• 1 British Library Add 42518, fol. 422^v. Quoted by Anthony Grafton, ‘Lisa Jardine: A Life in the Margi (...)

1William Shakespeare’s contemporary, the scholar Gabriel Harvey submitted that ‘The younger sort takes much delight in Shakespeare’s Venus & Adonis: but his Lucrece, & his tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke, haue it in them, to please the wiser sort’1 and thus offers one amongst a number of references during Shakespeare’s own lifetime to indicate the popularity of the text under examination in this issue.

• 2 For evidence of ongoing critical debate concerning the presence of the Ur-Hamlet in early modern th (...)
• 3 See respectively: Robert Greene, Menaphon (London: Thomas Orwin for Sampson Clarke, 1589), **3^r; Th (...)

2In addition to exploring the dramatic development of act 1 scene 2 of Shakespeare’s tragedy, the present discussion is shaped as an opportunity to reflect upon theatrical expectations and the ways in which they might be challenged, modified, resisted and/or satisfied. There has been a tendency in early modern scholarship to construct Shakespeare’s audiences as clones, all reacting in predictable ways to given texts or as having all the information at the disposal of the given critic. On reflection, taking into account the number of lost texts from the early modern playhouse and our enduring critical need to speculate given the lacunae in the surviving documentation, there should be no reason to standardise audience consumption of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre in any way. More generally, audiences down the centuries seem to have had the irresistible urge to summon up the spectral figure of Shakespeare when the word ‘Hamlet’ is mentioned, but it might be helpful to remind ourselves that some audience members at the time might have had other performative associations in mind: what the critique nowadays calls the Ur-Hamlet.2 Thomas Nashe, for example, refers in his prefatory text to Robert Greene’s prose romance Menaphon (1589) to ‘whole Hamlets, I should say handfulls, of tragical speaches’ and another of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, Thomas Lodge, draws attention in Wits Misery (1596) to ‘y^e ghost which cried so miserably at y^e Theator like an oisterwife, Hamlet, reuenge’.3 Thus, as with Shakespeare’s Henry V, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, for example, it is perfectly possible that the audience member was lured through the early modern playhouse doors by the prospect of revisiting a familiar narrative for the stage, but this time treated by a different dramatist.

• 4 For further discussion here, see Andrew Hiscock, ‘Hamlet, Early Modern Tragedy and the Question of (...)
• 5 On the influence of Stoicism on early modern drama see Donovan Sherman, The Philosopher’s Toothache (...)

3Each audience, or rather each member of that audience, brings with it different horizons of expectation and it is important to bear this imponderable in mind when formulating critical readings of a collectively constructed artform: drama. Regarding the scene under discussion, one possible key frame of reference for educated Elizabethans and Jacobeans in understanding act 1 scene 2 of Shakespeare’s dramatic narrative would be that of Seneca’s tragedies. These texts, which may have benefited from ensemble reading at the imperial court in Rome in the first century CE rather than fully-fledged theatrical performance, may easily have been encountered in English universities, Inns of Court, elite libraries as well as the classroom environment of older, more able pupils in the grammar schools; and the dissemination of these texts was inevitably even wider with the publication of English translations in the second half of the sixteenth century, culminating in Seneca His Tenne Tragedies (1581).4 Seneca’s concept of tragedy is one powered wholly by the dynamic motivation of revenge and this led to a whole sequence of recurring tropes in his dramatic narratives: enactments of murder and mutilation; scenes of horror; evocations of supernatural presences; referencing of omens; the deployment of sententiae (apophthegms or proverbial sayings); the interventions of a chorus and so on. More generally, amongst the three primary philosophical legacies to the European Renaissance, Platonism, Scepticism and Stoicism, the latter with its emphasis on the vigorous government of the emotions was particularly associated with Seneca. Indeed, this branch of enquiry was enjoying a particular renewal of interest across early modern Europe at the close of the sixteenth century supported by the scholarship of eminent figures such as Justus Lipsius and Henri Estienne.5 However, all of these branches of philosophical enquiry inherited from antiquity with their concerns to posit a higher reality of existential meaning (Platonism), the querying of received wisdom (scepticism) and the restraint of the passions (stoicism) came to be a familiar source of scrutiny and questioning in all kinds of cultural and educational environments across the continent. As Peter Mack has demonstrated, from the earliest age in the sixteenth-century classroom:

• 7 See John Strype, Annals of the Reformation and Establishment of Religion and other various occurren (...)

5In addition, building on paradigms of Senecan dramaturgy, there was a whole sequence of revenge tragedies regularly served up for Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences. These might include Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet or Titus Andronicus, for example, but extend to a whole host of productions offered also by his fellow dramatists in the period, such as: Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1587?); Henry Chettle’s The Tragedy of Hoffman (1602); John Marston’s Antonio and Mellida (1599) and Antonio’s Revenge (1602); Thomas Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy (1606‒7); John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (c. 1614); John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s A Whore (1629); James Shirley’s The Cardinal (1641). Such dramatic narratives transport us all too frequently to heady, emotionally charged, horrifyingly corrupt locations around the Mediterranean. This may have been especially persuasive for London audience members when even Elizabeth I’s chief minister, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, had advised, ‘Marry thy daughters in time, lest they marry themselves. And suffer not thy sons to pass the Alps. For there they shall learn nothing but pride, blasphemy and atheism’ – and a goodly number of publications available on the bookshelves might endorse such contentions.7 For example, in a translation from a text by Benedetto Varchi, Richard Tofte’s The Blazon of Jealousie (1615) made reference to commonplace opinions that

• 9 ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, in T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays (London: Faber, 1932), pp. 1 (...)

6In his influential essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, T. S. Eliot argued that ‘what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it’.9 These prefatory remarks to a consideration of act 1 scene 2 of Shakespeare’s tragedy are focused on how we might encounter and re-encounter this now celebrated text. Hamlet enriches enormously our understanding of the tragic experience as it has been formulated since the fifth century BCE at least, but it can also encourage us to query how we might wish to constitute Shakespeare’s audiences and texts, then and now.

• 11 These cultural markers (nation, country, (fore-)father, race) were frequently deployed in classical (...)

9At this castle of Elsinore, the seat of political power and dramatic interest, we are left in no doubt that we are far from the Mediterranean world conventionally associated with such revenge intrigues. There is a vigorous focus on Danish-Norwegian relations and we, as audience, become an extension of the court listening attentively to the proclamations of a new regime on the Baltic. Moreover, we are not allowed to forget the ways in which the power structure of this northern world is governed by ailing uncles and headstrong nephews. Political thinking extending back to antiquity and renewed regularly during the medieval centuries had stressed that tyranny might frequently be identified in part by the refusal of the political leader to take counsel. Here, however, Claudius emphasises the communal labours of mourning and the court’s assent to his new marriage: ‘Your better wisdoms, which have freely gone / With this affair along’ (1.2.15–6). The dissonant words and presence of Shakespeare’s protagonist inevitably deeply colour our experience of this very particular dramatic world, but we are wrong if we nominate him too quickly as a public hero, championing widely perceived wrongs. None of the other characters is agonizing like the protagonist with the advent of a new political leader. On the political (if not the theatrical) stage of Denmark, the prince must give place to the new incumbent on the throne. And what is the manifesto of this Claudius? – the reassuring, traditional values of natio, patria, pater and gens.11 Claudius articulates this newly assumed role of pater patriae (father of the nation) with assurance, attending meticulously to details of state and concern for those most immediately under his care in the court.

• 12 The ‘Vice’ figure is a recurring figure in survival English moral plays from the medieval period. T (...)

12Expertly adopting the role of the monarch, orchestrating all the operations of the court, Claudius now turns his attentions as adoptive father from Laertes to Hamlet himself. Visually and linguistically, Hamlet wishes to distinguish himself from this elite community, creating dissonance with his tactical punning and drawing energy from the discomfort, humiliation and confusion of others: like Shakespeare’s Richard III, might we not see him in such scenes as a persuasive descendant of the medieval Vice figure?12

• 13 While much has been made of the importance of memory and memory performance in early modern society (...)
• 14 T. S. Eliot, ‘Hamlet’ (1919), in Selected Essays, pp. 141–7 (p. 145). In this context, see also, fo (...)
• 15 See, for example, the dominant emphases in: David Leverenz, ‘The Woman in Hamlet: An Interpersonal (...)
• 16 This is also a theme taken up elsewhere in Shakespeare’s oeuvre: in Twelfth Night, for example, the (...)

13At this point in the scene, Gertrude is ushered into the exchanges of this court world, insisting upon the needful and healing properties of an ars oblivionis (the art of forgetting): ‘Thou know’st ’tis common, all that lives must die, / Passing through nature to eternity’ (1.2.72–3).13 Such counsel in the arts of forgetfulness is, of course, anathema to the prince who promotes himself as a memory expert in a world enacting political transition and seeking social renewal. Gertrude has been seen as a recurring, sometimes obsessive source of interest for the prince, but also for critics and audiences down the centuries. T. S. Eliot was notable, for example, in his contention that ‘Hamlet is not up against the difficulty that his disgust is occasioned by his mother, but that his mother is not an adequate equivalent for it; his disgust envelops and exceeds her’.14 It may be that audiences have a marked appetite for learning more about the queen than Shakespeare’s intrigue is willing to yield and many adaptations in the theatre, the dance studio, in the concert hall and on the screen have sought to cater to this appetite in recent decades. However, while focusing on perceived lacunae in the intrigue, critical studies have frequently failed to attend to the multifariousness of the queen’s functions in the texts of Hamlet which have survived down to us: in this scene, Gertrude is afforded a number of sententiae (or proverbial sayings) in the manner of a character in a Senecan tragedy – ‘all that lives must die’ (1.2.72).15 This may or may not enhance her status in the scene depending on the given reading, but such utterances are nonetheless afforded attention onstage. Her expansive responses, like those of Claudius and Polonius, are made to contrast keenly with the often gnomic, terse utterances of the protagonist in this public forum of the court. Moreover, by investing in such apophthegms, Gertrude may indeed emerge as a familiar theatrical device, as an agent connecting directly with audience members trained in the arts of rhetorical debate: here, rehearsing and querying the relative merits of prolonged mourning.16

• 18 Shakespeare’s protagonist may be found elsewhere in the tragedy to indulge in this practice: see 3. (...)

15Hamlet’s emotionally-charged retort does not only seek to fracture the co-operative and politically achieving ambiance fostered by Claudius at the court. With his evocative discourse of mourning, weeping, sighing, victimisation and superlative interiority, Hamlet construes himself ably as the conventional Petrarchan lover (determined to stress his exceptionalism) and he may certainly have been recognised as such by educated members of the audience. Like most Petrarchan lovers, his sufferings eclipse all thoughts of the loved one, for his desire all too often reveals itself as narcissistic, an end in itself.18

• 20 A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (London: MacMillan, 1919), p. 128.
• 21 Chapter 7, ‘Of Murder’, in Edward Coke, The Third Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England (Lo (...)

19At the turn of the twentieth century, A. C. Bradley argued, ‘[i]t was not that Hamlet is Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy or most perfect work of art; it was that Hamlet most brings home to us ... the sense of the soul’s infinity’.20 With Hamlet’s soliloquy, we transition from the political world of the court to the metaphysics of philosophical enquiry. Overwhelmed, it seems, by a larger, existential world nausea, the prince engages in swift succession with the provisionality of human life, the relationship of Christian faith to the death wish and the corrupt living environment in which he finds himself. Equally importantly, we are asked to address the nature of Hamlet’s mental responses. One of the leading jurists of the period, Sir Edward Coke (1552–1634), defined murder as the act of ‘a man of sound memory and of the age of discretion, [who] unlawfully killeth … any reasonable creature … with malice aforethought’.21 The degree to which Hamlet has reached the age of discretion may be a source of ongoing debate, but the question may be legitimately asked whether is he of ‘sound memory’? In contemporary English, we might be more likely to turn to the phrase of sound mind in this context, but concerns surrounding memory percolate into all the nooks and crannies of this dramatic world. How secure is the prince’s grasp of the past? Is it credible that the warrior Old Hamlet was of such a fine sensibility that he wished Gertrude’s complexion protected from the fierce elements? Moreover, perplexingly, it becomes increasingly apparent that the son is not remembering these two figures as parents, but as lovers – indeed, calling to mind the intimacies of their responses to each other and impressing the audience with the subsequent vehemence of the demonisation of his mother. Again and again in Shakespeare’s tragedy, this embittered prince is forced to confront the impermanence of his father’s place and his own in the affections of others.