For out o’ doors he went without their helps,
And, to the last, bended their light on me.
This passage, in its graphically precise detail, plays a double game, both indicating the nature of Hamlet’s possession as he approaches Ophelia, yet also establishing, by the fierce lucidity of the reporting, the troubled mind of the reporter.
And destabilising the centre of the play, are a group of actors. The long stretch (almost a quarter of the play) dominated by the arrival and performance of the theatre company from London creates a liminal, uncertain reality that seems to infect the air of the play. The actors invoke Troy, and suddenly Troy is more real than Denmark. Elsinore’s hold on its own materiality starts slipping, the court becomes intoxicated by the possibility of ‘this play’, and the play transports us to a place that both is and isn’t the story we are already within. It creates a parallel world, coarse and clumsy, but nevertheless opening out the possibility of infinite others. Metatheatrical devices don’t shore up reality, they throw it up in the air, where it scatters and falls reconfigured. The golden centre of this play is another play. The play is indeed the thing.
In any environment, whether an office or a family or a relationship or a theatre company, mental states can be contagious. Clarity, simplicity and confidence spread into the waters around them; confusion, complexity and insecurity muddy them. The Elsinore depicted in Hamlet is a pressure-cooker environment, where instability passes speedily from person to person. Ophelia has stepped outside the frame of her own portrait, yet tries with heart-rending courage to claw her way back in. She speaks in encoded riddles that mean everything to her but nothing to the others. But it is not just her. After Hamlet’s exile to England, the focus narrows. This is common in Shakespeare’s plays – a broad panorama reducing into a claustrophobic intensity – and this is true of the Fourth Act of Hamlet. When Ophelia rushes from character to character handing out rue and rosemary and columbine, it is not only the flowers she is dispersing, but also the burden of her excess of sensibility. No one is immune. Claudius disintegrates from a wise, sophisticated politician to a clumsy murderer. Laertes casts aside all niceties, social and religious, even before he jumps into his sister’s grave. Families, political groupings, conspirators. . . All, if set on the wrong path, twist and contort each other into instability.
* * *
We were witnessing such volatility in Mexico, where notions of calm and cool had very much left the building. I looked across at Wills, our travelling production manager, a friend of great good sense and humour, and a man of awe-inspiring solidity and perspective (as well as bulk). Nothing phased him, he was our high-water mark of sangfroid. Until now. He just shook his head at me, mouthed ‘no más’, sat down heavily on a speaker and stared blankly out into the square beyond, sucker-punched by the extreme oddness of reality.
I had long since given up making my sporadic on stage appearances to ‘help’. Instead, I watched in hallucinatory admiration as tonight’s Hamlet decided to deal with Tommy’s absence in the Fifth Act by saying not only all his own lines, but also all of Horatio’s. For a fair old stretch, he simply talked to himself via an alter ego. He did it with skill and bright good cheer and a feverish, psychotropic certainty. Characters were melting into characters. Hamlet was standing sweaty with fever, babbling as two people, in a tongue foreign to his audience, on a makeshift stage, grasping helplessly for an equally makeshift identity. In many ways, he was himself again.
* * *
The madness in the play centres on the Prince himself – a man in a state of perilously contained agitation from the off. His first soliloquy (‘O, that this too too solid flesh. . .’) is an explosion of sewage, erupting onto the streets of himself from the gurgling catacombs beneath. From the moment he meets the ghost of his father, he knows his hold on himself is delicate (to put it mildly). He tells his trusted allies, with urgency, that he will soon put on an ‘antic disposition’, and that they are not to wonder at it. This opens up a quandary that has troubled people for four centuries: is Hamlet’s madness real or feigned? Is he using it as a mask, or genuinely succumbing to it? The answer, as with most Shakespearean quandaries, is to avoid framing it as an either/or and to keep both possibilities open. Hamlet knows he is in psychological trouble, and knows he needs a disguise to conceal his pain. The solution is to create a mask that is both true and not true, to create a role that fits the self.
When Hamlet says he is ‘mad in craft’, he is speaking part of the truth; when Rosencrantz describes it as a ‘crafty madness’, he is doing the same; when Polonius says there is ‘method in his madness’, his is a genuine insight; when Gertrude says he is suffering from ‘ecstasy’, it is offered from a mother’s understanding; when Hamlet asks that his mother and stepfather be told that he is but ‘mad north-northwest’, he is doing his best to describe a marginal state. Everyone is telling a version of the truth, all of which add up to a comprehensive, if chaotic, picture of a troubled mind, like a Cubist painting. For what is the truth with mental health but such an aggregation of different subjectivities? Which of us when looking at a friend or a loved one suffering from mental turmoil can say something simpler of them? Sanity plays endless games with its own definitions and leaves no one the wiser.
It is hard to gainsay Hamlet’s own summary at the end of the play, when his mind is as stable as we find it, in front of Laertes and, more critically, his mother:
Give me your pardon sir: I’ve done you wrong;
But pardon’t, as you are a gentleman.
This presence knows, how I am punished
With sore distraction. What I have done,
That might your nature, honour and exception
Roughly awake, I here proclaim was madness.
The caesura pause necessitated by the comma after ‘This presence knows’ is a pregnant one. It does not lead us to believe he is lying. This is not the moment in the play for manipulation.
Earlier he has said he was ‘mad in craft’, so both states can clearly coexist. Sometimes it is straightforward to tell when he is faking it. His joshing of Polonius and his cryptic responses to the old man’s questions are clearly performative. Similarly, his carefree wildness and verbal exuberance in front of Claudius seems a mechanism to deal with an impossible situation. How else do you deal with having to co-habit with the murderer of your father? There’s no book of etiquette for such things. Beyond his public face, there is a world of hypocrisy and linguistic falsity in the Polonius/Claudius generation that can only be met with the jabberings of the Joker.
The real moments of madness, the moments when, in his own words, ‘Hamlet from himself be ta’en away’ are easy to spot. Most of them, crucially, involve Ophelia. His first reported appearance to her is a vivid description of a mind absented. His explosion after he realises she has tricked him and starts raving ‘Get thee to a nunnery’ is so jangled and out of order it is clear he has fallen into a deep well of unwellness. This moment follows ‘To be, or not to be . . .’ and precedes ‘Speak the speech. . .’, two of the most articulate statements of expressed thought in dramatic history. The rapidity with which he collapses into the other self, the self revealed by madness, is the mark of someone in trouble beyond their own care. The third is over Ophelia’s grave, when he can no longer bear to hear Laertes’ expressions of grief. Having planned to hide himself, he bursts into the middle of the group, screaming like a demented rock star ‘This is I, Hamlet the Dane!’, before leaping into the grave to grapple with Laertes and scream abuse at him. This is a man with an alarming capacity for loss of self. In all three cases, the trigger is Ophelia, and love.
People can be loath to attach to a figure as cosmic as Hamlet a narrative as corny as a love story. His finely wrought sensibility has to be the result of something philosophic, something grand. But there is no reason why the corny and the cosmic cannot walk hand in hand. The evidence is clear. The letter he sends to Ophelia, which Polonius accuses of being stuffed with ‘vile phrases’, speaks of
a love full of the innocence that always carries the greatest freight of hurt. We know he has given her gifts, since Ophelia’s attempt to return them upsets him so deeply. And his raving declaration over her grave, directed at Laertes,
I loved Ophelia: forty thousand brothers
Could not, with all their quantity of love,
Make up my sum.
is hyperbolic, but true love and hyperbole are hardly exclusive. Hamlet, in the jittery state he is in after the death of his father, has returned to Elsinore and attached himself to the one person who can fill the outsize hole within him. Nor does that love have to be a reaction to a problem elsewhere. The heart is the heart, and always its own boss. You can love and have crushes wherever you like, you can make a thousand sensible choices, but the heart is its own boss. It strikes without prescription. The love for Ophelia is yet another factor piling weight upon Hamlet, all that downwards pressure paradoxically catalysing his diamond-like clarity of thought.
One of the most Hamletian figures I have known was the playwright Sarah Kane, who took her life at the age of twenty-eight, having produced a compact but astonishing body of work. Often given to wearing a demonstrative black, at odds with her own time – theatrically, politically and spiritually – and helplessly over-exposed to the pain around her near and far, she stood hovering off the pitch of the world on a wet day, much as Hamlet does. As bright and free and joyous in moments as Hamlet can be, a delight to drink with and a lover of infantile party games, she was also incapable of setting herself apart from the world’s million cruelties, and had no choice but to go to war with them. Yet what broke her, as much as anything, was love. Her loves were total and titanic, consuming passions that obliterated all matter outside their own vivid and livid existence. When they didn’t work out, as they could not, since the objects of her affection could never match her level of intensity, there was no consolation. Nowhere to turn. Stuck within that conundrum, the fact that she managed to celebrate love (in all her plays, but most noticeably in Cleansed and in Crave), love with its redeeming fierceness and its savage loyalty, says much for her courage as a person. But writing doesn’t purge, it only stirs the pot, and there was no escape for her.
The loss of a parent is, of course, the other source of rocks in the rucksack. We know Hamlet is grieving from the start: he tells us so. His rebuke to the court about who is doing the best grieving smacks a little of competitive rage rather than sorrow, but the disorder of his thinking during the first soliloquy and his behaviour after the encounter with his father’s ghost means there is no doubting the derangement caused by grief. Another manifestation of Hamlet’s inner chaos occurs in the closet scene with his mother, after he has stabbed through the curtain and killed Polonius. That action, plus his loving recall of his real father, plus his horrified disgust at his mother sleeping with another man, plus his incomprehension at his mother’s capacity to change herself, all contribute to a loss of self. Consumed by rage, he screams at his mother:
A murderer and a villain;
A slave that is not twentieth part the tithe
Of your precedent lord –
GERTRUDE No more!
HAMLET A king of shreds and patches –
At that moment, when it feels his rage is about to bubble over into violence, the ghost of his father reappears, seemingly to protect his mother. There is a propensity for violence against women here, which is less than charming, but we can see the swirls and eddies of a spirit in grief, of a personality whose keystones and foundations have been ripped away. How can any of us expect to survive intact the loss of a parent?
Hamlet had always spoken to me most clearly when fresh from the poleaxing of lost love. What solution is there for that but work, and time, and booze, and walking the streets at night like some poor beast in the rain? When I was fresh from the poleaxing of a lost parent, my mother, an event that occasioned a ground-swell of wildernessing sorrow, I sank into a depression the like of which I had never anticipated. Sleeplessness, spiralling inwards, terror of the world, panic at events and responsibilities, all had introduced me to the brute reality of a state of which I had previously been sceptical. To my shame, I had always been dismissive of it in others, including Sarah Kane. ‘Pull yourself together’ was the shameful calibre of advice I offered. Until I myself was heartbutted by it.
Depression is a subject so thoroughly explored by others it seems impertinent to add to the pile of words already written. (It occasionally seems too thoroughly explored, but this is preferable to the stiff-upper-lip silence within which my generation grew up: rather a surfeit of understanding than a scarcity.) It would also seem a little impertinent, given that the moment I started talking to friends about it, it quickly became apparent I was only in the foothills of the condition; others risked themselves on far higher and more hazardous peaks. Competitive depression has given rise to a whole new form of one-upmanship. Anecdotes about mental deterioration are told with a wary eye, knowing that one can imminently be trumped by something more dramatic. Nothing sharpens the competitive instinct like comparing milligrammage of antidepressant – my 10mg a day turned out to be comically small in comparison with others’ pharmacological mountaineering.
What I endured was foggy and mild beside the sharp plunges of Hamlet’s condition. Shakespeare was a natural exaggerator, a compounder of what predecessors had only done by half. Plautus wrote the Menaechmi with one set of twins; Shakespeare stole the plot for The Comedy of Errors and made it two sets. Double the confusion, double the fun. In the source for Hamlet, the main character acts mad to achieve his ends; here he both acts mad and is mad. Why not pile on every conceivable stress, to take him to the very edge of that high rock, jutting precariously over the North Sea waves: a lost parent, a murdered parent, a political fortune lost, a betraying mother, a first love inexplicably cut off. Why not see whether anyone can survive all that, twisting in the lurching wind, and keep a grip on themselves? That Hamlet falters, that he does dip and surge out of himself, is inevitable and human. For all my milquetoast depression, I never came close to the flinging loss of self that afflicts Hamlet (thank God), but I am grateful the play is there as a paradigm to show what can happen at the brink.
It is not just anyone that these problems afflict, it is Hamlet, a young man of acuity and exquisite attunement. That is the further reach of Shakespeare’s risk: he doesn’t pile all these calamities on a dullard’s head; he piles it on the man most susceptible to feel it. In many ways, the person least likely to survive it. The fact that he survives for as long as he does, doing us the favour of trying to articulate how it is to live it, increases our admiration for him. That paradox, the infliction of the greatest pain on the most sensitive human, begs the question close to the heart of the play. How are we to deal with the vast, illogical pain of the world? How, in the face of the world’s desire to demonstrate its capacity for unnecessary torment, are we to react? Is madness not the only appropriate response? Hamlet is clearly far too exposed, just as Sarah was, but what is the correct amount of exposure? As Lear asks with a wrecking simplicity at the threshold of his own madness, when he thinks of those who have turned on him: ‘Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?’ Should we cauterise and harden our own hearts to protect ourselves better from the pain of love, from the pain of loss? Or should we open ourselves up as fully as possible, meeting pain with the vital sensitivity of a Hamlet? And thus expose ourselves to the foothills of depression in some cases, or to a plunging loss of self in others. What price pain, and what price its compensation – openness and wisdom?
* * *
The solutions to these questions weren’t going to be found in the Zócalo that evening. Somehow, by a heroic triumph of will over common sense, we got to the end of the play. It was my birthday, St Crispin’s Day, and driven by the same absurd sense of duty that got us through the show, we happy few repaired to a bar for what was supposed to be a party. Hardly anyone put a glass to their lips before we were all rushi
ng back to the sanctuary of the hotel. I lay myself out on my bed, folded my arms across my chest like a recumbent knight on an old tomb, and waited for the waves to crash. Some lucid part of my brain was determined to stay present for this. It attacked my body first, legs and arms twitching gently, before surges of heat and cold expanded tremors into shakes and then full-on convulsions – arms, legs and torso hurling themselves into funny shapes like a cartoon character. ‘Hello, I’m having a fit,’ I thought. ‘This is jolly.’ It was one of the most cleanly out-of-body experiences of my life.
Shortly thereafter, the enjoyable weirdness gave way to the pure dullness of becoming an extension of the toilet, where every trip back to the bed is merely a pause before your master, the bowl, calls you back again. The early sprints became a grim, unending marathon, and disbelief grew at how an ostensibly finite problem could seem to stretch so endlessly onwards.
Sleep, wake, night and dawn folded in and out of each other in their uneasy wrestle, and somehow I became part of the new day. I quickly discovered that my psychodrama was being replicated in almost every other room. Distress calls were sent out to our Mexican promoters. Later that day, they appeared in numbers. They went from room to room, accompanied by a wizened, Yoda-like doctor. A figure of seemingly infinite wisdom, he asked peculiarly delicate and tender personal questions, most of which had nothing to do with our bodies. Having gained infinite trust, he then swiftly stabbed each of us in the arse with some cocktail of antibiotics, steroids and vitamins. It would be an exaggeration to say this did the trick, but his presence reassured and some form of normality returned.
With the whole company down, there was no way we could do a show that evening. We put an extra one on later, and somehow the company recovered sufficiently to do four shows in two days. I got out before that, a depleted figure, and was driven to the airport for an early flight by one of our producers. Still elastically attached to any passing convenience, I scrawled my signature on a contract and crawled onto a plane. Just before the plane was about to take off, my phone erupted with texts. A lovely gay woman I had met a couple of days ago, and who had helped us considerably, was making a late-breaking bid for me to donate some of my sperm. I assented enthusiastically in theory and prayed that the plane would take off soon.
Hamlet, Globe to Globe Page 9