"What, not as thine? That is a lie,
As massy as the earth: I had a son,
Whose least unvalued hair did weigh
A thousand of thy sons; and he was murdered."
Thus Hamlet cries to Laertes:—
"I lov'd Ophelia: forty thousand brothers
Could not, with all their quantity of love,
Make up my sum."
Hieronimo, like Hamlet, again and again postpones his vengeance:—
"All times fit not for revenge.
Thus, therefore, will I rest me in unrest,
Dissembling quiet in unquietness:
Not seeming that I know their villainies,
That my simplicity may make them think
That ignorantly I will let all slip."
At last he determines to have a play acted, as a means to his revenge. The play is Kyd's own Solyman and Perseda, and in the course of it the guilty personages, who play the chief parts, are slaughtered, not in make-believe, but in reality.
Crude and naïve though everything still is in The Spanish Tragedy, which resembles Titus Andronicus in style rather than any other of Shakespeare's works, it evidently, through the medium of the earlier Hamlet play, contributed a good deal to the foundations of Shakespeare's Hamlet.
Before going more deeply into the contents of this great work, and especially before trying to bring it into relation to Shakespeare's personality, we have yet to see what suggestions or impulses the poet may have found in contemporary history.
We have already remarked upon the impression which the Essex family tragedy must have made upon Shakespeare in his early youth, before he had even left Stratford. All England was talking of the scandal: how the Earl of Leicester, who was commonly suspected of having had Lord Essex poisoned, immediately after his death had married his widow, Lady Lettice, whose lover no one doubted that he had been during her husband's lifetime. There is much in the character of King Claudius to suggest that Shakespeare has here taken Leicester as his model. The two have in common ambition, sensuality, an ingratiating conciliatory manner, astute dissimulation, and complete unscrupulousness. On the other hand, it is quite unreasonable to suppose, with Hermann Conrad,[1] that Shakespeare had Essex in his eye in drawing Hamlet himself.
Almost as near to Shakespeare's own day as the Essex-Leicester catastrophe had been the similar events in the Royal Family of Scotland. Mary Stuart's second husband, Lord Darnley, who bore the title of King of Scotland, had been murdered in 1567 by her lover, the daring and unscrupulous Bothwell, whom the Queen almost immediately afterwards married. Her contemporaries had no doubt whatever of Mary's complicity in the assassination, and her son James saw in his mother and his stepfather his father's murderers. The leaders of the Scottish rebellion displayed before the captive Queen a banner bearing a representation of Darnley's corpse, with her son kneeling beside it and calling to Heaven for vengeance. Darnley, like the murdered King in Hamlet, was an unusually handsome, Bothwell an unusually repulsive man.