A Shakespearean Ghoststory Part 1: Hamnet Shakespeare

“—But this prying into the family life of a great man, Russell began impatiently.”

This is part one of a two part post about searching for real-life “ghosts” by prying into Shakespeare's personal life.

Who was the real Hamnet Shakespeare?

Not much is known about the life of William Shakespeare’s only son Hamnet, in large part because he was so young at the time of his death. We don't know his date of birth, but we do know he was christened on 2 February, 1585 (auspiciously, on James Joyce's birthday). We know that he lived in Stratford with his mother, his twin Judith and his older sister Susanna. Father William had moved to London when Hamnet was quite young and was not very involved in Hamnet’s life, likely spending little if any time with his son and heir before Hamnet's death in 1596 at the age of 11. And that's it.

How did Hamnet's father react to his death?

We can assume that the death of his only son had some effect on Shakespeare. We can assume grief, as well as the legalistic complication of the absence of a male heir to his estate. Shakespeare would eventually leave the bulk of his inheritance to his elder daughter Susanna. However, we can only speculate how that loss revealed itself in his work. Shakespeare's career was blowing up in the 1590's, hence his absence in Stratford. Luckily for us, this lack of hard evidence has never stopped scholars from theorizing. Some believe that Hamnet’s memory was immortalized in one of Shakespeare’s most enduring works. Our young Irish bard says:

“To a son he speaks, the son of his soul, the prince, young Hamlet and to the son of his body, Hamnet Shakespeare, who has died in Stratford that his namesake may live for ever.”

Others have asserted, like Stephen Dedalus, that Shakespeare's grief was translated into plays like Hamlet and King John, with its intense dramatization of Constance's grief in the wake of the prince's death. Thus spake Dedalus:

“His boyson’s death is the deathscene of young Arthur in King John. Hamlet, the black prince, is Hamnet Shakespeare.”

This theory may not be the open and shut case it seems, though. In the five years following Hamnet's death, Shakespeare wrote some of his greatest tragedies, including Hamlet and Julius Caesar, but he also penned some of his greatest comedies, including As You Like It and Much Ado About Nothing. He also created the jolly, comic duo of Falstaff and Prince Hal. His comedic output in these years was about equal to the number of histories and tragedies combined. Additionally, Shakespeare lost his father much closer to the time in which he was writing Hamlet, a play which centers the grief of a son rather than the grief of a parent. I think it's reasonable to assume that Shakespeare worked out some of his personal loss on the page, but at the end of the day, Shakespeare was writing for profit for a commercial audience. I think the variety in the plays following Hamnet's death is more likely a reflection of the economic demands on the playwright than purely creative output. The market favored a variety of genres and so that is what Shakespeare wrote. This era of Shakespearean work is not exactly Picasso’s blue period.

How did audiences interpret Hamlet?

The notion that Hamlet's grief was a reflection of Shakespeare's own melancholy did not arise as an interpretation until centuries after the initial run of the play. Audiences in the 17th century tended to see Hamlet as a bitter, cynical malcontent. The French writer Voltaire said of Hamlet:

“...one would imagine this piece to be the work of a drunken savage.”

Psychological analyses of Hamlet’s grief and subsequent madness proliferated in the 18th century, when critics began to see Hamlet as a tragic figure tossed about by cruel, merciless circumstance. Romantic poets like Samuel Coleridge Taylor and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in the early 19th century first declared Hamlet was Shakespeare's most personal play and reimagined the melancholy Dane as a universal Everyman type. William Hazlitt, writing in 1818, said Hamlet's speeches, “are as real as our own thoughts. Their reality is in the reader's mind. It is we who are Hamlet.” Actors and even doctors in the 19th century increasingly interpreted Hamlet's actions as sane given his circumstances. In the span of about 200 years, critics’ impressions of Hamlet shifted from “look at this asshole” to “so relatable.”

What did Sigmund Freud have to say about all of this?

The next big shift in Shakespearean analysis came at the end of the 19th century with the rise of Freudian psychoanalysis. Now, Hamlet was struggling with an Oedipal complex, enraged by Claudius living out every young man's dream of killing a father and marrying a mother. It was in this era that Shakespeare’s sexuality began to factor into the interpretation of his plays. It became essential that Hamlet reflected its author's grief as Shakespeare was seen as working out his own suicidal ideation and his own sexual anxieties through his plays. Freud himself was a great lover of Shakespeare and saw Hamlet as not just a creation of Shakespeare’s, but that he was Shakespeare. Æ's insistence in “Scylla and Charybdis” that one must separate out the artist's biography and focus only on close readings of their work anticipates the direction of 20th century literary criticism, particularly the New Criticism movement, though that movement would not reach its peak until decades after Ulysses was published.

What about Ulysses then?

Hamnet's ghostly presence in Ulysses tells us as readers more about Joyce’s mindset than Shakespeare's. There is no hard evidence that Shakespeare based Hamlet on his son, only a gut feeling among his audience. Nonetheless, that feeling is enough to propel us through the complex emotional landscape of Ulysses. Stephen’s ideas about the influence of Hamnet Shakespeare’s death on Hamlet shifts this Elizabethan play about internecine dynastic struggle into a contemporary Ibsenian family drama. Within the context of Ulysses, tying Shakespeare’s personal life into Hamlet allows Leopold Bloom to embody Shakespeare within the novel. He is, afterall, a man haunted by the grief for his father and his son who would be eleven had he lived. Like Shakespeare, his heir will be a daughter rather than a son. Stephen goes as far to state that Hamnet and Hamlet would be twins had Hamnet lived:

“Is it possible that that player Shakespeare, a ghost by absence, and in the vesture of buried Denmark, a ghost by death, speaking his own words to his own son’s name (had Hamnet Shakespeare lived he would have been prince Hamlet’s twin), is it possible, I want to know, or probable that he did not draw or foresee the logical conclusion of those premises: you are the dispossessed son: I am the murdered father: your mother is the guilty queen, Ann Shakespeare, born Hathaway?”

Could Rudy Bloom be an additional metempsychotic triplet? Hamnet’s inclusion in Stephen’s Shakespeare theory deepens the theme of paternity and father-son relationships that permeates Ulysses. Stephen, like our freudian Hamlet, is searching desperately for a father figure, and Bloom completes the equation, a man in desperate need of a son. In Part Two, we’ll look at the other off-page phantom that figures into Stephen’s theory in this passage: Anne Shakespeare née Hathaway.

A Shakespearean Ghoststory Part 1: Hamnet Shakespeare

Further Reading:

Decoding Dedalus: Hamlet, ou le Absentminded Beggar