Dusting Off Hamlet

In Culture’s dress-up box there are many fun costumes that we can wear to the Grand Party. But none has been taken out, shaken up a bit, and donned in fashion all anew as Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The old warhorse has been trotting the boards for lo these four hundred years, always new, always bright, and always---insufferably dull. Like that legendary unmarried aunt in the next county, who is always reputed to be a beauty beyond compare, a cook extraordinaire, and a pillar of all the virtues we hold dear. Until she materializes in the flesh, as it were. Then we discover that she is less than the songs of her praises.
And such is the masterpiece of our Western World. We study her; we profess our love to her; we admire her for the quality of her parts. But dear Lord, don’t make me spend any time with her! She’s a bore! She talks too much. She gasps breathlessly, endlessly like the self-obsessed, delusional patient upon the psychiatrist’s couch that she is. A neurotic woman with too much time on her hands and not enough love in her life.
I don’t hate Hamlet. I just won’t spend another minute of my ever-diminishing lifespan watching her prance and preen upon the stage or screen. And yet the old girl won’t rest. Like the old whores who lived in my hometown, she keeps rising like Dracula and his brides, to shimmy and shake every time a new man comes to town.
Well, here I am, the new man in town, and she is shimmying and shaking not only in my face but in my subconscious, wanting to be loved, to be embraced, but most of all--to be understood. Why should I give one moment’s thought to this crazy old whore? The Cliff Notes plot summary tells us all. A Danish prince’s father is cruelly murdered so that the perpetrator can obtain the throne and the queen; the prince is told to seek revenge via the ghost of the father; the murder is avenged but at a cost (of the entire Danish royal family). So what’s not to understand?
Yes, if only it would end there and this Reader’s Digest plot summary be the be-all and the end-all. But something is dreadfully amiss that skirts the edges of our consciousness, something that doesn’t sit well, good acting be damned. And that something is that the Genius of the World, the man who wrote this work, the Bard of Avon, created something that doesn’t make sense.
The man we know as Shakespeare poured more of his ineffable brilliance and insight about the meaning of being a human being into this work than into any of his other works. Using the language of English but the gift of the gods, this man let escape insights into humanity that have never before captured the essence of the mystery, majesty, and divinity of human life itself. Even with the prejudices and predilections of a man of his time, birth, and condition, he was able to see beyond all of these things into the infinite, into the sublime, into the black hole where resides the excised sacrificial beating heart of humanity.
And thus we must treat Hamlet reverentially, tiptoeing around the corpse in the living room, the stern countenance of our great ancestor--intimidating and profoundly serious. But it is this attitude about the play that keeps it in a state of suspended animation that with each passing year, each passing generation, makes it more and more remote, with its rarefied dust eventually striking the nostrils of only the highest of the high priests of arcane literature. Well, quite frankly, this work is headed to the dustbin to be added to the ash heap of oblivion if some fundamental restoration isn’t done to it.
This thing has to get personal or it’s doomed!
Every creator’s greatest work is all about himself. Whether a building, a painting, a musical composition, a literary work--the masterpieces are what they are because they are autobiographical. Who’s that Christ-like figure sitting in the center of that long table in “The Last Supper”? Why, it’s DaVinci as he saw himself, the center of the universe, patient, beatific, all-knowing, in a world of chaos and betrayal. I don’t care what the medium: Look at the masterpiece and you are looking into the heart and soul of the creator.
Yet this is absolutely not considered when looking at Hamlet--the author is as detached from his masterpiece as was a French king from his peasants. It’s as if it makes no difference who wrote the thing--the work is all that matters. But without an author, the work is soulless, like a reflection in a mirror without anyone standing in front of the mirror. Or like a vampire standing in front of the mirror and causing no reflection.
No. The author and the work are complementary and inseparable.
We must know what the author was up to when he created his work, but with Shakespeare this is less than easy. Tradition has it that the part of the ghost in Hamlet was actually played by the author when the play was first performed at the Globe Theater. And I think this is very telling that we’ve treated Shakespeare as a ghost ever since, never as a man.
Why is this? Why do we deny humanity to the most humanistic of writers? Are we so pompous and cocksure that we don’t need the author? Not really. The answer to this oversight or omission or whatever it might be considered has not been deliberate--on OUR part. I do think it was deliberate and forced upon us by the author himself.
Elusive is a word that is an understatement in describing our attempts to know the man behind the words that were penned in the English Renaissance. The traditional view of the playwright as the man from Stratford on Avon is a laughable fiction maintained more to promote tourism to the English countryside than to provide a plausible biography of our bard. That an uneducated country bumpkin who never went more than forty miles from home in his whole life was able to create the world of Shakespeare’s poetry is utter nonsense. Our man was an aristocrat of the first order with a great education and great connections who took the bumpkin’s name--with whatever financial arrangements the two of them worked out lost in the mist of time. I can take no criticism of the works of Shakespeare seriously if the critic does not attribute the works to their only rightful source--Edward de Vere, the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford.
People do not leap from writing nothing into writing masterpieces of poetry and drama--yet we are to believe that the man from Stratford did just this. And great writers do not degenerate into subliterate drivel as the will of Shakespeare attests to. There is too precipitous an ascension to the heights and a too profound sinking to the depths to be remotely believable.
But de Vere was educated, trained, traveled, and connected from an early age, and his writing shows progress in letters and poetry. De Vere was early known as a wit, bon vivant, and exceptionally skilled verbal talent. But there is no stage where he shows a maturing talent. Why? The reason is undoubtedly that he quit writing under his own name in favor of the assumed one of William Shakespeare.
And why would he assume a name of a real contemporaneous person? For a nobleman in Elizabeth’s court to write poetry under his own name was certainly not forbidden or frowned upon; indeed, it was encouraged. But writing for the theater most certainly was seen as less than honorable for one of the noble class. It was akin to working in commerce. The nobility did not soil their hands for the rabble to applaud or hiss.
Though his reason to use a pseudonym was surely to shield himself and the court from disgrace, still the world of Elizabeth’s court and that time’s London were fairly small. This is a secret that was likely known in the inner circles and perhaps in larger circles as well.
I think his reason for doing so was more complex. Part of his reason surely lay with the name William Shakespeare itself. De Vere, I believe, wanted that name for its verbal possibilities. His own did not have any play within it, but Will Shakespeare--now here was a three syllable combination that can be at least three verbs or three nouns or combinations thereof that the clever de Vere could imagine all pertained to him. By altering the meaning of one of the syllables, an identity could be whatever he wanted it to be. The name, in short, amused him.
That it was attached to a real person, albeit a not overly bright one, working at a theater in London must have appealed to de Vere’s sense of dramatic comedy, intrigue, irony, and drama. With money and puffery, he probably convinced the real Shakespeare to allow him to use his name and maintain the fiction that he, the lowly one, was the author of the works. (Had a man of Oxford’s status, wit, and money approached me with such an offer of money for silence, I would have jumped at the chance.)

More in the Next Posting
And I promise I will get back to the subject of Hamlet.