“But I have that within which passeth show”

Brilliant stage craftsman though he was, there is evidence in the Sonnets to suggest that, paradoxically, Shakespeare disliked, even despised, his profession as actor and playwright. If we do not discount the presence of the biographical element in the Sonnets, then corroborative evidence—especially from Hamlet—might help to explain why the three tragedies written after Hamlet are so different from Hamlet. Evidence from the Sonnets of Shakespeare’s distaste for his profession has, of course, been noted in Shakespearean criticism, but, as far as I am aware, the presence of such an attitude in Hamlet has never been suggested. I propose to argue that, while Hamlet is unquestionably an outstanding theatrical success, the play nevertheless encapsulates the conflict within the author that I have outlined above and marks a turning point in the trajectory of the tragedies.

It is ironic that, despite Hamlet’s advice to the players to exercise restraint, many of Hamlet’s own speeches demand a display of excessive emotion—“Angels and ministers of grace defend us!” (1.4.39), “O all you host of heaven!” (1.5.92), “For Hecuba! / What’s Hecuba to him, or he to [Hecuba]” (2.2.558-59), “Look here upon this picture, and on this” (3.4.53).^[1] It is as though Shakespeare created a paradox here, investing his most thoughtful and intellectual creation with an unlimited capacity for histrionics—more so, in fact, than any other character in the canon. I shall argue that this intriguing contradiction is a vignette of the larger contradiction that this paper seeks to put forward and develop.

Though well known, Sonnets 110 and 111, being central to my argument, require a fresh look. In the former, Shakespeare laments his putting on of various stage identities as actor—“Alas, ’tis true, I have gone here and there, / And made myself a motley to the view, / Gor’d mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear . . . ” (ll. 1-3)—resulting in the obliteration of his own identity. In the latter, he enlarges on the subject, deploring his creation as a writer of the many masks that have concealed him from the public:

As will be recalled, in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, when Sybil, who acts Juliet, realizes that Dorian has fallen in love with her, the quality of her acting becomes abysmally bad, to the chagrin of Dorian and the exasperation of Lord Henry. Backstage, after the play is over, when Dorian remonstrates with her, this is her explanation:

Sybil’s experience is somewhat similar to what Shakespeare expresses in the Sonnets, the writing of which may well have coincided with the period during which he was writing Hamlet. The prince, disgusted by the curtailing of a decent mourning period for his dead father, appears in court clad in black, an alien amid the gaiety of Claudius’s first public appearance as king. Hamlet is onstage, as it were, the cynosure of all eyes, yet to his mother he repudiates his actor-like stance and stresses an inner identity that the mask only poorly represents:

Rejecting the “suits of woe” that he has himself donned, Hamlet is in the conflicted position of both endorsing and dismissing “play”—a contradiction that I see in Shakespeare’s attitude to his professional life, on the one hand, and his feelings on the other. As John Turner observes, Shakespeare’s “new theatre . . . tends always to deconstruct itself” (153). Richard P. Wheeler has sensitively explored Shakespeare’s feelings after the loss of his eleven-year-old son, Hamnet, twin brother of Judith, and the imaginative recovery of the loss through the magical reunion of Viola and Sebastian, her “dead” twin brother, toward the close of Twelfth Night (5.1.230-33, 242-45).

And yet more recently, Stephen Greenblatt has suggested that the truncated funeral rites accompanying Ophelia’s burial (5.1.215-31) could be a reflection of what Shakespeare himself saw, standing by the grave of his son in 1596, by which time the Reformation had long since suppressed the old Catholic practices “of candles burning night and day, crosses everywhere, bells tolling constantly . . . neighbors visiting the corpse and saying over it a Pater Noster or a De profundis” (46). However, the dramatist’s attitude to his profession, as far as I know, has not been examined, especially with reference to Hamlet’s detailed instructions to the players on their acting styles. Nor has attention been paid to the fact that the three great tragedies Shakespeare wrote after Hamlet are markedly different in tone from Hamlet.

The great tragic figures who come after Hamlet—Othello, Macbeth, Antony, Cleopatra, Lear, Timon, Coriolanus—are, when compared to Hamlet, simple-minded, non-intellectual, non-complex characters: Shakespeare never repeats a Hamlet. It would be superfluous—even tedious—to labor the point by citing similar opinions from the vast body of critical writing on this theme; hence I will offer only one example, expressed recently by a medico-legal expert who is not a professional Shakespearean critic. Alan Stone, professor of law and psychiatry at Harvard Law School and Harvard Medical School and former president of the American Psychiatric Association, who, as a prosecution witness at “The Trial of Hamlet,” while refuting the plea of insanity at the time of the killing of Polonius, said this in reply to a question from the defense: “I can tell you, in all my experience I have never seen a more brilliant, more profound mind than Prince Hamlet’s in any person I have had the experience of talking to or evaluating.”

That the character of Hamlet comes close to Shakespeare’s own personality has, of course, been a staple of Shakespearean biographical criticism over the past three hundred years. Speculative though such a view is, the circumstantial evidence seems overwhelming. Hamlet is the longest of Shakespeare’s plays, exceeding the acting time of plays during his age. G. R. Hibbard has perceptively observed, “The very length of the tragedy [Q2], even in the Folio version, almost invites one to speculate that Shakespeare composed it, at the compulsive urging of his daimon, for his own satisfaction. . . . It is almost as though the creative impulse refuses, for once, to heed the practical limitations and demands of the theatre” (1-2). And Y. S. Bains has pointed out that “there are bits and pieces of evidence to confirm that Shakespeare had worked on Hamlet for more than ten years from the late 1580s to about 1603. Even after the appearance of the Second Quarto, he altered the text slightly for the Folio” (Review 140-41).

The first acting version of the play, Ql (1603), which Gabriel Harvey may have seen in 1598, is less than half the length of Q2 (1604-5), which was, according to the title-page, “Newly imprinted and enlarged to almost as much again as it was.” Remarkably enough, this earlier, shorter version, as noted by Harvey in the margin of his edition of Chaucer published in 1598, seems to have impressed him as more poem than play, for he brackets it with the poems: “The younger sort,” he observes, “takes much delight in Shakespeares Venus & Adonis: but his Lucrece, & his tragedie of Hamlet, prince of Denmarke, have it in them, to please the wiser sort” (quoted in Stern 127). Indeed, some recent scholars see Hamlet as a poem. Rawdon Wilson, for instance, considers Hamlet “more like a metaphysical poem than either a tragedy or a comedy” (206), Helen Vendler names Hamlet “the greatest poem of the millennium” (123), and Harold Bloom, echoing Polonius, entitled his book Hamlet Poem Unlimited. Hamlet has the largest number of soliloquies in the canon, thus aligning it not only chronologically— as we have seen—with the writing of the Sonnets, but intrinsically as well. Hamlet’s seven soliloquies identify him more closely with the author of the Sonnets than any other character in the plays, the soliloquy and the sonnet being sister art forms focusing on feelings. One of the most striking instances, among several, of this affinity occurs in the correspondence between Hamlet’s dying words to Horatio and two lines from Sonnet 74. Hamlet’s “as this fell sergeant, Death, / Is strict in his arrest” (5.2.336-37) contains an echo of the opening lines of Sonnet 74, “But be contented when that fell arrest / Without all bail shall carry me away.” Speaking of their own deaths, both the dying Hamlet and Shakespeare the sonneteer verbalize a metaphorical visualization of Death coming with an unbailable warrant of arrest.

Regardless of our reaction to T. S. Eliot’s well-known and provocative indictment of Hamlet—“far from being Shakespeare’s masterpiece, the play is most certainly an artistic failure”—his observation in the same essay that “Hamlet, like the sonnets, is full of some stuff that the writer could not drag to light, contemplate, or manipulate into art” is nothing if not perceptive, though controversial. His recognition of the intertextuality between the Sonnets and Hamlet and his designating the latter as “the ‘Mona Lisa’ of literature” (123-24) are suggestive pointers toward the problematics the two texts have posed over the past four centuries. Philip Edwards argues that, as in the Sonnets, “the poet circles and recircles the same complex relationship, surveying and resurveying it”; likewise, in Hamlet, “the hero is trying to find himself, and the search for a commitment is as arduous for the author as for his creature” (108, 109). Margreta de Grazia points out that it was only in 1780, when Edmond Malone provided a full textual apparatus for the study of the Sonnets as related to Shakespeare’s subjective psychic life, that critics began to see anything interesting in Hamlet’s personality (158-204). Henry Mackenzie (1780), William Richardson (1783), and Thomas Robertson (1788) (quoted in Ralli 1:84-85, 89-91, 95-96) began the process of attempting to reconcile disparities in Hamlet’s behavior—features that Dr. Johnson had never remarked—and, from then onwards, the “interiority” of Hamlet became a subject of intense investigation, reaching its high watermark with Coleridge and the Romantics seeing themselves reflected in the prince (430-44). The Sonnets and Hamlet share an inwardness of feeling that the subsequent tragedies do not—for reasons that the remainder of this paper will develop.

The dichotomy between the fiction of theater and the stuff of life’s incertitude reaches a climax in Hamlet with the staging of The Murder of Gonzago. Hamlet’s plan is to employ drama in order to ferret out the truth or, put differently, to use fiction in order to uncover reality. Yet, during the performance of the play-within-the-play, he intrudes with interruptions, comments, and criticism. As if the fiction of the play is inadequate, he intervenes and amends it to suit his purpose, describing the murderer Lucianus as “nephew to the king” (3.2.244), not brother to the king, thus identifying himself with the murderer and brazenly threatening the king with regicide. This explains why, though he is jubilant at what he believes is his success in proving the king’s guilt, claiming to qualify for “a fellowship in a cry of players,” Horatio’s dry corrective, “Half a share” (3.2.277-79), tersely undercuts the boast. Far from proving the king’s guilt, he has now put Claudius on his guard against his nephew, who clearly has self-confessed designs on his life. But why, we must ask, does Shakespeare make Hamlet’s dissatisfaction with the players’ performance so pronounced a feature of the play-within-the-play if not to showcase the inadequacy of the contemporary state of the theater—which Hamlet deplores—to replicate life? Further, his dissatisfaction seems to encompass not merely the play-within-the-play but the whole contemporary philosophy of acting and, even more, of stage representation itself. Just prior to the staging of the play, he severely criticizes the acting styles of the players, admonishing “those that play your clowns [to] speak no more than is set down for them” (3.2.38-40)—a possible swipe at William Kempe, who had joined a rival company, and even denounces the Elizabethan audience for its propensity to laugh inappropriately, “though in the mean time some necessary question of the play be then to be considered” (3.2.42-43). He declares the dumb show to be “[miching] mallecho” and sarcastically asks whether the Prologue is “the posy of a ring” (3.2.137, 152).

I would like the reader’s indulgence for a brief digression. We know from our experience of watching stage or screen that our responses oscillate between seeing the role as character (if well done) or actor (if poorly done). More often than not, the performance is so poor that the actor eclipses the character. However, occasionally there are memorable performances when the actor is extinguished and the character is supreme. In Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, the Father underscores this distinction:

Hamlet watches two dramatic performances: the First Player’s rendering of Aeneas’s tale to Dido and The Murder of Gonzago, neither of which has his unqualified approval. Watching the former, Polonius is impressed by the First Player’s display of emotion—“Look whe’er he has not turn’d his color and has tears in ’s eyes” (2.2.519-20)—but Hamlet has reservations. He sees through the player’s visible signs of emotion to the professional actor beneath, strenuously endeavoring to impersonate in his narrative Pyrrhus and then Hecuba, and overdoing it, such displays being a form of “conceit,” a pejorative term that Hamlet uses twice within five lines:

Of course, Hamlet is being not a little unfair to the actor and his profession, but his objections give us an insight into the problematics of fiction versus truth, of the ersatz versus reality. For Hamlet, the actor’s working himself up to “force his soul so to his own conceit” and his arsenal of stage tricks like ‘“tears,” “distraction,” and “a broken voice” are but “forms to his conceit” (2.2.551-60), which Harold Jenkins explains “may have no external reality” (270n). Marvin Rosenberg remarks that, in Derek Jacobi’s television production, when Hamlet “went up to his Player, who seemed to be sobbing behind the hands covering his face, Jacobi gently pulled the hands away—and the Player was smiling, he was playing a joke” (436).

At the same time, it must be noted that Hamlet had initially warmly welcomed the players and later warned Polonius to entertain them hospitably, “for they are the abstract and brief chronicles of the time” (2.2.524-25), an ambivalence reflected in Shakespeare’s own attitude toward his profession. Hamlet’s conflicting responses to stage enactment are further manifest in his deep involvement with the Player Queen’s lines affirming her unshakeable loyalty to her husband even after his anticipated death: “Both here and hence pursue me lasting strife / If once a widow, ever I be wife!” (3.2.222-23). “If she should break it now,” Hamlet exclaims, a phenomenological projection of the Player Queen’s assertion onto his mother, who, like the Player Queen, has broken her vow. Yet, despite his deep emotional identification with the action at this point in the play-within-the-play, throughout its performance, he is contemptuous of its rendering, his exasperation reaching its culmination when he angrily castigates Lucianus: “Begin, murdtherer, leave thy damnable faces and begin. Come, the croaking raven doth bellow for revenge” (3.2.252-54). If his treatment of the players has been marked by ambivalence, his extended advice to them before the commencement of The Murder of Gonzago on their acting technique is categorically unsparing and has often been seen as Shakespeare himself stepping into Hamlet’s shoes, similar to, for instance, Henry Fielding’s comments on the art of fiction writing interspersed throughout Tom Jones. Further, it has been argued that the very irrelevance of such detailed advice at this point in the action, and especially since the actors disregard it in their performance, to Hamlet’s intense chagrin, is the justification for its being excised in many modern productions. True enough as far as the plot of Hamlet is concerned, but, as an indication of Shakespeare’s own quarrel with his contemporary theater professionals, the passage is revealing. Recommending restraint rather than excess, “to hold as ’twere the mirror up to nature” (3.2.21-22), Hamlet-Shakespeare’s advice is far ahead of the age, anticipating the late nineteenth-century naturalistic style of acting of which Stanislavsky was a noted practitioner, the movement giving birth to the drama of Anton Chekhov and Maxim Gorky. If, then, by extrapolation we conjecture that Hamlet’s diatribe against overacting could well have been directed against the most prominent actors of the time, Richard Burbage and Edward Alleyn, his advice is the corrective to their Elizabethan style of acting that was one of over-emphasis, exaggeration, a larger than life portrayal, of histrionics on a high decibel:

Burbage, for example, was particularly admired for his performance of Richard III (Wells 69; Holmes 32), the character about whom Bloom has this to say: “Richard’s gusto is more than theatrical; his triumphalism blends into theatricalism, and becomes Shakespeare’s celebration of his medium, and so of his rapidly developing art. To invent Richard is to have created a great monster” (Invention 73). Using Hamlet as his mouthpiece, Shakespeare denounces the contemporary style of delivery resembling that of “the town-crier” who “tear[s] a passion to tatters, to very rags, to spleet the ears of the groundlings, who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb shows and noise” (3.2.3, 9-12), an actual burlesque demonstration of Laertes’ ranting at Ophelia’s burial being given by Hamlet, concluding bitterly with the words, “Nay, and thou’lt mouth, / I’ll rant as well as thou” (5.1.283-84).

It is noteworthy that, after Hamlet, the three great tragedies that Shakespeare wrote provide ample scope for the histrionics of an actor like Burbage—for example, Othello’s “Like to the Pontic Sea” (3.3.453), Lear’s “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow!” (3.2.1), or Macbeth’s “Is this a dagger which I see before me, / The handle toward my hand?” (2.1.33-34). It is easy to imagine with what tremendous theatrical effect Burbage would have delivered these stupendous speeches. While Alleyn did not belong to Shakespeare’s acting company, the Chamberlain’s Men, but to a rival company, the Admiral’s Men, this would have made him, too, a natural target of criticism, perhaps even more so than Burbage, for, as Gabriel Egan points out, “Contemporary allusions suggest that Alleyn was an unusually large man—which undoubtedly helped his celebrated presentation of Marlowe’s anti-hero Tamburlaine. . . . To augment his bulk Alleyn apparently developed a powerful style of large gestures and loud speaking which others mocked as ‘stalking’ or ‘strutting’ and ‘roaring’” (5). And George Rylands speculates that Bottom’s boast—“yet my chief humor is for a tyrant. I could play Ercles rarely, or a part to tear a cat in, to make all split” (1.2.28-30)—is a joke at Alleyn’s expense (211).

Numerous passages from the three great tragedies looked at above in which conflict is rendered in terms of objective confrontation of opposites, rather than the endless play of indeterminate meanings that proliferate in Hamlet, were admirably suited to Burbage’s full-throated delivery, but it is doubtful whether Hamlet would have been impressed. As a successful playwright, Shakespeare wrote these parts to suit his chief actor, but Hamlet is more fastidious: he is Shakespeare’s alter ego, his creative conscience, the critic concealed within the dramatist. As noted, Lear’s lines on the storm were admirably suited to Burbage’s manner of delivery, and, two hundred years later, by which time stage realism had become fashionable, Charles Lamb was to argue that Lear must himself act the storm, embody the storm, not rely upon the artificial aids of stage realism. But had Hamlet been the director, perhaps for him it would have been more the language that must do the work, must create the storm in the spectator’s mind, not so much the volume of delivery or the large sweeping gestures. Consider the key words and phrases that Hamlet uses in his scathing critique of the contemporary stage: “trippingly on the tongue,” “use all gently,” “acquire and beget a temperance,” “give it smoothness,” and, though he then advises the players not to be “too tame neither” (3.2.2, 5, 7, 8, 16), this is more in the nature of a codicil, an afterthought to check them from being too colorless. His anger directed at actors who “have so strutted and bellow’d” (3.2.32) had been anticipated three years earlier by the Boy in Henry V, who likens Pistol to the “roaring devil!” (4.4.71) and was to be echoed less than ten years later by a disillusioned Macbeth who likens his existence to “a poor player, / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, / And then is heard no more” (5.5.24-26). Is Shakespeare here mischievously forcing Burbage to be his own critic?

Undoubtedly, Shakespeare’s success, along with that of his acting company, elevated to the status of the King’s Men with the accession of James to the throne, was due to the magnificence of his writing, aided by precisely the kind of acting that Hamlet had criticized so severely; hence it is ironic that Hamlet should celebrate and praise so highly a play that “was never acted” (2.2.434-35), a remark almost amounting to an oxymoron. The very negativity of Hamlet’s preferences, the extraordinary paradox of its going against the theater’s chief aim, popularity, seems prophetic, for, after Hamlet Q2, Shakespeare never wrote a play that is so inward looking. Intriguingly, Hamlet’s praise for the play “that pleas’d not the million” (2.2.436) comes close to Harvey’s description of Lucrece and Hamlet as works “to please the wiser sort,” necessarily in the minority. It is important to remind ourselves of one of the striking differences between Hamlet Ql (1603) and Hamlet Q2 (1604-5)—the latter’s inordinate length—and to recognize, as Eric Sams has shown, that all early references to performances of Hamlet from 1589 onwards were to Ql, not Q2 (“Taboo” 12-46; “Hamnet” 94-97). As long as Shakespeare’s acting company was known as the Chamberlain’s Men, the first and subsequent performances of various plays, including Hamlet Q1, were staged at sites other than the court—The Theatre, the Cross Keys Inn, the Globe—but when the company came under the direct patronage of James in 1603, acquiring its new title, the King’s Men, the first performances were invariably given at court. Thus N. W. Bawcutt states, with reference to Beaumont’s Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn: “This was presented before King James on 20 February 1613, and it is unthinkable that it should have been shown on a public stage before the King saw it” (11). Significantly, “there is no record of an early performance [of Hamlet Q2] at Court,” the first court performance being given during the winter of 1619/20, nearly four years after Shakespeare’s death. On the other hand, Othello was acted before James at Whitehall Palace in November 1604, Macbeth at Hampton Court during the visit of King Christian IV of Denmark on 7 August 1606, and King Lear, according to the Ql title-page, at court on 26 December 1606 (Campbell and Quinn 288, 601, 485, 433, seriatim). Further research beyond the 1966 publication by Campbell and Quinn has indicated that the absence of a court performance of Hamlet Q2 could have been due to caution on account of political compulsions, for, as Lisa Hopkins (38-40), Mark Thornton Burnett (24, 38), and David Ward (280-302) have pointed out, Shakespeare goes beyond Saxo Grammaticus and Belleforest, incorporating not only an obvious Roman dimension but also using this disguise to impregnate it with contemporary Scottish-English political developments that would have been obvious to the wiser sort in Shakespeare’s audience. This might also have been due to the inwardness of the play’s dynamics, unpalatable to a demotic audience and, consequently, a theme abandoned by the playwright thereafter.

That up to this time Ql was the Hamlet seen and known onstage is confirmed by circumstantial evidence, one instance of which is the stage direction in Ql during the funeral of Ophelia (5.1.281): “Hamlet leaps in after Leartes” (16.119), a stage direction only in Ql, neither in Q2 nor in F. This spectacular stage direction was enacted by Burbage and remembered specially by his admirers, as recorded in a line from his funeral elegy: “Oft have I seene him leap into the grave” (quoted in Campbell and Quinn 89). Even the performance of Hamlet on 5 September 1607 on board the East India Company’s ship the Dragon on its way to India, as putatively recorded in Captain William Keeling’s journal,^[2] would most probably have been of Ql, not Q2. If it was of Q2, this was not in England but on the high seas, becalmed off the coast of Sierra Leone and, therefore, free of the convention that first performances by the King’s Men would be at court. Captain Keeling’s journal records that “I invited Captain Hawkins to a fish dinner, and had Hamlet acted aboard me; which I permit to keep my people from idleness and unlawful games, or sleep” (quoted in Wells 210). If dinner was around mid-day and an uncut Hamlet Q2 was acted, it would have continued till late evening. It is doubtful that the enduring capacity of Captain Keeling’s sailors would have lasted so long, or that the captain would have had the time to shorten Q2 for performance, especially because the Ql text was readily available and popular.

Ironically, and perhaps unfortunately, our familiarity with the play has been established on the basis of the Q2/F texts, thus rendering it difficult to make the mental adjustment required for recognizing that, in Shakespeare’s lifetime, it was the Ql text—long lost thereafter and rediscovered as recently as 1823 in an attic in Barton—that was the Hamlet for his contemporary audiences. Yet such an adjustment is essential in order to visualize Hamlet’s early theatrical history correctly.

Going, then, on the assumption that the absence of any record of a court performance of Hamlet during its author’s lifetime is evidence of Q2’s never having been acted publicly—though perhaps privately—from the year of its publication (1604/5) till the winter of 1619/20, would there not be justification for occupying ourselves with the entertaining thought that when Hamlet says “I heard thee speak me a speech once, but it was never acted, or if it was, not above once; for the play, I remember, pleas’d not the million, ’twas caviary to the general, but it was—as I receiv’d it, and others, whose judgments in such matters cried in the top of mine—an excellent play” (2.2.434-39), his reference to the play that was never acted—or, if it was, not more than once—could well be none other than Hamlet Q2, an instance of witty authorial self-reflexivity that was certainly not beyond Shakespeare’s art? Thus, in As You Like It, written shortly before Hamlet, T. W. Baldwin sees in the persona of the country bumpkin William a humorous self-projection of Shakespeare himself as a rustic playwright among the brilliant University Wits, “an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers,” as Robert Greene famously described him in A Groatsworth of Wit (1592) (Baldwin 228-31; Greene 12:144), and, fifty years before Baldwin detected the joke, Joyce’s Stephen had hinted at it while visiting Dublin’s National Library: “He has hidden his own name, a fair name, William, in the plays, a super here, a clown there” (209).

That Hamlet scholars have not identified a likely candidate to fit Hamlet’s enigmatic reference to the play that was never acted must give us pause,^[3] for, as a growing body of textual scholars believe, Ql was an early authorial draft, not a pirated memorially reconstructed version, and Q2 a revised and expanded version of Q1 and, therefore, virtually unactable on a public stage on account of its inordinate length, then these authorial changes are clues toward its self-reflexive identity.^[4]

Also revealing would be a comparison of the descriptions of Hamlet as advertised on the title-pages of Ql and Q2, both texts having been published by Nicholas Ling (“N.L. and John Trundell” on Ql’s title-page; “N.L.” on Q2’s title-page). Ql’s announcement restricts itself to describing the play’s distinguished performance history: “THE/Tragicall Historie of/HAMLET/Prince of Denmarke/By William Shake-speare./As it hath beene diverse times acted/by his Highnesse ser/vants in the Cittie of London: as also in the two V-/niversities of Cambridge and Oxford, and else-where/[Ornamental device]/At London printed for N.L. and John Trundell/1603.” Q2’s title-page, on the other hand, makes no mention of the play’s having been acted, an avoidance that can be construed as indicative of the author’s withdrawal from the theater, a retreat from stage to page, from acting to reading. How else can we account for Q2’s silence on Hamlet’s stage history, of which Ql is evidently so proud?^[5] The title-page of Q2 reads thus: “THE/Tragicall Historie of/HAMLET,/Prince of Denmarke./By William Shakespeare./Newly imprinted and enlarged to almost as much/againe as it was, according to the true and perfect/Coppie./[Ornamental device]/AT LONDON,/Printed by J.R. for N.L. and are to be sold at his/shoppe under Saint Dunstons Church in/Fleetstreet. 1605.” Q2, in fact, seeks to attract prospective buyers of the book by stressing its greatly enhanced length compared to Ql without at the same time impugning Ql in any way but, rather, endorsing Ql by implying that Q2 is based on Ql.

What does all of the above indicate? Perhaps that, for Shakespeare, Hamlet was some kind of a watershed, its eponymous hero the obverse of Falstaff and a more highly developed Brutus, after which his writing takes a turn toward a more direct, less complex style having mass appeal, a repudiation of Hamlet’s ideal critic, “the censure of which one must in your allowance,” he tells the incredulous actors, “o’er—weigh a whole theatre of others” (3.2.26-28). It is ironic, but happily so, that history has proved Shakespeare’s own theatrical judgment too severe and unjustified: Hamlet, whether Q2 or F or a conflation of both, albeit necessarily shortened, onstage or onscreen all around the globe, has far exceeded in its number of performances those of any other work of drama, whether by Shakespeare or any other dramatist.

At the risk, then, of overstating my case, let me sum up my argument by suggesting that Hamlet, in contrast with the three later declamatory tragedies, is Shakespeare’s most internalized work. Hamlet’s solipsism, his introspective ruminations, his inner conflicts that remain unresolvable have been, for four hundred years, the site of intense and unending moral, ethical, and critical debate. His subjectivity, his insistent self-reflexivity, and the interiority of the play’s imaginative landscape have given rise to a body of writing exceeding that on any other single literary text: Louis Marder liked to say that the bibliography of Hamlet, if collected in one place, would be more voluminous than the New York telephone directory. And A. C. Bradley, over a century earlier, observed that Hamlet “has probably exerted a greater fascination, and certainly has been the subject of more discussion, than any other [character] in the whole literature of the world” (74).

In the Shakespeare canon, plays-within-the-play occur only twice: A Midsummer Night’s Dream features Pyramus and Thisbe, and Hamlet, The Murder of Gonzago.^[6] During the acting of the former by Bottom and his companions, Hippolyta’s reaction is one of irritation: “This is the silliest stuff that ever I heard,” to which Theseus’s response reduces all play-acting to the same ludicrous level of make-believe: “The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them.” The generosity of Theseus’s defense is, however, crushingly dismissed by Hippolyta with the retort, “It must be your imagination then, and not theirs” (5.2.210-14). Hamlet, too, as noted, finds the acting of The Murder of Gonzago far below his expectations. Do, then, these two instances of inadequate stage performances hint at Shakespeare’s disillusionment with the populist theater of his time? A few years later, he was to write Coriolanus, which again shows the hero out of syncromesh with his times, contemptuous of the rabble, not unlike Hamlet’s castigation of the groundlings as “barren spectators” (3.2.41), “capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb-shows and noise” (3.2.11-12). On a similar tack of reasoning, W. W. Greg discerned Shakespeare’s gradual drift toward the page rather than the stage:

If my thesis as to Shakespeare’s representation of play-acting in an unflattering light, thus reflecting an ambivalence toward his profession as expressed in Sonnets 110 and 111, is tenable, then this might explain Shakespeare’s own roles as actor being so minimal. Understandably, John Heminge and Henry Condell placed the name of the author of the First Folio at the top of the list of “The Names of the Principall Actors in all thefe Playes” (Hinman) “but that was but courtesy,” as Roderigo says to Iago. As far as we know, Shakespeare acted in only two of Ben Jonson’s plays, Everyman in His Humour and Sejanus, and, it is believed, in two of his own plays, as Adam in As You Like It and the Ghost in Hamlet. Is it merely coincidental that both Adam and the Ghost fade into oblivion long before the plays’ conclusions are reached? Both roles make an early and important appearance in proximity with the plays’ heroes, Orlando and Hamlet, but quickly withdraw from the action, and, though the Ghost does reappear in Gertrude’s closet after the play-within-the-play, it is not seen by her and “steals away . . . even now, out at the portal!” (3.4.134-35). Thereafter, the Ghost vanishes, the memory of the old king being only briefly revived—and that obliquely—in Hamlet’s use of his father’s signet ring to send Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their deaths in England. According to Nicholas Rowe, “the top of his Performance was the Ghost in his own Hamlet” (quoted in Schoenbaum 148), yet, inexplicably, so absolute is the Ghost’s erasure from the play that, in the last scene, it is remembered by none, not even by Hamlet, who, at the play’s beginning, had assured his father’s spirit that “thy commandment all alone shall live / Within the book and volume of my brain, / Unmixt with baser matter” in response to the Ghost’s parting words to him, “Adieu, adieu, adieu! remember me” (1.5.91).

Adam’s plight in As You Like It is no better. Orlando’s confidante at play’s beginning, he loyally accompanies him into the forest, after which he disappears and is never even mentioned thereafter. William Oldys, in his Notes, charmingly records that one of Shakespeare’s younger brothers remembered “having once seen him act a part in one of his comedies, wherein being to personate a decrepit old man, he wore a long beard, and appeared so weak and drooping and unable to walk, that he was forced to be supported and carried by another person to a table, at which he was seated among some company, who were eating, and one of whom sang a song” (quoted in Campbell and Quinn 592). Shakespeare’s acting of both of these diminishing roles seems to be curiously suggestive of his own withdrawal from the theater as an actor. Both roles, from a thematic point of view, have the potential for a more important presence in the later scenes of the plays in which they feature, yet, surprisingly, this potential is not exploited.

Thus, in the opening scene of As You Like It, Adam, in hiding as symbolic, fallen, archetypal father-figure, watches his two “sons” warring, Oliver-Cain threatening Orlando-Abel, which then becomes the theme of Hamlet to which Claudius alludes while on his knees: “O, my offense is rank, it smells to heaven, / It hath the primal eldest curse upon’t, / A brother’s murther” (3.3.36-38). But Adam simply vanishes. What happens to him after Orlando has drawn his sword, demanding food and drink to revive his faithful companion? Does he continue to serve Orlando? Or go back to the court? Or die in the forest? Such questions might seem jejune in any context other than the present one in which both characters acted by Shakespeare mysteriously disappear not only from the action but from remembrance as well. Are they, as Shakespeare’s own acting parts, precursors of the ephemerality of all of his characters who “are melted into air, into thin air” (Tempest 4.1.150) as he declares at the end of his career in the person of Prospero? Possibly, yet Prospero’s declaration is a general philosophical reminder that encompasses all of the spirits under his command, whereas the inexplicable disappearance of Adam and the Ghost is still within the particularized confines of stage performance. Along with Rowe and Oldys, who assign the roles of Adam and the Ghost to Shakespeare (“characters with either one or both feet in the grave,” Schoenbaum wittily remarks), Edward Capell seems to endorse the view that “he was no extraordinary actor, and therefore took no parts upon him but such as this.” Capell goes on to speculate that the poet’s “lameness” in Sonnets 37 and 89 might be the reason. And, according to the 1699 “anonymous enthusiast of the stage” Capell references, “Shakespear . . . was a much better Poet, than Player” (Schoenbaum 148-50).

Hamlet is Shakespeare’s most personal play. If, as Stephen in Joyce’s Ulysses theorizes, the play refracts Shakespeare’s grief over the death of his son Hamnet in 1596, then the Ghost, according to Stephen, is Shakespeare “who has studied Hamlet all the days of his life which were not vanity in order to play the part of the spectre . . . To a son he speaks, the son of his soul, the prince, young Hamlet and to the son of his body, Hamnet Shakespeare, who has died in Stratford that his namesake may live for ever” (188). If Stephen is right, then Hamlet Q2 could well have been a culminating point for Shakespeare. Thereafter, the plays he writes are cast in a radically different mold from that of Hamlet, the work through which, one would like to believe, he arrived at some kind of a catharsis over the loss of his son. I began this paper with a reference to Sybil in Wilde’s Dorian Gray, who, on encountering the experience of love, loses all interest in acting Shakespeare’s heroines. Might not something similar have happened to Shakespeare after the loss of his son, not quite in the way of losing interest in theater but in recognizing that the kind of acting styles exhibiting an excess of emotion that were so certain to prove popular were not compatible with the intricacies that permeate Hamlet? Karl Elze, a nineteenth-century German critic, asks, “Who can estimate the effect which grief for his only son may not have had in producing that deep-seated melancholy and distaste for the vanity of the world which have found in this tragedy their immortal expression?” (quoted in Furness 23).

In this connection, I’d like to go back to what I think is a key speech in the context of grieving over the loss of a loved one: Hamlet’s words to his mother in 1.2.76-86, “Seems, madam? nay, it is. I know not ‘seems,’” which I quoted in full at the commencement of this paper. As has often been noted by editors of the play, it is remarkable how closely 1.1 of Ql and Q2 resemble each other, and the explanation offered for this by the memorial reconstructionists is that the actor playing Marcellus would naturally have remembered distinctly the lines because he himself featured in the scene. And this theory seems initially to be strengthened when we come to 1.2 (the court scene): “Though yet of Hamlet our dear brother’s death,” which is considerably shorter in Ql than in Q2 because—so the argument goes—here the Marcellus actor does not feature; hence, his recollection of the lines would inevitably be weaker. However, the theory breaks down when we come to 1.3 (the Polonius family): “My necessaries are imbark’d. Farewell,” in which, likewise, Marcellus does not figure, yet the correspondence between Q1 & Q2 is as close, if not closer, as that found in 1.1. Similarly, later scenes do not sustain the memorial reconstruction theory.^[7]

The revisionists, then, who argue that the differences between the Ql and Q2 texts are the result of authorial expansion and revision, as stated on the title-page of Q2, stand on surer ground. Thus, the “sable suit I wear” (2.33) of Ql becomes “my inky cloak” and “customary suits of solemn black” (1.2.77-78) in Q2; “the distracted ’haviour in the visage” (2.35) of Q1 becomes “windy suspiration of forc’d breath, / No, nor the fruitful river in the eye, / Nor the dejected havior of the visage” (1.2.79-81) in Q2; “mixt with outward semblance” (2.36) in Q1 becomes “These indeed seem, / For they are actions that a man might play” (1.2.83-84) in Q2; and “These but the ornaments and suits of woe” (2.39) in Q1 becomes “But I have that within which passes show, / These but the trappings and the suits of woe” (1.2.85-86) in Q2. Equally important is the change made in Q2 as to the person being addressed. In Ql, Hamlet addresses the king (“My lord”) at the speech’s beginning; in Q2, he addresses the queen (“good mother”), which suggests a more intimate kind of self-revelation. These remarkable revisionist expansions are pointers toward Shakespeare’s involvement at this time with the question of acting versus feeling, the point at which this paper began and to which I now return, culminating in Hamlet’s incisive critique of the First Player’s simulated emotion at the end of act 2. I’d like to suggest that we consider the speech as crucial because it points toward the interiority of Hamlet: “But I have that within which passes show,” a statement in Q2 explicitly made in the first appearance of the prince and, as I have noted, not occurring in Ql in this arresting language.^[8] Nietzsche could well have had this speech foremost in mind when, in The Birth of Tragedy, he saw Hamlet not as an ineffectual dreamer who delays but as one who “penetrated into the true nature of things” beyond “the veil of illusion” and who, seeing the reality beneath, arrives at “the consciousness of the truth” (984).

This insight gives us an explanation for Hamlet’s being not only thematically complex but textually complex as well: Ql, Q2, and F, especially the first two texts, represent a crucial phase in their author’s professional career, giving rise to a vast body of speculation as controversial as the unending debate on the hermeneutics of the play itself, with the “sudden and more strange return” (4.7.48) of Ql in 1823 being eerily reminiscent of Hamlet’s own reappearance in Denmark after having been supposedly put to death in England.^[9] The explanation also seems to account for the dramatist’s having changed direction after Hamlet toward the writing of plays less challenging intellectually and more readily comprehensible by a theater audience than was Hamlet, whose convolutions of thought call more for the locale of the study than the stage.

Hamlet’s last words, “the rest is silence” (5.2.358), are wonderfully prophetic, for, after him, no tragic hero of Shakespeare’s can equal his scalpel-like linguistic formulations that are both supremely cerebral and disconcertingly nonsensical, his oscillations between a comprehensive world-weariness and an energetic commitment to action. At one stage, he has “lost all [his] mirth, forgone all custom of exercises” (2.2.296-97), yet, later, he “will delve one yard below their mines / And blow them at the moon” (3.4.208-9); at play’s end, he informs Horatio, “I have been in continual practice. I shall win at the odds” and goes on to say, “Thou wouldst not think how ill all’s here about my heart—but it is no matter” (5.2.211-13). Not even Horatio can detect the turmoil within, so impenetrable is his outward composure. Might not these peculiar inner contradictions in Shakespeare’s conceptualization of his most enigmatic character be symptomatic of the conflict within himself toward his professional life—on the one hand, distasteful but, on the other, the source of his success, fame, and prosperity?

Shakespeare left behind no letters, no diaries, no journals. Unlike Ben Jonson, he never published his own plays, a neglect lamented by the editors of the Folio, who, in their note “To the great Variety of Readers,” “wished, that the Author himselfe had liv’d to have set forth, and overseen his owne writings”(Hinman 7)^[10] and Dr. Johnson, writing a century and a half later, interpreted Shakespeare’s indifference to the fate of his own work as symptomatic of “that superiority of mind, which despised its own performances” (98). It is only by extrapolation from his plays and poems and a few recorded memoirs of his contemporaries that something of the man behind the work can be glimpsed. But four hundred years ago, in his own time, his peers may well have understood the disappearance of the two roles that he himself acted in his own plays to convey the message of his displeasure with the prevailing acting styles and his intention thereafter to abandon acting and focus on writing plays that would better suit the extrovert talents of the actors of his time. Hamlet’s exasperation with the players for their melodramatic performance—“Oh, reform it altogether” (3.2.42), he tells them in anguish—could well have been Shakespeare’s.

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Notes

Quotations from Shakespeare follow The Riverside Shakespeare.

See Bernice W. Kliman’s essay for the possibility that this account is a forgery, perpetrated by the notorious John Payne Collier.

As far as my survey goes, no specific play has been identified up to now; the following editors simply ignore the allusion: H. H. Furness (Lippincott, 1877), Warren Chappell (Random House, 1944), G. B. Harrison (Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1948), John Munro (Simon and Schuster, 1957), Willard Farnham (Pelican, 1957), Edward Hubler (Signet, 1963), Nigel Alexander (Macmillan, 1973), T. J. B. Spencer (Penguin,1980), Harold Jenkins (Arden, Methuen, 1982), Philip Edwards (New Cambridge, 1985), G. R. Hibbard (Oxford, 1987), Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (New Arden, Thomson Learning, 2006). Only Chappell and Jenkins identify Marlowe and Nashe’s Tragedy of Dido as having perhaps influenced Shakespeare in the lines recited by Hamlet and the First Player in act 2. In fact, with reference to the play “that was never acted,” Jenkins states, “There is no justification for identifying this with Marlowe and Nashe’s Tragedy of Dido” (477).

Among contemporary scholars who subscribe to what may be called the revisionist point of view, as opposed to the memorial reconstructionists, I mention a few names: Ann Thompson, Neil Taylor, Stephen Urkowitz, E. A. J. Honigmann, Eric Sams, Y. S. Bains, Gary Taylor, Graham Holderness, Harold Bloom, and G. R. Hibbard (a recent convert). Earlier scholars who were revisionists include Fredson Bowers, F. J. Furnivall, Frank G. Hubbard, Hardin Craig, and Peter Alexander.

For the astonishing effectiveness of Q1 on stage in some modern productions, see Shrimpton; O’Brien, 59-60; Edmonton; and Jones.

I exclude impromptu performances like the one enacted by Falstaff and Hal in 1 Henry IV 2.4 or masques like the one in The Tempest 4.1. The Taming of the Shrew, too, is a case apart, since, while Christopher Sly is watching the play, he is being duped into believing that wives can be browbeaten into submission, a male fantasy like all of the other fantasies he is made to believe.

See, for example, Urkowitz, 277-83; Sams, “Real Shakespeare,” 157-62; Bains, “Loose Ends,” 94; Foster, 87-112; and Hubbard, all of whom regard Q1 as a text in its own right, not a derivative offshoot from Q2 or F. Recognizing this, Bertram and Kliman published the three texts as separate entities, a significant step in this direction.

From Hollywood in recent times, the best movie explorative of the metaphysics of acting, of stage and screen representations being self-destructive but also self-fulfilling, is The Real Blonde, directed by Tony Hendra and produced by Paramount Pictures.

For a general synoptic view of a history of the texts of Hamlet, see Rosenbaum; Thompson and Taylor, 1-39.

10.

Although there is no evidence of Shakespeare’s having “overseen” the publication of his plays in quarto format, Heminge and Condell’s regret carries the implication that he may have done so.