Hamlet (35 page)

What kind of man was the Old King when he lived? Was he always busy at the office (or off fighting wars) and did he neglect his wife? How unhappy was she and did she turn to Claudius for consolation? Is Gertrude now, on her wedding day, a happy and sexually satisfied woman? How close were Hamlet and his father who, truth be told, seems so forbidding and so aloof, an irascible and bitter old man? And how much time did Hamlet spend as a little boy, playing in his beautiful mother’s closet? Do the memories of his innocence, of her motherly love—and of her subsequent betrayal—color the way he now enters the chamber? The way he speaks to her?

Certainly this is a story about kings and queens and princes and it may feel that questions like these tend to “suburbanize” the narrative.
And it may be that academics feel impatient if not infuriated by such banality. But beyond all the poetry, all the spiritual aspirations and deepest meanings of the plays, the personal relationships between fathers and mothers and their sons and daughters lie at the heart of most if not the entire canon. How many plays center around the death of a father (or the king, which of course is the same thing)? How many daughters disobey their fathers (or, like Ophelia, pay the price for their obedience)? How many sons struggle with the desire or the need to kill their fathers? Bringing these relationships to life in the most intimate and truest way possible is the task that befalls the director and the actors—and if in doing so the questions asked and strategies adopted (along with a most rigorous analysis of the text, of course) may appear at first to reduce the scope and magnitude of the narratives, these are the very strategies that bring heartfelt immediacy and credibility to the plays and make them leap off the page and pulsate with life.

In many readings, Hamlet seems to have undergone a huge change during the fourth-act rest when he is away at sea: was it like that in yours?

Daniels:
Yes, the change is indeed huge. It is as if for Hamlet the agonizing inner struggle is over. His thoughts have indeed become bloody—he may not have actually wielded the knife, but he has sent his old friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their death and they are not near his conscience. There is a curious serenity about him. The landscape of death is now awesomely familiar to him (no accident that at this moment he encounters Yorick once again) and he is not so much resigned as ready to face his own.

Caird:
Yes, I think it has to be. The temperature of his language is so different from earlier in the play. It’s to do with what happens to his mind immediately after he kills Polonius. He’s such a deeply moral creature that once he has murdered someone he forfeits the right to his moral superiority over his uncle and his mother. He cannot thereafter decide how his own story should be resolved.

This is a philosophical discovery, and the metaphor for his subsequent mental development is a voyage. As in
Pericles, The Tempest
,
and
Twelfth Night
, a journey by sea is an escape into a different world, a different way of life, or way of thought. Discovering that Ophelia has died unhinges him for a moment, but it does so only temporarily. In the very next scene he has recovered his equilibrium and seems quite sanguine when Horatio faces him with the possibility of his own death.

There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come: if it be not to come, it will be now: if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all. Since no man has aught of what he leaves, what is’t to leave betimes? Let be.

The “Let be” is not in the folio, but Simon Russell Beale and I both thought it indispensable. It is the perfect spiritual punctuation for that speech and it must, surely, be by Shakespeare’s hand. No other writer could have been at the same time so bold and so succinct.

Boyd:
By the time of his return to Denmark, Hamlet has pondered on the resolute leadership of Fortinbras, killed two men, and arrived at a readiness to die. All of which seems to have stilled his bad dreams, and none of which bodes well for Claudius.

The exchange of rapiers in the duel is sometimes played as a matter of chance, sometimes with Hamlet knowing exactly what he is doing: how did your production handle it?

Daniels:
My sense is that Hamlet perceives very quickly what is happening in the course of the duel. He is no longer an innocent in the face of worldly treachery and he can now give as good as he gets.

Caird:
Hamlet can’t know what’s going on when the duel is happening. The text is very clear. As Laertes is dying, he tells Hamlet what he’s done and he speaks with what seems like genuine remorse.

Shakespeare wouldn’t have had Hamlet speaking that line if he already knew the point was envenomed.

Boyd:
Once Hamlet knows for certain that the duel is a plot to murder him, there is nothing to stop him killing Laertes. Indeed, he’ll probably have to if he’s going to kill the king.

The play exists in three early texts of greatly differing lengths, suggesting that it evolved in performance in Shakespeare’s lifetime and that cuts were applied at various times. In cutting your text to a manageable length, did you have a set of principles or was it more a case of following your directorial instincts?

Daniels:
Common sense, I suppose. A desire to keep the action immediate and exciting, to make sure the text was clear and accessible. And understandable.

Caird:
A bit of both. There are obvious economies to be made whatever text you use. You don’t need the play-within-the-play and the dumb show. One or other suffices. Playing them both means Claudius has to be peculiarly blind or arbitrarily distracted while watching the dumb show. Hamlet asking for his own lines to be inserted in
The Murder of Gonzago
must have been added by Shakespeare for performances where the subsequent soliloquy—“O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!”—was to be cut. If you include both, the former lines disable the climax in the latter—where Hamlet says “About my brain” and goes on to invent the idea of using the play as a means of discerning Claudius’ guilt.

But the largest cuts I made were inspired by a clear principle. I took the view that Shakespeare’s play is at heart a domestic and philosophical drama, not a history play. In many of the productions of
Hamlet
that I’ve seen, the scenes that seemed to be more like history play than domestic tragedy were always the dull points in the evening, where you could feel the audience switching off; the plot
involving Cornelius, Voltemand, Fortinbras, and the Ambassadors; the mention of Norway or Poland seeming to distract the audience from the metaphorical power of the world that is Denmark. I started to feel as I studied the text leading up to rehearsals that there was a case for saying that the more political scenes may have been later additions, though certainly not by another hand. It is not too fanciful to think that Shakespeare may have been warned, or warned himself, that the language with which Hamlet describes the world was apparently so dangerously irreligious, even amoral in its tone, that his audience, and more importantly his noble sponsors, would find it impossible to accept, that it would behoove him to set it in a more political framework and especially to give some hope for the future at the end of the play.

In any event it seemed to me that Fortinbras has absolutely no moral right to say what has been written for him. We don’t know him, we don’t care about him, and yet he’s given a moral authority at the end of the play, an authority he hasn’t earned and that seems to be written without any irony. He isn’t like Malcolm at the end of
Macbeth
, who has lived through the terrible events of the play and, cleansed by his experience, has every right to the crown. So I cut Fortinbras and all that goes with him, ending the play with Horatio’s lines:

What more apposite words could there be to end a play about mortality, nobility, philosophy, and the meaning of earthly existence?

By the same token, I felt I couldn’t do better than begin and end the play on the relationship between Hamlet and Horatio. At the start of the play I had Horatio arriving on the scene as if returning to it after a long absence. The other characters were enshrined in their tombs, all long dead. Horatio’s memory of the events of the play brought them back to life. At the end of the play while Hamlet lies dying Horatio threatens to kill himself, but Hamlet stops him. If Horatio dies, who will tell Hamlet’s story? Horatio is the only living witness.
We may even ask another question: who other than Horatio could have told Shakespeare the story? It is diverting to imagine a silent final scene to
Hamlet
that we, the surviving inhabitants of Elsinore, watch at a distance from the battlements. Horatio is leaving the castle to return to Wittenberg and falls in with the company of Players, starting on their long trip back to London. We see him deep in conversation with the First Player who listens intently. The story is being told for the first time. It has started on its own long circular journey. From Hamlet to Horatio, from Horatio to the Player, from the Player to the page, from the page to the stage. Horatio has survived for the same reason that Kent and Edgar survive at the end of
Lear
, to “speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.”

Boyd:
We exploited the brevity and directness of the First Quarto, which feels like a cut playing script and propels the action forward, particularly after the death of Polonius; but the suppleness, subtlety, and elegance of thought in the Folio reeks of the integrity of original authorship, and so we allowed its style to predominate.

I flirted until late in rehearsal with transposing “To Be” as a “suicide bomber” speech immediately before “Lights, lights, lights!,” with the whole court frozen as Hamlet advanced slowly on Claudius, surrounded by Switzers. It worked as a thrilling dramatization of the difficulty of direct action, but it pushed the speech’s vulnerability out the door, and so we restored it to the moment before Hamlet meets Ophelia.

1.
Anthony B. Dawson,
Shakespeare in Performance: Hamlet
(1995), p. 25.

2.
Printed by J. P. Collier,
Annals of the Stage
, 1831, Vol. 1, in Gamini Salgado,
Eyewitnesses of Shakespeare: First Hand Accounts of Performances 1590–1890
(1975), pp. 38
–
9.

3.
John Downes,
Roscius Anglicanus
(1708, repr. 1969), p. 21.

4.
Richard Steele, in an originally unsigned review of
Hamlet
in
The Tatler, with Notes and a General Index: Complete in One Volume
(1835), p. 154.

5.
Colley Cibber,
An Apology for the Life of Mr Colley Cibber
(repr. 1889), p. 61.

6.
Henry Mackenzie,
The Mirror
(Edinburgh), No. 99, 17 April 1780.

7.
Walter Scott, “Life of John Philip Kemble,”
Quarterly Review
, 34 (1826), p. 214.

8.
Georg Lichtenberg,
Lichtenberg’s Visits to England
, translated and annotated by Margaret L. Mare and W. H. Quarrell (1969), p. 10.

9.
Mary Russell Mitford,
The Life of Mary Russell Mitford
(1870), Vol. 2, p. 336.

10.
Theodore Martin, “An Eye-Witness of John Kemble,”
Nineteenth Century
(1880), p. 292.

11.
Robert Hapgood,
Shakespeare in Production: Hamlet
(1999), p. 27.

12.
James Henry Hackett,
Notes and Comments upon Certain Plays and Actors of Shakespeare
(early nineteenth century, printed 1968), p. 140.

13.
William Charles Macready,
The Diaries of William Charles Macready 1833–1851
, ed. William Toynbee (1912), p. 242.

14.
New York Herald
, 28 November 1864.

15.
J. Ranken Towse, “Henry Irving,”
Century Magazine
, 27 March 1884, p. 666.

16.
Charles Edward Russell,
Julia Marlowe
(1926), p. 39.

17.
Academy
, 18 September 1897.

18.
Eden Phillpotts, “Irving as Hamlet,” in
We Saw Him Act
(1939), p. 122.

19.
George Bernard Shaw,
Shaw on Shakespeare
, ed. Edwin Wilson (1969), p. 91.

20.
Shaw,
Shaw on Shakespeare
, p. 87.

21.
Daily News
, 13 September 1897.

22.
James Agate,
Brief Chronicles
(1943), p. 247.

23.
John Gielgud,
Notes from the Gods
(1994), p. 98.

24.
Laurence Olivier,
On Acting
(1986), pp. 60–1.

25.
Olivier,
On Acting
, p. 62.

26.
Ivor Brown, quoted in Claire Cochrane,
Shakespeare and the Birmingham Repertory Theatre 1913–29
(1993), p. 119.

27.
Sunday Times
, 30 August 1925.

28.
Gielgud,
Notes from the Gods
, p. 102.

29.
Hapgood,
Shakespeare in Production
, p. 65.

30.
Quoted in Richard Findlater,
The Player Kings
(1921), p. 201.

31.
Dawson,
Shakespeare in Performance
, p. 116.

32.
Hapgood,
Shakespeare in Production
, p. 69.