Henslowe's Diary ... as a Blog!: Kyd (Thomas)

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Monday, 11 June 2018

11 June, 1594 - Hamlet

Here's what the Admiral's Men and/or the Chamberlain's Men performed at the Newington Butts playhouse on this day, 424 years ago...

Henslowe writes: y^e 9 of June 1594 ... R at hamlet ... viij^s

In modern English: 11^th June, 1594 ... Received at Hamlet ... 8 shillings.

Well, here's a surprise! Today, Hamlet, one of the most famous plays of the English Renaissance, was performed at Newington Butts. But as always with Henslowe's Diary, things are more complicated than they seem. Shakespeare's Hamlet is normally dated to circa 1600, so what is it doing here 6 years previously?

The answer is that today's play was probably not the Hamlet that we know today. Shakespeare did not invent the story of Prince Hamlet: it is based on a Scandinavian legend, retold in many forms over the centuries, in which a young man fakes madness in order to exact revenge upon the murderer of his father. So, this play may be an older, lost dramatization of the story (rather like the early King Leir play that we saw in April).

Scholars call this hypothetical lost play "the ur-Hamlet". Let's go through exactly what we know about this early Hamlet and the intriguing question of who wrote it.

1. Thomas Nashe and the English Senecas

In 1589, the satirist Thomas Nashe wrote the preface to a prose tale called Menaphon by his friend, the playwright Robert Greene. In it, Nashe writes facetiously about English writers who attempt to imitate ancient Roman authors. In particular, he refers to a fashion for emulating Seneca, a Roman dramatist whose tragedies are known for their long, rhetorical speeches and gruesome horrors.

Seneca's Ten Tragedies Translated
into English (1581), an example
of the vogue for Senecan drama

Despite his mocking tone, Nashe does admit that "English Seneca read by candlelight yields many good sentences, as 'Blood is a beggar!' and so forth". And then he adds that these plays "will afford you whole Hamlets - I should say handfuls - of tragical speeches".

This is not a very funny joke. But what's important is that Nashe gratuitously brings the word 'Hamlet' into a discussion of English Senecan tragedies. This implies that a play about Hamlet already existed, and that it was in the Senecan mode.

Was this early Hamlet written by the young William Shakespeare? We simply don't know, because the historical record tells us nothing about what Shakespeare was doing in the late 1580s.

Nashe hints at an alternative author. Continuing to scoff at Seneca's English followers, he says they "imitate the Kid in Aesop, who, enamoured with the Fox's newfangles, forsook all hopes of life to leap into a new occupation". This refers to Aesop's fable of the Fox and the Goat, but Nashe's use of the word "Kid" to refer to the foolish animal could be a pun on the playwright Thomas Kyd. After all, Kyd's Spanish Tragedy, one of the most popular plays at the Rose, is a perfect example of a Senecan tragedy, and shares several plot elements with Hamlet. So could Nashe be jokingly referring to Kyd as the author of the Hamlet play too? We don't know.

2. Henslowe's diary

Five years later, we find today's entry in Henslowe's Diary: a performance of Hamlet at Newington Butts. Is this the same play that Nashe was referring to? Probably, since Henslowe does not label it as new.

Henslowe's entry answers some questions but raises more. If you recall, two playing companies are currently sharing the Newington Butts playhouse: the Admiral's Men and the Chamberlain's Men. Hamlet probably belonged to the Chamberlain's, because it never appears in the repertory of the Admiral's when they are working separately. This is significant because Shakespeare is believed to have been acting with the Chamberlain's Men at this time.

In other words, in 1594, Shakespeare was probably acting in an old play called Hamlet. Was he its author? Or was he inspired by it to write his own version of the story? We don't know.

3. Thomas Lodge and the miserable ghost

Two years later, in 1596, Thomas Lodge wrote a satirical piece entitled Wit's Misery in which he categorized the devils who lurk around London. One devil is called 'Hate-Virtue' and Lodge describes him thus: he "looks as pale as the vizard of the ghost which cried so miserably at the Theatre, like an oyster-wife, 'Hamlet, revenge!'".

Henry Fuseli's illustration of the ghost calling
Hamlet to revenge (1796)

A vizard is a mask. The Theatre was the playhouse in London where the Chamberlain's Men were performing in 1596. An oyster-wife is a woman who sells oysters at the market, calling out loudly to potential customers. Lodge is therefore recalling a play in which a ghost in a white mask called on Hamlet for revenge in a voice like an oyster-wife's - clearly, he was not impressed by the actor playing the ghost.

The line "Hamlet, revenge!" does not appear in this exact form in any surviving version Shakespeare's play, and may thus hint at the existence of an earlier version. Overall, Lodge's comments could suggest that Shakespeare's company was still performing an old Hamlet play in 1596.

4. Hamlet by Shakespeare

An unfamiliar version of the "To be or not to be"
speech from the Q1 version of Hamlet

Finally, in 1603, evidence appears for a Hamlet by Shakespeare: a play was published entitled The Tragical History of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark and clearly attributed to William Shakespeare. But this text, known as "Q1", is not quite the Hamlet we know. It's shorter, some of the characters have different names, and the writing is often different (one speech begins "To be or not to be, aye, there's the point!").

Then, in 1604 and in 1623, two more texts were published; despite some differences between them, they together represent the play that we think of as Hamlet.

None of these texts read as though they were written in the 1580s, and a lot of internal and external evidence suggests that they were written around 1599-1601 (for a recent summary, see the introduction to the 2006 Arden edition). That is why scholars assume that the Hamlet play mentioned by Nashe, Henslowe and Lodge was probably a different one. But Q1 is a puzzle of its own. Is it a bowdlerized version of Shakespeare's play? Or some kind of halfway point in the transformation of the ur-Hamlet into Hamlet? We don't know.

So, what was the ur-Hamlet?

The short answer is, we don't know. Perhaps Thomas Kyd wrote an early Hamlet play and Shakespeare, acting in it, was inspired to create his own version a few years later. Or perhaps the young Shakespeare first wrote Hamlet back in the 1580s and gradually rewrote it into the version we know today. There is a vast amount of scholarly debate on these questions, but I'm not convinced that we'll ever know the truth.

And since Henslowe will never mention Hamlet again, I think we have the right to shrug and move on!

ur-Hamlet information

G.R. Hibbard, ed., Hamlet, The Oxford Shakespeare (Clarendon Press, 1987), 12-14
Emma Smith, "Ghost Writing: Hamlet and the Ur-Hamlet", in The Renaissance Text: Theory, Editing, Textuality, ed. Andrew Murphy (Manchester University Press, 2000), 177-90
Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, eds., Hamlet, The Arden Shakespeare (Methuen, 2006), 44-7.
Roslyn L. Knutson, "Hamlet", Lost Plays Database (2012).
Martin Wiggins, British Drama, 1533-1642: A Catalogue, vol. 2 (Oxford University Press, 2012), entry 814.

Henslowe links

Comments?

Did I make a mistake? Do you have a question? Have you anything to add? Please post a comment below!

Monday, 14 March 2016

14 March, 1592 - Hieronimo

Here's what Lord Strange's Men performed at the Rose playhouse on this day, 424 years ago...

Henslowe writes: R at Jeronymo the 14 marche 1591 ... iij¹¹ xj^s

In modern English: Received at Hieronimo, 14^th March, 1592 ... £3 and 11 shillings

Today, Lord Strange's Men performed Hieronimo, which is almost certainly an alternate title for The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd. Yesterday, and also a couple of weeks ago, we saw Strange's Men perform a lost play entitled The Spanish Comedy of Don Horatio, which apparently portrayed the events leading up to The Spanish Tragedy. Now, we see the famous tragedy itself.

The Spanish Tragedy was one of the most popular plays of the English Renaissance theatre, and it is still occasionally revived today. By 1592, it may already have been several years old. It was often referred to simply as Hieronimo, after its central character of a grieving father who seeks revenge for the murder of his son. But even though it was an old play, Hieronimo was still incredibly successful at the box office: Henslowe's takings, which work out to 71 shillings, are almost as high as the receipts for the brand new First Part of Henry VI. No doubt Edward Alleyn's performance as Hieronimo contributed to its ongoing popularity.

Indeed, The Spanish Tragedy seems to have captured the imagination of Elizabethan playgoers like no other, and it became a byword for crowd-pleasing. Later playwrights sneered at the affection some audience members held for it; in the induction to Bartholomew Fair (1614), a jealous Ben Jonson mocked "He that will swear Hieronimo or Andronicus are the best plays". In my description of The Spanish Tragedy, I'll quote a number of its most famous lines, because Kyd's rhythmic and memorable speeches became icons of Renaissance popular culture.

The play

The Spanish Tragedy begins with a ghost, Don Andrea, recalling his past:

When this eternal substance of my soul
Did live imprisoned in my wanton flesh
Each in their function serving other's need
I was a courtier in the Spanish court...

Andrea relates how he loved the Spanish King's niece, Bel-Imperia, and hoped to marry her, but was killed in battle by Balthazar, heir to the Portuguese throne. The figure of Revenge then appears, and assures Andrea that his desire for vengeance on Balthazar will be fulfilled. Andrea and Revenge sit down to watch the events unfold, and throughout the play they comment on what they see.

Balthazar has been captured in battle, and is taken to the Spanish court. To forge peace, the Spanish King decides to marry Balthazar to Bel-Imperia. But Bel-Imperia has other ideas, as she has fallen in love with Andrea's friend Horatio. Her Machiavellian brother Lorenzo is furious when he finds out, and hires murderers to kill Horatio.

Horatio is ambushed by Lorenzo's henchmen, who stab him and hang him from an arbour. His cries wake his father, Hieronimo, who enters with the lines

What outcries pluck me from my naked bed
And chill my throbbing heart with trembling fear?

Woodcut from the 1615 edition of The Spanish Tragedy. Hieronimo is discovering Horatio's body hanging in an arbour. A masked murderer is dragging Bel-Imperia away.

Hieronimo and his wife Isabella find the body of Horatio and they lament his death at length. One of Hieronimo's laments became exceptionally famous:

Oh eyes, no eyes, but fountains fraught with tears!
Oh life, no life, but lively form of death!
O world, no world, but mass of public wrongs...

As he watches all of this, Andrea becomes exasperated; instead of gloating over his revenge upon Balthazar, he has instead found himself watching the suffering of people he loves. But Revenge counsels patience; he doesn't quite say "Revenge is a dish best served cold", but he comes pretty close.

Hieronimo and Isabella, meanwhile, are going mad with grief, so that when Hieronimo interrupts the Spanish King, wildly demanding "Justice, oh justice to Hieronimo!" it is easy for the courtiers to dismiss him, and Hieronimo slinks away, saying to himself "Hieronimo beware, go by, go by!"

Isabella commits suicide, but Hieronimo instead plots a crazy but effective revenge. Working in league with the despairing Bel-Imperia, Hieronimo convinces Lorenzo and Balthazar that they should entertain the kings of Spain and Portugal with a play. And so the four of them perform a tragedy, Soliman and Perseda, to the assembled court. During their performance, the levels of meta-theatricality become extraordinary: the real-life audience in the Rose playhouse watches Andrea and Revenge watch the Spanish court watch the play-within-the-play.

Hieronimo's cunning plan is that the prop knives in the play are in fact real knives. So, in front of the two kings, Hieronimo and Bel-Imperia kill Lorenzo and Balthazar, and then Bel-Imperia kills herself. Only when the courtiers' applause dies down and the bodies fail to rise for their bows do the two kings realize what has happened. Hieronimo then reveals the corpse of Horatio and explains his actions, beginning with a lament:

Here lay my hope, and here my hope hath end;
Here lay my heart, and here my heart was slain;
Here lay my treasure, here my treasure lost;
Here lay my bliss, and here my bliss bereft.
But hope, heart, treasure, joy and bliss,
All fled, failed, died, yea, all decayed with this.

Image from a 17th century Dutch adaptation of The Spanish Tragedy entitled Don Jeronimo, Marschalk van Spanjen. Lorenzo, Balthazar and Bel-Imperia are dead, and Hieronimo is revealing the body of his son. The two kings are just realizing that the stage deaths were for real...

In a final burst of violence, Hieronimo bites out his own tongue in a refusal to speak more and kills himself.

Andrea and Revenge enjoy watching these events. And at the end of the play, Revenge, satisfied with his work, tells Andrea that it is time to return to the land of the dead:

Then haste we down to meet thy friends and foes,
To place thy friends in ease, the rest in woes.
For here, though Death doth end their misery,
I'll there begin their endless tragedy.

If you would like to read The Spanish Tragedy, there are numerous modern-spelling editions available.

What we learn from this

Decades after its first performances in the 1580s and 90s, English writers were still quoting the play's most popular lines. In her edition of The Spanish Tragedy, Emma Smith collects together an amazing array of allusions, parodies, pastiches and homages to lines from the play. The most popular lines and speeches include some of those quoted above: "Hieronimo beware; go by, go by!", "What outcries pluck me from my naked bed?", "When this eternal substance of my soul..." and, of course, "Oh eyes, no eyes, but fountains fraught with tears!"

I can't help wondering whether the audience in the Rose might have been able to recite along with some of these speeches. Is it possible that performances of The Spanish Tragedy might have eventually ended up something like screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show?

What's next?

There will be no post tomorrow because Henslowe records no performance on 15th March. We don't know why - perhaps the company were performing at the court instead, or perhaps Edward Alleyn had laryngitis after ranting too much as Hieronimo. Whatever the reason, Henslowe's Diary ... as a Blog! will return on 16th March.