This Is Shakespeare

by Emma Smith

In sharing a name, father and son cannot be entirely distinguished: young Hamlet cannot form an autonomous identity for himself. This psychological overlap has sometimes been literalized in stage productions: one review of Richard Eyre’s 1980 production at the Royal Court in London described how ‘Jonathan Pryce, in what is effectively his first soliloquy, plays both sides of the conversation between Hamlet and his dead father, adopting for the latter a deep voice wrenched from his stomach’; Laurence Olivier also voiced the ghost’s lines in his 1948 film. Such doublings suggest the strong psychic overlap between dead father and troubled son. The repeated names link Hamlet more closely than we often allow to the concerns with political and psychological succession that characterize Shakespeare’s history plays of the 1590s. In many ways Hamlet’s closest canonical neighbour is not the later tragedies of Othello and Macbeth but the earlier 1 Henry IV, another story of a prince trying to escape the burden of a father with whom he shares the same name (and we can see that that play goes to considerable onomastic lengths to hide the fact that the prince – variously dubbed Hal or Harry – is, like his father, ‘Henry’, a name he can only really inherit, like the crown itself, on the death of his father).