FOR A PENNY'S WORTH OF HAMLET

1603.There is a discernable hum about the city. The swarm and tread of a long forgotten life, a life far removed from our own—a large, teeming, and animated life, fluid, and slightly opaque, like the Thames that winds ventricle-like through its heart. The market at Smithfield is effuse with a smell that might be burnt brick, tallow, or sea coal. The slow moan and shuttle of livestock. There are the alehouses and ladies of sale. The bear-baiting precincts of Southwark and the great Globe itself, pulsing with life deep in the afternoons. The bustle of theatre cues for a penny’s worth of Hamlet.

Her language is as alive as her streets, as deathless and penetrating as the smell, as opulent and full of pomp as the fashions they wear—the silk, the lace, the excess, the ornament. Her English is without rule or harness, feral, wanton, a “hungry creature.” And she purrs in the hands of her masters.

Those are the first few lines from the prologue of my book Majestie: The King Behind the King James Bible (Thomas Nelson/Harper Collins, 2011). The year is 1603, the year James VI of Scotland became James I of England. It was also the year the Lord Chamberlain's Men became the King's Men. James was hardly in town a fortnight before placing William Shakespeare and his troupe on the royal payroll. There were reasons for that. For James it was perhaps a PR move. Hamlet, produced a couple of years before, had represented a sea change, when Shakespeare began to grow into his great name. Whether the crowning of the new monarch had anything to do with it or not, Shakespeare was about to launch a series of tragedies that gave his genius a whole new gloss—Othello, King Lear, Macbeth. She purrs, indeed.

By the way, in those days, the pen was not a metaphor. Plays, poems, and letters were written in longhand. You have to imagine a slower, more even rhythm, the detectable roll of the language. You were, after all, writing with the feather of a bird.

Today we celebrate the birth of William Shakespeare, chief among our English literary saints, born this day, 23 April, 1564. Our English is infused with his phrases, with the delicate algebra of his poetry, his constructions, the whimsy of his adjectives, the verbs he nouned, the nouns he verbed, and the peculiar way he bends a metaphor much like a guitarist bends a note [present tense intentional]. Whether we like the poor man or not, whether we believe he is who he says he is, whether we have committed his better known lines to memory or have little or nothing to do with this odd creature, this marvelously unexceptional little man, he is inescapable. As one commentator wrote, “he is in the air we breathe."

For a little backstory, the dismantling of the monasteries and the muzzling of the Roman Church by Henry VIII, had left a big gaping hole in English culture. The absence of the Mass, with its pomp, its high step, its transcendent elements, its gravity, was sharply felt. By a series of swift evolutionary steps, the theater in the age of Elizabeth became its natural substitute (if the Roman Mass was anything, it was theatrical). It was a theatrical age. There was no greater theater than the monarchy itself. Peter Ackroyd attributes the language and movement of the Elizabethan stage to the high tone of the Mass. The first theater in England (1576) was appropriately called The Theater [James Burbage was an actor, not a poet]. The Spanish Armada in 1588 that initiated England's Golden Age, and the splendors of the Tyndale Bible which inspired new pride for the English language, providing new backbone, set the tone for the emergence of a whole new breed of poets of the likes of William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, and others.

There is a school of thought that suggests that Shakespeare wasn't Shakespeare, that he was an imposter [strangely, this notion has become a popular one, among actors in particular]. And why even mention it in this celebratory piece baffles me, but it is a thing I suppose. But having had two Shakespeare courses in graduate school [MTSU}, on the first day, as if to end or stifle the argument, both professors declared "Shakespeare was Shakespeare!" The conspiracy doesn't take with the academy. Ask Harold Bloom what he thinks.

The candidates for the honor include Francis Bacon (though his brother Anthony might make the better playwright). The witty Elizabeth has been named by some, and Emilia Lanyer. If you have read the poetry of Walter Raleigh you might be tempted to throw his hat into the ring. But James despised Raleigh and not long after coming to town, he threw Raleigh in the Tower. Edward DeVere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, is the primary candidate. That he died in 1604 doesn't seem to rattle his following—they're a faithful lot. Conspiracies are a hoot, and with all the prestige [shudder] of a religious or a political argument, things I do my best to avoid (belief itself being the deceptive creature it can be at times). Plus, it was a fairly close community back then. If an actor named Will Shakespeare was getting plays "under the table," so to speak, if no one else was paying attention, Ben Jonson would have been all over it. He killed an actor once for botching his lines. Like everybody in that theatrical community, he too would have had to be in on it. Enough of that. Happy Birthday, Will! Forgive the conspiracy chatter.

To be, or not to be: that is the question:

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;

No more; and by a sleep to say we end

The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;

To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

Must give us pause: there's the respect

That makes calamity of so long life;

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,

The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,

The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,

The insolence of office and the spurns

That patient merit of the unworthy takes,

When he himself might his quietus make

With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,

To grunt and sweat under a weary life,

But that the dread of something after death,

The undiscover'd country from whose bourn

No traveller returns, puzzles the will

And makes us rather bear those ills we have

Than fly to others that we know not of?

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;

And thus the native hue of resolution

Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,

And enterprises of great pith and moment

With this regard their currents turn awry,

And lose the name of action.

—William Shakespeare, HAMLET, 3.1.56-85