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Hamnet’s Father
 Biographers
of Shakespeare — or the
Stratford gentleman who has been mistaken for him, anyway —
typically try to refute doubts of his authorship by assuring us that
“we know  more
about Shakespeare than about any other playwright
of his time except Ben Jonson.”
Well, in a way. We know a lot about
Mr. Shakspere’s personal life, his family, his business dealings; we just
have no real proof that he was a writer.
The comparison with Ben Jonson is
instructive by contrast. Jonson (1572–1637) is often ranked beside
the Bard as the second-greatest dramatist of the age. In fact, during the
seventeenth century and after, he was widely considered the greatest, a
model of classical “Art,” whereas Shakespeare, the poet of
“Nature,” was sometimes disparaged as somewhat uncouth.
Voltaire sneered that Shakespeare’s work amounted to “a few
pearls on a dunghill.”
Reading David Riggs’s fine
life of Jonson recently, I was impressed: It’s exactly the kind of
thorough biography scholars have always tried in vain to write about the
Stratford gent. Jonson’s huge, combative personality bursts out on
every page — his friendships, his feuds, his sorrows, his opinions, his
political alliances, and of course his literary achievements.
Jonson is so vivid a character that
a “Jonson authorship question” is simply impossible. Nobody can
doubt that he wrote the works ascribed to him.
When Jonson’s little son
Benjamin died at age seven, Jonson wrote a touching poem about him. Two
lines of it run: “Rest in soft peace, and, ask’d, say here doth lie
/ Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry.”
In 1596 Mr. Shakspere lost his
only son, Hamnet, who died at the age of eleven. The biographers pass over
this crushing event quickly, but it must have been the cruelest experience of
his life; every parent can understand. Watching your child buried is
something you never forget.
![[Breaker quote for Hamnet's Father: Didn't he mourn his own son?]](2005breakers/050913.gif) Yet
“Shakespeare” never wrote about
Hamnet’s death. Here is a real mystery the scholars neither explain
nor even notice. Yet it demands our attention as a baffling gap in the great
poet’s work.
Many of the Sonnets urge a young
man to beget a son; their theme is that fatherhood is a means of
self-perpetuation and defeating death. Is it humanly possible that if the poet
had seen his own small son buried, he would have failed to express his grief in
his most personal verses, which bewail so many lesser griefs? He promises
to immortalize the name of his young friend; why wouldn’t he do as
much for his own boy?
To my mind this alone makes it
very hard to believe that Mr. Shakspere could have been
“Shakespeare,” our most eloquent poet of love. The deaths of
our parents are sad occasions, but even from childhood we expect to outlive
them in the course of nature. But the death of your child is more than sad;
it’s agonizing. It may cause you to question divine justice, like
Job’s wife: “Curse God, and die.” If the Bard had been
Hamnet’s father, surely he would have written lines about the boy
that would still bring us to tears.
Some biographers speculate that
Hamlet, in the play, is somehow based on Hamnet. But Hamnet and his twin
sister Judith were named after two of Mr. Shakspere’s Stratford
neighbors, Hamnet and Judith Sadler.
Mr. Shakspere’s will,
written shortly before his death in 1616, fails to give any indication that he
had ever been a writer, or that he expected to be remembered for having
written the greatest plays and poems of the age. It leaves small bequests to
several of his friends in Stratford and “fellows” in the theater,
but no fellow writers. Later legends would link him closely to Jonson, but Ben
isn’t mentioned at all. Nor is the poet Michael Drayton, another
supposed friend, who lived near Stratford.
Posthumous legends, some
promoted by Jonson himself, would link “Shakespeare” and
Jonson as friendly rivals. One of these stories said the Bard had died of
“an ague” after drinking “too hard” with Jonson
and Drayton.
In doubting Mr. Shakspere’s
authorship, we needn’t belittle him as a “country
bumpkin”; we can grant him the dignity of a separate existence, a life
lived on its own modest terms, with its own implicit tragedies. We can try to
view him with sympathy and imagination rather than contempt. And I think we
can assume he mourned Hamnet; he just didn’t do it in immortal
poetry.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2005 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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