Five Mysteries of Shakespeare Solved

1. Were Romeo and Juliet too young to fall in love?

Yes. Juliet’s age is revealed in Act 1, Scene 3 in a discussion between Lady Capulet (Juliet’s biological mother) and the Nurse (who functions as Juliet’s de facto mother):

NURSE
Faith, I can tell her age unto an hour.

LADY CAPULET
She's not fourteen.

NURSE
I'll lay fourteen of my teeth,--
And yet, to my teeth be it spoken, I have but four--
She is not fourteen. How long is it now
To Lammas-tide?

LADY CAPULET
A fortnight and odd days.

There’s a (kind of funny) joke in there where the nurse tries to swear by fourteen of her teeth, then realizes that she only has four. But to the point: Juliet is “A fortnight and odd days” from being fourteen, so she’s thirteen years old. Romeo’s age isn’t explicitly stated, but his skill with a sword suggests he’s closer to twenty than to thirteen. In the poem that forms the basis for Shakespeare’s story, Arthur Brooke’s The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet (1562), Juliet is sixteen.

This bold and severe decrease in the age of Juliet’s character seems to be part of a dramaturgical strategy from Shakespeare to ratchet up the tension in the play however he can. At the outset, it seems to be structurally and thematically a comedy: the yin-yang structure of the warring families certainly has a comedic geography, and the focus on two young lovers (rather than the grabs at political power which drive the more mature tragedies) seems apposite to a comedy. Shakespeare rushes everything through with the impetuousness of youth, though, and suddenly relatively trivial matters (like Friar John being held up by a plague outbreak) become cases of life and death; usually the latter. Their warring families, as well as the extreme stupidity of Friar Laurence, both play a part in the downfall of the two young lovers, but it’s their total lack of maturity and perspective that proves to be the true tragedy of the play.

2. Just what is Hamlet saying in his first solo speech?

HAMLET
O that this too too sullied flesh would melt
Thaw, and resolve into a dew,
Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d
His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter. O God! God!

Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 2, lines 129-133

The opening lines of Hamlet’s speech alone on stage (nowadays commonly referred to as a “soliloquy”, though the OED cites the first instance of the word in 1613, three years before Shakespeare’s death, and the first instance as a literary term in 1641. It’s a handy term, sometimes, but an anachronistic one) feature one of the most contentious words in all of Shakespeare: depending on which text you read, it’s “sallied”, “sullied”, or “solid”.

The play we know as Hamlet exists in 3 distinct versions. The first published editions of the play we have are in Quarto format. The first quarto (1603) is quite possibly a memorial reconstruction, i.e., one of the actors in the play is doing his best to remember all of the lines. The second quarto (1604), gives a much longer and apparently fuller version of play: both quartos give the word as “sallied”. The first folio of Shakespeare’s works, published in 1623 by his colleagues John Heminges and Henry Condell, gives the word “solid”, and for just over 300 years, since the Folio was considered to be the authoritative text, although Tennyson thought that maybe “sullied” was right. John Dover Wilson in his influential What Happens in Hamlet (1935) thought that “sallied” was a misreading of “sullied”, and argued forcefully for the primacy of the second quarto.

Scholars have used some very complicated and circuitous reasoning to justify their choice of word. “Solid”, certainly, seems to fit the sense of “Thaw, and resolve into a dew” like a glove-- but since when was Shakespeare concerned with simple semantic chains? Perhaps, as postmodern readers, we ought to be willing to bear multiple possibilities in mind, and see the word as a portal back to the Shakespeare that existed before judiciously corrupted scholarly editions of his work-- which would have baffled him, by the way.

I’m certainly no John Gielgud, but if by whatever strange set of circumstances I found myself playing Hamlet, I’d be very tempted to pronounce the word ambiguously: it’s a fascinating monument to the fluidity and vitality of Shakespeare’s texts, the way that they’re designed fundamentally to be acted, and have a propensity to spill out of whatever arbitrary confines we try to erect around them.

3. What was Shakespeare’s first play?

A very difficult question to answer; the chronology of plays has perplexed scholars of Shakespeare for centuries, starting with Edward Malone’s 1778 “An Attempt to Ascertain the Order in which the Plays Attributed to Shakespeare were Written”. We must first redress our notion of what a “Shakespeare play” is: during the time he was writing, collaborations on dramatic works were common and often wholesale. The hardest evidence we have for Shakespeare collaborating comes at the beginning and end of his career: the early history play Henry VI, Part 1 was probably the work of a team of dramatists, and the early tragedy Titus Andronicus probably had some input, in the form of editing or co-authoring, from George Peele. At the other end of his career, The Two Noble Kinsmen is credited to Shakespeare and John Fletcher on the title page of its 1634 quarto publication.

So, while we often, in the post-Romantic spirit, identify Shakespeare as a singular genius with a unified creative vision, and would prefer clean boundaries around the body of work we sign to “Shakespeare”, the reality is much murkier. Nevertheless, scholars tend to agree that the first play Shakespeare completed was The Two Gentlemen of Verona. It’s a short comedy with the smallest cast of any Shakespeare play, and Stanley Wells, in his notes to the Oxford Complete Works, points out the immaturity of Shakespeare’s stagecraft: when there are multiple characters on stage, the dialogue is distributed very unevenly, with one character often failing to speak at all.

It’s possible that Shakespeare wrote the play back in Stratford, before he began to forge his career as a playwright and actor in London-- it’s pure conjecture, of course, but fascinating to think of a young Shakespeare in provincial England, honing his obvious writing skills on his first fully formed play, dreaming of seeing it on a grand London stage...

4. Who are the sonnets dedicated to?

Let’s be honest, we’d all like this voluminous collection of some of the most lyrically beautiful, philosophically profound, and technically perfect Renaissance poetry dedicated to us. And it might as well be, given the tantalisingly cryptic dedication that’s placed just before the poems start:

“To the only begetter of these ensuing sonnets, Mr W.H....”

So who was Mr W.H.? The most likely candidate seemed to be William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke (1580-1630). The pieces fit: he was a patron of Shakespeare's the First Folio was dedicated to him, and his initials fit, which is more than can be said about some of the other proposed candidates. The only problem is that it would be very untoward for Shakespeare, or his publisher Thomas Thorpe (either of whom could have written the dedication) to address the noble Herbert as "Mr". Shakespeare's previous patron, Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, has also been suggested, so long as he flips his initials, along with various other crackpot theories.

Herbert is probably as close as we'll get to a direct correspondence, but it's more useful to see the dedication in a less literal light. Romantic and Victorian critics, projecting their own sensibilities onto Shakespeare and his time, assumed that unlocking who “Mr W.H.” was would give them access Thorpe quite possibly hoped to intimate to readers that the sonnets were very private, exclusive things, and that with a copy of his pressing, they could almost buy into that: they would have the, basically unsolvable, clue to stoke their imaginations, and they could pretend that they were inside the secret circle of sonnet-readers.

5. What’s the best line in Shakespeare?

According to the mighty Harold Bloom, it’s “Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own”, but mortals are entitled to pick out their favorites, too. Here are a few of mine:

I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences at my beck than I have
thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in.

To be imprison’d in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendant world;

O, reason not the need: our basest beggars
Are in the poorest thing superfluous:

And when Love speaks, the voice of all the gods
Makes heaven drowsy with the harmony.