenticeship as a grocer when he married Rebecca Knell, the 16-year-old widow of William Knell (a Queen’s Men actor), on 10 March 1588. By May 1593 Heminges was an actor with Strange’s Men and by the end of 1596 Heminges was a Chamberlain’s Man, receiving with George Bryan the payment for their court performances; throughout his career, especially after 1611, Heminges’s business skill was as important as his acting. In 1599 Heminges became one of the original *Globe housekeepers and in 1608 one of the *Blackfriars housekeepers, and he managed to increase his shares to a one-quarter holding in each by the time of his death. Heminges probably owned the taphouse which adjoined, and which in 1613 caught fire from, the first Globe and he certainly had a house (possibly also a taphouse) adjoining the second Globe. In 1611 Heminges’s daughter Thomasine married the King’s Man William Ostler who died intestate on 16 December 1614 leaving his widow shares in the company playhouses over which father and daughter fought in the courts. The legal records of this battle are an important source of our knowledge about the ownership of the playhouses. Heminges appears as himself in the Induction to *Marston’s The Malcontent and is named as an actor in company cast lists for *Jonson’s Every Man in his Humour, Every Man out of his Humour, Sejanus, Volpone, The Alchemist, and Catiline. A surviving copy of Jonson’s 1616 folio has a handwritten Jacobean annotation assigning Heminges the part of Corbaccio in Volpone alongside Nathan Field as Voltore, and since the latter did not the join the King’s Men until 1616 Heminges’s acting career seems to have lasted until his early fifties. In 1619 Heminges’s wife Rebecca died and in 1623 he and Henry Condell produced the Shakespeare *Folio. Towards the end of his life Heminges was almost solely responsible for the business affairs of the King’s Men. After his death in 1630, Heminges’s son William sold Globe and Blackfriars shares to the King’s Man John Shank, triggering the dispute recorded in the Sharers Papers.
Gabriel Egan
Henderson, John (1747–85), actor. He was an immediate sensation as Hamlet at Bath in 1772 (followed by Richard III, Benedick, and Hotspur). *Garrick’s jealousy allegedly delayed his London debut but he achieved success as Shylock for *Colman at the Haymarket and, while continuing to play Hamlet and a range of roles, he excelled as Iago.
Catherine Alexander
hendiadys, a rhetorical figure in which two terms, usually nouns, are coupled by ‘and’ to form a single complex idea, where one would expect a noun qualified by an adjective: ‘a tale | Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury’ (instead of furious sound), Macbeth 5.5.26–7.
Chris Baldick/George T. Wright
Henley Street, the street in Stratford in which Shakespeare’s father was living by 1552, when he was fined for making a dungheap there, and where he owned property at the time of William’s birth in 1564. His house, now known as the *Birthplace, passed to William on his father’s death.
Stanley Wells
Henri IV (1553–1610), King of Navarre and France. Henri de Bourbon, King of Navarre, succeeded his cousin Henri III as King of France in 1594: his accession may have motivated Shakespeare’s depiction of the King of Navarre in Love’s Labour’s Lost. He was a Huguenot Protestant, greatly admired in England until his conversion to Roman Catholicism, to secure the succession, reportedly with the words ‘Paris vaut bien une messe’ (Paris is well worth a mass). Thereafter he was often cited as a model of French faithlessness and hypocrisy. His claim to the French throne depended on the Salic Law, firmly rejected by the King’s advisers in Henry V. It is probably also relevant that the Duke of Bourbon is represented in the play as a pompous braggart.
Stephen Orgel
Henriad. A modern nickname for the *Second Tetralogy, particularly the two Henry IV plays and Henry V, coined by anology with *Virgil’s Aeneid. It implies that these plays are Shakespeare’s epic, with Prince Harry, later Henry V, as their epic hero.
Michael Dobson
Henrietta Maria (1610–66), Queen of England, consort of *Charles I, posthumous daughter of *Henri IV of France and Marie de Médicis. Her marriage to Charles as Prince of Wales was a triumph of *James I’s ecumenism, and she maintained her Roman Catholic faith throughout her life. From her arrival in England, she was an enthusiastic patron of theatre, not only dancing in *masques but also commissioning plays in which she and her ladies took speaking roles. These were widely condemned and frequently cited as touchstones for the immorality of the court, but the debate they engendered opened the way to the domestication of actresses on the English stage at the Restoration—the word ‘actress’ was first used in reference to her. After the murder of the Duke of Buckingham (1628), she became the King’s chief confidante and adviser, and was often blamed for his unpopular policies. During the Civil War she actively supported the Royalist cause, raising money and troops. She fled to France in 1644, returning to England with Charles II in 1660.
Stephen Orgel
Henry IV (1366–1413), King of England (reigned 1399–1413 after supplanting *Richard II), surnamed Bolingbroke. See Richard II; Henry IV Part 1; Henry IV Part 2.
Anne Button
Henry IV Part 1 See centre section.
Henry IV Part 2 See centre section.
Henry V (1387–1422), King of England (reigned 1413–22). See Henry IV Part 1; Henry IV Part 2 (in which he is depicted as Prince Harry); Henry V.
Anne Button
Henry VI (1421–71), King of England (reigned 1422–71, though his rule was contested from 1455 onwards). See Henry VI Part 1; First Part of the Contention, The; Richard, Duke of York.
Anne Button
Henry VI Part 1 See centre section.
Henry VI Part 2. See centre section.
Henry VI Part 3. See centre section.
Henry VII. See Richmond, Henry, Earl of.
Henry VIII (1491–1547), King of England (reigned 1509–47). See All Is True; Religion.
Anne Button
Henry VIII. See centre section.
Henry, Prince. Son of King John, he is present at his father’s death, King John 5.7, becoming Henry III.
Anne Button
Henry, Prince of Wales. See Henry IV Parts 1 and 2; Henry V.
Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales (1595–1612), elder son of *James I and Anne of Denmark. Outgoing and charismatic, his character was antithetical to that of his withdrawn, intemperate, and awkward father. He had military ambitions; his investiture as Prince of Wales in 1610 was celebrated with Prince Henry’s Barriers, an extended display of jousting for which Ben *Jonson wrote introductory speeches and Inigo *Jones designed stage sets and costumes; and subsequently on New Year’s Day 1611 with Jonson’s and Jones’s Oberon, in which he danced the role of the fairy prince—the masque was originally planned to conclude with martial games, but the King demanded a more courtly and pacific culmination. His politics were aggressively Protestant, in contrast to his father’s commitment to accommodation with the Catholic powers on the Continent. From the age of 14 he maintained a large and increasingly influential court, and was an enthusiastic patron of the arts. Under the guidance of Arundel, Salisbury, and Inigo Jones (whom he employed as his surveyor), he amassed in a short period one of the greatest art collections in England at the time, which after his death formed the nucleus of his brother Charles’s superlative collection. He strongly supported his sister *Elizabeth’s marriage to Frederick the Elector Palatine, and deplored his father’s plans to marry him to a Catholic princess, though he was forced to acknowledge publicly that this was a matter of state, not of his choosing. He reportedly proposed following his sister and brother-in-law to Germany at the head of a Protestant army of liberation—something the heir to the throne would certainly not have been permitted to do. His death from typhoid fever at the age of 18, a few months before his sister’s marriage, was devastating to the nation’s morale, and it was widely rumoured that he had been poisoned by Catholic sympathizers. According to Anthony Weldon in 1650, the King himself was the prime suspect. The Winter’s Tale was written in 1610, two years before Henry’s death, but the play—with the sudden death of Prince Mamillius, and the marriage of his sister Perdita to a future king of Bohemia—must have had an eerie topicality when it was performed during the festivities leading to the royal wedding in February 1613.
Stephen Orgel
Henry Irving Shakespeare. This edition of the Works, with introductions by various scholars to the individual plays, and numerous illustrations, was published in eight volumes in 1890, and reissued in ten in 1906. It aimed to assist those who wished to read the plays aloud or prepare an acting version for private or public use. Here the influence of Irving is to be seen, in the use of wavy lines at the side of passages in the double-column texts of the plays to mark them as capable of being omitted without ‘any detriment to the story or action of the play’ (preface).
R. A. Foakes
Henryson, Robert (?1425–?1500), Scottish poet who wrote a sequel to *Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde entitled The Testament of Cresseid (1493). This work was partly responsible for the hostile representation of Cressida in 16th-century English literature: Henryson’s character is a prostitute punished with leprosy. The Testament may have come to Shakespeare’s attention through Thynne’s edition of Chaucer which, from 1532, included this poem.
Jane Kingsley-Smith
Henslowe, Philip (1555/6–1616), theatre entrepreneur (the *Rose, the Fortune, the Hope). Philip Henslowe was apprenticed to one Henry Woodward who died in 1578 and whose widow, Agnes, Henslowe married in 1579. Agnes was much older than Philip but not, as is often assumed, much wealthier and she already had two daughters. In 1587 Henslowe and John Cholmley built the Rose playhouse and in 1592 Henslowe recorded expenditure on a substantial enlargement of it. Also in 1592 Agnes’s daughter Joan married the actor Edward *Alleyn who led an amalgamation of Strange’s Men and Admiral’s Men performing at the Rose. In 1595 Henslowe paid for further work at the Rose and towards the end of the century (possibly as a result of competition from the Swan and the *Globe) Henslowe and his stepson-in-law Alleyn planned a new square open-air playhouse, the Fortune, located north of the river in the parish of St Giles without Cripplegate, which opened in 1600. In 1613 Henslowe built the multi-purpose Hope playhouse near to the site of the old Beargarden on *Bankside.
Much of what we know about the Elizabethan theatre business comes from Henslowe’s book of accounts and memoranda commonly (but misleadingly) known as his ‘Diary’ which was deposited among other papers at the College of God’s Gift at Dulwich founded by Alleyn and opened in 1617. Recorded in the account book are Henslowe’s pawn transactions, personal and business debts and loans, receipts from his theatres, expenditure on costumes, and an inventory of the Admiral’s Men’s stage properties. Critical work on these records in the early 20th century characterized Henslowe as a ruthless exploiter of actors, but recent work has tended to ameliorate this view.
Gabriel Egan
heraldry, the practice of allotting specific coats of arms and badges to families for easier identification on the field of battle.
Originally devised for swift and accurate identification of armed men, heraldry is a discipline of simple devices and limited use of colour which, in a defined system of presentation, can be used to show marriage and family relationships. Badges developed as personal cognizances and in the 15th century, under the system loosely defined as ‘bastard feudalism’, were used to identify the adherents of particular families or factions.
By the later Middle Ages, the right to a coat of arms had become a matter for social pride and strict control. The College of Arms was first incorporated by Richard III in 1483 and from that date heralds, originally neutral messengers between rulers, became arbiters of status.
Shakespeare was influenced by heraldry both professionally and personally, applying for a coat of arms on behalf of his father, granted in 1596. These arms exemplify the system, depicting a spear, displayed diagonally, in an allusion to the family name. In his works Shakespeare uses heraldry most particularly in the history plays, where frequent references are made to the arms or badges of the chief protagonists. Richard, Duke of Gloucester, is referred to as ‘abortive, rooting, hog’ (Richard III 1.3.225), alluding to his personal badge of the white boar, while his brother Edward IV, one of whose badges was a sun in splendour, is in the same play punningly referred to as ‘this son of York’ (1.1.2).
Elsewhere, Shakespeare attributes coats of arms to non-historic characters and uses the specific heraldic terms for colours: gules, sable, azure, to intensify an effect; ‘Head to foot, now is he total gules’ (Hamlet 2.2.259–60), ‘My sable ground of sin I will not paint | To hide the truth’ (The Rape of Lucrece 1074). Other formal heraldic words used liberally are ‘blazon’, ‘crest’, ‘badge’.
Mairi MacDonald
heralds. (1) In The First Part of the Contention (2 Henry VI) a herald summons Gloucester to Parliament, 2.4.71. (2) In Henry V a herald delivers the list of the dead at Agincourt to King Harry, 4.8. (3) In Othello 2.2, a herald announces a ‘triumph’ to celebrate the defeat of the Turks and Othello’s nuptials. (4) In The Tragedy of King Lear 5.3.102–6, a herald summons anyone who calls Edmond a traitor to combat (History of King Lear 24.109–13). (5) In Coriolanus 2.1.159–63, a herald announces Martius’ new name of ‘Coriolanus’.
Anne Button
Herbert, Sir Henry (1595–1673), Master of the Revels (1623–73). Herbert bought his mastership from Sir John Astley, and his collection of papers (extant until 1818) is an important source of information concerning the Caroline stage. (See censorship.)
Gabriel Egan
Herbert, Sir Walter. One of Richmond’s supporters, he speaks one line, Richard III 5.2.19.
Anne Button
‘Hercules’. See Mote.
Herder, Johann Gottfried von (1744–1803), German philosopher, historian, and critic. His admiration for English ballads, Ossianic poetry, and Shakespeare influenced *Goethe, and contributed to the developing intuitive, irrational Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) movement in late 18th-century German literature.
Tom Matheson
Her Majesty’s theatre, Haymarket. In 1897 H. Beerbohm *Tree opened this opulent playhouse on a site of theatrical prominence since 1704. Its stage was designed to frame his visually lavish productions of Shakespeare and other authors. George Robey appeared there as Falstaff in 1936. It now houses big-scale musicals.
Michael Jamieson
Hermia, daughter of Egeus, refuses his demand for her to marry Demetrius. She escapes into the woods outside Athens with Lysander in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Anne Button
Hermione, Leontes’ Queen, is falsely condemned as an adulteress in The Winter’s Tale.
Anne Button
Hero, Leonato’s daughter, is jilted at the altar by Claudio who believes her to be unfaithful in Much Ado About Nothing.
Anne Button
heroic couplets, pairs of rhymed iambic pentameter lines, typically but not always end-stopped and thus allowing an effect of completeness. Shakespeare uses them to round off all his Sonnets and some dramatic scenes.
Chris Baldick
Herrera Bustamante, Manuel (1779–1834), Spanish army officer exiled in London between 1823–33. He wrote a number of notes on Shakespeare’s plays, which together make up the first piece of Spanish Shakespearian criticism independent of translations. These notes, not published till 2000, show a neoclassical frame of mind in their opposition to Shakespeare and to A. W. *Schlegel’s critical principles.
A. Luis Pujante
‘He that has and a little tiny wit’, sung by the Fool in The Tragedy of King Lear 3.2.74; apparently adapted from *‘When that I was and a little tiny boy’ in Twelfth Night.
Jeremy Barlow
hexameter. See alexandrine.
Heyes, Thomas. See printing and publishing.
‘Hey Robin, jolly Robin, tell me how thy Lady does’, a three-part *catch by William Cornysh (d. 1523); sung as a solo by Feste in Twelfth Night 4.2.73.
Jeremy Barlow
Heywood, Thomas (1573/4–1641), poet, playwright, and miscellanist. In the preface to The English Traveller (1633) Heywood claims to have had a hand in some 220 plays, but only 20 or so survive. His best plays fall, broadly speaking, into two categories: lively studies of domestic and marital politics, often in a middle-class setting, such as The Wise-Woman of Hogsdon (1638), The English Traveller, and his tragicomic masterpiece, A Woman Killed with Kindness (1607); and spectacular dramatizations of classical myth and legend, such as The Rape of Lucrece (1608)—a strange musical tragedy which may be echoed in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline—and his Ovidian theatrical epic in five instalments, The Golden Age (1611), The Silver Age (1613), The Brazen Age (1613), and the two parts of The Iron Age (printed in 1652). The Iron Age, which deals with the Trojan War, owes much to Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, but Heywood conceives his audience very differently. Where Shakespeare’s difficult play evokes the exclusive atmosphere of a private performance, Heywood’s Ages are designed ‘the ruder censures to refine, | And to unlock the casket, long time shut, | Of which none but the learned keep the key, | Where the rich jewel (poesy) was put’ (The Silver Age 1.1.12–15). They are full of humour, of action rapidly switching between comedy and pathos, of special effects and musical interludes, and are based on another first-class piece of entertainment, Heywood’s mythological narrative poem Troia Britanica (1609). He also published the most elaborate defence of the English stage of its times, An Apology for Actors (1612). In it he complains that some of his poems had been published under Shakespeare’s name in the 1612 edition of The Passionate Pilgrim, and adds, with characteristic modesty, that they are not good enough to be Shakespeare’s. W. W. *Greg identified Heywood as the most likely candidate to be Hand B in the Sir Thomas More manuscript.
Robert Maslen, rev. Will Sharpe
Hicks, Greg (b. 1953), English stage and film actor. Considered by many as deserving of a place among the top tier of British classical actors, he can be spotted as a young Donalbain in Trevor *Nunn’s film version of Macbeth (1979), a production originally staged at the RSC, in which Hicks also appeared. He has gone on to play many great parts for the company in an association that has lasted over four decades, including the title role in Macbeth (2004), Leontes in The Winter’s Tale (2009), and a powerful, flinty Lear in 2010. He won the Critics’ Circle Best Actor Award for his portrayal of Martius in David *Farr’s 2002 production of Coriolanus (RSC), and was nominated for an Olivier Award for the same role. In 2013 he reunited with Farr to play Claudius to Jonathan *Slinger‘s Hamlet, and played the King of France in Nancy Meckler’s production of All’s Well That Ends Well the same season.
Will Sharpe
Hiddleston, Tom (b. 1981), English stage and film actor. After graduating from Cambridge Hiddleston trained at RADA, getting his first big break on stage with Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod’s *Cheek by Jowl company, first playing Alsemero in their 2006 production of Thomas *Middleton ’s The Changeling, before shifting to the forefront in their 2007 Cymbeline, in which he demonstrated an impressive ability to switch between characterizations in doubling Cloten and Posthumus. A growing television profile, chiefly through his role as Magnus alongside Kenneth *Branagh’s fatalistic Swedish detective, Wallander, saw him cast as Cassio in a star-studded Othello at the Donmar the following year, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Ewan McGregor in the lead roles. After shooting to global fame through his role as Loki in the Marvel Thor franchise of films, his Shakespearian roles became big events for fans. In 2012 he played Hal/Henry V in Sir Richard Eyre’s films of 1 and 2 Henry IV and Thea Sharrock’s Henry V for The Hollow Crown, and in December 2013 he returned to the Donmar to play Coriolanus, in a sold-out production that was also broadcast to cinemas as part of the NT Live series.
King of hearts: Tom Hiddleston’s Henry V drags the BBC’s Hollow Crown (2012) towards its apotheosis, overcoming medieval France and modern Britain in the process.
Will Sharpe
Higgins, John. See Mirror for Magistrates, The.
highways subscription. On 11 September 1611 Shakespeare was listed among 71 contributors ‘towards the charge of prosecuting the bill in parliament for the better repair of the highways and amending divers defects in the statutes already made’.
Stanley Wells
Hilliard miniature. A miniature by Nicolas Hilliard (1547–1619), now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, has sometimes been identified as a likeness of Shakespeare: see portraits.
Catherine Tite
Hinman, Charlton (1911–77), American academic. Hinman’s technical study The Printing and Proof-Reading of the First Folio of Shakespeare (2 vols., 1963) is based on an investigation of 80 copies of the First Folio in the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington. By tracing individual pieces of type Hinman was able to reconstruct the sequence of printing; to identify individual compositors; to establish the order of type-formes through the press; and to determine the limited degree of proof-correction. His Norton Facsimile: The First Folio of Shakespeare (1968) uses 30 original copies to produce a composite photographic facsimile, with introduction and specimen proofs.
Tom Matheson
Hippolyta. (1) The Queen of the Amazons, having suffered military defeat by Theseus, is to marry him in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. (2) Her wedding to Theseus is again dramatized in The Two Noble Kinsmen.
Anne Button
hired men. The majority of actors were not sharers in a playing company but were merely hired men expected to double several minor roles and paid a contract rate (5s. to 10s. a week) rather than a share of the profits. The term also covered musicians and non-performing playhouse personnel such as tiremen and stage-keepers.
Gabriel Egan
historical novel. See fiction.
historical phenomenology If phenomenology is the study of human experience and subjectivity, then historical phenomenology is the study of how these concepts worked in the past. Shakespearians interested in historical phenomenology have focused on how early modern theories of embodiment, the *humours, and sense perception shaped experience and consciousness in the period, and how such ideas are visible in Shakespeare’s plays. Topics of study have included the bodily effects of emotion, the connection between the inner human and the external world, and the sometimes surprising interrelationships among the senses.
Erin Sullivan
history. Plays based on English history flourished in the second half of the 16th century and declined soon after the death of Elizabeth I in 1603. A popular genre, the history play was the product of a high demand for new plays for the public stage and the rise of strong nationalist feelings following the Protestant Reformation and the commercial wars with European countries, such as the Anglo-Spanish conflict which culminated with the defeat of the Armada in 1588.
The history play has no classical precedents. It derived its structure from English medieval morality plays and its primary material from official Tudor historiography, such as Raphael *Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1587), Edward *Halle’s The Union of the Two Noble and Illustrious Families of Lancaster and York (1548), and Polydore Vergil’s Anglica historia (1534).
Shakespeare wrote ten history plays: King John, Henry VIII, and the two tetralogies, which cover the Wars of the Roses from the deposition of King Richard II in 1398 to the accession of Henry VII in 1485. Shakespeare wrote the tetralogies in reverse order: the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III were written in the early 1590s, Richard II, the two parts of Henry IV, and Henry V in the late 1590s.
The popularity enjoyed by the history play on the Elizabethan stage can also be explained in terms of the broader cultural history of the period. Elizabethan dramatists were attracted by the rhetorical and dramatic potential of the current conflict between a residual, Christian view of history as a divine, providential pattern, and the emergent, humanist notion of history as magistra vitae and source of political and pragmatic lessons for the Machiavellian ruler.
There is no critical consensus on the vexed issue of which view of history Shakespeare’s historical plays subscribe to. In his The Elizabethan World Picture (1943) and Shakespeare’s History Plays (1944), E. M. W. *Tillyard argued that Shakespeare’s history plays represent a nationalist enterprise celebrating the providential restoration of order following the accession of the first Tudor king to the English throne in 1485. In 1957, Irving Ribner concentrated instead on the influence of Italian humanism on the English history play. Recent criticism tends to reject both approaches, by pointing out that conflicting views of history encouraged Shakespeare and his contemporaries to question the very idea of the universality of the human condition, on the one hand, and of the viability of secular institutions, such as monarchical absolutism, on the other. Greater attention is therefore paid to episodes such as the deposition scene in Richard II, revived on the eve of the *Essex conspiracy against Queen *Elizabeth in 1601. Equally popular with contemporary critics of Shakespeare’s histories is Henry V’s failure to persuade Private Williams of the King’s genuine concerns for the welfare of his soldiers, while visiting his troops in disguise the night before the battle of Agincourt.
Sonia Massai
History and Fall of Caius Marius, The. See Caius Marius, The History and Fall of.
History of King Lear, The (Shakespeare). See King Lear.
History of King Lear, The. Nahum *Tate’s adaptation of King Lear was first performed in 1681, during the Exclusion Crisis (when the Whig party were attempting to disinherit the future James II in favour of Charles II’s illegitimate son the Duke of Monmouth), and some of its alterations to Shakespeare’s plot—particularly its focus on Edmund, and its happy ending in which the King is restored—may have been dictated by political considerations. The happy ending, though (a deliberate or instinctive return to Shakespeare’s sources), endured long after the Exclusion Crisis had been forgotten, as did Tate’s neat provisions of straightforward motive. His Cordelia, for example, only refuses to humour Lear in the love-test because she does not wish to be married off to either France or Burgundy: she is already in love with Edgar, to whom she will finally be betrothed (with the approval of both Lear and Gloucester, who is also spared) at the end of the play.
Tate clearly admired Shakespeare’s tragedy (anticipating subsequent editors by drawing on both the Folio and quarto texts in preparing his adaptation), but felt it needed adjustment to fit the Restoration theatre’s notions of characterization and decorum: in a preface he called it ‘a heap of jewels, unstrung and unpolished’. In particular Tate excised the Fool entirely, finding his jokes and his diction incompatible with the dignity of tragedy, and in this he was supported by most commentators on King Lear for more than a century, who regarded the Fool as an unforgivable concession to Shakespeare’s vulgar audience. The History of King Lear was progressively altered by successive 18th-century actors and managers—*Garrick restored many of Shakespeare’s lines at the expense of Tate’s, and in 1768 George Colman the elder eliminated the romance between Cordelia and Edgar altogether—but Tate’s happy ending (preferred even by Dr *Johnson, though lamented by Samuel *Richardson) was not laid aside until Edmund *Kean’s production of 1823, and the Fool was not restored until William Charles *Macready’s in 1838.
Cordelia, with her confidante Arante, is rescued by the disguised Edgar from Edmund’s two hired ruffians in Nahum Tate’s enduringly popular adaptation The History of King Lear. This mezzotint, after a painting by Peter van Bleeck, depicts Susannah Cibber as Cordelia.
Michael Dobson
Hoby, Sir Edward. See Castiglione, Baldassare; Richard II.
Hoffman. A 1656 bookseller’s catalogue lists this tragedy as Shakespeare’s. However *Henslowe’s ‘Diary’ more reliably reports that *Chettle received payment for writing a ‘tragedie called Hawghman’, which was first performed at the Fortune.
Sonia Massai
Hogarth, William (1697–1764), English painter and engraver. His most celebrated theatrical portrait, painted around 1745 and much engraved, is David Garrick as Richard III (now at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool), a work which is influenced by French baroque portraits. In 1757, Hogarth completed a double portrait of *Garrick and his wife, which shows Garrick seated on a chair made from wood supposedly taken from Shakespeare’s *mulberry tree. Known chiefly for his graphic satires, in 1728 Hogarth produced an engraving of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn ousting Catherine of Aragon and Cardinal Wolsey from influential positions at court, from Shakespeare’s All Is True (Henry VIII), at the time of the coronation of George II. Upon its publication, the print was read as an analogy for Tory hopes that the new King would remove the Prime Minister, Walpole, from office.
Catherine Tite
‘Hold thy peace’, a *catch or round sung by Sir Andrew, Sir Toby, and Feste in Twelfth Night 2.3.68. Two tunes survive for the words.
Jeremy Barlow
Holinshed, Raphael (d. c.1580), editor, translator, and historian. He began his career as a translator with the publisher Reginald Wolfe, who proposed that he compile a history of the world from the time of the Flood to *Elizabeth I. Wolfe died before he could see the early fruits of this labour, the publication in 1577 of The First Volume of the Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland … from the First Inhabiting unto the Conquest. As well as historical accounts, it included a sociological and geographical description of each country. The work was a collaborative effort by Holinshed, William Harrison, Richard Stanyhurst, Edmund Campion, and Richard *Hooker. These men must have worked on the second expanded edition published in 1587 after Holinshed’s death.
In the 1590s, the revived interest in English *history resulted in a fashion for plays on historical subjects. The Chronicles may have contributed to this fashion. Certainly, Holinshed’s work was an invaluable source for poets and dramatists at this time. Not only was it the most complete account of British history published so far but its descriptions provided ideal background material for drama. It was also relatively easy to read. Holinshed had condensed his chief source *Halle considerably, excising some of the moral comment and narrating events in his own plainer style. Although Shakespeare probably used Halle in the original, his main source for the history plays was Holinshed’s Chronicles (1587). Indeed, it stands alongside North’s *Plutarch as his primary dramatic source, providing material for Macbeth, King Lear, and Cymbeline, as well as for all the English history plays. Shakespeare’s borrowings vary from details of plot and character to the paraphrasing of whole speeches. Perhaps more interesting, though less tangible, is Holinshed’s historiographic influence. The Chronicles is the work of a number of writers drawing upon different historical sources. The juxtaposition of various opinions, often with little attempt to arbitrate between them, makes for a more complex and non-committal view of history than was usual. Shakespeare’s history plays are full of such ambiguities. The most obvious example is the tension in Henry V between different representations of the King. In his account of the reign, Holinshed includes a eulogy to Henry but also describes the King’s troubled conscience on his deathbed and laments the human cost of the French wars. The tensions in Shakespeare’s play may reflect Holinshed’s divided mind.
Jane Kingsley-Smith
Holland. See Dutch wars; Low Countries.
Holland, Henry. See Exeter, Duke of.
Holland, Hugh (d. 1633), poet. A fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, Holland contributed a sonnet to the First Folio (1623). Shakespeare is eulogized for ‘dainty Plays’ and especially for ‘Tragedies’. After the Globe’s applause, he has gone to ‘Death’s public tiring-house’.
Park Honan
Holland, John. See Bevis, George.
Holland, Philemon. See Livy; Pliny; Plutarch.
Hollar, Wenceslaus (1607–77), Czech engraver, active in England 1636–77. From drawings made at the top of *St Mary Overies church (now Southwark Cathedral), he executed the celebrated topographical Long View of London (engraving, 1647). The work depicts both sides of the Thames and includes the most reliable picture we have of the exterior of the second Globe, as well as other *Bankside theatres. This ambitious engraving was etched onto six plates and is annotated with names of the chief buildings depicted.
Catherine Tite
Hollow Crown, The. See television.
Holm, Sir Ian (b. 1931), British actor. His long association with the *Royal Shakespeare Company dates from 1964. Small of stature, he was cast in parts like Ariel, Puck, and Lear’s Fool, but in the history cycle The Wars of the Roses he played Richard Crookback and went on to trace Prince Hal’s development from youthful roisterer to politically adroit king. In 1967 he experienced a trauma and could not face live audiences until 1993. He appeared memorably in films and in television. In 1997 in the intimate Cottesloe at the National Theatre he was a great King Lear in a production later televised.
Michael Jamieson
Holofernes, a schoolmaster in Love’s Labour’s Lost, takes the part of Judas Maccabeus in the performance of ‘The Nine Worthies’, 5.2. He was probably based on the stock pedant of the *commedia dell’arte, though various scholars have suggested a real-life original: John *Florio, Richard Mulcaster, or Thomas Hunt.
Anne Button
Holst, Gustav (1874–1934), English composer. Holst’s one-act opera At the Boar’s Head, Op. 42 (1924), is based on the tavern scenes from Henry IV, and uses traditional 17th-century English dance music. It also includes settings of Sonnets 12 and 19. Holst earlier set ‘It was a lover and his lass’ as a partsong (1890s) and ‘Come away death’ as a six-voice madrigal (c.1900).
Irena Cholij
Holy Trinity church, Stratford-upon-Avon, stands in all probability on the site of an Anglo-Saxon minster, established by the 8th century. A settlement grew up around it, which was left undisturbed when, at the end of the 12th century, a new town was laid out on land to the north. This explains why today the church stands some distance from what is now the town centre. The success of this new town led to a rapid growth in population and, in the middle of the 13th century, to an almost complete rebuilding of the church. This is represented today by the transepts which have survived further periods of reconstruction. In the early 14th century the two nave aisles were rebuilt and the tower arch reconstructed. At the same time, a chantry was established, served by five priests, who soon afterwards assumed full control of the church. The rector became warden (later dean) and a college for the priests was built on adjoining land to the west. At the end of the 15th century, the old chancel was completely rebuilt by Dean Thomas Balsall, but leaving undisturbed an earlier building built against the north wall, the basement part of which became a charnel house. The last major alteration was made soon afterwards, probably under the direction of Balsall’s successor Ralph Collingwood, when a clerestory was built above the nave arcades, the roof raised, and the great west window inserted. Subsequent alterations and restorations have not altered fundamentally the appearance of the church, with the exception of the present spire, added in 1763 to replace a smaller timbered one, and the demolition of the charnel house building around 1800.
The college was suppressed at the Reformation in 1553 and its property, including the tithes, confiscated by the Crown. In 1553, the income from these tithes was granted to the newly formed Stratford Corporation, out of which it was to pay the vicar’s salary.
Several 17th-century accounts survive of visits to Holy Trinity church, specifically and often exclusively containing mention of Shakespeare’s grave and effigy, but the first account to imply that the visitor had been drawn there as an act of homage is William Hall’s of 1694. However, it is clear that, even when the Birthplace and Anne Hathaway’s Cottage had been identified, the church remained for many years the principal item on the visitor’s itinerary.
Robert Bearman
Holywell. The Liberty of Holywell, in the parish of St Leonard’s, Shoreditch, was where the *Theatre (1576) and *Curtain (1577/8) playhouses were built. The Liberty’s name and status was derived from a well within the Augustinian priory of St John the Baptist, Holywell, located between Shoreditch High Street and *Finsbury fields.
Simon Blatherwick
Homer is generally identified as the author of the two seminal epic poems of the classical world, the Iliad and the Odyssey. The earliest written versions of what were originally oral poems date from the middle of the 8th century bc.
The Iliad dramatizes the siege of the city of Troy or Ilion (as it was also known) in Asia Minor by a Greek expedition led by Agamemnon of Mycenae. The purpose of the Trojan War was to recover Helen of Sparta, the beautiful wife of Menelaus, Agamemnon’s brother. She had been abducted by Paris of Troy. The Odyssey tells of the turbulent return home from Troy to Ithaca of the resourceful Odysseus. It was his ruse of the wooden horse which caused the fall of Troy.
Shakespeare did not know Homeric epic in the Greek original, but he probably would have seen a version of George Chapman’s Seven Books of the Iliads (1598) or Arthur Hall’s Ten Books of Homer’s Iliads (1581) before writing the satirical and anti-heroic Trojan War play Troilus and Cressida. The Troy story was, however, available in a number of other classical sources that Shakespeare knew well, such as Aeneid 2 (the source of most of the Troy material in Hamlet), and Ovid’s Metamorphoses 13.
René Weis
homoeroticism. See sexuality.
homosexuality. See sexuality.
‘Honour, riches, marriage, blessing’, sung by Ceres and Juno in The Tempest 4.1.106; the original music is unknown.
Jeremy Barlow
Hooker, Richard (?1554–1600), theologian. He wrote Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, first published in 1593. This robust defence of the Church of England contains an eloquent passage on the necessity of Order, on which Shakespeare drew for Ulysses’ speech on degree in Troilus and Cressida (1.3).
Cathy Shrank
Hope theatre. See animal shows; flags; Henslowe, Philip; Swan theatre.
Horatio is Hamlet’s confidant in Hamlet.
Anne Button
Hordern, Sir Michael (1911–95), British actor. Coming to Stratford in 1952 as a mature actor, he played Jaques, Menenius, and Caliban, occasionally giving by his inflections new point to familiar lines. At the *Old Vic from 1953 his successes included Polonius, King John, Malvolio, Cassius, and Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida. Under Jonathan *Miller’s meticulous, probing direction he played a very human King Lear, first on stage and later on BBC television. At Stratford in 1978 he was Prospero; and in Love’s Labour’s Lost his Don Armado recalled Don Quixote.
Michael Jamieson
horn. Made from animal horn or metal, it is a signalling instrument for huntsmen (The Taming of the Shrew Induction 1.13), messengers (Richard Duke of York 3.3.160), and sowgelders.
Jeremy Barlow
Horner, Thomas, an armourer accused of treason by his servant Peter Thump The First Part of the Contention (2 Henry VI) 1.3. Gloucester sentences them to single combat, which the terrified Thump wins 2.3.98, Horner confessing as he dies. A historical account (eventually published in John Noorthouck’s New History of London, 1773) says that the armourer (William Catur) entered the lists drunk (at Smithfield, 1446) and was killed by his servant (John David) who later confessed slander.
Anne Button
hornpipe. Little is known about the dance in Shakespeare’s time. The music was in triple metre; the common-time ‘sailor’s’ hornpipe is much more recent. Also a reed instrument incorporating an animal horn.
Jeremy Barlow
horses are the second most frequently named animals in Shakespeare (after *dogs). They include Sir *Andrew Aguecheek’s Capulet (Twelfth Night 3.4.278) and *Hector’s Galathe (Troilus and Cressida 5.5.20). They are very frequently mentioned throughout the plays, as means of transport (‘Therefore to horse, | And let us not be dainty of leave-taking, | But shift away’, Macbeth 2.3.142–4) and as possessions of value (‘The King, sir, hath wagered with him six Barbary horses’, Hamlet 5.2.112). In Shakespeare’s day horses were also essential in battle as Richard III finds out to his cost. The importance of the horse for the combatant is parodied by Shakespeare in Bourbon’s panegyric to his ‘mistress’ Pegasus, Henry V 3.7.
Anne Button
Hortensio, Lucentio’s rival for Bianca in The Taming of the Shrew, forswears her for a widow.
Anne Button
Hortensius’ Servant, Titus’ Servant, and Philotus’ Servant (servants of Timon’s creditors) appear in Timon of Athens 3.4, to demand repayment of debts.
Anne Button
Hostess. (1) She berates Sly in The Taming of the Shrew (Induction 1), and could be the ‘fat alewife’ named as Marian Hacket (Induction 2.20). (2) See also Quickly, Mistress.
Anne Button
hosts. (1) The Host of Julia’s lodgings takes her (disguised as ‘Sebastian’) to see Proteus serenade Silvia. (2) The Host of the Garter Inn loses his horses in The Merry Wives of Windsor 4.5 (probably Evans and Caius’ plot, see 3.1.109–12), and helps Fenton win Anne Page.
Anne Button
Hôtel de Bourgogne, the first public theatre in France, built in 1548 in the market district of Paris and used for over 200 years. The theatre was built in a rectangular room about 109 by 44 feet (33 × 13 m), the approximate size and shape of English indoor hall playhouses of Shakespeare’s time. The Hôtel de Bourgogne had an upper playing space and flying machinery, and its main stage could employ perspective scenery as well as the more traditional use of multiple stage ‘houses’ representing diverse locations.
Gabriel Egan
Hotson, Leslie (1897–1992), born in Canada, variously resident in America and England, a scholar specializing in literary detection from original documents, most famously in his Death of Christopher Marlowe (1925). Of his Shakespeare researches, Shakespeare versus Shallow (1931); I, William Shakespeare (1937); Shakespeare’s Sonnets Dated (1949); The First Night of ‘Twelfth Night’ (1954), and Mr W.H. (1964) all infer from contemporary documents and records a complex network of associations, allusions, and identifications (not always accepted by other scholars) among Shakespeare’s friends and acquaintances in London and Stratford—including Francis Langley, Thomas Russell, Leonard Digges, and William Hatcliffe. Shakespeare’s Wooden O (1959) offers an in-the-round reconstruction of the Elizabethan theatre.
Tom Matheson
Hotspur (Henry Percy) appears with his father Northumberland as a supporter of Bolingbroke in Richard II. In 1 Henry IV he leads the rebellion against Henry, but is killed by Prince Harry at *Shrewsbury, 5.4.85.
Historically, Harry Percy (1364–1403) was older than Henry IV, though Shakespeare casts him as a strong-willed and ambitious young counterpart to the dissipated Prince Harry. Stage productions of 1 Henry IV have traditionally played off the youthful, heroic tragedy of Hotspur against the mature, abundant comedy of the tavern scenes. There were many memorable 20th-century Hotspurs: Matheson Lang in Beerbohm *Tree’s production (1914) started a stage tradition which lasted for decades of giving Hotspur a stammer; and Laurence *Olivier’s dedication to the part extended to spending three hours each night putting on a ginger beard and wig (1945). The convention of playing this aristocrat with a working-class northern accent—followed, for example, by Timothy Dalton (1981)—dates from the 1950s.
Anne Button
housekeepers, the owners of a playhouse, to be distinguished from the sharers in a playing company, although from 1599 several Chamberlain’s Men (including Shakespeare) were both.
Gabriel Egan
Houseman, John (1902–88), American producer and director. Hungarian by birth, English by schooling, he collaborated with Orson *Welles in New York on the voodoo Macbeth and the anti-fascist Julius Caesar. He produced films in Hollywood, including Julius Caesar (1953). From 1956 to 1959 he directed the American Shakespeare Festival at Stratford, Connecticut. He published three volumes of memoirs.
Michael Jamieson
Howard, Alan (b. 1937), English actor. Gifted with a striking physique and what one reviewer called ‘the great voice of the classical stage’, Howard dominated the *Royal Shakespeare Company stage during the late 1960s and 1970s, playing nearly all the kings in the Terry *Hands-directed history cycle. He also doubled Theseus and Oberon in Peter *Brook’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1970–3) and played Coriolanus (1977) and Mark Antony in Antony and Cleopatra (1978). After leaving the stage in the 1980s to spend time with his family, he returned in the early 1990s, playing Macbeth (Royal National Theatre, 1993) and Lear (Old Vic, for Peter *Hall, 1997).
Bradley Ryner
Howard, James (c. 1630–c. 1680), author of a lost, late 17th-century adaptation of Romeo and Juliet. In his tragicomedy the lovers survived to heal the civil rifts.
Catherine Alexander
Howard, Thomas. See Surrey, Earl of.
Howes, Edmund (fl. 1607–31), chronicler. In a continuation he added to the fifth edition of John Stowe’s Annals of England (1614), Howes in 1615 listed ‘excellent Poets’ of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. With attention to various ‘priorities’ including social rank, he places ‘Shakespeare gentleman’ thirteenth, among 27 poets.
Park Honan
‘How should I your true love know’, sung by Ophelia, to her own lute accompaniment, in Hamlet 4.5.23. The opening words, and also a tune apparently sung at Drury Lane in the late 18th century, both relate to the 16th-century ballad ‘Walsingham’; in this, an old man, driven mad by lost love in his youth, asks a traveller from Walsingham if he or she has seen his true love. The ballad tune was used for fine sets of keyboard variations by William *Byrd and John Bull.
Jeremy Barlow
Hubert takes Arthur into custody, and under John’s orders he prepares to put out his eyes, but he is unable to complete the task, King John 4.1. Hubert de Burgh (d. 1243), Duke of Kent, was a powerful statesman during the reigns of John and Henry III.
Anne Button
Hudson, Henry Norman (1814–86), American scholar and cleric. He published Lectures on Shakespeare (1848); an edition (1852–7); and Shakespeare: His Life, Art, and Characters (2 vols., 1872). According to Hudson the Sonnets are exercises, only thrown into the form of personal address—those addressed to the young man being in fact to Anne *Hathaway.
Tom Matheson
Hughes, Margaret (d. 1719), one of the first English professional actresses. She appeared with the King’s Company in the 1660s, possibly as Desdemona, and played Charmian in Sedley’s version of Antony and Cleopatra. The mistress of Prince Rupert, she is the subject of a provocative portrait by Lely.
Catherine Alexander
Hughes, Ted (Edward James) (1930–98), English Poet Laureate, 1984–98. Hughes once chided his first wife, the poet Sylvia Plath, with knowing only thirteen of Shakespeare’s plays, and in both his reading and writing he returned always to Shakespeare. His poetic preoccupation with birds, animals, and the English countryside (even in their more savage and destructive aspects) does seem to suggest Shakespearian affinities. Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being (1992) attempted, without convincing all readers, to identify his own mythic and mystic obsessions in the works of Shakespeare, focusing particularly on Venus and Adonis and King Lear. Tales from Ovid (1998) vividly translates the mythic murders, rapes, and mutilations of Shakespeare’s favourite author for a modern audience, and was itself dramatized for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1999. The final moving moment of Hughes’s thanksgiving service in Westminster Abbey on 13 May 1999 was the unidentified, disembodied, recorded voice of the dead poet reciting the dirge from Cymbeline.
Tom Matheson
Hughes, William, an identity hypothesized by Thomas Tyrwhitt (1730–86) from line 7 of Sonnet 20: ‘A man in hue, all hues in his controlling.’ Oscar *Wilde adopts the name for the beautiful boy actor in Portrait of Mr W.H. Samuel Butler discovered a sea-cook of this name.
Stanley Wells
Hugo, François-Victor (1828–73), French translator. Former journalist and second son of the distinguished man of letters, artist, and politician Victor Hugo, he translated the whole Shakespearian corpus into French in fifteen volumes after the Folio (but he adopted a different genre classification, and included two translations of Hamlet based on the early quarto) during his family’s political exile to Guernsey. Although still a literary milestone, this prose version never found its way to the stage.
Isabelle Schwartz-Gastine
Hugo, Victor Marie (1802–85), French poet, playwright, and novelist. One of the beacons of the Romantic reform movement, Hugo was among the most fervent partisans of English drama during the Restoration period in France. With the inception of his literary salon, the ‘Cénacle’ (1829), bourgeois and anticlerical liberals joined the aristocratic and monarchist Romantics with the intention of overthrowing the old school of their classical forefathers. Hugo’s rallying forces promulgated a new dramatic style capable of expressing not only the supple laws of nature through the run-on line, but above all the unruly spirit of Shakespeare through the alliance of tragic and comic genres. In his ‘Preface’ to Cromwell (1830) Hugo cited Shakespeare as his precedent for defending the total autonomy of the aesthetic voice. In proclaiming ‘The poet must only take counsel from nature, from truth and from inspiration which is also a form of truth and nature,’ Hugo planted the seeds of dramatic discontent which would trigger off ‘the battle of Hernani’ in 1830. He later published an equally enthusiastic critical study, William Shakespeare (1864).
Alice Clark
Hull, Thomas (1728–1808), Anglo-Irish actor and playwright. He played a wide range of secondary roles—Friar Laurence, Buckingham, Edgar, Pisanio—in Dublin, Bath, and, from 1759, Covent Garden. He adapted Shadwell’s Timon of Athens, abridged The Winter’s Tale, and wrote two versions of The Comedy of Errors.
Catherine Alexander
humanism is a philosophical and critical system of values with several applications relevant to Shakespeare: (1) the Renaissance revival of interest in the secular Greek and Latin classics, literae humaniores; (2) human experience as the criterion for man’s knowledge of himself, God, and Nature; (3) the attribution of positive value to individual human life.
Shakespeare and the French essayist Montaigne (1533–92) may be regarded as foremost among contemporaries in their consistent expression of humanist values. The related term ‘liberal humanist’, implying rational tolerance for a plurality of critical opinion, has in recent times become as derogatory in the mouths of the more doctrinaire literary theorists as ‘humanist’ itself once was in those of religious absolutists.
Tom Matheson
Hume, Sir John. In The First Part of the Contention (2 Henry VI) he is bribed by Cardinal Beaufort and Suffolk to undermine the Duchess of Gloucester. With fellow priest John Southwell, two unnamed priests, Roger Bolingbroke, and Margery Jordan, he is arrested for performing witchcraft. Hume, Southwell, Bolingbroke, and Jordan are condemned to death, 2.3.5–8.
Anne Button
humours. The theory of the four humours was one of the cornerstones of European *medicine from antiquity to the Renaissance. Based on writings found in the Hippocratic corpus and then disseminated more widely in the works of the Greco-Roman physician Galen, humoral theory held that the human body was composed of four liquid substances called humours, which included blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. When these substances were in balance, the body was healthy, but when the organs produced one or two humours in excess then disease ensued. According to this medical system, all bodies were slightly prone to a particular humour, and this in turn influenced both a person’s physical appearance and his or her personality. Those inclined towards blood were thought to be ruddy, fair, plump, and of a ‘sanguine’ or cheerful disposition; those tending towards phlegm of a pale, limp, and languid nature; those prone to black bile of a dark, thin, and melancholic temperament; and those dominated by yellow bile of a fiery, hot-tempered, and choleric character. Each of the four humours was connected to the four elements, the four seasons of the year, the four stages of human life, the four times of the day, etc., meaning that this system of medical knowledge easily mapped onto other philosophical, scientific, and astrological ways of understanding human life and the natural world. The connections between humours inside the body and elements and seasons outside it also helped create a view of the world in which inner and outer modes of existence were imagined to be more intimately connected than was the case in later centuries.
Erin Sullivan
Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester. See Gloucester, Duke of.
Hungary. The genesis of Hungarian Shakespeare is strongly linked with the cultural movements of national awakening of the late 18th century. After sporadic references to the playwright (György Szerdahelyi, 1776; György Bessenyei, 1777), the first translations were based on German adaptations: Romeo and Juliet (Sándor Kun Szabó, 1786), Hamlet (Ferenc Kazinczy, 1790). Kazinczy’s Hamlet was the text of the first Shakespeare performance in Hungarian (1793, Kolozsvár (Cluj)).
The reformation and standardization of the vernacular played a central role in Hungarian nation formation and Shakespeare’s plays were ideal touchstones for these efforts. Parallel with the initiatives to found the Hungarian National Theatre in Pest (1837) there were repeated demands to translate all of Shakespeare’s plays directly from English. The greatest translations of the first half of the 19th century still belong to the national canon of the Hungarian Shakespeare today: Julius Caesar (1847) and King Lear (1856) by Mihály Vörösmarty and Coriolanus (1848) by Sándor Petőfi.
A decade after the abortive war of independence against Habsburg Austria (1848–9), Anasztáz Tomori initiated and financed the translations of Shakespeare’s complete works. János Arany became a central figure in the enterprise: in addition to co-ordinating the work in general, he translated Hamlet (1867), King John (1867), and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1864). He was a dominant member of the first Hungarian Shakespeare Committee (1860), under whose aegis the first complete series of Shakespeare plays was published between 1864 and 1878.
The second Committee was established (1907) to promote further Shakespeare studies in Hungary. Its publication series (Magyar Shakespeare-tár, 1908–22) offered valuable contributions to historical scholarship. Its plans to revise and republish the existing translations were frustrated by the two World Wars and were only completed in 1948 (ed. László Országh and Kálmán Ruttkay). This edition included a few classical translations but was mainly dominated by new works by outstanding poets and translators such as Mihály Babits, Dezső Kosztolányi, Dezső Mészöly, Miklós Radnóti, György Somlyó, Lőrinc Szabó, and István Vas.
In the first half of the 20th century, Shakespeare became an ‘in-house’ author of the Hungarian National Theatre. The most celebrated directors of their time produced memorable ‘Shakespeare cycles’: Sándor Hevesi (director of the National: 1922–32) and Antal Németh (1935–44). After the war, Shakespeare’s popularity continued: there were eight Shakespeare productions in the National Theatre between 1945 and 1949. During the 1950s, Shakespeare was claimed to be a ‘proto-communist’ author: his plays were heavily appropriated by socialist realism. In 1955 an edition of Shakespeare plays was published (with more than a dozen new translations) and the poems were added in 1961. (Both were edited by László Kéry.) In the 1960s actor Miklós Gábor’s outstanding performances as Hamlet, Romeo, Iago, and Richard III were internationally acclaimed.
The third Hungarian Shakespeare Committee was founded in 1987; its president, István Géher, edited with Mária Borbás a collection of Shakespeare translations as well as, with Tibor Fabiny, a volume of essays on Shakespeare (Új Magyar Shakespeare-tár) in 1988. After the collapse of the Iron Curtain in 1989, Hungarian Shakespeare became significantly more international: more and more Hungarian directors, theatre troupes, scholars, and students of Shakespeare have been travelling, studying, and working abroad and—vice versa—an increasing number of foreign productions and Shakespearians have been visiting Hungary. Hungarian scholars’ recent monographs published in the UK and the US—such as those by Péter Dávidházi and Veronika Schandl—have helped to expand the dialogue on Shakespeare between Hungary and other countries.
In the new millennium, Shakespeare has frequently been evoked as a stimulating and contested cultural vehicle for negotiating the challenges of globalization in local contexts; as such, he has been enjoying a renaissance in Hungary. A host of new translations have been completed recently; the current president of the Hungarian Shakespeare Committee is a translator, Ádám Nádasdy. His translations, along with those by István Eörsi, György Jánosházy, Dániel Varró, and others, have offered a more up-to-date and stage-friendly Shakespeare to theatre directors and audiences alike. Since its foundation in 2005, the annual International Shakespeare Festival in Gyula has been a significant venue of this global/local Hungarian Shakespeare.
Zoltán Márkus
Hunnis, William (d. 1597), Master of the Chapel Royal (1566–97), poet, composer. Hunnis, together with Richard Farrant and Henry Evans, ran the first Blackfriars playhouse from 1576 to 1584.
Gabriel Egan
Hunsdon, George Carey, 2nd Lord (1547–1603), Lord Chamberlain from 1597. Despite being patron of Lord Hunsdon’s—later the *Chamberlain’s—Men, Hunsdon petitioned against *Burbage’s plans for a playhouse at *Blackfriars in 1596, resistance which forced Burbage to move to the south bank when the Theatre’s lease ran out in 1599.
Cathy Shrank
Hunsdon, Henry Carey, 1st Lord (1526–96), Lord Chamberlain from 1583 to his death in 1596. He was patron of Shakespeare’s acting company (later the Chamberlain’s Men), formed in 1594. His mistress Emilia *Lanier was proposed by A. L. Rowse as a candidate for the *Dark Lady of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.
Cathy Shrank
Hunsdon’s Men. See Chamberlain’s Men/King’s Men.
Hunt, Hugh (1911–93), British director. Younger brother of the mountaineer Lord Hunt, he became after war service the first director of the Bristol Old Vic, 1945–9. His success led to his taking over the *Old Vic Company in London after the departure of Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson. Under his regime the Vic moved from the West End to its restored theatre in Lambeth. Hunt’s book Old Vic Prefaces (1954) outlined his own directorial approach. He later ran the Elizabethan Theatre Trust in *Australia and in 1961 became the first professor of drama at Manchester University.
Michael Jamieson
Hunt, Leigh (1784–1859), English writer and dramatic critic, who from 1805 in the Examiner and other journals chronicled one of the great periods of English acting, a task to which he was ideally suited. No admirer of the stately John Philip Kemble, Hunt was prevented, being in prison, from seeing Edmund Kean’s debut as Shylock in 1814 and proclaimed his disappointment at his Richard III, but was won over by his Othello, which he hailed as ‘the masterpiece of the living stage’.
Richard Foulkes
Hunt, Simon, master of Stratford grammar school from 1571 to 1575 after graduating from Oxford in 1568. He may have been the Simon Hunt who matriculated from the University of Douai in 1575, became a Jesuit in 1578, and died at Rome in 1585, but another man of the same name died in Stratford in or before 1598, leaving £100.
Stanley Wells
hunting and sports. Belarius in Cymbeline hunts for his daily food, but his circumstances are special. Hunting in Shakespeare is normally for exercise or sport. The animals said to be hunted include lion, panther, bear, wolf, hare, boar, fox, and deer. Only deer, however, are treated in a way that seems to reflect personal knowledge and experience. The other animals are stereotypes for ferocity or, in the case of the hare and the fox, resourcefulness and cunning. But deer are referred to and deer-hunting scenes presented with a wealth of technical terms correctly used and from a large number of different aspects. We hear of ‘a jolly troop of huntsmen’ with their horns and hounds, see keepers carrying crossbows, are told of poachers breaking into parks and rascal deer breaking out of them, of stags locking horns, and of the ceremonies at the end of a hunt. We are invited to sympathize with the deer at bay that does not know which way to turn and with the fatally wounded deer ‘straying in the park, seeking to hide herself’. There are also constant puns and double entendres (heart/hart, deer/dear, suitor/shooter, stand) which would have fallen flat if stag-hunting had not been recognized as a part of real life even though most people could not afford to take part in it themselves.
The same is true of falconry. Though birds could be shot (Taming of the Shrew 5.2.47–51), they are far more often said to be flown at. Direct descriptions of falconry or allusions to it by way of simile or metaphor occur throughout the plays and cover every aspect of the sport. We are assumed to know how hawks are caught and trained and flown, how strong their sex-drive is, how their young behave, and are even expected to recognize the technical term (‘imp’) for repairing a broken wing (Richard II 2.1.294). Nevertheless, Shakespeare does not use what Ben Jonson’s young bucks call ‘the Hawking language’ (Underwood 44.72) if that means the pretentious and archaizing jargon of the falconry manuals. Instead his language seems to have been that of practising falconers. The likelihood is that he spoke of falconry from his own personal experience, as is also suggested by his having chosen a falcon to figure in his family coat of arms.
Fishing, conducted by line, hook (or ‘angle’), and bait, is recognized by Shakespeare as a gentleman’s occupation. Antony spent his days fishing (Antony and Cleopatra 1.4.4) and the Wooer in Two Noble Kinsmen (4.1.53 ff.) went ‘angling in the great lake that lies behind the palace’. But such moments are rare. Nearly all allusions to it are metaphorical and confined to its more obvious aspects, like fishing for approval (‘great opinion’) in Troilus and Cressida 4.4.103. One may therefore suppose that the sport held little attraction for Shakespeare. Indeed if Cleopatra’s remark about fish with a hook in their ‘slimy jaws’ (Antony and Cleopatra 2.5.13) reflects personal sentiment he may have found it positively unpleasant.
The most important pastime in Shakespeare’s plays, however—if any activity with such drastic consequences can be called such—is fencing, and here again the playwright both displays and presumes an extensive and up-to-date technical vocabulary. The rapier—a narrow, two-edged, lightweight, and pointed sword—had only been introduced into England around the middle of the 16th century, and the language used by fashionable fencing manuals (and, less reputably, by professional fencing instructors, who enjoyed the same vagabond status as common players) was still largely Italian. Mercutio, for example, ridiculing what he regards as Tybalt’s pedantic duelling style, mimics him with the words ‘Ah, the immortal passado, the punto reverso, the hai’ (Romeo and Juliet 2.3.23–4), while the more Anglicizing Host in The Merry Wives of Windsor tells Caius he hopes ‘To see thee fight, to see thee foin, to see thee traverse…to see thee pass thy punto, thy stock, thy reverse, thy distance, thy montant’ (2.3.22–5). Although all gentlemen were expected to be adepts at self-defence (the word ‘fence’ is merely an abbreviation of ‘defence’, and Shakespeare uses the two forms interchangeably), duelling with the rapier was associated with an over-scrupulous obsession with personal honour (as dramatized in Thomas *Middleton and William *Rowley’s A Fair Quarrel, 1617): characteristically, Shakespeare explores both the tragic possibilities of this vogue (in Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet) and the comic (in the abortive duel between Viola and Aguecheek in Twelfth Night, and in Touchstone’s disquisition on ‘the lie direct’ in As You Like It). These depictions of the modern rapier are a far cry from Shakespeare’s treatment of the medieval broadsword, still associated with the now-obsolete trial by single combat (as in Richard II 1.3), but increasingly felt to be a vulgar weapon for common brawlers (cf. Hotspur’s dismissive reference to the slumming Prince Harry as ‘that same sword-and-buckler Prince of Wales’, 1 Henry IV 1.3.228).
‘A braggart, a rogue, a villain, that fights by the book of arithmetic!’ (Romeo and Juliet 3.1.101–2). The continental ‘geometrical’ method of fencing scorned by Mercutio,from the aptly-named Gerauld Thibault’s L’Academie de l’espée (1618).
Maurice Pope
Huntington Library, San Marino, California. It specializes in English and American literature, history, and art. It holds 50% of the titles printed in England before 1641 and 95% of all English plays and masques of the period, including a collection of early Shakespeare editions second only to the *Folger’s in the USA.
Susan Brock
Huntsman. He reluctantly accompanies the freed Edward IV, whom he was supposed to be guarding, Richard Duke of York (3 Henry VI) 4.6.
Anne Button
huntsmen, two. They accompany the Lord, The Taming of the Shrew Induction 1.
Anne Button
‘hunt’s up, The’, a popular 16th-century ballad tune mentioned by Juliet in Romeo and Juliet 3.5.34.
Jeremy Barlow
Huon de Bourdeaux, a French romance, translated into English in 1534, and possibly adapted for the stage in the early 1590s, features a fairy king called Oberon. In anticipation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the romance associates Oberon with a forest in which travellers expect enchantment. It also asserts that the humans’ future happiness will depend upon the fairy’s generosity.
Jane Kingsley-Smith
Hutt, William ( 1920–2007), Canadian actor, director. Noted for his crisp voice, extremely technical acting style, and captivating stage presence, due partly to his 6-foot 2-inch (1.87 m), height Hutt has been a mainstay of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival (Ontario) since 1953. His roles include: Lear—which he has played four times, first as a member of the Canadian Players (1962) then three times at Stratford (Ontario), most recently in 1996—Prospero (1975, 1999), and Leonato (1998). Directing credits include As You Like It (1972) and All Is True (Henry VIII) (1986). In 1969, he was made Companion of the Order of Canada, Canada’s highest honour.
Bradley Ryner
Hymen is the god of marriage. (1) He presents Rosalind to her father and Orlando in the last scene of As You Like It. (2) He leads the wedding procession at the beginning of The Two Noble Kinsmen.
Anne Button
hyperbole, rhetorical exaggeration:
His legs bestrid the ocean; his reared arm Crested the world.
(Antony and Cleopatra 5.2.81–2)
Chris Baldick
Hytner, Sir Nicholas (b. 1956), British theatre director and artistic director of the *National Theatre from 2003 to 2015. After an early career in opera, Hytner rose to fame in 1989 as a result of his work as director of Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schonberg’s musical Miss Saigon. He became an associate director at the NT under the leadership of Richard *Eyre and later ascended to the associate directorship himself. During his tenure the NT introduced a more diverse repertoire, Sunday openings, a highly subsidized low-cost ticket scheme for the majority of its productions, and the *live-broadcasting of a selection of its productions to cinemas around the world through the NT Live series. All of his theatre work since 2003 has been for the National and notable productions of Shakespeare and other early modern drama have included a military-inspired Othello starring Adrian *Lester and Rory *Kinnear (2013), a police-state Hamlet also starring Kinnear, and a riotous The Alchemist with Simon *Russell Beale and Alex *Jennings (2006). His Shakespearian work tends towards modern-dress productions with clear directorial concepts and large, naturalistic sets, the latter perhaps reflective of his time in the opera house.
Erin Sullivan