Chapter 3 - Shakespeare at the Turn of the Century: 1599–1603

Summary

The Chamberlain’s Men moved to a new playhouse at the end of the 1590s: the Globe. The association of Henry V and Hamlet with Shakespeare and the Globe has, I argue, distorted our perception of their place in London’s theatrical marketplace. By putting Shakespeare’s plays into some unexpected dialogues with lost plays, I aim to defamiliarize Henry V and Hamlet and trace new sets of associations between their subject matter (and form) and the plays of other companies. Specifically, I argue that Henry V can be seen as the culmination of Shakespeare’s 1590s romance comedies as much as of the Henriad, and that it can thus be regarded as a continuation of the 1590s rather than a turn-of-the-century play intended for the Globe (and thus, by implication, a break with the past). Likewise, Hamlet can be seen as participating in a ‘Danish matrix’ of 1590s plays that playgoers would recognise as having its own set of expectations and concerns. Furthermore, in proposing a new identification of the likely subject matter of ‘felmelanco’, I argue that the fact of the Danish prince having studied at Wittenberg seems to speak importantly to a hitherto underappreciated repertorial context preoccupied with theology in 1602.