Shakespeare

The death of children was much more common in the sixteenth than in the twenty-first century. Elizabethan families were also more “extended,” with various cousins and other kin, so that sudden death had a natural buttress against prolonged or severe grief. It is not necessary to fall into the delusion that sixteenth-century parents were less caring or less emotional than their successors, but it is important to note that the death of a child was not an unusual experience. The cause of the death of Shakespeare’s son is not known, although at the end of this year Stratford suffered a severe rise in mortality from typhus and dysentery. Hamnet’s twin sister Judith, however, lived to the great age of seventy.

So Shakespeare had lost his only son, the recipient of his inheritance. In the sixteenth century the blood line was charged with significance, and in his subsequent will he went to elaborate lengths to provide for an ultimate male heir, suggesting that the matter still provoked his attention and concern. He had lost the image of himself.

It is of course impossible to gauge the effect upon the dramatist. He may, or may not, have become inconsolable. He may have sought refuge, as so many others have done, in hard and relentless work. The plays of this period have nevertheless been interpreted in the light of this dead son. One critic has described Romeo and Juliet as a “dirge for the son’s death”;² this stretches chronology, if not credulity. In James Joyce’s Ulysses Stephen Dedalus declares that his “boyson’s death is the death-scene of young Arthur in King John. Hamlet, the black prince, is Hamnet Shakespeare.” Indeed it cannot be wholly coincidental that Shakespeare was drawn at a later date to the tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, who is haunted by the spectre of his dead father. In Twelfth Night, the story of identical twins – boy and girl – is resolved by the miraculous reappearance of the male child from apparent death. The twin is restored to life. In the period immediately following Hamnet’s death, as Stephen Dedalus noted, Shakespeare also rewrote the play concerning King John. One of his additions is a lament by Constance on the untimely death of her young son, which begins (1398-1405):

Greefe fils the roome vp of my absent childe:

Lies in his bed, walkes vp and downe with me,

Puts on his pretty lookes, repeats his words,

Remembers me of all his gracious parts,

Stuffes out his vacant garments with his forme;

Then, haue I reason to be fond of griefe?

Fareyouwell: had you such a losse as I,

I could giue better comfort then you doe.

It may not be appropriate to draw strong lines between the art and the life but, in such a case as this, it defies common sense to pretend that Constance’s lament has nothing whatever to do with Shakespeare’s loss of Hamnet.

The comicall History of the Merchant of Venice, or otherwise called the Iewe of Venyce, written in this same period for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, begins in mournful tone. It is one of the strangest, and most arresting, openings in Shakespeare:

In sooth I know not why I am so sad,

It wearies me, you say it wearies you..

It is often assumed that Shakespeare himself played this part of Antonio, implicitly enamoured of his friend Bassanio. Antonio appears at crucial moments of action, but he is generally a lower-keyed figure who in rehearsals could have guided the others. The play does not linger on his sentimental tragedy, however, but mounts higher with the story of Shylock and his bloody bargain.