November 11, 2007
what a piece of work
I keep getting drawn back into Hamlet. I listened to a recorded performance starring Simon Russell Beale on a recent car trip, and then reread it when I got back. Now I’m watching the 1964 Richard Burton version, a theatrical performance (filmed in front of an actual, coughing audience) that’s the basis for the Wooster Group’s current production.
The Burton production was directed by John Gielgud, apparently the definitive Hamlet of his day, who plays the voice of the Ghost. The set and staging are very spare — the actors play in modern street clothes — but the Ghost is represented by a giant helmeted shadow thrown across the back of the stage, which is gratifyingly spooky.
I don’t know enough to critique Burton’s performance, but I’m enjoying it. Though he’s a bit shouty. I do keep thinking that he’s a little long in the tooth to be playing Hamlet (he was 39) and then I realize that it’s just as much his whole persona as it is his age. Like his modern-day counterparts George Clooney and Clive Owen, Burton practically reeks of assured masculine self-confidence, which no amount of anguished cries or hand-wringing can completely dissipate. Burton is too handsome, healthy, and worldly-seeming to really pull off a part that’s so grounded in illness and indecision.
One thing that strikes me on this viewing (that I’m sure isn’t original with me) is the play’s sifting of the nature of reality. Unless I’m missing something obvious, there are four states of deviation from everyday waking reality in the play: death, sleep, madness, and playacting. Sleep is the everyday, nontraumatic version of death in the same way that playacting is the socially acceptable form of madness (i.e., the creation of an alternate reality).
So far Burton is playing Hamlet as having complete control over his flights of supposed madness. (I haven’t finished watching it yet.) But it occurs to me that one possible interpretation of the play is that Hamlet begins by feigning madness but lapses into genuine insanity by the play’s end — a reading bolstered by the fact that the Ghost appears to him and him alone in Gertrude’s bedroom, whereas previously it’s visible to other people.
In the Ghost’s telling, King Hamlet’s murder takes place as he sleeps, so that the everyday stand-in for death unexpectedly becomes the real thing. It seems like this transformation could be pointing to a similar transformation from feigned madness to actual in his son.
If I remember rightly, Stephen Greenblatt argues in Will in the World that one of Shakespeare’s contributions to modern psychological drama was removing explanatory elements from the existing plots that he reworked into his plays. For instance, in the original story of Hamlet, Hamlet witnesses the murder and must feign madness so that Claudius won’t kill him. Robbing us of that neat explanation allows all these other questions to bubble up and complicate things.
It would also be a different play if the audience were deprived of the soliloquy in which Claudius confesses to his brother’s murder. Then we could completely identify with Hamlet’s indecision, since he’d be torn between the possibility of failing to avenge his father and the possibility of murdering an innocent man.
I suppose the fact that Hamlet hesitates too long to do what everyone knows what must be done is what makes him modern, and why I identify with him. But I also feel a little sick every time the ending rolls around, which is a strange reaction to have to the single greatest work of literature in the language.
(And has anyone ever made the observation that the Bhagavad-Gita is also about a supernatural being urging an indecisive prince to overcome his moral qualms about killing his relatives? Probably.)