105 Fiji, Suva
University of South Pacific
8 June 2015
106 Tuvalu, Funafuti
Vaiaku Fale Kaupule Hall
9 June
107 Samoa, Apia
National University of Samoa
12 June
108 Nauru, Yaren District
Nauru College
15 June
109 Solomon Islands, Honiara
The National Museum Auditorium
18 June
110 Vanuatu, Port Vila
Wan Smolbag Theatre
21 June
111 Tonga, Nuku’alofa
The Amphitheatre
23 June
112 Kiribati, South Tarawa
Betio Sports Complex
25 June
113 Marshall Islands, Majuro
International Convention Center
29 June
114 Federated States of Micronesia, Kolonia
FSM Sports Center
1 July
115 Palau, Melekeok
Ngarachamayong Cultural Centre
3 July
11
WITTENBERG IN THE DESERT
LAERTES when these are gone,
The woman will be out.
Act 4, Scene 7
ONE OF THE MANY SOURCE stories for Hamlet includes a Danish legend from the twelfth century which claims that Hamlet was actually a woman, and that his/her mum had hidden his/her identity to secure his/her claim to the throne. Hamlet could not even come into existence without being shrouded in ambiguity.
Though Hamlet was voraciously claimed by Burbage on its first outing – ‘2,000 lines! Yes, I think I’ll have a bit of that’ – there was no chance (pace Shakespeare in Love) of a woman playing it on the all-male Elizabethan/Jacobean stage. But it did not take long for women to start claiming the role. Theatre people (and especially the men) are whores for ticket sales above all else. Critics are kind enough to ascribe seriousness to our endeavours, but they would be dismayed if they knew how cravenly we chase full houses, and how much that chase dictates choices. Once women started to appear in British theatres by the lascivious good grace of Charles II, and once they proved their astonishing popularity (a process that took about twelve seconds), it was only a matter of time before women started claiming the leading male roles.
Nor should it be surprising that Hamlet, the most complete expression of what it is to be human, should be an attractive role for women. It invites open interpretation. Hamlet lives in a fog, the lines of his drawing are fuzzy and uncertain. Where other leading tragic figures in Shakespeare’s canon are more sharply delineated – Othello, the noble Moor; Lear, the mentally vulnerable tyrant; Anthony, the decaying libertine – Hamlet occupies space uncertainly. He is so negatively defined by what he is not, and what he is unable to become – he cannot become the king, he cannot return to Wittenberg to be a student, he cannot fulfil his desire to be Ophelia’s lover, he is incapable of becoming the man of action his father’s spirit wants him to be – all this inability to achieve clarity as a persona leaves room for interpreters to sketch their own shape. Free space enables the imagination – Hamlet’s very own negative capability. His uniqueness is in part his liminality, which makes him available to all.
His supreme intelligence, and the delicate game he plays (and often loses) between feigned madness, real madness and disabling clarity of sight, all leave his identity free. He sees so clearly through the constructions which others encase themselves within – the security blanket of two-dimensionality – and his own fluid identity enables him so accurately to deconstruct others, that he slips free of conventional definitions himself, including male and female. E.M. Forster divided his characters into flat and round, those stuck in a groove and those capable of change. Hamlet is in a separate dimension – a whirling cloud of thoughts, sensations and feelings. He becomes an essence of humanity.
Yet to deal for a moment in old-fashioned gender definitions, he does have something of the feminine about him. He is out of tune with the masculine boorishness of the Danish court, his relationship with Ophelia is a passionate meeting of spirits but far from a conventional love story, and his feelings for Horatio are as much sisterly as brotherly. In his greatest fit of self-loathing, when berating himself for being unable to enact vengeance on Claudius, he bitterly accuses himself of being too feminine:
Why, what an ass am I! This is most brave,
That I, the son of a dear father murdered,
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!
The expressions here are pejorative, but the anger driving Hamlet is an unease with his own femininity. Edwin Booth, the great nineteenth-century American actor, wrote of his approach to the role:
I have always endeavoured to make prominent the femininity of Hamlet’s character and therein lies the secret of my success – I think. I doubt if ever a robust and masculine treatment of the character will be accepted so generally as the more womanly and refined interpretation. I know that frequently I fall into effeminacy, but we can’t always hit the proper keynote.
There are about twelve things within those sentences which make you want to punch Edwin Booth, while still appreciating his point of view.
There is also Hamlet’s weight of feeling, a freight of emotion which on several occasions becomes insupportable for himself. That strength of feeling has traditionally been ascribed, for good or bad, to women. And the ability to translate such strong feelings into speech. Women are traditionally understood to be able to ‘unpack their hearts’, where men are more likely to pack them up and secure them with an undecipherable lock. That volatility, and that openness with the workings of the heart, makes the part available to women, where traditionally the more beefy roles have not been. Also in purely technical terms, actresses are good at summoning tears, where actors more often have to resort to the onion in the hankie.
We are uncertain as to when the first female Hamlet appeared, but by the middle of the eighteenth century it was far from exceptional. By 1775, Sarah Siddons is already being mentioned in dispatches for her brave work in the provinces playing Hamlet. Whether the audience loved her Hamlet or not, she was clearly a fan herself, since she carried on playing it for another twenty-seven years. London’s first recorded female Hamlet was Elizabeth Powell at Drury Lane in 1796. Another of the first female Hamlets, Kitty Clive, won effusive praise from Dr Johnson. ‘Mrs. Clive was the best player I ever saw,’ he opined. ‘What Clive did best, she did better than Garrick.’ It is hard to imagine what Garrick, Johnson’s close friend, would have made of this. Or maybe it’s not. Another fan of a female Hamlet was Edmund ‘flashes of lightning’ Kean. His contemporary Walter Donaldson told of his response to a Hamlet performed by one Julia Glover: ‘At the end of the first act [Edmund] Kean came behind the scenes and shook Mrs. Glover, not by one, but by both hands, and exclaimed, “Excellent! Excellent!” The splendid actress, smiling, cried, “Away, you flatterer! You come in mockery to scorn and scoff at our solemnity.”’
East-coast American theatre and London theatre were as neighbourly then as they are now, and in 1820 Sarah Bartley became the first female American Hamlet in the Park Theatre in New York. Another two American women assayed the role in the nineteenth century, both deeply unconventional and worthy of becoming figures as iconic as Hamlet himself. Anna Elizabeth Dickinson was a Radical Republican firebrand who campaigned throughout her life for the abolition of slavery and for women’s suffrage. A gifted and powerful orator from an early age, in a time when standing on a box and scooping a crowd into the swoop of your rhetoric could still nudge history a little this way or that, her power over a crowd was used extensively. Both before the civil war and in the most dangerous zones during it, she was utilised by the Radical Republicans to help push America towards a slavery-free future. At a time whe
n being seen and not heard was still a commonplace for many women, to stand up and excoriate Lincoln for being too soft in front of the House of Representatives is a testament to her courage. And to America’s unheralded ability to be ahead of the game in forging the future. When she took on the role of Hamlet, the very act of doing so was assumed to be a proof of her insanity. With a blurring Hamletian irony, in later life she was kidnapped and forcibly committed to an asylum by her own sister. She won her own freedom and spent much of the rest of her life clearing her own name from what was then thought the ‘slur’ of madness.
The face of Charlotte Cushman, another celebrated American nineteenth-century actress, stares out at us from a series of sepia-tinted photographs. She is far from a conventional beauty, really very far, but an iron will and an unabashed strength sail forth from each image like a Victorian battleship. In the photographs, she is usually accompanied by a frail female beauty, kneeling in supplication to her, or garlanding the frame timidly behind. These are several of the lovers who fell by the wayside as she blazed a trail of unconventional living through the Western world. Her soprano voice having failed her at an early age, she turned to acting and took on Lady Macbeth at the age of nineteen. The conventional female repertoire was never going to satisfy her. Her sister became her co-star, the two of them playing to great acclaim the passionate love story of Romeo and Juliet, with Charlotte as Romeo. She later graduated to Hamlet, playing it in Boston and New York from 1851, and, as a mark of high cross-gender- boundaries esteem, Edwin Booth lent her his Hamlet outfit.
She later had a flattering portrait done by Thomas Sully, whose daughter she seduced for good measure. They exchanged rings and performed some form of mock marriage, after which Charlotte went on a European tour that stretched from a planned couple of months to several years. Rosalie Sully, left behind, died of a broken heart. Charlotte’s continuing life in Europe proved a hectic merry-go-round of passionate shenanigans as stormy relationship followed stormy relationship. Each punctuated by a moment when the couple of the moment sat and stood for a photograph in grim stillness, dressed with a deliberate male sobriety, for the joy and scandal of their love to be captured in monochrome cheerlessness. For a long period, while she was still performing, she settled in Rome, where she nurtured a community of bohemian and gay writers and artists.
For both of these extraordinary women, and many others like them, playing Hamlet was an act of political reclamation, bound up with their desire for greater rights, social and political, for women. Standing up for rights, and playing the Prince were expressions of a similar desire for equality of respect and expression. Dickinson was the more clearly political of the two, though the communities that Cushman fostered and led were at the forefront of modern thinking on women’s rights. In both cases, their acting threw new light on the text and the role. Simply seeing a woman relating to Gertrude and Ophelia within the dynamics of the narrative makes the spectator look anew, and moves judgement away from conventional thinking. Cushman is reported to have gone out of her way to show Hamlet treating the other women in the play with respect. One is tempted to think, given her capacity to engineer romantic havoc, that this might have been less an early expression of Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt (alienation effect) and more an actress on the pull, but that would be very cynical.
These two and many others, all across Europe and right across America to the rootin’ tootin’ Gold Rush west, were using this most iconic role to change ideas of what was and was not permissible. The apotheosis of the journey of a female Hamlet from the edges of culture to centre stage belonged to the French actress Sarah Bernhardt. Her career was a rooftop-scorching comet which flew low over the Western world, and her Hamlet was the climax of it. Bernhardt was adamant about the right way to approach the role: ‘I cannot see Hamlet as a man. . . The things he says, his impulses, his actions, entirely indicate to me that he was a woman.’ A hyperactive über-passionate characterisation, flaming with exposed sensibility, it inspired cities to draw to a standstill wherever she appeared. Ticketless punters stood in droves outside theatres she was performing in, drawn by the collective hysterical delusion that they could sense what was going on within. As if gravitational waves rippled out from Ms Bernhardt.
Her outsize personality bestrode the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century world like a colossus, sleeping in a coffin, and according to gossip sharing her coffin with half of Europe. Certainly when you look at the astonishing footage of her Paris funeral, it looks as if half the men and women in the huge crowds – hats gripped tightly to chests, hankies theatrically crumpled into eyes – felt a personal connection. Henry James wrote of her: ‘It would take some ingenuity to give an idea of the intensity, the ecstasy, the insanity as some people would say, of [the] curiosity and enthusiasm provoked by Mlle. Bernhardt.’
Hamlet was a central part of Bernhardt’s myth, though sadly all we have left is two brief moments of film which show her to be a fine fencer, with a slim, line-drawn grace and a natural ease. Happily, we have two hours of her great successor Asta Nielsen, who produced her own film of Hamlet in 1920. The film is little hindered by its lack of speech, and manages to convey a portrait of Hamlet which is witty, fine, tragic and broad all at the same time. It changes the gender of the character entirely. Nielsen plays Hamlet as a woman who has been brought up as a man by Gertrude and Claudius. This Hamlet is in love with Horatio, who is somewhat confused by his own feelings. The gender transition here spoke eloquently to a moment in Europe when gender was more fluid and relaxed than it had been for a while, and would be for a while longer, a fluidity most eloquently expressed in Weimar Germany.
Then bizarrely, with suffrage for women, the number of female Hamlets decreased. The performance historian Tony Howard has diagnosed two principal reasons for this. First, that playing Hamlet was an act of political defiance, which lost some of its gravity and importance with the gaining of suffrage. Second, that the ascension of the critic, and his (and it was almost exclusively his) fierce adherence to bourgeois values banished women from taking on such roles. What had been a commonplace was deemed by the high critical voice to be improper, and hence unallowable. One critic, William Winter, ensured himself a long spell in posterity’s doghouse by declaring in 1911: ‘It is difficult to understand why Hamlet should be considered feminine, seeing that he is supereminently distinguished by a characteristic rarely, if ever, discerned in women: namely that of considering consequences, of thinking too precisely on the event.’
The dead hand of collective consensus drove women away from such parts. It is only recently on our stages that such performances have started to flourish again, although they are still surprisingly rare. The break in this tradition was a weird interruption in a natural continuum where Hamlet was seen more and more as the property of all, a break which hopefully will never re-occur. Hamlet, both the character in the play and the cultural entity in the world, is too comprehensive and all-encompassing to let something as piffling as gender get in the way.
* * *
I boarded the plane for Saudi Arabia and settled into my seat, eagerly looking forward to six or seven hours where mobiles couldn’t grab attention, and where pleasant oblivion could reign. It was the last moment you want to see your least favourite schoolteacher walking towards you or sitting across the aisle. I did frantic looking-out-of-window and into-newspaper activity, to make it seem that I hadn’t spotted him. I sneaked a look across the aisle and spotted with some disappointment that he was doing the same thing. I was clearly his least favourite pupil.
It was a short trip to join the company for what was being billed as an historic event – the first time that Shakespeare has been performed with men and women on stage in Saudi Arabia. Finding a venue that would do this had proven one of the more challenging tasks of arranging the tour. Several places volunteered to host an all-male version, but we were not prepared to, and after much searching and delicate negotiation, we found a university venue that could accommodate us
.
The screen within the seat in front of me carried a fair old freight of religious observance and instruction for the faithful. Being told to pray at the beginning of a flight always makes me uneasy. The list of films available was oddly slanted in a way that seemed to defy logic. I was too stupid to see the connecting thread. I started watching The Martian, and spotted the weird way that, within this already sexless film, a strange cloud materialised in front of any woman’s chest whenever they appeared, and then followed them daemon-like around the room. It seemed that even the smallest amount of female flesh had to be pixilated into abstraction. Then I realised the thread that connected the films – they all contained minimal amounts of female flesh. Swearing, violence and outrageous comedy all seemed fine; girl’s shoulders were unseemly.
We flew in low over Jeddah late on a Friday night. The city was ablaze with skyscraper-sized flashing advertisements. It seemed that the man in the moon was being told to drink Pepsi. We landed and then taxied past column after column of private jets, all sleek and angular and pointing in a uniform direction, looking like an alien army preparing to march. We raced off the aircraft but were then blocked at immigration by a failed computer. This meant we had to stand still for an hour and a half, in a queue. Right in front of me was my least favourite teacher: right behind him his least favourite pupil. For ninety minutes, in paroxysms of stupid Englishness, we explored every bodily angle and every mannerism possible to avoid catching each other’s eyes. The sheer fatuousness of it, on both our parts, made me want to faint.
Entering the country was going to be difficult, since I had been told fifteen times by different people that I was not to say that I was here to do a show, or perform Hamlet, or do anything theatrical. If I admitted this, I would apparently be sent home, and the authorities would cancel the show. I had been coached like a spy to say, ‘I am on a cultural enrichment programme.’ ‘Cultural enrichment programme. . .’ I muttered over and over to myself as I looked for fresh and spontaneous ways not to be simply civil to the person in front of me. I was otherwise surrounded by hundreds of men who were all wearing white towel skirts and wraps and revealing a large amount of very hairy flesh. They were all here for Hajj to Mecca, which was only about seventy miles away. They were far less nervous or intimidated than me, and were moaning loudly about the computer delay. ‘For fuck’s sake,’ they kept saying in broad Birmingham accents. ‘What a shithole,’ another one opined, in a manner that seemed to lack the requisite religious reverence for a pilgrim.
Hamlet, Globe to Globe Page 19