Lawrence Nowel: Excerpta Quaedam Danica (1565)
Translated by Graham Holderness
1. In case any of you
missed the clues, let's run through them quickly. We are offered
what purports to be a translation of a manuscript without a physical
location or cataloguing information, the original text of which
is not provided. That text, wherever it may be, is a Latin translation
of a lost Danish original. "There is no other trace of any
of the 'Hamlet' documents translated in Nowel's manuscript"
(Intro., ¶11), but they are "of course indisputably
genuine." These are in turn linked to an unverified and
unverifiable story, not even sourced, about a portrait whose
whereabouts are also unknown (or at least not given). And all
this is supposed to solve a mystery that apparently does not
exist: if the historical Lawrence Nowel fled England in 1570,
he somehow managed to retain the offices of rector of Drayton
Bassett; Archdeacon of Derby, Dean of Lichfield, rector of Haughton,
and Prebendary of York until his death in 1576, in spite of royal
hostility (see DNB, s.v. Nowel). More remarkably perhaps,
he managed to father a son who was baptized in St. Mary's church,
Lichfield, on 7 December 1571.1
At this point, I probably don't have to remind you that if Graham
Holderness had actually found a lost source for Hamlet,
he would have taken the news to the New York Times, or
at least The Guardian, rather than a scholarly journal
of elite but modest circulation.
2. We are dealing, it seems, with
a not very well disguised "trap for the unwary scholar"
(Intro., ¶13), as Graham Holderness's persona puts it: Hamlet
rewritten as an epistolary novelette pretending to be a source,
so that Shakespeare and/or Oxford can be accused of "pirating"
the non-existent original. (Exactly how Shakespeare can be plagiarizing
Nowel if Oxford wrote the play escapes me, but perhaps it's meant
to.) The pastiche nature of the project at least explain why
the style of the non-Shakespearean bits of both the Introduction
and the "manuscript" lurches between A. S Byatt and
Sylvie Krin, Private Eye's parodic version of Barbara
Cartland, who is clearly responsible for the opening paragraph.
Byatt seems to have been drafted in for the narrative of Ofelia's
death, more post-modernized late-Victorian than medieval. Identifying
this as a farrago is relatively easy; figuring out the point
of the farrago is a good deal harder. Postmodern pastiche, after
all, is usually supposed to be funny; this isn't. I mean, by
the way, to express genuine puzzlement rather than critical sarcasm.
I am used to finding Holderness useful.
3. He is generous with possible
points, of course, most of them disappointingly banal. We are
offered, for the umpteenth time, Shakespeare the "shifty
bumpkin" (Intro., ¶1) and upstart crow whom you will
remember from his more amusing outings in Shakespeare in Love
and Shaw's "Dark Lady of the Sonnets." In establishing
Shakespeare as plagiarist, Holderness has even borrowed from
Stoppard's Arcadia Septimus Hodge's trick of presenting
a Latin translation of a famous speech as the original. In Stoppard,
it's the barge speech from Antony and Cleopatra; here
it's "what a piece of work." This involves us in a
familiar, if faintly amusing game of authorship-as-theft in which
the "actual words" of eleventh-century Danes are Latinized
by Nowel so they can be plagiarized by Shakespeare/Oxford/whoever
and presented as new creations. At this point, we are perhaps
meant to remember Foucault's authorless, floating texts or simply
to note that Holderness has invented his own ur-Hamlet, presented
to us with appropriate irony as "altogether more fascinating"
(Intro., ¶ 8) than Shakespeare's version. Otherwise, it
is difficult for me to see why someone as clever as Graham Holderness
would bother demystifying a figure that, for contemporary criticism,
at least, is always already demystified.2
4. Of course, Holderness's narrative
also offers us a feminist decentering of Shakespeare's text --
Hamlet rewritten as the story of Ophelia -- that makes
a similarly familiar case: Ophelia (or Ofelia) as the victim
of pervasive masculine power and bad faith. In this version of
the play's backstory, Polonius (with help from Laertes) not only
procures her for the Prince, but offers him Ovidian advice on
how to seduce her, which Hamlet promptly puts into practice (IX-X).
This amplifies Hamlet's famous reference to Polonius as a "fish
monger" (2.2.174 in the Riverside Shakespeare). while
requiring us to imagine a Hamlet who takes stylistic as well
as erotic advice from Polonius. Having made themselves complicit
in the resulting affair, father and brother berate and coerce
her pretty much as they do in the play. This leaves us with the
melodrama -- again more Victorian or mock-Victorian than medieval
-- of the good girl beset on all sides by bad men, even if the
final predator turns out to be Gertrude. To be sure, the poor
waif has been given a feminist make-over that allows her to claim
that she has "with all reserve proper to a maid spoken out,
as my learning and good sense have obliged me, whenever I have
seen foolishness or injustice" (XXIX). The hints of a backbone
in Ophelia's rebukes to Laertes in 1.3 are thus amplified into
the real thing in Ofelia; both women remain, however, in the
same role of entrapped and acted-upon victim. The only significant
alteration is that Ofelia is rescued from Ophelia's watery death
so that she can be killed in childbirth. Wouldn't it have been
more fun to have her learn to swim?
5. When Stoppard rewrites the play
from the point of view of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern or when
Updike does so from that of Gertrude and Claudius, they offer
us fully fledged counter texts that re-imagine the story in profitable
ways. What do the actions of the powerful insiders look like
to powerless (and perpetually misled) outsiders? What might the
choice between warrior king and courtier brother look like to
Gertrude? What might be going on behind that character's impenetrable
opacity? The "Ofelia Murder Case" that Holderness offers
us at best amplifies what is already apparent in Laertes' self-righteously
incestuous preoccupation with his sister's sexuality or Polonius's
dirty-minded wittering on the same subject. We are, of course,
offered a solution to that old tutorial puzzler about how Gertrude
could have witnessed Ophelia's death without intervening. Gertrude's
willow speech is now simply the last of the tale's many cover-ups.
That puzzle, however, is normally used to disabuse undergraduates
of the very assumptions on which this version at least pretends
to operate: that the characters are real people engaged in realistic
action, and that the play, in Umberto Eco's useful terms, is
a detective story, whose mysteries can be solved, rather than
a failed-detective story, whose insolubility is its primary point.
It may be, I suppose, that the whole project is meant as a parody
of source-hunting and mystery-solving scholarship; if so, I wish
it were more amusing.
6. If the Introduction offers us
a whiff of that traditional West Midlands delicacy, the Oxford
Red Herring, the text as a whole offers us the full barrow load
of herrings: among others, a roman-a-clef about Elizabeth and
Leicester; a (fictitious) chapter in the rivalry between the
Admiral's and the Lord Chamberlain's Men; and a political fiction
full of cover stories, spin-doctoring and state secrets that,
again, is already better done in the play. No doubt I am being
obtuse, but the point of all this -- what atom is being added
to the sum of human knowledge or the criticism of the play --
eludes me. It is not merely that Stoppard and Updike play this
game better; so, to my mind, does a reasonably skillful mystery
writer like Philip Gooden, whose Sleep of Death has one
of Burbage's company using the plot of Hamlet to script
his own murders.3 I commend
it moderately to your attention. I await further elucidation
from Graham Holderness.
|
|
|
|
1 See the International Genealogical Index: http://www.familysearch.org/Eng/Search/frameset_search.asp. I thank Lisa Hopkins for the reference.
2 For a useful and thorough summary of the process, see the Introduction ("The Author Formerly Known as Shakespeare") to Courtney Lehmann's impressive new book, Shakespeare Remains (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2002), 1-24.
3 London: Robinson,
2000.