HAMLET DRAMATURGY
AUDIO: Listen to the pre-show audio talk with Dr. Philippa Kelly on YouTube here
Intergenerational Scandals
By Philippa Kelly
Most people have seen, read or heard of Hamlet and may hold some image of Shakespeare’s prince, standing betwixt and between, straddling heaven and hell, both mourner and avenger, communing with the dead (and about to join them). But the play is itself embedded in a less-familiar real-life history that is worthy of consideration.
Shakespeare wrote Hamlet in 1599, in the last years of Queen Elizabeth I’s half-century reign over England. Elizabeth had endured a long and contentious relationship with her first cousin Mary Stuart, known through history as Mary Queen of Scots. Mary, granddaughter to Henry VII and thus Elizabeth’s first cousin, was mother to King James of Scotland; and at Elizabeth’s death, James would be anointed ruler of both Scotland and England.
Jump back to 1548, when the 5 year-old Scottish Mary was betrothed to 4 year-old French Dauphin Francis, and duly shipped off to France for protection from the raging English/Scottish wars. This betrothal forged a Scots/French alliance against English aggression that was cemented ten years later when Mary married the Dauphin. Things moved quickly: a year after her marriage, in 1599, Mary suddenly found herself Queen Consort of France when the Dauphin’s father, King Henry II, died in a jousting accident. And just a year after that, the new king, Mary’s then-15 year-old husband Francis II, died from a chronic ear infection, after which the 16 year-old widow returned to rule her native land of Scotland.
In 1565, at the age of 22, Mary married for a second time. Shortly thereafter her new husband, half-cousin Lord Darnley (three years younger than Mary), ordered the killing of one of his wife’s closest advisers. In retaliation on Mary’s behalf, the Earl of Bothwell orchestrated Darnley's assassination. Prefiguring the ghost in Shakespeare’s play, Darnley was found in the garden, covered with a “vile and loathsome crust,” and a few months later Mary, just as would Shakespeare’s Gertrude, married her husband’s murderer. The rumors swirling around Mary’s “o’erhasty marriage” to her husband’s murderer caused such a public uproar that after a further three months, Mary was forced to abdicate from the Scottish throne in favor of her one-year-old son James. Her new husband Bothwell fled to Denmark, where he was imprisoned in horrific conditions until his death from insanity a decade later.
Resilient young Mary wasn’t quieted for long. She fled to England to seek protection from Elizabeth from the Scottish forces arrayed against her. But her arrival in England did not mark a joyous reunion between the two cousins. For much of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, Mary argued her superior right to the English throne: Mary and her Catholic supporters viewed the Protestant Elizabeth I, “bastard” daughter of Henry VIII’s second wife Anne Boleyn, as having a far weaker claim to the English throne than did her cousin. The presence of her ambitious (and very beautiful) first cousin nipping at her heels understandably threatened Elizabeth; she sent Mary back to Scotland to be imprisoned, receiving, from time to time, when she complained of penury, snidely-chosen packages of Elizabeth’s oldest, least attractive cast-off clothing. Ultimately, in retribution for a failed plot to assassinate Elizabeth, Mary was herself executed in 1587, which put paid to many years of regal challenge but gave Elizabeth cause for guilt until her own dying day.
Recent history thus provided fertile ground that Shakespeare could mine to create a script about marriage, ambition, vengeance and murder. But here things begin to diverge. Lord Darnley did have a son, James, but not one who could, like Hamlet, immediately avenge his murder. James was 9 months old when his father was discovered poisoned in the garden. James could, however, eventually be seen as achieving a kind of retribution, fueled by fate and strategy.
Consider James’ situation (and ask yourself whether you’d like to be king!) Being just nine months old at his father’s assassination at his mother’s behest; becoming King of Scotland in place of his mother at one year old; seeing his mother executed twenty years later by the forces of the English Queen; and finally, at the age of 35, coming down to inherit the throne of England from his mother’s proxy-executioner. Did James convert to Protestantism before Elizabeth’s death as a way of strategizing his way to the English throne? Of course he did. Would he come to see himself, the newly-minted king of England and Scotland in 1603, as his mother’s ultimate avenger? Did he blame his mother for orchestrating his father’s murder? Did he blame his father for the stories of his vain, arrogant, violent behavior that threatened the state and led to his murder? And more profoundly, who is the ultimate victim, a dead parent or a child left in the ruins of internecine conflict? And is Shakespeare’s Hamlet of 1599 perhaps a kind of “pre-avenger” for James, a figure deprived of parents and identity by death, deceit, and dreadful multi-level plotting, for whom Shakespeare scripts a kind of resolution? Hamlet doesn’t, as would James three years after the play was first staged, come to rest on the throne of a parent’s murderer: rather, Hamlet comes to rest in his grave. Both men, caught in the crossfires between generational battles, seeking clarity amidst the ruins of guerrilla warfare.