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Could Hamlet Be the "Other Shakespeare?" (7)
The dynamics of the theater in Shakespeare's time should also be taken into account.
We know that the theater was extremely popular. Probably one of the reasons for this popularity was that the theater was a place where, provided a certain amount of subtlety, symbolism, and/or metaphor were employed, the high and might could be considered fair game.
The dialog about the theater in Hamlet certainly supports this view. At one point it is said of a theatrical company that "After your/Death you were better to have a bad epitaph/Than their ill repute while you live." In another passage, the popular stage is described as a place where "many wearing rapiers are afraid of goosequills and dare scarce come thither."
For someone similar to Hamlet--exceptional, highly perceptive, principled, yet blocked by the power equations of court life from exerting much direct influence in the areas that most troubled him--the indirect opportunity to affect opinion via a popular, lively, and only somewhat cryptically topical theater might have been irresistibly attractive.
The case for a highly-placed nobleman writing the dramatic material that today we attribute to a commoner named William Shakespeare has already been made by others. Numerous observers have questioned how a man of Shakespeare's relatively modest origins could have written with such intimate and knowing familiarity about so many aspects of court life. They suggest that these details could only have come from a nobleman.
But these theories of Shakespeare's identity have been countered, to at least some degree, by physical evidence that a William Shakespeare actually lived, wrote for the theater, paid household bills, and so forth.
Hamlet illustrates how the author of Shakespeare's plays could have been both the nobleman and the commoner--with the nobleman acting as a hidden collaborator, supplying concepts as well as key text, in the same manner that Hamlet does--to a journeyman playwright who may have been already known in the theater of his day.
This arrangement seems, on reflection, to be at least as reasonable as for the nobleman to attempt to pass authorship of his material onto a plainly mediocre "front man." Wouldn't a gifted man choose to conceal his identity behind someone with at least enough craftsmanship to be plausible?
(c) COPYRIGHT 1992 ROBERT WINTER. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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