Read Online 30 Great Myths about Shakespeare by Laurie Maguire, Emma Smith - Free Book Online

first daughter, Mary, had died a few years before at only 6 months. Jonson wrote poems for the deaths of Benjamin and Mary. Shakespeare had lost no children when he wrote 3 Henry VI or King John but he could imagine such loss. In 3 Henry VI (included in the Oxford Shakespeare under the title Richard Duke of York , as in its 1595 publication), Queen Margaret, the “she-wolf of France,” kills the Duke of York's youngest son, Rutland, and taunts York with her latest atrocity. York's grief moves even his enemies to compassion. Northumberland says:
    Beshrew me, but his passions move me so
    That hardly can I check my eyes from tears
    …
    Had he been slaughter-man to all my kin,
    I should not, for my life, but weep with him,
    To see how inly sorrow gripes [grieves] his soul
    (1.4.151–2, 170–3)
    Margaret later experiences her own scene of grief in Act 5 when she, in turn, loses her son, Prince Edward. And the play's most famous stage direction describes the chiastic mourning of Act 2: Enter a Sonne that hath kill'd his Father, at one doore: and a Father that hath kill'd his Sonne at another doore (Folio TLN 1189–91).
    In King John Constance laments the loss of her young son, Prince Arthur. In this speech she defends her right to grieve, explaining the emotion's psychological function:
    Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
    Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,
    Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,
    Remembers me of all his gracious parts,
    Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form;
    Then, have I reason to be fond of grief?
    (3.4.93–8)
    The logic she uses here (that grieving fills the emotional void of bereavement) is the logic expressed as far back as St Augustine, the fourth-century bishop who, in the Confessions , depicts his tears of grief as occupying the space of his friend: “Tears alone were sweet to me, for in my heart's desire they had taken the place of my dearest friend.” 4 Thus grief is a constant Shakespeare topos from his earliest plays, independent of his personal circumstances.
    Christopher Rush's novel Will (2007) illustrates this beautifully when, in the pun of the title, Will Shakespeare dictates his will to his lawyer. “Death,” says Shakespeare, is what he does best. A childhood fascination with that biblical traveler from the undiscovered country (“Why did no one ask him, ‘Lazarus, what's it like—being dead?’”); the metaphoric death of his teenage relationship with Anne Hathaway; his observation that the primary qualification for a University wit is “the ability to die young” (Thomas Watson “went down in '92”); literary experimentation (his interest in Hamlet is not that of revenge tragedy, “putting one person to death but an interest in death itself”). “I do deaths, you see. And I can do the deaths of children. ‘Their lips were four red roses on a stalk’…—that sort of thing.” 5
    The temptation to speculate on a Hamlet who is Hamnet goes hand in hand with—or is reinforced by—a related possibility, that of Ophelia's drowning being an event close to Shakespeare both geographically (in Warwickshire) and emotionally (in his family). Critics have long known of the drowning in December 1579 of a young woman, Katherine Hamlett. She drowned in the River Avon at a part of the river, in Tiddington, which was known for “its overhanging willows and coronet weeds.” 6 Although her death had the appearance of suicide, her family, understandably keen to have a Christian burial, maintained it was an accident caused when she tried to fill her milk-pail with water from the river. The drowning, the willow and weeds, and the debate about suicide parallel the circumstances of Ophelia's death; the surname provides an additional point of contact. In June 2011 Steven Gunn, a historian studying coroners' records in early modern England, came across a report on the death of the 2½-year old Jane Shaxpere, who drowned while picking marigolds at Upton millpond