Hamlet in Louisville

What better setting for Shakespeare's tragic masterpiece than Louisville's Central Park?  A multilevel amphitheater stage surrounded by trees, the sound of crickets, a relatively overcast and cool evening with occasional mist and slight rain--it was perfect for settling back into a wooden Adirondack chair for two and one half hours of Hamlet.  The production was presented by Kentucky Shakespeare, the oldest FREE Shakespeare festival in the country.

This production was set in the Elizabethan Age, with traditional period costumes.  Polonius sported a neck ruffle, while Claudius spent the entire play in what could have been a well-worn bathrobe.  The stage was minimally decorated, but its levels and niches worked extremely well.  As it turned out, the height of the upper levels was a huge benefit.  The chamber scene was performed on one of these upper levels.  It was at that point of the evening that the rain, while not heavy by any stretch, became too much for an obnoxious couple several rows ahead.  They opened their umbrella, thereby obstructing the view of numerous patrons behind them.  One patron even mentioned this to the couple, who ignored him and continued to obstruct the view.  Eventually the mist stopped and they put the umbrella away, restoring some sense of normalcy to the evening.

The script was edited very adeptly.  The intermission followed the "Madness in great ones" line, and action resumed with Hamlet's instructions to the players.  There was no mention of Norway.  This condensed the play into a story of Hamlet and family and removed parallels with young Fortinbras.  Because of this, the "How all occasions" soliloquy was removed.  The play flowed very well and the action kept moving and seemed relevant.  While poor editing can leave the play lacking, that was not the case here.

Some comments on casting...  The actors did an excellent job with their roles.  Of note was the role of Polonius.  He was neither overly foppish nor overly meddling.  In a witty reference to the evening's weather, he looked up at a gloomy sky as Hamlet commented about Ophelia not walking in the sun.  There were no age issues as occur sometimes; Hamlet, Ophelia and Laertes all fit.  Two obvious variations were the casting of an African-American actor as the Ghost and a female in the role of Rosencrantz.

As to the performance itself...  Hamlet's first soliloquy began with a comment about his "sullied" flesh, not "solid."  The "rogue and peasant" soliloquy was very well delivered; although audience laughter and applause felt out of place, it was a sign that the speech resonated with them.  The "To be" soliloquy seemed shortened, or it just flowed very well into the next scene.  The "witching time of night" soliloquy fit perfectly with the weather--dark and cool with a misty rain that had just begun and what could have been bats flying overhead.

The interactions with the players had some novelties.  As the "Rugged Pyrrhus" speech was delivered by the first player, other members of the troupe mimed the action to fit the words.  Before The Mousetrap, Hamlet's full instructions were left in the acting script.  The dumb show was left in the script as well.  Oddly, Hamlet did not sit with Ophelia during the play-within-a-play; instead he roamed the stage while delivering his commentaries.

As Claudius and Laertes were discussing the murder plot, Hamlet's letters arrived.  I noted that the references to "High and Mighty" and being "set naked" were omitted.  Subsequently in a very subtle and clever edition, Claudius begins to describe preparing a chalice and stops abruptly as Gertrude enters.  This added a bit of mystery to the duel.  What did he mean by preparing a chalice?  What did he do to it?  The audience is left to wonder.

The graveyard discussion between the gravediggers was shortened; the reference to the gallows was dropped.  Additionally, Hamlet's comments on bungholes were removed.  In lieu of a funeral cortege, Laertes carried Ophelia to the grave and placed her in the ground.  The discussion between Hamlet and Horatio regarding the fates of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was shortened cleverly--the audience entered in medias res as the characters walked from offstage already in conversation.  The exchange with Osric was rather tepid and uninteresting.  (Why were two maids mopping the stage with modern mops during the interchange?)

The duel scene was well choreographed.  Hamlet and Laertes used both rapier and dagger in the fight.  The stabbing of Laertes was excessive and violent, not the usual quick exchange.  With Fortinbras out of the picture, the evening's action ended as the stage lights faded to black on "rest."

As I was heading back to my car to leave, I happened to be behind a pair of young gentlemen discussing what they had just seen.  One commented on what a great story Hamlet is.  I would agree wholeheartedly.  It also was great to see Hamlet affecting another generation of playgoers.  That's what a great play and a great production can do, and this one was no exception.  It was exceedingly well done-- a terrific reason to spend a free evening in the woods.

Hamlet on Vinyl

A local library was unloading some old vinyl recently.  The shopping excursion became yet another Hamlet experience.  Among the acquisitions was a promotional album for Derek Jacobi's BBC performance from 1980.  The single disc has a Behind-the-Scenes listen on Side A and a few excerpts on Side B.

Side A features several actors and the director discussing various aspects of the play.  Derek Jacobi, who played Hamlet, described his role as that of a "Man with a capital M."  For him, Hamlet is a man of spontaneous action who cannot commit the non-spontaneous killing of Claudius.  Later on Side A, we hear Jacobi performing the "To be or not to be" soliloquy.

The director, Rodney Bennett, describes Hamlet as a "God and Thunder" revenge play.  It was Shakespeare, he states, who added the character of Hamlet to extant sources.  The play for Bennett is not about Hamlet's delay.  If that were its sole focus, it would be a "dull play."  Rather, he sees Hamlet as a man of action, a dangerous man who could do it at any moment.  For him, Hamlet, the play, is a thriller.

Patrick Stewart portrays Claudius in this production.  That interested me immediately as I had already seen the RSC production in which he played that role.  (See 2/23/14 post.)  He speaks on this album of playing Claudius as a loving man:  one who loves his people, his queen and his stepson.  It is not until the nunnery scene when Claudius begins to suspect that there could be issues with Hamlet.  As Stewart quotes Shakespeare, "There's something in his soul/oe'r which his melancholy sits on brood...."

Rodney Bennett concludes the brief discussion with his opinion of why Hamlet has remained so popular.  It "asks a lot of questions and doesn't answer very many of them."  It is up to the audience, the scholars, the actors to answer them.

After listening to the album, I did some research and discovered that this version is commercially available on video.  It has been added to the blogger's ever-growing "to do" list.  Aside from the obvious draw--it's Hamlet--it will be interesting to compare Patrick Stewart's portrayal of Claudius in this production with that of the RSC production.  "If it be not now, yet it will come."

Vaudeville Hamlet

The appearance of Hamlet in Huck Finn got me looking for other appearances of Hamlet in American vaudeville.  One resource that I found was Ray B. Browne's 1960 article entitled "Shakespeare in American Vaudeville and Negro Minstrelsy" from American Quarterly (Vol 12, Fall, pp. 374-391).  In it, the author cites numerous examples of Hamlet being adapted for the "popular" stage.

• "Hamlet":  a five-stanza straight-faced account of the play
• "Hamlet Travestie" a.k.a. "Zouave Johnny's History of Denmark":  in which Hamlet's "mamma" kills his father with poison
• Dan "Jim Crow" Rice's blood-curdling account of the play
• "Hamlet's Lament":  sung to the tune "Wearing of the Green"
• "Hamlet" a.k.a. "N--'s Description of Shakespeare--Hamlet":  to fit the minstrel song "Jim Crow"

Browne describes two additional productions of Hamlet on the vaudeville stage.  The first is Hamlet the Dainty.  While the plot follows closely Shakespeare's original, the cause of the tragedy is whiskey.  Hamlet's father is killed with whiskey in the mouth at Claudius' hand.  Laertes is an alcoholic, and Gertrude dies from an alcohol overdose.  Another version, Ham(om)let, Prince of Dunkirk, has considerable contemporary flavor.  Polonius, a Prohibitionist, is not mourned.  The Ghost is found working in a sulfur factory.  The skull unearthed by the gravediggers is that of temperance crusader Carrie Nation.  "Alas!  Poor Carrie!  I knew her, Horatio."  The play concludes with the "usual number of corpses" and with an angelic Ophelia grinding a contemporary tune on a hand organ.

As we have seen, one of the beauties of Hamlet is its adaptability to different settings.  American vaudeville provides us yet more examples of this flexibility.

Hamlet as Burlesque

In an endnote to the Mark Twain Library edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, I came upon a reference to a "fragmentary Hamlet travesty" that Mark Twain attempted in 1881.  The text of this unfinished work is found in Mark Twain's Satires & Burlesques (S&B).  Entitled Burlesque Hamlet, it runs roughly 37 pages in length and covers the action through the beginning of Act II, Scene ii of Hamlet.

Notes in the University of California Press edition of S&B attempt to explain the origins of the Burlesque.  Twain's concept was to add a new character to the play.  It was a notion given to starts and stops in the author, a notion that remained ultimately an unfinished product. The new character, named Basil Stockmar, purports to be Hamlet's foster-brother.  He is a book salesman, visiting Elsinore with the intent of selling subscriptions to one of his latest pieces.  He appears in the action of the play, but he does not interact directly with the characters.  Given to occasional asides and monologues, Basil's part in the play is entirely accidental.  Twain intended not to manipulate Shakespeare's original text, only to throw anachronism into the mix.  His primary gag in the existing Burlesque is to have Basil state that in a drunken revel he has swallowed a spool of thread and then to recite his lines while pulling "a couple of hundred yards" of thread from his mouth.

The Burlesque is an interesting idea, but one the results of which readers are left largely to imagine for themselves.  The bulk of the existing fragment of the work is mostly Shakespeare and little Twain.  It appears that Twain grew tired of the work and stopped just as Hamlet has called Polonius a fishmonger and declared conception to be a blessing.  It is for us to consider how Basil might have affected the remainder of Hamlet and how his presence could have injected humor into the tragedy.

Within the editor's introduction to Burlesque Hamlet there is a reference to another such work.  Joseph T. Goodman, a contemporary of Twain, wrote his own treatment of Hamlet and sent it to Twain.  As the editor notes, "Hamlet's Brother was packaged and filed away among Twain's papers, where it still rests today, untouched anywhere by Twain's revising hand."  Perhaps someday a trip to Berkeley, California, may shed light on what exactly is there.