The scene that follows between Hamlet and the Captain is a miracle of compression, and another example of Shakespeare’s draftsmanship. With a few brief overheard lines, he gives us a character we can believe in, and creates a situation that is both familiar and surprising.
Enter HAMLET, ROSENCRANTZ, GUILDENSTERN, and others.
HAMLET Good sir, whose powers are these?
CAPTAIN They are of Norway, sir.
HAMLET How purposed, sir, I pray you?
CAPTAIN Against some part of Poland.
HAMLET Who commands them, sir?
CAPTAIN The nephew to old Norway, Fortinbras.
HAMLET Goes it against the main of Poland, sir,
Or for some frontier?
CAPTAIN Truly to speak, and with no addition,
We go to gain a little patch of ground
That hath in it no profit but the name.
To pay five ducats, five, I would not farm it.
HAMLET Why, then the Polack never will defend it.
CAPTAIN Yes, it is already garrisoned.
HAMLET I humbly thank you, sir.
CAPTAIN God be wi’ you, sir.
It is fine craft, hearing both the right words and the right silences, leaving the appropriate space for characters to work each other out, and leaving whatever needs to be silent unsaid. Each ‘sir’ is placed and distinct, showing deference from above or below. The comma after ‘Yes’, before ‘it is already garrisoned’ is delicious, leaving the briefest amount of air for irony. Somehow, and the art within it is unfathomable, he summons up the army beyond, and the landscape around. We struggled a little in our tight production to achieve a host of soldiers marching – the resources were beyond us – and our compensation with singing an old military song and wandering around didn’t always pass muster. The scene with the Captain was, however, a joy to play.
A strong solid man, who knows and is at ease with himself, terse almost to the point of impertinence, he shows little deference. It is the soldier’s withheld and subversive economy of language. In answer to Hamlet’s callow question about military purpose, the response is brutally plain:
CAPTAIN Truly to speak, and with no addition,
We go to gain a little patch of ground
That hath in it no profit but the name.
This elliptical encounter sums up the enduring daftness of war: young men dressing up in meaningless uniforms in their thousands and crossing continents to kill each other, all for nondescript parcels of land.
At this moment when you would expect Hamlet to pivot one way, he flips the other. Having seen his insight and his thoughtfulness, we expect him to see through the absurdity of this endeavour and to lacerate it, which he does:
I see
The imminent death of twenty thousand men,
That, for a fantasy and trick of fame,
Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot
Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause,
Which is not tomb enough and continent To hide the slain?
But instead of thus condemning it, he surprises and confounds us, by drawing the opposite conclusion. This he sees in his present state of mind as proof of the highest nature of human endeavour, where men fight, not for a worthy cause, but for nothing, ‘for an egg-shell’. ‘Rightly to be great,’ he says ‘is greatly to find quarrel in a straw.’ Nooooooo, we cry out in our hearts and heads, but Hamlet is not there to be the person we want him to be or to mollify our contemporary concerns; he is there to be Hamlet. There is a rush of blood that rushes through him rather like that which Tolstoy describes coursing through the young Nikolai Rostov at the sight of the Prince of Russia inspecting his troops.
Soldiers criss-crossing northern Europe felt poignant and pertinent as we made our way around the globe. Just before our tour began, Russia annexed the Crimea. They began with biker-gang diplomacy, sending in Putin’s thugs to stake a claim, then shipped in military without insignia to seize the nodal points of power, then finished with smoothy-chops lawyers organising a referendum and strenuously arguing the legality of the whole thing. Simultaneously, in concert with separatists from eastern Ukraine, they began a low-level civil war in an area around Donetsk, and fed the fire with armaments and soldiers. A couple of months after the tour had begun, a civilian plane was downed by a rocket, fired from the area of fighting, which practically had a sign on it saying ‘Made In Russia’. The Russians denied this had anything to do with them. Tensions ran nerve-shreddingly high between Russia and the Ukraine, and beyond that Russia and the rest of the world. All this as we steered our way through Russia, the Baltic countries who were now feeling freshly threatened, and Ukraine itself. These eggshells may have been fragile, but they were still endlessly attractive to men who wanted to stomp on them.
We had dealt extensively with Russia over the last few years with a variety of shows. They were charming and have a theatre culture which is the envy of the world. They also have their own way of doing things. In setting up our tour, we had originally planned to play Hamlet in St Petersburg. However, our regular promoter wanted us to come to Moscow. He was adamant when I was there on some other business. ‘Come to Moscow with Hamlet,’ he said. ‘No thank you, we’re going to Petersburg,’ I replied. ‘Come to Moscow,’ he said. ‘Erm, no thank you, we’ve already arranged to go to. . .’ ‘Come to Moscow,’ he said. ‘Well, very sorry, but we can’t.’ Two days after I returned to London, the St Petersburg theatre rang and said nervously, ‘We’re so sorry, but you can’t come any longer.’ Twenty minutes later, our regular promoter rang: ‘Come to Moscow.’ We had a problem getting in to Belarus. We had a long-standing relationship with the Belarus Free Theatre, a company working in exile from one of eastern Europe’s last old-fashioned dictatorships, and had supported their frequent attempts to throw a light on the tyranny and repression within the country they could not return to. Because of this, the Belarus government were refusing us entry to their country. We rang our friends in Russia and explained our problem. A day later, the National Theatre of Belarus was on offer to us. We felt compromised by all this, but we had to get our tour done, and every country is every country.
In the middle of all the mayhem with Ukraine, and shortly after the downing of Malaysian Flight 17, I flew in to Moscow. Dropping in to Domodedovo airport, you are surrounded by forests of silver birches. They look like long thin arms stretching up, branch and twig hands splayed out at the top as if pleading to be let free from the prison of the earth. It did not take long for the conversation to turn to the Ukraine, our old friend Irina being pre-emptive with the justifications. ‘The USA can do what it wants, they can conquer Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya and now Syria, but Russia, no, Russia can do nothing. . .’ I tried a little of the two-wrongs-don’t-make-a-right line, but it felt exceptionally feeble. A lot of the people we know and whose judgement we trust were swept up in a semi-judicious, semi-hysterical nationalism. People who would have cared nothing for Donetsk, who would not have farmed it for five ducats, were now staking their dignity on the fate of this small patch of land.
At the interval of the show, I was summoned into a little room. There were layers of men with bulging jackets and self-important earpieces to get through before I got to the inner sanctum. There was a palpable sense of threat. The man who is No. 3 in the Russian hierarchy was there, and I was being granted an audience. It was a lively little group, but the man of power was instantly recognisable – thin, seated and leaning back out of the circle. He was silent and playing a deliberate lack of engagement. Putin-Lite basically. It was a hackneyed status play – I’m too powerful and cool to contribute. The whole non-engagement culture started in California (the central dumbness of it brilliantly eviscerated by Nik Cohn in Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom) and has now spread across the world like an infection. Cool plague. Most of the world has grown out if it, but like a country that is still playing records which went out of fashion years ago, it was still au fait in Russia. They clearly run workshops in how
to be Steve McQueen in the FSB.
He was surrounded by sweet women who wanted to talk, and charming men, but he clearly felt that contributing would lessen his authority. I was having none of it. ‘You don’t say much, do you?’ I asked him directly. No one translated. ‘What do you think of Shakespeare then?’ Someone did translate. Once he had got over his affront at being asked a direct question, he offered a few words of rather hackneyed wisdom about the Bard, as if they were crystal drops from the Lake of Clever. ‘OK, now I see why you don’t say much,’ I returned. The atmosphere started to get a bit sticky. I burnt some brandies quickly down my throat, then burbled some stuff to the charming others, before they returned to the theatre. During the second half, I went for a swim at our hotel, where I was surrounded by huge sullen lumps of Slavic muscle, several garlanded with gangster tattoos, all deliberately radiating a contained violence as a badge of honour. The No. 3 man thought he was doing it with style, the thugs in the pool couldn’t care, but they all looked as stupid as each other. All followed a redundant and out-of-time masculinity, hopelessly clinging to a defunct old archetype in a world that fundamentally found them funny. Yet they were prepared to kill people in their effort not to see the joke.
The covert and not-so-covert war raged on within eastern Ukraine as we worked our way out of Russia, through Belarus and towards Kiev. We were walking through diplomatic minefields here; they were still picking up bodies and bits of aircraft from the fields around Donetsk; young men were still being sent in in convoys from Russia while they disclaimed any involvement. The Crimea, the scene of so many young men fighting for eggshells over the centuries – brilliant and brave and plumed young Englishmen hurtling into certain disaster in the Charge of the Light Brigade amongst many other flourishes of gallant stupidity – had now been taken over. But the Ukrainians were determined to stop any further loss of territory. Face was lost in the Crimea, and, for young men who treasured their honour above all else, face had to be regained.
In Kiev, on the morning of our performance, smart media girls clickety-clacked in high heels and marshalled us into a press conference, where we spouted platitudes about Shakespeare and fielded tough questions about politics. Russia, Belarus and now Ukraine, all distinct, all troubled, all eager for Hamlet in different ways, all had wanted something different from it, and all had wanted us to state a different allegiance. But our allegiance was to the play, and to the infinitely obscure and obscurely infinite good within it. The election the next day was focusing minds sharply, and they wanted to talk of little else. They asked a series of questions begging the single answer, ‘Putin is a shit’, but we steadfastly refused to fall into their not-very-discreet trap.
After the press conference, and once the matinee show was settled, I decided to dip back to Maidan square, which had enchanted us the previous day. The descending twilight the night before had bestowed a magic on the tented city, but the harsh mid-afternoon sun was less kind. I wandered round the square and the satellite streets, all enclosed by battered barricades. The population of the square started to look monolithically similar – angry, bored, disaffected young men. They sat withering in the sun, or hid angrily inside their tents, the road heat melting their joy and their will. This was not the Occupy Movement, with its rainbow diversity and its fundamental niceness; this was much closer to a bunch of sullen skinheads in paramilitary gear, who looked like they’d been drinking homemade vodka 24/7 for four months. Their eyes were bleary, their skin shot, their will sagging as they flopped carelessly on deckchairs and rugs.
This was not true of all – one family in traditional costume bashed out folk songs to try to entice people into their trestle-table improvised restaurant; another enclosure seemed to be offering advice and counselling – but it did seem to be the majority. Other details jarred and disturbed – a boy who looked fifteen wandered around glowering with a Kalashnikov, beside a group of older paramilitaries quaffing lagers. The violence in the air which had a sort of hope in it the night before now looked just threatening, a group of people who were trying, as has happened through history, to use violence to elect themselves as king-makers, to be the Praetorian Guard.
But more than anything the impression was of weariness, of a midsummer heat-soaked lassitude. This didn’t look like a revolution waiting to happen; it looked like one waiting to stop. It didn’t look like a fire waiting to blaze, but one which had blazed gloriously and now didn’t know how to put itself out. An energy that was pure in late winter had now given way, sozzled in booze, to a late-summer heat-haze confusion. I suppose the hardest thing with any revolution is to know how to end it.
The Russians called these Ukrainians ‘fascists’ and ‘nationalists’, but more than anything they just looked angry and left behind. Soon after our visit to the country, once Poroshenko was duly elected and the new political class established, they had to work out what to do with the energy of this revolution, and with this body of people, newly enfranchised and still smouldering with purpose. What did they do? What they always do with young men: they sent them off after a small patch of ground. To free up the square, to sort a social problem, and to export a potential danger to the city, most of the remaining members of the Maidan square were fired up about all the evils being perpetrated by the wicked Russians in the east, and formed the vanguard of the forces tasked to reclaim Donetsk. They were sent off to make mayhem out there, and they:
. . . for a fantasy and trick of fame,
Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot
Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause,
Which is not tomb enough and continent
To hide the slain. . .
It would be an over-simplification to say that all the mayhem we encountered was purely old men exploiting the appetite of young men for the ‘bubble reputation’. Many were fighting from a passionate religious conviction, from a desire to see land freed, for a powerful idea, to avenge a wrong done to their own family or people, many; but yet more were being steered into it by cynical old men who could see a way of profiting from the resultant mayhem. Generation after generation give themselves over to the hopeless vanity of it. The styling may have changed from medieval plumes and extravagant nineteenth-century uniforms – it may be more beach-boy psycho now – but it is still vanity. All over the globe, as we were attempting to arrange our schedule, we had to keep a weather eye on the world map of confusion, and keep our ear to the ground to guess when and where the next eruption of chaos was coming from.
Russia and Ukraine were discreetly carrying on their running war; Tunisia was nearly overrun by jihadism after we’d left; before we arrived in Pakistan, a suicide bomber from their Taliban killed sixty-five in a park, including many children; Paris and Belgium were both scarred by the sort of violence which remaps a city for ever in the heads of its inhabitants; there were attacks in Burkina Faso and Mali to precede our coming, in Mali in the hotel we were due to stay in; there was an escalation of terror in Bangladesh around our dates; the Peshmerga’s counter-offensive against IS began just four days before we got to Erbil; when we started we were hoping to visit Libya with the British Council, then it got progressively worse and became impossible to enter; Saudi went to war against the Houthis as we confirmed; and just for good measure, in Afghanistan the Taliban bunged a couple of mortars at the US Embassy the evening of our arrival. In Africa, we drove past pick-up tricks filled with young soldiers buoyantly bouncing across crumbling roads, guns lazing on their laps, heading off for ‘small patches of ground’, soldiers who will leave you with a cheerful ‘God be wi’you, sir’ as they head off into the depths of chaos. In Jordan, we stopped and a personnel carrier filled with young soldiers on the way to its border with Syria pulled up alongside. They were silent, and stared quietly into the distance.
The Earl of Essex was the star military adventurer of Shakespeare’s time, the Flashheart of his day. He seems to have been a wilfully anachronistic throwback, strange even in his own time. He seems, though ho
w much credit he is due is moot, to have launched a successful invasion of an undefended Cadiz, to have chased a few Spanish galleons around the Atlantic in a suitably piratical manner, to have invaded one of the Canary Islands, again undefended, and to have hung around some of the larger actions, led by the rather more authentic warrior Walter Raleigh. No matter, his PR machine was effective, his costumes from the many, many portraits of him extant look terrific (it’s amazing he had time for anything beyond modelling), and he knew how to carry himself well. Not only did he get the job to lead a major expedition to quash the nascent Irish rebellion in 1599, he got the most lavish encomia of praise ever ladled over an outgoing hero since Roman times, Shakespeare not least amongst them, who predicts his return as a ‘conquering Caesar’ in one of the choruses of Henry V.
On departure, he looked the exemplar of a delicate and tender prince, off to find honour greatly in a quarrel over a straw. But the Irish expedition ended up as a comical and squalid disappointment. Sent to destroy the rebel Tyrone, the English marched hither and thither, but the Irishman was far too canny to meet them in open battle. A whole class of overpreened aristocrats, tricked out like a pageant from a medieval tapestry, lost their way charging dumb and vainglorious English energy into Irish guile and mud. Essex tried manically to maintain an atmosphere of glamour by knighting everyone in sight, but it was not enough to instil purpose. Finally, they concluded a clumsy peace, favourable to the Irish, and with tails between legs, and plumes rather droopy, made their way home.
Hamlet, Globe to Globe Page 24