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The box in which they were concealed contained four pairs of forceps, representing different stages in their development, besides other instruments and a number of letters which established their ownership. After an unsuccessful attempt to sell the family secret in Paris, Hugh Chamberlen found a purchaser in Amsterdam.
The real secret was revealed by a son of Hugh Chamberlen, who bore the same name as his father; but probably the first accurate printed description of the forceps was made by Samuel Chapman, in his treatise on obstetrics which appeared in 1733. Subsequently they came into general use, and, with many modifications, remain the most important instrument in the obstetrician's equipment.
Clearly the instrument had been in use for some generations prior to Hugh Chamberlen, who translated from French into English the foremost obstetrical textbook of his time. It is not questioned that the forceps was the secret that his ancestors and he himself employed so long and so profitably.
It seems, however, certain that all the passages above quoted refer to a drama of Hamlet anterior to that by Shakespeare, and the same which is recorded in Henslowe's Diary as having been played at Newington in 1594 by "my Lord Admeralle and my lorde Chamberlen men, 9 of June, 1594, receved at Hamlet, viii, 5," the small sum arising from the performance showing most probably that the tragedy had then been long on the stage.
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