Hamlet’s Trojan Death Note - A reflection
Hidden inside the programme to Cheek By Jowl’s 2007 production of Troilus
and Cressida, artistic director Declan Donnellan includes a reference to A.D.
Nuttall’s final book Shakespeare the Thinker. It was here that the seeds of
Hamlet’s Trojan Death Note were sown. Donnellan’s attraction to the book is
understandable; it is a work of imaginative scholarship, overflowing with ideas,
each page is packed with profound insights. Nuttall’s readings of the plays are
endlessly innovative, making fresh even the most recognisable moments of
Shakespeare's works. The chapter titled ‘Stoics and Skeptics’ is particularly
dazzling and contains within it the idea that led to the creation of this project,
Hamlet’s Trojan Death Note.
Nuttall proposes that “Hamlet is the author of Troilus and Cressida—or, at
least, Troilus and Cressida is the play that Hamlet could have written.” (205) In a
peculiar twist of fate, Shakespeare’s literary legacy comes under threat, not from
one of his contemporary early-modern playwrights or some other antiStratfordian poster-boy, but from one of his own and arguably most significant
contribution to the world—Hamlet. A few years earlier, the academic Harold
Bloom hit a similar note. In Shakespeare, The Invention of the Human, while
referring to Troilus and Cressida and the Problem Comedies, All’s Well That
Ends Well and Measure for Measure, Bloom playfully suggests that it seems “as
though a fusion of Hamlet and Falstaff had written these plays.” (339) But
Nuttall’s idea is more compelling due to it’s irreducibility; it is not “as though”
Hamlet wrote the play, but that he actually did.
How useful can this be? It could be dismissed as a neat but pointless
fantasy, irrelevant to a substantive explanation of the plays; Shakespeare created
the character of Hamlet, who can only exist in an artistic format. But such a
response is too materialistic and does not recognize the subtlety of Nuttall’s
conception. By positioning Hamlet as the writer, endowing him with the potential
to write Troilus and Cressida, a unique way of exploring Shakespeare is revealed.
The important fact that Shakespeare was an actor as well as a playwright is
often overlooked, at least relative to its importance. As an actor, it meant that he
possessed a keen sense of writing for performance; Shakespeare always wrote
plays that were going to be performed. When this is considered in the light of
such notions, as Bloom puts “that the Prince transcends his play” (385) it is not
an intellectual somersault to assume that while writing Troilus and Cressida
Shakespeare was still inside Hamlet, thinking, writing and doing as Hamlet. That
is not to say that Hamlet was Shakespeare, but rather that Shakespeare was
Hamlet. This is impossible to quantify, but then it also impossible to know for
certain that Shakespeare had read Montaigne, or that particular events were the
direct inspiration for plays. Shakespeare’s career was an emergence and each play
is a marker in a continuous intellectual evolution. The plays emerge out of one
and other; themes and interests overlap in a vast dramatic tapestry. It is crucial
to be attentive to the elements that connect the seams. Just as Hamlet, the
revenge play to end all revenge plays grows out of his previous revenge play,
Julius Caesar, Troilus and Cressida grows out of Hamlet, or better still, it grows
out of Hamlet’s worldview. Hamlet’s Trojan Death Note, likewise, grew out of
these plays, even though Shakespeare wasn’t about to write it himself.
Hamlet and Troilus and Cressida have contrasting historical records.
Hamlet was Shakespeare’s Titanic. It was a box-office smash-hit and is well
documented in performance, critical and cultural history. And this is despite all
the arguments about whether or not we actually have the exact version that
Shakespeare wrote. After Hamlet came Troilus and Cressida. In comparative
terms it went straight to video. It was such a failure that there is no evidence that
it was performed before the twentieth century, in which case it was not revived
but discovered. When Hamlet talks to the players about a play he once saw, he
claims that “it was never acted, or if it was not above once, for the play, I
remember, pleased not the million: ‘twas caviar to the general.” (II.i.382-384)
Does Hamlet, in a moment of staggering prescience, predict the fate of the next
play to emerge, the play that he would write? Hamlet wrote a play that was “out
of joint” and it was only until society caught up that it could be appreciated.
What do we know about Hamlet? He is a student, that much is certain.
This is not merely an incidental biographical detail. Shakespeare makes it very
clear that Hamlet is a student at Wittenberg; there are four references to the
place in just one scene. There are a various speculations as to why Shakespeare
chose Wittenberg, none of which is as interesting as what it says about the
character. Hamlet is not following the footsteps of his father. He is society’s new
man, some might argue ‘modern’ man, a renaissance man, the thinker, the
intellectual. It is easy to imagine Hamlet coming into conflict with his father
about his choice to study. Perhaps Hamlet wrote Troilus and Cressida as a way of
enacting a great war? And it must not be overlooked that both Claudius and
Gertrude want Hamlet to stay in Denmark, to not go back to Wittenberg. But
Denmark suffocates him. Wittenberg becomes the retreat, the place that Hamlet
desires in order to escape the hustle and bustle of Denmark. Hamlet’s Trojan
Death Note explores what happens to Hamlet when Denmark’s tentacles
penetrate his safe-haven.
Hamlet wasn’t the only Dane at Wittenberg; Horatio also studied there.
Like Pisanio to Posthumous in Cymbeline, Horatio is unfailingly loyal to Hamlet
throughout the play, without any specific reason other than being Hamlet’s “poor
servant ever.” (I.ii.163) Could an event at Wittenberg have been the cause for this
loyalty? Horatio is perhaps just doing his job. But then why would he try to take
his own life at the end of the play? This suggests more than mere servitude, a
bond created from thicker stuff than social role. Hamlet wrestles the cup of
poison that Horatio has in his hand and declares,
O, good Horatio, what a wounded name —
Things standing thus unknown — shall live behind me!
If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,
Absent thee from felicity awhile,
And in this harsh world draw they breath in pain,
To tell my story. (V.ii.292-297)
At the end of the play Horatio is the only major character to survive. Could he be
the writer of Hamlet? After all, who knows Hamlet better than Horatio? He is
more than just a plot device, he is a friend to Hamlet through everything that
happens; Hamlet’s Trojan Death Note is a way exploring, if not explaining this
peculiar friendship.
Hamlet is a playwright, or at least he has dabbled in the art. The “speech of
some dozen or sixteen lines” (II.i.474-475) that he asks to insert into the player's
performance of The Murder of Gonzago is enough evidence to support this
observation. Hamlet is also happy to frequently express his views about theatre.
This is often claimed to be Shakespeare channelling his personal opinions
through his characters. But if Shakespeare was determined to leave a theatrical
manifesto, then why didn’t he write an essay or leave extended notes? A more
compelling idea is that Shakespeare’s entire body of work is his idea about the
theatre and therefore Hamlet’s lines are Hamlet's personal opinions, which he
puts into practice when he writes Troilus and Cressida.
Why, then, would Hamlet write this play? Why didn’t he write Coriolanus
or The Winter’s Tale? Why would he render a great hero like Achilles as a
“political propagandist” that refuses to fight? (95) He turns Pandarus into a
venereal disease-ridden pimp. It is a play in which nobody wants to act, where no
one can die, where nothing is resolved. It is awkward, viciously intellectual, more
like a thesis than a dramatic event.
Nuttall’s explanation is that “Hamlet is a sick, clever man. Troilus and
Cressida is a sick, clever play.” (205). His soul is sick as G. Wilson Knight notes in
The Wheel of Fire. Hamlet’s sickness is due to what he knows. It weighs on him,
stirs in his head; he can’t cope with his own intellect and knowledge. In Hamlet
he is further sickened by his father’s ghost, by the information it provides about
his death. The knowledge gnaws at him throughout the play. In Troilus and
Cressida the “whole world is sick with intelligence.” (207) Hamlet’s existential
crisis is fragmented and scattered across the deformed landscape of the Trojan
War. The courtly romance between Troilus and Cressida is rendered in a fatal,
almost brutal manner. Who would have such a view of love? A broken heart?
Could Hamlet’s soul have been saved by love? Hamlet conjures to the stage a host
of historical figures including Achilles, Agamenon, Thersites and retells the tale.
It is a mammoth task, the rewriting of historical figures. Yet Hamlet himself is
constantly being rewritten, in whatever way a particular critic, scholar or theatre
professional wants him to be. Isn't it the case that what really cuts through
Hamlet, is the possession of an impossible knowledge, that of his own literary
fate? A fate of repetition, recreation and adaptation, ad infinitum?
Hamlet is more than just a character in a play. Jan Kott in Shakespeare
Our Contemporary highlights the impact that Hamlet has had on history. He
states that the “bibliography of dissertations and studies devoted to Hamlet is
twice the size of Warsaw’s telephone directory” and continues that “he is one of
the few literary heroes who lives apart from the text, apart from the theatre.” (47)
The extent to which Hamlet has transcended the realm of his play is open to
debate, but there is something undoubtedly compelling about this literary figure
that few others have ever attained. This is even more impressive when taken in
light of Terry Eagleton’s point in his short book William Shakespeare that
“Hamlet has no ‘essence’ of being whatever, no inner sanctum to be safeguarded:
he is pure deferral and diffusion, a hollow void which offers nothing determinate
to be known.” (72) If that’s the case then it is this very search that compels
people. But for what? Are people searching in Hamlet for something that they
know they can never find?
Hamlet exposes the hollowness of the modern man, a hollowness that is
filled whenever anything is said, written or created out of Hamlet. Like two gases
that defuse into one and other, it is impossible to tell which particle belongs to
who; Hamlet or to us? He is the archetype of the modern subject and the
impossible equation. To solve Hamlet, is to solve humanity. But this is an
equation that can or will never be solved. That is part of the attraction. Hamlet’s
Trojan Death Note is just another guess.
Word Count - 1650
Bibliography Alexander, Peter, Hamlet: Father and Son, Clarendon Press, 1955
Bate, Jonathan, Soul of the Age, Penguin Viking, 2008
Bloom, Harold, Shakespeare, The Invention of the Human Mind, Forth Estate,
1998
Eagleton, Terry, William Shakespeare, Blackwell, 1986
Empson, William, Essays on Shakespeare, Cambridge University Press, 1992
Frye, Northrope, On Shakespeare, Yale University Press, 1986
Garber, Marjorie, Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers, Methuen, 1987
James, Heather, Shakespeare’s Troy, Cambridge University Press, 1997
Nuttall, A. D. Shakespeare The Thinker, Yale University Press, 2007
Montaigne, de Michel, The Complete Essays, Penguin Books, 2003
Knight, G.W., The Wheel of Fire, Methuen, 1949
Kott, Jan, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, Routledge, 1988
Shakespeare, William, ‘Trolius and Cressida’, The RSC Shakespeare, ed.
Jonathan Bate & Eric Rasmussen, Macmillan, 2007
Shakespeare, William, ‘Hamlet’, The RSC Shakespeare, ed. Jonathan Bate & Eric
Rasmussen, Macmillan, 2007
Shakespeare, William, ‘Julius Caeser’, The RSC Shakespeare, ed. Jonathan Bate
& Eric Rasmussen, Macmillan, 2007
Shakespeare, William, ‘Cymbeline’, The RSC Shakespeare, ed. Jonathan Bate &
Eric Rasmussen, Macmillan, 2007