Notes
1 Quoted in Richard Cavendish, “Five Oscars for Olivier's Hamlet,” History Today, 49 (1999); http://www.historytoday.com/richard-cavendish/five-oscars-oliviers-hamlet (accessed 12 July 2012).
2 Laurence Olivier, On Acting (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1986), p. 186.
3 Grigori Kozintsev (1967), quoted in Judith Buchanan, Shakespeare on Film (Harlow: Pearson/Longman, 2005), p. 4.
4 See Neil Taylor, “The Films of Hamlet,” in Anthony Davies and Stanley Wells (eds.), Shakespeare and the Moving Image: The Plays on Film and Television (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 180–95.
5 http://uk.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi1608515865/
6 Samuel Crowl, Shakespeare and Film: A Norton Guide (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2008), p. 109.
7 Brian Cox (Titus in the Royal Shakespeare Company production directed by Deborah Warner, 1987), in Russell Jackson and Robert Smallwood (eds.), Players of Shakespeare 3: Further Essays in Shakespearian Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 175.
Myth 27
Yorick's skull was real
In Act 5 of Hamlet the Prince encounters a gravedigger preparing a new grave. The grave has had previous occupants: as he digs, the gravedigger throws up skulls of the already-buried. This is not an unusual occurrence. The graves of commoners were unmarked (a practice unchanged until the early seventeenth century) and so the chances of reuse were high; and corpses were buried in sheets, not coffins, so if the grave was redug the sexton's spade would unearth bones rather than wood. Dislodged remains were removed to the charnel house—a bone house or ossuary within church grounds and therefore a consecrated space. (After death, a consecrated space was more important than personal space.)
Shakespeare's gravedigger identifies one of the skulls as that of the court jester, Yorick: “a mad rogue—'a poured a flagon of Rhenish on my head once!” (5.1.174–5). Hamlet remembers him as “a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy” and recalls childhood play with the jester: “he hath borne me on his back a thousand times” (5.1.181–2). (The Victorian artist Philip Calderon depicts this piggy-back riding in his painting The Young Lord Hamlet (1868), and Kenneth Branagh's 1996 film inserts flashbacks of Yorick [comedian Ken Dodd] entertaining the court.) Although Shakespeare does not provide a stage direction instructing Hamlet to pick up the skull, all modern editions insert one: Takes the skull. Since Hamlet addresses the skull for ten lines it is logical that he should do so with it in his hand—he tells the gravedigger “Let me see” (5.1.179), obviously an instruction to pass the skull to him. This has become one of the most iconic moments in Shakespeare, appearing in adverts for films and stage productions, in cartoons and parodies (usually about Yorick's dental records or pencil lead), and, most recently, in a Royal Mail stamp of 2011: a photograph of David Tennant's Hamlet holding Yorick's skull is superimposed over the first line of the Prince's “To be or not to be” soliloquy, the play's other defining moment.
Figure 5 This twenty-first-century play based on Hamlet explores death and memory. The skull (the “laughing boy” of the title) is central to the action, and even Ophelia gets to address it. Designed by Ian Pape. Skull image by iStockphoto.
Figure 6 David Tennant as Hamlet contemplates Yorick's skull in Greg Doran's production at the RSC Courtyard in 2008.
Malcolm Davies Collection © Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.
The image was already iconic before Shakespeare staged it. Skulls were part of the memento mori (remembrance of death) tradition. This reminder of one's future death had a didactic purpose: don't act sinfully lest you be taken unawares, like old King Hamlet, “cut off even in the blossoms of [his] sin,” with “all [his] imperfections on [his] head” (1.5.76, 79). In 2 Henry IV the prostitute Doll Tearsheet asks her friend (presumably also her client) the slothful fat old knight Sir John Falstaff, “when wilt thou leave fighting o'days, and foining o'nights, and begin to patch up thine old body for heaven?” Falstaff rebuffs this suggestion that he alter his lifestyle, saying “do not speak like a death's-head, do not bid me remember mine end” (2.4.233–7). “Death's head” is an alternative phrase for “skull” or memento mori. In Tourneur's The Atheist's Tragedy (published 1611) it occurs in no fewer than three stage directions: To get into the charnel house he takes hold of a death's head; They lie down with either of them a death's head for a pillow; starts at the sight of a death's head.
Portraits celebrating the sitter's success often contained memento mori skulls, reminders that the sitter's achievements were earthly and would one day be undermined by death. Hans Holbein the Younger's The Ambassadors (1553), now in the National Gallery, London, depicts two ambassadors at Henry VIII's court surrounded by the trappings of their cultured and civilized lives, as well as coded symbols of the political disquiet over Henry's divorce that had brought them to England: scientific instruments (globes, a sundial, a quadrant), a musical instrument (a lute), textiles (oriental carpets), and open books (symbols of knowledge, education, religion). When viewed obliquely a blur in the foreground rearranges itself as a skull. Similarly, portraits of young men or women often showed them holding or contemplating a skull, reminding them (and us) that, as Gertrude says, “all that lives must die, / Passing through nature to eternity” (1.2.72–3).
Hamlet is a young man holding a skull in a play about death. The play begins with Hamlet disabled by grief from his father's death. He continues to wear mourning clothes long after the official period of court mourning has ended. (The stage picture is striking: a figure, apart from the others, distinguished sartorially by his “inky cloak.”) In the first court scene, Act 1, scene 2, Claudius offers Hamlet conventional memento mori wisdom, reminding him that “your father lost a father; / That father lost, lost his”; Nature's “common theme / Is death of fathers, and … still hath cried, / From the first corpse till he that died today, / ‘This must be so’” (1.2.89–90, 103–6). But Hamlet is too crippled by grief to accept that “this must be so,” that life has 100 percent mortality, that death is the inevitable conclusion. The contrast with Act 5, then, is remarkable, when, holding Yorick's skull, he recognizes the skull-object's function as a memento mori symbol. Addressing it, he says, “Now get you to my lady's chamber and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour [face] she must come. Make her laugh at that” (5.1.188–90). In other words: remind her that no matter how much make-up she applies, she cannot avoid the fact that one day she will die, and then cosmetics will be of no help.
The importance of this moment in the play has been noted by many critics (Marjorie Garber and Roland M. Frye, for instance) but the most astute observation comes from Elizabeth Maslen. Maslen points out that not only does Yorick serve the traditional fool's function in Shakespeare, that of a balancing act, realigning the hero's moral coordinates, but that in this play of grief and mourning the fool's function could only be served by a dead fool.1
Yorick's skull did not attract a great deal of attention as a prop in modern productions until 2008 when the Royal Shakespeare Company used a real skull in a production directed by Greg Doran. The pianist André Tchaikowsky, who died of cancer in his forties, bequeathed his skull to the RSC in 1982. Although the skull was used in a photo shoot with Roger Rees when he played Hamlet in 1984, and was used in rehearsals when Mark Rylance played Hamlet in 1989, it did not appear in public performances until Doran's production with David Tennant in the summer of 2008. The unusual prop received so much media attention in newspapers and on television news that it was considered a distraction for audiences; consequently it was removed from use when the production transferred to London. (At least, it was reported to have been removed; it was actually retained in both the Stratford and London runs.) Nonetheless, questions had been raised about the role of illusion in drama, with Claire van Kampen noting that using a real skull was as inappropriate as using real blood.2
The Elizabethan theater did use real blood (not human blood but animal blood, supplie
d in bladders from the nearby slaughterhouses). Did it also use real skulls? Skulls are an infrequent stage prop. In Dekker and Middleton's The Honest Whore (1604) a servant sets out a table, on which he places a skull, a picture, a book and a Taper; in Webster's White Devil (1612) the ghost carries a pot of lily-flowers with a skull in it. Middleton's Revenger's Tragedy (1607) offers a perverse and extended variant when the hero, who has kept the skull of his beloved for nine years, now places it atop a dummy, dresses it/her up, and applies toxic lipstick to enact revenge on her priapic killer. When in 1598 Philip Henslowe took an inventory of props for the Admiral's Men, his list did not include any skulls. This is not surprising: all the examples of skulls in stage directions are concentrated in the first decade of the seventeenth century, suggesting that this was a temporary vogue.
In 1602 or thereabouts Henry Chettle wrote The Tragedy of Hoffman. In scene 1 Hoffman reveals that he previously rescued his father's body from the gibbet where he was unfairly hanged. He displays this skeleton, which he has concealed for years, to the audience. By the end of the scene he has managed to kill the prince whose father was responsible for the hanging (thereby achieving in just one scene the revenge that takes Hamlet five acts). Hoffman strips the new corpse to the bone, a “fair anatomy” and “image of bare death” (1.3.10, 16) (“presumably with some considerable effort,” observes Richard Sugg wryly3).
The play now has two skeletons. Producing a skeleton onstage (let alone two) is an order of magnitude different from staging a skull. One would dearly like to know if Hoffman predates Hamlet or was written as a response to it. There are many points of contact between the two revenge tragedies, and critics have often noted the ways in which Hoffman seems to compete with and outdo Hamlet. One of the intertextual moments relates to props: Elisabeth Dutton, who directed the play in 2010, said, “Hamlet may have a skull but Hoffman has the whole skeleton.”4 Henslowe, who managed the company that staged this play, entered no payment for skeletons in his accounts, but his Diary stops at the end of 1602, just on the cusp of the date when Hoffman would have been staged, so his silence is inconclusive.
Given that life was cheap in Elizabethan London, that deaths from plague epidemics occurred suddenly and in vast quantity, that burials were hurried and in mass graves, and that graves were reused, a real skull would have been a familiar object, an object capable of reuse or misuse. After all, the skulls in portraits come from somewhere—perhaps the same place as skulls in plays. Procuring a real skull (as for Yorick) seems far less challenging than procuring a real skeleton. But since skeletons, not just skulls, were removed to the charnel house, perhaps it was as easy to steal one as the other? The records of the Company of Barbers and Surgeons often refer to the production of fake skeletons; if the prop can be made for anatomical study, surely it can also be made for stage use.
Shakespeare's plays are not heavily prop-dependent. There are good practical reasons for this. Plays that require props (in Comedy of Errors a bag of ducats, a rope's end, and a gold chain are crucial) require impeccable backstage coordination. Without the handkerchief for Othello there is no tragedy and no play. (The 1960s playwright Joe Orton said that his earlier work as an assistant stage manager helped him as a writer because it taught him not to write in too much business with telephones.)
The genre that is most reliant on props is romance. Romance plays—the kind Shakespeare wrote late in his career—traditionally hinge on the reunion of separated families via an identifiable token, often a piece of jewelry that was left with the foundling child. In The Winter's Tale, the baby Perdita is abandoned in her basket with “the mantle of Queen Hermione's, her jewel about the neck of it” (5.2.32–3). But Shakespeare does not write in reunions that are dependent on these props qua props. In The Winter's Tale the Third Gentleman narrates the reunion. In Twelfth Night the twins recognize each other not through props but through memories of their father and through shared bodily marks that they narrate. In Pericles it is Marina's narrative of suffering that prompts Pericles to recognize her as his daughter (“I will believe you by the syllable / Of what you shall deliver”; 21.155–6). In The Tempest the reconciliation of brothers is rooted in Prospero's live body. When Alonso is embraced by Prospero at the end—“I embrace thy body”—he knows the body is real and not another “enchanted trifle” because “thy pulse / Beats as of flesh and blood” (5.1.111, 114–16).
A parody of theatrical romance by Michael Frayn illustrates the pitfalls of props. Frayn imagines a play called Error for Error in which the Duke's long-lost son, carried off at birth, proves his heritage by a prop—a locket—which he throws to the Duke. The Duke drops it; the actors have to improvise:
Duke: Alas! Methinks I have misfinger'd it!
Ferdinand: Sire, bend thou down thy aged frame
And do thou smartly pick it up again.
Duke: Bend me as I might I cannot see the thing.
My lords, do you explore your cloggy beard.
No sign? Ah me, I fear it must have roll'd
Amid this mazy grove of cardboard trees.
Ferdinand: Was not one glance as it came winging by
Enough to grasp the general sense of it?
– That here before thee stands thy long-lost son?
Duke: A fig for your problems—what worries me
Is how I speak my major speech, which starts:
“Come locket, let me kiss thee for thy pains
And taste the savour of fidelity”
Without the bloody locket. Come, let's shift
This forest. Take the yonder end and heave.
Ferdinand: Is this meet welcome for a long-lost son?
Duke: Meet welcome for a long-lost son, forsooth!
What kind of long-lost son is this, that chucks
Essential props outside my senile reach
And cuts his long-lost father's longest speech?
Lose thee again, son, till thou learn at last
The art of throwing props and not the cast.
Frayn's parody incidentally reveals the way in which Shakespeare's plays set up romance prop conventions only to shy away from using them.5
When Shakespeare's plays do demand props, the props demand attention. The mirror in Richard II, for instance, is probably anachronistic (glass mirrors were unusual in England at the time of Richard II) and it is not found in Shakespeare's sources. It is therefore a hugely symbolic item in which King Richard (soon to be ex-king Richard) contemplates the way his reflection does not mirror his sufferings. The language of the scene suggests that Richard dramatically smashes the mirror on stage—“there it is, cracked in an hundred shivers” (4.1.279), although this would be an expensive gesture in the theater. In Othello, the circulating handkerchief—it moves from Desdemona to Emilia to Iago to Cassio—starts to take on a life of its own. It becomes “not merely a sign but a performer in the play's action.”6
Stage props are not simply material properties. They have back stories (Yorick's skull prompts anecdotes about the Fool's activities; Othello's handkerchief is given two contradictory stories about its origins; we are told about the pre-play commission for the gold chain in Comedy of Errors). They cue emotions and associations. They function as go-betweens (we pay as much attention to their movements as to characters'). They are symbols (all the skulls in Jacobean drama have a conventional memento mori function). They have to be read and interpreted like every other stage picture. And in their concrete presence they negotiate the boundary between the fictional world and the material real world (so, too, do costumes). With its material onstage existence, Yorick's skull is as present as the physical body of a living actor. In this sense, Yorick's skull, like all stage props, is “real.”
Notes
1 Elizabeth Maslen, “Yorick's Place in Hamlet,” Essays and Studies, 36 (London: John Murray, 1983), pp. 1–13 (p. 12).
2 Quoted in Pascale Aebischer, Shakespeare's Violated Bodies: Stage and Screen Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 86�
��7.
3 Richard Sugg, Murder after Death (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), p. 20.
4 A video of this staged reading of Chettle's Tragedy of Hoffman, directed by Elisabeth Dutton, is available at bit.ly/hoffman2010
5 Michael Frayn, “Business Worries,” in Collected Columns (London: Methuen, 2007), pp. 44–7 (pp. 46–7).
6 Andrew Sofer, “Felt Absences: The Stage Properties of Othello's Handkerchief,” Comparative Drama, 31 (1997), pp. 367–94 (p. 367).
Myth 28
Queen Elizabeth loved Shakespeare's plays
Two examples. First, a caustically wise Queen Elizabeth enters the Curtain theater at a performance of Romeo and Juliet to stop the Master of the Revels from revealing that one of the actors is in fact a woman. Dispensing money and persons, she invites Shakespeare for future discussions at Greenwich, while sending his lover back to her husband and thence to the New World. Second, a letter discovered and published at the end of the eighteenth century sees the queen addressing Shakespeare in terms of warm appreciation: “Wee didde receive youre prettye Verses goode Masterre William … and wee doe complemente thee onne theyre greate excellence.”1
Both these encounters between monarch and playwright are fictional. The first is the denouement of John Madden's hugely enjoyable film Shakespeare in Love (1998) with Oscar-winning Judi Dench as the queen. The second is a fake by the noted eighteenth-century forger William-Henry Ireland, part of a sheaf of documents he claimed to have discovered in the private library of the mysterious “Mr H.” These two fictions, 200 years apart, attest to the vitality of the myth that the queen was Shakespeare's biggest fan. And they give us two indicative assertive strategies, recognizable from some of our other myths: where the required evidence is lacking, it must be invented—within the fictional genre of romantic comedy in the film, in scholarly hoaxes for Ireland.
30 Great Myths about Shakespeare Page 23