[In the following essay, Farley-Hills defends George Miles's linguistic argument (from 1870) that Hamlet planned his meeting with the pirates before he left for England. His defense involves some comparison of the Q2 and F versions of the play.]

The view that Hamlet had been planning, before he leaves Denmark, to be rescued by pirates on the journey to England has received short shrift from most Shakespeare commentators and editors since it was first given lengthy and forceful promulgation by the American scholar and author George Miles in his monograph of 1870, A Review of Hamlet. Miles made his suggestion provisional on the possibility of a pun on the word ‘craft’ at Q2 III. iv. 199: ‘If the word crafts had its present maritime significance in Shakespeare's time, the pun alone is conclusive of a pre-arranged capture.’¹

W.W. Lawrence regarded the whole of Miles's argument as ‘an absurd idea’,² and most of those few critics who have noticed Miles at all have substantially concurred. Later attempts to support Miles's view, such as Martin Stevens's article in Shakespeare Quarterly,³ have fared no better. The main objection, however, has often been that the use of ‘craft’ to mean ‘ship’ was unknown in Shakespeare's day or too rare to be a meaningful reference. The German scholar Robert Petsch, for instance, in his article refuting Miles's argument, argues that even if the word could have meant ‘ship’ in Elizabethan English, the usage would have been too rare and technical for a general audience to understand.⁴ Modern editors have been more forthright: G.R. Hibbard's note on Q2 III. iv. 190, for instance, comments (with rather strange logic): ‘The earliest instance of craft, signifying “boat”, cited by the OED belongs to 1671-2, so there is little likelihood that Hamlet is quibbling.’⁵ In providing evidence that Hibbard and those many commentators and annotators who share a similar view are mistaken in this assumption, I think it worth again raising the ghost of Hamlet's planned meeting with the pirates.

In the ‘closet’ scene of the Q2 version of Hamlet Shakespeare gives Hamlet nine lines in his last speech that do not occur in either Q1 or the Folio version. The last of these lines may or may not contain a pun on the word ‘crafts’:

                                                                                O, 'tis most sweet
When in one line two crafts directly meet.

(III. iv. 198-9)⁶

‘Crafts’ here certainly means (as most annotators agree) something like ‘cunning plots’ (Harold Jenkins). G.R. Hibbard rather ingeniously suggests in explanation of the last line: ‘when two exponents of the same skill or cunning device—in this case mining and counter-mining—meet one another head-on’. A problem with this, however, is that Hamlet promises to dig ‘one yard below their mines’. Jenkins too thinks that it is unlikely that the word also means ‘ships’ here: ‘A pun on crafts, ships, is (at this date) unlikely’,⁷ and elsewhere, in notes to III. iv. 207-11 and IV. vi. 19, finds ‘no justification’ for inferring that the pirates were in league with Hamlet in a plot to get him back to Denmark. At first sight the OED seems to give support to this scepticism; but as well as giving the date of the first known use of ‘craft’ meaning ‘ship’ as 1671 the compilers also add to the entry the note: ‘These uses were probably colloquial with watermen, fishers and seamen some time before they appeared in print, so that the history is not evidenced.’ Some support is given to the suggestion that this usage of the word is to be found earlier by the entry in Coles's English Dictionary (1676), where one definition of ‘craft’ is ‘small vessels as ketches etc.’, which may imply it was a well-established usage by this date. But the OED compliers need not have resorted to conjecture. Kurath and Kuhn give two relevant entries in their Medieval English Dictionary where ‘Craft 9a’ is partly defined as ‘something built or made … a building, ornament, painting, ship etc.’, and for their example of the meaning ‘ship’ they quote Beryn c.1460:

Wel was hym þat coude bynd or ondo
Any rope with-in shippe, þat longit to þe crafft.

Under ‘ship-craft (c)’ (meaning ‘ship’), they give as an example Scrope 1450: ‘The King sent … to get þingis that myght abide with thayme that their ship-crafte brake not in the see.’ An example can be cited from the late fourteenth century in Richard the Redeless, iv. 74-7, where we read:

Than lay the lordis a-lee, with laste and with charge,
And bare aboute the barge, and blamed the maister,
That knewe not the kynde cours, that to the crafte longid,
And warned him wisely, of the wedir-side.(8)

We can even go further back than this, for the Bosworth and Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary enters under ‘Cræft IV’ ‘a craft, any kind of ship’. In view of these examples it can be regarded as certain that the usage was current in Shakespeare's day; indeed Shakespeare himself may be using it elsewhere in a pun in Troilus and Cressida (IV. v. 103-4) where Troilus runs riot with piscatorial metaphors:

Whilst others fish with craft for great opinion,
I with great truth catch mere simplicity.(9)

Jenkins's objection clearly has no force against the weight of this evidence. Trusting to etymological evidence, then, to refute Miles's argument turns out to be relying on ‘false fire’.

A more fundamental objection, however, becomes clear in Jenkins's comment on Hamlet's earlier lines (III. iv. 207-11), ‘Let it work … at the moon’: ‘Hamlet's confidence in the outcome will prepare the audience for it, but affords no justification for supposing that he has any precise plan for bringing it about (which he ultimately does by sudden inspiration, V. ii. 6-53), still less that he “has planned in advance for the intervention of the pirates” (SQ, xxvi, 279)’. Jenkins rejects the possibility of a pun on ‘crafts’ because he refuses to contemplate the reading of these lines it would imply.

The possibility of a pun on ‘crafts’ does not, of course, prove that Shakespeare intended one, but it does open up the possibility of a different understanding of Hamlet's reaction to being sent to England. The phrase ‘two crafts directly meet’ suggests accommodation to a pun because literally it would be against Hamlet's interest for the plots or stratagems to meet directly, and his aim is obviously to keep his plans secret. It would be very much in character for Hamlet to express through a pun what he does not wish to reveal openly (as he shows in the first words he speaks in the play). It is true that the reference to ‘crafts’ in the ‘closet’ scene would be puzzling to an audience, because it is the first we hear of Hamlet's intention of initiating the counterplot (though the meaning ‘ships’ is the first, not the second, meaning that springs to mind to a modern audience, and this might well have been the case with a popular audience in Shakespeare's time if the OED is right that the meaning, far from being ‘technical’, was a popular one). In any case Hamlet constantly likes to keep friend, foe, and even audience guessing at his precise intentions. Shakespeare is constantly engaged in mystification in Hamlet (as befits a play which questions the adequacy of ‘your philosophy’), especially in the later versions, as, for instance, when he substitutes in Q2 and F a far more ambiguous response of the Queen to Hamlet's revelation that he knows of his father's murder, compared to her unambiguous response in Q1: ‘I never knew of this most horride murder’. The difference between Q2 and F in their account of the meeting with the pirates might well be explained by a later decision in F to make the nature of the encounter more ambiguous. We can also accept Jenkins's explanation that the purpose of the Q2 passage in III. iv. 207-12 is to ‘prepare the audience’ for what is to come.

Miles points out that Hamlet is surprisingly acquiescent when Claudius tells him he must board the boat for England (IV. iii. 44). He simply repeats Claudius's command ‘For England’ (F turns it into a question) and then says ‘Good’, followed by the somewhat mysterious remark: ‘I see a cherub that sees them’ (referring to Claudius's ‘purposes’). Jenkins finds in this ‘a hint that Hamlet perceives more than the King supposes’, but it is the cherub that sees Claudius's intention; Hamlet merely sees the cherub. He only finds out Claudius's true intentions when he opens the letter addressed to the King of England on board ship. Hamlet may be intimating that he sees a glimmer of providential help in the journey to England and that it might provide him with an opportunity if properly understood and prepared for, or it might simply be, as Petsch suggests, that Hamlet is here appealing to the conscience of the King to remember that God sees all.¹⁰

Miles interprets the nine additional lines of Q2 (III. iv. 204-12) as Hamlet's first revelation of an attempt to take advantage of such an opportunity:

Ther's letters sealed, and my two Schoolfellowes,
Whom I will trust as I will Adders fang'd,
They beare the mandat, they must sweep my way
And marshall me to knavery: let it work,
For tis the sport to have the enginer
Hoist with his own petar, an't shall goe hard
But I will delve one yard belowe their mines,
And blowe them at the Moone: o tis most sweete
When in one line two crafts directly meete.(11)

Jenkins's note on ‘knavery’ here is interesting, because it indicates a refusal to contemplate Hamlet's taking the initiative (the a priori assumption is the Romantic one found in Goethe and Coleridge that he is too inward-looking and too kind to act ruthlessly): ‘knavery’ therefore is interpreted as ‘to be suffered, of course, not committed by the speaker, cf. V. ii. 19’ (the reference to ‘royal knavery’ in V. ii. 19 is not relevant to the point). For similar reasons ‘marshall me to knavery’ is glossed by Hibbard as ‘ceremoniously conduct me into a trap’.¹² It is clear from the next lines, however, that Hamlet is talking about taking a lead from his erstwhile schoolfellows; he will ‘blowe them at the Moone’ by ‘undermining’ them at their own game. In any case he has no idea at this point that they are leading him into a trap; he has simply lost all trust in them. ‘Marshall’ means ‘lead me to knavery’, as it does for Macbeth when he addresses the phantom dagger: ‘Thou marshall'st me the way that I was going’ (Macbeth, II. i. 42). Hamlet's position is clear: he has lost trust in the friendship of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and suspects they are being used in some way by the principal plotter (‘enginer’) Claudius, although he does not know exactly how until he opens the letter to the King of England on board ship. He will therefore take counter-measures and destroy their plans by the kind of underhand means (‘knavery’) they are using against him. Given this reading, it is not unreasonable to interpret the reference to ‘two crafts’ as a pun by which Hamlet is suggesting covertly (as is his wont) that the preparations for this counterplot are already under way in arranging a meeting of the two craft at sea. It is perhaps indiscreet of Hamlet even to hint obscurely at such intentions, but one of the most intriguing features of Hamlet's complex character is the all too human mixture of discretion and indiscretion in his conduct. At this stage it seems unlikely that his plan involves having Rosencrantz and Guildenstern killed, in spite of the violence of the metaphors; but a plan to engineer a quick and unexpected return to Denmark might well enable him to ‘hoist’ Claudius ‘with his own petar’. Whether Hamlet has had time to arrange such a meeting is immaterial, so long as we feel there has been sufficient stage time. Claudius first mentions the intention of sending Hamlet to England in open conversation with Polonius, and in the presence of Ophelia, before the play scene (III. i. 171). Much happens between this and Hamlet's first mention of the journey, which Gertrude says she has ‘forgot’ (III. iv. 203)—a subtle intimation that she had the information some time before.

At this point it might be well to quote Miles's commentary on these lines:

One would think it required a miraculous allowance of critical obtuseness to ignore a counterplot so strikingly pre-arranged. Yet, opening Coleridge, you find ‘Hamlet's capture by the pirates: how judiciously in keeping with the character of the over-meditative Hamlet, ever at last determined by accident or by a fit of passion!’ And opening Ulrici … God save the mark! ‘Accident frustrates his plans. Captured by pirates he is set on shore in Denmark against his will’ etc. And opening Wilhelm Meister you find Hamlet's ‘capture by pirates, and the death of the two courtiers by the letter which they carried’, regarded as ‘injuring exceedingly the unity of the piece, particularly as the hero has no plan’. After such obvious, amazing misconception, one may be pardoned for believing he sees

                                                                                Two points in Hamlet's soul
Unseized by the Germans yet.(13)
To make assurance doubly sure, comes the letter to Horatio, ‘In
the grapple, I boarded them; on the instant they got clear of our ship: so
I alone became their prisoner. They have dealt with me like thieves of mercy;
but they knew what they did’. Can circumstantial proof go further? Could
any twelve men of sense on such a record, acquit Hamlet of being an accessory
before, as well as after, the fact?(14)

The letter from Hamlet to Horatio (IV. vi. 17-20) is interpreted very differently by Jenkins (who quotes Miles at this point):

There is no justification for inferring (as Miles A Review of Hamlet, 1870, pp. 70-1 and recently in SQ, xxvi, 276-84) that they were therefore in league with Hamlet and the whole pirate encounter a plot to get him back to Denmark. In that case Hamlet could hardly have spoken of their ‘mercy’. The implication is that they showed mercy in calculated exchange for services to be rendered.¹⁵

Jenkins's interpretation of the letter is not implausible if taken alone from what has preceded it and what is to come. Hamlet certainly seems to be giving the impression here to Horatio that the meeting with the pirates was fortuitous:

Ere we were two days old at sea, a pirate of very warlike appointment gave us chase. Finding ourselves too slow of sail, we put on a compelled valour, and in the grapple I boarded them. On the instant they got clear of our ship, so I alone became their prisoner. They have dealt with me like thieves of mercy. But they knew what they did: I am to do a turn for them … I have words to speak in thine ear will make thee dumb; yet are they much too light for the bore of the matter … Rosencrantz and Guildenstern hold their course for England; of them I have much to tell thee.

(IV. vi. 14-28)

Miles has not helped his case by omitting the words at the end of his quotation: ‘I am to do a turn for them’, because it looks as if Hamlet is suggesting he did some sort of deal with the pirates on the spot, though it does not necessarily mean this. On the other hand, Hamlet's remark, ‘But they knew what they did’, sounds suspiciously like an acknowledgement that the whole episode was under control in a way not usually associated with fights at sea, and his description of their behaviour as like ‘thieves of mercy’ is not incompatible with Miles's view that the meeting had been prearranged, especially if he is not being totally frank with Horatio. ‘Thieves of mercy’ would be a good phrase to describe pirates who have agreed to his rescue plan, whether or not they have received good payment. Robert Petsch argues against Miles's view that Hamlet is sparing with the information he imparts to Horatio, arguing that Hamlet always treats Horatio ‘with boundless trust’,¹⁶ but the text of the play hardly bears out the contention. Hamlet has all along been economical in what he tells his friend: he refuses to explain what the Ghost has said to him, for instance (I. v. 123 f.), and he does not reveal that earlier plot to catch the conscience of the King until just before the players enter (III. ii. 75-87), although he has been hard at work for some time arranging it. Even in this letter he is too cautious to reveal how he has behaved towards his old school-fellows, and the information that they ‘hold their course for England’, while perfectly true, is full of the irony of disingenuousness. Miles's comment would appear to be justified: ‘Horatio's ignorance of the capture is no argument against its being premediated. It would have been very unlike Hamlet, either to compromise his friend, who remained at Court in service of the King, or to extend his secret needlessly.’¹⁷

The implausibility of the story as Hamlet tells it also gives Hamlet's letter the impression of disingenuousness. It is difficult to believe that by chance Hamlet is the only person who boarded the pirate ship and that by chance the pirates immediately sailed away with Hamlet still on board without their attempting any further assault. Pirate ships would presumably usually attack in order to seize more than the first man who came on board, even if they immediately (by chance) happened to recognize who he was and his potential for ransom. Shakespeare need not have given all these circumstantial details or made them so prominent unless he wanted to draw special attention to Hamlet's conduct on the occasion. Indeed Q1 makes no mention of pirates and is none the worse in its plotting for that. Many earlier commentators have found Hamlet's account of the encounter with the pirates implausible, including those who for one reason or another come to accept that the meeting was accidental. Lawrence, for instance, remarks that it ‘strains probability’,¹⁸ while the nineteenth-century commentator D.J. Snider remarks: ‘The whole proceeding is so suspicious that were such an event to occur in real life, everybody would think at once of collusion.’¹⁹ Petsch argues in general that the events of the story, as Hamlet tells it, are thoroughly in character, and in particular that the impulsiveness of Hamlet's nature would make his rash attempt to fight single-handed thoroughly typical.²⁰ Our impression of Hamlet's character, however, must derive from the particularities of the text, not govern the text's interpretation, and it is these particularities that are in question here.

Jenkins follows earlier commentators in arguing that Hamlet's final account of the meeting with the pirates in Act V, scene ii is the key to understanding what happened. The dialogue at V. ii. 6-53, in which Hamlet gives Horatio an account of the forging of Claudius's letter to the King of England and the ultimate fate of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, clearly indicates, says Jenkins, that Hamlet's behaviour on board ship was the result of ‘sudden inspiration’, and so the author of the Shakespeare Quarterly article (Martin Stevens) is wrong. The same view had been taken some hundred years earlier by D.J. Snider, who finds Hamlet's description of what happened in this scene decisive in rejecting what he otherwise regards as the persuasive view that the meeting with the pirates was planned: ‘Yet this view, apparently so well founded, we must abandon when we read Hamlet's account of the affair (V. ii). In that he ascribes his action wholly to instinct; there was no premeditation, no planning at all.’²¹ Lawrence endorses this view in quoting Snider.²²

Miles's interpretation of Hamlet's narrative at this point is very different: the opening of Claudius's letter to the King of England is

a sudden inspiration … It is the only second hope on which he can count; for if the chances of the sea prevent the contemplated rescue, he is infallibly lost without that earnest conjuration. The whole ‘rash’ undertaking is a supplemented plot; a reserved escape, an ‘indiscretion’ only meant to serve in case his pirate plot should fail.²³

By opening the letter Hamlet providentially obtains the public proof of Claudius's guilt that he would otherwise lack, and he can thereby justify his actions before the Danish people when he finally takes his revenge.

In contrast to Jenkins's view that Hamlet links the finding of the letter and the meeting with the pirate ship as examples of providence coming to his aid, Miles contrasts the planning of the encounter with the pirates with the unplanned opening of the letter. Hamlet's second account of the episode (V. ii) says very little about the meeting with the pirates on the grounds that he has informed Horatio of that already (V. ii. 55). Instead he concentrates almost exclusively on the discovery of Claudius's letter and the substitution of his own version of it. His comments on the intervention of providence arise entirely in the context of the narrative concerning the letter, and it is therefore not unreasonable to conclude that that is what it is referring to. Miles's view seems to me much more closely in accordance with Hamlet's words than that of either Jenkins or Snider:

                                                                                Rashly—
And prais'd be rashness for it: let us know
Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well
When our deep plots do pall; and that should learn us
There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will.

(V. ii. 6-11)

Neither a chance meeting nor a planned meeting with the pirates could be regarded as an ‘indiscretion’, although Hamlet's action in boarding the ship might be. But at this point Hamlet is describing the moments before he steals the letter, not the later event. The rashness clearly refers to the sudden decision to steal the letter just before he leaves his cabin to seek out in the dark the sleeping Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (V. ii. 12-18). Hamlet only cursorily mentions the sea-fight next day nearly forty lines later (V. ii. 53-5). He must, therefore, be contrasting the unpremeditated opening of the letter with those ‘deep plots’ that he fears may have gone wrong—if he is thinking of a particular ‘deep plot’ it could only be the one Miles mentions, for he is hardly likely to be looking at the matter from Claudius's point of view. It is worth noting that Shakespeare does not use the word Pope thought appropriate here—‘fail’—but ‘pall/paule’,²⁴ a word meaning ‘falter’, suggesting doubt over whether it (‘they’) will succeed or not. At the moment he is referring to he would not have known whether the agreement with the pirates was going to succeed. Miles's interpretation is further strengthened by the imagery of lines 10-11, for if he had arranged the meeting with the pirates he would have ‘rough-hewn’ a plan that providence then refined by inspiring the impromptu opening of the letter. ‘Rough-hew’ would seem to be a perfect expression to describe the formulation of the plan, for there seems to have been no specific plan for dealing with Claudius when Hamlet arrives back. Imagery could hardly have a greater preciseness. The main argument, then, that Jenkins produces to defend his position turns out to be flawed. The orthodoxy that Lawrence, Jenkins, and Hibbard espouse is seen to be based on the a priori assumption that Hamlet lacks the initiative to finish the task of revenge, not on a plausible reading of the text (especially the Q2 text).

It is strange, however, that the best evidence to justify Miles's viewpoint comes from the text that also includes that long soliloquy ‘How all occasions do inform against me’ (IV. iv. 32-66) that the Folio suppresses. Strange because while the plot to meet up with the pirates suggests verve and initiative, the soliloquy is the most insistent example of that other theme in the play, Hamlet's own doubt and uncertainty whether he is able to carry out the revenge entrusted to him. It is apparent, however, that throughout Hamlet Shakespeare has tried to steer a difficult course between a sufficiently heroic tragic protagonist and the profound psychological interest in the character that results from Hamlet's constant introspection, which is the play's greatest achievement. That even some of his contemporaries had doubts whether he had achieved the right balance is evident (if somewhat obscurely) from two very different contemporary reactions to the play. For instance, in the account given of Burbage's interpretation of the part in the anonymous funeral elegy of 1618 (although scanty it gives his role as Hamlet the fullest treatment), we seem to be hearing of a vigorous, heroic figure:

He's gone and with him what a world are dead,
Which he revived, to be revived so.
No more young Hamlet, old Hieronimo,
Kind Lear, the grieved Moor, and more beside,
That lived in him, have now for ever died.
Oft have I seen him leap into the grave,
Suiting the person, which he seemed to have,
Of a sad lover, with so true an eye
That there I would have sworn he meant to die;
Oft have I seen him play this part in jest,
So lively that Spectators and the rest
Of his sad crew, whilst he but seemed to bleed,
Amazed, thought even then he died indeed.(25)

On the other hand the parody of Hamlet by Shakespeare's fellow playwrights Marston, Chapman, and Jonson in the Blackfriars' play Eastward Ho! mocks the lady Gertrude's footman called Hamlet for his unheroic incompetence in love (‘he gives no … milke, as I have an other servant does’, III. ii. 44-5), as well as his incompetence in his other duties. The very fact that he is given the role of a servant emphasizes the playwrights' view that he is unsuitable to be a tragic hero.

This is, no doubt, slight evidence to go on, but it might give us an indication of why Q2 and F differ as they do. In Q2 the attempt to strike a balance involves the inclusion both of the lines in which Hamlet expresses his wish to blow his enemies to the moon and his determination to outplay Claudius in knavery, shortly followed by a long soliloquy accusing himself of unnecessary delay, of cowardice, and of ‘thinking too precisely on the event’ (IV. iv. 41). The two passages are not absolutely contradictory since the soliloquy ends with a resolution to affect bloody thoughts from henceforth, a sentiment which, it could be argued, inspires the earlier passage. On the other hand there is a considerable contradiction in the tone of self-confidence with which he punningly announces his plan of action and the despondency and self-recrimination of the soliloquy. This contradiction becomes more disruptive if (as I have argued) the plan that Hamlet is announcing in his pun on ‘crafts’ turns out to have been put into effect later. The objection, of course, is not that people may not realistically be self-contradictory in this way, but that the suggestion of inadequacy in the soliloquy and the retrospective futility it accords the earlier vaunting (which in the light of the soliloquy is made to look like braggadocio) undermine Hamlet's tragic status. By taking out both these passages in the Folio text Shakespeare (assuming the modification is Shakespeare's) avoids both the element of contradiction and making so large an issue of Hamlet's inadequacy, though of course the issue is raised elsewhere in the play. A further consequence is to make the plan to meet the pirates more obscure and indeed, as the history of Hamlet commentary suggests, invisible to most subsequent readers. The same process of wanting to make Hamlet's initiative less prominent may also account for the substitution in F of ‘deare plots’ for Q2's ‘deep plots’ (V. ii. 9), for while ‘deep’ might well hark back to the mining metaphor of III. iv. 196-8, its change to ‘deare’ seems to suggest the more general theme of the vanity of human wishes. Even the question mark in F in place of the full stop in Q2, after Hamlet's repetition of Claudius's order that he must embark for England: ‘For England?’ (IV. iii. 47), is a curious addition seeing that Hamlet has informed his mother earlier that the order has already been given (III. iv. 202). It would be wrong, however, to insist here on a more precise interpretation of punctuation than Elizabethan practice required.

The influence of the F reading seems to have prevailed in spite of its greater obscurity, but there may have been another influence at work in masking Shakespeare's intention here. There is some evidence that there has been a shift in stage presentation of Shakespeare over the years away from emphasis on speech performance and towards a greater emphasis on action and stage business. Bertram Joseph, in his excellent account of the importance of elocution in the Elizabethan educational system and its influence on Shakespeare's style, suggests a level of aural sophistication in Shakespeare's contemporary audiences that no modern audience could hope to match.²⁶ The importance given to recitation not only accounts for the delight in the set speech in Elizabethan drama, but also for the propensity towards elaborate ‘undramatic’ narrative accounts of offstage events. There is some evidence too, I think, that Elizabethan stage presentation was considerably more static than our modern approach allows. We know, for instance, that it was the custom before Garrick for actors to stand around, inattentive to the speaker, until it was their turn to speak—which suggests that long speeches were treated more like operatic arias than as parts of realistic dialogue. Indeed we are informed by Francis Gentleman in his Dramatic Censor (1770) that it was common practice before Garrick to ‘sing’ Shakespeare's lines: ‘[Garrick] certainly, as a lover of nature, despised the titum-ti, monotonous sing-song then fashionable, and indeed equally admired, till within these last thirty years’.²⁷ Some hint that these ‘operatic’ techniques applied in Shakespeare's day is provided by that same anonymous elegy to Burbage I have already quoted, for there we are told that the other actors on stage, like the audience, were ‘amazed’ by Burbage's lifelike performance, suggesting that they were less concerned with responding in character than as ordinary onlookers. The new Globe in London, with its obscuring onstage pillars, also suggests, I think, that Elizabethan audiences were willing to accept a more static presentation of the acting that perhaps allowed the speaker to come forward, as in the older style of opera production on the modern stage. The fact that now even modern opera production, with its highly artificial conventions, attempts—sometimes ludicrously—a degree of realistic movement, shows how absurdly far we have gone along the road of misunderstanding the conventional nature of all drama. However, this is not the place to discuss acting techniques, but merely to point out that such tendencies towards stage realism add to the obscurity of Shakespeare's intentions.

Hamlet's meeting with the pirates is presented entirely in narrative in the play; we see nothing of the action on stage, while the prominence of the meditative Hamlet on stage with his soul-searching soliloquies has become all the more highlighted by the contrast with the activity that surrounds him. This might be at least part of the explanation why Miles's plausible reading of the text of Hamlet has been either ignored or condemned out of hand. The same fate has attended the more recent attempt to revive the argument by Martin Stevens in the Shakespeare Quarterly. The difference in the two texts of the play may indicate that the process of undermining Hamlet's heroic status may have been begun by Shakespeare himself, or at least by the players' interpretation of the play during Shakespeare's lifetime. If this softening of the Prince occurred so early, it might also account for why, even in the early responses to the play, we find a discrepancy between those, like Burbage's elegist in 1618 and the caricature of Hamlet in Eastward Ho!

Notes

1. As quoted in Variorum Hamlet, ed. H.H. Furness (London and Philadelphia, Pa., 1877), i. 354. Furness may be quoting from the version of Miles's commentary in the Southern Review (Apr./July 1870), which I have not seen. The version of this sentence in the Boston publication, G. Miles, A Review of Hamlet (Boston, Mass., 1870, reprinted 1907), from which I generally quote, is somewhat toned down.

2. W.W. Lawrence, ‘Hamlet's Sea Voyage’, PMLA 59 (1944), 53 n. 23.

3. M. Stevens, ‘Hamlet and the Pirates: A Critical Reconsideration’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 26 (1975), 276-84.

4. R. Petsch, ‘Hamlet unter den Seeräuben’, Englische Studien, 36 (1905), 235.

5. Hamlet, ed. G.R. Hibbard (Oxford and New York, 1994), appendix A, p. 361.

6. Quotations are from the Arden Shakespeare edition of Hamlet, ed. H. Jenkins (London and New York, 1982), unless otherwise stated.

7. Ibid., note to III. iv. 212.

8. William Langland, Richard the Redeless, ed. W.W. Skeat (London, 1954), i. 628.

9. References to Shakespeare's plays other than Hamlet are to The Complete Works, ed. S. Wells and G. Taylor (Oxford, 1988).

10. Petsch, ‘Hamlet unter den Seeräuben’, 234: ‘hier wie sonst handelt es sich um einen heftigen appell an das gewissen des verbrechers’.

11. I quote the text of the facsimile Hamlet (second quarto), 1605 (Menston, Ill., 1972), sig. I4^v.

12. Hamlet, ed. Hibbard, appendix A, x. 4.

13. Robert Browning, Bishop Blougram's Apology, ll. 946-7.

14. Miles, A Review of Hamlet (Boston, Mass., 1870, reprinted 1907), 162-4.

15. Hamlet, ed. Jenkins, note to IV. vi. 19.

16. Petsch, ‘Hamlet unter den Seeräuben’, 233: ‘aber, fragen wir, hat Hamlet solche geheimnistuerei gegenüber Horatio nötig, dem er doch grenzenloses vertrauen schenkt und den er als rechten confident in seine geheimsten pläne einweiht?’

17. Miles, A Review of Hamlet, 179-80.

18. Lawrence, ‘Hamlet's Sea Voyage’, 52.

19. Quoted in Variorum Hamlet, ed. Furness, ii. 184.

20. ‘Dass Hamlet sofort den kampf persönlich aufnimmt und als erster an das feindliche schiff springt, finden wir ja in seinem Naturell hoffentlich genügend begründet’: Petsch, ‘Hamlet unter den Seeräuben’, 236.

21. Quoted in Variorum Hamlet, ed. Furness, ii. 184.

22. Lawrence, ‘Hamlet's Sea Voyage’, 53 n. 23.

23. Miles, A Review of Hamlet, 176, 178.

24. There seems little doubt that this is what Shakespeare wrote even though ‘corrected’ versions of Q2 change the word to ‘fall’.

25. Critical Responses to Hamlet, ed. D.L. Farley-Hills (New York, 1997), i. 8. This elegy might be by Middleton, I think; cf. Middleton's poem in praise of The Duchess of Malfi, ed. F.L. Lucas (London, 1966), ii. 34.

26. B. Joseph, Acting Shakespeare (London, 1960).

27. See Critical Responses to Hamlet, ed. Farley-Hills, i. 216.