William Shakespeare : Hamlet 9781847600288, 9781847600844

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Literature Insights

General Editor: Charles Moseley

William Shakespeare Hamlet John Lennard

‘The final testimony to Shakespeare’s generosity is how much he leaves up to the actors’

Publication Data © John Lennard, 2007 The Author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Humanities-Ebooks.co.uk Tirril Hall, Tirril, Penrith CA10 2JE

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ISBN 978-1-84760-028-8

William Shakespeare: Hamlet John Lennard

Literature Insights. Tirril: Humanities-Ebooks, 2007

A Note on the Author John Lennard took his B.A. and D.Phil. at Oxford University, and his M.A. at Washington University in St Louis. He has taught in the Universities of London, Cambridge, and Notre Dame, and for the Open University, and is now Professor of British & American Literature at the University of the West Indies—Mona. His publications include But I Digress: The Exploitation of Parentheses in English Printed Verse (Clarendon Press, 1991), The Poetry Handbook (1996; 2/e, OUP, 2005), and with Mary Luckhurst The Drama Handbook (OUP, 2002). He is the general editor of the Genre Fiction Sightlines and Monographs series, and has written Sightlines on works by Reginald Hill, Walter Mosley, Octavia E. Butler, and Ian McDonald. His critical collection Of Serial readers and other essays on genre fiction (2007), published simultaneously with this e-book, launches the Monographs Series.

Contents A Note on the Author Preface A note on the texts of Hamlet Acts and scenes in the Arden 3 Q2 Hamlet Part 1. Approaching Shakespeare 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4

A Man of the Jacobethan Theatre Companies—Actors—Stages—Audiences Venus and Lucrece Errors and Two Gentlemen

Part 2. Approaching Hamlet 2.1 Revenge with Complications 2.2 A Play by Shakespeare Part 3. Actors and Players 3.1 Old Hamlet / the Ghost 3.2 Horatio 3.3 Claudius 3.4 Gertrude 3.5 Polonius 3.6 Laertes 3.7 Ophelia 3.8 Rosencrantz & Guildenstern 3.9 The gravediggers 3.10 Osric 3.11 Fortinbras 3.12 Hamlet 3.13 “The best players in the world”

Part 4. Acts and Devices 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8

Acts Scenes Soliloquy and Colloquy Verse, Prose, and Song Metatheatre Doubling Special Effects Exits

Part 5. Hamlet and Twelfth Night Part 6. Critics’ Corner 6.1 Bibliography 6.2 Web-sites Hyperlinked Materials serious doubt theatre-space breath-length discovery-space comedic and tragedic modes Vice Inconclusive Speculation Blackfriars Ciceronian periods

Preface Like much in the modern world, Hamlet has acquired a tendency to become obese. In the Arden 2 Shakespeare, Harold Jenkins’s edition was twice the width of every other play; in Arden 3, Ann Thompson’s and Neil Taylor’s edition is in two volumes, jointly twice as wide as Jenkins’s one, and such remorseless bulking is an unhappy trend. The play can also expand in performance: a fine 2001 Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) stage-production (directed by Steven Pimlott and starring Sam West) ran over four hours with two intervals, and Kenneth Branagh’s 1996 film-adaptation, lasting a whopping 242 minutes, is rarely watched from start to finish, especially in one go. Still more off-puttingly for students, Hamlet criticism has the same expansiveness. This Literature Insight is determinedly short. Great need not mean ponderous, and on stage Hamlet (like most Shakespeare) almost always does better at a brisk canter than a solemn march. In dealing with something as complex as the world’s premier Early Modern tragedy simplicity is not always useful; straightforwardness and cogency almost always are, so scholarly problems are ruthlessly relegated to references, while links in the bibliography make available to interested readers the primary materials, that they may see for themselves what the evidence supports. Casting matters are trickier, for there is almost no evidence about the first casting of any of Shakespeare’s plays, and most of what is said is pure speculation. But someone first played each role, and a pool of most probable names is known: so the game can be compulsive. It is in no way necessary, but a grasp of the practical necessities and constraints Shakespeare faced in writing (which for a working playwright of his kind means casting) is very helpful, and inevitably brings more speculative territory into view. So sometimes I speculate, but only in footnotes or link-text, and in Part 6, where it is properly flagged and discussion can be as careful as it need. Plot-summaries etc. are widely available, so I assume readers have read Hamlet at least once and know what happens. The only special thing readers—particularly those without theatrical experience—are asked to do is to think seriously about the  There have been three series of Arden editions: the second appeared 1946–82, the third began to appear in 1993.  ‘Early Modern’: for historians, the period 1500–1700; ‘Modern’ = 1700–present.

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business of acting in a particular space. If possible, visit a theatre, any theatre, sit, breathe, look, and absorb its design. Follow these links to images of a classical amphitheatre, Roman stage, pageant-wagon, and Elizabethan amphitheatre, and just look at each hard for a minute. Shakespeare’s Hamlet has over four centuries been done in, on, and round about all of them, and many stranger venues besides, and no performance is ever independent of the physical and institutional structures that enable and frame it—buildings, stages, actors, and audiences. If these things are missing from your imagined understanding of the play’s text/s, it will (rightly) seem to you as lifeless as a TV without power; but turn the current on … A note on the texts of Hamlet There are three ‘early texts’ of Hamlet: Q1 (1603), the so-called ‘Bad Quarto’, which at c.2000 lines is half the length of the others and very different; Q2 (1604), the ‘Good Quarto’ of c.3700 lines; and F (1623), the ‘Folio text’ of c.3550 lines from the first collected Shakespeare, which drops c.230 of Q2’s lines, adds c.70 of its own, and (slightly) changes many more. Since the nineteenth century there has also been an ‘eclectic’ or ‘composite’ text of c.3850 lines, generated by editors who combine all lines in Q2 and F with some lines and stage-directions from Q1. My references are to the Arden 3 Hamlet edited by Ann Thompson & Neil Taylor (2 vols, London: Thompson Learning, 2006), and usually to its (modernised) Q2 text (in vol. 1); when the Q1 or F texts (in vol. 2) are cited, the reference indicates this. I have also therefore followed the scene-numbering and act-division of the Arden 3 text; in other editions 1.4–5 may be combined, as may any of 4.1–4 (which in F form 3.5–7). For ease of reference a summary of Arden 3’s acts and scenes is given below. All other Shakespearean references are to the Riverside text, 2nd edition, 1997. Readers are reminded that lines per scene and role vary with editions, and that ‘verse-lines’ (i.e. complete iambic pentameters) divided between two or three speakers may count in two or three roles—so totals may seem not to tally. All line-counts given are my own, and derive from the Arden 3 Q2 text.

 External Hyperlinks appear in blue + underline; internal hyperlinks also have the symbol ►.  Including a ship in 1607: see http://www.as.ua.edu/english/strode/articles/taylor/hamlet3.htm  For a longer discussion of Shakespearean editing, using Hamlet 5.1 as an example, see John Lennard & Mary Luckhurst, The Drama Handbook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), ch. 3. Line-counts cannot be absolute because methods of counting stage-directions, headings, blank lines, and part-lines that are or end complete speeches vary.

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Acts and scenes in the Arden 3 Q2 Hamlet Act 1 Scene 1: Barnardo, Francisco, Marcellus, Horatio, Ghost Scene 2: Claudius, Gertrude, Voltemand, Cornelius, Polonius, Laertes, Hamlet (O that this too too sallied flesh), Horatio, Barnardo*, Marcellus Scene 3: Laertes, Ophelia, Polonius Scene 4: Horatio, Marcellus, Hamlet, Ghost Scene 5: Hamlet, Ghost, Horatio, Marcellus* Act 2 Scene 1: Polonius, Reynaldo*, Ophelia Scene 2: Claudius, Gertrude, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Voltemand*, Cornelius*, Polonius, Hamlet (O, what a rogue …), Players Act 3 Scene 1: Claudius, Gertrude, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Polonius, Ophelia, Hamlet (To be, or not to be) Scene 2: Claudius, Gertrude, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Polonius, Ophelia, Hamlet, Horatio, Players* Scene 3: Claudius, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Polonius, Hamlet Scene 4: Gertrude, Polonius†, Hamlet, Ghost* (‘closet scene’) Act 4 Scene 1: Claudius, Gertrude, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern Scene 2: Hamlet, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern Scene 3: Claudius, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Hamlet Scene 4: Fortinbras, Captain*, Rosencrantz*, Guildenstern*, Hamlet (How all occasions do inform …) Scene 5: Gertrude, Gentleman, Horatio, Ophelia*, Claudius, Messenger, Laertes (‘mad scene’) Scene 6: Horatio, Gentleman*, Sailors* Scene 7: Claudius, Laertes, Messenger*, Gertrude (There is a willow …) Act 5 Scene 1: Gravediggers*, Hamlet, Horatio, Claudius, Gertrude, Laertes, Priest* Scene 2: Hamlet†, Horatio, Osric, Claudius†, Gertrude†, Laertes†, Fortinbras * last appearance † dies

Part 1. Approaching Shakespeare 1.1 A Man of the Jacobethan Theatre The basic facts of William Shakespeare’s life—birth in 1564, education at Stratford Grammar, marriage to Anne Hathaway (1556–1623), children, work, death in 1616— are perfectly clear and without serious doubt ►; but detail of any kind is almost nonexistent, and what there is is dubious or unhelpful. For a man born in the mid-sixteenth century this is already a notably full record—Shakespeare has attracted millions of hours of research, and Early Modern English records are better than most—but there is, blazingly, one thing more: that Shakespeare’s central passion, occupation, art, and craft was the Jacobethan theatre, dominantly the public amphitheatres. As actor, sharer, and resident dramatist of the Lord Chamberlain’s / King’s Men he was a major player in a particular emergent art, craft, and trade about which much is known and more can be inferred. A basic problem in imagining the Jacobethan theatre is that the closure of all English theatres from 1642–60 severed professional continuity; theatres built after 1660 were strongly influenced by continental European models dominated by perspectival scenery—quite different from the London amphitheatres of Shakespeare’s day. All older English plays struggled after 1660, losing as much as gaining in being forcibly adapted for and into the new theatre—a change bluntly recorded in the shift from going, as Elizabethans did, to hear a play, as auditors in an audience, to going (as we still do) to see a play, as spectators of something we hope will be spectacular.  Susanna, 1583–1649; fraternal twins Hamnet, 1585–96, and Judith, 1585–1662.  ‘Jacobethan’: a portmanteau of Elizabethan (in the reign of Elizabeth I, 1558–1603) and Jacobean (James VI & I, 1603–25), used because Shakespeare’s working life straddles the reigns.  ‘Sharer’: Like partners in a modern professional practice, sharers invested a substantial sum to buy their share, entitling them to a percentage of net receipts. There were eight sharers in Shakespeare’s company who probably played larger roles in most plays, while minor ones were played by hired men.  ‘Lord Chamberlain’s’ / ‘King’s Men’: Under Elizabeth, the official patron of the company to which Shakespeare belonged was from 1594 the Lord Chamberlain, so they were the ‘Lord Chamberlain’s Men’; after 1603 King James assumed that role himself, so the company became the ‘King’s Men’.

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So there has since 1660 been a particular sensory and intellectual gap, and to meet Shakespeare on his own ground (where he makes fullest, most immediate sense) modern readers must be aware of auditing as well as spectating, and of the theatreworld that supported Shakespeare’s full, passionate, and successful career. Perhaps the most obvious thing about that theatre-world is its energy. London was buzzing, and throughout Shakespeare’s career (c.1590–1613) remained the largest, most innovative city in Europe. Trade, war, expansion, investment—and new ways of investing—were powerful drivers. England as a whole had also forcibly stopped an activity that had long been important, and the impulses it had satisfied needed a new outlet. Under Roman Catholicism theatre was sacred: mystery cycles were performed in public procession at their time in the liturgical round, while morality plays taught doctrine and miracle plays celebrated exemplary lives. Many people acted and very many more audited, so when Henry VIII broke with Rome in 1533 he couldn’t simply suppress traditions of sacred performance—but the Catholic doctrine and faith they celebrated could only be a problem for an Anglican monarch, so the weight slowly came on, and there is no known English performance of a complete cycle after Coventry in 1574. That date should give pause, for the mystery cycles and morality plays are often firmly labelled as mediaeval, as they are in origin—but they were performed into Shakespeare’s lifetime, and he certainly knew about them. Just as importantly, many people he spoke to, worked with, and wrote for were also familiar with the cycles and their performance: but in 1575 the cycles were no more, and theatre will out. The man with the good timing, right idea, and persuasive tongue was James Burbage (d.1597), and the idea he had was in all fundamentals the modern theatre. What may most surprise is just how original an idea it was. Greek theatre, like the mystery cycles, was sacred and classical amphitheatres part of temple-complexes, while Roman theatre was mostly political, usually a poor relation of gladiatorial sports, and always a matter of direct patronage and official subsidy. Travelling players in the middle ages have left no trace of any permanent stages, so what Burbage wanted in 1576 was radical: a large, purpose-built structure owned and run by professional actors, to be funded through commercial performances. Preconditions for such a venture include a sufficiently large and wealthy catchment area, a workable design for the building, a pool of (would-be) actors, writers able to  The ‘porter’ scene in Macbeth (2.3) is based on the ‘Harrowing of Hell’ in the mystery cycles, when ‘devil-porters’ are disturbed by Jesus hammering on the gates—but the specificity of this well-known example tends to mask rather than emblematise the far wider and deeper connection between the ‘mysteries and moralities (d.1574)’ and the ‘Shakespearean Stage (b.1576)’.

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supply a stream of new plays, a team to handle production, finance, and the public once admitted, the blessings of central government and local authority, and a financier willing to lend you a very large sum on the strength of these plans … but Burbage pulled it off, and built in Shoreditch, just east of the City of London, what was simply called The Theatre. It had to be outside the City wall because the City Fathers had religious beliefs (and social convictions) that led them to disapprove of theatre in all forms, but even in Shoreditch other restrictions applied. A great show-woman herself, Queen Elizabeth knew very well just what theatricality could achieve politically, and plays for public performance had to be licensed by her Master of the Revels; offenders could and did find themselves in prison for a month or three, and any playwright venturing towards religion or recognisably current politics did so at their (and the actors’) peril. But it all worked! Within two years a second theatre, The Curtain, was providing competition, and the 1580s saw steady growth, however measured, so by the time Shakespeare came to London, probably in the later 1580s, the stage was in every way set for him. A body of actors had emerged for whom increasingly talented and professionally assured playwrights were beginning to write great roles, and company structures had been created that for the sharers were beginning to produce real wealth. Above all, Londoners had taken to the new entertainment in a big way, and the acting profession, despite its perennial insecurities, was already entrenched in popular and elite cultures. That was the working world Shakespeare entered, and as sharer-playwright of the premier company from 1594–1613 bestrode. 1.2 Companies—Actors—Stages—Audiences Theatre is always, of necessity, a practical group business. When it is also putting food on the actors’ tables, and must finance a building as well as covering the initial and running costs of performance, there is no room for mavericks or spendthrifts—yet much about theatre seems to attract, and worse to need and benefit from, people with exactly those qualities. The main answer to this conundrum in Shakespeare’s day was the company, a professional business in which individual interests were merged and individual commitments had to follow. Next to nothing is known about Shakespeare’s career as an actor, so he clearly did not strike his contemporaries as an outstanding stage-performer, but it was as an actor able to put up the necessary cash that he gained his position in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men—and only that position, held as an actor

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for nearly twenty years, enabled the particular, steady writing career that followed. Shakespeare’s had started writing plays before he began to do so exclusively for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, but most if not all his earlier plays were for them, so he was to all intents and purposes a (one-)company playwright. His plain duty in writing was therefore to write for his fellow-sharers, providing in each drama roles that played to strengths, stretched talents, masked weaknesses, and for the company added up to lots of repeat customers. Finance and theatre-space ► allowed him, in addition to six or eight major roles for himself and his fellow-sharers, up to six hired players for bit-parts etc., and four boys, and all but one of his 37 plays fit that pattern. Of course they also fit infinitely greater, more interesting patterns, but however soaring their ambitions and achievements, the articulating cast of each could be varied only within limits—generous by the standards of modern theatre (which tends to smaller casts), but for Shakespeare a constantly necessary discipline of theatrical creation. At a company level the inevitable tension of mutual obligation and the egoism of performance is reflected in the sharp opinions Shakespeare gave Hamlet about actors who speak “more then is set down for them […] though in the meantime, some necessary question of the play be then to be considered. – That’s villainous and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it” (3.2.36–42). The dilemma is sharp: if you want to get the best out of actors you must give them a creative job to do, but to make that job possible something much more dictatorial is required. Many actors will play Shakespeare, but relatively few can, in sober fact, produce coherent interpretations of his major roles: they are genuinely very demanding, and it is clear that Shakespeare must have pushed his core sharer-actors hard throughout his career. Richard Burbage (c.1567–1619), James Burbage’s younger son and the company’s star actor, did something so distinct in playing the major roles Shakespeare wrote for him that he began to be described not as ‘playing’ but as ‘personating’; during his and Shakespeare’s careers a greater, parallel change occurred as mere ‘players’ (musicians, entertainers) became ‘actors’ (doers of dramatic deeds). Additionally, and very oddly, English women were not then permitted to act in public, so the female roles in all plays of 1576–1642 had to be taken by beardless boys; not ‘in drag’ in the modern sense, but nevertheless cross-dressed and known by all to be so. A great deal has been written about this strange rule and what it might signify; here the cogent fact is simply that for Shakespeare (as for all writers and  Both as a solo writer and in his even rate of production Shakespeare was (very) unusual.  The exception is Richard III, which seems to have been written for a double-size company.  The elder son, Cuthbert (1566–1636), handled company administration.

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actors) boys playing women of all ages was a fixed condition of performance. Little is known about individual boys, but the companies’ main source of supply was choir schools, as the many songs in female roles attest; the potent tragedy of some roles also makes it clear that comparisons with modern ‘drag’ acts or school plays will not do, and that the boys were a true theatrical resource. But exclusion of women was a severe craft limitation that Shakespeare probably found as irksome as Shakespeare in Love suggests; there is certainly a case that he was careful in writing his female roles not to demand the kind of breath-length ► he could from Burbage and the other fullgrown adults, and in many plays his heroines voice sharp complaint at (performative) restrictions on women. At the same time, as theatre-goers familiar with reconstructed amphitheatres will know, exclusion of women was theatrically a lesser problem than it would be today, because Shakespeare’s theatre did not depend on illusion—the presentation of a fiction as ‘real’. His audiences did not sit in warm, covered darkness, gazing through a proscenium arch into the illuminated world beyond: they stood in the open air or sat in open galleries, certainly on three and perhaps all four sides of a stage, watching by afternoon-light and so constantly seeing one another as well as the actors. There was no convention of silence during performance, dis/pleasure would have been freely expressed, and Hamlet’s complaint about clowns ad-libbing points to freedoms of reception as well as performance, so Coleridge’s famous tag about the “willing suspension of disbelief” simply doesn’t apply to the Shakespearean stage. Audiences knew full well at all times what was/n’t real, and cannot have ‘suspended disbelief’; rather they ran belief (faith, credit) and disbelief (reason, knowledge) always in jointharness, and seem not to have distinguished boy-plays-woman from commoner-playsking, living-plays-dead, or a London stage playing Rome, Damascus, or wherever was needed for a given performance. It is this duality between expansive fiction and constraining reality amongst both audiences and actors that underpins the ‘metatheatre’ often noted in Shakespeare in plays that have ‘plays-within-plays’ (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hamlet) or ‘boys-playing-girls-playing-boys’ (As You Like It, Twelfth Night). These are certainly metatheatrical devices, forcefully reminding audiences to think about what they and  A few older female roles, notably the comic nurse in Romeo and Juliet, are thought to have been played by adults, but all others, from Juliet to Cleopatra, by boys.  Biographia Literaria (1817), ch. 14; Coleridge was actually discussing the process of reading poetry, not the business of attending drama—on which see his ‘Remarks on the stage’ (1808) and lecture of 1818–19, both in e.g. R. A. Foakes, ed., Coleridge’s Criticism of Shakespeare: A Selection (London: Athlone Press, 1989).

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the actors are presently doing—but so are every use of the words ‘act’, ‘scene’, and ‘play’, every dis/guising or wilful deception, every mention in dialogue of a theatrical role or feature, and every moment of daylight performance. Dramatic verse and song are also metatheatrical, for audiences hearing a song or speech in iambic pentameter do not postulate some strange versifying madness; they know it is a convention and accept its composition and delivery as features of a performance by which author and actor (as much as the speaking role) are to be judged. This intense metatheatrical awareness in performance is the single most important feature of the stage- and theatre-design for which Shakespeare structured his works, and as those designs both drove and constrained his development of plots it is important to understand how they worked. There is no surviving image of The Theatre (moved in 1598/99 to become The Globe), but it would have resembled The Swan, shown in Figure 1 (next page) in the ‘De Witt’ sketch—the only known interior drawing of an Elizabethan amphitheatre. A vertical axis structured the understage (accessible through the stage-trap), stage, and half-roof as Hell–Earth–Heavens, while an inset smaller vertical axis made the first-floor windows of the tiring-house (the ‘building’ behind the stage) an ‘Above’ to the stage (Juliet’s window overlooking her garden, battlements etc.). One horizontal axis similarly made the tiring-house at stage-level a ‘Within’ to the stage’s ‘without’ (so unseen actors could call out from ‘inside’ a building etc.), while a cross-axis provided left- and right-exits, and a double-width central discovery-space ► (not shown in the sketch). The left/right distinction could separate factions (Montagues and Englishmen right; Capulets and Frenchmen left), and informed a convention whereby villains entered left and heroes right. The discovery-space allowed tableaux to be revealed, large props (such as thrones or beds) to be thrust on or off, and processions (weddings, funerals) to enter/exit two abreast; it also allowed central ‘authority entrances’ (arresting the action), and so might be ab/used by (would-be) rulers, but was also impudently favoured by clowns who could comically thrust their heads or feet out through its curtains. The stage itself, about 43 x 27 feet (13 x 8 m) was flat, so there was no ‘up- or ‘down-stage’, but a  Literally: the timbers were disassembled, moved south of the river, and reassembled.  For a detailed discussion of the sketch’s un/reliability see R. A. Foakes, ‘Henslowe’s Rose/ Shakespeare’s Globe’, in Peter Holland and Stephen Orgel, eds, From Script to Stage in Early Modern England (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 11–31.  ‘Stage-trap’: a trap-door in the stage providing access to/from the understage (sometimes called the ‘Hell’), allowing sudden dis/appearances and perhaps serving e.g. for Ophelia’s grave (see Part 4.7).  Or ‘second-floor’ in normal US usage—i.e. the first raised level, one higher than the stage.  As in the frontispiece to Kirkman’s The Wits (1662); see http://www.britannica.om/eb/art-13689.

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central ‘command-point’ (pretty much where the seated figures are placed in the sketch) allowed actors to be seen as well as heard by every member of an audience. Modern practitioners using similar stages also find it helpful (especially in crowded scenes) to have designated paired spaces for higherand lower-rank interlocutors, so that orders always come from one place to be received in another, and acts of defiance, rebellion, or usurpation can be expressed by physical relocation and/ or reversal of positions on stage. The other fundamental thing about a Jacobethan amphitheatre is the lack of separation between actors and audience. Most modern theatres have a transverse proscenium (‘in front of the Figure 1 : The ‘De Witt’ sketch of the Swan Theatre, c.1599. scene’) wall dividing the entire building, which is pierced by the proscenium [Picture Credit : Utrecht University Library] arch that controls spectators’ sight-lines and frames the action. On one side of that wall are the stage and its machinery, the actors’ dressing rooms etc., reached by the stage-door; on the other are the auditorium and the public areas, and the divide is policed both for security and to control ticketed access. In amphitheatres there was no such wall or division, so audiences were not corralled in a block but pressed close to the action, crowding round three sides of the stage and making any dividing-line between the presented fiction of a play and the ‘real’ world of the theatre very tenuous. In one other important way Jacobethan amphitheatrical audiences were unlike most modern audiences: cross-class composition. Nineteenth-century theatre-design enforced social hierarchisation of audiences in stalls, ‘dress-circle’ (where evening dress was required), upper circle, and ‘gods’, and by the later twentieth century, with ticket-pricing as the major agent of exclusion, indoor theatre was in most Anglophone countries primarily a middle-class recreation. But such exclusion of the ‘unwashed’ from ‘respectable’ theatre had barely begun in Shakespeare’s day, and his first audi-

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ences at The Theatre included lowly apprentices and day-labourers, tradesmen and their families, merchants, minor and sometimes major nobles, and visitors of all degree—so he wrote for all understandings. The backchat between Samson and Gregory that opens Romeo and Juliet, all maidenheads and innuendo, is a laugh for everyone, but the pleasure of the sonnet Romeo and Juliet piece together in their courting dialogue is a rarer gracenote: what matters isn’t that one is ruder/cleverer than the other, but that Shakespeare had no difficulty using both within one play, trusting all in his audiences to understand variety and take it all in all. It sounds simple, but few playwrights since have been able to write so successfully for so wide an audience, and modern work—particularly on TV—is often sharply divided between ‘up-’ and ‘down-market’ production values and dramatic themes. These facts and conditions—companies, actors, stages, and audiences—were the cornerstones of Shakespeare’s working life. You may in reading carelessly forget to bear them constantly in mind, but Shakespeare in writing never could, or did. 1.3 Venus and Lucrece Plague closed all London theatres from January 1593 to spring 1594, and companies had to make do as best they could. Shakespeare evidently spent some time writing two long poems, Venus and Adonis and Lucrece (often called The Rape of Lucrece), both handsomely published in 1593–94 by a school-friend of his, Richard Field, and dedicated to the Earl of Southampton. The usual view is that Shakespeare was seeking advancement through flattery and demonstrations of talent, as he probably was, but the paired poems also offer a sharply helpful lesson in his art. Venus and Adonis is a richly com(ed)ic version of the Greek myth in which the nubile Goddess of Love falls deeply in lust with the handsome Adonis—far more interested, as some young men will be, in boar-hunting than in dealing with a peskily naked goddess. She offers herself extravagantly, he sighs in boredom, and eventually leaves (Venus still in randy pursuit) to chase a boar—which promptly kills him. Shakespeare’s main source was Ovid’s Metamorphoses, so the poem ends with the transformation of Adonis into a white-and-purple flower (usually identified as the anemone)—but not before Venus, stumbling over the body, has in her unsatisfied grief given a dire warning:  For a few weeks in winter 1593 weekly deaths dropped and theatres were allowed to open, but the companies mostly had to tour the provinces or rest.  ‘Com(ed)ic’: ‘comic’ simply means ‘funny’, but ‘comedic’ means ‘structured as a comedy’, i.e. in the crude formulation ‘ending in sex/marriage/survival’. ‘Tragic’/‘tragedic’ are similarly distinguished.

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‘Since thou art dead, lo, here I prophesy Sorrow on love hereafter shall attend; It shall be waited on with jealousy, Find sweet beginning but unsavoury end;   Ne’er settled equally, but high or low,   That all love’s pleasure shall not match his woe.’ (ll. 1135–40)

Alas, then, for Romeo and Juliet, and all other Shakespearean lovers whose “course of true love never did run smooth” (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1.1.134). The vigorous sestets, rhyming ababcc, fluidly combine the racy narrative (carried in the crossrhyming quatrain, abab-) with mocking or epigrammatic reflections (in the punchy -cc couplets), so that as in this stanza there is a clear central theme with rich poetic and intellectual orchestration. Lucrece is by comparison overtly trag(ed)ic, a tale of betrayal and loyalty set when Rome was a city-kingdom beginning to conquer neighbours. At a battlefront near home the king’s son, Tarquin, and a group of nobles including Collatine argue as to whose wife is most chaste, and resolve to ride home unannounced. All discover their wives variously compromised save Collatine, whose Lucrece is found sewing with her women—so Tarquin lusts for her. Returning alone the next night, he ignores her pleas for mercy and powerful arguments about the terrible consequences of what he wants to do (the bulk of Shakespeare’s poem), rapes her and leaves; she then calls an assembly of the nobles who witnessed her chastity, tells all, and signs her accusation in blood by killing herself before them: Even here, she sheathed in her harmless breast   A harmful knife, that thence her soul unsheathed: That blow did bail it from the deep unrest   Of that polluted prison where it breathed.   Her contrite sighs unto the clouds bequeathed Her winged sprite and through her wounds doth fly Life’s lasting date from cancelled destiny. (ll. 1723–29)

Appalled, the noble witnesses expel, with the people’s consent, not only Tarquin but the monarchy through which he would have inherited the throne, to make of Rome the first republic—an event of enormous political importance, still very much resonant in Shakespeare’s day and not self-evidently tragedic. The poem is in a more  ‘Trag(ed)ic’: ‘tragic’ simply means ‘sad’ (in journalism ‘an accident’ implies injury, and ‘a tragic accident’ death/s), but ‘tragedic’ means ‘structured as a tragedy’—even in crude formulation implying not only ‘ends in death’ but ‘rightly ends in death’. ‘Comic’/‘comedic’ are similarly distinguished.

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complex stanza than Venus and Adonis, called rhyme royal, ababbcc, which can feature two thumping couplets (aba-bb-cc) to raise the moral(ising) stakes, or as here divide abab-bcc, blurring both couplets to create an unusual, sliding density of narrative that is especially notable in Lucrece’s extraordinary speeches to threatening yet somehow stilled Tarquin. While framed as narratives, both poems depend on long speeches in dramatic tableaux, and offer respective agendas for Shakespeare’s practices of comedy and tragedy: Venus and Adonis has an active female wooer, a woodland setting, and mockmoral love-talk in plenty, primary ingredients of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and As You Like It; Lucrece sacrifices a woman to patriarchal commodification in an acutely political context, as Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Antony and Cleopatra also do. Put like this the poems seem utterly distinct—but what is instructive are their profound similarities: marble-hearted men, pleading women, death ‘cancelling destinies’, and change; unrequited desires claiming chaste victims who metamorphose, Adonis into his flower and Lucrece into the Roman Republic. The first part of the lesson the two poems offer is this intimate pairing, evident in all Shakespeare’s art, of comedic and tragedic modes ► that the practice of theatre often (and criticism still more often) forces widely apart. This means adjusting your expectations and labels. Such moments in the tragedies as the irreverent gravediggers in Hamlet 5.1 or drunken porter in Macbeth 2.3 are often described as ‘comic relief’, as if they were a sort of tea-break from the real dramatic business—but in strong productions they almost always intensify emotion. So do the converse moments that stud the comedies—Helena abandoned in Midsummer Night’s Dream 2.1 or Beatrice demanding that Benedick ‘Kill Claudio’ in Much Ado 4.1—that no-one would think of calling ‘tragic relief’. It is on a macro scale the generic motley that pervades Shakespeare’s art, another expression of the impulse that made Hamlet rudely refer to his father’s terrifying ghost as “that fellow in the cellarage” before acting as a clown to gain his awful revenge; that placed the melancholy Jacques amid the joyous nonsense of As You Like It; that had Bottom and his fellow-mechanicals perform a version of Romeo and Juliet as the hilarious finale of a wedding-feast, and set the octogenarian King Lear capering naked in a storm. In most drama one twist is more than can safely be hoped for; in Shakespeare’s almost nothing is straight. The second part of the lesson is the function in both major genres of metamorphosis. Because Shakespeare’s friend and fellow playwright Ben Jonson (1572–1636)

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described him as having “small Latin and less Greek” it used to be confidently asserted that Shakespeare could read neither language. But this is nonsense: Jonson, a great classicist, had Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and several European languages, and his remark is like a professor saying ‘well, he only has school Latin’; “less Greek”, moreover, implies some Greek, and in grammar schools only those who mastered Latin even started Greek. This matters because it means Shakespeare could (and clearly did) read Ovid in the original, and that matters because Ovid—Publius Ovidius Naso, 43 bce–18 ce—was very clearly and by a long way his favourite poet. The adjectives derived from the great Roman poets—Horatian, Virgilian, Ovidian—are falling into disuse, but to understand Shakespeare as Ovidian is helpful. If Virgil stands for patriotic epic and Horace for urbane wit, Ovid stands for dynamic wisdom, in his Tristia (‘Blues’) written in exile as much as his more famous Metamorphoses, assembling myths of reactive change. The latter is the only book named in any Shakespeare play (explicitly in Titus Andronicus, implicitly in Cymbeline), and its themes and images are ubiquitous in his writing. Hopes and realities of change are also one of the very few constants among his many roles, which seems a simple thing—but most playwrights depend both in tragedy and comedy on decidedly fixed roles and ‘characters’. The two parts of the lesson go together: genres fuse and everyone can change. When a remorseless villain makes us laugh, a rogue tugs despite him- or herself at our heartstrings, or a well-deserving hero/ine leaves us itching for them to come a cropper on any available banana-skin, Shakespeare is not dismayed or disapproving, but interested. Almost no-one in his plays acts wholly to type, or is condemned to remain as they are when the play begins: opportunity will knock and change will happen, for better or worse; it’s how to profit from the inevitability by staying alive to rise a ‘sadder but a wiser’ wo/man that counts. Genre is primarily a process of expectation—and Shakespeare did more to subvert dramatic expectations than any other writer on record. 1.4 Errors and Two Gentlemen Exact dates are uncertain but most agree that Shakespeare’s earliest surviving comedies are The Comedy of Errors and The Two Gentlemen of Verona, probably written in that order in 1591–92. As with Venus and Lucrece, pairing them offers a valuable two-part lesson in Shakespeare’s art. The first part rests on Ben Jonson’s table-talk in 1619, when he walked to Scotland,

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billeted himself on the hapless Drummond of Hawthornden, and drank the man out of house and home while lecturing him on aesthetics—words Drummond had the wit and forbearance to record. Among a barrage of provocative opinions is the revealing remark that Jonson “had an intention to have made a play like Plaut[u]s Amphitrio, but left it off for that he could never find two so like others that he could persuade the spectators they were one”—i.e. Jonson in seeking to adapt a Roman play featuring twins (easy in classical theatre as actors were masked) was inhibited by a lack of twin actors. All well and good—but Shakespeare wasn’t inhibited by anything: The Comedy of Errors is also based on a twin-play, Plautus’s Menaechmi, and borrows from Amphitrio to double its number of twins. Theatrically this spells out a huge difference between Jonson and Shakespeare: bluntly, that Jonson didn’t trust audiences’ imaginations and thought play should, where it could, be real; while Shakespeare did trust imagination, and knew all he had to do was make sure an audience knew what its premises were. It is this more than anything that transforms the inherent metatheatre of Jacobethan amphitheatres (Part 1.2) into a living thing within Shakespeare’s plots, enabling an astonishing array of roles—Petruchio, Bottom, Falstaff, Hal, Touchstone, Mark Anthony, Hamlet, Feste, Macbeth and Prospero among them—to trust theatre in making their plans and speaking their speeches. When Jonson’s characters do this, as Subtle, Face, and Doll do in The Alchemist, they come to unhappy ends, but in Shakespeare there can be, as Touchstone declares, “Much virtue in If ” (As You Like It, 5.4.103). The second part of the lesson rests on a comparison of the two plays. The Comedy of Errors with its close adherence to classical models and strict logic is in many ways a clockwork perfection: its confusable twin masters and twin servants rotate through the possible combinations of mistake with slick precision, and the whole is one of only two Shakespearean plays to observe the classical unities of time, place, and action. The Two Gentlemen of Verona is by comparison a mess: relatively little performed without heavy adaptation, its intertwined plots seem unbalanced and avoid a fray of loose ends only by some outrageous devices in act 5—including an abruptly threatened rape followed by an offer to give the woman away that even now brings readers (and performances) to a nasty stand. Yet Errors was a one-off, while Two Gentlemen in all its un/happy chaos contained the distinctive elements of Shakespearean comedy: interwoven trials of paired lovers, male development from  Ian Donaldson, ed., Ben Jonson (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 604.  That is, it happens within one day, in a single place, and has no sub-plot. The other play to observe these unities is The Tempest, probably his last as Errors had been his first; the 35 or so in between drive a coach-and-four through all unities save their own.

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homosocial friendship to heterosexual love, acute metatheatrical clowning, insetperformance, a cross-dressed heroine on a journey, a general move out to the woods, and an array of marriages. Shakespeare, that is, seems only once and flawlessly to have imitated a received model; then he set out to do something quite different and in some ways frighteningly original. Most radical was the move to the woods, for all earlier stage-comedy is firmly urban; in Roman theatre the stage was even called the via (‘road’), because it invariably represented a street in front of houses. Other elements, including paired lovers and such stock-roles as the ‘clever slave’ (turned servant/page), obstructive father of the heroine, and the ‘braggart soldier’, boastful but cowardly—come from Plautine comedy and/or Italian commedia dell’arte, but combine in original ways with the cross-dressed female journey and processes of individual maturation. The clowns, conversely, derive largely from English popular culture and show startling aspects of the Vice►, the stage-crafty tempter-figure in morality plays, while Crab, a dog belonging to the clown Launce (or Lance), has the distinction of being the first known scripted role for an animal in English drama. This striking heterogeneity, mixing within a theatrical world figures from very different traditions who may find themselves strangely out-of-place or surprisingly make themselves a place, became a distinctive feature of Shakespeare’s writing in all genres. Plot developments and structures are similarly borrowed from disparate places and strangely recombined, sometimes awkwardly, sometimes very productively, and if Two Gentlemen as a whole doesn’t quite grow “to something of great constancy” (Dream, 5.1.26) its many successors did. Two other points are worth making. First, the geography of Errors, wholly set in Ephesus, is simply the town and adjacent sea-coast, but in Two Gentlemen something much stranger happens: all who travel from Verona to Milan go by sea—but neither  ‘Inset-performance’: A performance of a play as part of the plot. Inset-performances are often referred to as the ‘play-within-the-play’, giving the impression of a ‘Russian-Doll’ type recession of elements varying only in size, but Shakespeare always distinguishes theatrical kinds, and his insetperformances are by amateurs, by travelling players, or of masques.  Stock-roles’: functional roles occurring in many plays, as ‘the Bitch’ does in soap operas.  The obstructive father was called the senex (old man) in Roman comedy, Pantalone in commedia dell’arte; the braggart was the miles gloriosus (self-glorifying soldier) or Il Capitano (the Captain).  ‘Commedia dell’arte’: Italian, ‘comedy of the artisans’. A term coined by Carlo Goldoni (1707–93) for a very influential improvised theatre-form of sixteenth-century Venetian origin: actors play roles for which a mask, a walk, habitual props etc. are specified; the story is plotted but dialogue is improvised.  See Richard Beadle, ‘Crab’s Pedigree’, in Michael Cordner, Peter Holland, and John Kerrigan, eds, English Comedy (Cambridge: CUP, 1994), pp. 12–35.

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city is a port, and between them lies only a hundred miles of the Plain of Lombardy. As he famously did again in The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare simply put a sea where he wanted one, caring as little as most auditors for real geography: so there is no point complaining about foolishness or ignorance; the question is why he wanted a sea, and the obvious answer is its symbolism of mutability and metamorphosis, a constant (Ovidian) feature of Shakespeare’s imagery in Two Gentlemen as elsewhere. Such internal dramatic meaning is at least as important as real-world reference, a quality that goes with Shakespeare’s generosity of imagination and inclusion. Second, while the twins of Errors are not repeated (and recur only in the impossibly identical fraternal twins of Twelfth Night), their underlying principle of ‘doubling’ incidents to generate contrasts and parallels is switched to paired lovers and main/sub-plot intertwinings. This allowed Shakespeare to keep the useful density of relationship that doubling brings while escaping the shackles of twin-based plots, and it remained a favourite strategy in composition throughout his career. The two parts of this lesson also go together. Shakespeare was able to throw away the easy imitative certainties of Errors and open a new comedic path with Two Gentlemen because he trusted his audiences and their imaginations of his fictions. He could cheerfully raid other dramatic traditions, tickle stock-roles into new theatrical life, and put seas where he wished for the same reason: he trusted himself and his audiences to trust theatre (Touchstone’s virtuous If), and was willing to try things out. At the same time, the intrinsic shapeliness produced by ‘doubling’, constant similarities and glinting distinctions between roles and events, gave that generosity of imagination a strong frame, and disciplined exuberance.

 Ben Jonson complained to Drummond that “Shakespeare in a play brought in a number of men saying they had suffered shipwreck in Bohemia, where th[e]r[e] is no Sea near by some 100 miles” (Donaldson, ed., Ben Jonson, p. 599).  ‘Doubling’ may mean only the playing by one actor of two or more roles in the same play; I use it here in a wider sense, as a principle of dramaturgy in which plots are developed by creating parallel or paired characters, incidents, speeches etc., and main/sub-plots track one another.

Part 2. Approaching Hamlet 2.1 Revenge with Complications For all its complexities, the underlying structure of Hamlet is simply the ABC of a revenge tragedy: A (old Hamlet) is harmed by B (Claudius) and avenged by C (Hamlet), who undoes himself in the process. There was an earlier version of the story (the ‘ur-Hamlet’), perhaps by Kyd, in the later 1580s, and the sub-genre as it existed before Hamlet is exemplified by Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (1588/89). The idea of revenge was of intense interest to Jacobethans, who were completing the process by which it was outlawed and official justice took over; Francis Bacon in 1597 famously described “a kind of wild justice, which the more a man’s nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out”, and the fizzing paradox of wildness (lack of control) and justice (rule of law) is what fascinated Jacobethans. The sub-genre continued after Hamlet, notably with Middleton’s or Tourneur’s The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607) and Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy (1611), and continues to flourish today (think of the Death Wish or Mad Max films). Before Romanticism writers were not expected to be ‘original’; the question was rather how they put their own spin on a story. Of Shakespeare’s surviving 37 plays most have known sources from which their major characters and events as well as various details were taken, but he was a master of the telling tweak, an apparently slight change jagging an old tale into a new configuration, and in the Hamlet story picked out three aspects through which his revenge story could be shaped. The changes (or stresses) played to company strengths and indulged his own interests, but also served—deliberately, I think—to over-egg the pudding by massively elaborating the simple structure with which he started, and so raise a fascinating question about the extent to which Hamlet parodies the received revenge-form (ghosts, adultery, lost sweethearts, graveside fisticuffs, poisoned goblets …) while providing an apparently earnest philosophical version of it.  ‘Of Revenge’, in Essays (1597).  See G. Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (8 vols, London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957–75).

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The first great complication is the identity of A as the source of the information triggering the revenge. If C is to avenge A on B, C must learn what B did to A: but in Hamlet the only witness, A himself, is a ghost, and however convincing that ghost seems there is for Hamlet (as for all Jacobethans) a real possibility that it is a hellish sending trying to ensnare his soul with ‘disinformation’. Hamlet’s consequent need to verify the Ghost’s claim that old Hamlet, “King, father, royal Dane” (1.4.45), was murdered by his brother Claudius drives the most obviously metatheatrical element of the plot, the inset-performance in 3.2 by travelling players. For Hamlet, The Murder of Gonzago (a.k.a. The Mousetrap) serves principally to test Claudius’s guilt and prompts pointed statements about acting and theatre generally. For Shakespeare, it also serves to hasten Claudius’s self-protective measures that delay the resolution through acts 4 and 5, and contains a dire warning for Hamlet, in that King Gonzago’s murderer is his nephew Lucianus—so the inset-play anticipates Hamlet’s regicidal murder of uncle Claudius as much as it recalls Claudius’s regicidal murder of brother Hamlet. The second complication is the identity of B—Claudius the fratricide, but also Hamlet’s uncle and by the time the play begins his stepfather and king. Any obligation to kill is bad; an obligation to kill kin and king justifies serious consideration of suicide as an honourable alternative. Kin-slaying has always had a special opprobrium, and both in law and custom a monarch was to Jacobethans sacred: evil as Claudius may be, no-one but those who saw the Ghost has much reason to suspect anything—but because the paying audience, having (usually) seen and heard the Ghost, is aware of Claudius’s guilt, the magnitude of Hamlet’s problem is easy to forget. Think then of Macbeth, and the terrible, impious killing of King Duncan: Hamlet’s repeated, dying concern that Horatio “report me and my cause aright / To the unsatisfied” and “tell my story” (5.2.323–4, 333) is because he knows himself as a kin/g-killer very greatly to have transgressed, and fears that his memory will be as tainted as his uncle’s. Even with Claudius’s guilt proven, blood-relation and monarchy are potent inhibitions, and in the famous scene (usually 3.3), where Hamlet could stab Claudius while he prays but is unable actually to do so, one should always remember Claudius’s crown: as he (ironically) reminds Laertes, “There’s such divinity doth hedge a king / That treason can but peep to what it would, / Acts little of his will” (4.5.123–5). Claudius as king also very usefully explains at a stroke why personal revenge is needed and legal proceedings are impossible, for to invoke law against the king is to demand that he arrest himself. As the uncle-king is also stepfather, Hamlet’s relationship with Gertrude as  As distinct from on-stage audiences that all inset-performances generate.

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mother-queen is dragged into the mix. When (in the ABC of revenge) C is A’s son, he typically seeks vengeance not only on his own and his father’s behalf, but also in the sacred name of his mother, as much a bereaved claimant on ‘wild justice’ as he; but for Hamlet the support for revenge he might expect from his mother is reversed into powerful support for Claudius. It is this aspect of this second complication that opens Hamlet to the intense psychology many find in the play, as Hamlet (despite being warned off by the Ghost) forces a confrontation with Gertrude about her complicity, at best in cheapening old Hamlet’s memory, at worst with the lust and envy that drove Claudius to kill. The third complication, bracing the first two, is Hamlet’s personal identity as a man of words rather than action, conflicting with his imposed dramatic and filial identity as revenger. Impatience with Hamlet as a procrastinator tends to ignore the often slow pace of modern performances and the difficulty all actors of Shakespeare face if they have to deliver soliloquies through a proscenium arch, but there is nevertheless a clear contrast between roles like Hamlet or Benedick (in Much Ado), who resort to violence only in extremis, and roles like Lear or Coriolanus who show highly destructive tendencies to over-(re)act without thinking. By comparison with Shakespeare’s other recent protagonists—Romeo, Hal in the Henry IV plays, Orlando in As You Like It—Hamlet is at 30 somewhat older (as Benedick also is) and his studies at Wittenburg, like the habits of reading on which various stage-directions insist, suggest a bookish man who has stepped back from the world of energetic action—yet Hamlet too, like Romeo, accidentally kills a man in act 3 and finds himself part of a wholesale slaughter in act 5. This complication opens the play to Hamlet’s extraordinary personal voice, speaking more than 1300 lines, blazing phrases into the language throughout, and bringing with it the last great loop of the plot, for such qualities of well-read rhetoric and being dragged from study into worldly action are the very stuff of the male Shakespearean lover. Whence Ophelia, who (i) as Hamlet’s love-interest enables a comedic and deeply disturbing parallelism of lovers to emerge across the generations; (ii) as Polonius’s daughter helps knit together the stories of his and Hamlet’s families, none of whom  The age of 30 is based on the gravedigger’s statements at 5.1.134-53 and 163-71. In Q1 one statement is omitted and the other altered from “three and twenty years” to “this dozen year” (Q1, 16.86), which drops Hamlet’s age to 18/19. Many critics have felt that the younger age ‘fits’ the action better, and productions may follow suit for any number of reasons, but if Burbage did create the role he was at least 32 when he did so. Q1 has been argued to be a touring text, cut down for a smaller company, so an obviously younger actor may have taken the part and the text been adjusted accordingly. Both Q2 and F are unequivocal, however: Hamlet is in his thirtieth year.

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survive the play; and (iii) is in her own right a terrible burden on Hamlet’s conscience. His nerve-strung, hasty act in killing Polonius (who becomes a new A) makes him no longer simply C, the revenger, but also B, the sinner, on whom a new C, Laertes, should avenge A—a scenario which keeps Claudius safe for a while, but leads to the absurd confrontation between Hamlet and Laertes over Ophelia’s grave and the subsequent fencing that kills them both. It is also genuinely damaging for Hamlet— killing one’s putative father-in-law is rarely advisable—and if Ophelia is well-acted and -directed the role brings the play into a tauter arc by crossing the drive of the revenge plot with a distinct tragedy of forlorn love and betrayal that intensifies even as it is overshadowed. Thus the simple ABC of revenge is progressively complicated. A is made a ghost trailing metatheatre and a profound puzzle that only theatre can solve; B is made king-stepfather as well as murderer, trailing psychology and maternal conflict; and C becomes B to a new A and C in a parallel revenge-chain that uses comedic structures and a love sub-plot to echo and intensify all that happens in the tragedic revenge main plot. The linear A–B–C of revenge becomes a hall of mirrors where Polonius joins old Hamlet in victimhood, Claudius’s and Gertrude’s sordid love is set against Hamlet’s desires for and treatments of Ophelia, and Hamlet must become as regicidal a kinslayer as Claudius while (by the same code) properly dying himself at the hands of Laertes—the whole being invested with the intense poetry of a bookish prince caught between a paternal ghost and the political metamorphosis of the ghost’s kingdom. 2.2 A Play by Shakespeare This section applies to Hamlet the points made in Part 1, Approaching Shakespeare —summarily (i) that he was a consummate theatre professional, (ii) that generic motley and Ovidian metamorphosis pervade his art, and (iii) that he habitually extended to his actors, craft, and audiences a strong trust in collective imagination and a generosity of spirit that liberates in performance and resolution. Considered as a theatrical object of performance, Hamlet is by all measures striking. The title-role is long to learn and exhausting to play but gratifying in its centrality and richness of language, and greatly attracts actors. Given its (potential) length, the play is usually ‘cut’ in performance by 10–15%, and being very variously cut has proved itself a sturdy theatrical vehicle: even the so-called ‘Bad Quarto’, the shortest of the early texts and to readers familiar with the others absurd in getting things  Of the c.3850 lines of the ‘conflated’/‘eclectic’ text, merging Q2 and F.

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‘wrong’, proves in performance resiliently coherent. No early text needs anything that would not normally be in a Jacobethan props-chest (book, skull, letters, swords, goblets), and staging difficulties are minimal: the ghost may first appear ‘Above’, and different levels of a stage can certainly be used but are not required (so the play is tourable to the simplest venue). There is no overt polarisation of left/right entrances/ exits, but Fortinbras and his army probably came in by one and left by the other, returning through that other at the end. The discovery-space, however, would have been critical for getting any throne/s on and off and for the final exeunt by soldiers carrying Hamlet’s body, and it seems likely that it was used in other ways. Many critics once confidently believed that the discovery-space must have been used as an ‘inner stage’ for the performance of The Murder of Gonzago, but consensus is now strongly that this is unworkable. Yet the discovery-space was central, favoured by kings for authority entrances and clowns for comic or subversive ones: its curtains were most probably the arras behind which Polonius hid and died, and it seems unlikely in a play so concerned with playing kings and clowns that their joint association with the discovery-space was not exploited in staging. In reading the play it is thus worth pondering entrances/exits as left/right or central and keeping track of how that might layer meanings by physically associating particular moments or roles: Hamlet in his “antic disposition” (1.5.170) and Claudius were probably thus inter-woven in the original staging of act 3, and perhaps throughout. It is widely asserted that the role of Hamlet was ‘created’ (i.e. first performed) by Richard Burbage, which it may well have been, but the evidence is inconclusive►. The role of Ophelia needed a relatively skilled boy, but is significantly less demanding than the later comedic heroines of the 1590s. Like all Shakespeare, the play builds some parts on stock-role frames—Hamlet and Laertes as Revengers, Claudius as Villain-revengee, Polonius as Pantaloon, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as an Odd Couple—that are seen repeatedly in Shakespeare and other playwrights, and that the company actors would functionally have understood whatever complications Shakespeare had added this time. They and audiences would also have enjoyed the gossip about London theatre-life prompted by the arrival of the players (F 2.2.335– 60). Hamlet’s subsequent remarks in 3.2 about acting and clowns are often thought to be a pointed dig at a recently departed sharer, William Kemp, whose reasons for leaving may have included disagreements about ad libbing; the famous line about  “To be, or not to be—ay, there’s the point.” (Q1, 7.115)  The 1964 Broadway production directed by John Gielgud and starring Richard Burton used a split–level stage to great effect.  But jigging was probably more important: see Wiles, Shakespeare’s Clown, pp. vii–ix, 43–60.

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“groundlings” (a kind of bottom-feeding flatfish, and so a fairly insulting term in itself) being “capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb-shows and noise” (3.2.10– 12) is certainly a dig at the audience (who doubtless responded with broad defiance). Additionally, as the Lord Chamberlain’s Men had had particular success in the 1590s with Shakespeare’s history plays, a genre he championed, Polonius’s description of the travelling players as “the best actors in the world […] for […] history” (2.2.333– 4) would have been understood as something of a boast. The generic motley of Hamlet is often lost in performance, overwhelmed by pofaced attitudes to the triple-tragedy of revenge (original crime, expiatory death of the villain, self-destruction of the revenger) and the deaths of Gertrude, Polonius, Ophelia, and Laertes. One must nevertheless ask what exactly Polonius—as a father concerned with chastity and money a structurally comedic figure—is doing in this revenge world, and it is far less surprising to audiences than to Polonius himself when his ‘I’ll hide behind the curtain’ trick goes foolishly wrong and his corpse becomes briefly Hamlet’s heaviest prop. As an Odd Couple, typically played by a pair of actors with one fat or short and one thin or tall, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern can also become strikingly funny (especially if Claudius confuses them at 2.2.33–4). But beyond these evident cues for comedy, an astonishing amount of the play responds to comic treatment: as an example, Simon Russell Beale, playing Hamlet in John Caird’s production for London’s National Theatre in 2001, repeatedly obtained a general laugh with the simple non-committal 1.2.234, “Very like.”, through his body language and disbelieving reaction to Horatio’s tale of an armoured ghost. Moreover, as amateur productions may discover the hard way, the great slaughter of the last scene, with Laertes, Gertrude, Claudius, and Hamlet himself all dead on stage, can with terrifying speed tip from hushed disaster to stifled farce: all it takes is one overhammy death or a corpse surreptitiously adjusting its position, and one member of the audience who laughs, for tragedy to be utterly lost for the evening. It is true that any bad performance can kill a tragedy, but the razor-edge balance Hamlet finds between desolation and absurdity is rare, and repeats the question of whether the play as a whole is parodic as much as tragic. There is no single answer: the play can be done as straight tragedy, piling increment upon increment, or it can do all that with a knowing look, a winking eye that asks about  “Neither a borrower nor a lender be […] Be somewhat scanter of your maiden presence” (F, 1.3.75, 121): for a Jacobethan audience a greybeard opening his performance with these words to a son and daughter would strongly label himself as a com(ed)ic Pantalone-figure.  For documentation see Croall, Hamlet Observed, and for reviews: http://www.curtainup.com/ hamletliz.html and http://www.theaterpro.com/pl_shake3.html.

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to Hamlet’s ghostly doubts. In another sense it is Shakespeare’s generous inclusiveness that drives the ending. Just as in his comedies it can seem that marriage may overtake almost anyone within reach, so the slaughterous ending of Hamlet litters the stage with bodies, and the play as a whole has a death-toll for individuals and families matched only by Richard III and Titus Andronicus. This is in part a means of generic control, but also works (as in King Lear) to make those left alive seem excluded from a share in the deathly ending, inviting comparison with the endings of As You Like It and Twelfth Night, where Jaques and Malvolio exclude themselves by exiting, and leave behind powerful, unsettling impressions of absence. The sheer size of Hamlet, expanding geographically (Norway, England) and poetically as it goes, is also testimony to its driving inclusiveness, as is the extraordinary manner in which Hamlet’s infamous “To be or not to be” soliloquy has made him (despite being a Prince in a very peculiar situation) a kind of everyman whom audiences hear (and eventually see) preceding them into that “undiscovered country” of death (3.1.78) to which we must all come. The final testimony to Shakespeare’s generosity is how much he leaves up to the actors, and how much they must, willy-nilly, leave up to an audience. No-one could claim Hamlet lacks finality, yet questions unanswered in any text include whether Gertrude committed adultery, murder, and/or suicide; whether Ophelia committed suicide (for which there is only Gertrude’s flowery word); what will become of Denmark; and whether any kind of justice has been done. The reason Tom Stoppard’s famous response to Hamlet is called Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1966, filmed 1990; quoting 5.2.355) is in large part that despite five long and crowded acts that is almost all an audience really knows when the play is done—other than that both Hamlets, old Fortinbras, Claudius, Gertrude, Polonius, Ophelia, Laertes, and Yorick are also dead. To leave so much calculatedly open when so much has happened, and so much more been richly said, is not easy for a writer, but it is characteristic of Shakespeare, and (as much as the play’s generic instability in performance) these generous uncertainties explain the very wide range of responses and interpretations that have sustained Hamlet’s interest for more than 400 years.

 Tragedies may ‘end in death’, comedies ‘in marriage’, but it does not follow that four deaths or marriages make for greater tragedy or comedy than one: all after the first may as readily serve to qualify as to reinforce a generic identity.

Part 3. Actors and Players Readers are reminded that scene and line-counts derive from the Arden 3 Q2 text, and totals may for various reasons seem not to tally; see Preface 0.1 above. Comparative casting charts for Q1, Q2, and F appear (without line-counts but with commentary) as Appendix 5 in vol. 1 of Arden 3.

3.1 Old Hamlet / the Ghost Scenes (number of lines): 1.1 (0), 1.4 (0), 1.5 (89), 3.4 (6) Total scenes: 4 Total lines: 95

Ghosts make good theatre. In four of the five plays in which Shakespeare cast them they are murdered aristocrats or rulers (Richard III, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Macbeth), so old Hamlet keeps good company—but is in three ways unusual. The first is costume. Horatio insists the Ghost is wearing “the very armour he had on / When he the ambitious Norway combated” (1.1.59–60), and describes to Hamlet “a figure like your father / Armed at point, exactly cap-à-pie” (1.2.198–9); he, Marcellus, and Barnardo later reconfirm it, mentioning a “beaver” (visor) on the helm (.225–8). The battlement appearances in 1.4–5 are “again in complete steel” (1.4.52), but in Gertrude’s chamber the Ghost is “in his night-gown” (Q1 11.57 stage direction) or “in his habit as he lived” (3.4.133). This last means ordinary but distinctive clothing—like the night-gown conventional ghost-wear (cf. a white sheet), enabling recognition as a ghost and/or someone murdered earlier in the play. Armour is another matter, metal-clad ectoplasm giving both critics and players problems. For Hamlet it raises immediate doubt about whether the Ghost’s face was visible (1.2.227) but sends a clear message—“My father’s spirit – in arms! All is not well” (.253). As old Hamlet is never seen alive Shakespeare was free to dress the Ghost as he would, provided dialogue made (apparent) identity clear: armour seems in its distinctive concealment of individuality to embody doubt as much as a call to arms, and certainly makes the Ghost’s personality, if it has one, harder to assess.  cap-à-pie: Old French, ‘(from) head to foot’.  “in the habit as he lived”: Q1, 11.79.  “He may or may not have been in life what he is now: a little immodest, humourless obviously, proud to a fault and obsessively verbose.” Pennington, Hamlet, p. 155.

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Using real armour is impractical but faking armour well is hard, so that, frankly, the Ghost is rarely seen to be as described—which can necessitate cuts or set up troubling questions about whether Horatio, Hamlet, and an audience are seeing the same thing/s. For actors playing the Ghost any kind of armour affects movement and a visored helmet requires special vocal effort—so helmeted Ghosts often doff them to speak in 1.5. Any ghost’s movement and delivery are good questions—may a revenant be emotive? rhetorical? shout, growl, or stride about gesticulating?—but a ghost in armour is potentially pure headache. The second oddity is volubility. The choric ghosts in Richard III 5.3 each get at most eight lines to curse Richard and bless Richmond, Caesar’s ghost has three to goose Brutus in Caesar 4.3, and Banquo’s is mute in Macbeth 3.4; only the dreamed ghost-family in Cymbeline 5.4 collectively speak as much as old Hamlet, and have none of his revelations to make. The need for speech is a consequence of the first great revenge complication, making the Ghost witness of ‘his’ own death and explicit prompter of the revenge action (Part 2.1), but there are large implications. The account of purgatory Shakespeare gave the Ghost is sometimes claimed as doctrinally Catholic, but is better called firmly traditional (“sulphurous and tormenting flames”, 1.5.3) and rapidly truncated (“I am forbid / To tell the secrets of my prison-house”, .13–14). Even supposing he had wanted the Ghost to present some unorthodox view of an afterlife, Shakespeare would have been ill-advised to do so and avoidance of anything religiously problematical was his abiding theatrical practice. The rarity of having a ghost expound at length explains a deep uncertainty for actors about how one should speak and much modern experimentation with recordings: a lack of vocal affect seems in many ways more appropriate than spluttering passion (ghosts really shouldn’t seem to spit …), but if the Ghost is passionless, where is Hamlet’s cue for urgency? The last oddity is that the Ghost never appears to his murderer, as the revenant murdered usually do. They may even be invisible to others, as Banquo’s and Caesar’s ghosts seem to be, so invisibility to Gertrude in 3.4 is not a problem, but failure to appear at any time to Claudius is troubling. Considered coldly, the Ghost is actually very careful in its appearances, frighting Barnardo, Marcellus, Horatio, and Hamlet in the small hours without being seen by anyone else, and cueing Hamlet to seemingly deluded conversation with air only when he is alone with Gertrude. For the ghost of  Plastic looks like plastic; no ghost can be seen dead in it.  The remarkable thing about Shakespeare religiously is that no play or non-dramatic poem proves anything sectarian—which for a man who lived when he did is a testimony.

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a foully murdered king bent on revenge this seems inconsistent, as much concerned to haunt a disappointing son as punish a delinquent brother; it certainly does nothing to resolve doubts for Hamlet or the paying audience. As explanations, there are one speculation► and a functional observation, that the Ghost does not appear to Claudius because that accusatory-revelatory function is usurped by the Player King in The Murder of Gonzago. In performance these roles are not often doubled as it would then seem odd for Hamlet not to ‘recognise’ the player as he does the Ghost, but an actor is in any case a kind of spirit, reanimating the dead, as much as a reality; as Theseus says of Bottom and company in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, “The best in this kind are but shadows” (5.1.209–10), and Hamlet also understands such kinship. A doubling is practically possible, as the Ghost is unemployed from 1.5 to 3.4, while the first player/player king appears in 2.2 and 3.2; but so are doublings with Claudius, Fortinbras, his Captain, either gravedigger, and any of the Priest, Ambassador, Messenger, Gentleman, Sailor, and Osric. The 2001 RSC production starring Sam West unexpectedly did this last, revealing Ghost and Osric as stirrers, first and last roles who with elaborate egotism and self-serving rhetoric instigate actions in which others die; considered with hindsight in Osric’s light, the Ghost’s full armour in act 1 seemed a vanity, concealing disfigurements of the poison as much as symbolising a demand for vengeance. 3.2 Horatio Scenes (number of lines): 1.1 (101), 1.2 (54), 1.4 (27), 1.5 (15), 3.2 (9), 4.5 (3), 4.6 (24), 5.1 (11), 5.2 (50) Total scenes: 9 Total lines: 294

Horatio is the only role to speak in the first and last scenes, and 205 of his 294 lines come in 1.1–2 and 5.2, covering the back-story about old Hamlet and old Fortinbras, telling Hamlet of the ghost, and giving young Fortinbras a moralised summary of events. In between he is reduced to a running bit-part, with inconsistencies within and between early texts that rarely bother audiences but suggest Shakespeare never truly focused on the role. F 4.1 assigns Horatio the account of Ophelia that Q2 4.5 gives an anonymous Gentleman, and making Horatio at that stage a trusted advisor to Gertrude can catalyse a sense hinted elsewhere that he is at least a few years older and steadier than Hamlet. Productions taking this route discover many small rewards for the actor, but cannot disguise that while a persistent physical presence and boon for  For example, in 1.1 he knows his Danish history, but in 1.4 is ignorant of Danish customs.

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Hamlet, Horatio is from 1.4–5.1 structurally little more than a straight man providing cues and nods. Shakespeare had in earlier plays of all genres, from Two Gents to Henry IV and Julius Caesar, been deeply concerned with male friendship, and would be so again in most later plays, from Othello to The Winter’s Tale. But in Hamlet, though the word is frequent, friends turn so slippery that friendship is almost absent: Horatio, monumentally, stands fast, quick at first to go to Hamlet with what he has seen and willing at last to “draw [his] breath in pain / To tell [Hamlet’s] story” (5.2.332–3). Yet he is also a cipher, apparently taken for granted as much by Shakespeare as Hamlet, little thanked and less rewarded—but for one moment at least minimalism gives him authority, and in performance true power. At 5.2.38–66, after Hamlet’s mocking and cruel description of his substitute letter needlessly commanding that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern be “put to sudden death, / Not shriving time allowed”, and with Horatio’s immediate question about the document’s seal smugly answered, he says simply “So Guildenstern and Rosencrantz go to’t” (.56). This statement of fact provokes Hamlet to his most open self-justification, an additional line in F suggesting that this moment was milked on stage from a very early date; Horatio’s next line openly demands a mocking delivery—“Why, what a king is this!” (.61)—and stings Hamlet to a further reply about his “perfect conscience” (.66). Actors playing Hamlet and Horatio often find this exchange must be negotiated not only between themselves but with audiences, quick to respond to Horatio’s unease and doubtful of Hamlet’s callous certainties. Such plainspoken rebukes are very Shakespearean and need to be taken seriously, but can and do come from otherwise quite minor figures: so one could argue that while Shakespeare did neglect Horatio in acts 2–4, he took proper advantage of it in act 5 in winding up to the closing moments when Horatio, symbolically if not literally the ‘last man standing’, commands the stage to speak Hamlet’s epitaph. 3.3 Claudius Scenes (number of lines): 1.2 (91), 2.2 (39), 3.1 (39), 3.2 (7), 3.3 (50), 4.1 (34), 4.3 (45), 4.5 (67), 4.7 (137), 5.1 (9), 5.2 (27) Total scenes: 11 Total lines: 545

In most plays a role of 545 lines would be the lead, and it is, after Hamlet, much the  Which determines whether it will be obeyed.

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longest here. Big enough to compass a coveted throne and sister-in-law in one fell fratricide, and established as the play begins in his stolen bed and authority, Claudius proves unable to maintain himself once slippage starts and ends a far less likeable, impressive, and courageous villain than, say, Richard III or even Iago. The extremity of Hamlet’s comparative denigration in the ‘closet scene’ (“a mildewed ear”, “this moor”, “a vice of kings, / A cutpurse of the empire and the rule”, 3.4.62, 65, 96–7) makes Claudius sound like a deformed nonentity, but his scenes before The Murder of Gonzago begins the unravelling are full of stately dealing. Ambassadors Voltemand and Cornelius go in 1.2 and come in 2.2, their business successfully done, and the English Ambassador who arrives in 5.2 reports his king to have obeyed Claudius’s message with alacrity. He must also be enough of a lover to win (and bamboozle?) Gertrude, and of a machiavel to handle Laertes in 4.5, 4.7, and 5.1—which may on stage seem slight tasks (if Gertrude is placidly dim and Laertes self-importantly shallow, perhaps the easiest acting strategies), but may equally (if Gertrude has a brain and Laertes a heart) be anything but. After 3.2, however, Claudius progressively falls apart, undone by the insetperformance publishing his guilt. He acknowledges to Rosencrantz & Guildenstern his “fear / Which now goes too free-footed” (3.3.25–6), and once alone reveals in soliloquy both guilt and a mewling cowardice, hoping to “be pardoned and retain th’offence” (.56). As the scene wears on he is left living on his knees by Hamlet, and is thereafter explicitly on borrowed time; on one level he copes well enough with Hamlet’s slaughter of Polonius, but choices of hugger-mugger and a mock-mission to England with command for someone else to do the dirty work are in truth as evasive as they seem decisive. And once Hamlet is back the best Claudius can manage is the heavy-handed ploy of the duel, during which he has very little to say, again opts for poison, traditionally a ‘woman’s weapon’, and cannot prevent his wife from poisoning herself nor his intended victim from stabbing and twice poisoning him. The only line Claudius is given while being killed, “O, yet defend me, friends, I am but hurt” (5.2.308), is weak, untrue, and serves only to provoke Hamlet’s further assault with the goblet of poisoned wine; his assembled lords cry out once and watch passively as he is killed; no-one expresses regret. Critically, the absence of final defiance from Claudius is as striking as the initial loquacity of old Hamlet; theatrically, his muteness means the physical business of his wounding, last line, and somehow enforced drink from the goblet becomes another key to generic instability. A pitiable, a disgusting,  The ampersand is always used in ‘Rosencrantz & Guildenstern’, indicating their constant pairing as (in effect) one two-player role; see Part 3.8 below.

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and a crying Claudius, one who takes the goblet to drain it silently and one down whose gullet Hamlet must pour the wine, will make greatly differing contributions to the mood in which an audience departs. As importantly, confirmation of Claudius’s guilt, with his subsequent cowardice, incompetence, relative silence, and (usually) lack of terminal dignity or wit, collectively defuse the “divinity [that] doth hedge a king”. By comparison with the English kings of the histories, in whom Shakespeare had in the 1590s profoundly explored what it meant ‘to play a king’, Claudius is plainly without divine authority and readily opposed by the people when Laertes rises against him: an elected rather than hereditary monarch, known to have played peculiarly foul, he invites as little grief and constitutional concern as he gets. But Hamlet pays an interesting price in anticlimax for making the death of its chief villain—to kill whom (kin/g/ship notwithstanding) has been the whole aim of the plot—perhaps the least interesting thing to happen in its final scene. 3.4 Gertrude Scenes (number of lines): 1.2 (10), 2.2 (20), 3.1 (8), 3.2 (2), 3.4 (45), 4.1 (12), 4.5 (12), 4.7 (21), 5.1 (12), 5.2 (7) Total scenes: 10 Total lines: 149

As Michael Pennington says, Gertrude “has attracted and then disappointed many leading actresses”. Much is hinted—adultery and sexual obsession with Claudius, complicity in old Hamlet’s murder and Ophelia’s death, repentance, suicide—but nothing confirmed, and on stage the role is surprisingly slight. Besides one great line (“The lady doth protest too much, methinks”, 3.2.224) and speech (“There is a willow grows askant the brook”, 4.7.164–81), all is queenly competence, even from apparent repentance to putative suicide (3.4–5.2). Professionalism matters, and as Claudius becomes incompetent after 3.2 Gertrude can step up: but he (by whom she is usually standing) speaks most lines with her in mute support. The exception ought to be the ‘closet scene’; on film, with reaction shots, it can be, but Hamlet as usual does the talking, and stage-Gertrudes discover with dismay how limp her lines are. “What shall I do?” “Alack, I had forgot; ’tis so concluded on.” (3.4.178, 199)  Pennington, Hamlet, p. 159.  Sara Kestelman, Gertrude to Simon Russell Beale’s Hamlet in 2001, remarks that “Like a lot of observing roles Gertrude is a slow burn for the actor” (Croall, Observing Hamlet, pp. 31, 44).  Camera-shots showing someone reacting to an event or speech in voice-over.

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This blankness in Gertrude is why Freudian critics find the play a happy hunting ground, but is for actors more obstacle than opportunity. She has a comic chance to correct Claudius (2.2.33–4), and if played as an intelligent villain an interesting chance to make ‘repentance’ in 3.4 a piece of policy that fools Hamlet without trying to fool the audience: but suicide in 5.2 then seems unlikely, leaving her to expire tamely through Claudius’s incompetence as a poisoner. Conversely, drinking poison to expiate guilt requires genuine repentance, implying an innocence in Acts 1–3 hard to square with royal professionalism. This interpretation is nevertheless commoner, probably because it allows the role to develop through repentance and claim terminal grace with dignity; thinking of Lady Macbeth, a more obviously scheming wife who fades into muteness (but is compensated with the sleepwalking scene), a subsiding villainy is probably nearer the Gertrude Shakespeare gave us. 3.5 Polonius Scenes (number of lines): 1.2 (4), 1.3 (68), 2.1 (86), 2.2 (136), 3.1 (23), 3.2 (13), 3.3 (9), 3.4 (7) Total scenes: 8 Total lines: 346

It is sometimes said that in his office and advice to a son Polonius is recognisably a caricature of William Cecil, Lord Burghley (1520–98). This might explain his lengthy exchange with Reynaldo (conjured up for the purpose) in 2.1, but problematises all else, especially his killing and the fate of his family. In any case, what would have been recognisable to Jacobethan auditors wasn’t Burghley, nor any individual, but a type of father now best known by his commedia dell’arte name of Pantalone: an overbearing busybody controlling his children, specifically regarding marriage, whom a comedy will see happily defeated and reconciled to his children’s choices. That timehonoured role occurs in most early Shakespearean comedies, but after Old Capulet in Romeo and Juliet can equally turn up in his tragedy, as Polonius does, to find itself defenceless in a world where “purposes” that might elsewhere be comically “mistook” are fatally “Fallen on th’inventors’ heads” (5.2.368–9). This generic displacement explains the instability of the role in performance, for Polonius can to a greater or lesser degree trail his comedic identity (certainly called for in all exchanges with Hamlet and longer ones with his children and rulers), or try to shuck it. Bill Murray (in Michael Almereyda’s 2000 film-adaptation starring Ethan Hawke) is as severe a Polonius as I have seen, achieved with heavy cutting but cohering as a man of (in every way) intense repression, whose hidden, mistaken death was

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a logical end; but impressive as that performance is, the strategy is perverse. Details of the original performance (perhaps by sharer John Heminges) are unavailable, but it is not easy to believe that the role’s self-evidently comedic features, written by Shakespeare with a particular actor in mind, were simply ignored, and the issue (as Stoppard understood about Rosencrantz & Guildenstern) is not whether Polonius is generically displaced, but if and how he understands himself to be so. In this, as in prating, calculating paternity, he anticipates Lear; while in his disposability and (to him) very surprising death in act 3 he is a successor of Mercutio, but lacking wit at the last can say only “O, I am slain!” (3.4.23). Hamlet, standing ruefully over Polonius’s body, calls him a “wretched, rash, intruding fool” (.29), and like all theatrical roles named in Shakespearean dialogue such identification carries weight. Even if so self-important as to be unaware of his failings, few audiences before the darkening of auditoria for performance would have spared an uncut Polonius their laughter. The structure of his first long speech in 1.3 is unavoidably com(ed)ic, cascading in four lines from urgings of haste to an enumerative homily that delays ad absurdum, and his overt self-presentation as Pantalone continues to Ophelia (“Affection? Pooh”, 1.3.100): so he is from the first set up for mockery. But in Shakespeare a ‘fool’ had always been more than a butt; had with Touchstone in As You Like It (the year before Hamlet) become interestingly distinct from a ‘clown’; and would with Lear’s Fool become something else entirely—so while audiences properly laugh at Polonius’s follies, one needs also to be aware of moments when he should be laughed with. In some productions it is a lesson Hamlet appreciates in 2.2, if Polonius can rebuke with greybeard’s dignity his laddish behaviour with Rosencrantz & Guildenstern, and in all a lesson he must painfully learn after 3.4, as Polonius becomes the greatest weight on his conscience. One good test of a stage-Polonius is the ‘catalogue of genres’ through which he apparently stumbles in praising the newly arrived players; F makes some careful additions, so I quote it here (as it appears in Arden 3): The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastorical-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable or poem unlimited. Seneca cannot be too heavy nor Plautus too light for the law of writ and the liberty. These are the only men. (F 2.2.394–401)  Dimmer-switches were for actors the great side-benefit of electrification in the 1880s–1910s, as theatre-mangers discovered that darkness made audiences fall silent.

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This isn’t just the old idiot in another muddle. Generic instability is very much Hamlet’s business, and ours, and however you cut it this speech is high metatheatre, always important in Shakespeare: it affirms the inset-actors and -performance/s to come, and an inset-company, for whatever gossip Rosencrantz & Guildenstern relay about the travelling company, and however much of a burlesque or antique performance its Murder of Gonzago + dumb-show in 3.2 prove, all its members were to begin with played by Lord Chamberlain’s Men. Polonius’s praise of them as players, especially of “history”, refers to a real track-record, and his claims of polygeneric competence and fluent genre-bending (or generic engineering) are Shakespeare’s boasts, to which Hamlet proceeds to live up. No audience should be able to say they were not warned, and a Polonius who doesn’t understand that what he says here is vitally true abandons the metatheatre of the play. Likewise, an audience that insists, here, on laughing at rather than with Polonius misses understanding both Hamlet and Hamlet. Once Polonius has been so shockingly (for audiences as much as himself) killed in 3.4 and served his turn as a dead prop, the play finds comedy in short supply until 5.1, where it has since at least the 1730s been traditional for the actor playing Polonius to return as First Gravedigger. Beyond the evident similarities of the roles in responding to comic sententiousness and timing, Hamlet’s dialogue takes up with the Gravedigger and Yorick’s skull where it left off with Polonius and the worms (4.3.16–38, 5.1.61–205): audience recognition of the actor as ‘Polonius’ can thereby be cued, and some awareness in Hamlet of the identity links well with revelation of the grave as Ophelia’s. If remaining on stage throughout 5.1, to fill the grave when all else is done, ‘Polonius’ may mutely attend his daughter’s funeral, extending the sense in which his death precipitated hers: a spectre that also attends the play’s catastrophe, as Polonius’s heredity is wiped out with Laertes. Even King Lear lets one of Gloucester’s sons survive its sub-plot, but Hamlet is ruthless in eliminating Polonius’s line, using corpses of father and daughter as props in bleakly comic scenes fashioning the son as Claudius’s pawn and Hamlet’s nemesis. For Polonius and his children, too, “The rest is silence.” (5.2.342), and an audience’s knowledge in ending of just how much more than Prince Hamlet has been lost is an acute measure of the performance they have heard.

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3.6 Laertes Scenes (number of lines): 1.2 (7), 1.3 (52), 4.5 (46), 4.7 (47), 5.1 (18), 5.2 (35) Total scenes: 6 Total lines: 205

In abstract Laertes is an interesting figure, another studious son called to arms as a revenger, in every sense a foil for Hamlet with both an excellent return entrance in 4.5 to demand justice, and a fine death-speech in 5.2 offering Hamlet honourable quits and priceless forgiveness. In practice the role is, like Gertrude, often found a slippery disappointment, too pompous with Ophelia in 1.3, too easily suborned by Claudius in 4.5 and 4.7, and too inevitably absurd fighting over Ophelia’s corpse in 5.1 to bring more than a sly, Claudian meanness to his big opportunity in 5.2. The difficulty reflects the performative instability of Polonius and similarly responds to acceptance of comedy, especially if Laertes ear-wigging Ophelia in 1.3 is turned into a parody of their father and not played as self-importance. A lighterweight Laertes in 1.3 suffers less from succumbing to Claudius in 4.5 and 4.7, can play to his emotional strengths in 5.1, and a physically competent actor can bring to the prolonged fencing-bouts in 5.2 a potent grace and embodiment of force. Those bouts imply the actors who created Hamlet and Laertes were masters of fence, and Hamlet’s genuine interest in the skill (5.2.187–9) points the fencing as a final insetperformance, completing the interrupted metatheatrical action of The Murder of Gonzago by proving as fatal to its principal spectators as to its players. Any lack of fighting-skill is in acts 4 and 5 a major impediment for the actor, throwing him back on words never intended to carry the role alone, and awareness of inadequacy in the fencing is a reason for felt failure in the role—though to be fair concern about health and safety now usually makes any kind of real fight a legal impossibility unless both actors have more training than either is likely to have been able to afford. If a Laertes can win through, however, combining saving wit with a ready blade and charting his own course through corruption and malevolent agency to physical apotheosis and noble death, his abstract interest can become real on the stage: as Hamlet’s sub-plot shadow, foil, and nemesis; as the revenger of Polonius and Ophelia who alone has the right to take Hamlet down; and as Hamlet’s final accidental victim, following at the last where his father went first, to show the Prince his way. Fortinbras will then be seen to stand over the body of Laertes as well, and if the Q2/F stagedirections are followed, and Hamlet’s body borne off, Laertes may share the play’s last silence with his poisoned monarchs and true killers.  As a number of actors are known to have been, showy fighting being a dramatic skill in demand.

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3.7 Ophelia Scenes (number of lines): 1.3 (20), 2.1 (28), 3.1 (33), 3.2 (17), 4.5 (72) Total scenes: 5 Total lines: 170

There is an object lesson in comparing the film-performances of Helena Bonham Carter (directed by Franco Zeffirelli in 1990) and Kate Winslet (directed by Kenneth Branagh in 1996). Winslet shrieks, blubbers, and dry-grinds in a strait-jacket, her lines unintelligibly uninteresting in wide shot; Bonham Carter, afforded resources of technology, whispers in nuanced close-up as well as projecting in wider shots, and the role comes slamming back into focused relevance. ‘Madness’, in other words, is on page and stage a dead end, a label discouraging enquiry—though one good question is Ophelia’s age. Following the cue of Juliet, who is 14, there are good reasons for thinking (unless there is evidence to the contrary) that most of Shakespeare’s earlier heroines are not much older, or initially wiser. Katerina, Helena, Hermia, Portia, Rosalind and Celia, as well as Desdemona, Cressida and Isabella, respond well to being made ‘early teenage’, and with Ophelia such casting and/or costuming and/or direction jolts audiences about Hamlet’s righteous likeability more than anything else now can. 30 toys with 13 is never a nice story; 13 dead, by any means, is a turn than which no adult death can be grimmer. There is no credible evidence that having to write for prepubescent boys in any way masculinised Shakespeare’s female roles, but it did keep them young, and an Ophelia not of age to be coping either with sex or death is more potently tragedic than an older woman. At the same time the role is not hard to play. Outside the ‘mad scene’ (4.5, with 72 of 170 lines) it is mostly (like so many others) a straight man for Hamlet, feeding him answers or questions to pull cleverly apart and providing a target for his ill humours and misogyny. An unripe Ophelia sets these off as actively unpleasant, as she does Polonius’s careless usage of her when it suits his machinations, but needn’t do much, and in the ‘mad scene’ Shakespeare offered his young player assiduous support: the flower-giving is ritualised, generating meaning through image and action rather than relying on delivery and words, and there are no less than five songs, a fallback as  There is a sequence of great exceptions from Goneril and Lady Macbeth in 1604/05 to Hermione in c.1610: the career of one boy?  Shakespeare’s reworking of the action for Perdita in The Winter’s Tale (4.2.70–155) is by comparison considerably more complex and difficult to deliver well: a boy he trusted more than the one he had in mind for Ophelia?

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much as a strength for a trained treble. Yet a good singing voice has power in a theatre, and the scene is constructed as an astonishingly dense mesh of strong but uncertain implication, allowing Ophelia to become in her very youth (much like Juliet) a spokeswoman: what is naturalistically taken as ‘madness’ can play as no more mad than Hamlet’s “antic disposition”; rather as a lack of metatheatrical awareness that, as for her father Polonius, proves theatrically fatal. Productions in which Ophelia is explicitly murdered (and sometimes raped or otherwise graphically victimised), so Gertrude’s willow speech must be understood as ‘disinformation’ for Laertes, usually reflect conditions of performance (under dictatorships or in war-zones, for example). It is, strictly speaking, no business of Ophelia’s, only a reported variant on her martyrdom, but may involve an actor in business usually associated with the mutilated Lavinia in Titus Andronicus. I have never heard or read of a really sly or villainous Ophelia, but when clearly a later teen or early twenty-something she can readily become a would-be adult who suffers from callow misjudgements or overconfidence—an interpretation that goes well with an earnest Polonius whose strictures are fast becoming intolerable to a grown woman. This in turn raises for performers a seemingly important question about her sexuality, but while Desdemona, Cressida, and Cordelia can all benefit on stage from being perceived as (acutely) sexually desirable, it doesn’t seem to help Ophelia much: even if Hamlet is made, as in Branagh’s film, to have slept with a ripe Ophelia, her period of intimacy with the moody prince is at best (as Branagh had to make it) in flashback; all that might once have been attraction in her seems to Hamlet corrupted in imagining his mother bedding his uncle, and the reported passivity of Ophelia’s death signals the extent to which Hamlet has (with her father’s eager co-operation) progressively reduced her to a haunting memory. Her body serves its mute turn as a prop in 5.1 but need not appear, and there is no indication of her return in any form, though the role can theoretically be doubled with any of the bit parts (Ambassador, Gentleman etc.) who appear only after her last scene. Her greatest tragedic force is likely to be as the play’s purest, most needless victim, which is probably why neither sexuality nor wit are as much use to an actor as innocence, youth, and a semblance of incapacity.

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3.8 Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Scenes (number of lines): 2.2 (R27, G14), 3.1 (R12, G5), 3.2 (R13, G22), 3.3 (R14, G4), 4.1 (R0, G0), 4.2 (R9, G1), 4.3 (R4, G0), 4.4 (R1, G0) Total scenes: 8 Total lines: 126 (R80, G46)

If never apart, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are not equal. Rosencrantz is their spokesman: Guildenstern takes the lead only once, about recorders in 3.2, and comes a cropper; in his last four scenes he speaks only once, which strongly suggests the actor creating the role had physical presence and capacity. There is no reason to doubt that Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are theatrically exactly what they seem, an Odd Couple, somehow sharply differentiated but always in tandem as straight man & comic. Tom Stoppard settled any possible dispute about their comedic and tragedic capacities, and performance repeatedly shows the rewards of accepting them as, like Polonius, a role whose basic framework is comedic and whose fate otherwise. Once established with audiences such pairings of actors are quite enduring, and it seems likely Shakespeare knew exactly for whom he was writing the role/s. Part 5 deals with the possibility that the same pair created fat Sir Toby Belch and tall Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night, but doubleness is in itself enough to invite taking reversal of their names at 2.2.33–4 as a trace of comic misrecognition: the twin-joke made all the funnier by unlikeness of the twins. In their curious, anguishing deaths by self-borne message they also seem like servants Polonius has dragged with him from commedia dell’arte, go-betweens whose business and letters invariably miscarry: Shakespeare uses such figures often in comedy, and their indecorous deaths here by practical joke are meant to haunt. In F they are interestingly given the best of the theatre gossip about the travelling players having been forced on tour by the success of the “little eyases” (F 2.2.337), a reference to a children’s company that from 1600-08 played the Blackfriars►, and perhaps also to the Lord Chamberlain’s Men’s move in 1598/99 from Shoreditch to the south bank. Given their comedic roles it is possible Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are ironised in reporting the children’s success; elsewhere they are permanently off the pace, unable to keep up with Claudius, let alone Hamlet, and progressively reduced to silence before being dismissed to offstage deaths. But they are present in the core of the play, for eight consecutive scenes (skipping only 3.4) a recurrent reminder of un/likeness and Shakespeare’s enduring fascination with doubleness.

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Peter Holland has pointed out that Horatio says something fascinatingly odd when he argues that (the ghost he saw / old Hamlet in the living flesh) were so similar that “These hands are not more like.” (1.2.211). It’s a homely image and an easy gesture—but subtly wrong, for hands are mirrored rather than identical, and the whole chain of (supposed) likenesses—old Hamlet, Ghost, Claudius, Pyrrhus (in the play text ‘quoted’ in 2.2), Player King, Laertes, young Fortinbras, and Hamlet himself—is as kinked as it is undeniable. What matters here is that the ghost’s central appearance, in the chamber where his brother has most intimately usurped him, and following Hamlet’s violent insistence on the extreme difference of brothers, is framed by iterative appearances of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern, whether speaking or mute visible emblems of imbalance and embodiments of mismatch. For Hamlet (and all revenge tragedies) imbalance is the spring of action, as righteousness over-reaching itself is the necessary arc of a revenger’s downfall; what does for Rosencrantz & Guildenstern in Elsinore is their constant, witless resonance as an Odd Couple with the core asymmetries of the revenge and metatheatrical plots. Their very presence irritates Hamlet, and they can do nothing right by him: but if straight man and comic are worth their salt an audience will be on their side in the end, and Hamlet neither lauded nor believed when he declares them to be “not near my conscience” (5.2.57). As that suggests, directors blessed with actors who have timing should seriously consider letting Rosencrantz & Guildenstern loose while they’re alive. There is no reason in 2.2 or 3.2 for them to let Hamlet have it all his own way, nor to be as stupid as he chooses to make them seem for his own satisfaction. Given licence around the inset-performance or its following chaos, meeting Fortinbras, and in the background of Hamlet’s “How all occasions do inform against me” (4.4.31), the pair can even in silhouette maintain their motifs, helping comedically to bridge the time between the death of Polonius and the coming of the First Gravedigger, and tragedically asking Hamlet a permanent, pertinent question about un/likeness that he cannot abide. 3.9 The gravediggers Scenes (number of lines): 5.1 (G1, 89; G2, 17) Total scenes: 1 Total lines: 106

The “two Clowns” are recognisably a comic turn, but as always in Shakespeare do far  In an unpublished paper given at the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford in 2001.  Cf. “An apple, cleft in two, is not more twin / Than these two creatures” : Twelfth Night 5.1.223–4.

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more than the term ‘comic relief’ can suggest. The younger is there only as straight man to the elder before Hamlet for once takes over that role, and the whole interlude, 5.1.1–206, deliberately slows things down because time must seem to pass between announcing Ophelia’s death in 4.7 and the arrival of her cortège in the next scene. But if the First Gravedigger is recognisably Polonius (see Part 3.5 above) the scene is immediately charged, loquacious delay becomes a double-hallmark of twin-character, and Hamlet’s surprisingly patient interaction with a socially inferior recasting of the man he left to rot can enter strange territory. It is the Gravedigger who at 5.1.135–9 drops the interesting datum that Hamlet was born the day old Hamlet killed old Fortinbras (as described by Horatio in 1.1), and then from next to nowhere produces all that’s left of Yorick: skull and name. Hamlet supplies some back story, but it is the Gravedigger who pulls Yorick out of his hat, and (especially as dead Polonius) collocates a clown with death. There was probably already in Shakespeare’s day some distinction of the red-nosed and white-faced-crying variants of clown, and a Gravedigger able to meld bucolic sexton with a ghostly Polonius digging his daughter’s grave can achieve both in one; only Barnardine (in Measure, for Measure) and Macbeth’s drunken porter offer as much to the actor in fewer lines, and if some thespian relish shows, so much the better. 3.10 Osric Scenes (number of lines): 5.2 (48) Total scenes: 1 Total lines: 48

Often played as a complete peacock, or at best a nasty sign of Claudius’s court having gone rapidly to the dogs, Osric can be redeemed if his vacuous agreements with Hamlet are careful subservience to a dangerous prince, his bland determination is played up, and his role as the judge of the fencing given proper ceremony. If he has been visible at court throughout as a mute, he may be played as a promoted placeman, but if 5.2 is his first appearance specific association with the fencing-bouts is possible, and consciousness of a swordsman who could take on Laertes or Hamlet with ease (which may be intimated by his carriage with a sword) greatly enlivens his laboured exchanges with Hamlet.

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3.11 Fortinbras Scenes (number of lines): 4.4 (8), 5.2 (19) Total scenes: 2 Total lines: 27

For the actor little more than a bit-part, though with some satisfying lines and good opportunities for stage-business in 5.2, Fortinbras is in all other ways a looming figure. As old Fortinbras sometimes disappears from the dialogue in 1.1, so young Fortinbras is not infrequently cut entirely or dropped from 5.2, and the play’s ending made coincident with Hamlet’s death. But what the Fortinbrasses stand for, bracketing the play with their stories, is political change and the context of old Hamlet’s failed dynasty: lose them, and not only a critical frame but an essential part of the action go too. The appearance in 4.4 sustains a name unmentioned since 2.2 and provides Hamlet with the occasion of his last soliloquy, “How all occasions do inform against me”. Actively pursuing restitution and displaying martial prowess, Fortinbras follows Pyrrhus (cited in 2.2, provoking “O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I”), the Player King, and his father/the Ghost as actors, doers of deeds whose doing rebukes Hamlet’s own inactivity; and the warrior-prince is the purest of these examples. When, having in 5.2 surveyed the carnage and heard some account of it, he briskly announces “with sorrow I embrace my fortune” (.372), it should be a breath of much needed fresh air and common sense. 3.12 Hamlet Scenes (number of lines): 1.2 (102), 1.4 (66), 1.5 (95), 2.2 (259), 3.1 (75), 3.2 (223), 3.3 (24), 3.4 (174), 4.2 (18), 4.3 (24), 4.4 (47), 5.1 (128), 5.2 (210) Total scenes: 13 Total lines: 1445

The role is of course absurd. My line-count is maximal for Q2, counting all speeches as at least 1, but even counts using fractions of lines top 1300, and Hamlet is matched in the canon only by Iago (c.10 lines longer, depending). On-stage almost throughout and usually dominant, speaking more than one-third of the play, Hamlet is yet famous for delay and uncertainty; the urge to power of Richard III or driving purpose (whatever his motives) of Iago are not in him, and he must seek goads for his will, itself imposed on him by the Ghost’s version of events. Here too the question

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of parody begins to bite, for however fine his words and pretty his reasons, Hamlet’s record, once all is done, does not stack up well with the time spent centre-stage, and as either lovers or revengers go one would have to say he pretty much botches the job. He might also fairly be said to insult the audience, patronise the inset-actors, murder three clowns, be insufferably rude to everyone at least once, give his mother and girlfriend breakdowns, unforgivably disrupt a funeral, and deliver his father’s kingdom to an enemy, so he has no excuse for not having fun along the way: earnest psychological or naturalistic interpretation is something else. Audiences, like readers, tend to remember the great soliloquies—“O that this too, too sallied flesh would melt” (1.2.129–59), “O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I” (2.2.485–540), “To be, or not to be” (3.1.55–89), “How all occasions do inform against me” (4.4.31–65)—but all four amount to only 156 (of 1445) lines, and for the last two he isn’t alone. Most of the time Hamlet deals compulsively with others, whom he spends hundreds of lines dominating and discarding by turns: Barnardo and Marcellus, Horatio, Claudius and Gertrude, Polonius and Ophelia, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern, the Players, the Gravedigger, Laertes, and Osric are by ones and twos verbally held to account. More introverted, psychological Hamlets seem to be acting out in frantic compensation for not doing; princely, privileged ones tend to a demeaning arrogance genuinely without care for others; and those embracing performativity can openly relish centre-stage selfishness but find the role allows fellow actors in important ways to hold them to account. The soliloquies are thus in a sense actors discover moments when Hamlet can, after a fashion, relax. Any number of broadly coherent interpretations of the role are possible; detailed coherence as a living man in the post-Ibsenite sense promoted by Method acting should not be sought in Shakespeare’s text, for whatever else he may be Hamlet is utterly self-conscious as an actor. The roles of son, prince, and Revenger are thrust upon him; that of Lover he cannot quite forgo; that of the Clown he chooses. One or another is implicit in everything he says, and their conflict fills the soliloquies, aggravated by his insistence with everyone except Claudius and the Gravedigger on complete verbal domination and always being the comic to someone else’s straight man. In one sense he is an extreme version of Hal, Henry-V-to-be in the Henry IV plays (completed two or three years before Hamlet), a prince wholly aware of what he must and would not yet do, but where Hal’s focus is the throne he will inherit and  “sallied” is the Q2 reading; F and most memories have ‘sullied’.

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the constitutional demands of English kingship, circumstance and an elective Danish throne leave Hamlet nothing to hold fast but his postponed duty of revenge. He has his reasons for inaction, but his theatrical plan to “by indirections find directions out” (2.1.63) is Polonian in its fuss—or worthy of Shakespeare, shamelessly planting front and centre of his tragedy the business of acting, a writer’s control of the script, the truth of theatrical fictions, and the proper nature of audience credulity. Hamlet’s early line “I know not ‘seems’” (1.2.76) is a lie, as he promptly admits by claiming in his first soliloquy to “have that within which passes show” (.85)—a defiant claim of meaning more than can be conveyed that the (actor/s playing the) Ghost, Claudius, and Player King will also in various ways make. Of course he ‘knows seems’: the question is whether he knows anything else, and it is in its own way logical that only by doubling the theatrical stakes via an inset-performance can he hope to find a trustworthy answer. Hamlets, that is, must embrace theatre as their habit and strategy, turning to ‘fiction’ in ‘real’ hope; a task to which Jacobethan amphitheatres were ideally suited, and later theatres are often not. This is also the problem on film. Almereyda had the sense to make his screen Hamlet a student of film, and The Murder of Gonzago a video, which restored the force of metatheatre with metacinema; for films that retain a travelling stage-troupe all their relevance is lost, and the plot (as Olivier found out) risks a great deal in retaining them. The soliloquies are also exposed by the camera as problems for naturalised performance, though (as Olivier discovered) they can work interestingly well in voice-over. Despite the nineteenth-century image of gesticulatory Hamlets declaiming soliloquies to an imaginary point over an audience’s head, patterns of delivery on an amphitheatrical stage are conversational and readily extra-dramatic (addressing individual auditors or an audience at large). The dialogue with the players in 3.2 is also made stronger and more relevant if Hamlet can by then appeal to the paying audience for support in telling any potential thespian troublemakers what’s what. The insulation of film (and over-naturalistic stage-acting) from its audiences deprives Hamlet as a hyper-extended role in a verse tragedy of a resource it needs, and without which real coherence is pretty much impossible. And Hamlet does need to be able to speak the verse fluently, as he must be able to move fluently. That is in part the role’s function as a test for actors, working out their skills and range, and the best Hamlets I have seen have been the most mobile. There is also for actor and director the generic question: audiences will with the least encouragement (and sometimes anyway) laugh at some of the play; Polonius

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its own fictional emotions as sharply as Hamlet asks of the player “What’s Hecuba to him, or he to her, / That he should weep for her?” (2.2.494–5). Shakespeare’s pervasive metatheatre is far more often remarked in his comedies than his tragedies precisely because metatheatrical awareness (they’re all acting) is supposed to undermine the earnestness of tragedy: but Hamlet is as unignorably metatheatrical as it is overtly tragedic, and the constant awareness of pretence and dis/simulation leaves its tragedy vulnerable to laughter—or, as I suspect Shakespeare thought of it, open to the great union of the tragedic and comedic that was central to his work. The Ovidian presences in Hamlet are subtler, but peak in Hamlet’s exchanges with Claudius and the gravediggers about the transformations of corpses, including Polonius’s, Yorick’s, Alexander the Great’s, and Julius Caesar’s (4.3.17–36, 5.1.154– 205). Ophelia’s journeys into distraction, death, and decomposition are rich with flowers (4.5.21–73, 160–92, 4.7.161–82, 5.1.215–35), recalling Ovid’s vegetable metamorphoses. Underlyingly there is the originary transformation of old Hamlet by the poison that “barked about / Most lazar-like with vile and loathsome crust / All my smooth body” (1.5.71–3), the odd phrasal verb ‘barked about’ making him momently a tree before he became a corpse and then an armoured ghost metamorphosing his bookish son into an avenger. And though many productions omit him, the final arrival of young Fortinbras to claim the Danish throne is (like the end of Lucrece) a political transformation in the state, reversing old Hamlet’s victory in slaying old Fortinbras (1.1.79–106) as young Fortinbras gives order for young Hamlet’s burial (5.2.379–87). Finally there is the issue of Shakespeare’s imaginative generosity about and with performance. Inset-performances in their nature require some actors to play actors and others to play auditors, and Shakespeare’s running concern with how auditors should behave in crediting actors is sharply present in Claudius being driven to prayer by The Murder of Gonzago. Hamlet has “heard / That guilty creatures sitting at a play / Have by the very cunning of the scene / Been struck so to the soul that presently / They have proclaimed their malefactions” (2.2.523–7), and if Claudius isn’t quite struck sufficiently to “proclaim [his] malefactions”, speaking them only to God and the audience, inset-performance nevertheless provides through a fiction a ‘real’ answer  It is also odd that the poison should have been poured “in the porches of [his] ears” (1.5.63)— a terrifyingly reified metaphor (as gossip and innuendo are ‘poisons’ of the ear, or as the Ghost’s story ‘poisons’ Hamlet) more than a common or practicable method of administration; anything sufficiently easily absorbed and toxic fatally to poison through contact with outer ear or eardrum would work through any skin contact.  See Love’s Labour’s Lost 5.1, Midsummer Night’s Dream 3.1 and 5.1, .and Henry V, Prologue.

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and other roles certainly invite comedic performance; and Hamlet must laugh with the Gravedigger in 5.1, if not well before. But how seriously should one take that “antic disposition” (1.5.170) he threatens to put on? David Wiles argues for the odd, singing section of the role immediately after the interruption of The Murder of Gonzago (3.2.263–77) as Hamlet providing a jig for the tragedy, a little endpiece of a kind popular at The Theatre and usually provided by the company clown. His behaviours with Polonius, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern, and in some ways Ophelia are also easy to colour with a joking that may be played as wilful misdirection, but has ‘real’ consequences; as the body-count rises, Hamlet needs the magnificent verse Shakespeare gives him to keep our sympathy, if not our interest, and should not find it easy to pull off—at which point some degree of comedy may be a lifeline. It is in a way Hamlet’s last and worst millstone that he wants to be liked and thought honourably justified. It goes with his comedic cast as a lover, but even Romeo cares less for opinion, and the protagonists of the later tragedies are (save Timon) rulers of some kind who dealt with not being liked a long time ago; only Brutus (in Julius Caesar) and Hamlet, impossibly, want us to like them despite what they ‘must’ do—which in Hamlet’s case we might, if he didn’t do so much else along the way at such needless cost to others. But as I said to begin with, the role is in a genuine sense absurd, so ridiculously long, at the expense of almost all other roles, that one can see it as pushing the ‘star vehicle’ or ‘showcase’ play to its utmost limit, and falsely daring as much as it promises. Some famous Hamlets (including Gielgud’s with Burton) have exploited a rehearsal setting, but what they reveal is that for Hamlet it is always a performance. That compulsion is his tragedy; the ghost, Claudius, and all the rest are just Shakespeare’s way of raising the stakes—which explains why a fully comedic Hamlet can work to intensify the tragedy, because the compulsion is itself the story. He could act almost anyhow (and has), but Shakespeare wrote the part for someone with real stamina and enough comedic timing to beat Polonius (if not the Gravedigger) all ends up in conversation: if that someone was indeed Burbage, one should remember that his recent parts were Benedick, Hal, and perhaps Brutus. Murder might already have started with Brutus, but Othello and his more casually brutal tragedic successors were yet to come, and while Hamlet is and must know himself a killer bound to die, he is also the last of another line and in performance must needs deal with that too.  See Wiles, Shakespeare’s Clown, ch. 4, ‘Kemp’s jigs’, esp. pp. 57–60.

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3.13 “The best players in the world” Scenes (number of lines): 2.2 (PK 48, PQ/PP/PL 0), 3.2 (PK 46, PQ 31, PP 3, PL 6) Total scenes: 2 Total lines: 134 (PK 94, PQ 31, PP 3, PL 6) PK—Player King; PQ—Player Queen; PP—Player Prologue; PL—Player Lucianus

The First Player/Player King is a party-piece for an actor but asks for nice judgement in laying on the ham. As often in Shakespeare, supposedly quoted theatrical text is deliberately archaic, in language (though not metre) harking back to a kind of play that had been popular in the 1570s–80s, and that the new 1600s found good to mock. It is this that invites hamming and informs the absurdity of Polonius especially approving “the mobled Queen” (2.2.442); the dumb-show beginning the insetperformance was also by 1600 antique. But the Player King’s impromptu performance in 2.2, invoking Pyrrhus as a revenging man of action, the reaction he draws from Hamlet (“What’s Hecuba to him … ?”, .494), and the reaction The Murder of Gonzago must draw from Claudius in 3.2, are as serious as anything in Hamlet, and however stylised his inset-acting the Player (and the actor) must draw fully on the power of performance. The additional lines and/or business that Hamlet has spliced in, whatever they may be, also raise a question rarely considered (save by Stoppard), that Hamlet wilfully exposes the Player King (and all the company) to gross royal displeasure, and their rapid disappearance once Claudius abruptly leaves signals that they have departed at speed for anywhere far from Elsinore: but do the Player King, Queen, or Lucianus know the business they are really about? Steven Pimlott’s RSC Hamlet in 2001 disseminated (and perhaps invented) a way of doing 3.2 that will be about for a while. Hamlet and/or Horatio have a camcorder, and centre-stage something is co-opted or provided as a screen: Pimlott chose sensibly enough principally to freeze-frame Claudius’s face at particular moments, but other things may also be so magnified, and Player Kings given a chance to find out more closely what bearding a fratricidal king to his face might emotionally mean. The presence of an additional screen-image also seemed to help audiences focus on performativity in the stage-action, and for some moments at least the Players were by turns genuinely at the play’s centre. The other Players (a minimum of three, though mutes can be added) are crafted as support-roles and given little opportunity beyond their functions in Gonzago, though  Cf. Pistol’s hex- and heptameters in Merry Wives (1.3.85–99) and parts of the text of ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ in Midsummer Night’s Dream (5.1.276–347).

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the Player Queen (if ‘she’ knows of the plot as it concerns Claudius) can interact interestingly with Gertrude and Ophelia, and the Player Lucianus (if he knows) with Hamlet as well as Claudius. But their colloquies in 2.2 and 3.2 with Hamlet are a mine of implication about theatre-practice, particular concern about the boy’s voice having broken may reflect reality as much as the gossip about the “little eyases”, and all the Players must in 3.2 adapt to whatever balance of antiquity, hamming, and razor-edge political calculation the Player King seeks.

Part 4. Acts and Devices 4.1 Acts Act-division only became a feature of performance when theatre moved indoors and lamp-wicks needed regular trimming, but in composition and reading a sense of actstructure came with classical drama. Acts 1, 2, and 5 of Hamlet are usually thought clear but the 3-4 boundary is moveable, a problem now interlocking with the commercial need of theatres to have an interval thereabouts; neither blurring in the text nor bipartite performance brings into real question the play’s construction in five acts with 1 and 3 longer than 2, 4, and 5. One sign Shakespeare was thinking in acts is Hamlet’s soliloquies, in Q2 in 1.2, 2.2, 3.1, and 4.4. The absence of the Ghost from acts 2 and 4–5 and of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern from 1 and 5, the killing of Polonius in 3, and the death of Ophelia in 4 (ending the love sub-plot), also assure a five-fold rhythm; so does Hamlet’s exile from Elsinore between 4.4 and 5.1, a departure from and return to the primary locus that elsewhere in Shakespearean tragedy also happens in or around act 4. The acts might be titled Ghost, Friends, Players, Ophelia, Death, and the soliloquies of acts 1–4 both interlock and cross-match: “O that this too, too sallied [sullied] flesh might melt” is the primary statement of unhappiness; “O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I” contrasts inaction with acting; “To be, or not to be” ponders death as a way out, or in; and “How all occasions do inform against me” contrasts inaction with action. Measured by revenge the sequence is (1) instigation—(2) delay—(3) test and error— (4) delay and consequence—(5) action and consequence; the love-plot fits into acts 2–4, corresponding with delays and cutting across the metatheatrical test in 3.

 See T. W. Baldwin, Shakspere’s five-act structure: Shakspere’s early plays on the background of renaissance theories of five-act structure from 1470 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1947).  The primary function of intervals is to make money from bar and concession sales; many theatres depend on the income so generated.  In the Arden 3 Q2 the acts have 844, 657, 889, 638, and 675 lines respectively.  Think of Romeo or Coriolanus banished, Lear on the heath etc..

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4.2 Scenes Two styles of scene-division were used in Shakespeare’s time: the ‘French’, used by Jonson, in which any major entrance/exit or event marks a new scene, and the ‘English’, used by Shakespeare, in which only a clear stage marks a new scene. The absence of some necessary exits in early texts makes for mild ambiguity, and long battle sequences get messy (as in acts 3–4 of Troilus and Antony), but most scenebreaks in Shakespeare are clear and the resulting structures shapely, each new unit of dramatic action locking coherently into place and observing the ‘law of re-entry’. Apart from high total length the Q2 scene sequence shows only one clear anomaly: 2.2 at 540 lines. Such size is rare in Shakespeare—only Love’s Labour’s 5.2 (931 lines), Winter’s Tale 4.4 (842), when undivided Measure 3.1 (551), and 1 Henry IV 2.4 (550) are longer, while Measure 5.1 (539) runs it very close. None but Hamlet 2.2 are in tragedies, but all involve inset-performances: formally in Love’s Labour’s (the ‘Pageant of the Nine Worthies’), less so in Winter’s Tale (the sheep shearing and masking by Polixenes and Camillo), Measure 5.1 (unmasking the duke), 1 Henry IV (Hal and Falstaff role-playing), and Measure 3.1 (the masked duke). The oddity therefore is not simply distension of a tragedic scene, but that it is 2.2 rather than 3.2 (where The Murder of Gonzago is played) that becomes distended. Interaction with the Players and the soliloquy they provoke from Hamlet account for the last 200 lines; 1–358 (in Q2, or c.400 in F) present a string of exchanges between, first, the monarchs and (i) Rosencrantz & Guildenstern, (ii) Voltemand and Cornelius, (iii) Polonius, and, second, Hamlet and (i) Polonius, (ii) Rosencrantz & Guildenstern. Most of these could easily be scenes in their own right, so the question is why Shakespeare wanted to collocate them as continuous action; the apparent answer is the threaded multiple entries of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern and Polonius (who enters again ahead of the Players for the last third). Within the flow Claudius/Hamlet becomes a single stage position, Claudius dealing with his Ambassadors where Hamlet deals with the Players, and  See Emrys Jones, Scenic Form in Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971).  No-one who exits at the end of a scene will re-enter to begin the next.  The number of lines per scene is: 174, 256, 135, 91, 188 / 117, 540 / 187, 389, 98, 215 / 45, 28, 66, 65, 211, 31, 192 / 288, 387.  Editors often divide into 3.1 and 3.2, but there is no warrant in F (the only early text of Measure), and a clear case that an undivided act 3 anticipates the undivided act 5.  � Titus 1.1 (495 lines) and 2.1 (135), when undivided (which they should be, as the stage is never clear), add up to a scene of 630 lines—like Hamlet 2.2 and act 3 of Measure a rolling set of colloquies driving to a soliloquy, and like Winter’s Tale 4.4 a comprehensive set-up of events.

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both dealing with the comedic trio of Polonius + Rosencrantz & Guildenstern, so the scene sets up the intense comparisons of Claudius with both Hamlets and the Player King in act 3. A similar fluency shows both in Shakespeare’s use of a probably slow-spoken Gravedigger to create a necessary delay in 5.1 between Ophelia’s death and burial, which might elsewhere easily call for a separate small scene, and in his willingness to make Hamlet soliloquise in 3.1 and 4.4 without having the stage to himself. Critics have variously worked out time-schemes for the action, but exactitude is impossible, and what seems clearest is that the driving scene-sequence of act 1, kick-started by the Ghost and separated from 2.2 only by the curious interlude with Polonius in 2.1, runs fluently into act 4, holds for Laertes and Ophelia in 4.5 and 4.7, and speeds on again in act 5. The rolling inclusion and connectedness of 2.2 thus seems a general cue for stage-performance, and productions with extended scene-breaks (as for shifting scenery) suffer badly from loss of momentum and needlessly lackadaisical Hamlets. .

4.3 Soliloquy and Colloquy The relatively far greater demand on Hamlet of colloquy and his not being alone to speak his third and fourth soliloquies have been noted, with the unhappy forcing, on actors having to project through a proscenium arch, of a declamatory style and gesticulations. Criticism has also tended philosophically to seize on the soliloquies, and so promote intense delivery intended to make ‘great thoughts’ impressive, but after any exclamatory opening all four, while mostly in quite formal verse, invite conversational nuance (especially where an audience are practically available for eye-contact and gestural interaction). They are arguments, not conclusions, moments when Hamlet switches from testing others to testing himself and taking stock. Both in reading and on stage, therefore, one should be cautious of over-isolating them from the general flow of speech. In tandem, the range of colloquy in Hamlet is very extensive, trading both with Claudius and Hamlet on variable assertions of rank and dignity, and running a gamut from haunted explanation in act 1 and banter in act 2 to confrontation and formality in acts 3–5, punctuated by chummy exchanges with the Players and Gravedigger. Rosencrantz & Guildenstern and Polonius (especially if also the Gravedigger) must have their own speaking rhythms and can risk idiosyncrasy; Horatio also needs in his extended straight-man role a rhythm with Hamlet that will allow him maximally forceful rebukes in 5.2, as by deploying (for example) a delay in his response. In

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general Shakespeare’s dialogue works best at speed, but he was also a master of dramatic silence, and in either the comedic roles or Horatio’s interlocution with Hamlet extended pauses can be used to excellent occasional effect. As a habit, however, pauses for rumination will needlessly extend a running-time already bloated by slow modern delivery, curtains, intervals, and over-reverence. 4.4 Verse, Prose, and Song Shakespeare mixed verse and prose in all plays except Richard II, wholly in verse as part of the design of its tetralogy, but broadly observed the conventional associations of tragic aristocratic verse and comic peasant prose—if only to allow their creative reversal, as with Caliban (in The Tempest) and, complicatedly, Hamlet. Act 1 is wholly in verse, as is 2.1; 2.2 first features prose in a very conventional way, Polonius reading aloud Hamlet’s letter at .108–21, but there is an inset-poem (or song?) at .114–7 that sets a trend, and the scene switches abruptly into prose for Hamlet’s exchanges with Polonius (.168–214), Rosencrantz & Guildenstern (.215– 316), all three (.317–58), where snatches are again sung, and finally the Players (.359–484), where the quoted play-speeches about Pyrrhus are in verse, as is Hamlet’s closing soliloquy. In act 3, after “To be, or not to be”, he again repeatedly speaks in prose: to Ophelia at 3.1.102–48, to the players at 3.2.1–45, and to all during the inset-performance (.86–377), where there are inset-speeches in verse (the play) as well as song or chanting. Princely prose recurs in act 4 speaking of Polonius’s body, to Rosencrantz & Guildenstern at 4.2.1–28 and, strikingly, to Claudius at 4.3.16–36; Ophelia mixes prose and song in 4.5; 4.6 is almost wholly prose as Horatio reads out Hamlet’s letter; and another letter is read at 4.7.43–6. The gravediggers and Hamlet speak prose mixed with song from 5.1.1–201, and further prose exchanges with Osric, a Lord, and Horatio at 5.2.67–202 mean that 337 of 675 lines in act 5 are prose—a strikingly high figure for a great ‘verse tragedy’. The clear solution, considering this pattern and the usual associations of prose, is to set aside for a moment the exchanges with the Players and Gravedigger (who would speak prose anyway), and hear Hamlet’s prose elsewhere as the marker of his “antic disposition”, dropped for soliloquies but imposed on Claudius when need demands in shrugging off his killing of Polonius, normative with courtiers he half-suspects  ‘Tetralogy’: a group of four plays; in Shakespeare applied to 1, 2, 3 Henry VI + Richard III (the First or Minor Tetralogy), and Richard II + 1, 2 Henry IV + Henry V (the Second or Major Tetralogy). In the second tetralogy, 1 and 2 Henry IV mix prose and verse fairly evenly; the last, Henry V, is dominated by prose, and as strongly comedic as Richard II is tragedic.

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(Polonius, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern), and a cruel defence against Ophelia. Songs, especially in snatches, contrast more sharply with prose than with well-spoken verse: editors usually count only six songs in the play (five from Ophelia in 4.5, one from the Gravedigger), but there are lines in 2.2, 3.2, and 5.1 that Hamlet can and perhaps should sing, making the play a deal more musical than commonly thought. Speaking Shakespearean blank verse is an art that can only be learned through practice, but those interested will find it much more rewarding to try speaking the Folio text and observing its punctuation than to speak any modernised text. Editors chop up Shakespearean verse and prose as if they were written in modern sentences, and for actors and auditors alike the Folio’s punctuation (which however odd to modern eyes usually indicates the proper Ciceronian periods►) should be a primary resource for making sense in delivery (which it was all written to do). 4.5 Metatheatre It is the greatness and vanity of Hamlet to make itself the tragedy of an actor. The word Shakespeare learned in childhood meant one who acted in deed, not one who played a role, but the shift in sense was underway and the play’s imaginative spine is the duality of acting in life and on stage. The danger in performance is that as all roles are openly investigated as roles, no affecting tragedy can be condensed, but the escape clause is that all stage-tragedies are in any case fictions, however they claim reality; Hamlet simply has the courage to face this fact. And not so simply. There is an interesting question about when exactly Hamlet has the idea of using The Murder of Gonzago as a truth-telling mirror to unmask Claudius, but he is bent on theatre from his first “I know not seems”, and greets the Players as “good friends” (2.2.360). In any case, the plan to make theatre serve Hamlet’s turn cues his homily about acting in 3.2, with its gratuitous insults to the paying audience, and its own glaring status as a “villainous” digression from a “necessary question of the play” that isn’t being considered, so that Hamlet shows exactly that “most pitiful ambition” he scorns (3.2.40–2). Such multiple meanings coil throughout the insetperformance, and Hamlet’s “antic disposition” is at its most practical in jigging after the show (263–76) and palavering over dead Polonius (4.2.1–28, 4.3.16–36). After watching Fortinbras in 4.4 his re-entry in 5.1 is to give his own little inset-performance with the Gravedigger, often ventriloquising in some manner with Yorick’s skull, and the fencing-bouts in 5.2 are another formal display. Clearly the metatheatre is most  The puns on action/acting and kin-d/king are axes that between them map the whole play.

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overtly present in the Players and the inset-performances, but in every scene after the Ghost’s first appearance as spectacular set-piece and raree-show, the senses of theatre, of playing and acting, are flexed and extended. The trick is therefore to grasp (and present to an audience) the pervasiveness of metatheatre achieved, connecting Ghostshow, murder-plot, and revenger-identity with philosophy, comedy, and action. The idea of metatheatre is often treated as an academic fancy, an intellectual luxury that can (or even should) safely be left for scholars to worry themselves with. But its most basic condition in Shakespeare was simply daylight falling on actors and audience alike and, however metaphysical an idea, it sensibly inhered in the fabric of the theatre and every moment of performance. In Hamlet it is also made the keystone of the play’s arch, connecting what Hamlet says with what he does: the entire problem of his delay could be stated in terms of the pervasive intervention of theatre between his desire and ability to act as he thinks he ought. Trying to comprehend metagenerics can be dizzying (there’s a good analogy with the ‘infinity effect’ of facing mirrors), but if you don’t ‘get it’ in that mode, don’t abandon metatheatre: start instead at the other end, with the nuts and bolts of a play that stages a play, an actor who knows at every moment what it is both to act and not to act, and actors who must repeatedly act as auditors—Hamlet for the Ghost, and more or less everyone else for Hamlet, as well as for Polonius and the Players. All Shakespeare is to some degree metatheatrical, but not all Shakespeare does this: far from being a luxury, The Murder of Gonzago is for Hamlet the one thing he can’t not afford in a world that is, like the surrounding theatre, wholly performative. 4.6 Doubling In a strictly practical sense the major acting double is Polonius/First Gravedigger, while the Ghost/Claudius is possible but quite rare in modern practice. As always in Shakespeare minor roles can be doubled, and all three early texts can be played with as few as 11 actors, but some possible doublings are awkward in practice, and it seems likely a somewhat larger cast was deployed at the Globe. In the more general sense of mirroring, repeating, duplicating, iterating, echoing, or shadowing, doubling was Shakespeare’s engine of composition and Hamlet’s  Those interested in metatheatre should compare Shakespeare (especially the Late Plays) with Beckett (especially the dramaticules): there is a good case that only Beckett has ever seriously taken up where Shakespeare left off.  If played thematically, with an audience encouraged to see the identity, it can have explosive effects on Hamlet’s denigration of Claudius and so raise a major question about the ‘closet scene’.

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metatheatrical scrutiny falls on it as warmly and sceptically as anything theatrical. The whole play is dominated by a sequence of un/likenesses: of the Ghost, Player King, and Claudius to old Hamlet, and of old Hamlet, the Player King, Laertes, and Fortinbras to young Hamlet; amid which Rosencrantz & Guildenstern do their oddcouple thing. Horatio, if of an age with Hamlet and/or Fortinbras and/or Laertes, may also be drawn in to the parallels as a fourth young man (though lacking a troublesome dead father). Amidst all The Murder of Gonzago slips in yet another form of doubleness, slyly anticipating in Lucianus Hamlet as the killer of his uncle and king even while supposedly replicating that uncle’s killing of his brother and king—as if there weren’t already headaches enough in keeping track of who resembles whom, or doesn’t. Anticipating Part 5, it is helpful here to remember that in Twelfth Night, probably a season-pair for Hamlet, Shakespeare, the father of fraternal twins (though the boy had died in 1596), cheerfully cast a pair as identical twins. Viola and Sebastian cannot be identical but the fiction makes them so and audiences (if not spectators) usually accept it, as they do the double doubles of The Comedy of Errors (Part 1.4). The most forceful pairings of un/likeness in Hamlet, rotating around the Ghost, the Players, and the fraternal problem of old Hamlet and Claudius, have a similar quality of wilful paradox, inducing with ghostliness and self-conscious theatricality a sense of impossibility while yet acting themselves into ‘reality’. Hamlet thus extends to an audience the same theatrical challenge of credulity as Twelfth Night, but in a different mood and to differing ends: where the comedy withholds the necessary stage-meeting of the impossible twins until its final scene, and resolves all thereby, Hamlet begins with a horrid, nagging question about the bona fides and (in every sense) appearances of the Ghost, and parades so many insistently supposed identities that only the ‘real’ deaths of Polonius, Ophelia, and Rosencrantz & Guildenstern afford anyone any exit from the mix; and even that strategy has only partial success. In the largest view the propagating chain of doubled identities that pervades Hamlet is a consequence of the play’s insistent metatheatre, giving to every role a Janus-face of fictional and thespian aspects, and making the whole play tremble with self-consciousness of its acts of representation. 4.7 Special Effects Hamlet does not require any particular effects, but beyond whatever smoke-and-mirrors a director may feel necessary for the Ghost in his awkward armour, the play poses a series of staging challenges, several genuinely troublesome on a proscenium-arch

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stage with limited sightlines. The most interesting attend the inset-performance in 3.2 and the burial-fight in 5.1; others accompany the crowdedness of 2.2 and 5.2, the killing of Polonius, and Ophelia’s ‘mad scene’. All impose a need for clear thought about what one wants to present, and how. With the Ghost the question is fairly plain: the difficulty of one who spits and splutters is a good example of the downside of metatheatre, but there is always a buzz at new Hamlets about how ‘they’ will ‘do the Ghost’ this time. Special effects offer one kind of answer and recorded voice-over can work superbly, but the problems in 3.2 and 5.1 continue the test of theatre that the Ghost begins. With the inset-performance the difficulty is that two areas of stage-action are simultaneously of compelling interest yet must be facing one another—The Murder of Gonzago and the watching face of Claudius. If the Players are anywhere ‘upstage’, Claudius, Gertrude, Ophelia, and Hamlet are liable to have to turn their backs on most of a modern audience; and if ‘downstage’, their inset-play will obscure the on-stage auditors from many in the paying audience. There is real disagreement about how 3.2 was originally done at the Globe, as also about the burial of Ophelia: it is often supposed that the stage-trap was used, but (i) was it big enough for a horizontal body? (ii) what did Laertes land on when he (as all three early texts insist) leaped into the grave? and (iii) what did Hamlet land on when he jumped in afterwards (as Q1 has it), and stand on if he fought Laertes in the grave? Though very funny, the scene is all but impossible to stage as Q1 has it—unless the grave is not the trap, but simple the space off the front of the stage where there is room; but the problem then is getting poor Ophelia (or whatever plays her corpse) off again. This is where a performance must know clearly how dependent it is on illusion—must a ‘corpse’ constantly seem to be a corpse?—and the decision here can make special effects seem a less desirable ‘answer’ to the Ghost. Camcorders can certainly (as Sam West showed) now help out with The Murder of Gonzago in 3.2, and an audience’s awareness of sightlines, of seeing and performing, is readily enhanced by their use; but they fit far less easily into the crowded last third of 2.2 (the Players’ first entrance) and the fencing in 5.2, which equally require careful arrangement of action. If a production’s laundry-budget can sustain it Polonius may usefully suffer substantial loss of blood in 3.4, but the wounds given in 5.2 don’t do well as a gore-fest (and the play, with Claudius, tends to avoid bloodshed in favour of poison). Ophelia’s ‘mad scene’ is the other one where effects are often seen; unusual lighting can be good, especially if movement is accentuated by highlights and/or  An idea that fits with Q1 being a text cut for touring, using stages without traps or machinery. See also Sheldon P. Zittner, ‘Four feet in the grave’, TEXT 2 (1985): 139–48.

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silhouette, but expressionistic stagings of her disharmony seem often more to clash with than orchestrate the lines that must actually be delivered. 4.8 Exits Actors relish strong exits as much as authority entrances, and Shakespeare habitually provided good exit lines—but also had other things in mind. Use of the discoveryspace as a symbolic locus in act 3 was mentioned (Part 2.2), and with the death of Polonius there commences a sequence of last-exit-lines or dying words that carry cumulative weight but can, in the end, fall under the burden. The point about the discovery-space is its dual associations with rulers (for processional and authority entrances) and clowns (subversively parting the curtains). Though much depends on whether thrones are used for Claudius and Gertrude (and if so, where they come from), it is possible in 3.2 for both to enter and abruptly depart through the discovery-space, eventually followed by Hamlet, after his putative jig en route to Gertrude’s chamber; additionally, though much again depends, the Player King may be framed against the space’s curtains and/or brushed past by the exiting Claudius—who may also be so framed when praying in 3.3. In 3.4 there is a clear case for the curtains as the arras behind which Polonius hides, which would for Jacobethan audiences potentiate Hamlet’s post-mortem identification of him as a “fool”; it may also logically be where Hamlet stashes the corpse. The whole central act can thus be seen as structured around the central discovery-space and its curtains. Polonius also starts an intriguing sequence with his bathetic dying words, “O, I am slain” (3.4.23); always given to stating the obvious, he achieves brevity only redundantly in death. His children, in comparison, are granted last lines of real power: Ophelia in effect gets two, “Goodnight, ladies, goodnight. Sweet ladies, goodnight, goodnight” (4.5.72–3) and “God buy you” (.192), both affording very good exits, while Laertes, having achieved a proper revenge by most underhand means, makes a dying proffer of mutual absolution: “Exchange forgiveness with me, noble Hamlet, / Mine and my father’s death come not upon thee, / Nor thine on me” (5.2.313–15). In some productions he lingers long enough to receive a glad acceptance, but his gracious death is, inevitably, capped by Hamlet’s, ending as he began with a wicked pun. Of course “the rest is silence” (.342) in every sense, except that it isn’t for Horatio or Fortinbras, and the play began with a Ghost whose story was that he had no rest and  F’s punctuation imposes a quite different rhythm: “Goodnight Ladies: Goodnight sweet Ladies: Goodnight, goodnight.” (F 4.1.71–2, but unmodernised).

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could not be silent. F provides a last image capping the final imperative line from Fortinbras, “Go, bid the soldiers shoot” (5.2.387): where Q2 has only an “Exeunt”, F says “Exeunt marching, after the which a peal of ordnance are shot off”—i.e. a volley of shots, as still happens at military funerals. This is surprisingly rare in performance, perhaps because guns are felt to clash with the implicitly mediaeval world of Hamlet, but the Soviet director Grigori Kozintsev found a marvellous equivalent in his 1964 filmadaptation starring Innokenti Smoktunov: weather-beaten soldiers competently obey Fortinbras, using two pikes and three swords, covered by a flag, to create a stretcher on which Hamlet’s corpse is lifted and borne away (Figure 2). The film was shot at Ivangorod Castle in Estonia, and as the body rises on the stretcher the camera drops to show in the uppermost third of the frame the crenellated curtain-wall of the fortress; amid which a defensive tower raises the silhouette of a crown above dead Hamlet’s head, kept there by tracking as the soldiers bear him away. Fortinbras does tactfully mention, as he announces his intended take-over, that had Hamlet ever become King he “was likely […] To have proved most royal” (.381– 2); the man himself claims ambition as a motive only once, at his most defensive to Horatio (.64), but Kozintsev is right to add to Hamlet’s opening statement of kin and kind the spectres of kingship and power, and keep them there a while before the dead prince finally escapes the frame.

Figure 2 : The body of Hamlet is borne off by soldiers beneath a stone crown; Fortinbras fills the foreground [Picture Credit : Russian Cinema Council]

Part 5. Hamlet and Twelfth Night Relative datings of Shakespeare’s 37 canonical plays all involve guesswork, but the 18 plays published 1592–1609 offer some definite termini while reported stagings provide more, so there is also a framework to observe. Most schemata put Hamlet and Twelfth Night close together as a ‘season pair’—i.e. plays in distinct genres premiered within a few months of one another in 1600–01: which offers an interesting cue to consider them in thematic and practical relation. On the surface they seem as distinct as Venus and Adonis and Lucrece (Part 1.3), but similarities are also evident. Hamlet is a revenge tragedy, and to throw the word ‘revenge’ at Twelfth Night is to find the Fool, Feste, insulted by Malvolio in 1.5 and quoting him back at himself in 5.1: “But do you remember—‘Madam, why laugh you at such a barren rascal? And you smile not, he’s gagg’d’?: And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges” (5.1.374–7; cf. 1.5.83–9). Feste’s revenge, however, is largely enacted by Maria, Sir Toby, and Sir Andrew, all affronted by Malvolio in 2.3 with Feste as witness: in 2.5 the knights spy on Malvolio’s reception of a forged letter (combining Claudius and Polonius spying on Hamlet with the fate of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern), and in 3.4 Malvolio falls victim, obeying the letter in ways that make him a mock-Fool and lead to his imprisonment as a madman. Feste does later play an overt part in the revenging, tormenting Malvolio in the guise of a priest and identifying himself as the play’s Vice (4.2.120–31), so he can elsewhere readily be played as a ‘stirrer’ or even orchestrator of the revenge—and is, like Hamlet, put on his mettle in 1.5, delivering in act 5 a revenge set up through an act 3 performance by others. Each play observes generic decorum in its own fashion, Hamlet killing off two families and Twelfth Night marrying or engaging three couples as well as serving up the impossible twins’ reunion in a moment as purely theatrical as the appearances of the Ghost. But just as Polonius and the Odd Couple of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern find themselves misplaced in Elsinore, and colour Hamlet with their comedy, so Malvolio is too melancholic and austere a creature for the zany world of Twelfth Night; Olivia also starts the play in deep mourning, while Viola and Sebastian mistakenly grieve for one another until 5.1; and Feste (as actors variously discover) is profitably made  Those needing a summary of Twelfth Night may see: http://www.twelfthnightsite.co.uk/

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depressive, all the way to his sung epilogue about the rain falling every day. Trevor Nunn’s 1996 film-adaptation (starring Ben Kingsley as Feste) was shot against the backdrop of an autumnal, pewter-grey English Channel, and a sense of decline with the colours of vegetable death bring out much that more brightly lit and cheerier productions miss. Aphoristically, one might conclude that if Hamlet is a rather funny revenge tragedy, Twelfth Night is a rather bleak revenge comedy. Beyond these thematic relations, nine roles in each play interestingly pair; the names I give these pairings (in central column) are, save ‘the Odd Couple’, mine: Claudius Gertrude Laertes Ophelia Ros. & Guil. Horatio Polonius Hamlet

The Jealous Ruler The Mismourner The Bereaved Brother The Drowned Sister The Odd Couple The Surviving Friend The Foolish Victim The Revenging Fool

Orsino Olivia Sebastian Viola Sir Toby & Sir Andrew Antonio Malvolio Feste

Many minor roles are missing, unique to their plays (as the Ghost is), but the nine roles I list for Hamlet speak 3275 of 3703 lines (88.4%) and the Twelfth Night roles are similarly dominant, so the bulk of both plays is involved. The Jealous Ruler: Claudius / Orsino King Claudius is obviously jealous, having come to power only through fratricide driven by desire for his brother’s throne and wife, and Duke Orsino’s conduct with both Olivia and Viola/Cesario tends that way. He repeatedly claims to crave Olivia (as Claudius craves Gertrude), ignoring her mourning state and will (as Claudius ignores Gertrude’s), and when he sees that Olivia loves ‘Cesario’ threatens to kill the ‘boy’ in pure spite (5.1.117–31), bringing him close to Claudius’s killing jealousy. Claudius has already acted on his jealousy, and is lost, but Orsino as a comedic ruler enjoys the chance to change his ways, realise a truer love, and propose (after a fashion) to the dis-guised Viola, but his eventual right conduct emphasises how misguided he has previously been.

 This does not mean that the same actor necessarily played the paired roles—actors like variety much more than being typecast—but does suggest ways in which for Shakespeare the dramaturgical components with which he worked were constant.

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The Mismourner: Gertrude / Olivia As Gertrude weeps too little for old Hamlet, forgotten in a fresh wedding mere weeks after his funeral, so Olivia weeps too much for her dead brother, declaring an intent to sequester herself for seven years in his memory (1.1.25–31). Both find their attitudes necessarily reversed, Gertrude after 3.4, when Hamlet confronts her, and Olivia after 1.5, when she is smitten by ‘Cesario’. In each case a certain naïveté is revealed, more damagingly for the older, more experienced Gertrude, but still consequentially for Olivia, who for all her declarations of grief seems wholly to forget her dead brother once in love—as Viola pointedly does not. Olivia also resonates intriguingly with Gertrude, one wife of two brothers, in marrying one twin while thinking she is marrying the other, and even with the impossible, inclusively happy comedic resolution some hard questions linger about her judgement. The Bereaved Brother-Drowned Sister: Laertes-Ophelia / Sebastian-Viola Initially linkable as sibling pairs, the identities of each brother and sister are also close. Ophelia and Viola are frustrated in love, deprived of fraternal support, and reported drowned, while Sebastian, if lacking Laertes’s cue for revenge and capacity for deception, is equally grief-stricken and even more given to aggressive entrances. As protagonist, Viola is a far bigger role than Ophelia, but grieves for Sebastian as Ophelia does more concentratedly for Polonius; Laertes is conversely a bigger role than Sebastian, but the Bereaved Brothers both have the bulk of their lines in acts 4–5 (Sebastian otherwise appearing only in 2.1 and 3.3, and Laertes in 1.2–3). In both plays the presence of loving siblings (expressed negatively in Twelfth Night, through mutual grieving) is an important emotional component, off-setting the self-deluded or pretended affections that teem in both plots. The Odd Couple: Rosencrantz-Guildenstern / Belch-Aguecheek Here alone there is a clear case for the roles having been written for and created by the same actors, in which case fat, talkative Sir Toby Belch would pair with wordier Rosencrantz, and tall, relatively laconic Sir Andrew Aguecheek with quieter Guildenstern. The knights are not as inseparable as Rosencrantz & Guildenstern, Sir Toby appearing on his own in 1.3—but Sir Andrew never appears without Sir Toby (though he usually departs alone in 5.1 when Sir Toby finally tires of gulling him and makes plain his contempt for Sir Andrew’s foolishness). Both knights, moreover,

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are usually present for the twins’ reunion in 5.1, and so would have served in mismatched unlikeness to contrast with the (fictionally identical) twins, as Rosencrantz & Guildenstern frame the intense issues of un/likeness that pervade Hamlet. The presence of an Odd Couple is as decorous in comedic Twelfth Night as it is indecorous in tragedic Hamlet, but in both plays their fate is intensely melancholic. Hamlet’s needless death-sentence-by-joke on Rosencrantz & Guildenstern is far worse than his accidental hot-blooded killing of Polonius, while Sir Andrew for all his foolishness is wistful in 2.3 (“I was adored once too”, .181), and in 5.1, wounded by Sebastian and openly derided by Sir Toby, he can bring a small, sad dignity to his exit that haunts auditors as much or more than the victimisation of angry Malvolio. The Surviving Friend: Horatio / Antonio The similarities are as functional as the roles. Though differingly distributed, both serve on first appearance to cue or provide back-story (Horatio at the very beginning, Antonio in act 2), and are throughout exemplars of selfless loyalty in friendship. As such both specifically contrast with the ‘false friendship’ of the Odd Couple (Horatio with Rosencrantz & Guildenstern, Antonio with leeching Sir Toby and gulled Sir Andrew). Antonio is more active throughout, but has his best moment in 3.4, mistaking ‘Cesario’ for Sebastian; though onstage in 5.1 from about line 50, usually to the end, and with a good place in the climactic meeting of the twins when Sebastian greets him second only to Olivia, his presence in a crowded comedic ending inevitably means he has nothing of Horatio’s final status as Last Man Standing and singularly authoritative witness. There is no need to suppose Antonio’s love for Sebastian primarily or consciously homosexual—both same-sex friendship and the practices now designated as ‘homosexual’ are very differently conceived in Early Modern European than in any contemporary First World discourse—but it is not unreasonable to think that Shakespeare’s play poses a question along those lines. Gender of all kinds is at issue throughout the play, as are desires of body and mind, and recent productions have shown that desirous Antonios make good theatrical sense. At the same time, if this is played strongly Antonio’s necessary disappointment and eclipse in 5.1, rediscovering the true Sebastian only to find him married, makes him another melancholy man to haunt the feel-good ending: Trevor Nunn’s film showed him departing ahead of Malvolio and Feste, collar up against a grey sky; a reminder that he, as much as Horatio, has lost his best friend.  See Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London: Gay Men’s Press, 1982) and Lorna Hutson, The Usurer’s Daughter (London: Routledge, 1994)

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The Foolish Victim and the Revenging Fool: Polonius / Malvolio / Hamlet / Feste The pairings that I gave in the table are put aside for a moment because (as the chiasmus of a foolish victim and revenging Fool suggests) the cross-pairings are equally notable. If Polonius and Malvolio are victims who die (one only metaphorically) in confined spaces, and Hamlet and Feste revengers by third-party theatre, Polonius and Feste share the patter-comedy and sententiousness of Fools while Hamlet and Malvolio are melancholics given to black attire whom their play puts into antic costume, deems mad, and very wrongly assails. To complete the parallelogram, (Hamlet and Polonius) and (Feste and Malvolio) are each in their respective plays differentiated Fools in conflict, one taking the other down, and all four are further differentiated from an Odd Couple. Such arrayed and contrasted fooleries are a feature of several later plays, including Measure for Measure, King Lear, and Timon of Athens, and may be connected with the sharer Robert Armin, who in 1599 replaced William Kemp as the company’s principal clown. Armin seems to have been more intellectual than Kemp, publishing a taxonomy of Fools (in successive editions called Foole upon Foole, or Six sortes of Sottes and A Nest of Ninnies) as well as turning playwright, so his presence seems likely to have stimulated still further Shakespeare’s strong interest in com(ed)ic roles, and especially Fools; certainly Armin is assumed to have created Lear’s Fool, and that role to have been written specifically for his talents. That was in c.1604–05, and the effects of Armin’s presence are not usually identified as early as the composition of Hamlet in c.1599–1600: but perhaps they should be. The distended 2.2 in particular, with Hamlet (consistently speaking the prose of his own “antic disposition”) encountering Polonius, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern, Polonius again, and the Players, is helpfully seen as a parade of clowning ended by the arrival of the only people who ought truly to have a clown—but don’t seem to, and are for Hamlet much the most serious thing to happen in the whole scene. Hamlet and Malvolio as melancholics tell a different story. Jaques in As You Like It is a third, and the proximate source for these ‘humour’ characters is Ben Jonson’s plays Every Man In his Humour (1598) and Every Man Out of his Humour (1599), both performed by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, very probably with Shakespeare acting. The conceit Jonson popularised was based on the Elizabethan theory of constitutional humours, excess or defect of which might make one sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric, or in the case of ‘black bile’ melancholic, and though Shakespeare didn’t pursue the technique for long, his three great mid-period melancholics are the clearest instance by far in his canon of a new character type being introduced at a particular moment.

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Audiences of 1600 at the Globe, who might also have seen one or both Jonson plays, would have had every cue to recognise Hamlet and Malvolio (and Jaques) as ‘the Melancholic’, and thus to see their contrasts: the prince and the steward; Hamlet choosing an “antic disposition”, Malvolio having one thrust on him; the would-be ascetic and the would-be voluptuary; Hamlet as victimiser, Malvolio as victim. Audiences seeing Shakespeare’s plays seriatim, as they were written and premiered by a fairly consistent group of actors at the Theatre and later the Globe, had in all cases a set of cues to link roles through the actors who created them (and for whom they were in most cases probably written). When Polonius says that he once played Caesar and was killed in the Capitol (3.2.99–100), the actor who created the part of Polonius may have been saying what many in the audience knew full well, that he had played Caesar for them the year before—suggesting a comic way of playing Caesar not often now seen, without precluding a striking contrast between the playing of the parts, so that the actor’s reminiscence might have made his first auditors look more seriously at foolish Polonius as they recalled what this player could do when surprisingly stabbed in an act 3. At the same time Shakespeare was not often so kind as to drop such clues, and there are so many possible combinations of the known sharers and hired men, none dis/provable, that they become of little practical or critical use. Character types, however, are much fairer game, and whether the same or distinct actors were involved an auditor of Polonius familiar with Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar should be alerted by the allusion both to the authoritarian in Polonius and (for future reference) to the pantaloon in Caesar, as well as to their close positions in the constellation of act-3 Shakespearean deaths. In this sense, whoever created Hamlet, Polonius, Malvolio, and Feste, auditors of the first productions of Hamlet and Twelfth Night could have identified the Revenger and Victim roles, and some presumably did; as we may. The season-pairing of these contrasted plays, like the diptych of the Henry IV plays and the tetralogical structure into which they are embedded, is a macroscopic aspect of Shakespeare’s habitual doubling and generic motley; an aspect of his writing as much as the contrasts and echoes within each play. Hamlet, that is, answers to Feste as much as to Laertes, and those wondering how a melancholy and an antic disposition can meet in Hamlet can do worse than look to Feste as a model, noting especially his musicality and those several places where Hamlet can sing (or join the Gravedigger in singing). Reciprocally, readers of Twelfth Night puzzled by Feste’s seemingly disconnected interventions in 2.3 might consider Hamlet’s behaviour in 3.2, when he is also watching (and manipulating) a performance that will generate the resolution necessary to his

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revenge. Polonius and Malvolio as Victims equally resonate, Malvolio revealed as a would-be Pantalone, desiring as Olivia’s husband the overbearing condescension he cannot command in his failed authority entrance in 2.3, and Polonius illuminated in his potential melancholy, prideful lack of self-awareness, and very own, catastrophically failed authority entrance, which far from arresting Hamlet’s action induces it, and terminally arrests Polonius himself. In recent years all of the major tragedies have received productions generating more laughter than was once common; even Coriolanus and King Lear, typically very po-faced and bleak in criticism and performance alike, have been allowed some living motley, with interesting if various results. But neither ‘Shakespearean comedy’ nor ‘Shakespearean tragedy’ were or are fixed quanta, developing through his career in more than one extraordinary way, so to take our understanding of his generic motley further means, for Hamlet, looking at the proximate comedies: As You Like It and Twelfth Night.

Part 6. Critics’ Corner Hamlet has, at least since the criticism of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), been a dumping-ground for critical preoccupations and anxieties—meaning that many books ostensibly about Hamlet are in fact little concerned with the play as Shakespeare delivered it to us. Freudian psychoanalytical readings are perhaps most notorious, but because Hamlet has for so long been the tragedy, and Shakespeare’s ‘greatest play’, attacks on Shakespeare, the teaching of Shakespeare, and values (supposedly) encoded in the teaching of Shakespeare; discussions of tragedy or drama at large; and self-important effusions about very little except the author’s obsessions or hobbies can all take the form of books apparently ‘about’ Hamlet. A complete bibliography even of recent criticism would fill scores of pages and tally a shocking waste of trees, so this section lists (with annotations) only the most widely available/used individual editions, guides, and films, with a selection of the very best general criticism and web-sites. Fuller discussion is available in Arden 3, and in many of the other editions and guides cited. 6.1 Bibliography Editions of Hamlet Arden 1: ed. Edward Dowden, 1899. The first Arden published, long out of print, but findable used; an eclectic text and a fascinating period introduction by a poet-scholar. Arden 2: ed. Harold Jenkins, 1984. Now out of print, but widely available used; a very solid, scholarly eclectic text, with useful, heavy annotation, but skimpy (as are all Arden 2s) on stage-history and the performative. Arden 3: in 2 vols, ed. Anne Thompson and Neal Taylor, 2006. The new, long-awaited ed., on which the jury is still out, though some egregious theatrical incomprehension is rapidly apparent. All three texts, with an oddly organised, well illustrated introduction. The prohibitive pricing of the hardback vol.2 (the Q1 and F texts) defeats any use of it in teaching.

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New Cambridge Shakespeare: ed. Philip Edwards, 1985. Slimmer than most, with an eclectic text, decent annotations, and interesting introduction; remembers but is not great on staging. Oxford (World’s Classics): ed. G. R. Hibbard, 1987. A brisk and readable eclectic text with a decent introduction, but cavalier with stage-directions both textually and in annotations. Penguin: ed. T. J. B. Spencer, 1980. Contains a good introduction by Alan Sinfield and a brief essay on stage-history by Paul Prescott, but like all Penguin Shakespeares is insufficiently glossed and annotated for university use.

Books about Hamlet Brown, John Russell, The Shakespeare Handbooks: Hamlet: a guide to the text and its theatrical life (Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Brief chapters on sources, texts etc. surround a scene-by-scene playing commentary. Jonathan Croall, Hamlet Observed: The National Theatre at Work (London: National Theatre, 2001). Interesting, useful, sometimes tendentious documentation of John Caird’s 2001 Hamlet starring Simon Russell Beale; good photographs. Dawson, Anthony B., Shakespeare in Performance: Hamlet (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995). A stage-history, summarising 1600–1900 and dealing in detail with the twentieth century; includes a chapter on the Olivier and Kozintsev films. Eliot, T.S., ‘Hamlet and his Problems’, in The Sacred Wood: Essays in Poetry and Criticism (London: Faber, 1920). A famous attack on the play, arguing that it is badly constructed and that many of the ‘problems’ are insoluble. Foakes, R. A., ‘Hamlet’ versus ‘Lear’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). An intriguing argument about the ways in which King Lear has supplanted Hamlet as Shakespeare’s ‘greatest tragedy’. Hapgood, Robert, ed., ‘Hamlet’ In Production (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). A series of scholarly essays about stage-history, divided into periods. Jones, Ernest, Hamlet and Oedipus (1910, 1923; London: Gollancz, 1949). The primary Freudian account, an essay that grew into a book, by the founding president of the British Psychoanalytical Society. Mercer, Peter, ‘Hamlet’ and the Acting of Revenge (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1987). The fullest recent treatment of the revenge theme and context, complemented

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rather than superseded by Kerrigan’s study of the theme at large (see under ‘General Criticism’ below). Pennington, Michael, ‘Hamlet’: A User’s Guide (London: Nick Hern Books, 1996). An interesting, idiosyncratic guide to the play in performance by a professional actor. Thompson, Anne, and Neil Taylor, Writers and their Work: William Shakespeare: Hamlet (1996; 2/e Horndon: Northcote/British Council, 2005). A very brief guide with some good pictures. Wilson, John Dover, What Happens in ‘Hamlet’? (1935; 2/e Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959). Wilson was the great but capricious Hamlet scholar of the early-mid twentieth century; the book is now dated, but his reading of the ‘closet scene’ remains influential.

Major films of Hamlet All are available on DVD through normal commercial channels unless otherwise specified. They are given in chronological order; the first name given is that of the director; the bracketed name is of the actor playing Hamlet). Olivier, Laurence, 1948 (Laurence Olivier). Now dated, but important in so many ways that it demands at least one respectful viewing—and like all older films it records older styles of acting for stage and screen: the romanticised postures + voice-over of ‘To be or not to be’ is especially interesting and instructive. Kozintsev, Grigori, 1964 (Innokenti Smoktunov). For many the screen Hamlet and a contender for Best Shakespearean Film; consistently intelligent in almost every cinematic way. In SovScope, an ultra-wide Soviet format used to excellent advantage; rarely stocked, but available on all-region DVD on-line from e-shops or the Russian Cinema Council. Gielgud, John, 1964 (Richard Burton). A film of the Broadway production, preserved by Burton and restored after his death. The story of the film and its preservation is strange and wonderful, Burton is electric, and Hume Cronyn (old enough to remember vaudeville) is to my mind the best and most interesting (as well as funniest) Polonius on record. Zeffirelli, Franco, 1990 (Mel Gibson). Surprisingly watchable, and with a very fine Ophelia (Helena Bonham Carter) as well as sharp direction; Gibson struggles, not entirely in vain, while Zeffirelli does some camera and lighting magic. Gertrude (Glenn Close) is striking in her combinations of potent reserve and gnawing weakness.

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Kline, Kevin, 1990 (Kevin Kline). A film of the New York Shakespeare Festival production, with Kline as a sensitive, finely nuanced prince not as well supported as he might have been. Kline has given some interesting interviews about the production, and his Shakespearean work. Branagh, Kenneth, 1996 (Kenneth Branagh). A notorious film, based on Branagh’s successful RSC production and almost as long (242 mins), cramming in every line and casting a celebrity in every role (Gerard Depardieu as Reynaldo, Ken Dodd as Yorick ...). There is much to fascinate and instruct, and, shot in 70mm, the film is consistently and lushly beautiful in costume, furniture, architecture, and lighting; overall, however, a failure both as a film and an investigation of the play, because confused (as Branagh’s other Shakespearean films, some less well received, never are) about its medium. Almereyda, Michael, 2000 (Ethan Hawke). A deliberately lean, highly cinematic take, with Claudius as the CEO of Denmark Corp. in New York City, and Hamlet as a filmstudent. Polonius (Bill Murray) is notably severe, Ophelia (Julia Stiles) is intelligently wounded, The Murder of Gonzago becomes a video, and (save in dealing with the soliloquies) the film is generally sharp. Brooke, Peter, 2004 (Adrian Lester). Derived from a stage-production that while officially the usual ‘triumph’ in fact met mixed reviews; Lester’s performance is fascinating, but the sense Brooke was trying to make of the play around that performance is less so, and less than clear.

General Criticism Barton, Anne (as Anne Righter), Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967). Still the outstanding book on Shakespeare’s mediaeval inheritance and the evolution of the Vice. Bate, Jonathan, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). Fundamentally right, always interesting, and important in proving Shakespeare’s knowledge of Ovid in the originals, but sometimes pushing its arguments too far. Edelman, Charles, Brawl Ridiculous: Swordfighting in Shakespeare’s Plays (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press [Revel’s Companions], 1992). The only account of its subject by a trained swordsman; very interesting on 5.2. Kerrigan, John, Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). The major recent work on revenge as a whole; chs 1–4 on the legacies of Aristotle, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides are excellent; and see. ch. 7, ‘‘Remember Me!’: Horestes, Hieronimo, and Hamlet’.

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Rothwell, Kenneth S., A History of Shakespeare on Screen: A Century of Film and Television (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Thorough and fascinating, with a very useful appendix listing almost all Shakespearean films. Shapiro, James, 1599 (London: Faber, 2005). Unusual criticism looking at a single year in Shakespeare’s life, immediately prior to writing Hamlet. Wiles, David, Shakespeare’s Clown: Actor and Text in the Elizabethan Playhouse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Extremely interesting argument, controversial to some and taken up in a number of more recent works; the best account yet of Kemp’s departure in 1599, and good on all comedic roles.

6.2 Web-sites http://fly.hiwaay.net/~paul/shakspere/evidence1.html A site giving the documentary evidence of Shakespeare’s life and dealings. http://www.leoyan.com/global-language.com/ENFOLDED/index.html ‘hamletworks.org’, a marvellous, very scholarly site that includes The Enfolded Hamlet, allowing multi-text investigation and cross-reference by line. http://ise.uvic.ca/Library/plays/Ham.html An excellent site with all the early texts and a selection of articles. http://shakespeare.palomar.edu/ ‘Mr William Shakespeare and the Internet’—a very well-organised and helpful gateway site aiming to index all high quality internet Shakespeare resources.

APPENDICES: HYPERLINK-TEXTS The following pages contain explanatory materials you may have visited by hyperlinks from the text. They are included here for reference.



serious doubt There have since the mid-nineteenth century been Anti-Stratfordians, who believe (often fanatically) that ‘William Shakespeare’ was a front-man for some hidden genius—typically the Earls of Southampton, Oxford, or St Albans, or perhaps Christopher Marlowe (who therefore must not really have died in 1593). The first to become famous was American Delia Bacon (1811–59), who in 1856 kept vigil in Holy Trinity, Stratford (where Shakespeare is buried), desiring to dig him up because she believed evidence proving her theory was buried there (see http:// www.english.uiuc.edu/-people-/emeritus/baym/essays/last_heroine.htm). Some backers of Shakespeare’s Globe in London (a reconstructed amphitheatre and important tourist-venue), and its former Artistic Director, Mark Rylance, promote Anti-Stratfordianism as intellectually respectable, holding conferences and selling Anti-Stratfordian literature in the theatre-bookshop.   It needs therefore to be said loud and clear that it is not respectable, any more than believing the earth flat or Elvis living on Mars. No contemporary of Shakespeare’s ever expressed doubt that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare; nor did anyone before Delia Bacon in the 1850s. All evidence is wholly consistent with Shakespeare writing Shakespeare; none supports any other position. The argument most often advanced by Anti-Stratfordians is that a provincial grammar-school boy could not have written the plays ‘by Shakespeare’, and most alternative candidates are aristocrats; for what it is worth there is also a clear geographical pattern involved, in that the great majority of active Anti-Stratfordians are North Americans or Antipodeans of British descent. The orthodox ‘Stratfordian’ position has nothing to do with automatically defending ‘the Bard’, or debarring debate etc.—only evidence and reason. All Anti-Stratfordian theories are of necessity conspiracy theories, because they have to explain how everyone was for centuries duped into crediting the existence and genius of Shakespeare; those promoting Marlowe also have to explain the official faking of his death, and those promoting various earls the complete absence of anything relevant from their surviving records and correspondence.   Those wanting more detail should try   http://shakespeareauthorship.com/howdowe.html .

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theatre-space The theatre-space is the fixed physical features of a space used for performance, as distinct from places represented or named in performance (theatrical-spaces within and without). Thus when Agamemnon is performed at Delphi, the theatre-space is the actual amphitheatre, as you would photograph it when empty; the theatrical-space within is the play’s only setting, the square in front of Agamemnon’s palace in Argos; and the theatrical-space without includes everything from Troy, whence he arrives during the play, to the unseen bathroom in the palace where he is murdered.

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breath-length To consider this case you need an unmodernised First Folio text: the breathlengths needed to deliver speeches clearly are to some extent negotiable, but are outlined by the various punctuation-marks, particularly colons, and must respect subject-verb-object linkages—the acid test being immediate comprehensibility to auditors. The argument is that the female roles typically demand less extended delivery on a single breath, not because of anything Shakespeare thought about women, but simply because the boys who played them were smaller.

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discovery-space The ‘De Witt sketch’ shows only the left and right exits, omitting the discovery-space—but it is a copy of a lost original, some playtexts explicitly use a discovery-space, and many more are so structured that a wide central exit is strongly implicit. The older criticism that imagined an ‘inner stage’ is now discredited, but that was a theory about the use of the discovery-space; the space itself is universally accepted as a given; see also Parts 2.2 and 4.8.

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comedic and tragedic modes Of course comedy and tragedy are distinct—that’s the whole point, not despite but because they come as a pair, the smiling and the mournful mask. The pairing insists on each as a variant of the other, and in theatre how distinctly and rigidly the opposition is maintained is a complex function of text, performance, reception, and context. In Athenian drama the two were as distinct as Easter and Christmas, each with an allotted festival that had distinctive features and accoutrements; but in Shakespeare’s (as in modern) theatre the same company could successively perform tragedy and comedy in the same venue to a similar audience, so the force of the distinction was (and is) inevitably lessened—a fact of which he took the fullest advantage. Almost every Shakespearean play conforms to the basic generic rule that tragedies end in death and comedies in marriage, but collectively they create their own identities through generic morphing and fusion. There is a useful chemical analogy with mixtures and compounds: in a mixture each element keeps its own identity, but in a compound they fuse and become something else, as sodium and chlorine make salt, or hydrogen and oxygen water; other playwrights mix comedy and tragedy, but Shakespeare fused them, and the resulting ‘cogedy’ (or ‘tramedy’) is distinct.

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Vice A term coined by John Heywood (c.1497–1580) in 1532 for the chief tempter who in morality plays tries to ensnare the soul of the Everyman-protagonist. As their attempts to deceive typically include dis/guises, lying, etc., about which they and the audience know but other roles do not, Vices tend to high metatheatrical awareness and to function as Masters of Ceremonies, chatting intimately to the audience and becoming villains one ‘loves to hate’. Such Shakespearean roles as Richard III, Falstaff, Shylock, and Iago are clearly modelled on the Vice, and others have some traits of the Vice.

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Inconclusive The usual source given is an elegy on Burbage, dated to 1619 and attributed to ‘Jo ffletcher’, presumably the playwright John Fletcher (1579–1625): He’s gone and with him what a world are dead. Which he revived, to be revived so. No more young Hamlet, old Heironymoe, Kind Lear, the grieved Moore, and more beside That lived in him, have now forever died. Oft have I seen him leap into the grave, Suiting 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 his part in jest, So lively that spectators, and the rest Of his sad crew, whilst he but seem’d to bleed, Amazed, thought even that he died in deed. This may seem decisive, but the whole elegy is in some respects dubious and the lines listing roles in particular may be an insertion by J. P. Collier, a known faker. Even if they were written soon after Burbage’s death in 1619 by someone who had seen him act there are serious problems in accepting them at face value: “old Heironymoe”, for example, appears in Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, which was not a Chamberlain’s/King’s Men play and cannot have been one of Burbage’s regular roles—as John Fletcher would certainly have known. The idea that Burbage had “oft” been seen leaping “into the grave”—which most take to mean acting Hamlet in 5.1—also strains credulity: only Q1 has Hamlet leap anywhere, and there are so many questions about how Ophelia’s burial and the graveside fight were staged at the Globe that the other possible sense of the line, ‘leap into the grave’ meaning ‘speak seriously and gravely’, becomes much more attractive than it may seem at first. The parallel construction of the next four-line sentence, “Oft have I seen him play his part in jest” etc., then makes of the last eight lines quoted an appreciation of Burbage’s generic versatility.

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Speculation Thinking theatrically, the fact that Claudius and the Ghost never meet suggests they can be doubled, and in casting charts showing the minimum possible number of actors for the various texts (11), that doubling is assumed. The notion is attractive, explaining the armour as concealing the royal costume Claudius needs and Gertrude’s easy change of affections while throwing Hamlet’s derogatory comparisons of the brothers into ironic relief, but sacrifices other possibilities. In theatre the practice cannot be shown before various of Gielgud’s productions in the 1930s, and nothing in stage or critical history suggests any strong understanding of the Ghost/old Hamlet and Claudius as potently identical, nor of Hamlet’s insistence in 3.4 that his father and uncle are utterly distinct as misguided.

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Blackfriars A covered ‘hall theatre’ in old monastery-buildings within the City of London, acquired by James Burbage in 1597, but then unable to be used by adult companies and leased to the Children of the Chapel from 1600–08; after reversion of the lease to Cuthbert and Richard Burbage it was used by the King’s Men jointly with the Globe. In considering the reported ‘success’ of the children’s company, remember that the actor usually thought to have created Hamlet was their actual landlord.

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Ciceronian periods The dominant form in which prose was written from classical antiquity until the later seventeenth century. Modern ‘sentences’, and their constituent ‘clauses’, are usually defined in terms of a grammatical minimum—i.e. to be a sentence they must have at least one noun, verb, and if necessary object; periods, however, were defined in terms of a rhetorical maximum, and their constituent ‘members’ collectively constituted a body representing one ‘complete thought’. Colons in the First Folio usually indicate the members of a period.

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Humanities Insights The following Insights are available or forthcoming at: http://www.humanities-ebooks.co.uk/catalogue History The British Empire: Pomp, Power and Postcolonialism The Holocaust: Events, Motives, Legacy Methodism and Society Southern Africa

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Commissioned Titles Include Aesthetics Austen: Pride and Prejudice Blake: Songs of Innocence & Experience and The Marriage of Heaven & Hell’ Eliot: Four Quartets Fielding: Tom Jones Lawrence: Selected Poems Mental Causation Plato Plato’s Republic Renaissance Philosophy Shakespeare: Macbeth Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet Wonder