D⸻ R⸻ and the Player's Speech in Hamlet.

A pleasing turn of events. Group member D⸻ R⸻ refers to alternative sources and perspectives regarding the Player's Speech in Hamlet. This in the comment thread to my short essay “A 1572 Oxford Letter and the Player’s Speech in Hamlet.”¹, recently reposted here, where I passed along the following question.

The player’s speech has been a source of consternation among Shakespeare scholars for above 200 years.  Why was Aeneas’ tale chosen as the subject?  Why was it in an earlier, more florid style? Why was there a player’s speech in  the play at all?

“Obvious answer”, he replied, “is that he is providing instructions to Actors and turns to Plato's Ion for material.” He quotes from the Jowett translation.

Soc. I wish you would frankly tell me, Ion, what I am going to ask of you: When you produce the greatest effect upon the audience in the recitation of some striking passage, such as the apparition of Odysseus leaping forth on the floor, recognized by the suitors and casting his arrows at his feet, or the description of Achilles rushing at Hector, or the sorrows of Andromache, Hecuba, or Priam,- are you in your right mind? Are you not carried out of yourself, and does not your soul in an ecstasy seem to be among the persons or places of which you are speaking, whether they are in Ithaca or in Troy or whatever may be the scene of the poem?

Ion. That proof strikes home to me, Socrates. For I must frankly confess that at the tale of pity, my eyes are filled with tears, and when I speak of horrors, my hair stands on end and my heart throbs.

While I am not at all so sure that this is the answer, it is, nonetheless, an unusually substantial reply. While follow-up comments acknowledge the prevailing atmosphere of partisan rancor, D⸻ R⸻ himself does not partake.

I have quoted Churton Collins, at length, in my Variorum Edition of Ulysses and Agamemnon (1584, 2018)², on Shakespeare's references in that play, and in The Merchant of Venice, to Plato's First Alcibiades. I am confident that Shakespeare had read at some length from Plato. I also agree with Collins that he is likely to have read it in Latin translation.

In my “Shakespeare's Greek”³, however, I trace the provenance of “Shakespeare’s sonnets canonically numbered 153 and 154... two variations of a translation from a Greek epigram by Marianus Scholasticus” and find that he had only Greek versions available. By this indication, he did know some Greek.

But, surely, Ion's reply is not so obvious as to settle the matter. D⸻  R⸻ himself seems to have realized as much.

Trying to link Oxford to Shakespeare through Hecuba is a fool's errand. See Tonya Pollard's Whats Hecuba to Shakespeare (2012) for the full rundown

He has handed us off. Most of his confidence comes to him through Tonya Pollard's essay “What’s Hecuba to Shakespeare?” from Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 65, No. 4 (Winter 2012).⁴

So then, Plato is connected to Euripides — the latter Ms. Pollard's choice — through a generalization. The essay in question is surprisingly well researched. An even more pleasing turn of events: it seems that we're actually investigating the text of Hamlet. In a Facebook group.

The essay weighs in at 35 pages including bibliography so we will have to take it on piecemeal. Perhaps we may quote the following by way of an abstract:

In arguing that Hecuba’s association with Euripidean tragedy is crucial to understanding her meanings for Shakespeare, this essay does not exclude other depictions of Hecuba from the play’s web of literary engagement. Shakespeare’s compounding and confounding of literary models have been widely acknowledged, and critics have persuasively demonstrated his engagement with Virgil and Ovid, among other classical sources. Yet identifying Euripides’s role in this intertextual web points to Shakespeare’s engagement with the power of theatrical performance. As [Emrys] Jones⁵ has pointed out, Hecuba offered Shakespeare a classical model for a highly successful, publicly performed tragedy, something he could not find elsewhere.⁶

From this premise the author declares that Hecuba is “a synecdoche for Greek tragedy”. In particular, she means the vengeful Hecuba of Euripides’s play of that name. If the question is asked, “Why not Medea or Clytemnestra?” the answer would seem to be “Because Hecuba appears in Hamlet and elsewhere in the works of Shakespeare.” Needless to say, that is not reason enough.

Euripides, by virtue of the popularity of his plays among the growing community of 16^th century Greek scholars, is asserted to have been the link between the classical Greek and Elizabethan theaters. By-passing Seneca, the Latin redactor of Greek tragedy, through who most Elizabethan playwrights got their second-hand knowledge, and claiming direct connections between Shakespeare and the classical Greek tragedians is not a new pursuit. Gilbert Murray made a career of it in the early 20^th century — or at least a sidelight. A number of Oxfordian scholars have sought to add to his findings.

The attempt to closely tie Euripides' Hecuba, in particular, to the works of Shakespeare is a more recent development. In the plus column, as it were, we are reminded that

she was a figure of some fascination: [Shakespeare] alludes to her fifteen times by name, and additionally by status (‘‘the queen of Troy’’), throughout his works.⁷

Among the works cited are The Rape of Lucrece, Coriolanus and Cymbeline. In Cymbeline alone is the Hecuba reference taken from the vengeful fury of Euripides' play Hecuba.

Imogen. Pisanio,

All curses madded Hecuba gave the Greekes,

And mine to boot, be darted on thee:⁸

But once is enough to show that Shakespeare did, indeed, know something of the Euripidean version of Priam's wife.

But what it is not enough to show is that the Player's Speech, in Hamlet, was anything other than Aeneas's tale to Dido describing the fall of Troy. Because the Shakespeare Authorship Question has long ago descended into partisan warfare, onlookers eventually also lose track of even the most obvious perspective. That I point out the fact that there is a reference to Aeneas's tale also in a letter by Edward de Vere — and, for context, review the state of the scholarship regarding the Speech over the past 250 or so years — does not mean that I am claiming it proves that Edward de Vere wrote Shakespeare. It is a single data point. Definitely an intriguing one.

Even without it, the past ten years of my findings have proven several times over that De Vere wrote the works. But it is well worth following the line of pursuit D⸻ R⸻ brought to our collective attention. Here again is the link to download Ms. Pollard's essay. It lists a lot of great sources and raises real issues. http://triggs.djvu.org/global-language.com/enfolded/ABOUT/PollardHecubaRQ.pdf

1Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. “ A 1572 Oxford Letter and the Player’s Speech in Hamlet. https://gilbertwesleypurdy.blogspot.com/2020/08/a-1572-oxford-letter-and-players-speech.html

2Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. Ulysses and Agamemnon (1584) (The Early Plays of Edward de Vere (William Shakespeare) Book 1) . https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07JD7KM1T

3Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. “Shakespeare's Greek.” https://gilbertwesleypurdy.blogspot.com/2014/05/shake-speares-greek.html

4 Pollard, Tonya. “What’s Hecuba to Shakespeare?” Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 65, No. 4 (Winter 2012), , pp. 1060-1093.

http://triggs.djvu.org/global-language.com/enfolded/ABOUT/PollardHecubaRQ.pdf

5 Jones, Emrys. The Origins of Shakespeare. Oxford, 1977.

6Pollard, 1077.

7Pollard, 1074.

8 Cymbeline IV.ii.392-5.

Also at Virtual Grub Street:

• Matthew Gasda on the Shakespeare Authorship Debate. May 15, 2023. 'Among his Compact Mag pieces is the March 24 article “The Right Wing Crusade Against Shakespeare”.'

• Shakespeare CSI: Sir Thomas More, Hand-D. April 22, 2023. “What a glory to have an actual hand-written manuscript from the greatest English writer of all time!”

• Edward de Vere in the Lives of his Daughters. February 27, 2023. "At least they take some comfort from their belief that De Vere had no demonstrable relationship with his daughter, the Countess of Montgomery, Susan de Vere."

• Shakespeare’s Character Names: Shylock, Ophelia, etc. July 13, 2021. “The name Ophelia was, by all indications, quite rare in the 16th century.”

• A 1572 Oxford Letter and the Player’s Speech in Hamlet. August 11, 2020. “The player’s speech has been a source of consternation among Shakespeare scholars for above 200 years.  Why was Aeneas’ tale chosen as the subject?”

• Check out the Shakespeare Authorship Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.
• Check out the Letters Index: Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford for many letters from this fascinating time, some related to the Shakespeare Authorship Question.