Hamlet: Letters, Reputation and the Wounded Name

Robert Cecil wanted Henry Neville to keep watch on a young man in Paris: Aurelian Townshend. In spring 1600 Cecil asked Neville to arrange Townshend’s lodging, control his expenses, and report on his conduct.

[…] hearken whether he use any riotous life or disorder, and certify me, to the intent that I may guess whether he be fit to be near my son.¹

Polonius gives Reynaldo a strikingly similar task: deliver money and notes to his son Laertes in Paris, but first inquire into the young man’s behavior:

POLONIUS […]
Inquire me first what Danskers are in Paris;
And how, and who, what means, and where they keep,
What company, at what expense; and finding
By this encompassment and drift of question
That they do know my son, come you more nearer
Than your particular demands will touch it.²
— Hamlet, 2.1

The shared setting is Paris; the concerns are lodging, company, money and conduct. Cecil’s young man was a prospective servant for his son, whereas Polonius is watching his own son.

Neville carried out the commission. On 24 April 1600, he told Cecil:

I will be careful also to look into his conversation, so to make some judgment of him whether he be fit for that employment that your Honor designs him for.³

“Conversation” here means conduct.

Three days later, on 27 April 1600, Neville explained how he would obtain information about disputed precedence at the last Franco-Spanish treaty. The chancellor was the only commissioner available to question:

Directly sure I shall not, but I will do the best I can by oblique means.⁴

In the same scene, Polonius gives Reynaldo the corresponding maxim:

POLONIUS […]
By indirections find directions out.
— Hamlet, 2.1

Neville’s diplomatic inquiry and Polonius’s domestic surveillance share a method: an indirect approach may reveal what a direct question will not.

Polonius’s habits have long invited comparison with Robert Cecil’s father, William Cecil, Lord Burghley. The comparison includes Polonius’s advice to Laertes and Burghley’s precepts for Robert, especially their warnings against borrowing. The letter to Neville brings the parallel into the next generation of the Cecil family.⁵

Claudius and Laertes

Elsewhere, Hamlet turns the language of negotiation into pressure on an individual. Writing to Cecil from Paris on 15 June 1599, Neville considered what England and France should do if the United Provinces refused to join a peace with Spain. One possibility was to use the two monarchs’ authority to compel their acceptance:

either by their common authority to over-rule them to accept the peace, or otherwise, by common means to maintain them

In Hamlet, Claudius asks Laertes to submit to his guidance. Laertes agrees on condition that the king does not force him into a reconciliation:

KING […]
Will you be ruled by me?

LAERTES Ay, my lord,
So you will not o’errule me to a peace.

— Hamlet, 4.7

Both use “overrule” for forcing a reluctant party into peace. Neville considers compelling the Dutch to accept a diplomatic settlement; Laertes refuses to let Claudius compel him to make peace with Hamlet.⁶

In February 1604 Neville thanked Ralph Winwood for remembering him. Plague in his household had disrupted his correspondence, but he wanted his friend to put him to use:

how willing I would be to make it appear more than in words, if in your absence you would make any use of me.

Later in the same scene in Hamlet, Claudius uses the same expression when pressing Laertes to prove his love for his dead father:

KING […]
Hamlet comes back; what would you undertake
To show yourself indeed your father’s son
More than in words?
— Hamlet, 4.7

Laertes offers to cut Hamlet’s throat in church. Claudius turns the demand for affection proved in action into a demand for murder.⁷

The wording is uncommon in the surveyed drama: only Hamlet uses it among 239 plays dated 1590–1615. The comparison joins the same words to the same test: affection must become action. Neville offers to demonstrate his love through service; Claudius presses Laertes to demonstrate his through revenge. The phrase appears in the second quarto (1604/5), though not in the corresponding scene of the first (1603).⁸

The cast of brazen cannon

On 19 November 1599, Neville reported from Paris that Henri IV had ordered cannon to be cast and tested and, separately, for arms to be purchased:

hath taken order for the casting of 50 or 60 pieces here in the arsenal, whereof 30 are already cast and tried; he hath also appointed great store of arms to be bought in sundry towns as I am informed

Near the beginning of Hamlet, Marcellus asks why Denmark is preparing for war:

MARCELLUS […]
And why such daily cast of brazen cannon
And foreign mart for implements of war,
Why such impress of shipwrights, whose sore task
Does not divide the Sunday from the week.
What might be toward that this sweaty haste
Doth make the night joint laborer with the day?
Who is ’t that can inform me?
— Hamlet, 1.1

Both passages move from casting cannon to buying arms. Marcellus’s “cast,” the First Folio reading, names the manufacturing operation Neville reports. The arms markets differ: Marcellus specifies foreign purchases; Henri was buying weapons from towns he might also wish to disarm.⁹

On 9 May 1600, Neville sent Cecil another report from Paris, this time about Denmark’s naval preparations. The news had reached him through the ambassador of Württemberg, whose informant was in Hamburg:

The King of Denmark makes very great preparation by sea, which gives occasion of much discourse, no man seeing any apparent cause for it. […] I thought it my duty to relate what I heard of it, considering his demeanor the last summer toward our fishermen, and the northern jealousies.

The “northern jealousies” suggest mutual suspicion among the northern powers. Neville reports Denmark preparing its fleet without an apparent explanation; this parallels Marcellus’s question about why Denmark is preparing for war (Hamlet, 1.1).¹⁰

Two Danish names

When Claudius welcomes Hamlet’s old companions, he names them together:

KING
Welcome, dear Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
— Hamlet, 2.2

The corresponding Danish family names appear among the sixteen ancestral names on Jacques de Gheyn’s engraved portrait of the astronomer Tycho Brahe. “ROSENKRANS” is on the left side of the arch; “GVLDENSTEREN” is at the foot of the left column. The shields display Tycho’s ancestry.¹¹

The portrait has a route into Neville’s circle through Thomas Savile, the younger brother of his tutor Henry. Italian newsletters addressed to Thomas in 1591 survive among Neville’s papers, as discussed in Chapter 27. On his European tour of 1588–1591, Thomas followed his brother’s earlier route, visiting Dudith and Pinelli, whom Henry Savile and Neville had met on their own travels.

On 1 December 1590, Tycho wrote to Thomas that he had enclosed four copies of his likeness, recently engraved in copper at Amsterdam. He wanted English poets to compose an epigram on the portrait and his work, suggesting Daniel Rogers as a contributor. These were images intended for literary circulation. The documented recipient was Thomas; the letter places the portraits within Neville’s scholarly network, without establishing that Neville saw one.¹²

Neville’s family library supplies another Danish connection. The later Billingbear catalogue lists the 1576 Frankfurt edition of Saxo Grammaticus’s Gesta Danorum, whose account of Amleth is the ultimate source of the Hamlet story. That edition and its place in the library are discussed in Chapter 10.¹³

Enlarge image

Open full sizeSource

Deer, keepers and the hunt

Neville describes a deer hunt that took him away from a guest waiting at home. In an undated letter to Windebank, later docketed 15 September 1608, he apologizes for abandoning him and for his household’s poor hospitality:

My hope was to have killed our deer in time to have returned to you to dinner. But when I saw he had carried us out as far as Cramborne, and that it was not possible for me to come back in time, I thought it as good to stay out his death, presuming of their discretion at home, not to have stayed your dinner for me.

Neville stayed with the hunt; his servants kept Windebank waiting. He closes by hoping the visit had done his guest no other harm than “the loss of your dinner.”¹⁴

In Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness (2017), Rhodri Lewis follows the play’s sustained language of hunting: deer and hounds, snares, nets and falconry.

After Claudius breaks off the play within the play, Hamlet sings:

HAMLET
Why, let the strucken deer go weep,
The hart ungalled play.
For some must watch, while some must sleep:
Thus runs the world away.
— Hamlet, 3.2

Lewis emphasizes the distinction between the wounded deer and the hart: Hamlet demotes Claudius within the hierarchy of hunted animals, refusing him the fully regal status of a hart. Hamlet believes he has wounded his quarry and can now track him down.

Hamlet is also the quarry. When Guildenstern questions him, he asks: “why do you go about to recover the wind of me, as if you would drive me into a toil?” (Hamlet, 3.2). Lewis explains the technical precision: a toil is a hunting net, and getting upwind allows the quarry to smell the approaching hunter and flee into the waiting net. Hamlet describes political manipulation through the practical workings of a hunt.¹⁵

Neville’s letter catches him in the chase, unwilling to leave before the deer is killed. Lewis’s reading shows how Hamlet makes that world of pursuit, quarry and capture a language for life at court.

Conscience and reputation

After Essex’s failed rising in February 1601, Neville had to explain his dealings with the earl’s circle. In his confession of 2 March 1601, he described Henry Cuffe’s approaches and a meeting at Drury House where a plan to enter the queen’s court and seize Essex’s enemies had been discussed. He acknowledged knowing about the proposals but insisted that he had refused to become an actor in them. The distinction mattered: knowledge of a conspiracy could be made to look like consent to it.¹⁶

A mind examining itself

Neville’s separate defence, printed as Sir Henry Nevill’s Case, begins with a man acknowledging fault while resisting the judgment that his outward conduct appears to invite: “my own soul witnessing to herself” that he had remained loyal. He asks that his actions be read with the circumstances that reveal his intentions.

Hamlet likewise calls his soul “herself” when describing his choice of Horatio:

HAMLET […]
Since my dear soul was mistress of her choice
And could of men distinguish, her election
Hath sealed thee for herself. For thou hast been
[…]
— Hamlet, 3.2

Neville and Hamlet both invoke the soul as a feminine judge of personal allegiance.

The central question is why Neville failed to expose the plot. Neville rejects one explanation after another: malice against the state, a wish that the attempt should succeed, personal devotion to Essex. His sentences become questions: “for who had more interest therein than I?” and “for who could have more disliked it than I?” He is pleading his case by examining his motives.

His explanation comes in two parts. He had hoped that the weak, unfinished project would collapse when its authors recovered their reason. But he also admits a more personal cause:

partly upon an imbecility and weakness of my own nature, (if so it be to be termed), which could not resolve to become an accuser

Even while naming his weakness, he questions the name he has given it. He recoils from accusing a man of Essex’s standing, then concedes that public duty should have outweighed his fear of private disgrace. The defence moves through denial, inquiry, explanation and reluctant self-reproach.¹⁷

Hamlet’s encounter with Fortinbras’s army produces the same kind of argument with himself. Other men act; he tries to determine what has stopped him:

HAMLET […]
[…] Now whether it be
Bestial oblivion or some craven scruple
Of thinking too precisely on th’ event
(A thought which, quartered, hath but one part wisdom
And ever three parts coward), I do not know
Why yet I live to say “This thing’s to do,”
[…]
— Hamlet, 4.4

The force lies in the movement of the voice. Both men weigh reasons for inaction and interrupt their explanations to judge their own character. Neville questions whether his reluctance deserves the name of weakness; Hamlet divides his scruple into one part wisdom and three parts cowardice. Neville was explaining why he had not denounced a conspiracy; Hamlet is reproaching himself for delaying revenge. The Case gives us Neville writing in precisely this questioning, divided, self-accusing register.¹⁸

One idea in two words

The same documents also permit a comparison of verbal technique. Hendiadys expresses one idea through two terms joined by “and.” Shakespeare used it very unevenly. In his 1981 study “Hendiadys and Hamlet,” George T. Wright counted sixty-six examples in Hamlet, more than twice his total for any other play. “Youth and observation” (Hamlet, 1.5) means youthful observation; “the heat and flame of thy distemper” (Hamlet, 3.4) means a hot flame.¹⁹

Neville’s use likewise varies with the kind of writing he is doing. A study undertaken for this book found eight secure or probable examples in 168 letters containing 131,988 words. The Confession, the Case and the Advice Touching the Holding of a Parliament contain another eight in just 6,981 words: about 0.6 against 11.5 per 10,000 words.

In other words, Neville’s ordinary correspondence, including the diplomatic letters, used hendiadys sparingly; his extended defences and political arguments used it much more densely. The contrast points to a choice of register: he draws on the technique when it suits his purpose, just as Shakespeare varies its use between plays.²⁰

In the March confession, Cuffe breaks out into “words of heat and impatience”—impatient heat. In the Case, Neville answers the objection that a visit to Essex might have begun “a friendship and inwardness with him”: an intimate friendship. He denies that anything passed beyond general compliments. The Advice describes James’s breach with Parliament as “full of distaste and acrimony”—bitter distaste—and closes by defending “the honest purpose and sincerity of my heart”: sincere purpose.²¹

A wounded name

On 22 April 1601, writing from Chelsea, Neville asked Cecil to withhold his declaration—probably the March confession. It had been collected before he could include the circumstances that explained his conduct. He feared the judgment that an incomplete account would invite:

So as if it should be published in that naked sort as it is set down, it would be to my infinite disadvantage, and lay me open to the censure of every common person, even for that whereof I am not guilty. Therefore chiefly I desire it may not be published; or if that must needs be […] I humbly desire that I may be permitted to revise it and to add some circumstances which I have either by word or writing already declared unto your Honours, that so the world may know the best of me as well as the worst.²²

At the end of Hamlet, the prince appeals to Horatio, fearing what account will survive him:

HAMLET […]
O God, Horatio, what a wounded name,
Things standing thus unknown, shall I leave behind me!
[…]
— Hamlet, 5.2

He begs Horatio to live and tell his story. Neville worried that his account could contain true statements yet leave its readers with a false judgment. Hamlet needs a surviving witness to supply what his actions alone cannot explain.²³