Edition: HamletThe World of Elizabethan Theatre
Advice to the Players
Para1When Hamlet instructs the actors in their profession, in anticipation of their performing
The Murder of Gonzagoat his request before the King and Queen and Court, he stresses the need for moderation in gestures, and indeed in all things. They must not
tear a passion to tatters.They must
suit the action to the word, the word to the action,so that their play may hold
the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure(A3 Sc2 Sp1–A3 Sc2 Sp5). This is an exalted view of drama, one that, we can well imagine, embodies Shakespeare’s own estimation of his craft.
Para2A wall hanging or tapestry, named for the French city Arras, in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais,
north of Paris and near the border of Belgium. The city was famous as a woolen and
tapestry center. Walls of many houses were covered in cloth or tapestry to help prevent
drafts in winter.
Para3In theatrical terms, an arras is a curtain suspended in such a way as to serve as
a backdrop or part of a stage setting. Such wall coverings provide suitable places
for concealment in scenes of overhearing or hiding. Polonius, in Hamlet, twice conceals himself behind an arras to spy on Hamlet. The first is when he proposes
to the King that the two of them hide
behind the arrasto witness what Hamlet says to Ophelia; Polonius hopes and expects that the interview will confirm Polonius’s diagnosis of love-sickness (2). The second occasion proves fatal to the snooping counselor. He says to the King,
Behind the arras I’ll convey myselfto hear the conversation of Hamlet and his mother (3), whereupon he is stabbed by Hamlet, who assumes that he is slaying Claudius (4; A3 Sc4 Sp16–A3 Sc4 Sp18).
Para4Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor and 1 Henry IV, Borachio in Much Ado About Nothing, the Executioners in King John, and unnamed lovers in The Two Noble Kinsmen all avail themselves of the arras as a place of concealment.
Brave O’erhanging Firmament, this Majestical Roof Fretted with Golden Fire
Para5Shakespeare is probably alluding, in Hamlet’s disquisition to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
on the dual nature of humankind at 2, to the richly decorated
heavenson the underside of the roof over the stage in the Globe Theater. Richard Burbage, in the role of Hamlet, could well be gesturing upwards as he speaks.
Para6Francis Fergusson, in The Idea of the Theater (1949, 1953), sees this staging arrangement as one in which the Elizabethan theater embodies
the entire cosmos, with human action taking place on a flat and level stage representing
the earth, while the heavens are visible above at all times and hell is felt to be
present beneath the stage. Compare this to
All the world’s a stage(AYL, 2.7.138).
Para7This metatheatrical invocation of the Elizabethan theater anticipates Hamlet’s extended
discussion with Rosencrantz a short time later in scene about the rivalry of adult
players and boy actors that was such a lively topic in London around the time that
Hamlet was written and produced. The passage occurs in the Folio text (A2 Sc2 Sp110–A2 Sc2 Sp117) but not in Q2; the matter is briefly discussed in Q1.
Character Types
Dramatists often followed a practice, derived from classical dramatists like Plautus
and Terence, of fashioning typed characters in their plays
Hamlet, when he joyfully learns of the imminent arrival at Elsinore of traveling Players,
speaks of the Adventurous Knight, the Humorous Man, the Clown, and the Lady (A2 Sc2 Sp105).
Dumb-Shows
In Renaissance drama, a dumb-show can be a pantomime, or a play-within-the-play enacted
in the first instance without spoken dialogue.
Para8Hamlet inveighs against
inexplicable dumb-shows and noisein his indictment of the groundlings as for the most part incapable of anything else (2), by which he presumably has in mind simple pantomimes or puppet shows devised as popular entertainment, but the play called
The Murder of Gonzagothat he commissions the visiting Players to enact before the King, Queen, and Court is explicitly a dumb-show. The Folio stage direction begins with
The dumb-show enters,varied slightly as
Dumb-show followsin Q2 and
Enter; in a dumb-showin Q1. It presents in silent pantomime the murder of a King by the Poisoner who then wins the love of the widowed Queen (2).
Ford, John
Dramatist
See
Revenge.
Groundlings
Para9The groundlings (a term that Shakespeare seems to have invented for the occasion)
were those who stood in the theater yard around the raised platform stage. They could
be demonstrative, and tended to be of relatively low class standing since they could
gain admission to a play for a penny.
Para10Surprisingly, Hamlet uses this term in the derogatory sense of those who
for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb-shows and noise(2). Hamlet, and Shakespeare behind him, might appear to be insulting those spectators who were closest to the stage, but more probably this was intended as a friendly insult, an in-group joke. Perhaps what Hamlet means is to urge his spectators not to be like that if they wish to be discerning patrons worthy of the fine play they are witnessing.
Hobby-Horse
Para11The hobby-horse, made of wickerwork or other light material, was shaped in the figure
of a horse and fastened around the waist of one of the performers in a Morris dance,
a popular English folk dance executed by choreographed dancers with bell pads on their
shins, and sticks, swords, and handkerchiefs in their hands.
Para12Hamlet alludes to the hobby-horse just as the Players are about to enter to their
performance of
The Murder of Gonzago(2). He quotes from a lost ballad (
For oh, for oh, the hobby-horse is forgot,2) that turns up also in Love’s Labor’s Lost (3.1.22). The idea here seems to be a lament for the disappearance of such folk customs, in much the way that the memory of Hamlet’s father seems to have been quickly forgotten.
Jig
Para13A jig could be a lively dance, often in triple rhythm, or a song or ballad, or, as
at 2, a light entertainment normally given at the end or in an interval of a play. Hamlet
here caustically ascribes to Polonius the boorishness of preferring
a jig, or a tale of bawdryto a serious dramatic composition, such as the recital about the death of Priam and the grief of Hecuba (A2 Sc2 Sp150), which Polonius has found
too long(A2 Sc2 Sp149).
Kyd, Thomas
His The Spanish Tragedy was an important model for Hamlet, and Hamlet may have it in mind when he quips, at A3 Sc2:
For if the King like not the comedy, / Why, then belike he likes it not, pardie(2). The couplet in Kyd’s play reads
And if the world like not this tragedy, / Hard is the hap of old Hieronimo(4.1).
Lenten Entertainment
Para15The theaters in London were closed during Lent, the period of forty-six days of solemn
religious observance in the liturgical calendar from Ash Wednesday through the day
before Easter. This period, rigorously observed in The Anglican Church, commemorated
the forty or so days described in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke as the time
when Christ fasted in the wilderness and withstood the temptations of the devil.
Rosencrantz, at 2, uses the phrase to characterize scant hospitality.
Nashe, Thomas
Dramatist, and co-author with Marlowe of Dido, Queen of Carthage (2).
Poets’s War, War of the Theaters (Poetomachia)
Para16The description of a controversy between the adult actors and juvenile acting companies
occurs only in F (A2 Sc2 Sp110–A2 Sc2 Sp117). Q1 gives a shortened version; Q2 omits the passage entirely. It alludes seemingly
to a theatrical rivalry taking place in the years around 1599–1600 that is often called
The War of the Theaters or the Poetomachia, the Poets’s War.
Para17Rosencrantz, in response to Hamlet’s insistent questions, describes how a troupe of
boy actors, composed of
an eyrie of children, little eyases,that is, a nest of young hawks,
cry out on the top of question,i.e., shout shrilly, calling such attention to themselves that they
are most tyrannically clapped for’t,i.e., are vehemently applauded for their satirical putdowns of adult actors (2). They are so much in fashion that they
berattle the common stages,i.e., agitate with their noisy clamor the adult players who perform on the public stages, to the extent that
many wearing rapiers are afraid of goose quills and dare scarce come thither,i.e., many gentlemen are so afraid of the satirical jabs inflicted by these juvenile actors that they scarcely dare go to see plays (2).
Para18Hamlet, eager to know who supports the boy actors, wonders if the youngsters are not
doing themselves a disservice, since many of them will no doubt hope to be adult actors
on the public stages themselves when their voices change at adolescence. Are the dramatists
who write plays for them not egging them on to
exclaim against their own succession,i.e., attack the very basis of their future careers (2)? Rosencrantz agrees that the controversy has been heated, all the more so since the theater-going public encourages the debate. It has reached the point, indeed, that no playwright can hope to see his plays acted unless he joins in the fray.
Para19The juvenile acting companies had been closed by the authorities throughout most of
the 1590s because of their penchant for satire that not infrequently took aim at matters
of national and international politics: London shopkeepers and their wives, Puritans,
busybody public officials, hangers-on at court, sheriffs and other officers of the
law, and much else.
Para20When one group of boy actors known as Paul’s Boys and another known as the Children
of the Chapel were allowed to resume performances in 1599-1600, the volleying of insults
and criticisms quickly became intense. As the passage in Hamlet, in 2 ff suggests, the boys and the adult actors tended to line up on opposite sides of
many issues.
Para21The debate was further heightened and made colorful by a small cluster of dramatists.
Ben Jonson’s Poetaster, performed at the Blackfriars Playhouse in 1601 by a troupe misleadingly called the
Children of Her Majesty’s Chapel, lampooned the playwrights John Marston and Thomas
Dekker. Dekker replied in short order with a satirical portrait of Jonson in his Satiromastix, acted by the adult Chamberlain’s Men in conjunction with Paul’s Boys. Marston had
offered an affront to the adult companies in his Histriomastix or the Player Whipped, performed by Paul’s Boys, ca. 1599, and had attacked Jonson in Jack Drum’s Entertainment (1600). Marston and Dekker purported to see lampoons of themselves in the characters Hedon
and Anaides in Jonson’s Cynthia’s Revels (1600), acted by the so-called Children of the Chapel at the Blackfriars Playhouse. Whether
Shakespeare entered the fray or not is much debated.
Para22The adult actor Will Kemp, in the anonymous play called The Return from Parnassus Part 2, acted at St John’s College, Cambridge, some time around 1601–1602, asserts that
our fellow Shakespeare puts them the London playwrights all down,and among the rest has given Jonson
a purge that made him beray his credit; was this possibly in Troilus and Cressida, or Twelfth Night?
Trap Door
Para24Although the stage of the Globe Theater presumably had a trap door in the floor of
the main stage, there is no indication that the Ghost in Hamlet enters or exits by its means.
Para25The Ghost’s appearances in A1 Sc1, A1 Sc4, and A1 Sc5 are signaled by ordinary indications of
Enterand
Exit.He
stalks awayfrom the watch at 1. In A1 Sc4 the Ghost enters, then leaves with Hamlet following him, whereupon in A1 Sc5 they re-enter; the use of the trap door seems entirely unlikely here. However, after the Ghost has exited in A1 Sc5, he is heard below the main stage in the
cellerage(5), and is heard to move from place to place bidding the soldiers to
Swear: as the stage direction at 5 indicates, (Ghost cries under the stage).
Para26At A3 Sc4, the Ghost enters (in his nightgown) (4), Hamlet observes,
Look where he goes, even now out at the portal,surely referring to a stage door, not to the trap door. The space below the stage is understood to be a place where a ghost might reside, and where the Ghost is heard, but it is not entered or left by means of the trap door.
Webster, John
Dramatist.
See
Poisonin Tales, Customs, and Learning.
Prosopography
Bryan Valdes
David Bevington
David Bevington was the Phyllis Fay Horton Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus
in the Humanities at the University of Chicago. His books include From
Mankindto Marlowe (1962), Tudor Drama and Politics (1968), Action Is Eloquence (1985), Shakespeare: The Seven Ages of Human Experience (2005), This Wide and Universal Theater: Shakespeare in Performance, Then and Now (2007), Shakespeare’s Ideas (2008), Shakespeare and Biography (2010), and Murder Most Foul: Hamlet Through the Ages (2011). He was the editor of Medieval Drama (1975), The Bantam Shakespeare, and The Complete Works of Shakespeare. The latter was published in a seventh edition in 2014. He was a senior editor of the Revels Student Editions, the Revels Plays, The Norton Anthology of Renaissance Drama, and The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson (2012). Professor Bevington passed away on August 2, 2019.
Donald Bailey
Eric Rasmussen
Eric Rasmussen is Regents Teaching Professor and Foundation Professor of English at
the University of Nevada. He is co-editor with Sir Jonathan Bate of the RSC William Shakespeare Complete Works and general editor, with Paul Werstine, of the New Variorum Shakespeare. He has received the Falstaff Award from PlayShakespeare.com for Best Shakespearean Book of the Year in 2007, 2012, and 2013.
James D. Mardock
James Mardock is Associate Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Associate
General Editor for the Internet Shakespeare Editions, and a dramaturge for the Lake
Tahoe Shakespeare Festival and Reno Little Theater. In addition to editing quarto
and folio Henry V for the ISE, he has published essays on Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and other Renaissance
literature in The Seventeenth Century, Ben Jonson Journal, Borrowers and Lenders, and contributed to the collections Representing the Plague in Early Modern England (Routledge 2010) and Shakespeare Beyond Doubt (Cambridge 2013). His book Our Scene is London (Routledge 2008) examines Jonson’s representation of urban space as an element in
his strategy of self-definition. With Kathryn McPherson, he edited Stages of Engagement (Duquesne 2013), a collection of essays on drama in post-Reformation England, and
he is currently at work on a monograph on Calvinism and metatheatrical awareness in
early modern English drama.
Janelle Jenstad
Janelle Jenstad is a Professor of English at the University of Victoria, Director
of The Map of Early Modern London, and Director of Linked Early Modern Drama Online. With Jennifer Roberts-Smith and Mark Beatrice Kaethler, she co-edited Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media: Old Words, New Tools (Routledge). She has edited John Stow’s A Survey of London (1598 text) for MoEML and is currently editing The Merchant of Venice (with Stephen Wittek) and Heywood’s 2 If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody for DRE. Her articles have appeared in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Elizabethan Theatre, Early Modern Literary Studies, Shakespeare Bulletin, Renaissance and Reformation, and The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. She contributed chapters to Approaches to Teaching Othello (MLA); Teaching Early Modern Literature from the Archives (MLA); Institutional Culture in Early Modern England (Brill); Shakespeare, Language, and the Stage (Arden); Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate); New Directions in the Geohumanities (Routledge); Early Modern Studies and the Digital Turn (Iter); Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers (Indiana); Making Things and Drawing Boundaries (Minnesota); Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study: Audiences, Authors, and Digital Technologies (Routledge); and Civic Performance: Pageantry and Entertainments in Early Modern London (Routledge). For more details, see janellejenstad.com.
Jasmeen Boparai
Joey Takeda
Joey Takeda is LEMDO’s Consulting Programmer and Designer, a role he assumed in 2020
after three years as the Lead Developer on LEMDO.
Kate LeBere
Project Manager, 2020–2021. Assistant Project Manager, 2019–2020. Textual Remediator
and Encoder, 2019–2021. Kate LeBere completed her BA (Hons.) in History and English
at the University of Victoria in 2020. During her degree she published papers in The Corvette (2018), The Albatross (2019), and PLVS VLTRA (2020) and presented at the English Undergraduate Conference (2019), Qualicum History
Conference (2020), and the Digital Humanities Summer Institute’s Project Management
in the Humanities Conference (2021). While her primary research focus was sixteenth
and seventeenth century England, she completed her honours thesis on Soviet ballet
during the Russian Cultural Revolution. She is currently a student at the University
of British Columbia’s iSchool, working on her masters in library and information science.
Martin Holmes
Martin Holmes has worked as a developer in the UVic’s Humanities Computing and Media
Centre for over two decades, and has been involved with dozens of Digital Humanities
projects. He has served on the TEI Technical Council and as Managing Editor of the
Journal of the TEI. He took over from Joey Takeda as lead developer on LEMDO in 2020.
He is a collaborator on the SSHRC Partnership Grant led by Janelle Jenstad.
Michael Best
Michael Best is Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, BC. He is the Founding
Editor of the Internet Shakespeare Editions, of which he was the Coordinating Editor
until 2017. In print, he has published editions of works of Elizabethan magic and
huswifery, a collection of letters from the Australian goldfields, and Shakespeare on the Art of Love (2008). He contributed regular columns for the Shakespeare Newsletter on
Electronic Shakespeares,and has written many articles and chapters for both print and online books and journals, principally on questions raised by the new medium in the editing and publication of texts. He has delivered papers and plenary lectures on electronic media and the Internet Shakespeare Editions at conferences in Canada, the USA, the UK, Spain, Australia, and Japan.
Navarra Houldin
Training and Documentation Lead 2025–present. LEMDO project manager 2022–2025. Textual
remediator 2021–present. Navarra Houldin (they/them) completed their BA with a major
in history and minor in Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. Their primary
research was on gender and sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America. They
are continuing their education through an MA program in Gender and Social Justice
Studies at the University of Alberta where they will specialize in Digital Humanities.
Rae S. Rostron
Rae is studying a BA in English Literature at Durham University. She is particularly
interested in representations of grief and trauma in literature and is currently researching
femicide in the novel. Rae has interned for Creative Media Agency (NYC) and is an
acting student researcher for King College London’s Psychology Department exploring
loneliness in students.
Tracey El Hajj
Junior Programmer 2019–2020. Research Associate 2020–2021. Tracey received her PhD
from the Department of English at the University of Victoria in the field of Science
and Technology Studies. Her research focuses on the algorhythmics of networked communications. She was a 2019–2020 President’s Fellow in Research-Enriched
Teaching at UVic, where she taught an advanced course on
Artificial Intelligence and Everyday Life.Tracey was also a member of the Map of Early Modern London team, between 2018 and 2021. Between 2020 and 2021, she was a fellow in residence at the Praxis Studio for Comparative Media Studies, where she investigated the relationships between artificial intelligence, creativity, health, and justice. As of July 2021, Tracey has moved into the alt-ac world for a term position, while also teaching in the English Department at the University of Victoria.
William Shakespeare
Bibliography
Bednarz, James P.
Shakespeare and the Poets’ War, Columbia Uuniversity Press, 2001, New York.
Connor, Francis X., ed. A Pleasant Conceited Comedy Called Love’s Labour’s Lost. By William Shakespeare. The New Oxford Shakespeare. Ed. Gary Taylor, John Jowett, Terri Bourus, and Gabriel Egan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. 773–844. WSB aaag2304.
Connor, Francis X., ed. As You Like It. By William Shakespeare. The New Oxford Shakespeare. Ed. Gary Taylor, John Jowett, Terri Bourus, and Gabriel Egan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. 1689–1755. WSB aaag2304.
Fergusson, Francis. The Idea of a Theater. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949.
Fergusson, Francis. The Idea of a Theater: A Study of Ten Plays; The Art of Drama in Changing Perspective. Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1953.
Jonson, Ben. The fountaine of selfe-loue. Or Cynthias reuels. 1601. STC 14773. ESTC S109229. DEEP 320. Greg 181a(i).
Marston, John. Iack Drums entertainment: or The comedie of Pasquill and Katherine. London: Printed by Thomas Creede for Richard Olive, 1601. STC 7243. ESTC S105365. DEEP 314. Greg 177a.
Orgography
Internet Shakespeare Editions (ISE1)
The Internet Shakespeare Editions (ISE) was a major digital humanities project created
by Emeritus Professor Michael Best at the University of Victoria. The ISE server was retired in 2018 but a final staticized HTML version of the Internet Shakespeare Editions project is still hosted at UVic.
LEMDO Team (LEMD1)
The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project
director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators,
encoders, and remediating editors.
University of Victoria (UVIC1)
https://www.uvic.ca/Metadata
| Authority title | The World of Elizabethan Theatre |
| Type of text | Critical |
| Publisher | University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform |
| Series | New Internet Shakespeare Editions |
| Source |
File was created by Navarra Houldin. Content was pulled from the larger emdHam_Encyclopedia file, which has now been
divided into four seperate files
(including this one). Content was originally written for the Internet Shakespeare
Editions platform by David Bevington with the help of Jasmeen Boparai. It was transformed from IML, the SGML markup language of the Internet Shakespeare
Editions platform, by the LEMDO Team.
|
| Editorial declaration | n/a |
| Edition | Released with the New Internet Shakespeare Editions 1.0 |
| Sponsor(s) |
Internet Shakespeare EditionsThe Internet Shakespeare Editions (ISE) was a major digital humanities project created
by Emeritus Professor Michael Best at the University of Victoria. The ISE server was retired in 2018 but a final staticized HTML version of the Internet Shakespeare Editions project is still hosted at UVic.
New Internet Shakespeare EditionsThe Coordinating Editors of the NISE are Brett Greatley-Hirsch, Janelle Jenstad, James
Mardock, and Sarah Neville.
|
| Encoding description | Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines |
| Document status | IML-TEI_INP |
| Funder(s) | Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada |
| License/availability |