Hamnet or Hamlet, That is the Question


© Hamlet Studies, 1995 (Vol. XVII, pp. 94-98) 

 

 

 What did Anne and William Shakespeare call their only son? “Hamnet,” of course; so all the authorities intone in unison. It looks like the world's most obvious misprint; but an entire profession learns and teaches it as a fact. In the tradition of the original Academia, laughter remains forbidden: so “Hamnet” is rarely questioned and never explained.

 

    The boy's birth in 1585 and death in 1596 were certainly recorded in that form; and he was named after the Stratford baker Sadler, who appears as “Hamnet” among the witnesses to Shakespeare's will of 1616. There, however, scholarship typically stops, miles away from the actual point at issue, which is not how the parish clerk, or Sadler, spelt the name but what the boy's parents themselves wrote and said. Nobody asks this question, because the Shakespeares are nowadays never seen as real people in a real world. But the answer is perfectly plain, and equally on public record. The 1616 will, written or dictated by Shakespeare himself, leaves “Hamlett Sadler xxvjs viijd to buy him a ringe.” So now we know, straight from Shakespeare's own hand or mouth, what he actually called his friend and hence his own son.

     Orthodox experts and their admirers prefer to remain blind to those words and deaf to that voice. But all ordinary readers will welcome this commonsense conclusion. Of course the name bestowed by Shakespeare on his son in 1585 was Hamlet, not “Hamnet.” The latter is merely an alternative spelling in the phonetic fashion of Tudor times; the two were interchangeable. Sadler himself is recorded in both forms by the same clerk at a 1589 meeting of Stratford council. The simple experiment of speaking them aloud will pronounce those medial l and n sounds as strikingly similar. Only the l-form however is recorded as a Stratford surname. In 1579, one Katherine Hamlett was found drowned in the Avon. The Stratford inquest verdict, like Ophelia's in Hamlet, was accidental death, which permitted the Christian burial forbidden to suicides. Prima facie, the fifteen-year-old Shakespeare had heard of the fate of Miss Hamlett, who was a kinswoman (perhaps the godmother) of his contemporary and life-long friend Sadler; hence the latter's baptismal name, which is duly recorded in the l-form over a period of thirty years, in Stratford correspondence as well as the council minutes and Shakespeare's will. The Stratfordians Hamlet Holdar and Hamlet Smith are also spelt thus. So, above all, is the name of Shakespeare's world-famous play and hero, in every text and commentary for the last four hundred years.

     Then why and how in the world did "Hamnet" ever come to be ac­cepted by Academia as the name that the Shakespeares gave their only son, an assumption for which no evidence has ever existed? The main modern source of this chimera, as of so many others (exemplified in the Times Literary Supplement12 February 1993) is Samuel Schoenbaum. He acknowledges only “Hamnet.” He specifically cites Shakespeare's 1616 legatee in that wrong form; and he has consistently called both Sadler and the boy Shakespeare solely by that wrong or misleading name, for the last twenty years.

     The novelist Robert Nye, avowedly relying on such sources, makes the heroine of his 1993 novella Mrs. Shakespeare repeatedly refer to her only son as "Hamnet". When challenged, Nye continues to insist that this preference is right, equally without any evidence at all. He is strongly supported by Arthur Freeman, who admits the counter evidence (such as “Hamlet” in the will, and the fact that the name had both forms) yet rejects it for no ascertainable reason in favour of “Hamnet. All this obdurate irrationality can readily be verified from successive issues of the Times Literary Supplement (12, 19 and 26 February; 5, 12 and 19 March 1993).

     Thus the stranglehold of academic consensus has silenced common sense in so many aspects of Shakespeare studies throughout most of this century. It has misdated and misconstrued not only his life but his works. A determined tug at this thick curtain lets in a flood of light. Rebaptise Shakespeare's son as "Hamlet," for example, and many new crucial consequences are instantly apparent.

     First, “the Earl of Oxford” vanishes. His devotees will no doubt remain entirely undeterred by the fact that the positive archival evidence for his authorship is zero. But even they must surely concede that the Hamlet counter-evidence is compelling. A play of Hamlet is first mentioned, and its author is attacked, by Thomas Nashe in his 1589 Preface to his friend Robert Greene's novella Menaphon. But the Danish hero was never Hamlet but always Amleth, in the original source (Saxo GrammaticusDanorum regum heroumquehistoriae, 1514) and its adaptation (BelleforestHistoires Tragiques, 1570). The name Amleth could perfectly well have stayed the same in any English ver­sion. Instead, it was changed, prima facie by the English dramatist, to a quite different though superficially similar Starford name; the name, moreover, which also belonged not only to Stratford's Ophelia-figure but to Shakespeare's close friend and thence his own only son. The dramatist in question was therefore Shakespeare of Stratford, who by way of corroboration was famously attacked in 1592 by the same Robert Greene in the same satirical style and tone already used by his collaborator and protégé Thomas Nashe to attack the author of Hamlet. This dramatist was therefore not the non-Stratfordian Earl of Oxford. One disciple has desperately claimed that the latter had spies in Strat­ford who kept him informed of all the Hamlet relationships, which he cleverly exploited so as to create the impression that Shakespeare was the real author. In that ambition, at least, “Oxford” would certainly have succeeded exceptionally well. But no one else will believe a word of any such rigmarole. Exit “Oxford”.

     There is an analogous inference about all other non-Stratfordians, including Bacon, with the bonus that one copious source of such fantasies can now be sealed off. The point was pithily put by Mark Twain thus (Is Shakespeare Dead? 1909, 14-15): "Shakespeare couldn't have written Shakespeare's works, for the reason that the man who wrote them was limitlessly familiar with the laws, and the law-courts, and law-proceedings, and lawyer-talk, and lawyer-ways." All this, as Twain says, must have come from experience, not books. But the explanation was always apparent, and can now be confirmed from contemporary evidence. Shakespeare wrote the early Hamlet; and Thomas Nashe (loc. cit.) said that the author of the early Hamlet had been a noverint, that is, a scrivener or law-clerk; QED. In the days when scholars had specialist knowledge, the great palaeographer Sir EdwardMaunde Thompson had deposed that Shakespeare's handwriting, as identified in Sir Thomas More, "certainly does convey the impression of training, at least in some degree, in the formal style of the scrivener; and this impression is enforced by the employment of certain formal contractions and abbreviations of words which were in common use among lawyers and trained secretaries of the day" (Shakespeare's Handwriting 1916, 56). That expert view, then tentatively advanced, is now vindicated and long overdue for revival. It yields the clear corollary that the professional law-clerk Shakespeare would naturally write his own will when the time came. This would at last allow its famous final words "By me" to mean what they regularly meant in other such contexts, namely “in my own hand”, and also exorcise the phantom penmen “Francis Collins” or his “clerk.” Those wisps-o'-the-will are just as misleading and ubiquitous as “Hamnet.”

     Again, all the numberless authorities, such as Harold Jenkins (Arden Hamlet 1982, 84) who attribute the 1589 version of Hamlet to the non-Stratfordian “Thomas Kyd” are also wrong and misleading. Modern orthodoxy can be just as comprehensively and mischievously mistaken as ancient heterodoxy, because both habitually ignore historical evidence in favour of literary or social fantasy. Only the most blinkered of view­points could ever have failed to perceive the probability that Shakespeare, not Kyd, wrote the Ur-Hamlet, just as Goethe, not Schiller, wrote the Ur-Faust. But that perception in turn will soon dispel the modern academic self-mirroring image of Shakespeare as a well-educated slow developer who made a very late start as a creative artist. This was always a complete contradiction of the known facts, such as his marriage and fatherhood at eighteen, and his success with popular plays in London (as Aubrey assures us) soon afterwards, in the 1580s. Now there is further corroboration; his early Hamlet was just such a play.

     An even more fantastic example of modern scholarly misconception can now be finally refuted. Every edition of Hamlet, and almost every commentator (including the British Library cataloguers and labellers), will be found to denounce its first known printed version (1603) as a worthless pirated "memorial reconstruction" despite the words "by Wil­liam Shakespeare" on its title-page. But simple common sense insists that if Shakespeare had written a first version by 1589, then some at least of that lost text might well have been retained in the 1603 Quarto; so the typical and well-documented process of Shakespeare's self-revision, not the unprecedented and undocumented myth of "memorial reconstruction" by unknown agents for unknown reasons, is prima facie the cause of the well-known stylistic discontinuity between this first version and the next two (1604, 1623.)

     All these revolutionary inferences, and many more, follow from the well-evidenced and indeed self-evident realisation that Shakespeare called his son "Hamlet." Only academics will need to be told this; but they refuse to be told anything. Protest has so far proved useless. Mere abstract notions, such as “Hamnet,” “Oxford,” “Bacon,” “Kyd,” “Collins's clerk,” “late start” and “memorial reconstruction,” have hardened into concrete convictions and impeded progress for decades. “Hamnet,” thou hast thy father much offended.