Unsure of when to date King John, and assuming that вЂњa man of such sensibilityвЂќ as Shakespeare would not вЂњhave lost his only sonвЂ¦without being greatly affected by it,вЂќ Malone proposed that such heartfelt lines as вЂњGrief fills the room up of my absent childвЂќ made it likely that King John was written in the immediate aftermath of HamnetвЂ™s death.Д«ut nobody much cared about King John.

Malone was the first biographer to create a chronology of ShakespeareвЂ™s works and reconstruct his life out of his plays and poems. Searching through surviving records from Stratford-upon-Avon not long before this, Edmond Malone discovered that ShakespeareвЂ™s son Hamnet (the spelling was interchangeable with Hamlet) had died at the age of eleven in 1596. William Hazlitt wrote that вЂњit is we who are HamletвЂ¦whose powers of action have been eaten up by thought,вЂќ and Samuel Taylor Coleridge declared: вЂњI have a smack of Hamlet myself, if I may say so.вЂќ вЂњWe love Hamlet,вЂќ Lord Byron would add, вЂњeven as we love ourselves.вЂќ GoetheвЂ™s coming-of-age novel Wilhelm MeisterвЂ™s Apprenticeship (1795вЂ“1796) turned Hamlet into a model for subsequent portraits of the artist as a young man. Much of the credit for this goes to Romantic writers in Germany and England who were drawn to its intense exploration of the self and who saw their own struggles reflected in HamletвЂ™s. It wasnвЂ™t until 1711 that anyone wrote at length about Hamlet the Earl of Shaftesbury spoke of it then as the Shakespeare play that вЂњappears to have most affected English heartsвЂќ and was perhaps the most вЂњoftenest acted,вЂќ which likely owed much to the popularity of Thomas Betterton, one of the great Hamlets.ДЄnother century would pass before Hamlet became ShakespeareвЂ™s most celebrated play, a position from which it has yet to be dislodged. But editions of Hamlet were published less frequently than those of Richard III, Richard II, or even Pericles, and aside from echoes of it in the works of other dramatists, the play is mentioned by only a couple of ShakespeareвЂ™s contemporaries (one saying that it appealed to the вЂњwiser sort,вЂќ another that it managed to вЂњplease allвЂќ). It was performed at the Globe Theatre, in Oxford, Cambridge, and elsewhere, and revived at least twice at court. In the decades after it was first staged, probably in 1600, Hamlet seems to have been popular, though not especially so. Jean-Louis Trintignant in the role of Hamlet, at the ThГ©Гўtre de la Musique, Paris, 1971

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