Though Hamlet is thought of as a philosophical play, it was also quite political. First performed in the 1580s (in a lost version), then in 1600, this play about an insecure succession was obviously topic as Elizabeth aged. The Reformation and the rising popularity of Stoicism (as an opposition to tyranny, not just the milk-and-water stuff we use as self-help today) were disruptive religious and philosophical ideas that made Hamlet’s abstruser musings more “relevant”. The time, we might say, was out of joint.
Ghosts, justice, and vendettas were familiar plot devices from R&J, RIII, Titus, Merchant, and Julius Caesar. It’s true that Hamlet is a very high-minded play, but it also has many of the things audiences want: a ghost that calls his son to take revenge, a murder mystery, a failing romance, a surprise killing, sexual misbehaviour, pirates, skulls tossed up out of graves, rampant madness, sword fights. Hell, depending on how you want to play it, you can make Ophelia semi-gothic and throw in a young woman running through castles with their hair streaming out behind them, a look of abject terror on her face.
The lost Catholic practice of memorialising dead loved ones as they passed through purgatory was strange matter for a Protestant country to become obsessed with: all the blood and gore of the play are somewhat an excuse to keep the memory of Hamlet’s father alive in a way that religious practice now precluded. Audiences would respond to this lost (and missed) ritual.
In C18th, critics like Johnson and novelists like Charlotte Lennox thought Hamlet himself was not admirable. He fails to punish Claudius, treats Ophelia with needless cruelty, and only stabs the end at the end in revenge for his own death. Tobias Smollett thought the “to be or not to be” speech was “a heap of absurdities.
The Romantics thought Hamlet was a tragedy of thought. Schiller saw him as a doubter with “no firm belief within himself or anything else.” Coleridge thought it was a play full of potential action with a protagonist who was “over balanced in the contemplative tragedy.” An over thinker’s tragedy.
Carlyle and Poe saw Shakespeare in Hamlet. How could he have written such a play without great suffering himself?
Nietzsche: “Knowledge kills action; action requires one to be shrouded in a veil of illusion—that is the lesson of Hamlet.”
Russians like Turgenev and Checkhov saw Hamlet as an ineffectual self-involved aristocrat.
Freud, talking about melancholy patients: “When in his heightened self-criticism he describes himself as petty, egoistic, dishonest, lacking in independence, one whose sole aim has been to hide the weaknesses of his own nature, it may be, so far as we know, that he has come pretty near to understanding himself; we only wonder why a man has to be ill before he can be accessible to a truth of this kind. For there can be no doubt that if anyone holds and expresses to others an opinion of himself such as this (an opinion which Hamlet held both of himself and of everyone else), he is ill, whether he is speaking the truth or whether he is being more or less unfair to himself.”
Freud again: “The analogy with mourning led us to conclude that he had suffered a loss in regard to an object; what he tells us points to a loss in regard to his ego.”
Garrick developed a famous naturalistic style when he played Hamlet, full of real terror when he was confronted by the ghost. Edmund Keen played a brooding, Romantic Hamlet. John Kemble was sultry and solemn. Later on, Henry Irving played a tender, vulnerable prince. Female Hamlets were common in the USA by the mid-nineteenth century.
“Abraham Lincoln’s favorite actress was Charlotte Cushman (1816-1876), who, in addition to her well-known performances as Lady Macbeth, also played the roles of Hamlet and of Romeo opposite her own sister as Juliet in Romeo and Juliet. In 1895, the actress Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923) became the first actor recorded on film as Hamlet– a role she continued to perform even after having one of her legs amputated.” Link here.
(Ulysses S. Grant played Desdemona in an 1845 U.S. Army production of Othello.)
(The American actor Ira Aldridge (1807-1867) was the first black actor to appear on stage in England, as Othello in London in 1825. Although he was born in the United States, Aldridge created the myth that he was the descendant of a Senegalese prince whose family was forced to escape to America to save their lives. He also played King Lear, Macbeth, and Richard III. He never went back to America.) Paraphrase from here.
The director of a 1995 all women production in Japan said, “As soon as rehearsals started everyone forgot about the sex of the person, she was like any other performer, playing Hamlet.”
Delacroix made a series of drawings of Hamlet, based on Charles Kemble’s performance, which Baudelaire called delicate, pallid, soft and slightly hesitant.
Berlioz saw the same production and later married the actress who played Opehlia. His obsession with her led him to write the Symphonie fantastique. From Wikipedia:
Attending a performance of Shakespeare’s Hamlet on 11 September 1827, Berlioz fell in love with the Irish actress Harriet Smithson, who played the role of Ophelia. His biographer Hugh Macdonald writes of Berlioz’s “emotional derangement” in obsessively pursuing her, without success, for several years. She refused even to meet him.He sent her numerous love letters, all of which were unanswered.
The Symphonie fantastique reflects his obsession with Smithson. She did not attend the premiere, given at the Paris Conservatoire on 5 December 1830, but she heard Berlioz’s revised version of the work in 1832 at a concert that also included its sequel, Lélio, which incorporates the same idée fixe and some spoken commentary. She finally appreciated the strength of his feelings for her. The two met shortly afterwards and began a romance that led to their marriage the following year.
Do note, however, that in the intervening time between the performance of Hamlet and the wedding, Berlioz fell in love with a nineteen year old pianist. They planned to get married but then she left him and married an older, richer man. Berlioz plotted to kill them both, going so far as to acquire poisons, pistols and a disguise. Within a few weeks, the lust for revenge abated and he wrote the King Lear overture. Someone else invited Harriet Smithson to the Symphonie fantastique concert. They soon married against family wishes. But things did not go well. Her career was more or less over and now his began to flourish. Resentments gathered. He had an affair. The marriage later failed.
Between 2014-2016, sixteen actors led by Dominic Dreamgoole took Hamlet to 197 countries, including performances in refugee camps, finishing at the Globe in London to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death.
Edwin Booth, the famous American actor, played Hamlet from 1853-1891. His own father played the ghost, Junius Brutus Booth, who had played Hamlet from 1829-1849. Edwin used a miniature of Junius in the scene where Hamlet looks at a portrait of his father.
Playing Hamlet for long periods, perhaps intermittently, used to be much more common.
Shakespeare’s son Hamnet died in 1596; his father John died in 1601, and was ill for some time before. John was a tanner of leather, whose presence can surely be felt in the grave digger scene.
The know recorded performance (for which we have written record of the date) was on an East India ship off the coast of Africa in 1607. It is fascinating to think of them, a group of amateurs, working from a quarto or memory.
Satirical references were made to Hamlet by many contemporary playwrites: Dekker, Middleton, Chapman, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher.
There are three versions. Two Quartos (Q1 and Q2) and the Folio (F). Q2 is 72% larger than Q1 (sometimes known as the Bad Quarto).
Q1 may be an early draft, or an adaptation of another play. Or it might be a bootleg. Despite its superiority, Q2 may be the earlier edition, though printed later.
There are 230 lines in Q2 not in F. And 70 lines in F not in Q2.
By the 1990s there were over 400 scholarly publications about Hamlet every year.
I just read a Hamlet fact I would otherwise have included here.
Hitler used the phrase "to be or not to be" six times in Mein Kampf to "underline his all or nothing approach to what he thought was at stake for Germany in World War I." (from Richard Evans new book "Hitler's People"
I can’t imagine Grant playing Shakespeare.