Excerpt from Lars Kaaber: "Staging Shakespeare's Hamlet", Chapter One (Edwin Mellen Press, 2005)
 
What Happened to Hamlet – Text and Tradition
 
In 1897, George Bernard Shaw wrote to Ellen Terry: ‘I am certain I could make Hamlet a success by having it played as Shakespeare meant it.’[1] According to Shaw, nearly three centuries of stage tradition had changed the play beyond recognition. In Hamlet and Revenge, Eleanor Prosser states that stage tradition seems to be the greatest hurdle for anyone who wishes to find out what the play is really about: ‘For three hundred years, directors and actors have cut and rewritten the script to fit their own interpretation.’[2]
The problems connected with the acting tradition of Hamlet are inextricably linked to the problem concerning the trimming of Shakespeare’s text. The cuts inherited from predecessors have kept actors from breaking with received tradition, and, conversely, the Hamlet tradition launched by star performers has dictated further cuts and alterations. As Charles Lamb observed in 1818, it can be hard to tell the singer from the song:
 
It is difficult for a frequent playgoer to disembarrass the idea of Hamlet from the person and voice of Mr Kemble. We speak of Lady Macbeth, while we are in reality thinking of Mrs Siddons. Nor is this confusion incidental alone to unlettered persons (…) the error is one from which persons otherwise not meanly lettered find it impossible to extricate themselves.[3]
 
Lamb is right, of course, and today the influence of the actors’ Hamlet is increased by film versions which enable a single performance and interpretation to reach a much wider audience and survive for any length of time. For many years, Hamlet to me was Laurence Olivier, simply because I saw his film version when I was eight years old. For more than a decade, I subconsciously regarded Rosencrantz, Guildenstern and Fortinbras (missing in Olivier’s film) as interesting accretions to what I perceived to be the ‘real’ Hamlet. Similarly, I expect many spectators today to find Shakespeare’s Danish Prince epitomised by Mel Gibson, Kenneth Branagh or Ethan Hawke.
In the effort to separate the problems connected with the acting tradition of Hamlet from those that have to do with the various versions of the play, I have chosen to relegate the former category to Appendix B (“A Handful of Hamlets”), and to deal only with the history of Hamlet editing in this chapter, but I am aware that the two sides of the matter are too interdependent to render such a division entirely successful.
A ghost haunts the text of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the shape of the lost Ur-Hamlet. Thomas Nashe cryptically refers to this play in his preface to Robert Greene’s Menaphon (1590),[4] and theatre producer Philip Henslowe mentions a Hamlet production on 9 June 1594.[5] Most scholars propose Thomas Kyd as the author of this play, but Peter Alexander and Harold Bloom believe that it was Shakespeare’s own creation.[6] Whoever composed it, we should consider that Shakespeare must have been forced, at least to some extent, to take this older tragedy into account. The lost play contained certain elements that the audience would expect to find in a new version of the play – such as a spectre, a cry for revenge, and half a dozen murders.
As for the Hamlet we know, we do not know the shape in which it was originally performed at the Globe in 1601. We have three existing original texts, the last of which is the First Folio from 1623, printed seven years after Shakespeare’s death. The Folio omits what we have come to regard today as indispensable passages, such as Hamlet’s ‘dram of evil’ speech in I.4, a decisive detail of the Ghost scene in I.5, the ‘adder speech’ at the end of III.4, and the entire soliloquy ‘How all occasions do inform against me’ in IV.4. What speaks in favour of the Folio as the authentic version is the fact that its editors were John Heminge and Henry Condell. Both were Shakespeare’s colleagues from the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and the King’s Men, and Heminge, we presume, was the first Polonius. As they clearly intended the Folio to be read rather than acted – their preface is addressed to ‘the great variety of readers’ – Heminge and Condell would not have trimmed the text merely to reduce the running time of the performance. Nor may we suspect that Shakespeare’s trusted friends and colleagues were prompted by Ben Jonson’s reply to the compliment that Shakespeare never blotted out a line: ‘Would he had blotted a thousand!’[7] W.W. Greg states that Heminge and Condell ‘say nothing to make us believe that they personally performed the arduous duty of detailed supervision’,[8] but that seems to be an overcautious interpretation, as Heminge and Condell do seem to complain of having been overworked when they advise their readers not to envy the vast labour (‘we pray you do not envie his Friends, the office of their care, and paine, to haue collected & publish’d them’). In their preface, Heminge and Condell lament the fact that Shakespeare was barred from personally supervising the collection of his works, but left this task to his friends, from which we may deduce that they have endeavoured to be faithful to the original text. They underline the necessity of the task: ‘where (before) you were abus’d with diuerse stolne, and surreptitious copies, maimed, and deformed by the frauds and stealthes of iniurious impostors, that expos’d them: euen those, are now offer’d to your view cur’d, and perfect of their limbes’. This passage appears to denounce all previous versions of the plays as unreliable.
Preceding the Folio are two quarto editions of Hamlet. The Elizabethan quarto editions contained only one drama each and are to be considered as provisional versions of the plays, or even pirate versions, as appears to be the case with the so-called BadQuarto of Hamlet from 1603. This bore the imprint: ‘The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke, by William Shake-speare. As it hath beene diverse times acted by his Highnesse Seruants in the Cittie of London: as also in the two Vniuersities of Cambridge and Oxford, and elsewhere’, but is generally believed to be a pirated version.
The 1604 Second Quarto (generally known as the Good Quarto) is the longest version, and contains a great deal of text included in any given modern publication of Hamlet. Most editors agree with Dover Wilson[9] that this is also the most authentic version, as indeed its title boasts: ‘The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke, By William Shakespeare. Newly imprinted and enlarged to almost as much againe as it was, according to the true and perfect coppie’. However, Quarto 2 leaves out some Folio passages. In II.2, Hamlet’s ‘Denmark is a prison’ dialogue with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is missing (II.2, 229-56), as well as the discussion concerning the children’s acting troupes in the city (II.2, 306-33). When Nicholas Rowe Shakespeare’s first biographer, published Shakespeare’s collected works in 1709, he spoke of ‘comparing the various editions’, but based his publication mainly on the unreliable FourthFolio. Rowe’s aim was to render the plays more accessible to readers of his time, and he divided the play into acts and scenes, added exits and entrances for the characters and supplied a list of dramatis personae. After Rowe, the various versions started to merge. In 1733, Lewis Theobald published a version that included Folio and Quarto 2. Theobald did not have access to Quarto 1 of Hamlet, and his text was based rather more on the efforts of his adversary, Alexander Pope, than Theobald was willing to admit (Pope had taken it upon himself to expurgate Shakespeare, and a fierce war raged between him and Theobald). Then followed numerous revisions by Hanmer (1744), Warburton (1747), Dr Johnson (1765), Capell (the first to base his text directly on the Quartos and Folio), Dr Johnson again, this time in collaboration with George Steevens (1773), Malone (1790) and countless others[10] until we arrive at Hamlet-as-we-know-it with the Cambridge Shakespeare published in 1866.[11]
The full Hamlet – Quarto 2 and Folio – would certainly exceed the ‘two hours’ traffic of our stage’ by at least two additional hours (E.K. Chamber’s estimate).[12] Even then the actors would have to speak their lines at the speed of a patter song from a Gilbert & Sullivan operetta. However, theatrical events may have run up to four hours, and Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor may be right in assuming that Hamlet was actually performed at the Globe in its gargantuan entirety.[13] In 1601, faced with the competition from the children’s troupes mentioned in Hamlet, II.2, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men may have decided to go all out for a marathon extravaganza. We need not conclude that the ‘Full Hamlet’ – if it was ever staged – was the only version seen by the Elizabethans. In the second act of Hamlet, the touring players agree to insert ‘some dozen or sixteen lines’ of Hamlet’s own invention in the performance on the following evening, and such last-minute alterations made to suit the needs or taste of the audience of a particular performance may have been standard procedure. We must assume that after King James’ succession in 1603, his Danish Queen Anne was spared those passages describing her countrymen as drunkards (I.2, 175; I.4, 17-20). If we follow the play through history, however, we find that the majority of alterations and cuts have been made in order to save the hero of the play from charges of immorality or brutality. The result is, as Eleanor Prosser states, a Hamlet who can do no wrong.[14]
The era of Betterton, stretching from 1663 (when he first performed Hamlet) to 1709, was the first period to witness a decisive division between Hamlet on the page and Hamlet on the stage. From the mid seventeenth century, the play assumed a life of its own, and it was one that followed the maxim ‘Anything Goes’ as a heavy-handed and tendentious trimming of the tragedy began. Although William Davenant (1606-1668) circulated rumours that he was the illegitimate son of the Bard,[15] he nevertheless subjected Shakespeare’s plays to the most unfilial treatment. In 1693, critic Thomas Rymer applied neoclassical rules to Shakespearean tragedy and found the dramatist unsuited for the stage of the age. Rymer regarded Shakespeare as ‘quite out of his element,’ because ‘his brains are turned, he raves and rambles without any coherence, any spark of reason, or any rule to control him, or any bounds to his frenzy’. Although Dryden bravely stepped in to defend Shakespeare, it appears that the general treatment of Hamlet followed Rymer’s prescripts. Passages considered unsavoury or immoral were indiscriminately removed from the play – such as the ‘country matters’ dialogue with Ophelia in the player scene, Laertes’ advice to his sister in I.3 (‘your chaste treasure open’) and Ophelia’s bawdy songs. Even the delicately phrased reference to the lewd name of the flowers in Ophelia’s wreath – the Dead Men’s Fingers ‘that liberal shepherds give a grosser name’ – was adjudged too strong. Along with these passages went sections deemed defamatory to the image of Hamlet as the noble avenger. Consequently, Betterton’s Prince was spared the ordeal of calling himself ‘a dull and muddy-mettled rascal’, ‘a coward’, ‘an ass’, and in IV.4, no occasions whatsoever informed against Betterton’s Hamlet, or spurred his dull revenge. This particular Quarto 2 soliloquy (‘How all occasions do inform against me’) was not heard again for another hundred years.
The thought of a king passing through the entrails of a beggar (IV.3, 20-8) was considered improper in Betterton’s royalist times, as was Hamlet’s tirade against the immoderate drinking habits prevalent in Denmark (I.4, 14-20). Omitted for a practical reason – simply shortening the play – were nearly all references to Norway, and this trimming rendered Fortinbras somewhat of a mysterious figure when he was nevertheless permitted to enter at the very end of the tragedy. Tradition soon took care of that muddle, however, as the Norwegian Prince was simply written out of the play. Fortinbras was not to return for a couple of centuries.
Once passages or lines were cut from the play the result hardened into tradition, and it would prove a Herculean labour on the part of individual actors to restore the original text for performance. It may seem odd that this continued to be so even after reliable versions of Shakespeare’s Hamlet became accessible in print, but it can partly be explained by literary indolence, as voiced by actor Joseph Shepherd Munden (1758-1832): ‘I never read any book but a play, no play but one in which I myself acted, and no portion of that play but my own scenes’.[16]
David Garrick (1717-1779) was the next of the renowned Hamlets to wreak havoc on the text of the tragedy. He inherited many of Betterton’s prunings of the play – such as Hamlet’s disrespectful addressing of the Ghost in I.5 as ‘boy’, ‘truepenny’ and ‘fellow in the cellarage’, which would not be heard for many years to come.
It was Garrick’s express desire not to leave the stage till he had ‘rescued that noble play from all the rubbish of the fifth act’[17] and he made good his promise by discarding most of Act V and substituting it with text from Act IV. In Garrick’s version, Hamlet never left Denmark. On the verge of embarking on the ship for England, he stopped to deliver the now restored ‘How all occasions do inform against me’, but ended it differently. Instead of saying ‘O, from this time forth, my thoughts be bloody or be nothing worth’, Garrick inserted the following lines of his own invention: ‘O, from this time forth, my thoughts be bloody all! The hour is come! I’ll fly my keepers! Sweep to my revenge!’ – upon which he hied himself to court and arrived just in time to hear the distraught Laertes curse him for being the author of the deaths of his father and sister. When Claudius tried to intervene in the ensuing scuffle, Garrick promptly stabbed him, was in turn skewered on Laertes’ sword, but still prevented Horatio from taking revenge on his behalf: with his dying breath, Garrick’s Hamlet commanded Laertes and Horatio to ‘unite their virtues and calm the troubled land’.[18]  Garrick managed to complete the play from ‘How all occasions’ to Hamlet’s death in only 215 lines, against Shakespeare’s 1085. Such was the legacy which Garrick passed on to future generations. Granville Barker, the chief defender of the stage Hamlets, comments:
 
This much is to be said for Garrick and his predeccessors and successors in the practice of reshaping Shakespeare’s work to the theatre of their time. The essence of it was living drama to them, and they meant to keep it alive for their public. They wanted to avoid whatever would provoke question and so check that spontaneity of response upon which acted drama depends. Garrick saw the plays, with their lack of ‘art’, through the spectacles of contemporary culture.[19]
 
We must also keep in mind the fact that not only did Garrick dispense with Act V in order to restore vast parts of the previous four acts: he also valiantly withstood many strictures hurled at Shakespeare.
Among the fiercest foes of Shakespearean drama in Garrick’s day was Voltaire who mocked that Hamlet resembled the production of a drunken savage (‘on croirait que cet ouvrage est le fruit de l’imagination d’un sauvage ivre.’)[20] English retaliation came in 1769, in the shape of Mrs Montagu’s “Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespeare, with some remarks upon the misrepresentations of Mons. De Voltaire”.[21] Mrs Montagu compared Shakespeare’s ‘natural sallies of passion’ favourably with the ‘pompous declamation’ of Voltaire’s Tancred. She demonstrated that Voltaire’s attack on Shakespeare was an unethical attempt to cover up the fact that the French dramatist had borrowed heavily from the Bard: whole scenes had been looted from Macbeth in order to fill up Voltaire’s Mahomet, and Othello had been rewritten into Zaïre.
The French assaults on Shakespeare did not inflict as much damage as did the French attempts to produce the plays faithfully. In 1769, Garrick’s admirer Jean Francois Ducis refused to let his poor English stand in the way of a Paris production of Hamlet, and he contrived to get everything wrong:
 
Gertrude poisons her husband for the love of Claudius, and her son becomes king. Hamlet cannot marry Ophelia, daughter of Claudius, for the Ghost has visited him off stage to tell him of the murder. Claudius conspires with Polonius to seize the throne. Gertrude, challenged by Hamlet to swear to her innocence on the urn containing her husband’s ashes, faints and later does away with herself. Hamlet stabs Claudius to death as the latter leads an attack on the palace.[22]
 
There were English detractors of Shakespeare’s style, too. George Steevens confessed that he could never be ‘reconciled to tragicomedy’, and, in his view, Shakespeare’s ‘mirror held up to nature’ was rather like ‘a looking glass exposed for sale, which reflects alternately the funeral and the puppet-show, the venerable beggar soliciting charity, and the rascal picking a pocket’.[23]  To modern readers, Steevens’ critique sounds like an endorsement of the all-embracing diversity of Shakespearean drama, but to Steevens, Shakespeare’s violation of decorum was unforgivable. He commended Garrick for dispensing with what he considered low comedy in an otherwise grave play and thriftily advised the actor to serve up the leftovers as a comical encore: ‘The Grave-diggers; with the pleasant Humours of Osrick, the Danish Macaroni’.[24] 
We know for a fact that decorum was not as religiously observed in Shakespeare’s day. In 1604, Anthony Scoloker wrote that plays ought to be:
 
… like friendly Shakespeare’s tragedies, where the comedian rides when the tragedian stands on tip-toe; faith, it should please all, like Prince Hamlet.[25]
 
Francis Gentleman, Steevens’ contemporary, complained that Hamlet’s soliloquy in the Prayer scene (III.3) was ‘more suitable to an assassin of the basest kind, than a virtuous prince and a feeling man’.[26] Meaning to lend Shakespeare a helping hand, Gentleman suggested an alternative ending, in the light of which his family name becomes singularly appropriate:
 
After the detection of the play, if his majesty, upon the principle of self-defence, had formed a design of taking the prince off by instruments at home; if that design had been made known to the Queen; had she, through maternal affection, put Hamlet on his guard; and had that prince taken measures worthy the motive of stimulation, a tyrant of some consequence and uniformity would have been shown in Claudius; a tender mother in the Queen, and a hero in Hamlet; the innocent characters, Polonius and Ophelia, might have been saved; and death prevented from stalking without limitation at the catastrophe’.[27]
 
Compared to such creativity, Garrick’s changes seem almost protective of Shakespeare.
On Tuesday 30 September 1783, John Philip Kemble announced that his production of Hamlet would present the play as it was originally written by Shakespeare. Kemble’s biographer, James Boaden, adds: ‘….by which was to be understood no more, than that it was not the miserable alteration of the play, which had so discredited the taste and judgment of Garrick’.[28] However, Kemble discarded not only Garrick’s ending, but also many of Davenant’s ‘improvements’ on Shakespeare’s text. ‘Self-murder’ again became ‘self-slaughter’; ‘might not beteem’ replaced Davenant’s ‘permitted not’, and Kemble brought back passages that had not been heard since Burbage: ‘A beast that wants discourse of reason would have mourned longer’ and ‘o, most wicked speed: to post with such dexterity to incestuous sheets’.
In 1870, Edwin Booth restored the irreverent epithets addressed to the Ghost in I.5, ‘truepenny’, ‘boy’, ‘old mole’ and ‘the fellow in the cellarage’, but this reversion to Shakespeare’s original text did not pass unpunished. Nym Crinkle of New York World censured Booth for returning to the Bard and complained that Hamlet’s banter was incongruent with his filial affection. Consistent with his friendly Hamlet, Booth did not defend his reversion to Shakespeare’s original concept, but hurried to excuse himself on the grounds that he meant no disrespect to the Ghost – he intended to portray ‘the very intensity of mental excitement’. In Booth’s performance, Hamlet was non compos mentis in I.5, and this reading soon became firmly rooted in Hamletology. However, Booth emphasized with great care that his Hamlet was in no way bordering on true insanity, but was merely play-acting.
Booth’s Hamlet may be regarded as a return to the early Romantic version. He leaned heavily on the view of the Danish Prince as expressed in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, published in 1796, in which we find Hamlet as a bark too frail for the rough seas of painful experience, ‘a lovely, pure, noble and most moral nature, without the strength of nerve which forms a hero, [that] sinks beneath a burden which it can cannot bear and must not cast away.’[29]
What must necessarily be cast away in such a portrayal of the Prince are the rough treatment of Ophelia in the Nunnery scene, the lewd remarks addressed to Ophelia in the Play scene, as well as the harshness towards Gertrude in the Closet scene. Even the unkind words addressed to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in the sponge speech in IV.2 were considered out of character for Booth’s gentle Dane. Yet Booth’s courage should be commended for restoring ‘Now might I do it pat’ in the Prayer scene (III.3) in which Hamlet primitively resolves that the mere killing of Claudius will not sufficiently punish the King. These barbaric words had not been heard on stage since the days of Garrick. However, Booth’s motivation for bringing them back was not to show Hamlet’s fierceness, but rather to emphasize his leniency. After all, Hamlet does not act on his words. It need hardly be noted that the soliloquy in Act IV, ‘How all occasions do inform against me’, in which Hamlet decides to become a merciless killer, would never fit the Booth version and consequently had to go.
In 1874, Henry Irving’s contribution to the restoration of Shakespeare’s Hamlet consisted of the ‘Denmark is a prison’ dialogue from Folio, II.2, and in 1897, Irving’s protégé Johnston Forbes-Robertson took pity on Fortinbras who had been waiting in the wings for two hundred years. However, the belated arrival of the Norwegian Prince did not meet with the approval of London World, which found Shakespeare’s original ending to be ‘of no literary value’. Ridiculing the London World review, George Bernard Shaw wrote:
 
The Forbes-Robertson Hamlet at the Lyceum is, very unexpectedly at that address, really not at all unlike Shakespeare’s play of the same name. I am quite certain I saw Reynaldo in it for a moment; and possibly I may have seen Voltimand and Cornelius; but just as the time for their scene arrived, my eye fell on the word ‘Fortinbras’ in the program, which so amazed me that I hardly know what I saw for the next ten minutes. Ophelia, instead of being a strenuously earnest and self-possessed young lady giving a concert and recitation for all she was worth, was mad – actually mad. The story of the play was perfectly intelligible, and quite took the attention of the audience off the principal actor at moments. What is the Lyceum coming to?[30]
 
Nevertheless, Forbes-Robertson presented a refined gentleman Hamlet in the vein of Booth and Goethe and, as others had discovered before him, such a Hamlet cannot be allowed to utter all of Shakespeare’s dialogue. Hamlet’s horrible ‘Now might I do it pat’ (III.3) was once again scrapped.
The first complete Hamlet production – including all of Quarto 2 and Folio – was presented by Frank Benson in 1899 and 1900.[31] By then, the world had waited at least 255 years to see the play in an uncut version.[32]  Benson’s Hamlet does not seem to have been received as other than a Shakespearean marathon (it took six hours), and no one appears to have noticed that Hamlet in its entirety (or, as Mills quotes some actors as having said, ‘its eternity’[33]) altered the traditional view of the hero to any degree. But in 1934 when John Gielgud carried on the tradition of the full Hamlet he discovered that the restoration of all the offensive material rendered the Prince particularly churlish. As Gielgud reports in an interview:
 
There are so many unpleasant things in this man’s character and in the part of Hamlet. The actors in all the traditional performances rather sweeten them. I read how Tree had come back in the Nunnery scene and kissed Ophelia’s hair behind her back, and Forbes-Robertson had ended the Closet Scene on ‘I must be cruel only to be kind’, with all the last part cut out, about Polonius. The part had been so romanticized, and Goethe had said that Hamlet was a precious Grecian urn broken by the flowers or something very, very sententious. All the kind of coarse and lively thrust of the play came upon me when we did it at the Vic. (…) I thought that too much beauty was perhaps not a good thing, and I kept on trying, whenever I played Hamlet, to find the bad sides.[34]
 
It appears that Gielgud did not look hard enough for bad sides in the character, but, inadvertently or otherwise, clung to a score of embellishments from the Romantic version of the play, such as Hamlet’s undoubted love for his father and for Ophelia. Moreover, Gielgud presented a Hamlet who could not be fooled, whose ‘darting intellect’ saw through ‘the heavenless twins’, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern[35] and who, on the advice of John Dover Wilson, arrived in II.2 in time to overhear Polonius’ plan to use Ophelia as a decoy. Hamlet’s love for Gertrude was emphasized: Gielgud’s production ended the Closet scene (III.4) by sending Gertrude out, and then showed Hamlet as utterly distraught, crying ‘mother!’ Evidently fearing that ‘Hamlet in its eternity’ would tax the audiences severely, Gielgud rushed through V.2 and thereby prompted Elinor Hughes of the Boston Herald to comment on ‘the terrific speed with which the final scene is played, robbing Hamlet’s death of all tragic feeling. Of course, mass slaughter is melodramatic, but it need not be played with a stop watch in one hand and a starting pistol in the other’.[36]
By the 1950s, the theatre had abandoned most of its received, fustian traditions, and what Granville Barker referred to as the ‘pornographic difficulty’ – the risqué references still not permitted in the 1930s – had been cleared away. After two world wars no one could be shocked by Shakespeare’s dirty jokes, even if Eric Partridge had explained them all in 1947.[37] Moreover, faith in out-and-out heroism dropped as the idealism of former days lay buried beneath the ruins of Europe. The age seemed ripe for Shakespeare’s Hamlet to step forth in all his bawdy brutality. But, alas, just we might have expected to see Shaw’s ‘Hamlet as Shakespeare meant it’, the Danish Prince was ushered into the Theatre of the Absurd and on to Postmodernism.
In 1982, James Fenton had good cause to jibe: ‘For a masterpiece to come alive to us, and for it to come alive continually, it must be made strange. This is the generally given and accepted notion of theatrical aesthetics’.[38] Amazing indeed the very faculties of eyes and ears was Charles Marowitz’s Hamlet collage (Berlin, 1966), in which all the events in the play were figments of the protagonist’s imagination. In 1967, Joseph Papp staged William Shakespeare’s ‘Naked’ Hamlet in New York’s Central Park, a production which, according to the programme, sought to ‘discover the veins of the living original, buried under accumulated layers of reverential varnish’. Papp must have removed more than varnish, for his production lasted only an hour and twenty minutes. In Papp’s production, ‘naked’ referred to Shakespeare’s text, but Coronada’s 1976 film presented a set of stark naked twins playing Hamlet (Anthony and David Meyer), and had both Ophelia and Gertrude played by Helen Mirren (if Hamlet cannot tell the two women apart in the Nunnery scene, why should we?). Andy Lavender’s amusing term for many of the post-war productions is ‘the Play without the Play’.[39] In 1977, at a time when the world believed that Germany would not bother anyone again, Heiner Müller launched his Hamletmaschine, a postmodern treatment of Shakespeare’s play, of which traces could be seen at Kronborg Castle as late as in the summer of 2004.[40] Peter Brook’s version (Qui est là, 1995) had the Ghost speaking in the West African language of Bambara, and Robert Wilson (Hamlet – a Monologue, 1995) cut the text to confetti, put it together differently and performed all the parts himself. Jasenko Selimovich’s Swedish production from the 1990s included an excursion to the battlefields of Kosovo, evidently on the assumption that audiences would otherwise be unable to draw a parallel between Fortinbras’ Polish campaign and the wars that still ravage the world. Such allusions to modern-day life are what Jan Kott renounced as ‘forced topicality’,[41] while Jonathan Miller elaborates the point: ‘the text becomes an occasion for something else; it’s a pretext rather than a text’.[42]
At times, forced topicality even betrays an ignorance of the actual play. I have seen a Romeo and Juliet that permitted the main characters to survive Act V and split up out of sheer boredom in order for the production to make the statement that true and everlasting love as Shakespeare knew it no longer exists in modern life. This interpretation quite overlooked the fact that the ‘true, everlasting love’ portrayed in Romeo and Juliet escapes the definition of a one-night stand only by an overhasty wedding ceremony and a couple of hours. Consequently, the production in question did not revolt against Shakespeare, as was its intention, but against the un-Shakespearean, Romantic tradition brought down to us, as described by Granville Barker:
 
The production of the plays (…) is crippled by pseudo-traditions, which are inert because they are not Shakespearean at all. They are the accumulation of two centuries of progressive misconception and distortion of the playwright’s art.[43]
 
However, partly justifying forced topicality are the overly ‘true to tradition’ productions described by James Fenton:
 
The difficulty in directing Hamlet in England today is to prevent that irritating sense of anticipation in the audience, which can sometimes be heard – like the electronic pre-echo on a malfunctioning record-player – as each received interpretation clicks into place. Imagine an experience of Hamlet which was no more than a reliving of one’s A-level years – a fearful thought, and yet not perhaps an untypical experience of the play.[44]
 
In view of such productions in which Bardolaters take it all much more seriously than Shakespeare ever did, it is hardly odd that stage people occasionally feel obliged to give this Leviathan of a tragedy a new and radical approach. Fanciful treatments of Hamlet are not confined to modern times. When Samuel Pepys saw the play back in 1663, he was disappointed that his wife’s maid Gosnell, who had been given a minor part, neithersang nor danced – from which we may infer that the 1663 production of Hamlet was a musical extravaganza.[45] In 1793, a theatre bill from the Kilkenny Theatre Royal read:
 
The Tragedy of Hamlet. Originally written and composed by the celebrated Dan. Hayes of Limerick, and inserted in Shakespeare’s works. Hamlet by Mr Kearns, (being his first appearance in that character) who, between the acts, will perform several solos on the patent bagpipes, which play two tunes at the same time. Ophelia by Mrs. Prior, who will introduce several favourite airs in character, particularly “The Lass of Richmond Hill” and “We’ll All Be Unhappy Together”, from the reverend Mr Dibdin’s oddities.[46]
 
It is hard to see how Richmond Hill fits in, but Dibdin’s last oddity seems written for the occasion. The early nineteenth century offered a ‘canine Hamlet’, in which a trained dog followed Hamlet throughout five acts until it eventually assisted its master in killing the guilty king,[47] and America matched such antics with deliberate travesties:
 
Audiences roared at the sight of Hamlet dressed in fur cap and collar, snowshoes and mittens; they listened with amused surprise to his profanity when ordered by his father’s ghost to ‘swear’. [48]
 
After such clear instances of comic relief, we may return to Shaw’s issue of Hamlet ‘as Shakespeare meant it’, and conclude that for many an actor or director working within the conventions of his particular period, the Danish Prince has proved too complex a character. More than a handful of Hamlets have short-changed us with substantial trimmings of the text for the specific purpose of altering the image of the Dane from what he was into something rather more heroic and morally acceptable. The theatre is not solely to blame. Reversions to the original text have frequently caused critics to censure Shakespeare for coarseness, and scholars attempting to save Shakespeare from reproof are still at large. A good example is to be found in the notes to The Merchant of Venice in the New Swan Shakespeare edition published in 1962. Editor Bernard Lott tries to persuade us that in Portia’s dismissal of Morocco, (‘let all of his complexion choose me so’, II.8, 79), the word ‘complexion’ refers to the unfortunate suitor’s character rather than his colour, although Morocco’s opening line in II.1 (‘Mislike me not for my complexion, the shadowed livery of the burnished sun’) clearly contradicts this interpretation. Apparently, Lott fears that politically correct readers will tax Shakespeare with Portia’s racism, and his apprehensions are shared by many directors: of the eleven Merchant productions I have seen, I can recall only one that includes this line from Portia.[49] Although annotators, producers and actors act on the best of intentions, Shakespeare can seldom be altered with impunity. With the racist remark in II.8 of Merchant removed, nothing in the play prepares us for Portia’s treatment of Shylock in Act IV, and we are left to believe that Shakespeare supports a spotless heroine’s destruction of a vicious ‘alien’. Likewise, if Shakespeare’s criticism of his protagonist is removed from Hamlet – as has been done for centuries – we have no choice but to assume that the author sanctions the murders of three innocent people or, alternatively, no choice but to perform character assassinations of Polonius, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in order to justify Hamlet’s actions.
To the Romantics of the nineteenth century, Hamlet was the very model of a young hero, and, in spite of the efforts of Dr Johnson, George Steevens, G. Wilson Knight, Eleanor Prosser, William Empson, Robert Marks and countless others who have contested this view of Hamlet, we are still saddled with the Romantic verdict. However, if this reading really represents the true and incontestable interpretation, I am not at all sure that Shakespeare was aware of it. The heroic Hamlet leaves us with too many statements that stand all alone in the works of Shakespeare: the view of blood vengeance, of misanthropy and misogyny (Hamlet hates people in general and women in particular), of filial obligation and paternal authority, as well as of rashness as an ideal. We do meet people like Hamlet elsewhere in Shakespeare, but they are never people with whom we feel invited to sympathize. From an ethical perspective, Hamlet – as we have known the play since at least the beginning of the nineteenth century – sticks out like a sore thumb in the Shakespeare canon, or, as Hunter expressed it in 1845: ‘there are parts in it which seem quite at variance with the ordinary modes of thinking of its author’.[50]
The efforts to turn Hamlet into a Romantic hero – and every season has sent forth a new one, be it a Werther, a Gavrilo Princip, or a James Dean – have disregarded the fact that Shakespeare’s text describes the Royal Dane not only as a victim of circumstance, but also as callous, self-centred, pesky and brutal. Moreover, directors, actors, and critics in search of a hero have ignored one of Dr Johnson’s most lucid observations on Shakespeare, although it has been there for all to read since 1765:
 
Shakespeare has no heroes; his scenes are occupied only by men, who act and think as the reader thinks that he should have spoken or acted on the same occasion. [51]
 
It can be quite a task to spot the original play through centuries of misrepresentation. The neoclassical age administered the unkindest cuts to the text; the Romantic age is largely responsible for our uncritical view of Hamlet as a good son, a lover and a hero. Restoring the spirit of the original tragedy may require an ad fontes manoeuvre of titanic proportions and Occam’s razor will be dripping with the blood of four centuries of well-meaning Thespians, but if we want to be fundamentalists, we must see the play all the way home, to its opening in 1601. I believe it is worth the effort. If Hamlet is viewed in the Renaissance context in which it was written, it is my opinion that an entirely different play will emerge. It will no longer be a romantic dirge for a sad-eyed, long-suffering melancholic, but rather a Shakespearean tour de force of dramatic irony.




[1] Letter of 27 July 1897. Printed in Shaw on Shakespeare (1961) p. 101.
[2] Eleanor Prosser: Hamlet and Revenge (1967), 242 ff.
[3] Charles Lamb: Tragedies on Shakespeare (1818), quoted in Farley-Hills: Critical Responses to Hamlet, p. 100.
[4] Nashe writes: ‘ … English Seneca read by candlelight yields many good sentences, as ‘Blood is a beggar,’ and so forth; and if you entreat him fair in a frosty morning, he will afford you whole Hamlets, I should say handfuls, of tragical speeches’. (Quoted in J.B. Steane (ed.): Thomas Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works, p. 474.
[5] Foakes and Rickert (eds.): Henslowe’s Diary, p. 21.
[6] Peter Alexander: Introductions to Shakespeare (1964), p. 162; Harold Bloom: Shakespeare, The Invention of the Human (1998) pp. 408 ff.
[7] Ben Jonson: De Shakespeare Nostrati (1630), quoted in Shakspere Allusion Book I, p. 348.
[8] W.W. Greg: The Shakespeare First Folio (1955) p. 77. Greg finds it ulikely that ‘two busy actors, with the management of a large company and two theatres on their hands, would have found leisure for the task’. However, this may account for the fact that the Folio was not published until
[9] John Dover Wilson: The Manuscript of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1934).
[10] Such as Singer, Hudson, Collier, Halliwell-Phillipps, Delius, Staunton, Grant White and Dyce.
[11]The Cambridge History of English and American Literature (1907–21). Vol. V. The Drama to 1642, Part One. § 10 ff.
[12] Chambers, E.K.: Shakespearean Gleanings, p. 40.
[13] Stanley Wells & Gary Taylor (eds.) The Full Oxford Shakespeare.
[14] Eleanor Prosser: Hamlet and Revenge (1967) p. 244.
[15] Samuel Schoenbaum: William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life (1977) pp. 224-227 and Stephen Greenblatt: Will in the World (2004) p. 331.
[16] Bernard Grebanier: Then Came Each Actor (1975), p. 114. Quoting Munden, Grebainer goes on to comment that although ‘you never can tell about actors’ he finds Munden’s statement hard to believe. After directing 64 theatre productions, I am all too ready to acknowledge the likely truth of Munden’s comment.
[17] John A. Mills: Hamlet on Stage (1985) p. 27.
[18] J. Boaden: Life of J. P. Kemble (1825), quoted in New Variorum II, pp. 244-245.
[19] Granville Barker: Preface to Hamlet (1937), Nick Hern Books 2003, p. 1.
[20] F.E. Halliday: Shakespeare and His Critics (1949) pp. 416-7.
[21]The Cambridge History of English and American Literature (1907-21) Vol. XI, XV, § 5.
[22] Peter Alexander: Hamlet, Father and Son (1955) p. 10.
[23] Carol Jones Carlisle: Shakespeare from the Greenroom (1969) p. 36.
[24] Peter Alexander: Hamlet, Father and Son (1955) p. 14.
[25] Anthony Scoloker: Diaphantus, or the Passions of Love, 1604 (quoted in The Shakespeare Allusion Book I, p. 133
[26] Carol Jones Carlisle: Shakespeare from the Greenroom (1969), p. 37.
[27] Ibid. p. 37. In fact, Gentleman’s suggestions seem to follow Saxo’s Danish Chronicle more closely than Shakespeare’s play.
[28] James Boaden: Life of John Philip Kemble (1825), quoted in Farley-Hills (ed.): Critical Responses to Hamlet, vol. II, p. 165.
[29] Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1796), quoted from Farley-Hills: Critical Responses to Hamlet, p. 25.
[30]Shaw on Shakespeare, edited by Edmund Wilson (1961) pp. 101-2.
[31] Bernard Grebanier: Then Came Each Actor (1975), p. 421.
[32] In Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1796), Wilhelm persuades his manager Serlo to produce an ‘unmutilated’ Hamlet, but eventually concedes to cuts in the text.
[33] John A. Mills: Hamlet on Stage (1985), p. 209.
[34] Transcribed from the 1978 broadcast An Actor and his Time, in which Gielgud is interviewed by John Miller. An excerpt from Gielgud’s Hamlet survives in Humphrey Jenning’s war documentary A Diary for Timothy (1945). It is the Graveyard scene, V.1, and Gielgud’s address to Yorick is delivered much in the vein of a strict headmaster reprimanding a negligent pupil; it sounds as if Hamlet rebukes the dead jester for having misplaced his lips, jokes and jaw.
[35]London Evening Standard, 15 November 1934.
[36] John A. Mills: Hamlet on Stage (1985), p. 224. In Branagh’s full Hamlet (1996) we may detect similar signs of the director worrying about the concentration span of his audience. The Ghost scene is garnished with volcanic eruptions and a Ghost straight out of a Stephen King novel, and Act V ends with a Norwegian commando raid that claims even the life of Osric. These manoeuvres seem somewhat unnecessary in a film borne aloft by top notch performances from a star-studded cast – and never in cinema history has that phrase been more aptly applied: the minuscule part of Marcellus is played by Jack Lemmon, the even smaller part of Reynaldo by Gerard Depardieu, and the first prize for cameo appearance must be a tie: Sir John Mills, Dame Judi Dench and Sir John Gielgud are given the mute parts of, respectively, Fortinbras’ impotent and bedrid uncle, Hecuba and Priam.
[37] Eric Partridge: Shakespeare’s Bawdy (1947).
[38] James Fenton: Times Literary Supplement, 17 September 1982.
[39] Andy Lavender: Hamlet in Pieces (2001) pp. 3 ff.
[40] Did I mean traces of Müller or traces of Shakespeare? I meant both.
[41] Jan Kott: Shakespeare Our Contemporary, p. 48.
[42] Kirsten Hastrup: Action, p. 159.
[43] Granville Barker: Preface to Hamlet (1937), Nick Hern Books (2003), p. 3.
[44] James Fenton: Times Literary Supplement, 17 September 1982.
[45]Pepys’ Diary 28 May 1663, quoted in Halliday: Shakespeare and his Critics (1949), p. 415.
[46] Grebanier, p. 263.
[47] Grebanier, p. 263.
[48] Levine, Lawrence L.: Highbrow, Lowbrow, pp. 13-4.
[49] It was Joan Plowright who was given leave to speak the line in John Sichel’s 1973 production. The line is omitted in Alan Horrox’s TV version from 1996, and even in Trevor Nunn’s 2001 version and Michael Radford’s 2004 feature film, although both these productions focus on the racism of the main characters in the play.
[50] Joseph Hunter: New Illustrations of the Life, Studies and Writings of Shakespeare, quoted in New Variorum I, p. 274.
[51] Johnson, Samuel: Preface to Shakespeare’s Plays, p. xi.

To contact the author:
lars@larskaaber.dk