A short walk behind me is a beautiful late nineteenth-century theatre, built in tidy proportion for the single-room plays of Ibsen and Strindberg. On first sight earlier that morning, I had thought it too domestic a space for the open expanse of our play, but the focus is so clean and the acoustic so simple, it proves a claustrophobic thrill to play, forcing up to the surface all the family poison, like an Ibsen three-acter. We are giving our fiercest and tightest performances thus far. Members of my office have flown out for the occasion. The logic behind this is sound: to stay connected with the company and to reward colleagues for their hard work. The result is hen/stag-night mayhem. I’ve stepped out for a little quiet, being not quite in mayhem mood, yet.
The sea and the ships remind me of the first stage of our Hamlet journey. Shortly after the premiere, the company left London on a suitable mode of transport. Gathering just beneath Tower Bridge on the Thames, surrounded by a couple of hundred well-wishers, the company boarded a small tall-boat and set off for Amsterdam. It was manned and helmed by taciturn Danish Captain Haddock lookie-likies. There was champagne and waving and hugging. A laconic Northern actor disconnected us from the jetty, threw the rope off and uttered a drily minimal ‘Bye’. A boat bearing two television crews sped alongside for a while and then tailed off. Then there was silence. The high spirits gave way to a settled calm as the boat navigated its way down the Thames and out into the North Sea.
We awoke the next morning to a calm sea and moved forward wrapped in a caul of mist. People sat quiet and still on deckchairs, they lounged together in the netting, they climbed one by one up to the crow’s nest as if it was an act of anointing. Later that afternoon, we found the coast of Holland and spent four hours negotiating our way through the broad Dutch canals and rivers, lulled by a North Sea quiet broken only by the putter of the ship’s engine. In the evening, we pulled in behind the train station in Amsterdam. The expectation may have been of a 24-hour party, a sea-borne bacchanal, but the opposite had happened. A peaceful journey, untroubled by wind or wave, stillness moving through stillness, had bonded the company together in a silence more profound than any amount of exuberance could achieve.
Throughout our journeys, and in planning them, we talked of their correspondence to the first journeys that Shakespeare’s plays had made as they sailed from London to take their chance in the world, carried in the memory of actors. The most celebrated instance of this early promulgation by water involves Hamlet and is problematic. It was the iconic performance of Hamlet on board the Red Dragon off the coast of Sierra Leone in 1608. According to the notebooks of their captain William Keeling, they performed Hamlet twice in the course of their journey around the globe between 1607 and 1610. The crew, many of whom had no doubt seen the show at the Globe, used the mnemonic capacity of their age and stitched a show together for a group of visiting dignitaries from the African mainland. The exoticism of this – at such a distance from home, and so soon after its premiere – leads many, including us, to blazon it as proof of the speed at which Hamlet moved into the world. We accept the internationalism of Shakespeare as a commonplace, but assume it’s a modern development; in fact, it’s as old as the plays themselves. Yet a historical shadow falls across the performance. The Red Dragon was one of the first ships of the East India Company. The juxtaposition of Shakespeare, the most pervasive soft-power influence of all time, with the great-great-grandfather of all psychopathic corporations is an uneasy one.
Many make much of the historical ripples set running by this incident. It throws up a slew of questions about whether Shakespeare is only the innocent fellow-traveller riding along beside the spreading blush of British pink colouring the world’s map. But such thoughts rarely account for the parallel historical movement, which is the freedom with which these plays travelled elsewhere beyond the English Channel. Had Shakespeare’s plays travelled only where the English language travelled, it might be justifiable to raise an eyebrow. But, in fact, Hamlet was quite quickly all over northern Europe. It was carried by actors.
Known collectively as the Comedians of England, these performers were a late sixteenth/early seventeenth-century phenomenon, with as many as 200 employed across the Continent. What drove them to seek pastures new? Sometimes they were simply told to – the Earl of Leicester’s Men accompanied their patron on his progress through Utrecht, Leyden and The Hague in 1585, when the Earl was appointed commander of the English troops in the Netherlands. Frequently it was because they could make more money on the Continent. The economic instinct is a powerful one for an actor. There are almost always too many actors and too few jobs.
The kind of theatre presented in a German market square would have been distinct from what was presented at the Globe. The moniker ‘Comedians of England’ provides a clue as to their playing style. There is evidence the plays were substantially cut, and that broad farce, music and gymnastic feats were highlighted over delicate psychological acting. Hamlet, as we can surmise from contemporary accounts and from early translations, would probably have run at about an hour, with an extended dumbshow, and with incidents like the killing of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern played out in graphic fight sequences rather than reported. The kings of the companies were the clowns, who had to be bilingual so they could crack local jokes and bridge complicated narrative jumps with a little live storytelling. The resident Gdańsk clown went under the moniker Pickleherring, and a German one called himself Hans Stockfish, which tends to imply that German humour has been something of a historical constant.
We know the names of almost a hundred English actors working across Europe during this period, acting alone as house entertainer, travelling with companies, or joining local outfits throughout Scandinavia, the Lowlands, northern Germany, Austria, Bohemia and the Baltics. (France was left almost completely off the circuit, principally because of its Catholicism.) Amongst that list of actors are some distinguished names, including Ben Jonson and (from Shakespeare’s company) Will Kempe, George Bryan and Thomas Pope. The last two both spent time working in Kronborg Castle in Elsinore, which is a substantial clue as to how Shakespeare knew so much about the tide-splashed rocks without and the cold stone gloom within. Many question how Shakespeare knew so much of the places he wrote about, while forgetting the most powerful transmitter of information in history – conversation. Bryan and Pope, having frozen the tips of their fingers off for a couple of years entertaining the Danish court, were probably never short of a memory or an anecdote, and it is little surprise that Shakespeare’s evocation of the wind-whipped, forbidding grandeur of Elsinore is so accurate.
English actors were popular not for their delivery of text, but for the physicality of their performance. An Englishman, Fynes Moryson, travelling in Germany in 1618 remembered a group of English players, ‘having neither a Complete number of Actors, nor any good Apparell, nor any ornament of the stage, yet the Germans, not understanding a word they said, flocked wonderfully to see their gestures and action’. English plays were popular because the London theatres of the time were play-factories, turning out thrilling history after lurid bloodbath after psychological thriller after rom-com-sex-farce. One of the first plays in German is Der Bestrafte Brudermord (The Brother Murder), a radically cut version of Hamlet, though essentially the same play. A German noble, Landgrave Maurice of Hesse-Cassel (they don’t make titles like that any more), was so enamoured of the English theatre that he kept his own company of English performers. They toured under his patronage and played in a theatre he had specially built for them. Landgrave Maurice even travelled to London to commission new plays from English writers. This dashing and quixotic figure could be a neglected inspiration for Hamlet. We now see Prince Hamlet and his joy at the arrival of the Players in Denmark in a new light: the scenes around the play-within-a-play are not only a celebration of his ludic ingenuity, but also of his internationalism. When he welcomes the Players, for his contemporary audience he would not be an Englishman welcoming an English troupe, he would be a Dane welcoming an international troupe. Thus Hamlet becomes an early beacon of cosmopolitanism and a reflection of his own world.
Hamlet is a play full of a broad international awareness. Hamlet, a Dane, attends university at Wittenberg in what is now Germany. Laertes travels to find his fortune in Paris. Fortinbras travels from Norway to pass through
