‘To Be or Not to Be’ Through the Ages

Studies like this is always a very special occasion.

I’d like just as a prelude to begin by acknowledging a birthday that happened

over the course of the summer. Carl Schmidt is now ninety

six years old. He was born in 1924. Ninety six.

Ninety two years old. Ninety six. Nineteen twenty two. Ninety

six years old.

You. And then why dad said,

oh, Ellen, we

hand this over to you now so that Ellen is the mastermind of all of this. He

is always manages to pull it off. Year by year. One time he even managed to

explain how the actors from the London stage are financed.

If I did, I’d forgotten how we do it. That’s some

bubble gum and rubber bands and things like that.

I want, first of all, to correct the rubric on the announcement for today’s

event. What you see there is not what you’re getting. And the reason

for that is that it was a description that was turned into British studies by David Corn

Haber, who was going to do the talk today. And then family circumstances have prevented

him from being here. And so we fall back on the old standby Shakespeare

panel arrangement of which people seem to like well enough,

or at least they’ll accept it as as an air assaults version of what you were promised.

I will say briefly about actors from London stage. For those of you who may not be familiar with them, it’s

a program that’s been going on since the mid 1970s.

It was started by a professor of English from California,

Santa Barbara. I believe he was wanting to seize back Shakespeare

from the academics who had hijacked him in his view, who would essentially turn

Shakespeare’s plays into works of fiction, works to be read in class, to

be analyzed, to be discussed as if and passed

as if it were fictional prose. He insisted that Shakespeare wrote

scripts for actors for the theater

and that they should be understood that way. So he started taking his own students to England to see plays

at in London and in Stratford. And then he started badgering actors to come

meet with his students and talk about their experiences in translating the work

from the page to the stage. And he found some resistance. Actors felt that they were

uneducated and that quite a number of them felt they were under educated, ill equipped to talk, except

with Shakespeare’s script from Shakespeare script. And he

finally cornered Patrick Stewart, whom you may have heard of subsequently in other context.

And Patrick told him, no way, I don’t do that sort of thing. I wouldn’t have

anything to say. And squander the professor from California would not let go, badgered

him enough that he finally agreed to come around the next morning. I’d just answer a few questions.

He was told and as Patrick Stewart subsequently put it, after an

hour and a half, he discovered that he hadn’t even begun to say all the things he

discovered that he knew and wanted to respond to the students with. So he became

the British end of the operation. He was the founding British director of the program

squandered, decided he wanted to share the experience and to bring the actors to America, to American

campuses. And so that’s the way it evolved.

Their headquarters in London, their headquarters, the American headquarters, are

now at Notre Dame. The actors are all from British companies.

They are they audition and are cast in London. And

then in the summer and over the Christmas break, they rehearse. There are two seasons,

two different troupes, two different sets of plays. They take them to American campuses for a

week’s residency, seven or eight in the fall, seven or eight in the spring, a different

play each semester. So I’ve been bringing them here

to U.T. since nineteen ninety nine. So I guess our 20th year of doing this.

The company consists of five actors. It started out with five

and it stated five. Why five. Because you get five in a car. That was

the reason it was a cheap way of doing it. And almost no props, minimum props.

They they have to get all their props into a single trunk. And they

have no director. So in that regard, it’s like a Shakespearean production from Shakespeare’s

day. They direct each other. It’s the five of them alone in a room in south London,

locked away for a month or so. Then they take it on the road, they bring it over to Notre Dame. They spend a couple of weeks

there continuing to rehearse, get it up on its feet and. Performing they started performing

this week. We will have them here next week. And the schedule of the performances are on that

handout that I passed around. So that’s the background and I feel as if

there are any questions about them later. I’d be happy to to try to answer them.

I’m going to do a brief introduction about Hamlet, the play before we

get into the nitty gritty of what we’re doing together here. James O’LOGHLIN and Eric Malin

and I want to say a couple of things about about the play and then move

into something specific. Hamlet is the Mona Lisa of

literature. That’s not an original notion. With me, that was T.S. Eliot writing an essay

called Hamlet and His Problems back in the 1920s. Why Mona Lisa?

It’s an an enigmatic Mr. Ripley, not in the sense of who done

it. We know that pretty early on. But why and how and to what purpose?

It is not only filled with questions, riddles and enigmas, but it is more in the interrogative

mood and perhaps more unsettling than any other Shakespeare play.

John Dover Wilson in the 1930’s, great Shakespeare critic wrote a book called What Happens in Hamlet.

No other play has or needs such a book.

It is unique to Hamlet. There are seven questions asked in the

first 20 lines of the play. Almost none of which are answered

or at least not answered directly and clearly.

The word question itself or variations on it like questionable

a pair appears twice as many times in this play as in the next most

play, which is all’s well that ends well. Seventeen times, it

appears, from the questioning of the ghost that comes in questionable shape

to Hamlet’s uncertainty about the nature of human existence to be or not to be.

That is the question. And Horatio’s final hopeless determination

to answer this bloody question.

By telling Hamlet’s story right as if anybody could. In the brief time he’s allotted,

when you look back on the experience of Hamlet’s adventures that we’ve

just experienced. Hamlet objects to those who would pluck out the heart

of my mystery. But the play challenges its characters and us to

try to do just that. And then frustrates all our efforts so that I will

say in advance and I hope this doesn’t undermine what my colleagues are going to say. Anything that they or

I say about this play should be viewed skeptically with a question

mark hanging over it and challenged.

You get your own money. And so in his essay,

Eliot went on to call Hamlet extraordinarily, in my view, an artistic

failure. He argues

reasonably enough that Hamlet derives from the tradition of revenge tragedies

in which someone great or good has been murdered. The protagonist seeks revenge,

is thwarted by the king’s guard, feigns madness so that the guard is relaxed

and finally attains his revenge, but dies in the process. And that’s a

fair summary of the kind of revenge tragedy that Shakespeare would have inherited,

as Elliot notes, Hamlet contains all of these elements.

But he adds, they do not cahir fit together. Makes sense.

For example, in Shakespeare’s play, the king is unsuspicious.

After he’s killed his predecessor and his guard is down

until hamlet. harsh treatment of Ophelia and his wild behavior causes Claudius

to feel threatened and to raise his guard against Tamarla.

And hamlet., who has sworn to revenge his father’s death and seems often on the verge of killing Claudius,

especially in the pressing.

Avoids doing so when the opportunity presents itself.

Hamlet is far more than a failed revenge tragedy, far more complex,

problematic, interesting and popular than its source plays.

In fact, it’s probably the most popular shape play of Shakespeare’s that’s been performed on

the stage over the last 400 years. But Midsummer Night’s Dream is catching up quickly.

Unlike revenge, tragedy, conventional events, tragedies in which the nature and embodiment

of good and evil are clearly defined. Hamlet is, I submit, about

in certitude, doubt, ambiguity and equivocation.

OK. So they’re at the very heart of what the play is and does.

Now, I’m going to focus my attention for just a moment on one

speech. This is speech towards the end of Act 1, scene 5.

Hamlet has confronted the ghost who comes in questionable

shape. And he has to decide from this moment going forward

what to make of the ghost. Is it honest? Is it what it seems to

be? Is it some sort of demonic creature

appearing in the guise of his father or what he has? What I take to be a

kind of instinctual, passionate, intense

response to the ghost, to the moment to himself in this experience. And here’s

what it sounds like. What you host iPad. What else?

You couple. Hello, I hope. Oh, my God. And you might think you’ve got an instant old,

but fairly swiftly up. Remember me? That poor ghost.

Well, as memory holds a seat in this distracted globe, remember thee. Yay!

From the table of my memory, I’ll wipe away all trivial fun

records, all sorts of books, all forms, all pressures past that youth and observation

copied there by commandment. All one shall live within the book and volume of

my brain. Unmixed with basner matter. Yes, by heaven.

Most pernicious woman. Oh, Villon.

villans smiling. Damn it, really? My tables

melted, it is I set it down. That one may smile

and smile. And be a villain. At least

I’m sure of it. So in Denmark. So, uncle, there

you are. That’s my word. It is a deal.

Remember me?

I have sworn.

Thank you, Austin. It’s a it’s a wonderful speech. It’s powerful speech,

and what it does for me especially is to represent a dilemma.

I think what most people tend to hear, at least initially in this speech, is the business about memory

and remember and to read that as impelling action going forward toward

revenge. For me, the speech is more about something else. It’s more about

looking back. Hamlet talks about wiping away from his memory

all trivial, fond records, all sorts of books, all forms, all pressures

past everything Hamlet has known and been up until now.

He must sacrifice if he is it, to give himself over to becoming

the instrument of another person, another person’s or spirit’s

purpose. And I think he finds that extremely hard, as

would any of us. And

that this is, as I suggested, is is recurs.

It seems to me in the couple that he speaks towards the end of

end of the scene when unlike Shakespeare’s other tragic protagonists, a

fellow Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet says the time is out of

joint o cursed spite that ever I was born to set it right.

So he inherits his tragic burden, unlike the other tragic protagonists

who are essentially responsible for creating them. He inherits his,

and that’s an enormously crushing onus that is placed upon him. And

how does he how do you how do you begin to carry that and cope with it and enacted? You have to

break with everything that’s come before. It seems to me and he he knows that he’s

sort of kind of accepts it, but he also fights against it. And that’s the conflict that,

it seems to me, emerges during the course of the play and that we see repeated over and over again

in various ways. The first the very first deed that Hamlet performs, the very

first act he commits after the battlement scene. And we don’t see it. We hear about

it. He goes to Ophelia. With a kind of hail and farewell,

because what he must do, first of all, is to break off from the one he loves

most intensely. He cannot bring her along on this terrible journey

that he has had imposed upon him. And I think

it begins to destroy him from within as that goes forward.

Thank you, Alan. That was great. And actually it was that it was a great introduction for whenever I

wanted to say, I wanted to start out with an anecdote that I just remembered,

which was my Mike’s my first sort of a scholarly experience

with Hamlet. It was one of my dissertation chapters and I

was performing and performing. I was writing my dissertation on a very old computer back

when computers had just started to become computers. And

was as a step above the typewriter bit, but not much. And I had finished

a very long chapter on handling a hit Save and

the disk drive started spinning. There was a disk drive and it was spinning, spinning. After about

five minutes, I realized I was in trouble. It kept spinning. It wasn’t going to say what I’d written about Hamley

after 20 minutes. All of a sudden, every character that I’d written had converted

to a question mark. I’m not kidding. Proof positive.

I mean, I’m not putting my entire chapter of your wiped out replaced by question marks.

And that’s what you submitted. Yeah, I figured that would be that would be a sufficient scholarly

item of the play I’d taken. Yeah. Thank you.

Speaking of us, speaking of question marks, I’m supposed to talk today about to be or not to be.

And I do want to set the speech in context, which a lot

of people forget to do. Part of the reason they forget to do it is it seems so easily extractable

from the play. It seems like like such a great set piece. And

this goes along with a theory that I have about about Shakespeare, which is that he actually

wrote a bunch of speeches and he just put them in his drawer and he sort of pulled them out occasionally when he needed them

in an interview or not. We didn’t quite fit. But he didn’t let that bother him. So

so. So I wanted to I wanted to talk about that. But

also it also suggests that it is at the same time really crucial to the play

in certain symbolic ways. I believe it was and correct me

is that it was an Olivier. He said that Hamlet was about a man who could not make up his mind. Nobody

was film. Yeah. Yeah. And and the great literary critic Stephen Booth

said that Hamlet was actually that an audience that couldn’t make up its mind, which I think is pretty

clever. I want to steal this those comments and say essentially that I

think that that at its core, Hamlet is actually about a speech that can make up its mind. And the

speech is to be or not to be. And that’s that’s the soliloquy.

To set it up, though, I think I think we need to to put it in context

and to to properly understand the context. I guess you’ve set up the first part of the context.

And I would start with Polonius in Act 2, scene 1. And

we may not remember this, but Polonius begins that that act by giving instructions

to his servant Rinaldo to to spy on his son Laertes,

and not only to spy on him, but to sort of cede rumors about him. So, so

much so that that that renaud’s kind of shocked. No, no. That would dishonor him. And

pillories does not. Or now it will be fine, you know. You know, you can you can say that he’s been out hollering.

That’s all right. He said he says the reason he’s doing this

and this is a fairly famous line, he says by indirection we will find directions out.

So he proceeds indirectly in order to to to find a way forward. One of

the remarkable things that we realized in that moment is how much Polonius is actually like Hamlet.

We tend to think of them as as furious opposites, but they’re really pretty similar that way.

They’re both sneaky and and and indirect. And that’s kind of

it’s kind of shocking in a way. So.

So I wanted to begin the idea of context with Polonius

is surveillance of his son. Because what happens

in in the hamlet that we read that to be or not to be a soliloquy that we know is

that most of us understand it as a soliloquy.

Plain and simple. However, there’s that there’s another version of Hamlet that you may or may not know about,

which is the so-called Bad Korto. The first cuarto version, which is another version that came out in Shakespeare’s

lifetime. Scholarly opinion on it, it seems mixed, actually.

Some people think that it’s not authorial. It’s not by Shakespeare. It was a reconstruction by an

actor. I’m not so sure that’s true. But. But one thing that’s shocking about

the speech and maybe this is the reason that scholars have thought this, is that the speech to be

or not to be in the first quarto actually makes sense. How,

you know, it’s not Shakespeare. It actually makes sense. And part of

the reason it makes sense is, is that it is in a different context. It comes up at a

different point in the play than the famous to be or not to be soliloquy. And I actually

wanted to wanted to rehearse where it where it appears

at the point of the early to be or not to be soliloquy in the so-called bad Korto.

The following things have happened. Hamlet’s father has died. He’s come back. The ghost has appeared.

Hamlet is is distraught. He has.

And we will certainly differ on this interpretation. He has either presented himself

to Ophelia as sincerely miserable or set up

a performance for Ophelia for various reasons. He

again, this is in that this isn’t the first Korto version. He.

Let’s see. So she has told her father that that Hamlet has come. He’s been acting crazy.

But here the following things have not happened. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have not been sent

to Hamlet. The players have not yet showed up. And

he gives this he gives this speech. I don’t know if it if we have a copy available. I

actually don’t have a copy. Thank you. I made

a few copies of of the the version in the first courthouse.

And when you read this with the version that we all know in mind, he’s got it. If you

want to. If you don’t like it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That is fantastic. Thank

you so much. Yeah, that would be that would be great. This is actually the most fun lecture I’ve ever

participatory lecturer. That’s great. So this is this is this is the version in

in the first quarter. And I think you’ll notice a few differences from from the

version that most of us know. It connects the dots. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you.

To be or not to be. There’s the point

to die. To sleep. Is that all? I all

know. To sleep, to dream. Hi, Mary. There it goes

for in that dream of death, when we awake and born before an everlasting

judge from whence no passenger ever returned the undiscovered country

at whose sight, the happy smile and the accursed damned by for this

the joyful hope of this, who would bear the scorns and flattery

of the world scorned by the right rich, the rich Crowfoot of the poor, the widow

being oppressed, the orphan wronged, the taste of hunger or tyrants

reign and thousand more calamities besides to grunt and

sweat. Under this weary life, when he made his full quietus make with a bear

thought can who would this endure? For a hope

there’s something after death which puzzles the brain and death confound the

sense which makes us rather bear those

evils. We have to find others that we know not of.

I owe this. Conscience makes cowards

of us all. Maybe my autism is beyond my

students love. Thank you.

That was, I think, really beautifully and smoothly delivered, which is exactly the opposite of the way I would read

it. Which is not a critique at all. Try to do it some justice. I think that

I can’t. That was that was much better than I could possibly read it. But what I would

I would actually say about this speech is that it comes early enough in the play that it seems more or less continuous

with his earlier visit to Ophelia, which is to say in some ways, the way this speech

makes sense is that it’s not supposed to make sense. It’s supposed to be a bit daffy.

And so it has sentence fragments in it. He breaks off. He doesn’t seem to realize

that Ophelia is there. Of course, that’s true of both speeches. And and unlike the to be

or not to be speech that we that we know, he actually says the reason

that he doesn’t kill himself is for the hope of something after death, not

for the fear of what may happen after death. So this is that once is so much more

cheerful Hamlet, but also a hamlet. It sounds a bit scattered

or or unsure of of himself as opposed to

the to be or not to be speech that that we all know it was Hamlet sounds famously philosophical

and plausibly suicidal to be. We’re not to

be. That is the question. Whether it is 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 to die to sleep no more. And by a sleep

to say we end the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to is a contribution

devoutly to be wished to die to sleep. To

sleep, change to dream. Right. There’s the rub for that

sleep of death when we have shuffled off this mortal coil. What dreams may come

must give us pause. There’s the respect that makes calamity of

so long. But for who would bear the whips and scorns of time,

the oppressor is wrong. The proud men contemplate the pains of describes, love

the loss, believe in swords of office and the spurns, the patient merit of the unworthy takes when

he himself might his way just meet with a bear. But who would final’s

bear to grunt and sweat under a weary life

that the dread something after death, the undiscovered

country from whose born no traveler returns? Puzzled. The will

makes us rather bear those ills we have that fly to other that we know not of

conscience does make cowards of us all. And thus the native

few of resolutions stick, lead, or with a pale cast and

enterprises of great pith and moment with disregard, their currents turn to ride

and lose the name of action. You know the fair Ophelia

you might or is the all night sins, remember?

Thank you. Thank you so much. So that speech

has been ably and beautifully explicated by my colleague Douglas burster here.

If he’s not here in this book, which is called to be or not to be an apt title,

and and I won’t rehearse his arguments here here at all except

to say is something something that that he concludes with, which is essentially that

in his reading that to be or not to be speech as we know it is essentially a distillation of the play

that that that numerous themes of questioning, of of of

worries about the afterlife, etc., etc. are contained in that speech,

that that in a way goes against what I’m going to say about the speech, mostly

because if we contextualize it, a very different kind of speech emerges.

That is to say, when Daniels speech occurs, the following

things have happened, which I telegraphed earlier, the following things have happened.

Hamlet’s relationship with Ophelia has disintegrated, as with

the first quarter speech, however, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have come to court and they

have been set to Hamlet by the king and queen to spy on him. They have come to

Hamlet and he is instantly suspicious of them and rightfully so, and

sniffs out that they’ve been that they’ve been sent to spy on him.

He’s not really happy about that. But it’s really crucial to understand that he knows he’s under surveillance.

That’s absolutely important for the speech as we have it. The next

thing that happened, which is really important, is they’ve been bantering with him and they say, well, you know, if

you’re upset now, I can’t imagine what Lenten entertainment the players will have

from you. And he says players. What players? And they say all of the players are on their way and Hamlet.

Then there’s a very, very famous passage in the play that in

which Hamlet enters. ICE-SAR entertains the players. He needs them. They’re his old friends.

And he’s struck with a very famous idea, which is what?

Play something thing. Thank you. Yes, exactly right. Yes, he has decided

this is near the end of Act 2, scene 2. Hey, it’s not just great to see the players,

but that they can serve my purposes. How cool. And in fact, not only am

I being spied on, but maybe I can spy myself. So what he’s decided to do is

use the players to spy on on on Claudius. And he’s

very excited about this. And this is his plan, at which

point. Unintelligibly he then gives the to be or not to be speech.

Why? Why

is he suicidal? Probably not. Probably not at this point.

Probably not even close. He should be excited. He should be pleased.

So. So this is a very strange sort of mystery about about the

about the speech. An extremely famous Shakespearean and AC Bradley seemed to actually think this

is a strength. That is to say that Hamlet sort of entertains suicide a second time,

even after even after the players have come. And I’m not quite sure why this

is the strength. I actually think it’s incoherent. He seems to be on a linear path

to test Claudius to see what’s what’s going to happen. And so

he gives this speech, which is characterized in a way that no

other soliloquy that Hamlet gives is characterized or can be characters, which is to say we will search

in vain in this particular soliloquy for any personal detail about Hamlet’s

life. Every other soliloquy makes reference to his personal situation,

to the death of his father, to the that possibly the loss of love in his life

to particularly to to King Claudius. This has nothing.

This has. This is completely abstract, random, impersonal.

To see this speech as deeply felt, I believe is a mistake. Or or I should say,

to speak. See, this speech as deeply felt in the moment is a mistake. It may have been deeply felt

when Hamlet wrote it and put it in a drawer 20 years. But but at this point at

this point, it makes no sense to have Hamlet give this particular speech now unless we make it

make sense. So that’s what I’m gonna do or suggest. OK. So. So

once again, nobody’s being surveilled, wants to surveil the king. He’s got this exciting new idea.

He doesn’t really have any thoughts of suicide. This speech is essentially a sham.

It’s essentially fraudulent. Not only that, but let us not forget that this is not

fundamentally a soliloquy. There are many people on stage. The king

is behind the curtain. Polonius is behind the curtain. Ophelia is onstage.

He may pretend just to see her at the end of the speech. But there she is. Oh. Softly Now the

Ophelia. Hey, how are you? It’s surprising. Now

this can be staged so that he I assume that he doesn’t see her or that she comes on at the end of the speech

and his back is her right there. All all kinds of ways to arrange it so that Hamlet

doesn’t know if Feel is there, but Hamlet knows Ophelia is there. I would I would guess

so. I guess I want us to think about how how different this speech

is. If Hamlet is giving it to an audience and knows he’s giving it to an audience.

What what what the speech means under those circumstances.

And. There aren’t that many plausible answers. But

but one interesting thing does does sort of emerge. Again,

this this depends on my much different reading from Alan’s reading of Hamlet. Go

into Ophelia and essentially essentially saying goodbye

to her, saying farewell to her. My guess is he. He does so in a in a

in a ironically almost comically

over-the-top way in which in which his miming is is easily summarized

by Ophelia to the king and queen. He knows she’s going to tell and

and he you know, he makes gestures and he sighs heavily and and runs

away. So that so that a would say, oh, my gosh, Hamlet, poor Hamlet. And the

immediate reading is, oh, he must be mad for your love. So that that seems

that seems plausible. So so Hamlet right now is buying time.

That is to say, before the players show up, when the players show up, he has a plan.

But until that point, he was just buying time. He didn’t quite know what to do. Right. The players show

he has a plan. His plans have to change. He needs instead of instead

of people to be suspicious of him, he needs to allay suspicions. So he gives this speech

to explain this speech that we know it. The speech as we have it, it should be or not to be soliloquy,

not essentially to say I’m going to kill myself, but as he says at the end of

the speech. To lose the name of action. Just to promise Claudius he’s not

going to do anything. It’s a promissory note for passivity. And

what’s great about Hamlet, the play in Hamlet, the person is whenever Hamlet makes

a plan, he then messes it up. He cannot help himself. This is one

of the keynotes of his character, so that after Hamlet gives the speech and he thinks,

oh, this is great, nicely formed. Got this guy, got the fake philosophy down.

Sound really passive. Not going to do anything to lose the name of action. Soft to Ophelia

nymphet. They are since be all my sins remembered. She says Here are some of your love letters. And he goes like

this and he flips out at her.

He cannot control himself. He he loses the plan that

he had so carefully formulated, after which point put Claudius and Polonius

steps out and Claudius turns to play and says Love and insight, much like love.

And he said, You. And although his speech lacks form a little, it wasn’t much like madness either.

So Hamlet really does a very, very bad job of carrying through with the plans that

he does seem to have. But at this moment, at this central moment in the play, the to

be or not to be soliloquy. I think we need to see it as a completely insincere setup

job that he then cannot sustain. The one other great example

of Hamlet having having the moment that he’s simply having a plan that he simply cannot sustain comes

in the famous play within the placing. But I’ll yield my time now to James.

All right. Thank you. And Eric, I am here

sort of batting cleanup. And one

of my goals was to make sure that you’ve got something like what you were promised in the

advertisment, which I think said it was going to be about to be or not to be through the

ages. And Eric has given us a lot about

to be or not to be. And so I’ll try to say a little about Hamlet through the ages.

But I’m sure will want to return to all of our thoughts about the

play and some of your thoughts afterwards. Hamlet has

always been one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays. Perhaps his most popular was Allanson,

both on the stage and in the study. It was published several

times in Shakespeare’s lifetime. That’s part of the problem, because we

have these different competing texts, as Eric mentioned, that make present

certain challenges of interpretation. But it also seems to have always been very popular

in performance and with good reason. It is a play

that that has everything right. It’s got all kinds of

narrative devices and character types and plot elements that

we find really compelling. It’s got a ghost story and a murder

mystery. It has a love interest. It’s got a family drama. It

has these larger political dimensions.

And. It also has this very compelling central character

that people have always enjoyed trying to get the measure of. And certainly the actors

have always enjoyed playing. Yeah, if you’re young after

word of advice, if you hear that somebody is having auditions for a production of Hamlet,

don’t go along thinking that you might get cast as Hamlet because people tend to do this play

because actors want to play the part. So probably that part has already been cast. I’ve

I’ve been in Hamlet five times, I think. And I’ve never, never played Hamlet.

I have played the Ghost. The King, Laertes fought and Bross and Renaldo.

So I’ve only I’ve Polonius left, I guess, anyway.

So it’s it’s a play that’s always been successful. It was done by Shakespeare’s

company in The Globe Theater. Now we know that. We think we know Richard Burbidge

is leading actor who also played his other tragic protagonist, played the role

of Hamlet, Ophelia and Gertrude would’ve been played by male actors.

And the play would have been done in broad daylight in on a bare

stage in the middle of the afternoon. So it’s a play that

in modern performances tends to be quite atmospheric with a lot of night scenes and

creepy castle settings and so forth, but would have been done very simply and starkly

in Shakespeare’s theater. We know that it was done also at the two universities

of Oxford in Cambridge. It was done at the court before King James first,

though, after Shakespeare’s death. And it was

also performed abroad in Germany. Seems to have been

one of the first Shakespeare plays performed outside of England. And it was even performed

in a ship called the Dragon off the coast of Sierra Leone in

Africa. And 6:44, apparently, the captain decided that it was

a good entertainment for the crew. He said he let the tragedy of Hamlet be performed

to keep my people from idleness and unlawful games or sleep,

which I’ve always enjoyed. Hamlet doesn’t always succeed in that goal.

But anyway, I think one of the reasons it’s continued to be so

popular is that it creates these kinds of questions of interpretation

that we’ve been talking about. Can the ghost be trusted?

You know, why does Hamlet delay if he does? How guilty

or complicit is Gertrude in the murder? Our Hamlet

and Ophelia lovers. Why is Claudius on the throne instead of Hamlet? All of these kinds of questions

are part of the play and especially relating to what we’ve been saying about

Hamlet’s behavior to Ophelia and so forth. Is Hamlet really mad? All right.

Oscar Wilde famously jokingly proposed an essay entitled

Are the commentators on Hamlet really mad or only pretending to Be? And what

I think gives a sense of just how much ink has been spilled

over those kinds of questions. But each

production has to explore the play in its own terms. And

each age, I think, remakes Hamlet in its own

image. And it’s really interesting to look at the performance history of apply

to read about the famous Hamlet, to see

images of those productions and see how the play has been

continually transformed. And that’s, I think, the thing that David Corn Haber was going to

talk about and hopefully maybe sometime we’ll give that same talk to to British studies

just to give some examples. The great hamlet of the the 18th century

was in London was John Philip Kemble, who was very much a hamlet for the

age of reason, a a neoclassical hamlet. He. You see images

of him. He looks like a Greek statue. He carried himself

very nobly. He was never especially

passionate, always very thoughtful and reflective in his delivery of the soliloquies

and so forth. Whereas the great hamlet of the 19th century, Edmund Kean

was a very passionate romantic him. Right. He was a very

kind of fiercely physical, energetic presence in the role. He had

a blazing dark. Eyes and a kind of intense, wiry

presence, and he was a true romantic in that he he sort of burned himself out

at an early age through dissipation and drink, and this kind of led

to his sort of cemented his his legend.

One of the very famous comments about Edmund Keen’s acting, I think in the role

of Hamlet, I believe, as Coleridge said, that to to see Keene Act

is like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning. And I think that’s a great kind of

romantic characterisation of his performance

in the 20th century. You move on to a kind of psychological

hamlet, especially with the reading of Sigmund Freud developed by

Ernest Jones. That Hamlet is in the grip of an edifice

complex and that his his delay and his neuroses all

are connected to the fact that he is his uncle has

done the thing that he himself desired to do, which is kill his father and marry

his mother. And so you get a lot of sort of psychological edible

hamlets in the first half of the 20th century, including, most famously, Laurence

Olivier, who played the role in the 30s on stage and in the

nineteen forty eight film where he’s he’s definitely a little

long in the tooth for that part, but it it kind of maybe sort of builds up

the sense of Hamlet Gertrude family romance in that he is

I think exactly the same age as his mother in that film. And their scenes

are very passionate and particularly the famous the scene that used to be called the closet

scene where Hamlet and Gertrude have a kind of intense encounter

which Olivier set in in Gertrude’s bedroom and in many

subsequent productions, the bed is a prominent prop in that scene.

So that’s kind of gets us into the 20th century. And the later 20th century tended to get

a lot of kind of drop-out student hamlets. Who were, you know,

kind of fighting against authority and their oppressive

older generation. Martin Sheen played such a hamlet for Joseph Papp

in New York in the late 60s, and then David Warner

for Peter Hall at the Royal Shakespeare Company did a famous kind of anti-establishment,

you know, sort of teen rebel student Hamlet. So that’s, you know,

kind of a few instances of the way this play has been kind of remade

over time in recent years.

In recent decades, there’s been, I think, a a little more interest in that

kind of geopolitical dimension of the play, which used regularly to be cut.

Right. That the play begins and ends with a conflict

between Denmark and Norway and with the figure

of Fortune Bros. Who is a also an avenging

son like Hamlet. His father was killed in single combat by Hamlet’s father. And he’s

kind of out for revenge now. And I think in a lot of recent productions, he’s become

a sort of powerful and kind of disturbing figure in that

he takes over the kingdom at the end. There was a very famous production directed

by Ingmar Bergman in Stockholm, and then it played in New York also where the

play ended with Fourton Bross and his troops coming in, in

kind of modern. I mean, it was the production was all in sort of different periods,

but they they rappelled in from the flies and kind of crashed in

from the sides in kind of black riot gear, military garb with helmets

and machine guns and with modern Danish rock music blaring.

And it was this kind of assault on the world of the play from this kind

of threatening invader. And I think that that image has come up

a lot of times in modern performances.

But yeah. Fourton Brass used to always be cut from the play. It tended just

to end with Hamlet know, saying the rest is silence in a ratio, saying, good night, sweet prince

and flights of angels sing Nature Rest. And you didn’t have this kind of reassertion

of the kind of international scene. And the becomes one of the consequences

of this. Is that one of the great. Soliloquies of Hamlet was

almost never performed, and so we’re gonna have one more tiny bit of performance.

But it is this very interesting speech from Act 4,

which occurs only in the second quarter of Hamlet, not in the other two

published early published versions of the play. And it’s a speech in which

Hamlet has just he’s been. He’s on his way to be

sent to England. And he happens to have a kind of close encounter with Fourton Bross,

who’s marching through Denmark with his troops going

to invade Poland, since he can’t invade Denmark at the moment. And

Hamlet learns from foreign brass, Captain, that there’s going to be this this huge

battle over this very inconsequential patch of ground, which is not

toom enough or continent to hide the slain. Right. It’s in thousands of people are going to

die over this unimportant piece of land. And Hamlet,

in some strange way is inspired by this and

has the following reaction. 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 put to sleep

and feed a beast no more? Sure, he’d have made us

with such large discourse looking before and after, gave us not that capability

and godlike reason to fust in us unused. Now,

whether it be best you oblivion, or some craven scruple of thinking

too precisely on the vent, I thought, which quartered. But one part wisdom and ever

three parts coward. I do not know why yet I lived to say this

things to do so as I have cause in the will and strength means to do it.

Examples gross as earth exhort me. Witness this army of such mass and

charge led by a delicate and tender prince whose spirit with divine ambitions

makes mouths at the invisible event, exposing what is mortal and unsure to all

that fortune, death and danger dare. Even for an egg

shell. Rightly to be great. He’s not to stir

without great argument, but greatly to find quarrel in a straw. Win honors

at the stake. How stand by. That have a father killed

a mother staind excitement’s of my reason and my blood and let all sleep

well to my shame. I see the imminent death of twenty thousand men who a

fantasy and trick of fame go to their graves like beds.

Fight for a plot. Run the numbers cannot try the cause, which is not 2mm

enough and continent to hide the slang.

Oh, from this time forth, my thoughts. Be bloody

or be nothing worth.

OK. So that that’s the speech that that no one wants in hand letter that somehow

doesn’t make it into many productions, but that, you know, people have found

interesting of late. And it certainly seems that Hamlet

is able to see the kind of futility and waste of war in this

military adventure of and brasses. But at the same time, he he seems to

tell himself, that’s what I have to do to carry out my revenge from this time

forth, my thought to be bloody or be nothing worth. And we can

argue about exactly what Hamlet’s position is at that point, because

as Alan has pointed out, he doesn’t turn around and go back and kill Claudius. Right.

Then he gets on the boat and goes to England. But from this point of

the play, he does start killing a lot of people. And the last movement

of the play is famously kind of a blood bath, which, you know, when when when pushed,

you know, finally to take action. Hamlet takes some some pretty

severe and violent action. And the German playwright,

great Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht focused on this moment in his reading of

Hamlet. And he’s the poem that he wrote about Hamlet as as kind of the moment of Hamlet’s

regression that, you know, Hamlet has been this philosophical character who has not

been able to bring himself to take a violent revenge. And something about this encounter

with Fourton Bross spurs him onto that. So anyway,

something to think about. I want us to be able to get onto your questions and

just you know, I would encourage everybody to go see that after your last performance next

week and and look out for kind of how they handle some of these different issues

that we’ve been bringing up. Because, again, Hamlet is an endlessly

fascinating text that will repay continued exploration of this kind.