Hamlet (30 page)
Authors: William Shakespeare
In recent years there have been many notable Hamlets: Paul Scofield, Richard Burton, David Warner, Nicol Williamson, Michael Pennington, Daniel Day-Lewis, Ian Charleson, Ben Kingsley, Jonathan Pryce, Derek Jacobi, Mark Rylance, Kevin Kline, Kenneth Branagh, Alex Jennings, Ralph Fiennes, Sam West, Simon Russell Beale, Adrian Lester, Toby Stephens: the list goes on. Playgoers and critics no longer look for a definitive
Hamlet
and all these productions have been variously praised and appraised. Several had striking innovations and experiments: Pryce, for instance, conjured up the voice of the ghost from within Hamlet’s own body, while Lester (in Peter Brook’s supremely lucid, heavily cut production of 2000 at the Bouffes du Nord in Paris) played the “solid flesh” soliloquy at the very
beginning of the action, giving a rationale for a Hamlet that was more modern everyman, “intelligent, decisive, extremely hurt,”
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than Renaissance prince. The radical spirit of the 1960s interrogated the play’s status as cultural icon by deconstructing and reconstructing the text in Charles Marowitz’s
Hamlet Collage
(1965) and Joseph Papp’s American
Naked Hamlet
(1968). Tom Stoppard’s
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
(1966) owes its inspiration to the same questioning spirit.
The historical focus on Hamlet tended to exclude the importance of other characters. There have, however, been notable Ophelias including Susannah Cibber playing opposite Garrick, Harriet Smithson with Kemble, Helena Faucit with Macready, Mrs. Charles Kean to her husband’s prince and Kate Terry with Charles Albert Fechter. Kate’s younger sister, Ellen Terry, playing opposite Irving, was much praised and led to the role enjoying greater prominence. The challenge for an actor has been in the title role, though, and there has been a tradition going back to Sarah Siddons in 1775 for women actors to take it on including Charlotte Cushman, Sarah Bernhardt in a notable 1899 production in Paris, Asta Nielsen (in the silent film of 1921), Eva Le Gallienne and more recently Judith Anderson, Diane Venora and Frances de la Tour. Bernhardt indeed argued that the role was more suitable for a mature woman than an immature man, since “The woman more readily looks the part, yet has the maturity of mind to grasp it.”
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From an early date the play has had extraordinary international connections and appeal. One of the first recorded performances was in 1607 off the coast of Sierra Leone by sailors aboard a ship called the
Dragon
on the way to the East Indies. Troupes of visiting English actors performed throughout northern Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: indeed, Shakespeare probably knew about the castle at Elsinore because two of his colleagues (Thomas Pope and Will Kempe) had played there in the 1580s.
Hamlet
was certainly seen in Germany not long after it was written.
In the eighteenth century it was the French Enlightenment sage Voltaire who shaped attitudes to Shakespeare in continental Europe. His view of
Hamlet
was that it was a great play, despite breaking neoclassical rules and patent “absurdités” such as the introduction of gravediggers in the last act.
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German Romantics such as Goethe, Schiller and Schlegel claimed a special affinity with
Hamlet
and Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck (c.1795) produced a fine German translation. Successful French Hamlets have included François Joseph Talma and Charles Albert Fechter. In nineteenth-century Russia “Hamletism” was the term coined by Turgenev to describe the introspective political malaise of the ruling classes. Plays such as Chekhov’s
Ivanov
(1887) and
The Seagull
(1896) provided explicit commentary on the character of Hamlet. In Eastern Europe in the twentieth century, productions of
Hamlet
were staged which obliquely critiqued oppressive and corrupt governments, notably Moscow’s Taganka Theatre
Hamlet
directed by Yuri Lyubimov, which used a translation by Boris Pasternak and ran from 1971 to 1980, and a Romanian production with Ion Caramitru in the title role—this was recognizably a critique of the tyrannical regime of the Ceauşescus, who were evoked by Claudius and Gertrude. When the Ceauşescu regime was overthrown in 1989, Caramitru was recognized in the street by a general commanding a tank squadron. The actor was pulled up onto the tank and taken to the television station, where the battle for power was being fought. He was among the men who announced to the world that regime change had taken place. Hamlet had teamed up with Fortinbras to oversee the demise of Claudius and Gertrude.
4.
Sarah Bernhardt as Hamlet. Of all Shakespeare’s male tragic roles the one that has been played most often and most effectively by female actors: in his book
Women as Hamlet
(2007), the critic Tony Howard notes that Bernhardt was the first Hamlet on film and Eve Donne the first Hamlet on radio.
Hamlet
has been no less popular in the cinema than the theater. The first onscreen Hamlet was Sarah Bernhardt. Forbes-Robertson starred in a twenty-two-minute silent version in 1913 and the Danish silent film star Asta Nielsen played Hamlet in an astonishing 1921 version in which a female Hamlet has been brought up as male to provide an heir to the Danish throne. Laurence Olivier directed and starred in a brooding black-and-white version (1948), full of vertiginous long shots and use of voice-over for soliloquies. Richard Burton’s 1964 stage production directed by Gielgud was filmed, as was Tony Richardson’s 1967 Roundhouse production starring Nicol Williamson as a very modern Hamlet. Grigori Kozintsev’s rigorous, intellectual 1964 black-and-white Russian version took as its theme “Denmark’s a prison.” This contrasted sharply with Franco Zeffirelli’s 1990 version starring Mel Gibson and Glenn
Close set in medieval Denmark which eliminated politics altogether and focused on the play’s family dynamics and made Hamlet into a version of the action hero. Kenneth Branagh, like Olivier, directed himself in the lead role: his sumptuous four-hour 1996 version was set in Regency costume and shot at Blenheim Palace with a star-studded cast. Using a conflated Quarto and Folio text, it maintains a balance between the private and the political. Fortinbras’ great-coated army arrive in the last act to storm the palace in a scene recalling the storming of the Winter Palace in Sergei Eisenstein’s
October
(1926). Michael Almereyda’s
Hamlet
(2000) with Ethan Hawke as Hamlet updated the story to modern-day Manhattan where corrupt gray “suits” run the Denmark Corporation in a spiritual landscape of urban isolation and Hamlet’s meditation on his own inadequacy as a man of violence is wittily delivered as he wanders the aisles of a Blockbuster video store, passing the section of movies marked “Action.”
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Young Hamlet: Modernity and Politics
Hamlet
is the best-known play in the history of the world, but no two productions are the same: at the level of text as well as interpretation and stage-business, every director will seek to remint the old familiar words and to make Shakespeare speak in answer to the pressure of new times.
(Jonathan Bate)
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The mutability of
Hamlet
is demonstrated by the wide variety of approaches which the Royal Shakespeare Company have taken in their dozen revivals of the play since the 1960s. Modern concerns regarding politics, psychology, religion, and the metatheatrical nature of the play have shaped themselves into productions that reflect the time in which they were produced. Whether with the judicious cutting of the lengthy text or with choices in setting, the difficulty in pinning down
Hamlet
is also its director’s blessing—an
opportunity to reflect a uniquely personal vision of the play, with an actor who will bring out the essential elements of that reading:
Actor and audience alike have an oddly personal relationship with the part and the play. It seems to identify itself with the particular age and body of the time in which it is being played. Productions are often seen as pinpointing the nature and quality of the day’s disaffected youth, though this quality can vary from gentle disappointed fatalism to angry violent nihilism without a word being altered.
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In 1965, Peter Hall’s production had the youth of the day queuing round the block for tickets. Camping out in sleeping bags, they waited determinedly to have the chance of seeing the twenty-four-year-old David Warner speak for their generation. And speak he did: his soliloquies were addressed directly to the audience from the forefront of the stage in a naturalistic language, the text was cut to emphasize his loneliness and isolation,
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and the aspect of the individual against officialdom was emphasized.
Warner found his closest companions to be the theatre audience.… Peter Hall … began with his reaction to a particular political climate, as [Tony] Church
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described it, “the corrupted end of a long conservative administration … sex scandals [Profumo
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] and all that going on,” the oppressiveness of which produced disaffection in the youth of Great Britain. On the surface, then, Hall wanted to make a production that was “relevant” and spoke to the audience of the sixties, a unique and eventful decade.
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On the “How all occasions do inform against me …” soliloquy, Warner himself commented that
There was a lot going on then in the sixties, Vietnam and everything, and although this production was not commenting on that, I … was feeling something there about that particular situation, “The imminent death of twenty thousand men … Go to their graves.…” I grew to like this speech, and it began to mean more things as one just played with it.
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5.
David Warner as Hamlet, wearing student scarf, japing with Rosencrantz (John Bell, left) and Guildenstern (James Laurenson) in Peter Hall’s 1965 production.
Peter Hall explained in a lecture that
Hamlet
is one of mankind’s great images. It turns a new face to each century, even to each decade. It is a mirror which gives back the reflections of the age that is contemplating it. And the need to define these reflections produces, on average, a new appreciation of
Hamlet
every twelve days.… For our decade I think the play will be about the disillusionment which produces an apathy of the will so deep that commitment to politics, to religion or to life is impossible. For a man said to do nothing, Hamlet does a great deal. For a man said to refuse experience, he experiences a great deal. He is always on the brink of action, but something inside him, this disease of disillusionment, stops the final, committed action.… [Talking of the young intellectuals of his day, Hall felt]: There is a sense of what-the-hell-anyway, over us looms the Mushroom Cloud. And politics are a game and a lie, whether in our own country or in the East/West dialogue which goes on interminably without anything very real being said. This negative response is deep and appalling.
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The cold, self-perpetuating nature of the political machine was also prevalent in Steven Pimlott’s 2001 production. Whereas in 1965 historical costumes were made with modern fabrics, loosely referencing the twentieth century, Pimlott went for a completely modern interpretation:
Searchlights and swivelling surveillance cameras make spies of everyone in [a] windowless Elsinore.… In this contemporary court, the wily new king Claudius (Larry Lamb) is every inch the president. Made over by image consultants as used by Blair and Clinton, he always appears hand-in-hand with his smiling soignée First Lady, Gertrude, a gang of whooping, clapping yes-men, presswomen and suited, armed, security guards in their wake. This is a world we all recognize.
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The production started and ended with around twenty anonymous-looking sycophantic suited types, clapping Claudius and later his successor, Fortinbras. Despite the momentous events of the play the indifferent world of politics survived. Almost otherworldly and uncanny in their uniformity, they appeared as an unstoppable and timeless crowd, without any sense of loyalty, compassion, or understanding of humanity, homing in on Fortinbras with our hero’s dead body still warm on stage.
