Hamlet in The Globe

Hamlet probably was acted at the Globe during 1600, but it was for Shakespeare a highly volatile text, and in 1601 he seems to have expanded its ironic commentary on the War of the Theaters that he had with his rival/friend Ben Jonson. And yet even this Poets' War is only a portion of the maelstrom that constitutes the sequence that goes from Act II, Scene ii, line 315, through Act III, Scene ii, line 288. For almost a thousand lines, a fourth of the play, Shakespeare cuts a gap into his representation of reality, or imitation of an action.

The Globe's audiences, on afternoons in 1601, evidently were sophisticated enough to accept an art that capriciously abandons the illusions of stage representation and then picks them up again.

This freedom to forsake our legitimate expectations is central to Hamlet (and to Hamlet). I will elaborate upon Shakespeare's elliptical art, which I do not find illuminated by the term "metatheater." Hegel memorably said that Shakespeare's greatest characters were "free artists of themselves." Hamlet ought to be the freest, but Shakespeare prevents this, in order to maintain his own freedom to make at least this one play a work so vast that it transcends category or limitations such as genre or plot.

Why does Hamlet return to Elsinore after his sea adventure? Certainly it is not to complete his baffled revenge, now as defunct as the Ghost, or the son's memory of the father. Orson Welles had the happy fantasy that Hamlet goes to England, abandoning Denmark forever, and ages into Sir John Falstaff. This is akin to my own favorite fantasy, in which Falstaff declines to die of a broken heart, and finds himself again in the Forest of Arden, crunching Jaques and Touchstone in contests of wit and happily substituting Rosalind as adopted daughter for the murderously bad foster son Prince Hal.

But Shakespeare does not indulge fantasies.

Hamlet and Falstaff must die. But only one of them dies onstage, and this is distinct and deliberate.

As compensation, we are offered, at least in Hamlet, perspectives that keep reminding us we sit in a theatre, intensely conscious that Hamlet, despite his brilliance, is only his creator's puppet. The function of the gap Shakespeare cuts into Hamlet is to keep Hobgoblin from running off with the garland of Apollo.

Faulconbridge in King John and Shylock in Merchant of Venice walked off with their plays. Mercutio had to be killed by Shakespeare lest he did the same. To say of Falstaff that he makes off with the two parts of Henry IV would be weak understatement. Shakespeare had promised to bring Falstaff to France in Henry V, and sensibly thought better of it, killing the great wit to the gorgeous funeral music of Mistress Quickly's elegiac Cockney prose. No one, not even Shakespeare, could curtail Hamlet's largeness of being, but Shakespeare had the audacity to keep Hamlet under some control by immersing us in plays within plays within plays.

When Rosencratz tells Hamlet that the players are

"coming to offer you service," the prince answers, "What players are they?" and is told, "Even those you were wont to take such delight in, the tragedians of the city." Manifestly, this is Shakespeare's own company, and Shakespeare’s audience would have been in on the joke, as we cannot be now, without scholarly aid. The best I know is Shakespeare and the Poets' War (2001), by James P. Bednarz.

Rosencrantz, doubtless to the delight of Hamlet's audience, overstresses the discomfiting of Shakespeare and his company by Ben Jonson's Children of the Chapel, with whom Jonson worked in 1600-1601. Hamlet, surprised that Shakespeare’s players have taken the road to Elsinore, demands explanation from Rosencrantz:

HAMLET How chances it they travel?.. Do they hold the same estimation they did when I was in the city? Are they so followed?

ROSENCRANIZ No, indeed are they not.

HAMLET How comes it? Do they grow rusty?

ROSENCRANTZ Nay, their endeavour keeps in the wonted pace; but there is, sir, an eyrie of children, little eyases, that cry out on the top of question, and are most tyrannically clapped for't. 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 thither.

HAMLET What, are they children? Who maintains

"em? How are they escorted? Will they pursue the quality no longer than they can sing? Will they not say afterwards, if they should grow themselves to common players as it is most like, if their means are no better-their writers do them wrong to make them exclaim against their own succession?

ROSENCRANTZ Faith, there has been much to do on both sides; and the nation holds it no sin to tar them to controversy. There was for a while no money bid for argument unless the poet and the player went to cuffs in the question.

HAMLET Is't possible?

GUILDENSTERN O, there has been much throwing about of brains.

HAMLET Do the boys carry it away?

ROSENCRANTZ Ay, that they do, my lord, Hercules and his load too.

[II.ii.328-58]

The Globe audience, knowing that the globe was Hercules' load, would be roaring by now, appreciating that Shakespeare's hyperbole was refuted by a packed house.

The aerie of little eyases, a nest of young hawks, Jonson's child actors, were being compelled by surly Ben to "exclaim against their own succession," since maturing into adult actors was their only destiny. Bednarz expounds all this admirably. I wish to shift focus to this question: Why does Shakespeare, here and in what follows, so cheerfully hazard the dramatic continuity and persuasive power of Hamlet?

We will not leave the world of players and plays until Hamlet stands poised, sword in hand, above the kneeling and praying Claudius (Act III, Scene iii, 70-96). By then, the prince has been perspectivized for us as being only the most substantial shadow on a stage of shadows. We are so mastered by Shakespeare (as we should be) that we rarely stop to reflect upon how bizarre Hamlet's story has become.

Is it still a drama? Isn't Hamlet himself no more or less ghosty than his father?

So powerfully has Hamlet impressed his creator, as well as ourselves, that he is asked to survive as a veritable apocalypse of theatricalities, heaped upon one another. After the hilarity of gossip on the Poets’ War between Shakespeare and Jonson, we are given Hamlet-as-Shakespeare, admonishing and instructing the Globe's actors, and then we go on to not one but two plays-within-plays, both practices of blood-melodrama. The first has no title, but the second has two, The Murder of Gonzago and The Mousetrap. The untitled bloody farce could be called The Slaughter of Priam, with the Lamentation of Hecuba, and is of a poetic height and rapturous furor not to be dismissed:

The rugged Pyrrhus, he whose sable arms, Black as his purpose, did the night resemble When he lay couched in the ominous horse, Hath now this dread and black complexion smear'd With heraldry more dismal. Head to foot Now is he total gules, horridly trick'd With blood of fathers, mothers, daughters, sons, Bak'd and impasted with the parching streets, That lend a tyrannous and damned light To their lord's murder. Roasted in wrath and fire, And thus o'ersized with coagulate gore,

With eyes like carbuncles, the hellish Pyrrhus Old grandsire Priam seeks.

Hamlet admires this poetry, and repeats it from memory, having experienced it at the supposed single performance of the play from which it is extracted, a play that never existed. Since Shakespeare's own Troilus and Cressida

"was never acted, or if it was, not above once," Hamlet is treating us to another Shakespearean in-joke. Whatever the account of Priam's slaughter parodies, it is not Troilus and Cressida but some imaginary play Christopher Marlowe never survived to write. The First Player, or Player King, almost certainly the actor Will Shakespeare, then takes over, and gives us the rest of Pyrrhus's butchery of Priam, followed by Queen Hecuba's lament for her husband. Even as Marlovian parody, this surely would have irritated the Globe audience had Shakespeare not, with delicious irony, had Polonius protest, "This is too long," and Hamlet chide Polonius, "It shall to the barber's with your beard." Still funnier, after Hamlet urges the First Player to continue on with Hecuba, both the prince and the councilor of state force a pause after the line "But who-ah, woe!-had seen the mobbled queen—."

Presumably a Shakespearean coinage, "mobbled" must mean that the poor lady had her face muffled. Hamlet, relishing the touch, repeats

"The mobbled queen," and Polonius renders aesthetic judgment: "That's good. ‘Mobbled queen’ is good." Thus encouraged, the First Player gives us a third swatch of verbiage, which allows Billy Shakespeare the actor to turn red with passion and weep, doubtless captivating the Globe.

This recitation from The Player King played by the bard himself sets the stage, so that the actor Richard Burbage can out-act Will Shakespeare, as the audience rightly expects. The First Player has come apart, "for Hecuba," and Hamlet spurs himself on to a more extraordinary performance:

What's Hecuba to him, or he to her,

That he should weep for her? What would he do

Had he the motive and the cue for passion That I have? He would drown the stage with tears, And cleave the general ear with horrid speech, Make mad the guilty and appall the free, Confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed The very faculties of eyes and ears.

[I.11.553-60]

Yet I,

A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause, And can say nothing- no, not for a king, Upon whose property and most dear life A damn'd defeat was made. Am I a coward?

Who calls me villain, breaks my pate across, Plucks off my beard and blows it in my face, Tweaks me by the nose, gives me the lie i ch' chroat As deep as to the lungs— who does me this?

Ha!

Swounds, I should take it: for it cannot be But I am pigeon-liver'd and lack gall To make oppression bitter, or ere this I should ha' fatted all the region kites With this slave's offal. Bloody, bawdy villain!

Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain!

When Hamlet is not whipping himself up, he imagines physical abuse from a censorious alter ego, but he is highly aware of his playacting. Once an intricate melder of language and the self, the prince has begun to disjoin them. His heavy irony is defensive, but cannot veil his conviction that his words whore him:

Why, what an ass am I!

What he intimates is larger and more lasting than his momentary self-disgust. If you can unpack your heart with words, then what you express is already dead within you.

With no faith left in either language or the self, and no transcendental allegiances, Hamlet nevertheless retains a con. viction in the truth-inducings of theater, his first and only love.