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of Lilian Winstanley’s
Hamlet and the Scottish Succession
Carl Schmitt
The great dramatic work of art that bears the name Hamlet is, in the core of
its action and the main character, nothing other than the dramatized story
of a real king named James, James Stuart, son of Mary Stuart and her hus-
band. James’s father was murdered, and his mother married the murderer
shortly afterward. What Mary Stuart, the mother of King James, did was
bad, almost as bad “As kill a king, and marry his brother.” Shakespeare’s
Hamlet drama is grounded then in a direct relation to the times. It contains
the kind of dramatization that results from participation in an immediate
present. The full historical topicality of its place and time of origin lives in
Hamlet. The disguise of an old Scandinavian Hamlet saga is so thin that
the drama is better interpreted through its historical context than through
the saga. It is well known that a great Russian writer, Leo Tolstoy, fiercely
criticized the foolishness of the action in Shakespeare’s drama, but this
brilliant Russian should have recognized that the utter foolishness in Ham-
let is finally nothing other than the real historical event itself and that his
criticism applies less to the drama than to world history.
Following the astounding findings outlined in the book by Lilian Win-
stanley, there is no longer any question that in Shakespeare’s Hamlet there
reappear, down to the finest detail, the concrete situations, events, and
people of the historical moment contemporary with the life of James I and
* First published in German as Carl Schmitt, “Vorwort,” in Lilian Winstanley,
Hamlet, Sohn der Maria Stuart, trans. Anima Schmitt (Pfullingen: Verlag Günther Neske,
1952). © 1952 Klett-Cotta, J. G. Cotta’sche Buchhandlung Nachfolger GmbH, Stuttgart.
This English translation has been authorized by George Schwab and is being published
with the kind permission of Klett-Cotta. Translated by Kurt R. Buhanan.
164
Telos 153 (Winter 2010): 164–77.
doi:10.3817/1210153164
www.telospress.com
Foreword to Hamlet and the Scottish Succession 165
his mother Mary Stuart. James’s tragic situation is marked by the fact that
his mother married his father’s murderer and that, in the general opinion
of the English, she knew about and was involved in the murder—precisely
the core of the tragic situation surrounding Hamlet, who, very different
from Orestes, goes to extraordinary lengths to protect his mother. Shake-
speare’s drama originated between 1600 and 1604, and debuted in the
London Theater. It was around this same time, 1603, that the Scottish King
James ascended to the English throne in London—James, the son of Mary
Stuart and her murdered husband John Darnley, James, whose father was
brutally murdered by Bothwell, the man who was to marry James’s mother
soon thereafter. For the poet, for every actor, and for every spectator, these
awful circumstances constituted the immediate present.
So, Shakespeare’s Hamlet presents a mirror to, but by no means a
mere reflection of, this historical reality. It is not a roman à clef, nor is it
an old-fashioned form of what today would be called the weekly news.
On the other hand, it is also not the case of a freely invented, free-floating
fable. It is quite impossible to ignore the strong contemporary historical
presence that lives in this drama, which summons up the situation of the
young King James and puts it on stage, playing it out before the eyes of
the court as well as the public of the capitol. Horrifying things take place
in all tragedies, but this direct and immediate convergence of the hor-
rific historical present and the horror of the drama is rare in the history of
tragedy. The spectators of ancient Greek tragedy saw and heard terrible
things of Oedipus or Agamemnon and Orestes, but they were not the first-
hand contemporaries of Oedipus, Agamemnon, or Orestes. They did not
view the tragic event as the fate of their own age. In Aeschylus’s Persians,
these Persians make their entrance in the Attic amphitheater immediately
after the Persian Wars, and they have something of the contemporary his-
torical presence of Hamlet, especially when Xerxes himself appears in the
amphitheater. But even here the difference remains considerable, because
Xerxes himself, his court, and his subjects were not sitting in Greece in
the seats of the theater. In contrast, at a time when the Stuarts were still
the brand-new royal family in England, this piece of Stuart family history
thinly veiled as an old Hamlet saga and performed on the stage in London
must be viewed as amazingly immediate in its relation to the time, perhaps
more than any other piece that the history of drama has ever seen. Shake-
speare’s historical dramas are “historical” in the sense that the actors and
spectators consider the terrible things taking place on stage to belong to
166 Carl Schmitt
the past, things that may well have affected their fathers and grandfathers,
but not their own present times, and nothing that would have taken their
directly contemporary and immediate fate as its content. Shakespeare’s
Hamlet, however, presents extreme simultaneity, in terms of time, place,
and action: the convergence of the theatrical with the historical present.
It was a play, but here the stakes for the heroes were their lives, and the
spectators who saw such plays were not mere spectators, rather their lives
were also at stake in the drama as it played out before their eyes.
These were, then, not yet the spectators of the later eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, not yet Schiller’s spectators who viewed world his-
tory as world theater and delighted in its tragedy for their self-edification,
as described in the verses of Schiller’s Homage of the Arts that depict
“Dramatic Art”: “With all its depths, with all its heights serene / I life’s
great map before thy view unroll. / When thou hast once the world’s great
drama seen, / Thou comest back more rich to thine own soul.” In Shake-
speare’s time the play was not yet the realm of human innocence—the
spectator risked more than just the price of admission. Sixteenth-century
England was far removed from this later sort of cultivation and comfort-
ability. Even the hero of the tragic play Hamlet was a direct participant
in this story of the audience’s own fate. He was not a source of catharsis,
nor a model for ethical maxims or aesthetic education. The drama theatri-
cally staged a piece of the immediate historical reality, which itself was
perceived as theater. It was an intensified representation of the present,
condensed actuality. Shakespeare’s great drama drew on the dramatization
and theatricalization of contemporary events for its poetic impulse, but
much more for its very essence as modern drama. It is theater within the
theater, play within the play—at once the most intense historical presence
and the most immediate contemporary reality.
Such were the origins of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in 1601, and it was
in this way, as theater within the theater of contemporary life, that it was
played on-site in London, by a poet, by actors, and in front of an audience,
all of whom were well acquainted with the young King Hamlet-James
as their own King of England and Scotland. Everyone knew of his fate,
the murder of his father and his mother’s marriage to the murderer, and
everyone was directly engaged, whether as courtiers or their followers or
as participants in court intrigues, and in any case as subjects of this king.
Shortly prior to this, in the final years of the reign of Queen Elizabeth,
Shakespeare himself had stumbled into the conspiracy of Earl Essex. He
belonged to the clientele of the Earl of Southampton, who was condemned
to death, and the Earl of Essex, who was executed. The murder of James’s
. [Charles T. Brooks, Schiller’s Homage of the Arts with Miscellaneous Pieces from
Rückert, Freiligarth, and other German Poets (Boston: James Munroe and Company,
1847), pp. 14–15.]
168 Carl Schmitt
father, his mother’s marriage to the murderer, the inhibitions and weak-
nesses of the philosophizing and theologizing king, all of that was the
immediate historical present for the poet, actors, and audience—perhaps
similar to the significance that the death in 1889 of the crown prince
Rudolf von Habsburg and the “Tragedy of Mayerling” would have had
for a Viennese public, or the significance of the Röhm affair for a Berlin
public in the year 1934. What if such immediately current events had been
put on stage in a similar way, in the presence of prominent figures of the
regime and of the public of the capitol, the way that the fate of James was
actually brought to the stage in 1603–5 London? My claim here is not that
sheer topicality makes great art. It is quite certain, though, that this sort of
urgent historical presence and engagement is essential to Shakespeare’s
drama, because it was not written for some neutral or foreign audience. It
was also not written for posterity, rather for his contemporaries, namely, as
theater within the theater of their own historical present.
The famous play within the play in the second act of Hamlet is there-
fore double-filtered actuality, theater of higher, intensified potency. The
reality staged in the drama is itself put on stage within the drama. This sort
of theater within theater is only possible and meaningful where the reality
of contemporary life itself is perceived as theater, as theater of the first
degree, and where the theater itself is therefore essentially theater of the
second degree, theater within the theater of life. Only there can the double
mirroring occur, by means of which the theater within the theater can lead
to an intensification and not to a dissolution of the theater. In every other
case the play becomes merely the actor’s play within the theater, and that
means nothing other than the mask’s unraveling and the glimpse behind
the scenes, into the actors’ personal situation and social conditions. This is
indeed present to some degree in the actor scenes of Hamlet, but it is pre-
cisely in juxtaposition with these that the difference and contrast becomes
clear.
In Hamlet, the actor’s play as such is only present in a scantly rec-
ognizable form. It remains entirely in the service of the play itself and
does not disturb the urgency of the action. The hero does not yet fall apart
into the mask and the actor. The actor scenes in Hamlet are far removed
from actor’s plays like Kean, one of Dumas’s late works, which takes as
its content the tragic story of a famous Hamlet actor—not to mention the
tragicomedy of the late nineteenth century. In contrast, the play within
the play in the second act of Hamlet is no play behind the scenes—on the
Foreword to Hamlet and the Scottish Succession 169
contrary, it is the real play itself repeated before the curtains, similar to
Velázquez paintings where we see that the painted scene is represented
again in a painted mirror. The staged reality is itself identically reproduced
and put on stage. This presupposes that the theater stand in extreme prox-
imity to the historical present. Only the most immediate actualization of
the directly lived event, the directly experienced fate, is capable of this sort
of secondary process of actualization before the curtains, standing up to
this double exposure.
The secret of the Hamlet drama is the immediate, self-evident proxim-
ity to the historical present of its time of origin. This drama is not written
for posterity, but for the contemporary world physically present in the
audience and actively and passionately involved in the action. That is
the timely core of its presence, that is what makes the spectacular theater
within the theater possible. This core contains within itself the mysterious
power that has transmitted this drama from the moment of its time and
place of its origin even down to the present day, inviting over the course of
centuries thousands of interpretations and symbolizations, without costing
the drama its hero and its vision. The core is therefore not an invented
fable, not an adapted saga, not a dramatically exploited history, rather it
possesses the singularity of the historical time in which the poet, present-
ers and presented, actors and audience all participated. The mythic power
of this drama nourishes itself from this origin.
Greek tragedy lived from a myth, the core of which also contained a
historical reality. But the antique tragedy was not theater in the sense of
a stage play. As a result, it did not live in the singularity of the historical
event of its time of origin. The prince Hamlet-James is no Orestes, and his
mother, the queen Mary Stuart-Gertrude, is no Clytemnestra. Shakespeare’s
drama is theater and, precisely as a stage play, it lives into distant times
through the singularity of the historical moment from which it sprang and
which it managed to put on the stage. In this way, it was strong enough to
bring forth its own myth, to create a new myth, while the tragedy of antiq-
uity depended on the availability of an ancient myth, passed down through
the ages, in order to become drama. This is why there is in antique tragedy
no tragedy within the tragedy. That would run completely counter to its
essential nature and would only be imaginable as an open, cynical self-
destruction. In Shakespeare’s drama, in contrast, the play within the play
in the second act of Hamlet functions as a consummate experiment, one
that is directed, namely, toward the question of whether a core of historical
170 Carl Schmitt
actuality has the power to produce a new myth in this way, by means of
the theater.
Morgenblatt, after these had earned the praise of men like Gervinus, Ulrici,
and Friedrich Theodor Vischer—and it is precisely this 1877 essay by Sil-
berschlag that critics have invoked in order to cast doubt on the originality
of Lilian Winstanley’s thesis.
In reality, this English Shakespeare researcher has done something
altogether different and much more important than merely to pick up
on arguments advanced by Karl Silberschlag. All of the research listed
above on the question of contemporary-historical context, including Karl
Silberschlag’s 1877 essay, falls short even of beginning to overcome
the reigning subjectivism, psychologism, and aestheticism, by means of
which the nineteenth century appropriated the figure of Hamlet, trans-
forming him into a Mona Lisa of literature. T. S. Eliot noted this well in
the observation: Goethe made of Hamlet a Werther, and Coleridge made
of Hamlet a Coleridge. Lilian Winstanley’s Hamlet book has now pro-
vided the decisive turn. No wonder it has been met with bitter rejection
by those most comfortable and self-assured in the old Hamlet discussions.
One well-known Anglicist in Zürich made every attempt, in 1924, in the
Beiblatt zur Anglia, vol. 35, to destroy the disruptive book once and for
all. He felt the thesis was old and long outdated; he underlined mistakes
and imprecisions and finally declared: “And the boring James, the alleged
model for Hamlet—who can take this seriously?” Today we find the life,
the fate, and especially the sentiments of the ill-fated king less boring than
that overbearing Anglicist of 1924, who unlike the ill-fated James unfor-
tunately has no Shakespeare to put him on stage in the alienated form
appropriate to his time.
On real critics, however, Lilian Winstanley’s Hamlet book has made
the deepest impression. It has had a profound effect on the turn toward the
objective. Its traces may be recognized in many later investigations into
Elizabethan theater and its audience, on the sociological structure of the
work and the time, even where Winstanley’s name is not cited. The author
of the standard work on the history of Shakespeare research and interpre-
tation, Augustus Ralli (A History of Shakespearean Criticism, 2 volumes,
Oxford University Press, 1932), devotes to Winstanley a detailed analysis,
conveying the highest respect. Admittedly, he does raise the question as to
. [T. S. Eliot, “Hamlet and His Problems,” in Selected Essays, 1917–1932 (New
York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1932), p. 121.]
. [Bernhard Fehr, “Reviews of Recent Literature on Hamlet,” Beiblatt zur Anglia
35 (1924): 8.]
Foreword to Hamlet and the Scottish Succession 177
July 1952
Carl Schmitt