Poli Arctici Et Circumiacentium Terrarum Descriptio Novissima
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Shakespeare's Sources
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Shakespeare often spun new stories out of old, offering a fresh perspective on things already read or seen. He mined popular books such as Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande (first published in 1577) and John Harington’s 1591 translation of Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. Shakespeare also wove into his work references to current events, books, maps, and artifacts that would have been familiar and meaningful to early modern audiences and readers, but are often opaque to modern readers or spectators.
Other references are less specific, but nevertheless would have served as a touchstone for audiences. In Love’s Labour’s Lost, filled with humor about education and language, Shakespeare mocks a pedantic schoolmaster with a joke about a hornbook, a common tool used to teach children to read:
Armado [to Holofernes]: Monsieur, are you not lett’red?
Moth: Yes, he teaches boys the hornbook. What is a, b, spelt backward with the horn on his head?
Holofernes: Ba, pueritia [a boy], with a horn added.
Moth: Ba, most silly sheep with a horn. You hear his learning.
—Love’s Labour’s Lost Act V, Scene 1This dialogue is constructed on the model of education used at the time. Schoolmasters taught boys to put the consonants in order before every vowel, and to repeat them over together—out loud— as thus: “ba, be, bi, bo, bu.” After they learned to say them, they learned to spell them in order, as the schoolmaster prompted, “What spells ‘b-a’?”
Maps
He does smile his face into more lynes, than is in the new Mappe, with the augmentation of the Indies.
—Twelfth Night, Act III, Scene 2In Twelfth Night, when Maria makes the above comment about Malvolio, she is alluding to this map, created in 1599 by the mathematician Edward Wright for the the geographer-navigator Richard Hakluyt’s The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1599). Wright based the work on the terrestrial globe of Emery Molyneux, and on the maps of Gerhard Mercator (1512-1594), the cartographer renowned for creating a world map based on a new projection, which represented sailing courses of constant bearing as straight lines. Given that Twelfth Night was probably written in 1601 or 1602 (with the first known performance recorded by John Manningham), Shakespeare had probably seen, or at least heard about, this map, as would his audiences.
The Comedy of Errors (probably written in 1594 but not published until the First Folio of 1623) tells the story of two sets of twin brothers and the mishaps that arise because of mistaken identity. In one scene, Dromio of Syracuse, fleeing the advances of Nell, a woman the audience has not seen, provides a lengthy physical description of her in cartographic terms. While a globe never appears onstage, Nell’s description certainly conjures the image of one. The first English globes, made by Emery Molyneux in 1592, prompted great sensation. Shakespeare may have known not only globes, but also metamorphic maps, such as this one, configuring maps in the shapes of animals or people and often intended as social or political commentary.
Dromio: No longer from head to foot than from hip to hip:
she is spherical, like a globe; I could find out countries in her.
…
Antipholus: Where Scotland?
Dromio: I found it by the barrenness; hard in the palm of the hand.
Antipholus: Where France?
Dromio: In her forehead; armed and reverted, making war against her heir.
…
Antipholus: Where Spain?
Dromio: Faith, I saw it not; but I felt it hot in her breath.
Antipholus: Where America, the Indies?
Dromio: Oh, sir, upon her nose all o’er embellished with rubies, carbuncles, sapphires, declining
their rich aspect to the hot breath of Spain;
who sent whole armadoes of caracks to be
ballast at her nose.
Antipholus: Where stood Belgia, the Netherlands?
Dromio: Oh, sir, I did not look so low.
—The Comedy of Errors, Act III, Scene 2Sonnet 122
In Sonnet 122, Shakespeare muses on the usefulness of artificial objects of memory, including notebooks and tally sticks (or tallies) versus the heart and the brain:
Thy gift, thy tables, are within my brain
Full charactered with lasting memory,
Which shall above that idle rank remain,
Beyond all date, even to eternity:
Or, at the least, so long as brain and heart
Have faculty by nature to subsist;
Till each to razed oblivion yield his part
Of thee, thy record never can be missed.
That poor retention could not so much hold,
Nor need I tallies thy dear love to score;
Therefore to give them from me was I bold,
To trust those tables that receive thee more:
To keep an adjunct to remember thee
Were to import forgetfulness in me.
—Poems: written by Wil. Shake-speare. GentTally sticks were essentially wooden receipts for financial transactions, and were used in England until the early 19th century.
Romeo and Juliet
In Romeo and Juliet, Mercutio calls Tybalt “a villain, that fights by the book of arithmetic,” a reference to the style of fencing by the Dutch fencing master Gerard Thilbault. Based on the Spanish school of fencing, Thibault’s method is notable for its highly logical, mathematical approach to swordplay. He discusses at great length the precise geometric relationships between opposing swordsmen, stressing the importance of natural proportion. These relationships are expressed through a circular diagram that Thibault refers to as the “mysterious circle,” visible on the floor in most of the plates in Academie de l’Espée. With his dying words, then, Mercutio accuses Tybalt of fighting without inspiration, as though he had learned from a manual.
The main storyline of Romeo and Juliet can be traced back to a number of Italian sources. Agostino Velletti’s Ginevra degli Almieri is similar to some of the texts Shakespeare may have seen: Ginevra is in love with Antonio but is forced to marry Francesco. Her heartbreak causes her to fall into a deep trance, leading people to believe her dead. After being buried in a tomb, she awakens, escapes, and knocks first on the door of her husband’s house, and then her parents’ house, but they do not see her. Ginevra then goes to the home of her beloved Antonio, who takes her in his arms and revives her, later claiming her as his wife.
Love's Labour's Lost
Love’s Labour’s Lost was the first play published with Shakespeare’s name on the title page. Although it was not printed until 1598, the play was probably written and first performed around 1594-95. Love’s Labour’s Lost is one of the few Shakespeare plays for which we can identify no earlier sources, but it abounds in sophisticated wordplay, puns, and literary allusions. Perhaps more than any other Shakespeare play, it explores the power and limitations of language.
Shakespeare and his audience may have been familiar with Richard Mulcaster’s 1582 Elementarie, an early attempt to organize the English language into a list of 8,000 words. Many of these words are familiar today, such as elephant, gunpowder, bum, or glitter, while others are more obscure, like brible brable, carpetknight, or flindermouse. None of these words are accompanied by definitions; therefore, the list cannot be classified strictly as a dictionary—there was no such thing as a purely English dictionary at this time.
The Poet's Pen
Shakespeare would have learned to write as a boy from a writing book, perhaps with additional tutoring from a writing master. Shakespeare likewise skilled his character of Hamlet in the art of penmanship. In the play, Hamlet confesses to Horatio that he had once hated the writing lessons that would eventually save his life; his penmanship enabled him to forge a new, innocuous copy of the commission that, in its original form, requested the English king to kill him:
. . . I sat me down,
Devised a new commission, wrote it fair:
I once did hold it, as our statists do,
A baseness to write fair and labour’d much
How to forget that learning, but, sir, now
It did me yeoman’s service.
—Hamlet, Act V, Scene 2The earliest writing books were Italian or French. Giovanni Battista Palatino’s writing manual, one of the most famous Renaissance books on writing, offers examples of a wide variety of contemporary writing styles. The French writing master Jehan de Beau-Chesne published the first English writing manual in 1571 and later served as writing master for James I’s children, Elizabeth (1596-1662) and Charles (1600-1649); the manuscript shown here was created by Beau-Chesne (at age “72 ½”) specifically for Elizabeth, who has a Shakespeare connection of her own: A Winter’s Tale was performed at her wedding to Frederick V of Bohemia.
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Hamlet
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What a piece of work is man!
—Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Shakespeare’s longest play (over 4,000 lines), is also his most popular. From its creation in the early 17th century, Hamlet has captivated audiences and readers with its tale of desire, revenge, madness, and murder. As with many of his plays, Shakespeare may have drawn upon existing versions of the story–including a 13th-century Danish history and an earlier (now lost) Elizabethan play—in crafting his own Hamlet. The earliest printed version of the play differs greatly from the one we know. The works in this section illuminate how Shakespeare created one of the most powerful and influential works in the English language and how it has inspired countless writers, actors, and artists from 1603 to 2016.
Hamlet through the Centuries
This above all, to thine own self be true.
—Hamlet, Act I, Scene 3The creation of Hamlet has been dated to 1600, and it was published as a quarto four times before the 1623 First Folio. Hamlet was one of the first plays revived after the Restoration in England and has rarely been out of the spotlight since then, albeit in different versions and formats.
By 1744, Hamlet’s now-famous soliloquy, “To be, or not to be,” was extracted from the play and reproduced as parody, suggesting that the speech was by then widely known. In “The Bachelor’s Soliloquy,” a man muses, “To wed, or not to wed, that is the question.” Later parodies ran the gamut, from “To write, or not to write,” “To shave, or not to shave,” and even one about dentistry:“To have it out or not–that is the question.” These parodies became a genre in their own right, and were themselves mocked by Mark Twain, whose characters the Duke and the King, in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), declaim, “To be, or not to be, that is the bare bodkin.”
18th-century writers worked Hamlet into their own stories. The protagonist of Henry Fielding’s novel The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749) attends a performance of the play. In The Life and Adventures of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-1767), one of Laurence Sterne’s characters, Parson Yorick, is said to have descended from the famous “Yorick” of Hamlet’s graveyard scene (Act V, Scene 1). When Tristram Shandy reveals that his friend Yorick is dead, he asks the reader to gaze upon a black page, and declares, “Alas, poor Yorick!”
In the early 18th century, as Shakespeare’s works became known abroad, they often inspired operas, although they may have been based on his source material more often than the plays. Amleto, the 1792 opera by Gaetano Andreozzi, departs dramatically from Shakespeare, as when the old king’s funeral monument bursts into flames in the first scene. Although Hamlet never gained wide popularity as a subject for opera, when it was staged operatically it could be visually stunning, with dark graveyards and haunted castles creating an atmosphere both Gothic and Romantic.
Although the first American edition of the collected works of Shakespeare was not published until 1795 (in Philadelphia), an edition of Hamlet was published in Boston in 1794. By the early 19th century, illustrated editions of the plays flourished; in 1807, the English authors Mary and Charles Lamb created prose versions of 20 plays in their Tales from Shakespear, using language and illustrations aimed at children. The Lambs’ book proved popular throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, and was used as the basis for a 1951 radio play. In 1888, E.M. Palmer used the Lambs’ version of Hamlet for a pamphlet on phonography, finally answering the question of what “to be or not to be” looks like in shorthand.
The Undiscover'd Country: Hamlet and Purgatory
While Hamlet is a deeply introspective play, it is also very much about physical spaces, including both the terrestrial world and the “undiscovered country” of the afterlife. The play includes not just philosophical meditations on death, but material ones as well (for example, the decay of Yorick’s body and the place of Ophelia’s burial). Early modern discussions about the afterlife often involved debates about its geography—if heaven, hell, and purgatory are real places, where are they located?
The opening concern of the play is who will inherit Hamlet’s father’s lands. Even in death Hamlet’s father is anxious about this: in Act I, Scene 1 his ghost appears wearing the same armor he wore when he fought in Norway and Poland. Early modern audiences would have construed the countries mentioned throughout the play—Denmark, Norway, Poland, England—as a geographical unit, as shown in the top-down view in Gerard Mercator’s hand-colored atlas in the adjacent case. The map groups another country into this cluster—Iceland. Mount Hecla figures prominently in the topographical landscape in both Mercator’s map of Iceland and Abraham Ortelius’s map. This volcano loomed large in discussions about the reality of purgatory and its geographical location. Some believed that the ice-covered volcano was the entrance to purgatory and that the noises emanating from it were actually the cries of tormented people trapped inside. Many regarded Hecla as the purgatory for soldiers, as well as those who had been murdered. Mercator’s map emphasizes Hecla’s infernal associations, with its vivid illustration of the volcano spewing plumes of smoke and the inscription “mons perpetuo ardens” or “always burning,” while Ortelius’s goes a step further with the inscription “perpetuis damnata”—“perpetually damned.”
Hamlet, Before and After Shakespeare
Contemporary references suggest that there was an earlier play on the subject of Hamlet, although the text does not survive in manuscript and was apparently never printed. Scholars now refer to this hypothetical play as “Ur-Hamlet,” and have suggested Thomas Kyd as its author. Scholars have also cited Kyd’s play The Spanish Tragedy as an influence on Shakespeare. First published in 1592, The Spanish Tragedy features many elements that also appear in Hamlet, such as the play-within-a-play used to trap a murderer and a ghost intent on vengeance.
In 1661, Hamlet was the first play theater manager and playwright William Davenant adapted and staged after securing rights to a number of Shakespeare’s plays for the Duke’s Theatre at Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Davenant cut nearly a quarter of the lines, speeding up the play and making Hamlet less a man of philosophy and more a man of action. He cast Thomas Betterton as Hamlet, who acted the role until he was 74 years old. John Downes, who worked for the Duke’s Theatre and later wrote an account of the late 17th-century stage, claimed of Davenant’s production: “No succeeding Tragedy for several Yeares got more Reputation, or more Money to the Company.”
The Fourth Folio (1685) promised on its title page many “corrections” and “amendments,” but it also included a number of egregious typographical errors, including the one on the page shown here:
The Tragedy of Hamlet Rpince of Denmark.
The Artist's Touch
The year 1603 saw the publication of the first printed edition of Hamlet. Now known as the “Bad Quarto,” only two copies survive. In 2015, The Virginia Arts of the Book Center created a collaborative artist’s book titled The Bad Quarto, using facsimiles of the copy from the British Library. Four teams of artists participated. They were assigned pages from the original and given the following constraints: only words from the original page could appear, although they could be re-arranged; and the only colors that could be used were red, black, white, and silver.In 2016, Chicago bookbinder Samuel Feinstein created a bespoke binding for the copy of The Bad Quarto now at the Newberry. The binding is goatskin, with red and black onlays, and tooled in 23K gold and palladium. In the notes for his design, Feinstein explains that the text and limited color scheme of the artist’s book contributed to his design for the binding, as did the many disparities between the original 1603 quarto and the Hamlet that we now know. Feinstein explored the idea of limitations through the use of line, with the vertical lines in palladium and the horizontal lines in gold. The lines within the curved ornaments (an abstract allusion to a prince’s crown) are based on the same design, but are all different, emphasizing the fragmentation within the play itself, as well as the collaborative nature of the artist’s book.
The Cranach Press Hamlet
In 1912, Count Harry Graf Kessler commissioned Edward Gordon Craig, the English actor, director, set designer, and wood engraver to produce illustrations for an edition of Hamlet. Craig’s blue paper contract with Kessler is shown here. Hamlet was a play that Craig knew well; he had designed a minimalist set for the now legendary 1911-12 production of the play at the Moscow Art Theatre. Craig believed that theater could be reduced to form, light, and movement, and he translated these principles into his illustrations. The book took more than a dozen years to complete.
Craig sent Kessler a number of sketches. In July 1913, he wrote to Kessler from Florence, proposing a design for a page in ink. In 1927, Craig wrote from Genoa, providing a sketch in addition to suggested texts that Kessler could use in the margins of the book surrounding Shakespeare’s play text. Kessler ultimately chose the Historia Danica of Saxo Grammaticus, a 12th-century chronicler, whose work was first published in France in the 16th century. The story of Hamlet, or Amlethus, is contained in the work, and the French version may have been known to both Thomas Kyd, the possible author of the text now known as Ur-Hamlet, and Shakespeare.
Kessler selected John Dover Wilson to edit the English edition of the book. Dover Wilson was a professor at King’s College, London, and the chief editor of the New Cambridge edition of Shakespeare’s plays; his 1935 book, What Happens in Hamlet, is a classic work of Shakespeare criticism.
In March 1930, the calligrapher and type designer Edward Johnston (1872-1944) wrote to Kessler to congratulate him on the English edition of the book. He writes, “The Hamlet is a really noble book. It will I believe form a ‘milestone’—as they say in the history of printing, and you and all those associated with you in the production of this monumental work are to be congratulated.” In June of that same year, Johnston wrote again to Kessler, telling him, “I took up my precious Hamlet, partly to encourage my students…& partly to show the keeper of the library at the Victoria & Albert Museum, as I want him to get a copy if possible (I am so afraid of the edition being all snapped up by Americans, & my own country perhaps not having any copies in our national collections).”
Johnston’s instincts were right: the Cranach Press Hamlet is considered a landmark of 20th-century book design and printing.
Hamlet! One Night Only!
Theaters rarely featured a run of a single play. Instead, each night included a different combination of performances, interspersing plays, music, and dancing. This practice allowed actors and actresses to cycle through the plays in their repertoire and encouraged patrons to return many times to see their favorites in different roles. Theaters advertised performances with broadside playbills, often featuring eye-catching type, which could be pasted up in various locations.
Hamlet in the 20th Century
The Theatre Guild on the Air was created to bring Broadway theater to radio with leading actors in major productions. Sponsored by the United States Steel Corporation, it premiered September 9, 1945, and within a year the series drew some 10 to 12 million listeners each week. The program was broadcast for eight years before it became a television series.
In 1951, the Theatre Guild on the Air broadcast a performance of Hamlet, starring John Gielgud as Hamlet, with Dorothy McGuire as Ophelia. Gielgud was already renowned in the role of Hamlet, first performing it when he was 25 years old. Initially emphasizing the character’s youthful changeability and mercurial speed of thought, as he returned to the role over the years, his Hamlet became more thoughtful and romantic. The production was a combination of Shakespeare’s play and Charles and Mary Lamb’s 19th-century prose adaption of it, which proved very helpful for explicating the action for listeners. The pages from the script reproduced here bear further notes and amendments by the director, Homer Fickett.
Classics Illustrated was a comic book series that ran from 1941-1971, featuring adaptations of literary classics such as Moby Dick, The Iliad, and Hamlet that were intended to be distributed in classrooms as teaching aids. The comic book version of Hamlet functions as a hybrid between book and performance, emphasizing the play’s action and “staging” it graphically in a way that might appeal to young readers, who could relate it to other comic books of the period.Read Magazine was also designed for classroom use. In 1964 (the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth), it devoted an entire issue to Shakespeare silliness, including games, fake advice columns (with letters sent in by characters from the plays), and this feature, “To Beatle or not to Beatle,” which celebrates the most recent British stars alongside a centuries-old one.
In 2016, the Newberry worked with students from Chicago High School for the Arts to record a Hamlet mash-up. With this recording, we're adding one more link to the chain of interpretive creativity inspired by Shakespeare.
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