Hamlet

by William Shakespeare

  He's gone and with him what a world are dead!

  Which he reviv'd, to be revived so,

  No more young Hamlet, old Hieronymo

  Kind Lear, the grieved Moor, and more beside,

  That lived in him; have now forever died,

  Oft have I seen him, leap into the grave

  Smiting the person which he seem'd to have

  Of a sad lover with so true an eye

  That there I would have sworn, he meant to die;

  Oft have I seen him, play this part in jest,

  So lively, that spectators, and the rest

  Of his sad crew, whilst he but seem'd to bleed,

  Amazed, thought even then he died indeed.2

  Assuming that the lines describe the graveyard scene in Act 5 Scene 1 of Hamlet, we are also given some idea of how he played the part. In general Burbage is praised for the realism of his performances. It is striking that all the great actors who followed in his footsteps are similarly praised despite very different conceptions of the part and performance styles. There is also a tendency for actors themselves to trace a lineal descent for their performance, as though perhaps this might validate or authenticate their interpretation. This was certainly the case after the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 when the part was played for Sir William Davenant's company by Thomas Betterton. John Downes, company bookkeeper and prompter, reports that

  Hamlet being Perform'd by Mr Betterton, Sir William (having seen Mr Taylor of the Black-Fryars Company Act it, who being Instructed by the Author Mr Shaksepeur) taught Mr Betterton in every Particle of it; which by his exact Performance of it, gain'd him Esteem and Reputation, Superlative to all other Plays ... No more succeeding Tragedy for several Years got more reputation, or Money to the Company than this.3

  In fact Joseph Taylor, who inherited Burbage's roles, joined the King's Men at the Blackfriars three years after Shakespeare's death so could not have been personally instructed by the author, but he probably performed them in a similar way. Betterton played Hamlet to great acclaim until he was seventy:

  had you been to-night at the play-house, you had seen the force of action in perfection: your admired Mr Betterton behaved himself so well, that though now about seventy, he acted youth; and by the prevalent power of proper manner, gesture, and voice, appeared through the whole drama a young man of great expectation, vivacity, and enterprise. The soliloquy where he began the celebrated sentence of "To be or not to be?," the expostulation, where he explains with his mother in the closet, the noble ardour, after seeing his father's ghost; and his generous distress for the death of Ophelia, are each of them circumstances which dwell strongly upon the minds of his audience, and would certainly affect their behaviour on any parallel occasions in their own lives.4

  The early eighteenth-century actor-manager Colley Cibber described Betterton's performance as restrained, "governed by decency, manly, but not braving; his voice never rising into that seeming outrage, or wild defiance of what he naturally revered."5 The actor seems to have attended to Hamlet's advice to the players at the beginning of Act 3 Scene 2, although these lines were cut in the so-called "Players' Quarto" (1676) which was used, as were the Ambassadors, Polonius' talk with Reynaldo, his advice to his son, Laertes' advice to Ophelia, and most of Fortinbras. Many other speeches were thinned, including all the soliloquies apart from "To be, or not to be," which was presumably too well-known to be cut. Hamlet's complicated textual history and length has led to a stage history characterized by cuts and exclusions designed to create a fast-paced script concentrating on narrative and action.

  David Garrick, the outstanding eighteenth-century Hamlet, used a version of the same text for much of his theatrical career until 1772 when he decided to cut most of the fifth act and have Hamlet reappear after Ophelia's final exit, fight and forgive Laertes and kill Claudius. This drastic action had the positive effect of enabling much of the material from the first four acts to be restored, adding depth to the other characters and making Hamlet a more complex, ambiguous figure. Garrick's performance was noted for its liveliness and energy and was based on a conviction of Hamlet's deeply felt love for his dead father. In an age of feeling, "The basis of Hamlet's character seems to be an extreme sensibility of mind, apt to be strongly impressed by its situation, and overpowered by the feelings which that situation excites."6 Walter Scott characterized Garrick's acting as "impetuous, sudden, striking, and versatile."7 He was also known for carefully thought-out stage business, including a collapsing chair, a wig wired so that the hair stood on end and his famous "start" on first seeing the ghost. The German scientist and Anglophile Georg Lichtenberg described how

  His whole demeanour is so expressive of terror that it made my flesh creep even before he began to speak. The almost terror-struck silence of the audience, which preceded this appearance and filled one with a sense of insecurity, probably did much to enhance this effect. At last he speaks, not at the beginning, but at the end of a breath, with a trembling voice: "Angels and ministers of grace defend us!"8

  The liveliness of Garrick's interpretation contrasted markedly with the late eighteenth-century actor John Philip Kemble's melancholy prince. The memoirist Mary Russell Mitford thought him "the only satisfactory Hamlet I ever saw--owing much to personal grace and beauty--something to a natural melancholy, or rather pensiveness of manner--much, of course, to consummate art."9 The Regency star Edmund Kean, by contrast, was passionate and impetuous. At the end of Act 3 Scene 1, for example, according to the Scottish poet Theodore Martin, after screaming "get thee to a nunnery" at Ophelia, he was about to leave

  when he stops, turns round, and casting back the saddest, almost tearful look, stands lingering for some time, and then with a slow, almost gliding step, comes back, seizes Ophelia's hand, imprints a lingering kiss upon it with a deep-drawn sigh, and straightway dashes more impetuously than before out of the door, which he slams violently behind him.10

  William Charles Macready's performance in the mid-nineteenth century was described as a "composite,"11 combining "the classical dignity of John Kemble with the intense earnestness and colloquial familiarity of Edmund Kean."12 Reviewers praised his naturalism and ability to suggest subtle, complex feelings, but in his diary Macready confesses how difficult he found it to achieve "the ease and dignified familiarity, the apparent levity of manner, with the deep purpose that lies beneath."13 Edwin Booth, the great American actor, was praised for his portrait of a "reflective, sensitive, gentle, generous nature, tormented, borne down and made miserable by an occasion ... to which it is not equal."14 Booth softened and refined the role.

  Accounts of Henry Irving's performance at the Lyceum are contradictory, although he was astonishingly successful; some critics faulted him for "the entire absence of tragic passion"15 while others talked of his "real frenzy."16 He is credited with introducing a "psychological Hamlet."17 Eden Phillpotts later analyzed his performance in terms of the psychological connection between his intellectuality, insanity and failure to act.18 Irving's chosen successor as Hamlet was Johnston Forbes-Robertson, whose performance likewise drew contradictory notices. George Bernard Shaw praised his verse-speaking for the way he "does not utter half a line; then stop to act; then go on with another half line ... he plays as Shakespeare should be played, on the line and to the line, with the utterance and acting simultaneous, inseparable and in fact identical."19 While all reviewers agreed on the delicacy of his performance, some found him "affable" and "light-hearted"; Shaw talked of "celestial gaiety"20 while others mention his "gentle melancholy."21 This production reintroduced Fortinbras in the last act after the character had been banished from the stage for over two hundred years, an innovation suggested by Shaw but regarded as anticlimactic by many at the time.

  The matinee idol John Barrymore was praised by James Agate as "nearer to Shakespeare's whole creation than any other I have seen."22 To John Gielgud he suggested "tenderness, remoteness, and neurosis,"23 and he also impressed the young Laurence Olivier:
"Everything about him was exciting. He was athletic, he had charisma, and to my young mind, he played the part to perfection."24 Olivier was impressed also by the way in which Barrymore emphasized certain words in a line, although critics were less enthusiastic. Olivier drew a telling theatrical line directly back through Barrymore to Booth, from Booth to Kean and hence ultimately to Burbage.25

  Evolving twentieth-century production styles were influenced by the attempts of the late-Victorian producer William Poel to re-create an authentically Elizabethan bare stage as opposed to a cluttered historical realism with elaborate scenery. There was also a trend toward ensemble-playing which meant that focus was no longer exclusively on the star. Interpretations, meanwhile, veered between exploration of the politics of the play and interest in sexuality in the light of Freud's theory of the family romance. Late twentieth and early twenty-first-century productions were often concerned with self-conscious dramatic devices (overhearings, the play-within-the-play) and references to play-acting, a phenomenon that became known as "metatheatricality" (theater about theater). Performances of Hamlet frequently sought to interrogate their own meaning.

  The play's contemporary significance was signaled in the 1925 Birmingham Repertory production which became known as "Hamlet in plus fours" on account of its modern-day set and dress. Postwar disillusionment infected Colin Keith-Johnston's "snarling prince."26 Not all were convinced, but The Sunday Times' reviewer was one of many who responded to its modern treatment: "A certain matter-of-factness of diction, combined with the absence of gesture and pose, do give a certain added humanity and life, even if sometimes at the expense of majesty."27 Gielgud's judgment on the production was "UNspeakable,"28 but it influenced his own performance at the Old Vic in 1930; as one critic puts it, "Like Barrymore with his veiled demonic streak and Keith-Johnston with his open hostility, Gielgud brought out the darker side of Hamlet's nature."29 The unabridged text in the Gielgud production (conflated from the Quarto and Folio versions of the play) included Hamlet's bawdy talk to Ophelia and his mother, which hitherto had usually been cut. In the course of his career, Gielgud played the part in six different productions in total and critics are divided in their judgment on each. W. A. Darlington sums up his performances over fifteen years in terms of a progression from "a sensitive youth, aghast at the wickedness of the world which he had just discovered, to a sophisticated man to whom that wickedness is no surprise."30 Gielgud's intellectualism is often contrasted, somewhat crudely with Olivier's physicality, but as Dawson points out, "Both were 'modern' though in different ways."31 Olivier's Hamlet is best known for the film version of 1948; the stage version on which it was based a decade earlier and directed by Tyrone Guthrie is regarded as "more forceful and energetic and volatile."32 Both stage and screen versions were strongly influenced by Freud's "Oedipal" reading of the part of Hamlet, as well as by the Romantic image of the solitary, anguished intellectual: as the opening voice-over of the film put it, "This is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind."

  3. Realistic historical staging, with elaborate sets and large casts of spear-carriers in attendance, characterized the play in the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: this is the duel scene in the 1913 Forbes-Robertson production on the cavernous stage of London's Drury Lane Theatre.

  In recent years there have been many notable Hamlets: Paul Scofield, Richard Burton, David Warner, Nicol Williamson, Michael Pennington, Daniel Day-Lewis, Ian Charleson, Ben Kingsley, Jonathan Pryce, Derek Jacobi, Mark Rylance, Kevin Kline, Kenneth Branagh, Alex Jennings, Ralph Fiennes, Sam West, Simon Russell Beale, Adrian Lester, Toby Stephens: the list goes on. Playgoers and critics no longer look for a definitive Hamlet and all these productions have been variously praised and appraised. Several had striking innovations and experiments: Pryce, for instance, conjured up the voice of the ghost from within Hamlet's own body, while Lester (in Peter Brook's supremely lucid, heavily cut production of 2000 at the Bouffes du Nord in Paris) played the "solid flesh" soliloquy at the very beginning of the action, giving a rationale for a Hamlet that was more modern everyman, "intelligent, decisive, extremely hurt,"33 than Renaissance prince. The radical spirit of the 1960s interrogated the play's status as cultural icon by deconstructing and reconstructing the text in Charles Marowitz's Hamlet Collage (1965) and Joseph Papp's American Naked Hamlet (1968). Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) owes its inspiration to the same questioning spirit.

  The historical focus on Hamlet tended to exclude the importance of other characters. There have, however, been notable Ophelias including Susannah Cibber playing opposite Garrick, Harriet Smithson with Kemble, Helena Faucit with Macready, Mrs. Charles Kean to her husband's prince and Kate Terry with Charles Albert Fechter. Kate's younger sister, Ellen Terry, playing opposite Irving, was much praised and led to the role enjoying greater prominence. The challenge for an actor has been in the title role, though, and there has been a tradition going back to Sarah Siddons in 1775 for women actors to take it on including Charlotte Cushman, Sarah Bernhardt in a notable 1899 production in Paris, Asta Nielsen (in the silent film of 1921), Eva Le Gallienne and more recently Judith Anderson, Diane Venora and Frances de la Tour. Bernhardt indeed argued that the role was more suitable for a mature woman than an immature man, since "The woman more readily looks the part, yet has the maturity of mind to grasp it."34

  From an early date the play has had extraordinary international connections and appeal. One of the first recorded performances was in 1607 off the coast of Sierra Leone by sailors aboard a ship called the Dragon on the way to the East Indies. Troupes of visiting English actors performed throughout northern Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: indeed, Shakespeare probably knew about the castle at Elsinore because two of his colleagues (Thomas Pope and Will Kempe) had played there in the 1580s. Hamlet was certainly seen in Germany not long after it was written.

  In the eighteenth century it was the French Enlightenment sage Voltaire who shaped attitudes to Shakespeare in continental Europe. His view of Hamlet was that it was a great play, despite breaking neoclassical rules and patent "absurdites" such as the introduction of gravediggers in the last act.35 German Romantics such as Goethe, Schiller and Schlegel claimed a special affinity with Hamlet and Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck (c.1795) produced a fine German translation. Successful French Hamlets have included Francois Joseph Talma and Charles Albert Fechter. In nineteenth-century Russia "Hamletism" was the term coined by Turgenev to describe the introspective political malaise of the ruling classes. Plays such as Chekhov's Ivanov (1887) and The Seagull (1896) provided explicit commentary on the character of Hamlet. In Eastern Europe in the twentieth century, productions of Hamlet were staged which obliquely critiqued oppressive and corrupt governments, notably Moscow's Taganka Theatre Hamlet directed by Yuri Lyubimov, which used a translation by Boris Pasternak and ran from 1971 to 1980, and a Romanian production with Ion Caramitru in the title role--this was recognizably a critique of the tyrannical regime of the Ceausescus, who were evoked by Claudius and Gertrude. When the Ceausescu regime was overthrown in 1989, Caramitru was recognized in the street by a general commanding a tank squadron. The actor was pulled up onto the tank and taken to the television station, where the battle for power was being fought. He was among the men who announced to the world that regime change had taken place. Hamlet had teamed up with Fortinbras to oversee the demise of Claudius and Gertrude.

  4. Sarah Bernhardt as Hamlet. Of all Shakespeare's male tragic roles the one that has been played most often and most effectively by female actors: in his book Women as Hamlet (2007), the critic Tony Howard notes that Bernhardt was the first Hamlet on film and Eve Donne the first Hamlet on radio.

  Hamlet has been no less popular in the cinema than the theater. The first onscreen Hamlet was Sarah Bernhardt. Forbes-Robertson starred in a twenty-two-minute silent version in 1913 and the Danish silent film star Asta Nielsen played Hamlet in an astonishing 1921 version in which a female Hamlet
has been brought up as male to provide an heir to the Danish throne. Laurence Olivier directed and starred in a brooding black-and-white version (1948), full of vertiginous long shots and use of voice-over for soliloquies. Richard Burton's 1964 stage production directed by Gielgud was filmed, as was Tony Richardson's 1967 Roundhouse production starring Nicol Williamson as a very modern Hamlet. Grigori Kozintsev's rigorous, intellectual 1964 black-and-white Russian version took as its theme "Denmark's a prison." This contrasted sharply with Franco Zeffirelli's 1990 version starring Mel Gibson and Glenn Close set in medieval Denmark which eliminated politics altogether and focused on the play's family dynamics and made Hamlet into a version of the action hero. Kenneth Branagh, like Olivier, directed himself in the lead role: his sumptuous four-hour 1996 version was set in Regency costume and shot at Blenheim Palace with a star-studded cast. Using a conflated Quarto and Folio text, it maintains a balance between the private and the political. Fortinbras' great-coated army arrive in the last act to storm the palace in a scene recalling the storming of the Winter Palace in Sergei Eisenstein's October (1926). Michael Almereyda's Hamlet (2000) with Ethan Hawke as Hamlet updated the story to modern-day Manhattan where corrupt gray "suits" run the Denmark Corporation in a spiritual landscape of urban isolation and Hamlet's meditation on his own inadequacy as a man of violence is wittily delivered as he wanders the aisles of a Blockbuster video store, passing the section of movies marked "Action."*

  AT THE RSC

  Young Hamlet: Modernity and Politics

  Hamlet is the best-known play in the history of the world, but no two productions are the same: at the level of text as well as interpretation and stage-business, every director will seek to remint the old familiar words and to make Shakespeare speak in answer to the pressure of new times.