Words Into Action

by William Gaskill

  The finished narrative is like the completed sentence. Both are linear. Ritual is not. Ritual, like music, uses repetition. You keep returning to the same theme in variation. In theatre there is a pull between ritual and action: the action that moves you forward and the ritual that opens sideways to show the universal significance of what is being done. Very few plays have a narrative drive with no expansion or digression. Rosmersholm is one of them, but compare it to a Greek tragedy, which, in many ways, it resembles. In the Greek play the choruses interrupt the narrative and give it a larger meaning. The interruption changes our experience of the play. This is mirrored in the form of the Greek stage in which the action is played out by actors on the raised platform at the back while the chorus sings and dances in the huge orchestra in the middle of the audience, creating the ritual.

  Action also differs from old-fashioned storytelling. Stories that we are told as children fascinate us by what happens, however strange. The stories may mean something but we don’t know what. The narrative is everything. A play is not quite like that. The basic story of Oedipus is essentially the same in all versions, but it is the way it is told by Sophocles, the precise succession of events which give the play its identity. Even Hamlet was based on an earlier play that the original audience knew. It is the different stress or the variation of the details of the story which makes us feel that this particular version has something to say, that the story has a meaning which can relate to our own lives.

  Francis Fergusson in his book The Idea of a Theater gives examples of the action of the whole play expressed in one sentence. The action of Oedipus is the discovery of the murderer of Laius, the action of The Cherry Orchard is the sale of the cherry orchard, and so on. But this still begs the question, ‘What does the play mean?’ The realisation by Oedipus of who the murderer of Laius is and the action he takes because of his discovery bring the play to its final statement. The relentless search instigated by the king at the beginning of the play, in order to lift the plague from the city, is as clearly defined as any detective story. But the consequences of his discovery are necessary to complete the dramatic ritual.

  4

  Action and Inaction—Hamlet

  What is the action of Hamlet? The avenging of the murder of Hamlet’s father? It is not an adequate description of our experience of the play. If Hamlet did not kill Claudius at the end we should feel cheated, but we know it is not what the play is about. The energy of the play is not driven by a character’s need for revenge, as it is in The Revenger’s Tragedy. In the very first speech of the Middleton/Tourneur play, Vindice has a soliloquy in which he tells us what he is going to do and why. In the rest of the play he does it. In Hamlet’s first soliloquy he tells us he is unhappy because his mother has married his father’s brother. He has no idea what to do and decides to keep quiet. Our first insight into his mind—which is so inconclusive—colours our feeling about not only the character but about the actions or lack of actions which are to follow. In a modern play the material of Hamlet’s soliloquy might be enough reason for him to kill Claudius. In 1600 the audience had to have the trappings of the ‘revenge play’ to justify it.

  Hamlet is a play about—among a thousand other things—play-acting. Two of its great scenes are about the theatre: the arrival of the Players, and the play scene itself. Hamlet claims he is not playing a part by wearing mourning:

  These indeed seem,

  For they are actions that a man might play

  (Hamlet 1.2)

  but very soon he is playing the part of a madman. He plays at being an actor when he speaks the ‘rugged Pyrrhus’ speech in front of the professional actors, he is a director in the ‘advice to the Players’, and he is an audience in the play scene. If he had been cast as the King he might have been very good.

  For he was likely, had he been put on,

  To have proved most royally.

  (Hamlet 5.2)

  There is a clear comparison between the Player’s convincing imitation of emotion—‘tears in’s eyes, distraction in’s aspect’—and Hamlet’s lack of demonstrated feeling. The answer to poor play-acting is to proceed to action itself, to the doing not the pretending. In the conflict of these two ideas, the inactive feeling and the unfelt doing, is the paradox of the character and the meaning of the play.

  In key moments where the action becomes physical and the narrative is moved forward by violence, like the sudden killing of Polonius, we feel the actions of the protagonist are somehow unrelated to the gravitas of a ritual fulfilment. Hamlet is acting on an almost irresponsible impulse. When he finally comes to kill Claudius he does it on the spur of the moment, because he has discovered the treachery of the poisoned rapier rather than after five acts of inexorable fate fulfilling the demands of his father. The required action of the play—the death of Claudius—is Hamlet’s responsibility, which he has avoided. It’s like a bus rushing along with Hamlet standing on the pavement deciding whether to jump on or not and then almost missing the step as he leaps. Suddenly he’s there and the bus is arriving at its destination but he’s not driving.

  Most critics agree that Hamlet stands midpoint in Shakespeare’s development, not quite a tragedy in the sense of the later, more centred tragedies, yet radical in its exploration of the relation of character to action. Before Hamlet the men of action know what they want and where they are going—Richard III and Henry V (the great parts of Laurence Olivier, the actor par excellence of ruthless, undebated action). The action and the character are one. The opening soliloquy of Richard III sets in motion the play. ‘This is what I’m going to do. Now watch me do it.’ After Hamlet there are always doubts. ‘This is what I feel and is this what I should do?’ For the first time the inner life of the character becomes important, not just as part of the plot but as something to be explored in its own right. The play uses language as it had never been used before, leaping from verse to prose and back again, with the utmost variety of style, to cope with the new demands. Hamlet asks the question, ‘What am I going to do? What must I do so as not to lose the name of action?’ He would like to become water:

  O, that this too, too solid flesh would melt,

  Thaw and resolve itself into a dew…

  —but he can’t.

  The basic metaphor of action as opposed to inaction is most vividly expressed in the Player’s speech from the play about the fall of Troy. He is describing Pyrrhus about to kill Priam:

  For lo, his sword,

  Which was declining on the milky head

  Of reverend Priam, seemed i’the air to stick.

  So as a painted tyrant Pyrrhus stood

  And like a neutral to his will and matter

  Did nothing.

  (Hamlet 2.2)

  Three scenes later Hamlet is in exactly the same situation. He discovers Claudius praying, raises his sword to kill him, and pauses. For Pyrrhus this is only a pause before the action is carried through. Hamlet does nothing. He justifies his inaction to us—or to himself—and goes off to see his mother, which the Freudians would tell us is what it’s all about. One action has been rejected in favour of another. The delay creates new catastrophes. The killing of Polonius, about which he has no hesitation and no remorse, produces the madness of Ophelia; and the two actions together bring back Laertes from Paris for revenge. Laertes’ return is used by Claudius for his own ends. The delay has caused the catastrophe. Sometimes it feels as if it is Shakespeare delaying, not his protagonist, as if he doesn’t want to resolve the action or feels dissatisfied with what form it will take if he does. Certainly no play has such outrageous digressions: the discussion of the success of the boys’ companies—the ‘little eyases’—or the fencing skill of Monsieur Lamord being among the worst. They are impossible to justify, either as narrative or thematically, by even the most sophistical apologist. These are not character delays: they are the author’s, for whatever reason.

  The play is a series of variations on action and inaction and their interplay. Can inac
tion be as interesting as action? Three centuries later Beckett answers the question with an assured ‘Yes’. Both acts of Waiting for Godot end in the same way:

  VLADIMIR. Well, shall we go?

  ESTRAGON. Yes, let’s go.

  They do not move.

  They feel the need for action but do nothing. Yet the circular, aimless conversation, the futile, unfulfilled action, are the meaning of the play. The digressive rhythm of Hamlet (or Shakespeare’s obsession with it) is also central to our experience. The not going is as important as the going; the not being as being.

  Mark Antony in Julius Caesar knows what he is doing. In his speech over the dead body of Caesar he incites the mob to turn against the conspirators. His words create the action. In the brilliant short scene that follows we see the mob in mindless violence beating up a totally innocent man. But in a sense Antony’s speech is an action too; the persuading of the mob is as much an action as the physical actions he sets in motion. We feel, hear, see its movement. We know where it has come from—Antony’s love of Caesar—and we know where it is going to. Now look at Hamlet. How do his soliloquies relate to the action of the play? Where do they come from? What happens as a result of them? Do his words lead to action? And is there action in the words?

  In Hamlet’s first scene he says nothing at all for over sixty lines. He makes a few cryptic comments when Claudius speaks to him, is persuaded not to go back to Wittenberg after defending his mourning in a rather flowery speech, and then is left alone. We know very little about him as he starts:

  O, that this too, too solid flesh would melt,

  Thaw and resolve itself into a dew…

  We are plunged inside a mind. There is no obvious dramatic preparation. But the fact that he has been sitting saying nothing, that he has been so hidden in his dialogue with his uncle/father and aunt/mother, must hide a preparation. We want to know what is behind the silence. The first thing he tells us is that he would rather not be, to have the responsibility of being. He speaks of suicide but doesn’t say why; it’s an idea he has already rejected. He makes a generalised statement about his feelings and then uses a metaphor about the state of Denmark. Cryptically he says, ‘That it should come to this!’ What ‘it’ and what ‘this’? In spasms of emotion, expressed in broken phrases and interjections, we learn very slowly of his mother’s remarriage. It takes him the whole speech to voice the word ‘married’. He compares his uncle to his dead father, comments on the speed of the remarriage, describes his parents’ relationship, but not in logical sequence. We have moved from generalisation to the painfully specific; the rottenness of Denmark as a metaphor both for his state of mind and the life round him. The movement of the speech is disjointed and searches for an outcome that it cannot possibly find. It tells us no new facts but makes us part of an unresolved journey. Hamlet works through the situation without deciding on any course of action and finishes:

  But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue.

  The wave breaks, the waters retreat. This kind of cyclic movement establishes the rhythm of the play. The action has not moved forward, but its not moving is part of the true action of the play. The soliloquy has taken us from the social, external situation of affairs of state to an individual’s feelings, and we know the conflict between the two will make the stuff of the play.

  The soliloquy at the end of the scene with the Ghost has to carry the impact on Hamlet of what has been revealed by his father, and he nearly cracks in the impossibility of the task. Again there is the long build-up in which Hamlet is only listening, with just three or four violent interjections to the inexorable narrative of the Ghost. As he is left alone he is almost incoherent in the attempt to release his feelings.

  O all you host of heaven! O earth! What else?

  And shall I couple hell?

  Unlike the ‘solid flesh’ speech, which is the accumulation of a feeling over a longer period of time, this is hot from the moment, immediate, violent, produced by what he has just heard. The fulfilment of the scene is in the speech. This is akin to opera, when the narrative arrives at a point where the action stops and the emotion is released in an aria. In a play the action doesn’t stop. The emotional reaction to what has happened is bound up with what is going to happen next. The tension is never fully released as it is in opera. It spurts out jaggedly:

  O most pernicious woman!

  [His first thought is not of the murder or the murderer but of the adulterous mother]

  O villain, villain, smiling damnèd villain!

  [Not the crime but the hypocrisy]

  My tables, my tables, meet it is I set it down

  [He actually writes down his thoughts]

  That one may smile and smile and be a villain.

  At least I’m sure it may be so in Denmark.

  [He finishes writing]

  So, uncle, there you are. Now to my word:

  It is ‘Adieu, adieu, remember me.’

  I have sworn’t.

  But what has he sworn? To remember the Ghost? Not one word of murder or revenge, though both words have been used dominantly in the scene with the Ghost. We, with Hamlet, are off balance. What happens next is the scene of the ‘wild and whirling words’ and the swearing to silence of Horatio and Marcellus with the Ghost under the stage. But even the swearing does not resolve the scene as Hamlet shifts his ground to escape from the power, perhaps evil power, of the Ghost. The physical image is of wild and uncertain action and the scene ends with:

  The time is out of joint. O cursèd spite

  That ever I was born to set it right.

  What his next action will be is unclear, but the speech has taken us forward in some sense. Something is about to happen.

  The next soliloquy comes at the end of the long and complex second scene of Act 2. It includes, among other things, the antic dialogue with Polonius, the arrival of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, in the middle of which we have ‘What a piece of work is a man’, and then the arrival of the Players. The metaphor of the stilled action of Pyrrhus’s sword and the theatrical emotion of the First Player in the Hecuba speech provide the themes of ‘O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I’ at the end of the scene. Hamlet reviews his own behaviour as if he were an actor performing, rather than a man who has to act. He feels his emotions, rather than his actions, have been inadequate. He works himself up into a frenzy—

  Bloody, bawdy villain;

  Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain!

  O, vengeance!

  like a very bad actor—something he realises immediately, pulls himself together in a very upper-class way (‘Steady, Carruthers, behaving like a tart on a Saturday night’), and produces, apparently from nowhere, the idea of The Mousetrap.

  The play’s the thing

  Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King.

  And the act ends as theatrically and decisively as one could wish. At last he is prepared for action. Or so we think.

  Fifty-five lines later he is on stage saying, ‘To be or not to be.’ The odd thing about the most famous speech in dramatic literature is that it is so undramatic. It doesn’t come from anywhere. All the other soliloquies occur when Hamlet is already on the stage in a situation and what he says has a relationship to what has gone before. In this, Hamlet just walks onto the stage and starts the speech. He may enter very slowly and walk down centre stage like Jack Benny in the Lubitsch film, To Be or Not To Be, or he may bound on from the wings to get it over as soon as possible like Michael Pennington at Stratford. Or the director can build up to it with music and discover Hamlet at the top of the tower, dagger in hand, as Olivier did in the film, or reveal him in a hole in the ground, as Zeffirelli did in his stage production. But there is always the question of why he says it now and what has happened immediately before to make him say it.

  However we interpret the meaning of the speech itself, we cannot relate it to the previous moment of apparent certainty. How has he got to this point? If he has had doubts he
hasn’t said so. The tenor of the speech is calm, dispassionate, not subjective or personal, which is wholly untypical of the Hamlet we have seen before. The extra syllable at the end of the first four lines gives it a heavy quality. It may or may not be about suicide but, even if it is, the suicide is not imminent. The first-person singular is not used once in the whole speech. It feels as if Hamlet is speaking not of his own situation but of a generalised philosophical problem. He even says, ‘From whose bourn No traveller returns,’ which he of all people knows to be untrue. The speech is so unrelated to anything that happens that it could easily be cut. If you didn’t know it was Hamlet’s—and the world’s—most famous speech, no one would notice. In the ‘bad’ First Quarto the equivalent speech comes much earlier, so there is no break between the idea of catching the conscience of the King and its realisation. Since this version, however imperfect, must represent an actual performance, we can assume that actors at the time also realised the inconsistency and had corrected it as best they could. The First Quarto gives us an idea of the contemporary actors trying to make sense of a play by editing it and simplifying its meaning. It tries to iron out inconsistencies.

  When I last directed the play at RADA in 1998, in a very cut version of the Second Quarto, I tried placing ‘To be or not to be’ in the earlier position. But it means you have the ‘nunnery’ scene and the rejection of Ophelia much earlier too, which feels wrong. The soliloquy becomes a loose cannon disturbing the balance wherever it is put. The speech represents a point of stasis in the play in which nothing happens, a still centre in which even Hamlet’s turbulent mind is relatively calm. This is not a very satisfactory interpretation. It goes no way to explaining its meaning. Its fascination may partly be its lack of dramatic logic, as if Shakespeare is taking off into an entirely new way of looking at what makes a play. The action has to proceed, Claudius has to be killed, the mayhem will happen, but at the centre of the play is a non-action. This could be the beginning of the road to Godot.