Hamlet in Historical Context
Notes for EH 410, Shakespeare, and LS 299W, Sacred Texts (John Bienz)
January 13, 2005
My guess is that should you ask people in the United States today to describe life
in England, words that would not come to mind would be “chaotic, “ “restless, “ or
“unruly.” However, the England of Shakespeare’s time was far more turbulent than the
England of today. The period in which Shakespeare lived is traditionally called the
Renaissance, a period of time sandwiched between two sets of civil wars, the so-called
Wars of the Roses (ending about 1500) and the English Civil Wars (beginning in the
late 1630s). This period was also the time of the Reformation, the change from an
England still a part of the “universal,” or “catholic,” church under the Pope of Rome and
the England of multiple religions (and even of the outspokenly non-religious) that was in
place by the late 17th century. While these years included the lives of many people still
famous today—King Henry VIII, Queen Mary (Bloody Mary), Queen Elizabeth I, King
James I (who had the Bible translated once more into English), and King Charles I (who
was publicly beheaded for treason); and a host of famous writers such as Saint Thomas
More (the author of Utopia), Christopher Marlowe, Sir Philip Sidney, Ben Jonson, John
Donne, George Herbert, and John Milton—the one person to emerge with almost mythic
status was, paradoxically, a commoner of modest birth, little wealth, and (at least at the
start) a marginal profession—the playwright and actor William Shakespeare. By the
late 18th century and throughout the 19th century and even up to today, Shakespeare has
often been treated as some sort of transcendent genius, beyond the ability of mere mortals
to fully understand. It has often seemed as if Shakespeare had become a poetic Holy
Ghost, the mysterious source of that sacred book, The Complete Works. If ever a merely
mortal poet came close to having nearly religious stature in England and the United
States, it has been Shakespeare. So that’s one reason he is being included in a course
called “Sacred Texts.” But there is a better reason as well.
Since the early 20th century, there has been an on-going effort to get behind the
bardolatry, the tendency to place Shakespeare above the merely human, and to find the
real man behind the ghostly myth and to find and analyze the true text of his works
behind the extravagant praise that had frequently passed for “literary criticism” in the
case of Shakespeare. What these efforts have given us is a much more rational and
thoughtful idea of what might be called a “demythologized” Shakespeare. Here, then, is
a parallel to Biblical studies that during the same period of time became more analytical
and rational than in certain earlier periods. However, the parallel with the sacred text of
the Bible is easy to exaggerate: even though Shakespeare came closer than any other
writer to having a sort of quasi-religious status, relatively few people ever made a god of
him or put his writing in the same category as the Bible. The better reason for including
Shakespeare in a course on sacred texts follows from this situation of being close to the
sacred, but—for most—not really there: we can look at his work, his historical person,
and his time rationally and critically without the complications of religious faith getting
in the way.
If we take Socrates to represent a rational, critical, and sceptical approach to the
intellectually extravagant, the last century has been comparatively Socratic in its
treatment of Shakespeare and his time period and his work. My plan will be to introduce
what has emerged over the decades as a “Socratic” consensus about these three topics.
I’ll start today with the first two: the period and the man. Who was the historical
Shakespeare and what trends most marked the world he occupied? Then, next
Tuesday, I will turn to the Shakespeare text: What is the pure or true text of his
works? Finally, I’d like to look at the question of transmission of the text: how has his
work come down to us today? Especially for questions two and three, we will use
Hamlet as our illustrative text, but what is the case with Hamlet is often, more or less, the
case with the rest of Shakespeare’s plays—and (this is something for the students in LS
299W especially to think about) perhaps with more genuinely “sacred texts” as well.
So, on to the first question: Who was the historical Shakespeare and what
trends most marked the world he occupied? Here the consensus leaves a Platonic
Socrates in the dust: a preeminent fact about Shakespeare’s historical period (in addition
to the turbulence referred to above) was something Platonists have usually ignored:
inflation and job loss. From about 1500 to the period of the English Civil Wars, England
saw a growing population that brought about a progressive loss of employment
opportunities and a progressive rise in the costs of daily living. These circumstances put
a lot of pressure on the sons and daughters of the less than wealthy, the vast majority of
English men and women. Put another way, and one that many Americans today can
understand, inflation and job loss meant a hollowing out of the economic center. Just as
the loss of those stable blue-collar factory jobs in the old industrial belt of the Midwest
and Northeast has left an up-or-down-the-economic-ladder option for many sons and
daughters of the labor force, so the commoners of Shakespeare’s day faced a similar
difficult choice: climb higher up the economic ladder than your parents or fall below the
economic status of your family. Shakespeare’s father made gloves and other leather
goods (and did some commodities trading), so we can see that as a sort of economic
benchmark for young William.
But the turbulence made things trickier: William’s father and a good deal of his
family seem to have held Catholic views well along into the reign of the first successful
Protestant monarch in England (successful in the sense that she actually won the majority
of her subjects over to her religious position). Advancement economically was greatly
enabled by inherited wealth (Shakespeare would not have had much of that at all),
inherited social status (as a commoner, Shakespeare had only a little of that), and religion
(Shakespeare would have had to abandon his family’s historical preferences on this
matter). But to advance economically, one also needed a path that would lead to money,
a path that one’s talents and training enabled on to pursue. Here Shakespeare had an
opportunity: if we know anything about him, we know that he had a way with words!
And we know that Shakespeare had another, complementary, opportunity as well: the
London theatre was just getting off the ground as an institution with a future—although,
at the time, one could hardly have guessed what a magnificent future that would be since
professional theatre people in the 1580s and 90s had only slightly higher social status
than downright outlaws.
Almost nothing is known about the details of Shakespeare’s life until his plays
began to appear on the London stage. What the modest documentation that survives
reveals, is that Shakespeare married young to a woman a bit older than he (and a little too
shortly before their first child was born—although then as now, if was not uncommon for
women to be pregnant at the altar, and it seems many couples delayed marriage in those
days until the prospect of a child made further delay unwise). In his early years,
Shakespeare may have taught grammar school; he may have traveled, perhaps in the
army; he may have worked as a sailor—no one really knows. What we do know is that he
did not go to either of England’s two universities, Oxford or Cambridge—unlike most of
the other playwrights of his day (a fact that has probably been most responsible for
fueling the usually classist argument that someone other than Shakespeare actually wrote
the plays that carry his name—there is really no solid evidence for such claims). In any
case, by the late 1580s or early 1590s, Shakespeare was in London acting in plays,
writing scripts for plays, and seeking to establish some patronage for himself by writing a
few other items as well (two miniature epics, one tragic and one comic, and a sequence of
sonnets). By about 1594, he seems to have turned entirely to writing plays, probably
because he had become successful enough in the theatre world to abandon his earlier
efforts at writing more “literary” sorts of poems for patronage. In time, in fact, he
became part owner of the acting troupe to which he belonged, at first known as The Lord
Chamberlain’s Men and, after 1603, as The King’s Men, the most prestigious acting
company in England since it was the company directly patronized by the king himself,
James I, the gay monarch (to use our modern category) who also subsidized the
Authorized Version of the Bible. By the time Shakespeare retired from the stage, about
1611, he was a comparatively wealthy man. He had arranged for a coat of arms for his
father and thereby for himself, and he was able to buy one of the largest and most central
homes in the town of his birth, Stratford on Avon. He appears to have lived there until
his death in 1616. In his will he famously left his “second best bed” to his wife. A
daughter lived on for years, and was later visited by Queen Henrietta Maria, the wife of
King Charles I, out of regard for the father. In fact, Charles himself was, it seems, an
avid reader of Shakespeare’s plays that had come out in a single volume in 1623, the first
attempt to publish the complete plays of a contemporary writer in English history. There
is no evidence that Shakespeare himself had anything to do with the publication of his
plays, however. He seems to have written only for the stage, not for the press, but I will
have a good deal more to say about that matter next period.
So, despite, or even because of, a lousy economy and a disadvantageous social
situation, Shakespeare made it to the top, or as close to the top as anyone in his original
situation was likely to have managed. Although the world of the theatre was disreputable
when he entered it, by 1600 or so, that too had changed (Francis Beaumont, another
member of the King’s Players, was, for example, an aristocratic by birth yet a playwright
by 1600—one would not have found anyone of that social rank in the theatre earlier). In
other words, Shakespeare, son of a Catholic glove maker in a provincial village with
limited opportunities, made the most of it by finding a place in a new and up-coming
field that suited his talents. Actually, all this has long rankled a bit with more Romantic
critics who do not take well to Shakespeare’s combining his undisputed genius as a writer
with what these critics see as an all too conventional career. But then Wallace Stevens
and Ted Kooser, the current U.S. poet laureate, both worked for insurance companies, as
did the composer Charles Ives. And T.S. Eliot long worked as a bank teller. William
Carlos Williams was an obstetrician, and so on. These also are all quite conventional, so
what is so bad about actually combining the conventional with the brilliant? It’s a nice
trick if you can to it. Most of us simply have not been able to do so. As a side note, I
would only add that the story of an exception hardly makes one long for bad times or
gives justification for them to the extent they can be avoided or changed. Trying to keep
perspective, one can admire both the luck and the accomplishment of the historical
Shakespeare without gainsaying either. The more difficult matter is the genius, in a
sense, where we started. We know a lot about Shakespeare’s life, and we know there is a
lot more we do not know. But nothing here really gives us a clue about what we find so
compelling in the plays. Shakespeare remains a mystery.
If biography doesn’t explain Shakespeare, perhaps we can get somewhere by
looking more broadly at the period. We have already touched on this topic, so at this
point I can be brief. The England of Shakespeare’s day was turbulent: the Humanism of
the Renaissance had challenged the idea that logical thought could raise the human mind
to eternal truths by placing emphasis instead, not on logic but on human experience,
especially experience as revealed in classical poetry and history, the collective records of
human aspirations and failures here on earth. Humanism’s attempts to recover the
ancient Greek and Latin classics, in fact, had more than a little to do with starting the
Reformation: getting back to the ancient originals also finally came to mean getting back
to the original Bible, particularly the Greek New Testament. The Dutch Humanist,
Desiderius Erasmus had demonstrated errors in the official Bible, the Latin Vulgate.
While Erasmus said he did not have the stomach to be a martyr and challenge the Roman
Church, one of his followers did: in 1517, the Augustinian monk Martin Luther
published his 95 Theses to call the Roman Church back to the Christianity that Luther
believed marked the period of the New Testament. King Henry VIII of England was so
outraged by Luther’s views that he wrote a book against him. For this book, the Pope
proclaimed Henry “defender of the faith” only to find Henry later keeping the title and
changing the faith: Henry broke with the Roman Church and made himself the head of
the Church in England. With this change, the rather elite intellectual dynamics of the
Renaissance began to affect everyone. If there was one main cause for the social and
political turmoil in Shakespeare’s day, religion was most likely it. England, one might
say, became permanently unsettled in matters of basic belief. Or more positively, one
might say England became permanently a nation of religious diversity, although almost
no one went on record with positive things to say about diversity until well into the 17th
century. Perhaps, however, this turbulence born of a new world of diversity did have
something to do with Shakespeare’s genius. In any case, few writers have provoked such
a wide range of critical interpretations of their work while at the same time offering so
few clues as to their own point of view. Perhaps, Shakespeare’s mysterious genius was
rooted, to some degree anyway, in his fascination with and exploration of a new sense of
humanity’s infinite potential for variety at every level of our being. He at least found
words for such wonder.