Notes Place of publication is London unless I state otherwise. The following sources are always cited using the abbreviated form of reference specified; for other sources, full details are given on first reference in each chapter, subsequent references being by surname of author or editor and title or short title. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy. A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (1904). Chambers, William Shakespeare. E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems (2 vols, Oxford, 1930). OED. The Oxford English Dictionary, ed. James A. H. Murray et al. (13 vols, Oxford, 1933). Plutarch. Shakespeare's Plutarch, ed. T. J. B. Spencer (1964). SR. Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London, 1554-1640, ed. Edward Arber (5 vols, privately printed, 1875- 94). INTRODUCTION 1. S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ch. 15. 2. A. Scoloker, 1604: see also my Shakespeare's Impact on his Contemporaries (1982) pp. 17-18. 1 IN SEARCH OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: THE PUBLIC AND THE PRIVATE MAN 1. All the early allusions quoted in this chapter can be found, through the index, in Chambers, William Shakespeare. To avoid a clutter of footnotes I give references in only a few cases. 2. See Leslie Hotson, 'Shakespeare's Sonnets Dated' and Other Essays (1949) p. lllff.; and my Shakespeare: the 'lost years' (Manchester, 1985) p. 77ff. 3. See my ' "There is a world elsewhere": William Shakespeare, businessman' (forthcoming in the Proceedings of the Third Congress 222 Notes 223 of the International Shakespeare Association, ed. P. Brockbank et al. (1988)). 4. A. C. Bradley, Oxford Lectures on Poetry (Oxford, 1909): 'Shakespeare the man'. 5. See my 'Sir John Oldcastle: Shakespeare's martyr', in Fanned and Winnowed Opinions: Shakespearean essays presented to Harold Jenkins, ed. J. Mahon and T. Pendleton (1987) p. 121. 6. Many (but not all) biographers believe that William Herbert (1580-- 1630), who became the third Earl of Pembroke in 1601, was the Young Man ('Mr W.H.') of the Sonnets. Clarendon, in his History of the Rebellion, said that Pembroke 'was immoderately given up to women. But therein he retained such a power and jurisdiction over his very appetite, that he was not so much transported with beauty and outward allurements, as with those advantages of the mind as manifested an extraordinary wit, and spirit.' Compare Shakespeare's picture of the Dark Lady's outward allurements and 'advantages of the mind'! 7. See my Shakespeare's Impact on his Contemporaries (1982) pp. 13-14. 8. Bradley, Oxford Lectures on Poetry, p. 321. 9. Chambers, William Shakespeare, II, 243. My italics. 10. Bradley, Oxford Lectures on Poetry, p. 322. 11. See my John Weever: a biography of a literary associate of Shakespeare and Jonson (Manchester, 1987) p. 26ff. 12. See my Shakespeare's Impact, pp. 9-11. 13. M. H. Spielmann, 'Shakespeare's portraiture', in Studies in the First Folio, ed. Sir Israel Gollancz (Oxford, 1924). 14. As in note 13. The discussion of Droeshout's engraving follows my 'Shakespeare and London's immigrant community circa 1600', in Elizabethan and Modern Studies Presented to Willem Schrickx, ed. J. P. Vander Motten (R.U.G. 1985). See also Samuel Schoenbaum, Shakespeare's Lives (Oxford, 1970) pp. 10--11. 2 POLffiCS, RHETORIC AND WILL-POWER IN JULIUS CAESAR 1. T. S. Eliot, 'Shakespeare and the stoicism of Seneca', Selected Essays (ed. 1953) p. 136. 2. See Chambers, William Shakespeare, II, 210. 3. Harley Granville-Barker, Prefaces to Shakespeare, First Series (ed. 1948) p. 105. 4. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, p. 60. 5. M. W. MacCallum, Shakespeare's Roman Plays and their Background (1910) p. 214. 224 Notes 3 THE POLITICS IN HAMLET AND 'THE WORLD OF THE PLAY' 1. The Sources of 'Hamlet': with essay on the legend, ed. Israel Gollancz (1926) pp. 225-7. All my quotations from Belleforest are taken from Gollancz's reprint of the seventeenth-century English translation, except where there is a special reason for quoting the French original (also reprinted by Gollancz), which was either Shakespeare's immediate source, or the source of his source. 2. Bradley noticed this 'curious parallelism' (Shakespearean Tragedy, p. 90). 3. Cf. V.1.138-57. Both princes are given the same epithet - 'young Fortinbras', 'young Hamlet' - and the play generally suggests that they are of roughly the same age. 4. J. E. Hankins, 'The Character of Hamlet' and other Essays (1941) p. 11. 5. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, pp. 103, 107, etc. 6. For the contribution of the 'Fortinbras story', cf. also Hankins, Character ofHamlet, pp. 244-5. 7. Ibid., p. 96. Unlike Wilson, Hankins recognised 'that the Danish king was chosen by some group', but, like Wilson (whose discussion of the same subject Hankins seems to have overlooked), he interpreted the politics of the play from a too inflexibly 'historical' viewpoint. 8. For instance, Shakespeare brings in at regular intervals words such as 'act', 'scene', 'stage', 'prompt', 'cue', 'tragedy'. Cf. S. L. Bethell's admirable account of the 'unreality' of Shakespeare's plays, Shakespeare and the Popular Dramatic Tradition (1944). 9. Cf. also H. D. F. Kitto, Form and Meaning in Drama (1956) p. 258: 'But surely it does not follow, as Wilson says it does, that Shakespeare must have composed the scene with the English constitution in mind .... It is surely the common experience that we go to the theatre willing to accept, without prepossessions, what the dramatist offers us . since nobody in the audience knew or cared what the Danish constitution was, in whatever century this is supposed to be, the dramatist could go ahead and assume what suited him best.' 10. The good Second Quarto includes the Council in the stage-direction for 1.2: 'Florish. Enter Claudius, King of Denmark£, Gertrad the Queene, Counsaile . .' 11. Quoted in Malone's Variorum Shakespeare (1821) VII, 200. 12. 'Claudius's description of Gertrude (1.2.9) as 'imperial jointress' is important ... since the phrase signifies, not joint-monarch as some editors explain, but a widow who retains the jointure or life interest in the crown, and so points to the legal argument or quibble by means of which Hamlet was supplanted' - J. Dover Wilson, What Happens in 'Hamlet' (Cambridge, 1935) p. 38. Even if 'jointress' later acquired the meaning advocated by Wilson (cf. OED), this tells us little about Shakespeare's meaning, especially if, as seems likely, he invented the word. In Belleforest, incidentally, Old Hamlet and Claudius are joint governors ('Rorique ... donna le gouvernement de Jutie ... a deux Notes 225 seigneurs ... nommez Horvvendille et Fengon'- p. 180), which might have suggested joint monarchs for the play. But clearly Shakespeare wished only to stir vague thoughts about Gertrude's rights, not to define them meticulously. 13. 'It is permanently ambiguous. Indeed the very word "ghost", by putting it into the same class with the "ghosts" of Kyd and Chapman, nay by classifying it at all, puts us on the wrong track. It is "this thing", "this dreaded sight" .. .'-C. S. Lewis, 'Hamlet: the prince or the poem,' in Proceedings of the British Academy, XXVIII, 1942, p. 147. 14. 'The elder Hamlet had died two months before, at which time his son was presumably at Wittenberg . it is probable that in Hamlet's absence he [Claudius] had taken over control of affairs' (Hankins, Character of Hamlet, p. 98). Bradley, however, has shown that at the time of his father's death Hamlet was almost certainly not at Wittenberg (Shakespearean Tragedy, Note B). It therefore seems more likely that the shock of his mother's marriage stunned Hamlet's interest in the succession; but this matter lies genuinely 'outside the play', and so cannot be pursued. 15. Cf. A. C. Sprague, Shakespeare and the Audience: a study in the technique of exposition (1935) p. 243, and the excellent section on 'Testimony'. Bradley (Shakespearean Tragedy, p. 168) thought Claudius 'courteous and never undignified' as a king, an opinion that is, I believe, the accepted one. 16. Hankins (Character of Hamlet, p. 96) felt that when Fortinbras called 'the noblest to the audience' (V.2.379) this 'indicates that the kingdom's affairs were handled by a council of nobles'. In Belleforest, on the other hand, Hamlet is chosen king after his harangue 'en l'assemblee des citoyens' ('among the multitude of people') (pp. 264, 265). 17. Lewis, 'Hamlet: the prince or the poem', Proceedings of the British Academy, 1942, p. 147. After Lewis's lecture the 'mystery' and 'doubt' in Hamlet received even greater emphasis, in D. G. James's The Dream of Learning (1951), ch. 2 ('The new doubt'); Maynard Mack's 'The world of Hamlet', in Tragic Themes in Western Literature, ed. Cleanth Brooks (1955); Harry Levin's The Question of'Hamlet' (1959); and elsewhere. 18. Probably a technical reason also dictated the allusions to Hamlet's popularity in Act IV. In several tragedies Shakespeare felt a need to rehabilitate his hero in the audience's sympathy at this point, partly, perhaps, because the tensions of Act III brought into notice some of the hero's less amiable qualities. Thus he invented Brutus's solicitude for the sleepy boy Lucius in Julius Caesar (IV.3.238ff.), and underlined Lear's humility in his reunion with Cordelia. 19. The technique is not unfamiliar. Kitto wrote 'We have to observe first how Shakespeare uses his Clowns much as the Greek dramatist used his Chorus; for they fill our minds with generalised thoughts about mortality and the vanity of human life, before we are brought, as by a gradual contraction of the focus, to the particular tragedy' (Form and Meaning, p. 283). Mack also explored 'umbrella speeches', 'mirror situations' and that 'inward action' which fills 'our minds with 226 Notes impressions analogous to those which we may presume to be occupying the conscious or unconscious mind of the hero' ('The Jacobean Shakespeare', in Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 1, 1960).