A number of plays dealing with "revenge for a father" followed. In 1602 "The Revenge of Hamlet" was entered in the Stationers' Register; and the first quarto, a pirated and very corrupt edition, appeared in the following year. This quarto, in the opinion of a majority of critics, represents Shakespeare's partial revision of the old play, which was put on the stage by Burbage's company in 1601-02. In the same years Ben Jonson was receiving pay from Henslowe of the rival company for two sets of additions to "The Spanish Tragedy," and these were published in 1602. In that year Henslowe also paid Chettle for a tragedy, "Hoffman" (1631); and in 1602-03 Tourneur's "Atheist's Tragedy" (1611) was probably acted.[18] By 1603 Shakespeare had given "Hamlet" its final form as represented by the second quarto (1604). The almost simultaneous appearance of these various plays is sufficient testimony to the popularity of the old revenge story with both audiences and authors. Dealing with similar plots, they naturally have many elements in common, but they exhibit few or no signs of servile imitation of one another. They represent independent developments of the type that Kyd had introduced a dozen years before and that Marston had revived, each retaining many of the old conventions, and each adding much that was new.
Jonson's additions to "The Spanish Tragedy" are distinct from the rest of the play and affect the proportion and movement of the action rather for the worse. They deal in the main with Hieronimo; his irony is increased and made more effective; his reflections become more elaborate and pregnant; above all, his madness gains enormously in reality and intensity. His madness, indeed, receives a disproportionate development. Throughout the additions Jonson is picturing a mind diseased by grief, sometimes conscious of life's unrelaxing pain and again lost in frenzied delirium. Thus, the imaginative impulses that responded to the demand for revenge plays here stirred a great poet to a rehabilitation of the crude ravings of the old Hieronimo in a form more intellectual, more vitally human, and of immensely greater imaginative range.
"Hoffman" is a sensational melodrama by a hack writer not unskillful in using prevailing conventions with theatrical effectiveness. The story is again the revenge of a son for a father, but there is no ghost, only the skeleton to excite him to vengeance. He banishes "clouds of melancholy" at the start and shows no hesitation in carrying out the revenge until turned from his purpose by his passion for the mother of his chief victim. Intrigue and slaughter reign supreme; and, as in "Locrine," there are two plots of revenge—Hoffman seeking revenge for his father and every one else seeking revenge on Hoffman. In the pathetic situation of Lucibella, driven insane by grief, Chettle made use of a character and a situation familiar on the stage in much the same fashion as they must have been presented in the old "Hamlet." Lucibella's madness, however, is made the instrument of some telling hits at the villain and the means of discovering his iniquity. While Ophelia's madness has no influence on the main action, that of Lucibella leads directly to the dénouement. Dramatically this is a very important difference and seems due to Chettle's invention. Unlike Marston or Jonson, he made little effort to give the story either imaginative intensity or philosophical significance. He took common theatrical motives and situations, added much and changed much, and constructed a good acting play not without some grace of verse. A play that was popular thirty years after it was written must have successfully met the stage demand.
Tourneur's "Atheist's Tragedy" differs in many respects from all preceding revenge plays. The revenge is for a father murdered by an uncle and directed by a ghost. The revenge, however, is left to Providence; the ghost is Christian; the avenging son not only hesitates, but after a little irresolution overcomes his inclinations to revenge, and, obeying the ghost's behests, resignedly awaits the judgment of heaven. In stage presentation the play also shows a wide departure from Kyd, especially in the indescribable comic underplot. There are, however, three appearances of the ghost,—one to soldiers on watch,—churchyard scenes, banquets, sword fights, suicides, scaffolds, and death's-heads. In the accumulation of horrors, in the development of the villain's character, in the emphasis on new sensational motives at the expense of revenge, and in the more elaborate handling of the intrigue, it may be said to carry the general development of the revenge tragedy a step farther than Marston or Chettle, and a step nearer to Webster. On the other hand, in its definite attempt to present an intellectual conception not lacking in moral grandeur, it sometimes, more closely than any of the other plays considered, approaches "Hamlet." The change in the revenge motive is especially manifest in the soliloquies and reflective passages, which unite in a fairly well connected argument that points the moral of the action, the omnipotence of God's providence.
When, after an interval of some half dozen years, Shakespeare returned to tragedy, evidently both the demands of the theatres and the artistic impulses of the poets were different from those of Marlowe's day. The plays of Marlowe and Kyd were still active forces in the drama, but in 1600-01, when Shakespeare was perhaps writing both "Julius Cæsar" and the first revision of "Hamlet," the man of the hour in tragedy was Marston.
In "Julius Cæsar" Shakespeare availed himself of a theme already a favorite. The story of the overthrow of a tyrant, the progress of a conspiracy, the fall of a prince, and his revenge upon the murderers furnished material well approved for tragedy, while the greatness of the events and the actors both gave assurance of popular interest and incited the poet to his best. Shakespeare was not directed by scrupulous regard for historical accuracy, but his genius was stirred by that of Plutarch to give the events of the Roman civil war the interest and vitality he had given to the reigns of English kings. In dealing with a story that followed so closely the standard lines of tragedy,—the murder and the revenge,—Shakespeare adopted some of the methods current in contemporary plays. There is really no evidence to support Mr. Fleay's ingenious surmise that the play was originally in two parts,—I, The Death, and II, The Revenge of Cæsar,—but the play seems to have separated itself naturally into those two divisions. The rise of the action traces the rise of the conspiracy to Cæsar's death; the return of the action proceeds to the failure and deaths of the conspirators. But from the beginning Shakespeare must have found his interest engaged less by the story of conspiracy or revenge, or even by the presentation of the turmoil of an empire, than by the delineation of the character of Brutus. There, for him, lay the kernel of the tragedy, in the struggle of a highly gifted nature with a task unfit for his accomplishment. The play became not a tragedy of over-reaching ambition, as Marlowe might have made "The Tragedy of Cæsar," nor the tragedy of supernaturally ordained revenge, as Kyd might have made "Cæsar's Revenge," but the tragedy of Brutus,—the fateful struggle of a noble mind against counter actors and against chance, and also against an incurable deficiency in his own temperament.
Similarly, in revising the old "Hamlet," Shakespeare must have been attracted by the possibilities in the character of the hesitating avenger. Here, however, as we have seen, the influence of his contemporaries was considerable and complex. The plot, situations, types of character, and leading motives of the old "Hamlet" were already familiar to the stage in several plays. Revenge, directed by a ghost, hesitation on the part of the hero, insanity real or feigned, intrigue, copious bloodshed, a secondary revenge plot, meditative philosophizing in the form of soliloquies, were all essential elements probably of the Kydian "Hamlet," certainly of several other revenge plays. The refusal of an opportunity to kill the villain, the songs and wild talk of a mad woman, the murder of an innocent intruder, scenes in a churchyard, the appearance of the ghost to soldiers of the watch, the play within the play,—all these as well as many more minor conventionalities, such as the swearing on the sword hilt, or the voice of the ghost in the cellar, had appeared in other plays than the old "Hamlet." And Hamlet himself, wild and ranting at times, crafty and dissimulating at others, cynical and ironical, given to melancholy and meditation, hesitating in bewilderment, harassed by the unavoidable "whips and scorns of time,"—so far as we can analyze the tragic hero, his characteristics had been already used by contemporary dramatists. Dramatic ingenuity was all that was required to make a new play out of this abundance of old material. Chettle succeeded in doing just this. Marston, Jonson, and Tourneur, however, had been trying to give the old story philosophical significance and a highly imaginative phrasing. They had glimpses of the dramatic and poetic possibilities that lay in the situation of the hesitating revenger, and at moments they succeeded in realizing these. Shakespeare set himself to their task, and naturally enough he was in many ways limited and directed by their efforts. It was perfectly possible for him to change the plot completely, or to omit the ghost in the cellar, or to remove the bloodthirsty and intriguing elements from the part of Hamlet, or to give a more Christian interpretation to the revenge; but in these and other matters he followed the practice of the earlier plays. There was no dramatic need of so many long soliloquies; the meditative avenger need not have been ironical; insanity might have received less elaboration; but in these respects Shakespeare was in agreement with his contemporaries. The themes which they took inspired him. He succeeded in doing what they vainly attempted.
He by no means neglected the external story or denied the theatrical demand for sensation. He, perhaps, did not radically change the course of events as depicted in the old play, but he unquestionably improved on any preceding tragedy in the mere effectiveness of the scenic presentation of a sensational story. How great this effectiveness is may be judged by the continued popularity of "Hamlet" as a stage performance even before unlettered auditors. We may surmise that had poetry and philosophy both perished, it would still draw its crowds as it does to-day on the remote borders of civilization. This theatrical triumph is due in part to dramatic excellence of structure and presentation. From the old play probably came a story restricted by semi-Senecan technic to a great emotional crisis; but Shakespeare at least resisted the temptation, to which his contemporaries succumbed, of extending the action over the events leading up to the murder. And assuredly to him rather than to Kyd or another is due the recognition of the dramatic values of the story's beginning, middle, and end. Magnificent as is his development of the ghost scenes at the beginning, still more important structurally is his realization of the value of the middle of the tragedy and treatment of the play within the play and its immediate sequences; and if the end is developed with an Elizabethan looseness of coherence that will not correspond to any logical scheme of structure, yet the pathos of the Ophelia scenes and the wonderful grotesquery of the graveyard excite and renew the spectator's interest to the final catastrophe. The scenic presentation, while telling a sensational story with preëminent effectiveness, becomes as never before in English drama the means for exhibiting the inner struggle of the protagonist. Parallel with the external conflict between murderer and avenger, beginning with the advent of the ghost and ending with a holocaust, there runs the story of a man's moods and thoughts; and this story of doubt and melancholy overpowering resolution imposes its unity of structure and emotional tone upon the external conflict so full of visible action. The throng of dreadful happenings becomes a foil to set off the inner struggle of thought. Their climax is only the brink of resolution from which Hamlet shrinks. Their catastrophe is the end of irresolution in silence.
The reflections and moralizings and broodings over misfortunes inherited from Seneca, and long an essential element in the revenge plays, are also, like the sensational incidents, integrated and humanized by the conception of the hero's character. The soliloquies, though keeping to the themes and methods of contemporary drama, become landmarks in the depiction of the inner struggle and in the general progress of the action. The absurd convention of speaking aloud one's unformed and unbidden thoughts becomes theatrically exciting, dramatically essential, and, through the reach of Shakespeare's imaginative expression, representative of the eternal battle of human frailty against the mysteries of chance and evil.
Analysis might, indeed, continue to discover in the multiform impressiveness of the characterization and the poetry survivals of old conventions and hints of the method of Shakespeare's transformation. Taken apart, various passages seem overburdened with rhetoric, after the style of the day, and others over-sententious. Taken piece by piece, the sarcasm, the irony, the pessimism, the stoic philosophy, even the passionate protest against destiny, have much in common with the ideas then current in other plays. But here again the transformation accomplished through unrivaled powers of expression and knowledge of human nature seems to result from an absorbing interest in the meditating and hesitating temperament of the hero. The union of a drama of blood-vengeance with a drama of thought, a union that had been often attempted by others, is finally achieved, because here for the first time there is full recognition of the tragic interest, movement, and significance of a man's battle with himself. The tragic drama of character has been consummated.