Hamlet at the Plantations

A trip to Ithaca provided another occasion to see Hamlet.  This time, it was the Ithaca Shakespeare Company's presentation at the Cornell Plantations.  The stage was set deep in the woods, nestled among the trees, far from modern annoyances (and modern lighting).  It was a picturesque location.  Unfortunately, that was one of the few positives of the evening.

The stage set was very rudimentary, with multiple levels and an area beneath the stage floor to serve as Ophelia's grave.  (Amusingly, she stayed there during the duel and popped out for the curtain call.)  The painting of the set was reminiscent of a high school musical, though.  Furniture was minimal; in fact, the chamber scene between Hamlet and Gertrude had none at all.  The costumes were Medieval period, aside from modern footwear and (sometimes wrinkled) chinos.  Claudius spent the evening not in a crown but rather in a jeweled headband, which reminded me of Wonder Woman's head-wear.  The Ghost wore white make-up to give the appearance of a pale complexion.  When he removed his helmet, however, some of the make-up went with it, leaving his natural skin tone apparent.

The acting was emotive and overdone.  I did not find any of the actors believable in the roles.  The dialogue was stiff and unnatural, and the bulk of the lines were delivered while yelling.  Undoubtedly this was an attempt to project due to the lack of external amplification, but it removed a sense of natural conversation among the actors.  Hamlet was a combination of Jim Parsons' Dr. Sheldon Cooper (from TV's The Big Bang Theory) and Jim Carrey's Ace Ventura with overactive salivary glands.  The attempt to portray Hamlet's insanity was far beyond the pale.  By the end of the play I was waiting for the duel so that the rest would be silence.  The best acted parts were those of Ophelia, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, although the latter two actors spent much of their non-speaking scenes upstage whispering between themselves.  It may have been an attempt to play up the conniving, spying aspect of their characters, but it became annoying.  Their entrance to the play was marked by coin flipping, an inside reference to Tom Stoppard's play, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead.

The script was edited to fit in a running time of approximately 2.5 hours, a function of the decreasing amount of sunlight and the lack of artificial lighting.  While this is a typical length, the editing was atypically sloppy.  Gone were Polonius' instructions regarding spying on Laertes, "outward limbs and flourishes,"  beautified being a "vile phrase," most of Hamlet's instructions to the players, the dumb show, references to "herb of grace o' Sundays," the gallows maker and bungholes.  For all that was excised, however, the role of Fortinbras was left in the play.  As a result, the "How all occasions" soliloquy, the one most easily removed, remained.  It added nothing to the action and only made the play drag.

One major change was the movement of the "To be or not to be" soliloquy.  The director justified this in the playbill, writing that the speech "doesn't grow out of any specific dramatic circumstances in the play" and is a "movable set piece."  Hamlet thrice delivered the line "except my life" to Polonius and then, while supine on the stage, delivered the "To be" soliloquy.  It ended with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern entering to tell Hamlet about the arrival of the players.  The "rogue and peasant slave" soliloquy followed.  The action moved to Claudius, Gertrude, et al, discussing the players.  Ophelia was left alone on stage, Hamlet entered and the play moved into the nunnery scene.  For such a "movable set piece," the flow of action in this section of the play was largely disrupted.

The eventual arrival of the duel scene signaled that the evening was drawing to a close.  The role of Osric was not at all the fey, effeminate portrayal that is typical, and there was no discussion of the warmth of the castle or his hat.  In fact, he wore no hat at all.  The duel involved both rapier and dagger.  In a new twist, Laertes' dagger was the instrument envenomed.  Oddly, it was that weapon that fatally wounded Hamlet, Laertes and Claudius.  Hamlet's death was awkward, but all things considered, that was neither unsurprising nor unwelcome.  As one last example of the sloppy editing, the play ended seemingly mid-line.  Fortinbras commented that the sight of bodies "shows much amiss," and then the cast members still standing took a bow.  Did the actor forget the concluding line "Go, bid the soldiers shoot." or was its omission a directorial decision?

While I was awaiting the start of the play, I overheard a discussion between two audience members.  One asked what the story of Hamlet is about, and the other commented that she had never read it.  It is a shame that their first exposure to Shakespeare's masterpiece was this rather ham-handed attempt.  Hopefully they have a future opportunity to see it done much more respectably.

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.

The Huck Finn Soliloquy

Following last week's post is a further discussion of the Hamlet Soliloquy in Huck Finn.  The passage was the subject of a 1969 article by E. Bruce Kirkham in the Mark Twain Journal ("Huck and Hamlet:  An Examination of Twain's Use of Shakespeare."  Vol. 14, Summer, pp. 17-19).  Prof. Kirkham begins with an analysis of the soliloquy, comparing each line to the original Shakespearean texts (Hamlet, Macbeth and Richard III).  He continues with a discussion of variations between them, explaining why it might be that these differences occur.  He believes that Twain was purposeful in his selection of source lines and in the changes that he made.  He presents Twain's passage in translated modern English, read as an "original composition."

Prof. Kirkham's thesis is that the soliloquy parallels a thread running through Huck Finn.  Each of the sources within the soliloquy embodies themes of action and inaction.  We have seen this previously in Hamlet.  Its protagonist knows what he must do, but he fails to act.  Huck has the same issue in Twain's book.  He debates the morality of helping Jim to escape.  "Society tells [him] he should not; humanity tells him he should."  Upon hearing the soliloquy, which urges "action at all costs in all situations," and seeing Jim returned to slavery, Huck decides that it is time to act.

As Prof. Kirkham concludes, the soliloquy serves as more than mere comic relief.  It "serves to point up an important theme in the story."

Hamlet and Huck Finn

Where best to find references to Shakespeare's masterpiece than in Mark Twain's masterpiece?  In revisiting the latter's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, I ran into the former's Hamlet.  I don't know whether my subconscious remembered this confluence of literary icons from a previous reading of Huck Finn decades ago, but there it was, front and center in Chapter 21.

In lieu of retyping the relevant passage, I found the following breakdown on the Internet at http://jmohsen.weebly.com/shakespearean-allusions-in-huck-finn.html.  It was so well arranged that I copied it below.  The website includes further dissection of the soliloquy, including the original citations from each of the three Shakespearean works quoted.

Allusion in the Hamlet Soliloquy in Huck Finn

In Huck Finn, the King performs a creative version of Hamlet’s soliloquy, with allusions to three of Shakespeare’s play.  Below is the actual breakdown of the allusions, with a color code to understand the original text behind each allusion.

Key 
Hamlet’s Soliloquy

Other Hamlet
Macbeth
Richard III

Soliloquy
To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would fardels bear, till Birnam Wood do come to Dunsinane,
But that the fear of something after death
Murders the innocent sleep,
Great nature's second course,
And makes us rather sling the arrows of outrageous fortune
Than fly to others that we know not of.
There's the respect must give us pause:
Wake Duncan with thy knocking! I would thou couldst;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The law's delay, and the quietus which his pangs might take,
In the dead waste and middle of the night, when churchyards yawn
In customary suits of solemn black,
But that the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns,
Breathes forth contagion on the world,
And thus the native hue of resolution, like the poor cat i' the adage,
Is sicklied o'er with care,
And all the clouds that lowered o'er our housetops,
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.
'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.
But soft you, the fair Ophelia:
Ope not thy ponderous and marble jaws,
But get thee to a nunnery- go!

created by Yvonne Hangsterfer and Jerome Mohsen (c) 2012