We sat there on the deck, the red sea gently bashing against the rocks below us, and talked about how this inarticulacy has plagued us all our lives. About how many of our sentences open with phrases of uncertainty: ‘I don’t know, but. . .’ ‘I have a sense of. . .’ ‘There is a feeling. . .’ ‘Something beyond our own ken. . .’ The uncertainty frightens us, because it leaves a vacuum, but it also offers hope, because that vacuum needs to be filled. That absence provokes an appetite for the world, for all its surprises, and, most importantly, for love. A love that is ever on the wing, occasionally flying beside but more often caught on currents of air, floating away, leaving the gentle agnostic on the lookout once again. Love as a search, not a certainty. The agnostic’s journey is always one of doubt, of openness, of confusion offered with humility to the world. It is in many ways, we hope, the journey we are making around the world, and the story of the play itself. Hamlet is a play for agnostics who are on the hunt for more. It is a play that resists certainty. Actively.
Christ wanders through Hamlet like the man with a cross pursuing a lonely Calvary around the world. He dances in and out of the play. There is a plethora of theories about the operation of Christianity and religion in the play – each theory a better reflection of the world it emerges from than the world it purports to explain. During eras that were keen to deploy Shakespeare as an extra buttress in that fortress called civilisation, Hamlet was a Christian play about a Christian chap whose head got a little turned but who found his way back to sanity again with some help from good old Christian clarity. What there is little doubt about, after Greenblatt’s revelatory work on the question of purgatory in the play, is that the afterlife and ideas of proper and improper burial are the central source of much of its emotional heat. It is clear that the act of killing, whether of others or of the self, is framed in the context of its moral weight in the Christian world. It would be hard to contest, in a play whose central character has spent a substantial amount of time in Wittenberg, that the seizing muscular tension between Catholicism and Protestantism within which all of Europe was racked was not also a source of its restless energy.
Given all that, it still seems possible to overstate the presence of religion and Christ in the play. The soliloquies are clear thinking in a fog; they are not foggy thinking in a clear world. The afterlife is uncertain, as Hamlet outlines:
Who would these fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns. . .
(There is an inherent wobbliness in this statement, given that Hamlet is one of the few people who has met a traveller from that bourn: his own father. You do feel like shouting, ‘What about the ghost then?’. . . But looking for cosmic consistency in Shakespeare is as daft as looking for it in the world.) There is something exquisitely unsure about the clumsiness of that ‘something’. It is a word that questions rather than asserts. It is a wonderfully English word, as aptly used in its Anglo-Saxon vague-ness here as in Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’ when he reaches for the sublime and can only find:
Of something far more deeply interfused
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man. . .
In both, the word ‘something’ feels lumpy and contingent, emerging from a coarse, confused, secular world, from our loamy English earth, happy to reach for the heights but less than confident of its ability to touch them.
The messy human dynamics between characters also belie the idea of an infrastructure based on Christian certitude and stability. The love between Hamlet and Ophelia is a mortal love: it overpowers them both and destroys Ophelia. Religion offers no solace: the nunnery is elsewhere. Family dynamics are fraught and modelled on a pre-Christian pattern, with their conscious echoing of Aeschylus’s Oresteia. Interactions between parents and children lay waste to everyone, and godliness does nothing to soothe, to mitigate, to heal. The play’s politics are the machinations of human politics, monitoring internal dissent, squashing petty rebellions, jostling with other states for regional influence. The sanction of religion for these actions is sought, but more out of expediency than conviction. These are just people blundering around and across each other’s blunderings. Even the Priest who appears seems, as with many of Shakespeare’s friars and priests, more human than divine. We live now in a world full of people of terrifying religious certainty; none of them pop up in this play.
At the conclusion of the play, Hamlet does align his soul to a place of calm and quiet. He returns from his odd escapade with the pirates with a new strand in the twisted skein of his self: a religiously inflected determinism. Talking to his confidant Horatio about how he found himself back in Denmark, he says: ‘There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will. . .’
This seems to settle the free will versus predestination argument pretty neatly. Later, we have his seraphic calm after he has accepted the challenge to fight Laertes: ‘There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. . .’ The fall of a sparrow is a reference to Matthew 10, 29–31: ‘Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing, and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your father?’ The biblical quotation, a weary soul finding sweet repose in providence, the final submission to a higher will, all seem to point in a certain direction – towards a nice undergraduate essay about a confused young man finally finding resolution through the religious language available to him.
But this is not the whole story. After Hamlet’s return, he goes feral crazy at the sight of Laertes’ outpouring of grief at Ophelia’s grave; he cattily and viciously humiliates the court gadfly Osric; his pride manipulates him into accepting Laertes’ challenge, and in the course of the fight he again loses self-control. The new-found religiosity, the Christian calm are there, of course, but they are wound tightly together with madness, depression, pride, aggression. Hamlet, and his creator Shakespeare, are too restless and protean to settle on a single thread. Hamlet incorporates religion within himself, he lives its richness and potential, but it does not consume the whole of him.
In the final, desolate, image of the play, as son, mother, stepfather and Laertes lie twisted and bleeding on the floor of the court, as other freshly dead corpses lie in newly turned earth elsewhere, as the state teeters on the brink of collapse, and a foreign leader takes control, as all this loss stacks up, it is hard to see religion as much of a presence, let alone as an overpowering force. Christ is there, but not dominant – he is on the margins, flitting in and out of the play, as he flitted in and out of Shakespeare’s world. As Arthur Blessitt and Keith Wheeler move through nations now, lonely figures wandering with a cross. Christ is driven to the edges of the play and the world, but he is still there.
* * *
It is almost morning in Taipei, and we are, as we have been in so many nightclubs, in so many cities, in so many countries, the last people to leave. The music is softer and the elaborate light shows have morphed into solid, white, go-home-now blankness. After their dystopian odyssey through the Pacific Islands, the company have spent all their stockpiled appetite for a big night out, and their excitement melts into exhaustion. The room, a few hours ago full of sex and noise and dance, and rich with stories old and new and yet to come, is empty as we step into the lift to depart into the dawn. The strangers all are gone.
65 Portugal, Lisbon
Centro Cultural de Belem
5 January 2015
66 Algeria, Algiers
The Algerian National Theatre Mahieddine Bachtarzi
7 January
67 Tunisia, Carthage
La Cathédrale Saint-Louis de Carthage
10 January
68 Egypt, Cairo
Bibliotheca Alexandrina
12 January
69 Eritrea, Asmara
&n
bsp; Cinema Roma
15 January
70 Sudan, Khartoum
National Theatre
19 January
71 Ethiopia, Addis Ababa
National Theatre of Ethiopia
22, 24 January
72 Dijbouti, Djibouti City
Djibouti Palace Kempinski
26 January
73 Somaliland, Hargeisa
Ambassador Hotel, hosted by Hargeisa Cultural Center
29 January
74 Kenya, Nairobi
Oshwal Centre
2 February
75 Uganda, Kampala
Uganda National Cultural Centre
4 February
76 Rwanda, Butare
National University of Rwanda
7 February
77 Burundi, Bujumbura
King’s Conference Centre
9 February
78 Tanzania, Dar es Salaam
The Little Theatre
12 February
79 Nigeria, Lagos
The MUSON Centre
4 March
Nigeria, Lagos
St Saviour’s School
6 March
80 Benin, Cotonou
The English International School
8 March
81 Togo, Lomé
British School of Lomé
10 March
82 Ghana, Accra
National Theatre of Ghana
13 March
83 São Tomé and Príncipe, São Tomé
Congress Palace
15 March
84 Ivory Coast, Abidjan
Village Ki-Yi Mbock
19 March
85 Republic of Congo, Brazzaville
Centre de Formation et de Recherche en Art Dramatique
22 March
86 Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kinshasa
Centre Culturel Boboto
24 March
8
MURDER AND THE RICE FIELDS
HAMLET . . . now could I drink hot blood,
And do such bitter business as the day
Would quake to look on.
Act 3, Scene 2
FOR A PLAY THAT IS supposed to be one of literature’s most meditative and philosophical, Hamlet has a fairly impressive body-count. It’s not quite in the Terminator class, but it’s not a long way off Titus Andronicus either. The play begins on a tensely guarded battlement. Denmark is a country in a state of watchful nervousness – Fortinbras, the young tyro of neighbouring Norway, has ‘sharked up a list of lawless resolutes’ to recover lands lost by his father.
The back story for this unease is laid out after the first appearance of the Ghost. Hamlet’s father, also called Hamlet, just seen in spectral form, had killed Fortinbras’s father, also called Fortinbras, a generation ago – on the day of young Hamlet’s birth – and thus gained for his nation a chunk of territory. The coincidence of the names can be confusing when first trying to figure out some dense exposition, but offers up a field day for psychoanalysts. Factor in that Shakespeare’s son who died young was called Hamnet, and the field day becomes an extended conference. Add the rumour that Shakespeare acted the part of the Ghost, Hamlet’s father (shortly after his own father had died), and the conference spins out into a never-ending congress.
The killing of old Fortinbras is one of the many well-coiled springs which impel the play’s trajectory. The second and principal killing is, of course, the murder of old Hamlet, the Ghost we have just seen. At first this is a mystery to us, though audiences then and now know that a spirit that walks the earth is not a happy one. We soon learn why, and the reason is presented with the melodramatic flourish of a popular barnstormer:
GHOST I am thy father’s spirit,
Doom’d for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confined to fast in fires,
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purged away. But that I am forbid
To tell the secrets of my prison house,
I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul; freeze thy young blood;
Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres.
O, if thou didst ever thy dear father love –
HAMLET O God!
GHOST Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder.
HAMLET Murder!
GHOST Murder most foul, as in the best it is;
But this most foul, strange and unnatural.
The whole passage pivots around the word ‘murder’ with the architectural intent of the keystone being dropped into a complex arch. It pivots on the word just as a ballerina spinning a whirlwind pirouette spirals an unconscionable amount of pressure onto two toes. This murder kick-starts the narrative, and murder becomes the rocket fuel that powers the play along.
Of all Shakespeare’s plays, Hamlet features the most impressive cull of its principal dramatis personae. Polonius is killed by Hamlet. Ophelia takes her own life in suicidal distress at her father’s death and the disastrous love affair with Hamlet. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have their heads lopped off by an English king we never see. Gertrude is inadvertently killed by Claudius’s poison intended for Hamlet. Laertes is finished off by the poisoned tip of his own sword. Claudius is doubly done in by the sword’s tip and his own poison. Hamlet is finished off by both these means too. When he intones ‘the rest is silence’, he appears to speak both for himself and for the other corpses strewing the stage.
Along the way we see the skull of a dead clown, amidst a field of other skulls, and we watch a Norwegian army cross the stage, off to commit senseless slaughter in Poland. The lightness and brightness of the play’s thought, the flashes of its dancing wit, the wild spree of its improvised insight – all take place in front of a landscape of death.
Left alive, we have Horatio, a figure of unending goodwill, though more a witness than a protagonist, and Fortinbras, a soldier accustomed to fields of slaughter. He is able to survive the chaos and to give the audience some measure of its horror by his own disquiet: ‘Such a sight as this / Becomes the field, but here shows much amiss.’ It is a play that leaves few survivors.
The onslaught of action confounds the play’s reputation as a philosophic treatise, and Hamlet himself is a long way from the ‘procrastinator’ of popular reputation – a myth given hefty emphasis by Olivier’s film, which opened with the statement that it was ‘the tragedy of a man who couldn’t make up his mind’. In the second half of the drama, after the long period when he manages little more than putting on a play, he stabs Polonius through the arras, indirectly causes the death of Ophelia, and fixes a letter to dispatch his old friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Without knowing what he is doing, he finishes off Laertes with his own poisoned sword, and knowing what he is doing, kills Claudius with sword and poison. In the space of about an hour of stage time, that is three acts of killing done in ignorance (the whole Polonius family), two intentional acts of killing done indirectly, and one done directly and knowingly and triumphantly. It is a wonder that in the course of this mayhem we retain such sympathy for him. It is hard to think of another Shakespeare protagonist who kills as many of those we have come to know and love as Hamlet. Yet when Horatio intones over his friend’s freshly dead body,
Now cracks a noble heart. Good night sweet prince:
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!
we weep. Macbeth reveals the unfolding of a psychopath, and his chilling deadness to those around him is in a different realm, yet even he doesn’t do as much damage to the main characters in the drama as Hamlet. Shakespeare has a capacity for sneaking things in under the radar, and the conclusion of this play, when we weep for the fate of a man who has caused so much destruction, is one of his most arresting paradoxes.
Once Hamlet begins to act, the mental cloud shrouding his perception, together with the speed of the drama, diminishes reflection on his moral choices. In the first half
of the play, he is paralysed by questions; in the second half, with interruptions, he acts. ‘To be, or not to be . . .’ is a discourse on the rights or wrongs of self-slaughter. Its question of ‘should I or shouldn’t I?’ is often misapplied to the other principal question of whether he should follow his father’s instruction and kill Claudius. His struggle with the latter is less ‘Should I or shouldn’t I?’ and more ‘Why can’t I?’ It is less about moral choice than the summoning of willpower. From the moment the task is laid down by his father, he indulges in little moral analysis and a lot more self-castigation for not getting on with it. In another of Shakespeare’s amoral manipulations of sympathy, we find ourselves willing him to get on with it, without counting the moral weight ourselves. The more he asks in exquisite language and with fierce truth, ‘Why can’t I kill this man?’, the more we find ourselves thinking collectively, ‘Yes, why can’t we?’, without asking whether it is right or not. We all become complicit.
At the conclusion of the Mousetrap play, when the court is in disarray, and he is cock-a-hoop with the success of his own plan, he finally speaks with the resolution of the authentic man of action:
now could I drink hot blood,
And do such bitter business as the day
Would quake to look on.
Immediately after this, Shakespeare provides him with the ideal opportunity to follow through, when he passes the defenceless Claudius at prayer – ‘Now might I do it’. He rushes towards Claudius sword in hand, ‘Now I’ll do it. . .’ Then, mid-action, he pauses. Thus providing us with one of the play’s most iconic plastic images, the young Prince, sword raised above the head of the praying King, pausing in the moment of murder. Someone about to kill, who has chosen not to.
Hamlet, Globe to Globe Page 13