Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare by Stephen Greenblatt
Fortunately, the Catholic Church taught, there was a way to help your loved ones and yourself. Certain good works—prayers, alms, and above all special Masses—could significantly ease the suffering, reduce the purgatorial prison term, and hasten the soul’s passage to heaven. You could prudently arrange for these good works on your own behalf, during your lifetime, and you could bestow them on those who had passed away. The wealthy and powerful endowed chantries where priests would say prayers in perpetuity for the dead, and they founded civic institutions—almshouses, hospitals, schools—designed to generate an abundant supply of prayers for the founder. Poorer people saved their pennies to pay for sets of Masses, available in different packages. The most effective was said to be the trental, a sequence of thirty Masses, but even one or two could help.
What evidence was there for the efficacy of these measures? In addition to church doctrine, there was the testimony of the dead themselves. Many stories were told of ghosts who had returned to earth from purgatory, desperately pleading for help. And after the help was given, these same ghosts would often return to thank the giver and bear witness to the immense comfort that their charitable donations had provided. The ghostly apparitions that people actually encountered were almost always terrifying. They could be harbingers of catastrophe, signs of madness, or manifestations of evil, for the devil could assume the shape of a dead person and sow wicked ideas in the minds of the unsuspecting. But the church’s teachings helped make sense of what was happening when people were haunted by the spirits of those whom they had loved: the dead in their purgatorial suffering were simply pleading to be remembered. “Remember our thirst while ye sit and drink,” the Catholic Thomas More heard the voices of the dead crying; remember “our hunger while ye be feasting; our restless watch while ye be sleeping; our sore and grievous pain while ye be playing; our hot, burning fire while ye be in pleasure and sporting. So might God make your offspring after remember you.” And with remembrance, in the form of the appropriate rituals, would come relief.
Zealous Protestants regarded this whole set of beliefs and institutional practices as an enormous confidence game, a racket designed to extract money from the credulous. Purgatory, they said, was “a poet’s fable,” an elaborate fantasy that had been imposed upon the whole society, top to bottom, so that king and fishwife alike were being ruthlessly exploited. Persuaded by these arguments or, more plausibly, simply eager to seize church wealth, Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries and chantries that had been the ritual centers of the Catholic cult of the dead. Under his Protestant successors, Edward VI and Elizabeth I, reformers in Parliament abolished the whole system of intercessory foundations created to offer prayers for souls in purgatory. The authorities kept many of the hospitals, almshouses, and schools, of course, but stripped them of their ritual functions. And through sermons and homilies and the church service itself, the clergy made a systematic effort to reeducate the populace, urging their flock to reimagine the whole relationship between this life and the beyond.
This was not an easy task. Belief in purgatory may well have been abused—plenty of pious Catholics thought it was—but it addressed fears and longings that did not simply vanish when people were told by the officials of the church and the state that the dead were beyond all earthly contact. Ceremony was not the only or even the principal issue. What mattered was whether the dead could continue to speak to the living, at least for a short time, whether the living could help the dead, whether a reciprocal bond remained. When Shakespeare stood in the churchyard, watching the dirt fall on the body of his son, did he think that his relationship with Hamnet was gone without a trace?
Perhaps. But it is also possible that he found the service, with its deliberate refusal to address the dead child as “thou,” its reduction of ritual, its narrowing of ceremony, its denial of any possibility of communication, painfully inadequate. And if he could make his peace with the Protestant understanding of these things, others close to him assuredly could not. Nothing is known of his wife Anne’s beliefs about death, though there may be a very small hint in the strange inscription that was placed on her grave in 1623 by her daughter Susanna. “A mother’s bosom you gave, and milk and life,” the inscription begins; “for such bounty, alas! I can only render stones!” The lines that follow imply the radical idea that the dead woman’s soul, as well as her body, is imprisoned in the grave: “Rather would I pray the good angel to roll away the stone from the mouth of the tomb, that thy spirit, even as the body of Christ, should go forth.” But these may be Susanna’s heterodox views and not at all those of Anne Hathaway Shakespeare, let alone ones she might have held back in 1596, the year of Hamnet’s death.
Shakespeare’s parents, John and Mary, also presumably stood by Hamnet’s grave. Indeed, they had spent far more time with the boy than his father had, for while Shakespeare was in London, they were all living together in the same house with their daughter-in-law and the three grandchildren. They had helped to raise Hamnet, and they tended Hamnet through his last illness. And about his parents’ beliefs with regard to the afterlife, specifically about his father’s beliefs, there is some evidence. This evidence strongly suggests that John Shakespeare would have wanted something done for Hamnet’s soul, something that he perhaps appealed urgently to his son to do or that he undertook to do on his own. The arguments, or pleading, or tears that may have accompanied such appeals are irrevocably lost. But at least there is a trace of what Shakespeare’s father (and, presumably, his mother as well) would have thought necessary, proper, charitable, loving, and, in a single word, Christian.
Back in the 1580s, while Thomas Lucy was combing the neighborhood of Stratford for Catholic subversives and Catholics were said to be hiding the evidence of their dangerous loyalties, John Shakespeare (if the papers discovered in the eighteenth century were authentic) put his name to something seriously incriminating: the “spiritual last will and testament” that the Jesuits had circulated among the faithful. At the time William may have known nothing about this—his father probably slipped the papers between the rafters and roof tiles of the Henley Street house in secrecy—but the faith and anxiety that led to the signing of the document would probably have come up at the funeral of Hamnet. For what John Shakespeare had hidden away had specifically to do with death.
The “spiritual testament” was a kind of insurance policy for the Catholic soul, and it must have seemed particularly important to those who could not practice their faith openly or who were under pressure to collaborate with the Protestants. The signer declares that he is a Catholic, but he adds that if at any time he should chance “by suggestion of the devil to do, say, or think” anything contrary to his faith, he formally revokes his sin and wills “that it be held for neither spoken or done by me.” So too if he should happen not to receive the proper Catholic last rites—confession, anointing, and communion—he wishes that they be performed “spiritually.” He knows that he “is born to die, without knowing the hour, where, when, or how” and fears that he could be “surprised on a sudden.” Hence he is grateful, he declares, for the opportunity to experience penance now, for he knows that he could be taken out of this life “when I least thought thereof: yea even then, when I was plunged in the dirty puddle of my sins.”
Catholics were taught in this period to be particularly fearful of a sudden death, a death that would prevent the ritual opportunity to settle the sinner’s accounts with God and to show the appropriate contrition. Any stains that had not been removed in this life would have to be burned away in the afterlife. The “spiritual testament” was an attempt to address this fear, and it went on to enlist family and friends as allies:
I John Shakespeare do . . . beseech all my dear friends, parents, and kinsfolk, by the bowels of our Savior Jesus Christ, that since it is uncertain what lot will befall me, for fear notwithstanding lest by reason of my sins I be to pass and stay a long while in Purgatory, they will vouchsafe to assist and succor me with their holy prayers and satisfacto
Those who set their name to such a document (and it is at least plausible that John Shakespeare was among them, and probable that he shared their concerns) were not speaking solely for themselves; they were asking those who loved them to do something crucially important for them, something that the state had declared illegal.
In 1596, at the funeral of Hamnet, the issue would almost certainly have surfaced. The boy’s soul needed the help of those who loved and cared for him. John Shakespeare, who had virtually raised his grandson, may well have urged his prosperous son William to pay for masses for the dead child, just as he likely wanted masses to be said for his own soul. For he was getting old and would soon be in need of the “satisfactory works” that could shorten the duration of his agony in the afterlife.
If this delicate subject was broached, did William angrily shake his head or instead quietly pay for clandestine Masses for Hamnet’s soul? Did he tell his father that he could not give his son—or, looking ahead, that he would not give him—what he craved? Did he say that he no longer believed in the whole story of the terrible prison house, poised between heaven and hell, where the sins done in life were burned and purged away?
Whatever he determined at the time, Shakespeare must have still been brooding over it in late 1600 and early 1601, when he sat down to write a tragedy whose doomed hero bore the name of his dead son. His thoughts may have been intensified by news that his elderly father was seriously ill back in Stratford, for the thought of his father’s death is deeply woven into the play. And the death of his son and the impending death of his father—a crisis of mourning and memory—constitute a psychic disturbance that may help to explain the explosive power and inwardness of Hamlet.
A ghost comes back to earth to demand revenge: this is the thrilling theatrical device that everyone remembered from the earlier Elizabethan play about Hamlet, and Shakespeare invests the scene with incomparable power. “If thou didst ever thy dear father love . . . ,” the ghost says to his groaning son, “Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder” (1.5.23–25). But, strangely enough, the spectral injunction that Shakespeare’s Hamlet dwells upon is not this stirring call to action but something quite different: “Adieu, adieu, Hamlet. Remember me.” “Remember thee?” Hamlet echoes, clutching his head.
Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat
In this distracted globe. Remember thee?
(1.5.91, 95–97)
On the face of things, as Hamlet’s tone of incredulity suggests, the request is absurd: the son is hardly likely to forget the return of his father from the grave. But in fact Hamlet does not sweep to his revenge, and it turns out that remembering his father—remembering him in the right way, remembering him at all—is far more difficult to do than he imagined. Something interferes with the straightforward plan, an interference whose emblem is the feigned madness that makes no sense in the plot. And it turns out that this interference springs from the same sources that may have led Shakespeare’s own father to sign the Catholic “spiritual testament,” with its desperate plea to his family and friends: Remember me.
“I am thy father’s spirit,” the ghost tells his son,
Doomed for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confined to fast in fires
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purged away. But that I am forbid
To tell the secrets of my prison-house
I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul.
(1.5.9–16)
Shakespeare had to be careful: plays were censored, and it would not have been permissible to refer to purgatory as a place that actually existed. There is thus a sly literalness in the ghost’s remark that he is forbidden “To tell the secrets of my prison-house.” But virtually everyone in Shakespeare’s audience would have understood what this prison-house was, a location Hamlet himself signals when he swears, a few moments later, “by Saint Patrick” (1.5.140), the patron saint of purgatory.
The ghost has suffered the fate so deeply feared by pious Catholics. He has been taken suddenly from this life, with no time to prepare ritually for his end. “Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin,” he tells his son, adding in one of the play’s strangest lines, “Unhouseled, dis-appointed, unaneled” (1.5.76–77). “Unhouseled”—he did not receive last communion; “disappointed”—he did not undertake deathbed confession or appointment; “unaneled”—he did not receive extreme unction, the anointing (or aneling) of his body with holy oil. He went into the afterlife without having undertaken any preparatory penance, and now he is paying the full price: “O horrible, O horrible, most horrible!” (1.5.80).
What does it mean that a ghost from purgatory erupts into the world of Hamlet pleading to be remembered? Even setting aside for a moment the fact that purgatory, according to the Protestant church, did not exist, the allusions to it here are an enigma, for spirits in God’s great penitentiary could not by definition ask anyone to commit a crime. After all, they are being purged of their sins in order to ascend to heaven. Yet this ghost is not asking for Masses and alms; he is preempting God’s monopoly on revenge by demanding that his son kill the man who murdered him, seized his crown, and married his widow. Audiences then as now would not necessarily worry about this—the play is not, after all, a theology lesson. But Hamlet worries about it, and his paralyzing doubts and anxieties displace revenge as the center of the play’s interest.
The official Protestant line in Shakespeare’s time was that there were no ghosts at all. The apparitions that men and women encountered from time to time—apparitions that uncannily bore the appearance of loved ones or friends—were mere delusions, or, still worse, they were devils in disguise, come to tempt their victims to sin. Hamlet at first declares that he has seen an “honest ghost” (1.5.142), but his initial confidence gives way to uncertainty:
The spirit that I have seen
May be the devil, and the devil hath power
T’assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps,
Out of my weakness and my melancholy—
As he is very potent with such spirits—
Abuses me to damn me.
(2.2.575–80)
Such thoughts lead to a cycle of delay, self-reproach, continued failure to act, and renewed self-reproach. They account for the play-within-the-play—Hamlet’s device to get some independent confirmation of the ghost’s claims—and for the hero’s queasy sense of groping in the dark. And they are linked to a broader sense of doubt and disorientation in a play where the whole ritual structure that helped men and women deal with loss has been fatally damaged.
Shakespeare would have experienced the consequences of this damage as he stood by the grave of his son or tried to cope with his father’s pleas for help in the afterlife. The Protestant authorities had attacked the beliefs and outlawed the practices that the Catholic Church had offered as a way to negotiate with the dead. They said that the whole concept of purgatory was a lie and that all one needed was robust faith in the saving power of Christ’s sacrifice. There were those who firmly possessed such faith, but nothing in Shakespeare’s works suggests that he was among them. He was instead part of a very large group, probably the bulk of the population, who found themselves still grappling with longings and fears that the old resources of the Catholic Church had served to address. It was because of those longings and fears that people like John Shakespeare secretly signed “spiritual testaments.”
All funerals invite those who stand by the grave to think about what, if anything, they believe in. But the funeral of one’s own child does more than this: it compels parents to ask questions of God and to interrogate their own faith. Shakespeare must have attended the regular services in his Protestant parish; otherwise his name would have turned up on lists of recusants. But did he believe
Shakespeare grasped that crucial death rituals in his culture had been gutted. He may have felt this with enormous pain at his son’s graveside. But he also believed that the theater—and his theatrical art in particular—could tap into the great reservoir of passionate feelings that, for him and for thousands of his contemporaries, no longer had a satisfactory outlet.
The Reformation was in effect offering him an extraordinary gift—the broken fragments of what had been a rich, complex edifice—and he knew exactly how to accept and use this gift. He was hardly indifferent to the success he could achieve, but it was not a matter of profit alone. Shakespeare drew upon the pity, confusion, and dread of death in a world of damaged rituals (the world in which most of us continue to live) because he himself experienced those same emotions at the core of his being. He experienced them in 1596, at the funeral of his child, and he experienced them with redoubled force in anticipation of his father’s death. He responded not with prayers but with the deepest expression of his being: Hamlet.
In the early eighteenth century, the editor and biographer Nicholas Rowe, trying to find out something about Shakespeare’s career as an actor, made inquiries, but memories had faded. “I could never meet with any further account of him this way,” Rowe noted, “than that the top of his performance was the Ghost in his own Hamlet.” Enacting the purgatorial spirit who demands that the living listen carefully to his words—“lend thy serious hearing / To what I shall unfold” (1.5.5–6)—Shakespeare must have conjured up within himself the voice of his dead son, the voice of his dying father, and perhaps too his own voice, as it would sound when it came from the grave. Small wonder that it would have been his best role.