There’s a curious, rather awkward scene in “Henry VI Part Three” where the King is pictured sitting on a molehill wishing he were a shepherd. Meanwhile, in the background, civil war spreads across England. In the foreground, oblivious to the presence of the King, a young man discovers that the enemy soldier he has killed is someone he knows: “O God!” he exclaims, “it is my father’s face”.
‘Poor naked wretches!’
Shakespeare’s politics are famously hard to decipher. In his plays he is everywhere and nowhere, leaving few traces of himself and his own voice. So the reader is never quite sure whether the views expressed are the author’s own. Take for example Ulysses’ view of the ideal society in ‘Troilus and Cressida’, where he argues for rigid social hierarchies to be respected: ‘The heavens themselves, the planets and this centre’, he believes, ‘Observe degree, priority and place’.
Between the birth of his twins in 1585 and his emergence as a London dramatist in the early 1590s, Shakespeare disappears from view. There are several theories about his activities in these years. He may have spent the time in Italy, later the setting for around one third of his plays. Or he may have remained in England, working as a “schoolmaster in the country”, perhaps private tutor to a Catholic family in the north west of England.
Shakespeare lived in an era when careless talk cost lives. With Europe divided by the Reformation, England had no shortage of enemies across the water, while suspicions lingered over Scotland’s traditional ties with the old enemy France. Meanwhile a large proportion of the population remained loyal to the old faith, and following the 1570 Papal Bull excommunicating Queen Elizabeth, such recusants were routinely seen as an enemy within.
Shakespeare was the oldest of four brothers and was himself brother to two sisters. How seriously he took his role as a brother cannot be gauged, though something may perhaps be deduced from the fact that he spent his adult life three days’ travel distant from his entire family. Nonetheless brothers (and sisters) are an insistent feature of what he wrote, and it is possible to draw two very clear conclusions about his attitudes to siblings from his plays.
It seems reasonable to think of Hamlet as an only child. Does this affect his conduct? For example, does it explain his immense loyalty to his father? Or his fractious relationship with Gertrude? It’s an intriguing question, but Hamlet is not alone: only children seem to abound in Shakespeare. Juliet is likely another such.
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