The Elizabethans (66 page)

She developed a throat infection, and was perpetually thirsty. She would eat nothing. She was sleepless, and restless. Robert Cecil told her that she must go to bed. ‘Little man, little man,’ she replied, ‘
must
is not to be used to princes. If your father had lived, ye durst not have said so much.’

On 21 March, Carey at length persuaded her to take to her bed. One gruesome and emblematic detail was that her finger had swollen, so that the Coronation Ring had eaten into her flesh. The ring had to be sawn off. Only by such means could she be separated from her hold on power. The woman and the office had become so deeply enfleshed and entwined. And still, with only days of life to run, she gave no certain indication about her choice of successor. Cecil came into the bedchamber, where she was by now silent, and tried to get her to make a formal assent to the succession of James VI of Scotland. She held up both her hands and made her fingers into the shape of a crown and held them to the sides of her head.

Presently she asked for John Whitgift, the Archbishop of Canterbury. The great royal bedchamber was now filled with people, who kept a discreet distance. At the bedside were only the archbishop on his knees and Robert Carey. Whitgift prayed for about half an hour and then made to rise, but one of the ladies-in-waiting, Philadelphia Carey, gestured to him that he should continue. So the prayers went on. Again, his knees and his voice weary, the archbishop attempted to bring his part of the proceedings to an end, but this time an arm-gesture from the silent royal form on the bed prevented him from rising, and he continued to utter prayers until the Queen appeared to sink into unconsciousness. As deep night fell, all but the ladies-in-waiting left the bedroom. Midnight chimed. It was now 24 March, the eve of Lady Day. At quarter to three the watchers approached the bed and stared at the figure who lay there. She was lying with her head on her right arm. Her Welsh chaplain, Dr Parry, said that she had slipped away ‘mildly, like a lamb, easily, like a ripe apple from the tree’. But these gentle, pastoral images were not really appropriate. A twentieth-century biographer, Elizabeth Jenkins, captured the moment more aptly when she wrote that ‘her warfare was accomplished’.

29

Hamlet
: One Through Two

IF THERE WAS
one linguistic quirk that the Church of England had given the world, it was hendiadys. The Greek word means ‘one through two’. Like a stammer or a second thought, hendiadys suggests that the first word needs amplification or qualification. ‘Law and order’ is a typical example of the genre. Queen Elizabeth’s godfather, Thomas Cranmer, died at the stake in Oxford when he refused to abjure his Protestant heresy. But before he allowed himself to be thrust bodily into the flames, he put out his own right hand to be burned. For, with this right hand, he had, in fact, abjured his ‘heresy’ and proclaimed his belief in Catholicism. He was not only Elizabeth’s godfather; he was, spiritually speaking, the godfather of the Church of England, the Church whose
raison d’être
was holding together two points of view that many Christians considered irreconcilable: the Church of Reform, and of Catholicism – the Church of hendiadys. By the end of Elizabeth’s reign that Church had provided the official national religion for forty years. It had been of very limited success. There were still plenty of Catholic recusants, particularly in the North, who would not accept the new rites as acceptable to their tastes; just as there were ever-growing numbers of Puritans who believed that Cranmer’s liturgy was the old popish Mass-book done into euphonious English – ‘the Pope’s dregs’, as the scornful Cambridge Puritans called it.
¹

But Cranmer’s words had entered the language. For forty years now, English men and women had attended Morning and Evening Prayer, and the Communion, and baptisms, and weddings, with the Prayer Book as the libretto of their life-experiences. And Cranmer’s hendiadys had become music inside their heads: ‘Almighty and most merciful father; We have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts . . . Almighty God . . . hath given power, and commandment, to his Ministers, to declare and pronounce . . .’ ‘Behold our most gracious sovereign lady Queen Elizabeth . . . grant her in health and wealth long to live; strengthen her that she may vanquish and overcome all her enemies; and finally after this life she may attain everlasting joy and felicity.’

Hamlet
, too, is a play that would be half the length were it not for Shakespeare’s addiction to Cranmerian hendiadys. ‘It harrows me with fear and wonder’ . . . ‘Without the sensible and true avouch / Of mine own eyes’ . . . ‘this same strict and most observant watch’ . . . ‘of un-improved mettle, hot and full’. . . ‘Of this post-haste and rummage in the land’ . . . ‘In the most high and palmy state of Rome . . .’ ‘Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets’ . . ‘If thou hast any sound or use of voice’, and so on, and so on.

Cranmer’s distinctive stylistic tic reflected the core modernity of the Reformation. We might think that existential angst began with the nineteenth century, perhaps with Kierkegaard’s idea of the self divided against itself. But Kierkegaard was a Lutheran, albeit a very eccentric one, and Luther – the mastermind of the Reformation – was
simul justus et peccator
, as he described himself: both justified and a sinner. He was both the genius who invented the modern Protestant mind and the inevitable mouthpiece of history. Had he not existed, Time would have invented other Luthers, who threw off the collective wisdom of the Church in order to become the soliloquist alone with God – if there was a God. And even Luther was perpetually visited by the temptation to turn away from God or to deny him, or to mistake His presence for that of the Devil. Wittenberg was the German town where it all began, where Luther taught in the university. King Claudius of Denmark was a monarch who, in history, was supposedly living in the Dark Ages. Yet in Shakespeare’s version of the events he enjoins his nephew:

For your intent

In going back to school in Wittenberg

It is most retrograde to our desire . . .

If the Book of Common Prayer was the libretto for English national self-consciousness, not only in Elizabeth’s reign but for centuries afterwards,
Hamlet
is its psychodrama, its portmanteau work of art that contains everything. Indeed,
Hamlet
is without parallel in any other literature in the world, in many ways of greater significance in the English language and culture than the Bible. Shakespeare’s first plays for the London theatres had been reconstructions of English national history, portrayals of the dynastic and internecine struggles, through the fifteenth century, that led to the power-seizure of the Tudors. Midway through the journey of this our life, when Shakespeare was thirty-five, he wrote a different sort of play: a rehash of an old revenge theme, which had been doing the highly successful theatrical rounds for at least a decade. But into this reworking of a popular piece of theatrical hackwork he poured everything – the national identity-crisis, as London awaited the death of one monarch and the arrival of another; the mood of public disillusion as Elizabeth’s reign ended; the doubts and anxieties that thoughtful men and women felt about politics, religion and philosophy. But if politics were in crisis, the court riven with faction, the Church Settlement unsettled, the public raucous and drunken and often disease-ridden and hungry, the culture was still fructiferous.

Note the very fact that
Hamlet
contains more coinages than any other Shakespeare play, or than any other work of English literature. Shakespeare’s work is the strongest example of what happens when a culture is still growing and alive and, for all its misgivings about itself, in a position of strength. The old Greek word
poet
was rendered by Middle English in its literal sense – ‘Maker’. When the culture has life in it, the Makers are quite literally helping to fashion it. Thirty per cent of the words current in the Italian language were coined by Dante. Shakespeare did not perhaps actually invent the English language in the way that Italian was invented by Dante. Nor did he – as did Luther, using his own version or dialect of German to translate and interpret the Bible – determine the variety of his native language that would be spoken by men and women in after-generations. But Shakespeare, more than any other Elizabethan, stretched and expanded the English language and therefore (since the playhouses were so hugely popular and drama was in no sense an esoteric art-form) he gave to all speakers of English a larger vocabulary and hence a larger capacity to describe experience.

Hamlet
was written some time (probably) before the death of Essex. The Stationers’ Register records ‘
A Book Called the Revenge of Hamlett
’ on 26 July 1602, and the date on the First Quarto version of the printed play is 1603. Although the First Quarto is the famously bad version, presumably based on a poor actor’s memory – ‘To be or not to be – ay, there’s the point, / To die to sleep – is that all?’ – it clearly is our play, and represents therefore the
terminus a quo
for Shakespeare’s
Hamlet
, however much he revised or cut or retouched it for performance. We know that there was an earlier Hamlet play, not by Shakespeare, which was going the theatrical rounds in the 1590s, since Thomas Lodge in
Wit’s Misery
(1596) alludes to the pale-vizarded ghost ‘which cried so miserably at the Theatre, like an oyster-wife,
Hamlet, revenge
!’ (this is not a phrase that occurs in Shakespeare’s play).

And one of the things that makes Shakespeare’s
Hamlet
so modern, so almost modern
ist,
in texture is that it seems so closely and so relaxedly to admit its own staginess. The Players not only perform a play within the play. They are recognisably part of the London theatre world of 1600–1. Hamlet asks Rosencrantz of his friends the actors (I quote from the First Folio text of 1623), ‘Do they hold the same estimation they did when I was in the city?’ Now, which city is that? We are meant to be in a Danish castle. Yet it is obvious that Rosencrantz (Rossencraft in the First Quarto) is telling Hamlet about the theatrical spats in London between the Children of the Chapel, who were used as actors by Ben Jonson at the Blackfriars Theatre towards the end of 1600, and the adult actors of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men.

‘There is, sir, an eyrie of children, little eyases that cry out on the top of question and are most tyrannically clapp’d for it. These are now the fashion, and so berattle the common stages (so they call them) that many wearing rapiers are afraid of goose-quills and dare scarce come hither.’
²

Shakespeare is actually making the London theatre audiences part of the drama that they are themselves watching. A supposedly medieval Danish prince in an embattled royal court in the Dark Ages is, with casual and deliberate anachronism, pulsating with topical Elizabethan allusions. In the Second Quarto, of 1604–5, we find that the tragedians have lately been censored or inhibited – ‘I think their inhibition comes by the means of the late innovation’: enough time has elapsed since the play’s first performance to put into print this possible allusion to the Essex rebellion. Even if it is not an allusion to the Essex rising, it is clearly a topical allusion of some kind. From the beginning, then,
Hamlet
was not a drama staged in some reconstructed past: it is not a ‘history’ play; it is a play by and about Elizabethans. The First Quarto title-pages tells us that The Tragicall Historie ‘hath beene diuerse times acted by his Highnesse Seruants in the Cittie of London: as also in the two Vniuersities of Cambridge and Oxford and elsewhere’. There is no reason to doubt this claim that
Hamlet
was, from the beginning, an extremely popular play. Richard Burbage is traditionally supposed to have made the role his own at the Globe, and the theatre tradition is that Shakespeare himself played father Hamlet’s Ghost. The first record we possess of a performance of
Hamlet
was not, as it happens, in a theatre or a university, but on board ship. In the journal of Captain William Keeling, captain of the
Red Dragon
, anchored off the coast of Sierra Leone in 1607, we read, on 5 September, ‘We gave the Tragedy of Hamlet’ and, on 31 September, ‘I invited Captain Hawkins to a ffishe dinner and had Hamlet acted abord whiche I permit to keepe my peple from idleness and unlawful games or sleepe.’
³
There are many allusions to
Hamlet
in the popular playwrights of Jacobean London – Middleton, Marston and Dekker – and it is impossible to escape the conclusion that this was a play that was quickly established as part of the inner life of English-speakers and play-goers.

There is a peculiar aptness, then, about it being a play that entered anglophone consciousness at about the time that the Elizabethan Age was coming to an end. Of all great works of art of the Elizabethan period,
Hamlet
speaks to us most eloquently about the Elizabethans’ inner lives and concerns – political, philosophical, religious, social. There is, on a simple and superficial level, the fact that it is a play about royal succession. We begin the play by regarding Fortinbras as a threat, and we end it by seeing Fortinbras as the saviour of a state that had gone rotten. The Elizabethan statesmen, led by William Cecil, began their era regarding the Scottish monarch as the ultimate threat, and ended it with Cecil’s son Robert seeing the arrival of James VI as the best hope for stability.

Schoolteachers ask their pupils why Hamlet delays his revenge. The play begins like any good old-fashioned Revenge Tragedy, with a Ghost calling for his son to ‘revenge his foul and most unnatural murder’.
⁴
But already audiences of the play know that they are in a world quite other than the blood and spooks of the old Hamlet play, or of Kyd’s
Spanish Tragedy
. For one thing, they have been turned to gooseflesh by poetry. The guard on watch on the battlements at Elsinore have delivered themselves of some of the most beautiful lines of English verse ever written, about the fading of the ghost at cock-crow, about the legends surrounding Christmas, and about the coming of the dawn, which: