The Shakespeare bookclub meets again on Sunday 8th September 19.00 UK time to discuss Twelfth Night and Hamlet. Schedule here.
The next Western Canon salon is about Emma by Jane Austen on September 12th. Tickets here.
I have no idea how many times I read Hamlet as a teenager. Fifty? I helped direct a school production in which I played Rosencrantz. Later on I played Polonius. So there was a time when I knew the play inside out. Though I love to read it and to hear it, I rarely go to watch it. It inspires too much high-falutin psuedo-profound acting. All that swooning and unbearable heavy intonation. Ghastly. Haven’t they read Shakespeare’s Advice to the Players?
Because, while Hamlet’s appeal certainly does lie in the nature of its ideas (and what could be more appealing to a teenager than a play quite so dramatically stuffed with philosophical statements?), its immense popularity surely owes more to the action. It has often people said that Hamlet is a relatively inactive play. Hamlet is a ditherer, forever failing to take revenge.
But Hamlet is a grab-bag of excitement. A ghost appears on the castle battlements and tell his son the prince to avenge his bloody death. It turns out that the old king was murdered by his brother Claudius. If that’s not exciting enough, Claudius then married his sister-in-law and took the throne. Prince Hamlet is now vexed by dilemmas. He hates Claudius (the throne is won by election and he feels he was robbed). And he has pretty ambivalent notions of his mother Gertrude. Oh, and he’s a middle-aged man whose academic career has stalled. So he hates a lot of things…
He seems to have adored his father, but, it’s complicated. And so Hamlet does what a lot of men do when their father dies. He has a breakdown.
The play now shifts into a sequence of scenes in which no-one knows what Hamlet’s mental state really is. He appears before Ophelia, his not-quite-girlfriend, gibbering like a lunatic. He then walks with Polonius (courtier, Ophelia’s father) and plays at being mad while running rings around the old man. Two old friends arrive, who Claudius commissions to find out what is going on with the Prince. He runs rings around them too, contributing to the whirlwind of confusion he is spreading through the court.
And then the players arrive. Hamlet becomes, suddenly, not a manic, half-mad depressive, but a startling aesthete, who can recite whole speeches and who shows quit clearly he has long preferred what Proust called “the golden gate of the imagination” to “the low and shameful gate of experience.” Indeed, he has shown us again and again in the earlier scenes how much he despises ordinary life at court. “It is a custom more honoured in the breach than the observance.” We will not see another misanthrope of his like until Swift; nor, perhaps, will we see another aesthete of his intensity till Proust. He can see, in every sense, the skull beneath the skin.
So, they put on a play. And they re-enact Claudius’s murder right in front of him and everyone else. Inactive my foot! It is tempting to think that Hamlet never takes revenge but for himself. (It’s an idea I held/hold myself.) But consider: what is the better, colder revenge—to kill Claudius outright, or to play him along like this?
Like a lot of over-egoistic theatre directors, Hamlet now gets far too big an idea of himself. Is this the point at which he flips into a true madness? His mother calls him to her chamber, appalled that he could treat Claudius in that way. They have a good-old-fashioned family row, with Hamlet treating Gertrude with pure contempt. The soap-opera writers have nothing on this. And then, hearing a noise, Hamlet spins round, cries out “What? A rat?” and kills the person hiding behind the curtain without caring who it is.
What started out as a (probably) fake bout of madness to wind Claudius ever closer to the centre of a vortex of revenge (was Shakespeare writing the first psychological thriller?) now morphs into a monstrous tragedy of Hamlet’s own making. Something has snapped. The ghost comes back to tell him to get it together, but it is too late. His revenge plot has overtaken them all, most of all him. He is a dangerous ironist and we realise he cannot be trusted.
Now, if that wasn’t enough action, Hamlet is sent to England, where assassins are waiting to kill him. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are sent to chaperone the mad Prince to his death. Hamlet gets wind of this, escapes, sails back to Denmark with some passing pirates, and arrives in time to see that Ophelia has killed herself, having been driven mad by Hamlet’s unforgivably crass treatment of her.
And so he leaps into her grave and fights her brother Laertes. They arrange a duel. Laertes, in cahoots with Claudius, uses a sword tipped with poison. There’s also a cup of poisoned wine, just in case. Inevitably, in those pre-Health & Safety days, mistakes were made. Gertrude, desperate for fat, sweaty Hamlet not to fall victim to Laertes, drinks the wine. Claudius is genuinely grieved by this but Hamlet cares hardly at all. Both he and Laertes die from the poisoned sword. But not before Hamlet finally kills Claudius.
The final lines anticipate the invasion of Denmark by the Norwegian king. The rest is silence.
Far from being inactive, frozen by indecision, Hamlet is too busy, too energetic, becoming the victim, ultimately, not of his circumstances but of his over-teeming self. The reason why this play is so enduring, sits so securely at the centre of the Western Canon, is that as well as being a play of ideas it is a play of irrepressible action, unceasing tension, it is a play in which almost everyone may smile and smile and be a villain. It is not a dull, contemplative play, but one full of intense electrical charge that has been lighting and exciting our imaginations for four hundred years. Long may it continue to do so.
Virginia Woolf:
'Hamlet one reads once only in one's life, between the ages of twenty and twenty-five. Then one is Hamlet, one is youth; as, to make a clean breast of it, Hamlet is Shakespeare, is youth. And how can one explain what one is? One can but be it. Thus forced always to look back or sidelong at his own past the critic sees something moving and vanishing in Hamlet, as in a glass one sees the reflection of oneself, and it is this which, while it gives an everlasting variety to the play, forbids us to feel, as with Lear or Macbeth, that the centre is solid and holds firm whatever our successive readings lay upon it.
save for the (in my view, frankly preposterous) soliloquys declaimed upon a cliff top, and set to a Mahlerian whirlwind of music, i thought Branagh's Hamlet best captured this psychological thriller aspect to the play. despite its length, i found the film incredibly pacy and taut.
having just finished Much Ado (of course it's a very different piece), i found we were at our best when we zipped through the play without pondering on anything too much (again, a much easier play with which to do this - not much in the text of Much Ado lends itself to extended bouts of stentorian introspection in its performance).
not sure it's true, but i do feel the best of Shakespeare's plays are teeming with action
great piece as ever, cheers