Shakespeare in Perspective: Hamlet

Shakespeare in Perspective was a series of 25-minute TV programmes, each focusing on one of the plays in Cedric Messina’s series The BBC Television Shakespeare, and broadcast the evening before the play itself was to be aired. For the edition of 24th May 1980, Clive was invited to present his personal views on Hamlet, which he did, filming on location in Cambridge, Berkeley Castle and the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. We can’t stream a copy of that programme, but the following transcript was later published by Ariel Books (BBC Publications) in the first volume of their series, also called Shakespeare in Perspective.

Wikipedia writes:

I want to start off in familiar surroundings because I’m setting out on a task foredoomed to failure: to sum up Shakespeare’s Hamlet, one of the supreme achievements of the human imagination. Fifteen years ago I was an undergraduate at Pembroke College, Cambridge University, and then later on stuck around for a while as a postgraduate. I hope I was too weatherbeaten to fall for the mystique that these old dens of privilege supposedly generate, but I can’t deny that I’ve got the sort of affection for Cambridge that anybody feels for a place where they read a lot and thought a lot and wasted a lot of time.

Hamlet feels the same way about his university, Wittenberg. He has to act out his destiny on the sleet-spattered battlements of Elsinore, while Horatio makes regular trips back to Wittenberg for the port and walnuts and the relative safety of academic intrigue. Many a time in Fleet Street, as I’ve sat there sucking my typewriter and waiting desperately for inspiration, I’ve envied those of my contemporaries who stayed on in Cambridge to become academics, the Horatios. In other words, I identify with Hamlet. In my mind’s eye, he even looks a bit like me. Perhaps a couple of stone lighter, with blonde hair and more of it: one of those rare Aussies who happen to fence quite well and stand first in line of succession to the throne of Denmark. I don’t think this is mad conceit because I think all men and most women who’ve ever read or seen the play, feel that its hero is a reflection of themselves.

What’s more, I think Shakespeare felt the same way. All his characters in all his plays — men or women, heroes or villains — are aspects of himself, because his was a universal self and he knew it inside out. Shakespeare was everybody. But Hamlet is probably the character who comes closest to reflecting Shakespeare’s whole self. When I think of what Shakespeare was like, I think of Hamlet. Shakespeare probably didn’t behave like that, and he almost certainly didn’t talk like that. Hamlet talks a great deal and Shakespeare probably spent most of the time listening. At the end of the night’s revelry in the tavern, he was probably the only one sober and the only one silent. Nor was Shakespeare famous for being indecisive. From what little we know of him, he was a practical man of affairs in the theatre, which gave unlimited scope to his imagination. He was an art prince, like Michelangelo. If he’d been the other kind of prince, his imagination would have become his enemy, the enemy of action:

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment,
With this regard, their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action — [ 3.1.83-8 ]

In Shakespeare’s time, the biggest question of the day was how a prince should rule. When Hamlet was being written, as the sixteenth century turned into the seventeenth, the stable reign of Queen Elizabeth, amidst universal trepidation, was drawing to its end. The Earl of Essex, ‘the glass of fashion and the mould of form, the observ’d of all observers’, had dished himself through not knowing how to do what when Essex died on the block somewhere about the time that Hamlet was being born on the page. Shakespeare was a keen student of these weighty matters. He was a keen student of everything. Not that he ever went to university as his university was the theatre. The same has held true for a lot of our best playwrights right down to the present day. John Osborne, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard were all educated in the university of life. Shakespeare was a gigantic natural intellect who had no more need of a university than Einstein did, who didn’t go to one either. But Shakespeare did have a contemplative mentality. We know that much for certain because we’ve heard so little about him. Only in the theatre did Shakespeare create experience. In the outside world he was content to reflect upon it. Shakespeare knew that he was a man of outstanding gifts. Talent of that magnitude is never modest, although it’s almost always humble. Shakespeare knew that he could dream up a whole kingdom and breathe so much life into it that it would live in men’s minds, perhaps for ever. But he also knew that he didn’t have what it took to rule a real kingdom for a week. He lacked the limitations; he wasn’t simple enough; and it was out of that realisation that he created Hamlet, who was really a changeling. Hamlet is what would happen if a great poet grew up to be a prince. He might speak great speeches, but the native hue of resolution would be ... well, let’s hear him tell it:

To be, or not to be — that is the question;
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die, to sleep —
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to. ’Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause.             [ 3.1.56-68 ]

‘To be, or not to be’ — I wish I’d said that. By now that speech has been translated into every major language on earth and most of the minor ones, and it’s remarkable how the first line always seems to come out sounding the same. ‘Sein, oder nicht sein’, runs the German version, ‘das ist die Frage’. Which perhaps lacks the fresh charm of the English subtitle in the recent Hindi film version: ‘Shall I live, or do myself in? I do not know.’ Today Hamlet belongs to the world. He’s come a long way from Elsinore, and there’s no reason why not. After all, Shakespeare not only didn’t go to university, he didn’t go to Denmark either. He got his idea of what Elsinore should look like from local rock-piles like Berkeley Castle. It’s got battlements outside and arrases inside. There’s a graveyard next door and the sea’s not far away. If you happen to be William Shakespeare, that’s all you need to go on for a Danish setting.

He inherited the plot from a Scandinavian scholar called Saxo Grammaticus, who wrote an early version of the play. Hamlet was called Amleth and his wicked uncle Claudius was called Fang, who sounds like the leading heavy in Flash Gordon Conquers Denmark. Saxo’s story was the basis for a later English version by Thomas Kyd of Spanish Tragedy fame. Shakespeare took over the property and transformed it out of all comparison, although not out of recognition. That old warhorse of a plot is still there inside it. So — what happens in Hamlet? Well, the old King dies and the Queen marries his brother with indecent haste. The fretful Prince is told by his father’s ghost that murder most foul has occurred. Hamlet feigns madness, gives Ophelia a thin time, casually rubs out her father Polonius and waits for the right moment to act. But he waits too long. Things get out of hand. The story ends with Hamlet being carried up to lie in state on the battlements. Before Shakespeare got hold of it, the old plot was pretty barbaric stuff. He civilised it by moving it inside the mind and inside the house.

One of the things that makes Shakespeare a great man of the theatre is that he knew the real thing when he saw it. He knew that power couldn’t be wished out of the world. If power were used wisely and firmly, then everyone might thrive. If it were mismanaged, corruption ensued as surely as rats brought plague, and the whole state went rotten. Shakespeare believed in order and degree. He believed in justice, too, but he didn’t think there was any hope of getting it unless the civil fabric was maintained. The idea of social breakdown was abhorrent to him. He knew that he was a kind of prince himself, but he had no illusions about how long his own kingdom would last if the real one fell into disarray. To Shakespeare, Hamlet’s tragedy was not just personal but political. Like Prince Hal in an earlier play and indeed like Mark Antony in a later one, or even King Lear, Hamlet has responsibilities. And because Hamlet can’t meet those responsibilities, he gets a lot of good people killed for nothing and loses his kingdom to the simple but determined Fortinbras.

Nowadays we tend to see Hamlet’s blonde head surrounded by the flattering nimbus of nineteenth century Romanticism, which held that Hamlet was a sensitive plant with a soul too fine for the concerns of this world. But Shakespeare was too realistic to be merely Romantic. And, of course, he was too poetic to be merely realistic. He knew that there was more in this world than the mere exercise of power. He could feel it within himself — imagination, the supreme power. But even that had its place. In the wrong place it could have tragic consequences. The first reason Hamlet hesitates is dramatic. If Fortinbras were the play’s hero, it would be all over in five minutes instead of five acts, with Fortinbras heading for the throne by the direct route, over Claudius’s twitching corpse. But the second reason Hamlet hesitates is that he has puzzled his own will by thinking too precisely on the event:

How all occasions do inform against me,
And spur my dull revenge! What is a man,
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more!
Sure he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and god-like reason
To fust in us unus’d. Now, whether it be
Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple
Of thinking too precisely on th’ event —
[ ... ]     — I do not know
Why yet I live to say ‘This thing’s to do’,
Sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and means,
To do’t.                        [ 4.4.32-46 ]

Throughout history, the thoughtful onlooker has been astonished at the man of action’s empty head. Napoleon and Hitler, to take extreme examples, did the unthinkable because they lacked the imagination to realise that it couldn’t be done. With Hamlet it’s the opposite. More than 300 years before Freud, Montaigne, a great student of the human soul, whose essays Shakespeare knew intimately, identified the imagination as the cause of impotence. Because Hamlet can’t stop thinking, he can’t start moving. Hence his melancholy. Happiness has been defined as a very small, very cheap cigar named after him, but really Hamlet is as sad as a man can be. He’s doubly sad because of his capacity for merriment. Clowns don’t want to play Hamlet half as much as Hamlet wants to play the clown, but always the laughter trails off. He loses his mirth and the whole world with it. But he does this with such marvellous words that he stuns us into admiration. No actor can resist turning Hamlet’s defeat into a victory.

From the moment the part was there to be played, every important actor has looked on his interpretation of Hamlet as defining him, not just as a talent but as a human being. And every Hamlet has studied the Hamlet before him in an almost unbroken succession from that day to this. Richard Burbage, the original Hamlet, gave way to Joseph Taylor, Taylor gave way to Thomas Betterton. Samuel Pepys saw Betterton play Hamlet in Lincoln’s inn Fields in 1661 and said that he played the Prince’s part beyond imagination, ‘the best part, I believe, that ever man played’. Pepys spent a whole afternoon learning ‘To be, or not to be’ by heart. And as the seventeenth century became the eighteenth, Betterton was still playing Hamlet in his seventieth year when Richard Steele saw him and said that for action, he was perfection. Hamlet was at centre stage all over the world. In London he was at Covent Garden, he was in the Haymarket, but above all he was at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, where great actor after great actor strove to convince the audience that to play Hamlet stood as far above ordinary acting as Hamlet in the play stands above the Players. In the early eighteenth century, the great tragedian Robert Wilks played Hamlet here. According to contemporary accounts, when the Ghost came on, Wilks climbed the scenery. When he climbed back down again some time later, he used his sword not to fend off his companions who were trying to keep him from the Ghost but to attack the Ghost. In other words, he tore a passion to tatters. And he did so while wearing a complete tragedian’s outfit of full-bottomed wig, plumes and a cape. The outfit was the only complete thing about his performance because, like most of his successors, he cut the text drastically. When David Garrick came on, he wore elevated shoes and stole one of the Ghost’s best lines, ‘O, horrible! O, horrible! most horrible!’ Dr Johnson thought Garrick was over the top, but most of the playgoing public concurred in the opinion that Garrick was unbeatable in the role. Garrick agreed with them and played it every season of his career.

As the eighteenth century gave way to the nineteenth, John Philip Kemble arrived and the Romantic interpretation of Hamlet began to arrive with him. William Hazlitt didn’t think much of Kemble in the role. He thought he played it with a fixed and sullen gloom, but I think we recognise that gloom as the beginning of the Romantic interpretation of Hamlet, which has persisted almost down to our own day. Hazlitt didn’t think much of Edmund Kean either. He thought Kean’s performance was a succession of grand moments, but had no real human shape. Everybody else thought Kean was marvellously natural, especially in his appearance, and he looked like the Hamlet we know today — short hair, white lace collar. And on they came: William Charles Macready, Barry Sullivan, Edward Booth — who some people thought was the ideal Hamlet but who had his thunder stolen by Henry Irving. The total effect of the nineteenth century actor-managers was to establish Hamlet as the Romantic, alienated outcast, the poet who perhaps couldn’t write poetry but could certainly speak it, the man who was just too good for this world.

As the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, a truly revolutionary actor-manager arrived on the scene, Johnston Forbes-Robertson. Revolutionary because he widened the focus of attention from the central character to the whole play, so that never again was it possible to argue plausibly that the play was anything less than the miraculous sum of its parts. Nowadays we never think of any interpretation of the central character, no matter how brilliant — John Gielgud’s vividly mental, Laurence Olivier’s vividly physical — as anything more than a contribution to the total character, just as we never think of any cut version, no matter how consistent within itself, as anything more than a contribution to the total play.

I live and work in the part of London that’s still called the City, even though the old City in which Shakespeare ruled as a prince of the theatre is long gone. The ground clearance around here was done by the German air force. Even from the top of one of the tower blocks you still can’t see the edge of modern London. I suppose the day is coming when all the cities on earth will join up. And yet the world could go on changing unimaginably and Hamlet would still have everything to say to us. Whenever we hear of some new atrocity and wonder impotently what life is for, we always find that he got there ahead of us. Hamlet poses the eternal question of whether life is worth living. The answer that he appears to arrive at is that it isn’t, but the way he says so makes us realise that it is. Hamlet has been given the creative vitality of Shakespeare himself. Even though robbed of will, he’s still the embodiment of individuality. Hamlet is what it means to be alive. So all those actors were right, after all. Hamlet’s tragedy really is a triumph. A prince of the imagination, he inherits his kingdom in eternity, even if Fortinbras inherits it on earth. Boris Pasternak, who translated Hamlet into Russian, also wrote a famous poem in which Hamlet faces something even worse than his own doubts — a world in which his doubts are not permitted:

Yet the order of the acts is planned
And the end of the way inescapable.
I am alone;

Pasternak wasn’t the first, and probably won’t be the last, to see Hamlet as the supreme symbol of liberty. As the doomed Prince of Denmark, Hamlet must act out his tragic fate, but as a mind he remains free. He fails in the outer world only because his inner world is so rich. Scorning necessity, he reflects upon his own existence. ‘In my mind’s eye, Horatio’. Hamlet is the human intelligence made universal, so he belongs to all of us. ‘For which of us’, wrote Anatole France, addressing Hamlet, ‘does not resemble you in some way?’ We’re all like him because we all think, and it’s because, on top of all its other qualities, that its hero incarnates the dignity of human consciousness, that Hamlet is the greatest play by the greatest writer who ever lived.

[ Shakespeare in Perspective, Ariel Books, BBC Publications 1982 ]

[ Clive's Observer review of the BBC Television Shakespeare's Hamlet production appeared in the 1st June 1980 edition of the paper ]