Hamlet, Globe to Globe

by Dominic Dromgoole

  No one had attempted anything this daringly intimate before. Greek drama has a piercing interiority and is often directly simple, but it never quite loses the rhythm of recitation and song from which it was born. It rarely slips the grip of its own sculpted form to reveal the isolated human, lost within its stories. The Senecan tragedies from Rome which Shakespeare admired are steady and stately marches towards planned conclusions. Tudor dramatic poetry is not admired for much, but least of all for its sayable freshness. Marlowe opened up a collection of doors for Shakespeare beyond which were dazzling possibilities – epic, lyric and satirical – but his verse always tended gorgeously towards the rich, the marinated and the heavily sauced, rarely to the human and the lost. This speed of thought, this dizzying improvisation in extremis, was to a great degree Shakespeare’s own invention. He would have been helped towards it more by comedy than tragedy. The fast thinking of a distressed farceur in Aristophanes and Plautus, a quick-witted servant or adulterer speed-thinking his way out of a crisis, were better guides in how to write thought than the stately grandiosity of tragedy. It is doubtful he could have written consciousness so beautifully without his complementary comic voice. Or without a sense of humour. The storyteller spellbinding his audience in the Ecuadorian park knew that humour quickened the mind of his audience and brought them alongside him.

  The soliloquy comes to full flower in Hamlet, where 3,000 people sitting in a wider circle than the one I witnessed in Quito, in the first Globe, were brought into the seasick mind of a young prince. Richard Burbage stood above the groundlings in the yard, on the same level as the punters in the lower gallery, and below those paying higher prices in the two upper galleries. The audience were on every side of him. A human figure surrounded on all planes, up down left and right, by other humans all sharing the same light. It is not a position from which you dictate; it is a position from which you share.

  For several centuries, when everyone chose perversely to present Shakespeare in every form of theatre architecture bar the one he wrote for, actors would agonise over the nature of soliloquy and how to play it. ‘Who am I talking to?’ actors would ask. ‘Am I talking to myself? To another character in the play? To my mother? To ghosts? And why am I talking? Is it a confession? A plea? A justification?’ All these questions were necessitated by the fact that the audience were plunged wrongly into darkness, and that the only thing the actors could see were glaring theatre lights rather than receptive human faces. When the Globe was reconstructed and newly opened, the answers to these questions were bluntly supplied. ‘You’re talking to the audience, stupid. You’re telling them what you’re thinking.’ It unbundled centuries of misdirection.

  There is an honesty in this connection which many find problematic. Many want to hide Hamlet from the audience, not only with blinding lights, but also with a shield of tone. He should be anguished, he should be sardonic, he should be bitter, a centuries-high heap of ‘shoulds’. What matters most is that he is clear, and that he is fresh and alive in the moment. There is a purity of thought within these speeches, unmediated by a priori decisions. Each thought arrives for the first time, and finds the appropriate words for the first time. Often the words create the thoughts – words and thoughts birthing and new minting each other in that brave and reckless collaboration with the audience. The conversation is live and mutual. The look in the audience’s eyes, the intake and the exhale of their collective breath, affects each thought and its progress to the next. It is a young vulnerable man, saying, ‘Here I am, this is what I think (or what I think I think), listen to me, please.’ The openness in that request, the immediacy of its fragility, is why Hamlet has conquered the world. This is a gentle spirit talking modestly in the cold outside, whom we are pleased to ask in.

  The only rule of thumb for playing Hamlet’s soliloquies, above and beyond clarity, is never to teach, and always to learn. If you arrive with your thoughts pre-packaged before you start speaking, then unfurl them for the benefit of your audience, you are dead before you start. The morally superior Hamlet is as dull as the morally superior person sitting next to you on a park bench or at a table. Academics, actors and directors sometimes want to create a Hamlet who lives at an Olympian height, a character knowing and superior. It is the sort of figure one is as keen to punch on the stage as in life. The person we listen to is the person who is as excited by what he is saying as we are. Sometimes Hamlet’s own instruction – ‘Let be’ – is the best one for directors and commentators. Let the play be what it is.

  * * *

  Hamlet’s soliloquies are events in themselves, but there is also a narrative of intimacy and closeness which grows and shifts with them, the changing nature of Hamlet’s relationship with us, the audience. In our first private moment with the young Prince, he hurls his spew of thought at us with the force of projectile vomit. The court, dominated by his usurping uncle, have all just exited. Hamlet has been engaged in a terse, clipped exchange with his mother and uncle. The gnomic taut nature of his responses communicates the tension bubbling inside. The moment he can, he turns to us and unleashes:

  O, that this too too solid flesh would melt

  Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!

  Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d

  His canon ’gainst self-slaughter! – O God! God!

  How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,

  Seem to me all the uses of this world!

  Fie on’t! ah fie! ’tis an unweeded garden,

  That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature

  Possess it merely. That it should come to this!

  But two months dead: nay, not so much, not two:

  So excellent a king; that was, to this,

  Hyperion to a satyr; so loving to my mother

  That he might not beteem the winds of heaven

  Visit her face too roughly. Heaven and earth!

  Must I remember? Why, she would hang on him,

  As if increase of appetite had grown

  By what it fed on: and yet, within a month –

  Let me not think on’t – Frailty, thy name is woman!

  A little month, or ere those shoes were old

  With which she follow’d my poor father’s body,

  Like Niobe, all tears: – why she, even she –

  O, God, a beast, that wants discourse of reason,

  Would have mourn’d longer! – married with my uncle,

  My father’s brother – but no more like my father

  Than I to Hercules – within a month –

  Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears

  Had left the flushing in her galled eyes –

  She married. O, most wicked speed, to post

  With such dexterity to incestuous sheets!

  It is not nor it cannot come to good:

  We course down tumbling rapids of thought at synaptic speed, repetitions piling on repetitions, sense ripped from thought, exclamations erupting with violence. The iambic beat maintains a forward tread, but the incline is downhill and the ground is gravelly, so every minor eruption loosens the footholds. The actor, the character and we the audience keep slipping and stumbling. The only way not to fall is to give in to the cadence. The headlong rush of this soliloquy is an artful way to dump us, the audience, in at the deep end. Before we have had a chance to get to know this young man, he is pouring out the lava of his soul without mediation or filtering. The directness forces us into, if not agreement, immediate sharing, before we have any chance to consider what is being said. We are plugged directly into this young man’s scrambled soul. We become his confidants. Every confession needs a priest, every ancient mariner a wedding guest, every lament a hearer. Hearing a sorrow is not passive. It is as if we are at a large function, and someone has suddenly turned and planted a troublingly passionate kiss on our soul before rushing off. We are affronted, a little shocked. And also keen to see them again.

  We track his progress as he is told of his father’s ghost, as he meets
the Ghost and is informed of his father’s murder. We share in his determination to avenge his father’s spirit. The next time we meet him, instead of seeing him pursue that ambition, we see him trapped within an antic disposition, processing his emotional turmoil. His friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern arrive, then the Players with whom he shares memories. With both encounters, he secures a pause from his torment. Delighted as we are to see him, there is a feeling of privacy withheld, of being at an event with someone we now know well, whose secrets we share, but with whom it is difficult to renew our relationship at its full depth. This is frustrating, since we know secrets now, and found the depth of our previous intimacy exciting. We long for the privileged friendship again. After the First Player has moved himself and others to tears with his recitation of the fall of Troy, and the grief of Hecuba, we watch as the stage clears. We know with tantalising expectation that we are about to come face to face again:

  HAMLET Now I am alone.

  O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!

  Is it not monstrous that this player here,

  But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,

  Could force his soul so to his own conceit

  That from her working all his visage wann’d,

  Tears in his eyes, distraction in’s aspect,

  A broken voice? and his whole function suiting

  With forms to his conceit? and all for nothing!

  For Hecuba!

  What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,

  That he should weep for her? What would he do,

  Had he the motive and the cue for passion

  That I have? He would drown the stage with tears

  And cleave the general ear with horrid speech,

  Confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed

  The very faculties of eyes and ears. Yet I,

  A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak,

  Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause,

  And can say nothing. Am I a coward?

  Who calls me villain? Breaks my pate across?

  Plucks off my beard, and blows it in my face,

  Tweaks me by the nose – who does me this?

  Ha!

  ‘Swounds, I should take it: for it cannot be

  But I am pigeon-liver’d or ere this

  I should have fatted all the region kites

  With this slave’s offal: bloody, bawdy villain!

  Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain!

  O, vengeance!

  Why, what an ass am I! This is most brave,

  That I, the son of a dear father murder’d,

  Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell,

  Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words,

  And fall a-cursing, like a very drab,

  A scullion!

  Fie upon’t! foh! About, my brain! I have heard

  That guilty creatures sitting at a play

  Have by the very cunning of the scene

  Been struck so to the soul that presently

  They have proclaim’d their malefactions;

  I’ll have these players

  Play something like the murder of my father

  Before mine uncle: I’ll observe his looks;

  I’ll tent him to the quick: if he but blench,

  I know my course. The play’s the thing

  Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.

  At every moment of this speech, we walk beside Hamlet. From his initial self-disgust, through his disbelief that the Player in his fictional passion can be more authentic than he can within his own real pain. We live on the horns of his dilemma just as he does. All around the world, when our Hamlets asked the question ‘Am I a coward?’, they asked it directly and simply. They found someone in the audience, looked into their eyes, and pinned them back with the question. Sometimes people looked away, embarrassed, sometimes they offered support, often people replied ‘No.’ Whatever fourth wall remained by that point dissolved, and we the audience were in an open conversation with our leading man. The moment was electric, a gap of silence when we did not know how the story would proceed. It is disarming to hear an icon asking ‘Am I a coward?’

  He goes on to beg the treatment that would be meted out to a clown, to ‘break my pate across’, ‘to tweak me by the nose’. This is not an Agamemnon or a Priam. It is the opposite of what we expect from a hero. Burbage, who first played the part, would have been known to the audience as Titus, as Richard III, as Oberon, as Brutus, as Henry V – the ghosts of those sturdy Titans would have shimmered around his frame as he played Hamlet – and here he was dissolving the audience’s sense of security in his authority, asking them to tweak his nose. The risk is enormous, as is the courage in presenting weakness. As naked as we know it, and as comically foolish, it is the same eloquent openness as the entertainer on the grass in Quito.

  We follow him through his rage at himself. There is something unconvincing in his cursing of his uncle – ‘Bloody, bawdy villain’ – and effortful in his attempt to embody the spirit of retribution – ‘O vengeance’. This is too conventional for the Hamlet we know, this Heroding and roaring. Hamlet knows it; he shares in our embarrassment at his having tried too hard. There is a rueful apology, almost a complicit humour in his ‘Why, what an ass am I! This is most brave. . .’ This is the Hamlet we know, and we feel a renewed familiarity as he abuses himself for having been such a fool. His resolution to move things forward by producing a play seems more appropriate. The couplet he finishes on is a secure ending, a safe mooring. We share in his purpose and exhilaration as he leaves the stage.

  Which makes it all the more surprising that the next time we see him, we hear:

  To be, or not to be: that is the question:

  Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer

  The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

  Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

  And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;

  No more; and by a sleep to say we end

  The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks

  That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation

  Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;

  To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;

  For in that sleep of death what dreams may come

  When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

  Must give us pause: there’s the respect

  That makes calamity of so long life;

  For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,

  The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,

  The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,

  The insolence of office and the spurns

  That patient merit of the unworthy takes,

  When he himself might his quietus make

  With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,

  To grunt and sweat under a weary life,

  But that the dread of something after death,

  The undiscover’d country from whose bourn

  No traveller returns, puzzles the will

  And makes us rather bear those ills we have

  Than fly to others that we know not of ?

  Thus conscience does make cowards of us all. . .

  Those six grave yet flighted syllables, the bareness and the directness of them, an arrow of expressed thought. A hero, with all that Shakespeare’s audiences had come to expect from heroes, a hero who has the courage to ask the simplest question of all, and to ask it in its simplest form. Six syllables, thirteen letters, and everything packed within them. A question, not a statement. With no certainty in the right response. Hamlet has carried us thus far, we are in part him, in part his friend, and now he asks on our behalf the question that sits at the centre of our lives. The speed at which it is presented wrong-foots us. I’ve seen those six words done a hundred different ways. They’ve been preceded by post-modern pantos providing context, they have been repeated musically, they have been scr
eamed out, gurned and churned, and cued-in by every form of drum roll, literal and metaphorical. In our production, he simply came out and said it.

  The argument then twists and turns, and we shift with its tides. The opening movement is essentially ‘Why not’? Why not release ourselves from our bondage to the tyranny of the flesh, let ourselves float free from the shivering beast we are tethered to, and call it an end? The doubt sets in on the tiny phrase, placed in the middle of a line to make us stumble over it, ‘perchance to dream’. It is the dreaming, the potential for we-know-not-what which stops us. Seductive as it may be to disappear into unknowability – ‘what dreams may come’ are four words of surpassing invitation – it is still unknowable. We might want to sink into the pillow of the three kindly m’s in those last three words, but the dark still scares. He swerves away from the metaphysical to the all too bitterly worldly, and enumerates with political rage the injustices and frustrations of living in the world. But then we stumble again, on an aptly vague ‘something’. And on a more picturesquely imagined ‘undiscovered Country from whose bourn / No traveller returns’. What stops us is what we don’t know, what is in our imagination.

  Hamlet stood at a critical juncture in our own development, one of many when those long and uneasy walking companions, mind and body, were set to take a further step away from each other. All the evidence of the body, all that is substantial and can be recorded, is saying one thing, but the mind, its power of argument and imagination and of alternative reasoning, suggests another. How breathtaking to have heard those words for the first time, a lonely figure standing on a wooden stage, held in an embrace of human bodies, lifted by the held breath and fascinated attention of 3,000 spirits, each word defining and illuminating the tightrope we balance on as we try to hold battered flesh and fleeting thought together in one uncertain vessel.