Hamlet (29 page)
Authors: William Shakespeare
I am aware of perpetuating the discredited tradition of equating performance history with detailed accounts of how one or another famous actor played a single role. But one explanation is that the available source materials make such an emphasis almost unavoidable; moreover, leading actors express in heightened ways features of cultural style, and when they take on Hamlet they help to reveal an era’s understanding of subjectivity.
1
Thanks to an anonymous elegist writing on the death of Richard Burbage, the leading actor in Shakespeare’s company, we know that Burbage played the part in the early seventeenth century:
He’s gone and with him what a world are dead!
Which he reviv’d, to be revived so,
No more young Hamlet, old Hieronymo
Kind Lear, the grieved Moor, and more beside,
That lived in him; have now forever died,
Oft have I seen him, leap into the grave
Smiting the person which he seem’d to have
Of a sad lover with so true an eye
That there I would have sworn, he meant to die;
Oft have I seen him, play this part in jest,
So lively, that spectators, and the rest
Of his sad crew, whilst he but seem’d to bleed,
Amazed, thought even then he died indeed.
2
Assuming that the lines describe the graveyard scene in Act 5 Scene 1 of
Hamlet
, we are also given some idea of how he played the part. In general Burbage is praised for the realism of his performances. It is striking that all the great actors who followed in his footsteps are similarly praised despite very different conceptions of the part and performance styles. There is also a tendency for actors themselves to trace a lineal descent for their performance, as though perhaps this might validate or authenticate their interpretation. This was certainly the case after the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 when the part was played for Sir William Davenant’s company by Thomas Betterton. John Downes, company bookkeeper and prompter, reports that
Hamlet
being Perform’d by Mr
Betterton
, Sir
William
(having seen Mr
Taylor
of the
Black-Fryars
Company Act it, who being Instructed by the Author Mr
Shaksepeur
) taught Mr
Betterton
in every Particle of it; which by his exact Performance of it, gain’d him Esteem and Reputation, Superlative to all other Plays … No more succeeding Tragedy for several Years got more reputation, or Money to the Company than this.
3
In fact Joseph Taylor, who inherited Burbage’s roles, joined the King’s Men at the Blackfriars three years after Shakespeare’s death so could not have been personally instructed by the author, but he probably performed them in a similar way. Betterton played Hamlet to great acclaim until he was seventy:
had you been to-night at the play-house, you had seen the force of action in perfection: your admired Mr Betterton behaved himself so well, that though now about seventy, he acted youth; and by the prevalent power of proper manner, gesture, and voice, appeared through the whole drama a young man of great expectation, vivacity, and enterprise. The
soliloquy where he began the celebrated sentence of “To be or not to be?,” the expostulation, where he explains with his mother in the closet, the noble ardour, after seeing his father’s ghost; and his generous distress for the death of Ophelia, are each of them circumstances which dwell strongly upon the minds of his audience, and would certainly affect their behaviour on any parallel occasions in their own lives.
4
The early eighteenth-century actor-manager Colley Cibber described Betterton’s performance as restrained, “governed by decency, manly, but not braving; his voice never rising into that seeming outrage, or wild defiance of what he naturally revered.”
5
The actor seems to have attended to Hamlet’s advice to the players at the beginning of Act 3 Scene 2, although these lines were cut in the so-called “Players’ Quarto” (1676) which was used, as were the Ambassadors, Polonius’ talk with Reynaldo, his advice to his son, Laertes’ advice to Ophelia, and most of Fortinbras. Many other speeches were thinned, including all the soliloquies apart from “To be, or not to be,” which was presumably too well-known to be cut.
Hamlet’s
complicated textual history and length has led to a stage history characterized by cuts and exclusions designed to create a fast-paced script concentrating on narrative and action.
David Garrick, the outstanding eighteenth-century Hamlet, used a version of the same text for much of his theatrical career until 1772 when he decided to cut most of the fifth act and have Hamlet reappear after Ophelia’s final exit, fight and forgive Laertes and kill Claudius. This drastic action had the positive effect of enabling much of the material from the first four acts to be restored, adding depth to the other characters and making Hamlet a more complex, ambiguous figure. Garrick’s performance was noted for its liveliness and energy and was based on a conviction of Hamlet’s deeply felt love for his dead father. In an age of feeling, “The basis of Hamlet’s character seems to be an extreme sensibility of mind, apt to be strongly impressed by its situation, and overpowered by the feelings which that situation excites.”
6
Walter Scott characterized Garrick’s acting as “impetuous, sudden, striking, and versatile.”
7
He was also known for carefully thought-out stage business, including a collapsing
chair, a wig wired so that the hair stood on end and his famous “start” on first seeing the ghost. The German scientist and Anglophile Georg Lichtenberg described how
His whole demeanour is so expressive of terror that it made my flesh creep even before he began to speak. The almost terror-struck silence of the audience, which preceded this appearance and filled one with a sense of insecurity, probably did much to enhance this effect. At last he speaks, not at the beginning, but at the end of a breath, with a trembling voice: “Angels and ministers of grace defend us!”
8
The liveliness of Garrick’s interpretation contrasted markedly with the late eighteenth-century actor John Philip Kemble’s melancholy prince. The memoirist Mary Russell Mitford thought him “the only satisfactory Hamlet I ever saw—owing much to personal grace and beauty—something to a natural melancholy, or rather pensiveness of manner—much, of course, to consummate art.”
9
The Regency star Edmund Kean, by contrast, was passionate and impetuous. At the end of Act 3 Scene 1, for example, according to the Scottish poet Theodore Martin, after screaming “get thee to a nunnery” at Ophelia, he was about to leave
when he stops, turns round, and casting back the saddest, almost tearful look, stands lingering for some time, and then with a slow, almost gliding step, comes back, seizes Ophelia’s hand, imprints a lingering kiss upon it with a deep-drawn sigh, and straightway dashes more impetuously than before out of the door, which he slams violently behind him.
10
William Charles Macready’s performance in the mid-nineteenth century was described as a “composite,”
11
combining “the classical dignity of John Kemble with the intense earnestness and colloquial familiarity of Edmund Kean.”
12
Reviewers praised his naturalism and ability to suggest subtle, complex feelings, but in his diary Macready confesses how difficult he found it to achieve “the ease and dignified familiarity, the apparent levity of manner, with the deep
purpose that lies beneath.”
13
Edwin Booth, the great American actor, was praised for his portrait of a “reflective, sensitive, gentle, generous nature, tormented, borne down and made miserable by an occasion … to which it is not equal.”
14
Booth softened and refined the role.
Accounts of Henry Irving’s performance at the Lyceum are contradictory, although he was astonishingly successful; some critics faulted him for “the entire absence of tragic passion”
15
while others talked of his “real frenzy.”
16
He is credited with introducing a “psychological Hamlet.”
17
Eden Phillpotts later analyzed his performance in terms of the psychological connection between his intellectuality, insanity and failure to act.
18
Irving’s chosen successor as Hamlet was Johnston Forbes-Robertson, whose performance likewise drew contradictory notices. George Bernard Shaw praised his verse-speaking for the way he “does not utter half a line; then stop to act; then go on with another half line … he plays as Shakespeare should be played, on the line and to the line, with the utterance and acting simultaneous, inseparable and in fact identical.”
19
While all reviewers agreed on the delicacy of his performance, some found him “affable” and “light-hearted”; Shaw talked of “celestial gaiety”
20
while others mention his “gentle melancholy.”
21
This production reintroduced Fortinbras in the last act after the character had been banished from the stage for over two hundred years, an innovation suggested by Shaw but regarded as anticlimactic by many at the time.
The matinee idol John Barrymore was praised by James Agate as “nearer to Shakespeare’s whole creation than any other I have seen.”
22
To John Gielgud he suggested “tenderness, remoteness, and neurosis,”
23
and he also impressed the young Laurence Olivier: “Everything about him was exciting. He was athletic, he had charisma, and to my young mind, he played the part to perfection.”
24
Olivier was impressed also by the way in which Barrymore emphasized certain words in a line, although critics were less enthusiastic. Olivier drew a telling theatrical line directly back through Barrymore to Booth, from Booth to Kean and hence ultimately to Burbage.
25
Evolving twentieth-century production styles were influenced by the attempts of the late-Victorian producer William Poel to re-create
an authentically Elizabethan bare stage as opposed to a cluttered historical realism with elaborate scenery. There was also a trend toward ensemble-playing which meant that focus was no longer exclusively on the star. Interpretations, meanwhile, veered between exploration of the politics of the play and interest in sexuality in the light of Freud’s theory of the family romance. Late twentieth and early twenty-first-century productions were often concerned with self-conscious dramatic devices (overhearings, the play-within-the-play) and references to play-acting, a phenomenon that became known as “meta-theatricality” (theater about theater). Performances of
Hamlet
frequently sought to interrogate their own meaning.
The play’s contemporary significance was signaled in the 1925 Birmingham Repertory production which became known as “Hamlet in plus fours” on account of its modern-day set and dress. Postwar disillusionment infected Colin Keith-Johnston’s “snarling prince.”
26
Not all were convinced, but
The Sunday Times’
reviewer was one of many who responded to its modern treatment: “A certain matter-of-factness of diction, combined with the absence of gesture and pose, do give a certain added humanity and life, even if sometimes at the expense of majesty.”
27
Gielgud’s judgment on the production was “UNspeakable,”
28
but it influenced his own performance at the Old Vic in 1930; as one critic puts it, “Like Barrymore with his veiled demonic streak and Keith-Johnston with his open hostility, Gielgud brought out the darker side of Hamlet’s nature.”
29
The unabridged text in the Gielgud production (conflated from the Quarto and Folio versions of the play) included Hamlet’s bawdy talk to Ophelia and his mother, which hitherto had usually been cut. In the course of his career, Gielgud played the part in six different productions in total and critics are divided in their judgment on each. W. A. Darlington sums up his performances over fifteen years in terms of a progression from “a sensitive youth, aghast at the wickedness of the world which he had just discovered, to a sophisticated man to whom that wickedness is no surprise.”
30
Gielgud’s intellectu-alism is often contrasted, somewhat crudely with Olivier’s physicality, but as Dawson points out, “Both were ‘modern’ though in different ways.”
31
Olivier’s Hamlet is best known for the film version of 1948; the stage version on which it was based a decade earlier and directed by Tyrone Guthrie is regarded as “more forceful and energetic and volatile.”
32
Both stage and screen versions were strongly influenced by Freud’s “Oedipal” reading of the part of Hamlet, as well as by the Romantic image of the solitary, anguished intellectual: as the opening voice-over of the film put it, “This is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind.”
3.
Realistic historical staging, with elaborate sets and large casts of spear-carriers in attendance, characterized the play in the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: this is the duel scene in the 1913 Forbes-Robertson production on the cavernous stage of London’s Drury Lane Theatre.
