Shakespeare Magazine Issue 14 by Shakespeare Magazine

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Who the Hell is Hamlet?

“...the readiness is all.”

— Hamlet V.2

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Welcome

to Issue 14 of Shakespeare Magazine

Photo: David Hammonds

When I decided to devote an entire issue of Shakespeare Magazine to Hamlet, I assumed it would be a relatively straightforward process. After all, lots of people have lots of interesting things to say about this play and this character – all I had to do was fling it on the page. What I didn’t bargain for, but which in retrospect seems all too obviously predictable – is that in the process I would become Hamlet. I hesitated, I prevaricated, I dithered. I underthought things that required a good deal of thinking, and I overthought things that didn’t require any thinking at all. I prepared reams of interview questions, and them scrapped them. I wrote thousands of words and then chucked them in the bin. I remembered things – like the time I wrote and acted in a Hamlet spoof at school, over 30 years ago, in part inspired by an edgy production of the play that wowed me at Southport Arts Centre. And then I realised that some of my memories were no longer trustworthy. I think perhaps my main point here is that we all think we know Hamlet like we know ourselves. But when we return to the text(s) there are always shocks, surprises and rude awakenings in store. And just like Hamlet, my dithering at last ended, I suddenly knew what had to be done, and the issue finally rocketed to its conclusion. It’s been an education, and the bodies that litter this particular stage are, thankfully, all metaphorical. Anyway, here it is. Thanks as ever, for your patience and support. Enjoy your magazine. Pat Reid, Founder & Editor

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shakespeare At last! A magazine with all the Will in the world

Issue 14

FREE

Who the Hell is Hamlet?

Contents

Shakespeare Magazine Issue Fourteen July 2018 Publisher JoAnn Markon Founder & Editor Pat Reid Art Editor Paul McIntyre Contributing Writers Samira Ahmed, Alice Barclay, Maddy Fry, Michael Goodman, Rhodri Lewis, Stewart Kenneth Moore, Clare Petre, Jen Richardson

How Old is Hamlet?

Hamlet is 30 years old – it says so in the text, right? Rhodri Lewis, author of Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness, explains why this is NOT the case.

Photography Tim Gutt, Manuel Harlan, Jonathan Keenan, Francis Loney, Johan Persson, Bronwen Sharp, Julie Vrabelová Web Design David Hammonds Contact Us shakespearemag@outlook.com Facebook facebook.com/ShakespeareMagazine Twitter @UKShakespeare Website www.shakespearemagazine.com Newsletter http://tinyletter.com/shakespearemag Donate https://www.paypal.me/ ShakespeareMagazine

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The Avenger Disassembled

Soul-searching 14 with Scott 20

Maddy Fry savours the “intimacy and intensity” of Tom Hiddleston’s Hamlet at RADA.

Clare Petre recounts the shatteringly cathartic experience of Andrew Scott’s Hamlet.

Contents

Why do Women Victorian Hamlet Time Travelling 38 with Ophelia 26 Love Hamlet? 32 Illustration 7XI[EVX /IRRIXL 1SSVI [EW E ¾] SR XLI [EPP HYVMRK XLI ½PQMRK SJ Daisy Ridley’s Hamlet spin-off.

How’s your Father?

Michael Goodman picks his Hamlet favourites from the Victorian Illustrated Shakespeare Archive.

I Capture 48 the Castle

Jen Richardson meets Gyles &VERHVIXL XS ½RH SYX EFSYX LMW family production of Hamlet.

Samira Ahmed argues that there are “Three Ages of Hamlet” for the women fascinated by the Prince.

Hamlet in the heat 56 of the Night 60

Pat Reid takes a trip to Denmark to visit Hamlet’s historic home, the mighty Kronborg Castle.

Alice Barclay makes Hamlet the people’s play on a sweltering summer’s evening in Bristol.

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! How Old is Hamlet? Artwork for the National Theatre’s 2015 Hamlet (starring Benedict Cumberbatch) featuring the play’s characters as children.

How Old is Hamlet? It’s a question every reader of Hamlet has found themselves asking. And one that Professor Rhodri Lewis has addressed in his recent major work Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness.

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How Old is Hamlet?

“In addition to its role in signifying mourning, black is also the academic colour”

n writing Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness, one of the central planks of my argument is that Prince Hamlet is youthful and a university student. Approaching Hamlet – and Hamlet – from this perspective helped me to make a series of claims about what I take to be Shakespeare’s attitudes to the humanistic doctrines of his era (Hamlet never stops grappling with, and can never quite escape from, the “saws and observations” of his Wittenberg education), and about how Shakespeare uses his dramatic art both to critique them and to move beyond them. Hamlet’s youth also offers a plausible explanation for the decision of the Danish court to elect Claudius its monarch in succession to Old Hamlet: Hamlet is on the way to full manhood, but is not there yet. Claudius kills Old Hamlet shortly after Hamlet has left Denmark for the new academic year in Wittenberg, juxtaposing his presence (in all senses of the term) with his nephew’s absence. “Young Hamlet” is still learning about himself and the world around him; his time will come. A peculiarity of writing books for university presses is the process of peer review. Your manuscript is handed by the press to two or perhaps three anonymous experts, who then write reports in which they submit your work to thoroughgoing scrutiny. Even when agreeing in their recommendations (from “publish as it stands” to “over my dead body”), these reports frequently differ so much from one another that you can begin to doubt whether their writers were reading the same things; as an author, the best you can hope for is that what you’ve written will be approached intelligently and with an open mind. One of the few topics on which the anonymous reviewers of my manuscript agreed with each other was that as I had made a lot of Hamlet’s youth and student status, I couldn’t sidestep the fact that, in the Graveyard scene, we are told pretty unambiguously that he is thirty. So it was that I decided to write an appendix tackling the question of exactly how old Hamlet is supposed to be.

Writing it turned out to be more difficult, more interesting, and much more enjoyable than I had anticipated: the action of the play not only enables us to say some concrete things about Hamlet’s age, but also allows us to witness Shakespeare’s engagement with what, in the years around 1600, was the new language of numbers. Familiar though Hamlet is to all of us, and voluminous though the literature on it has become, writing my book led me to the conclusion that we have only begun to scratch the surface. Hamlet is described on several occasions as “young”; he is roughly the same age as Fortinbras, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern; he seems to be a little younger than Horatio and Laertes; he is a student at Wittenberg; he thinks and speaks like one in the midst of a humanistic education. And yet his exchange with the Gravedigger at the beginning of Act 5 appears, anomalously but unambiguously, to suggest that he is thirty years old. However, the age given in the graveyard scene does not stand up to scrutiny: it emerges from a textual crux, is at variance with the manifest signs of Hamlet’s age given elsewhere in the play, and relies on an authority – the Gravedigger – whose arithmetical skills are very much open to question. I also suggest that thinking about Hamlet’s age in terms of the number of years he might have been on the earth is misconceived. After satisfying himself that the Ghost is not purely a figment of Marcellus and Barnardo’s imaginations, Horatio decrees that they should impart what they “have seen tonight / Unto young Hamlet” (1.1.174-75). “Young” here differentiates the son from his father: deuteroHamlet, Hamlet Junior, Hamlet the Younger. But it is also the adjective with which Shakespeare chooses to introduce his disaffected prince, and reveals something not only about his royal status but about his quality of being. Versions of it reappear frequently throughout the play. Claudius counsels Hamlet that his enduring display of grief shakespeare magazine

! How Old is Hamlet? “Hamlet’s desire to return to his studies at Wittenberg tells us that he is a teenager” Benedict Cumberbatch played the role of Hamlet at the age of 39, having just become a father for the ½VWX XMQI

for his father is “unmanly” (1.2.84), a term that is normative rather descriptive, but whose persuasive force depends on Hamlet aspiring to, rather than already having attained, the condition of manliness; Laertes thinks of Hamlet as “A violet in the youth of primy nature” (1.3.7); the Ghost tells Hamlet that if it were to describe the afterlife in detail, the effect would be to “freeze thy young blood” (1.5.16), and addresses him as a “noble youth” (1.5.38); Claudius turns to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern because they are “of so young days brought up with him, / And with so neighbour’d to his youth and haviour” (2.2.11-12); the fencing match between Hamlet and “young Laertes” (4.5.101; cf. 5.1.217) is framed with some care as a contest of “youth” (4.7.72-80). One might go on, but the point is incontestable: although it might be possible to dispute what “young” is intended to signify in the dramatic context of Hamlet, it definitively connotes more than Hamlet’s status as the son of a father with the same name. Before he has taken on the part of the

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forensic huntsman, tracking and seeking to expose his uncle’s guilt, Hamlet himself acknowledges his resemblance to a “rascal”, or juvenile deer (2.2.562). On the basis that Hamlet and Fortinbras are so obviously set in counterpoint to one another, to say nothing of the fact Fortinbras’s father was killed on the day Hamlet was born (5.1.139-40), we can surmise that Hamlet is about the same age as Fortinbras; either a little older than him, or a little younger. If the former, then no more than nine months so. As the frustrated son of an overthrown monarch, Hamlet sees his own character illuminated by the bold example of his Norwegian peer. So much so that his final soliloquy projects his own likeness onto this would-be conqueror of Denmark, envisaging him as “a delicate and tender prince” (4.4.48); Fortinbras will return the compliment by imagining the dead Hamlet as a soldier. In fact, their tender years are all they have in common. Hamlet’s status as a student further asserts his

How Old is Hamlet?

youthfulness. Lawrence Stone’s statistical labours give a clear picture of when it was that early modern Englishmen went to university. For instance, the median age of matriculation at Oxford for the years 1600-02 was 17.1. Among the aristocracy and gentry it was substantially lower, at 15.9 years. Further, it was common for the well-educated sons of socially elevated families to enter university as young as eleven or twelve. A good example is Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton and the dedicatee of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis and Lucrece. Wriothesley went up to St. John’s College, Cambridge in 1585 at the age of twelve; he graduated before he turned sixteen in 1589, at which point he had already been admitted to Gray’s Inn. In a word, Hamlet’s desire to return to his studies at Wittenberg tells us that he is a teenager. To an audience of theatregoers or readers in late Elizabethan or early Jacobean London, it would have been starkly irregular for an aristocrat, let alone a member of the royalty, to have remained at university beyond the age of about twenty. Hamlet’s ambitious but frequently confused and incoherent mode of discourse sounds like that of an early modern university student. But as Barbara Everett has proposed, it might well be that he also looks like a student, or at least that he did so to Shakespeare’s earliest audiences: in addition to its role in signifying mourning, black is the academic colour. We come now to the encounter between Hamlet and the Gravedigger. Hamlet asks the Gravedigger when he began digging graves, and the following exchange ensues: Gravedigger: Of all the days i’th’ year I cam to’t that day that our Last King Hamlet o’ercame Fortinbras. Hamlet: How long is that since? Gravedigger: Cannot you tell that? Every fool can tell that. It was that very day that young Hamlet was born – he that is mad and sent into England. (5.1.139-44) From which we deduce that although the Gravedigger thinks that “every fool” knows when Old Hamlet defeated Old Fortinbras and Hamlet was born, Hamlet himself is less sure. After several lines in which the Gravedigger works hard to evade the questions he has been asked by and about

“young Hamlet”, he steers the conversation back to the ground beneath their feet: Gravedigger: I have been sexton here, man and boy, thirty years. Hamlet: How long will a man lie i’th’ earth ere he rot? Gravedigger: Faith, if a be not rotten before a die ... a will last you some eight year or nine year. (5.1.156-62). On the face of it, this is open and shut. The gravedigger has been at his trade (i.e., a sexton) for thirty years. Hamlet is therefore thirty years old, however out of keeping that might seem with the rest of the play. There are, however, both textual and interpretative grounds to doubt this reading, and to stick with our inference that Hamlet the student is a teenager. The textual crux first. As many readers of Shakespeare Magazine will be aware, there are two authoritative versions of the play. One is the 1604/05 Second Quarto (Q2), the other is the 1623 First Folio. Only Q2 supports the reading of the text given above. On the question of how long the Gravedigger had been at his work in Denmark, the Folio (TLN 3351-52) has him say “I have been sixeteene heere, man and Boy thirty yeares”. The reading is grammatically challenging, but offers a very different picture of Hamlet’s age. The Gravedigger has been “heere” (qua Denmark and/ or his graveyard – he is being willfully ambiguous) for sixteen years, and has been “man and Boy thirty yeares”. On this account, it is the Gravedigger who is thirty years old, while Hamlet is only sixteen. Q2 has traditionally been preferred, on account both of its grammatical simplicity and of what the Gravedigger reveals about a disarticulated skull that has caught his attention: “Here’s a skull now hath lien you i’th’ earth three and twenty years” (5.1.16668). On being pressed, the Gravedigger discloses that “This same skull, sir, was Yorick’s skull, the King’s jester” (5.1.175-77). As Hamlet goes on to recall the joyful times he had spent with Yorick as a child and as Yorick died twenty-three years ago, the textual logic runs smoothly: Hamlet must be thirty years old, and the Folio reading a corruption of Q2, which spells sexton “sexten”. The more so because the thirty years of Hamlet’s life echo the thirty years shakespeare magazine

! How Old is Hamlet?

Left: Naeem Hayat, one of the young actors who portrayed Hamlet in the epic Globe to Globe production. Right: Maxine Peake’s Hamlet was full of adolescent energy – although she was aged 40 at the time.

that the Player King and Queen have been married (3.2.150-55). Even “unedited” texts of Hamlet based on the Folio emend it. If one sticks with the mortal remains of Yorick, things quickly become more complicated. Putting to one side the question of why the Gravedigger has unearthed his skull (has it been dug up accidentally or on purpose? Where is the rest of him? And how, with human remains apparently littered around him, can he be sure that the skull in question belonged to Yorick?), a twenty-three-year-old corpse should on the Gravedigger’s own account long ago have become a skeleton: it has been in the ground for fourteen or fifteen years more than the eight or nine he specifies for complete decomposition. And yet, Yorick’s skull has the rankly sweet odour of human decay. “My gorge rises at it” (5.1.181-82) might just about be understood as an expression of metaphysical nausea at handling the skull beneath the skin of a loved one, but the gross physicality of the matter is soon beyond doubt:

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Hamlet: Prithee, Horatio, tell me one thing. Horatio: What’s that, my lord? Hamlet: Dost thou think Alexander looked o’ this fashion i’th’ earth? Horatio: E’en so. Hamlet: And smelt so? Pah! Horatio: E’en so, my lord. (5.1.189-95) This is a graveyard, not a charnel house in which the stink of a newly decomposing corpse might taint even the most desiccated bones. Yorick’s soft tissue has not yet fully putrefied. His body has been in the ground for nothing like as long as twentythree years. Before going any further, I want briefly to glance at the 1603 First Quarto (Q1) of the play. By virtue of so straightforwardly making both numerical and dramatic sense, it hints at something integral about the puzzles of Hamlet’s age and Yorick’s subterranean years in Q2 and the Folio. In Q1, the Gravedigger brandishes a skull:

How Old is Hamlet?

“The Earl of Southampton attended Cambridge at the age of 12, and graduated at 15” Look you, here’s a skull hath been here this dozen year – let me see, ay, ever since our last King Hamlet slew Fortenbrasse in combat – young Hamlet’s father, he that’s mad. The Gravedigger subsequently reveals that the skull belonged to Yorick; Hamlet laments the dead clown and the transitoriness of life, then recoils from the skull’s smell. There is no mention of Hamlet’s age (the problem of which is thereby resolved), and granting that “dozen” need only be the reflexively imprecise unit of measurement of one brought up in the duodecimal thinking of English tradition, there is no difficulty with Yorick’s skull still reeking of putrefaction. As these remarks imply, I take it that the textual discrepancies of Q1 are, as usual, those of simplification. Whoever was responsible for Q1 and however he or they produced it, the text fails to grasp that numerical incoherence is the point of Hamlet’s exchange with the Gravedigger. This incoherence has its root in Shakespeare’s awareness that the cultures of early modern England and Europe were not arithmetically advanced. Although arithmetic belonged to the quadrivium, facility in mental arithmetic (“reckoning”) was confined to merchants, sailors, soldiers, and other more or less artisanal trades. For the general populace, of high and low social status alike, the ability to compute more than the most elementary sums of addition and subtraction depended on the manipulation of physical counters on a board, and recording the results in Roman numerals. And yet at the same time, the impulse to exact measurement and quantification, and with it Arabic numerals, had already begun its transformation of western intellectual life. The dramatic potential of this state of affairs had long since been exploited by Marlowe (who frequently has his characters grasp at numbers in the ineffectual effort to show themselves in control of a situation), and Shakespeare was not slow to turn it to his own ends. As Edward WilsonLee has shown, he did so sustainedly in Troilus and

Cressida. But perhaps the most obvious place to look in establishing this claim is The Winter’s Tale – where much is made of the discrepancy between the apparent precision of numeration and the vagueness with which numbers are, in reality, employed. A Clown enters, destined to be swindled by Autolycus. The Clown is attempting to figure out the value of the wool he has shorn from his 1500 sheep, but has to give up: “I cannot do’t without counters”. Like any good cony-catcher, Autolycus is as astute as he is opportunistic. He does not share the Clown’s difficulties, and sets to work on his mark. The exchange between Hamlet and the Gravedigger is animated by exactly the same cultural dynamics. Both characters enjoy feeling like the cleverest person in any conversation; both will say anything to ensure that they get to feel like this; in the culminating skirmish of their wits, neither shows more than the most rudimentary notion of how to compute numbers in general, or of how to use numbers to compute time in particular. Shakespeare quickly establishes that the Gravedigger, like Dogberry, is prone to detach verba from res for self-aggrandising rhetorical effect. In describing the prospect of Ophelia having drowned herself in self-defence, he asserts to his less loquacious partner that “It must be se offendendo” (5.1.9). He means the opposite (i.e., se defendendo), but the chance to accrue some Latinate cultural capital is too good to miss. A little later, he theorises that if a man goes to the water, “but the water come to him and drown him, he drowns not himself. Argal, he that is not guilty of his own death shortens not his own life” (5.2.18-20). For “argal”, he means to say ergo; he again seeks to repeat a Latin word that he has heard others use to impressive effect, but that he does not himself understand. Once Hamlet and Horatio arrive in the graveyard, Hamlet begins to speculate about the various disreputable parts that the people whose skulls are before them might formerly have played (“here’s fine revolution”). He and the Gravedigger then engage in some mutual chicanery about lying, lying down, and the business of digging graves. The shakespeare magazine

“Adolescence is an age of apprenticeship in the world, of preparation for the challenges ahead” Gravedigger considers answering direct questions to be dull or otherwise beneath him. Hamlet sees his answers as a sort of “equivocation”, and informs Horatio that “these three years I have took note of it, the age is grown so picked [i.e. pernickety, nit-picking] that the toe of the peasant comes so near the heel of the courtier that he galls his kibe” (5.1.135-38); the sophistry of the lower orders is snapping at the heels of the nobility. Quite aside from the fact that Hamlet has spent most of the last year or two (or three) away from Elsinore as a student at Wittenberg, the most important aspect of this declaration is that his “three years” is meaningless as anything other than a placeholder for “of late” or “in recent history”. It operates on the same level as the “he walks for four hours together” (i.e., for long periods of time) that Polonius observes of Hamlet at 2.2.160, or Hamlet’s own assertion that not even “Two thousand souls and twenty thousand ducats” (i.e., a vast accumulation of manpower and money) would be enough to “debate the question of this straw” between Fortinbras and “the Polack” (4.4.25-26). “Three years” nevertheless has the feel of considered observation, and leads Hamlet to ask the Gravedigger how long he has been about his business. The Gravedigger seems no keener to answer this question than those that preceded it, but his response is historically specific: since the day on which Old Hamlet defeated Old Fortinbras and the younger Hamlet was born. Remarkably, even for one who has trouble reckoning with numbers, Hamlet shows no sign of being able to quantify when his father’s famous victory took place. Furthermore, the Gravedigger asserts that “every fool” knows this event to have been synchronous with Hamlet’s birth, and it beggars belief to suppose that Hamlet has never heard of this synchroneity for himself – especially as it makes his royal birth, like his royal patronymic, seem distinctly auspicious. The conclusion? Hamlet does not know how old he is. He immediately changes the subject when the Gravedigger’s comments threaten to lay this reality bare. The Gravedigger may or may not suspect that his high-

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born interlocutor is, in fact, the “young Hamlet” of whom he is now being pushed to speak, but must sense that the drift of their conversation towards matters of state puts him in danger. He needs to tread carefully, and once he guesses that his questioner has a limited facility with numbers, sees a gratifying way out. His gambit succeeds: unable to fathom what the Gravedigger says about his age and the duration of career, Hamlet counter-bluffs with a question about rates of bodily decay. From there, the Gravedigger – aided by the skull of Yorick (if, indeed, it is the skull of Yorick) – has no difficulty in redirecting their discussion to safer territory; in this case, to the conditions of mortality. In dwelling on Yorick and then discovering the death of Ophelia, Hamlet lets numbers go, but soon returns to them in belittling the “dozy arithmetic” of Osric’s memory. (As he does in claiming to understand the “odds” on his fencing match with Laertes.) The rub is that the Gravedigger is no better at the numerical computation of time than he is at Latin. His historical measurements of sixteen, thirty, and twenty-three years are empty signifiers – no more than words. They are self-contradictory, but he doesn’t care: he gets to put one over on someone of a far higher social and educational status than himself, and who has presumed to question his work. So, the numbers in the graveyard scene as recorded in Q2 and the Folio designedly do not compute. They represent the inability of Hamlet and of the Gravedigger to reckon with historical numbers in their heads, and the desire of both characters to look as if they can. Both “sexten/ sexton” (Q2) and “sixeteene” (the Folio) lend themselves to the incongruity of what follows (the more so as “sexten heere” and “sixteene yeare” are likely to have been all but homophonic in early modern English), but “sixeteene” seems to me the better reading. In clashing so directly with the twenty-three years that Yorick is supposed to have been in the ground, it allows the exchange to make even less sense, thereby capturing more of the Gravedigger’s pretentions and self-regard, and of

In his midtwenties, Paapa Essiedu (pictured here in the Gravedigger scene) was a boyish-looking Hamlet for the RSC (2016-18).

Hamlet’s inability to expose them. Folio “sixteene” as a corruption of Q2 “sexten” cannot be ruled out, but nor can the possibility that just as Q2 stumbles over the nonsensical se offendendo, so it sees that sixteen (howsoever spelled) is contradicted by the reported death of Yorick, and emends it to “sexten”. On one level, a far from unreasonable procedure. Unfortunately, to convey the impression of nonsense is precisely Shakespeare’s point: Hamlet and the Gravedigger only feign to know what they are talking about. Their attempts to speak the new language of numbers offer a comically macabre miniature of the pretence, and frequent bravado, that drives life in Elsinore as a whole. Ever the radical egalitarian, Shakespeare reminds us that the willingness to mislead does not belong to the socially elevated orders alone; Denmark’s afflictions cannot be explained by looking in isolation at the vices, or even the crimes, of those who rule it. What does all of this tell us about Hamlet’s age? As his student status suggests, he is an adolescent. That is, an inhabitant of the intermediate category between boyhood and the assumption of adult masculinity; on the seven-stage model of human life familiar to Shakespeare, the period between one’s fourteenth and twenty-first birthdays. To venture anything more precise is guesswork or special pleading, and to maintain that he is thirty – perhaps with reference to the age of Richard Burbage when

he played him for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men – is unsustainable. In As You Like It, Jaques portrays adolescence as the age of “the lover, / Sighing like a furnace, with a woeful ballad / Made to his mistress’ eyebrow”, and his depiction maps well onto Hamlet’s relationship with Ophelia – before and after she jilts him. But in most iterations, adolescence has a different aspect. It is an age of apprenticeship in the world, of preparation for the challenges ahead, and of fitting one’s understanding to one’s burgeoning physical and sexual potency; it is also marked by heat, impetuousness, and impatience. Ecce homo.

Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness is published by Princeton University Press Buy it here

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! Tom Hiddleston “Revenge is a fool’s errand,it gets you nothing. And Hamlet is really about that.The interesting thing about playing Hamlet is that as an actor one is so aware of the size of the play and the significance of the role… And then when you approach playing it, you have to meet the play head on and confront it.” Tom Hiddleston, speaking to Jenelle Riley for Variety

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Tom Hiddleston

Left: Hamlet (Tom Hiddleston). Below: Guildastern (Eleanor de Rohan), Horatia (Caroline Martin), Hamlet (Tom Hiddleston) Rosencrantz (Ayesha Antoine).

The Avenger Disassembled If you were one of those lucky enough to get a ticket, director Kenneth Branagh’s massively over-subscribed RADA Hamlet starring Tom Hiddleston was all about the “intimacy and MRXIRWMX]² SJ EGXMRK GVEJX EX MXW ½RIWX Words by Maddy Fry

Photos by Johan Persson shakespeare magazine

! Tom Hiddleston

Left:Tom Hiddleston as Hamlet and Caroline Martin as Horatia. Above: Hamlet and King Claudius (Nicholas Farrell). Right: Hamlet battles Laertes (Irfan Shamji).

ften I’ve found it comforting that most of Tom Hiddleston’s alter-egos seem incapable of making good choices. Whether it’s the PTSDinspired alcoholism of Freddie Page in The Deep Blue Sea or the Shakespearean sibling angst of the Marvel villain Loki, most of his characters are dogged by despair and failure. Even the nefarious Prince Hal of The Hollow Crown and the enigmatic Jonathan Pine at the centre of The Night Manager go through considerable travails before fulfilling their true purpose. It seemed apt that director Kenneth Branagh described the Prince of Denmark, that great monument to unfulfilled ambition, as “the role he was born to play.” For any devotee of Hiddleston, the chance to

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see him as Hamlet in a tiny central London theatre, nestled within the walls of his old drama school, felt akin to seeing The Beatles at the Cavern Club – the sense of a colossal talent scaled down while losing none of its potency. The result was little short of magical. Up close and personal in RADA’s 160-seat auditorium, the play opened with Hamlet sitting in near-darkness at the piano, crooning out a low wolf-howl of defeat. “And will he not come again?” our hero moaned, lamenting the absence of his father via the heart-wrenching cadence of “No, no he is dead. Go to thy deathbed...” Hamlet’s alienation and sense of betrayal over his mother’s hasty remarriage was, particularly for

Tom Hiddleston

those in the front row, frighteningly visceral, made manifest through kicking and screaming, spit, sweat and tears. In turn, Hiddleston masterfully depicted Hamlet’s inability to be what those around him needed – supportive, vengeful, loving, or even just consistent. Much has been made of how HiddleHamlet’s madness was undoubtedly feigned, yet the production’s great strength was the ease with which he switched to an all-too-real malice and vindictiveness. His brushing aside of Ophelia

(Kathryn Wilder), triggering her fatal sense of abandonment, combined with his shrugging off the deaths of his informant friends, were shocking in their callousness. Yet one couldn’t shake the feeling that the derangement and loss of control in Hamlet’s eyes after murdering Polonius (Sean Foley) was genuine. The final duel resulting in the Prince’s death, barely two feet from my seat, was no less agonising for its portrayal of one man imprisoned by grief, with its destructive effects spiralling outwards.

“More than anything, this Hamlet was about bereavement and family breakdown” shakespeare magazine

! Tom Hiddleston “Hamlet’s alienation and sense of betrayal over his mother’s remarriage was frighteningly visceral”

Above:The Ghost of Hamlet’s father, King Hamlet (Ansu Kabia). Right: Hamlet’s mother, Queen Gertrude (Lolita Chakrabarti).

The threat of military conquest by Norway always hung in the foreground, but more than anything this Hamlet was about bereavement and family breakdown – the torment caused by our relatives moving on, even if we can’t, and robbing us of any space to heal. Proof, as though it were needed, that Shakespeare speaks to us for the moment we find ourselves in. Few plays have left me waking up sobbing the next day, but the rage, remorse and anguish on display still resonated, to the refrain throughout of “Go to thy deathbed...” Yet on the night, for those in attendance it was three hours of uncomplicated happiness. Watching Hiddleston seamlessly recite ‘To be, or not to be’

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right in front of me was enough to make me feel thankful for my pulse. As much as I loved Benedict Cumberbatch’s 2015 turn at the Barbican, it couldn’t rival RADA’s Hamlet for intimacy and intensity of craftsmanship.

This performance of Hamlet took place on 20 September 2017 at the Jerwood Vanbrugh Theatre, London

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! Andrew Scott “With Hamlet… we mourn our own tragedies as they are reflected on the stage”

SOUL-SEARCHING

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Andrew Scott

Behind the sofa: Andrew Scott’s Hamlet had a watchful quality, in a production where surveillance technology was given a notable supporting role.

WITH SCOTT Irish actor Andrew Scott delivered an “exquisite, fragile” performance in Robert Icke’s “electrifying, heart-wrenching production” of Shakespeare’s Hamlet at London’s Harold Pinter Theatre. Words: Clare Petre Photos: Manuel Harlan

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! Andrew Scott “Laertes became a man torn between his loyalty to the court and his desire to forgive Hamlet” Gertrude (Juliet Stevenson) attempts to restrain Laertes (Luke Thompson).

irector Robert Icke’s exceptional contemporary interpretation of Shakespeare’s most famous play has had plenty of time to sit. Indeed, London has seen two further Hamlets (Tom Hiddleston’s and Benet Brandreth’s) since this formidable piece of theatre closed, but Andrew Scott’s is the one that seems to haunt the capital. With its soundtrack of some of Bob Dylan’s most touching songs, this electrifying, heart-wrenching production has plunged a poisoned foil into the hearts of thousands. Andrew Scott’s exquisite, fragile Hamlet was offset beautifully by Jessica Brown-Findlay’s graceful yet physically strong Ophelia (her dance

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background was evident throughout), whose weakness, ironically, lay in her attempting to convince herself and the court of her strength. I have seen criticism of the “monotony” of Angus Wright’s Claudius, as if his performance left something to be desired. I disagree – Wright is an accomplished actor and his Claudius was cunningly crafted. He left us in no doubt as to how Derbhle Crotty’s elegant and likeable Gertrude, in the midst of her confusion and grief, was attracted to his lupine, prowling figure but saw the error of her ways so quickly in the closet scene. Peter Wight’s Polonius was apparently succumbing to the insidious effects of dementia,

Andrew Scott

but his performance lost none of the character’s levity. Aided by a cast of such strength, the play felt so fresh that some of its most famous and often most laboured words became unfamiliar. Icke’s daring direction served to emphasise this by giving several of the play’s best-known moments entirely new readings. Laertes’ plea to use another foil, as the one he has chosen is “too heavy”, for example, became a sudden second thought – a desperate and urgent cry to avoid the inevitable, and perhaps use a foil untainted with poison. He became a man torn between his loyalty to the court, and his desire

to forgive Hamlet and begin to define a better future. For the duel scene itself, Shakespeare’s words were all but abandoned, the fight performed as a dumb-show to Bob Dylan’s ‘Not Dark Yet’. Emotionally manipulative? Perhaps. Facile? Possibly. Heart-breaking? Undeniably. This production’s outstanding competence lay in giving its audience the opportunity to share grief and express its own, usually muted, sorrows. Shared emotion equates to shared humanity. As a fully paid-up member of Generation X, I cannot remember a more (over)dramatic outpouring of love and grief than that which we witnessed after

Hamlet’s brooding isolation is neatly updated and encapsulated in this scene.

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Andrew Scott

“Angus Wright is an accomplished actor, his lupine, prowling Claudius is cunningly crafted” Barry Aird as the play’s infamously irreverent Gravedigger.

Awkwardly positioned between Claudius and Gertrude, Hamlet is forced to smile for the cameras.

the death of Princess Diana, which has been much discussed of late, it being the 20th anniversary of the Paris crash. There was, at the time, an extraordinary and tribal response to her carefully orchestrated funeral. With Diana, we were not mourning the death of a princess so much as celebrating the opportunity to experience human communality. So with Hamlet, while we feel acutely his pain, Ophelia’s, Gertrude’s, we mourn our own tragedies as they are reflected upon the stage. When we weep for Hamlet and his fellow characters, we are weeping for our own grief and for the sense of loss which might permeate our own lives, but using Shakespeare’s writing as a conduit. To paraphrase

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Gertrude, this Elsinore turned our eyes into our very souls. I fell in love with Hamlet 30 years ago, and in that time many interpretations have come and gone. But it is Andrew Scott’s that has remained with me above all others, and which will do until usurped. I suspect I am in for a long wait.

This performance of Hamlet took place on Monday 24 July 2017 at the Harold Pinter Theatre, London, with Derbhle Crotty in the role of Gertrude.

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! 3TLIPME Â½PQ

British actress Daisy Ridley, who plays the title role in Ophelia.

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3TLIPME ½PQ

Time

Travelling

with Ophelia Painter, illustrator and occasional actor Stewart Kenneth Moore shares his MQTVIWWMSRMWXMG SFWIVZEXMSRW JVSQ XLI '^IGL WLSSX SJ XLI VIGIRX ½PQ MRWTMVIH F] 7LEOIWTIEVI´W ,EQPIX

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! 3TLIPME ½PQ

(Left to right) Daisy Ridley as Ophelia, and as Rey in Star Wars:The Last Jedi.

ot so much “Who’s There?” as “Who and where am I?” While they moved the time machine I took in my surroundings. I had become an old priest, moored, anchored, for a few days, somewhere deep in the past. The location could not have been more beautiful. Seated at the edge of all the machines I looked out at a stunning summer view, a small pond, a steep field of green grass running away from me to meet a hillside and escape into a tree line in the sunset. Actors are time travellers and cameras are time machines. They capture light and change its speed, they frame the moment forever. Films take you back to the past and they wait as time capsules for future generations. If you ever find yourself in costume, on a film set, somewhere deep in the countryside, you will know how easy it is to imagine you are actually in some past century. Easy, that is, until you get hungry and wander back to Catering and leave the hazy world of fireflies for that of the crackle of walkie-

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talkies and gaffer tape. I had been cast in Ophelia, the new film directed by Claire McCarthy starring Daisy Ridley in the titular role. Based on the novel by Lisa Klein, this is the story of Hamlet and Ophelia retold from the point-of-view of Ophelia. In this way the story shares similarities to the Tom Stoppard play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Both take a parallax view of the classic narrative. The pond was not in shot but it made me think of the painting of Ophelia by John Everett Millais. The time-machine (the camera) was behind me at a small yard that seemed like an old abandoned graveyard with one small section of chapel wall remaining. A scene both humble and epic that could have been painted by John William Waterhouse. Czech set builders are so very good at their work that I’ve given up trying to discern reality from set design. This little yard sat at the edge of a tiny village, not even a village – a hamlet. No pun intended. The residents were out silently watching the strange goings on. Hollywood had appeared out of nowhere with its time machine and its many trucks and time travellers (crew). The locals stood and watched as we changed the weather, conjuring a cold downpour on a warm summer evening, I think

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“Ophelia has an excellent cast, including Daisy Ridley, Naomi Watts and Clive Owen” we may even have brought the moon with us. This is a fairly vast illuminated ball, a moon in essence, that is lassoed and suspended nearby for lighting purposes. It takes a long time to film a few scenes because we go back and forth filming various close-ups and reaction shots, and from this the editor will later put together an aggregate of all our actions and reactions. It’s always a surprise to see the final outcome. You might shoot a scene ten different ways, so you’d think you’d have a good memory of what happened, yet it’s always a surprise to see the final version. The theme of Hamlet and Ophelia has been popping up in my work for years now. I’ve sketched my fellow actors at work, mostly on stage. The series that has slowly emerged, such as it is, has no real title and I’m not planning on showing it any time soon, but it’s basically a study of ‘stagecraft’. I’ve drawn scenes from Hamlet and Macbeth (on stage and rehearsals) and even created a Macbeth graphic novel based on the work of the Prague Shakespeare Company. I’ve also studied the players of Blood, Love and Rhetoric at work on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. So my studio has quite a few images based on some form of Hamlet. Add to this the redoubling weirdness of a chat between scenes

with an actor who, I suddenly realise, is the son of that particular parallax playwright. All of this made working on this film very familiar and more than a bit coincidental. After all, I had only just portrayed Czech theologian Jan Hus (1369-1415) for Nat Geo, so I’d been walking the walk, or, the dogma, only a few weeks prior. And in the weeks before auditioning I had begun asking why it was I only ever seem to meet male directors, where are the female directors? This question seemed like an epiphany (I am a man, it would). But, I wondered, where is the female perspective in cinema? And is the lack of that perspective one reason for the rot? Probably not, but female direction shouldn’t be a parallax view, it should be just another norm. To this day I’ve never met a female director of photography. I’ve met and worked with a few female student directors, perhaps an indication of the changing balance, but never on a big budget film, or any film for that matter. The only exception being Susan Tully directing us on an episode of Britannia (the time machine forcing me back a few thousand years this time, and into the sandals of a Roman revolutionary) for Sky television. And then, suddenly, there was Claire, like Susan, another excellent director and, for that, no different than so many. Ophelia (Daisy Ridley) with Queen Gertrude (Naomi Watts).

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! 3TLIPME ½PQ Two of Stewart’s paintings inspired by Tom Stoppard’s Hamlet-referencing play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.

By now you may be wondering why I am not writing about the stars, the roles, other nitty-gritty. Well, I can’t, time-travellers take a vow of omertà when they sign on the dotted line. I cannot tell you what I saw, what happened. I can say that it was a good-natured place, it was a good set. I might be able to tell you about a prank I pulled – an absolute blinder, to be honest – but unfortunately it is connected with a key moment in the story and would be a spoiler. I’m no spoiler. I might be able to tell you about the dead body, a life-cast, an avatar identical in the smallest detail to an actual dead man, that lay on the grass and why that was so hilarious... but I can’t. I can say the villagers noted it but were apparently unfazed and that too was amusing. Ophelia has an excellent cast. As I’ve said, Daisy Ridley as Ophelia but also starring Naomi Watts (Gertrude), Clive Owen (Claudius) and Tom Felton (Laertes). Two you may not know – George MacKay as Hamlet and Devon Terrell in the role of Horatio – are both superb actors. I didn’t realise I’d seen George in one of my favourite TV shows of the previous year. He was in the miniseries 11.22.63, about a time traveller, played by James Franco, attempting to prevent the assassination of John F Kennedy. I wished I could have told him how much I enjoyed the series. Stranger still, when I got home my son suggested we watch a film after dinner, one he’d been waiting to see. He’s very interested in politics and told us

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about a film about the young Obama, he chose it out of the blue. I was stunned and found myself saying “You’re not going to believe this, but I was just in the car with that guy... today!” It is interesting to see how actors shape a scene and, in some sense, are guardians of logic in the story. The time machine sometimes remains on standby while an actor questions the logic of an action. It may all become clear to the actor and we move forward in time as planned. Or the director may be alerted by the actor to the lack of logic in the scene, make some adjustment, and the timeline shifts slightly and the scene becomes more logical, it can go either way. This is the alchemy of motion picture storytelling at its heart, and actors don’t get much credit for those key moments. Before you know it, it’s a wrap and the set and all its players evaporate. Before you know it, the whole crazy event is over and “Tis in my memory lock’d...”

Stewart Kenneth Moore (aka Booda) is a painter, graphic novelist and actor. He has recently completed acting work on Lore for Amazon, and is currently developing a new comic strip with writer Pat Mills. You can buy his graphic novel of Macbeth Here

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! Samira Ahmed â&#x20AC;&#x153;The third age of Hamlet for women is post-40. I am completely Team Gertrudeâ&#x20AC;?

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Samira Ahmed

Brodcaster and cultural critic Samira Ahmed grapples with one of the the thorniest questions in literary and theatrical history…

“Why do

women love Hamlet?” shakespeare magazine

! Samira Ahmed Samira interviewed Tom Hiddleston in March 2017.

here are three ages of Hamlet. Like a lot of women, I first encountered Hamlet as a teenager, and of course I fell in love. He’s misunderstood by the adults, he’s disgusted by their phoneyness. So far all so very Holden Caulfield. The first soliloquy “Oh that this too too sullied flesh...” is when you fall in love with Hamlet. However as you get older, by your late twenties, the way Hamlet treats Ophelia is impossible to reconcile. It’s like Molly Ringwald rewatching the old John Hughes movies, shocked at the sexual harassment all the way through – seeing Judd Nelson looking up her skirt. All the crude sexual references. What way is that to speak to the woman you love? And in the age of Me Too, I think it’s interesting how we try to find get-out clauses for Hamlet. There’s something of the tormented dark

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soul in romantic fiction that you can trace back to Hamlet that appeals to young women who think they can rescue him. Even Kylo Ren in Star Wars. Misunderstood, cruel because he’s tormented and, guess what, it’s all tied up with his dodgy relationship with his father, grandfather and his hated Uncle Luke. There are revisionist Hamlets where women have rightly tried to give Ophelia more agency for female readers. The YA novel Dating Hamlet by Lisa Fiedler was written with that in mind. In the intro it says “She felt female characters like Ophelia always got a raw deal... so she gave them the guts to change their own destinies”. The third age of Hamlet for women is post40. I am completely Team Gertrude. I realised she might well have been only 15 when she had an arranged marriage, possibly to a much older man. What was really made clear in the wonderful

Samira Ahmed

“By your late twenties, the way Hamlet treats Ophelia is impossible to reconcile”

Clockwise from top: Star Wars baddie Kylo Ren has some of Hamlet’s darkly destructive angst. Laurence Olivier’s hugely MR¾YIRXMEP ½PQ SJ Hamlet. Maxine Peake played Hamlet at the 6S]EP )\GLERKI MR Juliet Stevenson as Hamlet’s mother Gertrude, 2017.

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! Samira Ahmed Andrew Scott/Juliet Stevenson Almeida/West End production last year was how she was finally in a happy marriage and having wonderful sex for the first time with a considerate lover. I did discuss this with Juliet Stevenson, so I know I’m right. And here’s Hamlet, totally self-absorbed and unable to cope with the idea that she has basically finally found happiness with another man. Actress Nicola Walker told me Sarah Phelps has written a version of Hamlet from Gertrude’s point of view. Perhaps we need more of that, in the way that Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea was able to give Bertha’s story and challenge Jane Eyre. I don’t have a problem with women playing Hamlet. We need to take ownership of the right to be the angst-ridden hero/ine who matters, and it emphasises the feminine aspects of the character – but I think it changes everything. Under patriarchy a female Hamlet is such a different being. I find it interesting that Janet Suzman – a very famous Ophelia opposite David Warner – wrote a book,

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Not Hamlet, frustrated by the lack of such a part for women, but is insistently against women playing those male roles. The thing I can’t fathom is Hamlet being 30. That makes no sense, for him as a young romantic hero. That seems practically middle-aged for Shakespeare’s age, though more palatable today in the age of eternal middle youth. But I would say Hamlet can still grip your heart the way he did when I was a young girl. The Paapa Essiedu RSC Hamlet moved me more than any for years, for the tears in his eyes as he faces his death at the end, suddenly realising how, despite all his clever plotting, he was a naive young man, who could not conceive of the depth of the adult wickedness of his Uncle and his courtiers. For all his faults, he is a noble soul.

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! Victorian Hamlet

“A hundred ducats apiece for his picture in little...” The Victorian Illustrated Shakespeare Archive is a wondrous free resource compiled and curated by Dr Michael Goodman of Cardiff University. So we asked him to select some of his favourite examples of Hamlet-related artwork from the archive.

1. Kenny Meadows, Hamlet Dramatis Personae

This is a clever example of the illustrator Kenny Meadows commenting upon the theatricality of the page and, indeed, the illustrated edition itself. By alluding to the device traditionally used in the theatre to signify the start of a play – the lifting of the curtain – Meadows draws (quite literally) our attention to the differences between stage and page and wittily challenges us to reconcile the two. But there is something more going on here. Hamlet is a play which is all about looking – things seen and unseen, the observer becoming the observed, and the dangers that lie with misunderstanding what our eyes are telling us. By opening his illustrated imagining of the play in this way, Meadows is also implicating us, the readers, within the play’s narrative. The illustration is an effective instance of word and image combining to create a larger and more richer meaning than they could in and by themselves.

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Victorian Hamlet

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! Victorian Hamlet “Knight’s editions focus more on the geography and objects in the plays than on the characters” 2.

2. G.F. Sargent, Platform at Elsinore.

3. G.F. Sargent, Church and Churchyard at Elsinore. 4. G.F. Sargent, View of Elsinore.

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Victorian Hamlet

5. G.F. Sargent, Hamlet’s Grave

One of the most overlooked editions in VISA (going by the stats) is the one published by Charles Knight. Knight, who was a publisher and not an illustrator, included in his edition the work of many different artists in many different styles, and I suspect the reason this edition is the least used is because it focuses more on the geography and objects of the plays than on the characters. In effect, the edition singularly treats each play like a history play – as if they depict actual

historical events. Nevertheless, it is a fascinating document which reveals what Knight thought [EW WMKRM½GERX JSV LMW :MGXSVMER audience to know about the plays of William ‘Shakspere’ (Knight was preoccupied by ideas of historical authenticity and concluded, along with others, that ‘Shakspere’ was the likely spelling of ‘Shakespeare’ in the early modern period). When I have been teaching students, a valuable way of approaching the illustrations in Knight’s edition has been to think of them, to use a term from cinema, as setting up an

‘establishing shot’ and depicting the scene where the play’s action will take place. These four examples, all by the artist G.F. 7EVKIRX EVI XIVVM½G I\EQTPIW SJ this. We see Elsinore Castle from a distance (2) and then we can ‘zoom in’ closer in the illustration in ‘Platform at Elsinore’. We can use the same strategy again with the illustrations ‘Church and Churchyard at Elsinore’ before transitioning to ‘Hamlet’s Grave’. But let’s, for the time being, imagine that we could zoom in even further onto the ‘Platform at Elsinore’. What would we see?

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! Victorian Hamlet 6.

6. H.C. Selous, The Ghost.

We would probably witness Horatio encountering Hamlet’s Ghost, as depicted here by Henry Courtney Selous. This is not just one of my favourite illustrations from Hamlet, but one of my favourites in the whole archive. Whilst the other illustrators depict the ghost shrouded in darkness or unsatisfactorily, Selous uses his characteristic light style to create an image that is bold, distinct and satisfyingly composed. There is a real sense of physicality to both Horatio

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and Marcellus, which makes the disparity between them and the otherworldliness of the ghost even more pronounced. Indeed, what this illustration I\LMFMXW MW XLI ½RI WOMPP SJ XLI wood engraver – the craftsman who would realise the artist’s illustrations by engraving them onto a block of wood. If you look closely at many Victorian wood engraved Illustrations you will often see two signatures. In this case, at the bottom left of the image you can just about make out the initials H.C.S (Henry

Courtney Selous, the illustrator), whilst on the right we see the signature of F. Wentworth (the engraver). The signatures remind us that the world of Victorian image making, much like the theatre, was a collaborative process and often, in the case of these illustrated editions, an elaborate production as well.

7. H.C. Selous, Hamlet Full Page Introductory Illustration.

Victorian Hamlet

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! Victorian Hamlet 8.

8. Kenny Meadows, Hamlet Introductory Remarks

Just as there are innumerable ways to stage one of Shakespeare’s plays, there are also a vast amount of ways to illustrate them. One of the most interesting aspects of VISA is that it allows us to easily explore how the different illustrators interpreted the same scene. These two illustrations by Selous and Meadows are a case in point with both demonstrating the different artistic styles of the two artists. In XLI ½VWX MPPYWXVEXMSR F] 7IPSYW [I could be very much be mistaken in thinking that Hamlet is a sort of

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pastoral drama – a kind of more serious counterpart to As You Like It. With Meadows’ illustration, LS[IZIV [I EVI ½VQP] MR XLI realm of the macabre and the gothic. While Selous’ illustration represents wickedness occurring in an idyllic landscape (the snake on the ground makes us think that we could be in the Garden of Eden here), in Meadow’s interpretation of the scene even the trees look dark and malevolent. Something is indeed rotten in the state of Denmark. As ever with Meadows there is also some fourth wall breaking

going on as well, with Claudius (or is it?) clutching at the wall with ‘Introductory Remarks’ written upon it. The effect is unsettling for the reader and it is possibly a visual reference to Claudius’ line in Act III when he talks about his ‘cursed hand’. The fact that both these illustrations appear near to the start of their respective editions (before the play has actually begun) means XLEX FSXL MPPYWXVEXMSRW JYP½P XLI purpose a trailer does for a ½PQ EX XLI GMRIQE ¯ XLI] TMUYI SYV GYVMSYWMX] [MXL WMKRM½GERX moments of drama and we wish to learn more.

Victorian Hamlet

“John Gilbert presents Ophelia here with great skill – alone, still, and garlanded with flowers” 9. 9. John Gilbert, Ophelia

John Gilbert’s portrait of Ophelia is perhaps the best and most interesting imagining of the character in the archive. That said, none of the illustrators’ depictions of Ophelia are particularly good (Meadows’ Ophelia is awful) and indeed, more broadly, there is a certain reluctance to fully engage with Shakespeare’s female characters to ER] WMKRM½GERX I\XIRX Whether this comes from the cultural and political context in which the illustrators were working or, as I suspect, they found it easier to depict men, is for a future research project. Nevertheless, Gilbert presents Ophelia here with great skill. Alone, still, and garlanded [MXL ¾S[IVW FIJSVI her ‘muddy death’, the WMKRM½GERGI SJ XLI moment is visually WMKRM½IH F] XLI illustration taking up three quarters of the page. Of course, the problem for any artist wishing to depict Ophelia in the second half of the nineteenth century is that it will be immediately compared with the famous John Everett Millais painting from 1851-2. Gilbert sensibly chooses to portray Ophelia just before the scene Millais depicts and it is no less poignant because of that.

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! Victorian Hamlet 10.

10. Kenny Meadows, Hamlet, Full Page Introductory Illustration. 11. H. C. Selous, Hamlet and Claudius. 12. John Gilbert, Poor Yorick. 11.

12.

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Victorian Hamlet

13.

13. H. C. Selous, Mr Henry Irving as Hamlet

%RH Â˝REPP] SJ GSYVWI Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark himself. Because, as everyone knows, you cannot have Hamlet without Hamlet!

Explore the Victorian Illustrated Shakespeare Archive Here

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! Gyles Brandreth “What makes this special? What makes it justifiable? It’s that we are a family fascinated by Hamlet”

Shakespeare’s Hamlet becomes the ultimate domestic drama in the hands of Gyles Brandreth and family.

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Gyles Brandreth

HOW’S YOUR FATHER? In the summer of 2017, veteran British author ERH FVSEHGEWXIV +]PIW &VERHVIXL JYP½PPIH E long-held ambition to appear in a production of Hamlet. Acting alongside him were his own son and daughter-in-law. He tells us all about it. Interview by Jen Richardson Photography by Francis Loney

Tell me about your 90-minute, strippeddown version of Hamlet, and how you came to take multiple roles in the play.

“Yes. How did this come about? I suppose it came about because I’m an almost lifelong Hamlet obsessive – who isn’t? And I thought to myself, ‘I’d like to play Hamlet’. Then my wife said to me ‘Please, don’t be absurd, you can’t play Hamlet, you’re knocking 70. I said, ‘Sir Frank Benson was still a very credible Hamlet aged 72. The older Hamlet often works very well. Michael Redgrave played Hamlet at Stratford when he was 50 years of age. There have been plenty of ‘old’ Hamlets’. ‘Be sensible,’ she said. “So I thought ‘OK, I can’t play Hamlet, but there are two characters called Hamlet in the play, Hamlet Senior and Hamlet Junior. I shall play Hamlet the ghost’. Then I thought, ‘Who’s going to play Hamlet?’, and it occurred to me that my son could play Hamlet. “My son is, by day, a

barrister, but by night he’s a performer and he is an author. He has written, for example, recently two novels – the first one was called The Spy of Venice. They’re novels based on Shakespeare’s lost years. In fact, you should be interviewing him in due course, and am sure will be! He knows all about Shakespeare, but more to the point, he’s rhetoric coach at the Royal Shakespeare Company and, as readers of Shakespeare Magazine don’t need to be told, rhetoric was a core subject in Elizabethan schools, and at grammar school Shakespeare would have learned rhetoric. “Rhetoric imbues all of Shakespeare, and my son is a brilliant rhetoric coach. I thought this would be a brilliant opportunity for him to put what he preaches to the test. As a result of this, we came up with this idea of doing a family Hamlet, because why do Hamlet? Well, you do Hamlet because you want to. And once you’ve done it, you realise that you want to keep on doing it, but shakespeare magazine

! Gyles Brandreth “Benet plays Hamlet. Kosha plays Ophelia and Gertrude, but also Rosencrantz and Horatio”

Husband and wife Hamleteers Benet Brandreth and Kosha Engler.

I’ll come back to that later on. But we thought, what makes this special? What makes it justifiable? It’s that we are a family fascinated by Hamlet. I’m going to play the older characters, my son is just going to play Hamlet, and by chance he is married to a very fine American actress called Kosha Engler who was born in Maryland, and before she came to live in the UK performed at the Folger Shakespeare Theatre in Washington DC. “So we thought ‘she can do the female parts, I can do the older parts, and Benet can do Hamlet’. We were encouraged to do this by Steven Berkoff. He wrote a wonderful book years ago called I am Hamlet. In it he reminds us that everyone, every actor, will want to play Hamlet and every actor should and could play Hamlet because what there is in Hamlet is everything, which is what we began

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to discover as we rehearsed and as we played it. Every kind of human experience is there. Then we thought, ‘how are we going to do this with three people?’ Well, my wife and I are patrons of the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond, and we had seen there a number of outstanding Shakespeare for young people productions, all of them brought down to size for either four actors or six actors by a director called Imogen Bond. We’d seen these productions of hers, she is a Shakespeare scholar, and we asked her if she would be interested in creating for us a 90-minute version. “We got on board Simon Evans, a brilliant young director, and he brought with him a colleague as a co-director called David Aula. It was fascinating working with two directors and we gained from that. One of the things that we

Gyles Brandreth

Gyles as the Player King, giving his speech at Hamlet’s request.

discovered that we hadn’t really expected was that the doubling would be revelatory. Benet plays Hamlet, Kosha plays Ophelia and Gertrude, but she also plays Rosencrantz and she plays Horatio, and we’ll come on to Laertes later! Basically, what we discovered was all these characters were all aspects of – well, you see – your friends and family in terms of yourself. Here is Hamlet looking at the people closest to him through the personification of one woman, which becomes suddenly intriguing. “David and Simon took Imogen’s script and played with it a bit. In the play, Simon wanted us to throw in odd lines and speeches from other plays because audiences think they know Hamlet and we’re doing something different here. They were determined to be bold. We wanted to do an intense version, and because we are a family – the reason

for doing it – to do a family Shakespeare and concentrate on the family. Out go the politics, out goes Fortinbras. This is about a family.” With that in mind, we are interested to know which themes, as a family, you found particularly difficult to confront through your characters.

“I think it added something, both for us and, curiously, for the audience. The audience didn’t need to know that we were related, but we’re quite similar in different ways. Could you tell we were father and son? Yes. So I think, for example, people did find the Hamlet the ghost and Hamlet scenes quite touching. When the ghost wanted to go away because dawn was breaking, Hamlet wants to hold onto him, so the ghost had to struggle to get shakespeare magazine

! Gyles Brandreth “A wonderful and terrifying experience” Benet Brandreth

“I was instantly excited” Kosha Engler

“As one of the most performed Shakespeare plays, Hamlet has been done a lot. I have personally seen it done a lot – usually with excellent actors as Hamlet, but often directed in a fairly traditional and predictable way. When Gyles suggested a three-person, family version with a young innovative director I was instantly excited. I loved the idea of breaking open the play in a new way, paring it down to its essence and discovering what that would reveal. Playing so many characters was daunting, thrilling and exhausting. Of all the bold choices we made my favourite, and most controversial, was about Ophelia. “We decided she wasn’t suffering from general ‘madness’ but specifically multiple personality disorder – she’s a textbook case. Instead of actually dying, the trauma of Hamlet rejecting her then murdering her father triggers Ophelia to ‘kill’ her more fragile, submissive personality and replace it with a stronger, aggressive alter ego – her absent brother Laertes. It was a practical as well as a creative decision and some audiences found it challenging, but I just loved giving Ophelia the chance to fight Hamlet at the end and ultimately forgive him on her own terms without another man doing it for her.”

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“For my own part, the production was both a wonderful and a terrifying experience. Wonderful because we got to play with Shakespeare and explore one of his greatest plays. It is important to me that his plays shouldn’t be viewed as museum pieces but as texts that still speak to us, that are alive and reflective of our times. I feel our production had that vitality to it. It was an experiment, more successful in some parts than in others but always, I feel, illuminating the characters and the themes of the play. It was wonderful to feel that we had really explored the text and made something of it. At the same time it was terrifying because the part and the play is so well known. I felt the weight of the history and the expectation on me.”

Gyles Brandreth

Gyles crying as the Ghost with Hamlet just before he departs: “Remember me”.

away. He wanted to hold onto him not because he wanted to hear more, but because it was his Dad. Obviously, from Kosha and Benet’s point of view, they are husband and wife, so the struggle between Ophelia and Hamlet, and being rejected by your husband, was very real. “Because of what we did with Laertes – he has already gone to France, so as Polonius I couldn’t deliver the famous speech to him – so, in fact, we had Ophelia asking Polonius what he had said to Laertes when he saw him off. It became quite touching, actually. Also that it was genuinely my daughter-in-law that I was giving this advice to. So, I think the emotional impact was greater.” You once quoted Steven Berkoff, who you mentioned earlier, as saying that

‘you cannot be miscast as Hamlet’, and that ‘there is something of Hamlet in everybody… the wit will play for laughs, the lunatic for madness’ and so on. What did you see come to the fore in your son’s performance?

“We saw the thinker, the intellectual, the student, the clever person. The directors made him wear his glasses. Benet made a decision before that he would do whatever he was told to do and go with the flow, and he wore his glasses. One performance he didn’t because he had forgotten them, and he was quite thrown. He wore them so he was a studious Hamlet. In years gone by that would have been terribly controversial, but it enabled him to do something with ‘To be, or not to be’ that Sir Derek Jacobi was kind enough to say. He said ‘you are an shakespeare magazine

! Gyles Brandreth “Steven Berkoff reminds us that everyone, every actor, should and could play Hamlet”

Ophelia’s mad scene with Claudius featured a variation of the knife game that was repeated throughout the play.

intellectual, you’re holding a book all the time. You are reading ‘To be, or not to be’ – it’s a philosopher and you’re reading it’. So, he was an intellectual Hamlet.” What would you say Hamlet, as a play, has to offer audiences in 2018? Why does it endure as one of the most popular works?

“It has everything. That is the reason it works, that all human life is there. There are so many facets to it, you find so many aspects of yourself. Anyone – men can play it, women can play it, tall people, short people. You can bring anger to it, you can bring gaiety, because it’s all in there. I think that’s really the reason. Jonathan Slinger, who was a brilliant Hamlet at the RSC, he said to us ‘You will find that you will go on, you can’t stop digging

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with Hamlet. Dig, dig, dig, and there’s still more’. He told us an interesting story that he’d been told by Sir Kenneth Branagh. Kenneth Branagh did Richard III at Chichester and was asked, inevitably, would he like to bring it to London and he said ‘No, I’ve done it at Chichester and I’ve discovered everything there is in this play. I’ve dug deep, and I’ve got it all’. And Jonathan said ‘I’ve also played Richard III, and it’s true. Richard III is a great character to play, but it is what it is’ – Hamlet, you could carry on playing forever.”

Find out more about Gyles Brandreth via his website https://www.gylesbrandreth.net

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! Elsinore

the castle

Shakespeare Magazine’s Editor takes a trip to the real-life Elsinore for a spot of ghost-hunting at Hamlet’s ancestral home – Kronborg Castle. Words: Pat Reid

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Helsingør

Left: Historic print of Kronborg Castle – it looks quite different today. Right: Statues of Hamlet and Ophelia at Helsingør railway Station.

hen asked to think of a Shakespeare character, you might immediately picture an English monarch, like Henry V or Richard III. You could possibly envisage one of the noble Romans that Shakespeare remixed, such as Julius Caesar or Mark Antony (or their Egyptian partner in greatness, Cleopatra). Your mind’s eye might even flash upon one of Shakespeare’s numerous Italian characters – Romeo and Juliet, for example – or an exotic outsider in that world such as Othello (aka The Moor of Venice). However, the character who most epitomises Shakespeare’s works is not English, Roman, Egyptian, Italian or anything else. He is in fact a man who, in the second half of the play that bears his name, introduces himself with the words: “It is I, Hamlet the Dane!” That’s right. The world’s favourite Shakespeare character is from Denmark. And what’s more, you can even pay a visit to his home. Mind you, taking a trip to Kronborg Castle at HelsingØr (Elsinore) can have a strange effect on

the way one imagines Hamlet. For a start, it makes the events of the play feel more real, somehow, as though they were historical fact rather than a decidedly wild creative journey. And once you’ve got it into your head that this is where Hamlet took place, you may start rearranging the scenes, characters and events in the play to fit the layout that Kronborg now reveals to you. As an ardent Shakespearean, I’m especially susceptible to this syndrome. It’s not so much that Kronborg gives flesh and bone to Shakespeare’s tragic imaginings, but it certainly adds monolithic slabs of history-infused masonry – not to mention the ominous beauty of the Danish coast. I’d somehow convinced myself that Hamlet’s Elsinore was situated slap bang in the middle of Denmark’s modern-day capital, Copenhagen, where we’re staying. But in actual fact, Helsingør is about 50 km to the north of the city. The good news is the train journey is covered by the prepaid cards we’ve bought that give you free public transport and entry to various attractions. The scenery is fairly unremarkable, but the train does go through shakespeare magazine

! Elsinore “Kronborg certainly adds monolithic slabs of masonry to Shakespeare’s tragic imaginings” Kronborg Castle, photographed on our visit in October 2015.

a station near the famous Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, and so we plan to stop there on our return journey. Maybe it’s just my excited anticipation but I’m captivated by HelsingØr from the moment I walk out of the station and see the statues of Hamlet and Ophelia mounted there. They aren’t pretty, but their metal features seem to be wrought from tormented passion, dark eroticism and subsumed violence. If I was hoping to find one of the cradles of Europe’s gothic imagination, it seems I’m on the right track. HelsingØr is basically a small maritime town, with sailing boats moored at the harbour and a big ferry waiting to cross the Øresund Strait to Helsingborg in neighbouring Sweden. It’s maybe a 20-minute walk to the castle, but first we stroll by the Maritime Museum and have a look at a fairly new-looking ‘Culture Yard’. There’s cool artworks everywhere and and equally cool-looking Danes of all ages enjoying generous servings of food and drink. Despite its connection with Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy, Denmark has a reputation as the world’s happiest country to uphold. But I like to imagine there’s a dark undercurrent. I can picture Saga Noren, the autistic detective from Scandinavian noir series The Bridge, tracking down a suspect to this award-winning restaurant, leading to a climactic shoot-out among the oven-fired pizzas (with locally-

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sourced ingredients) and bottles of organic lager. Onwards to Kronborg! Well, the castle is certainly an imposing sight, but sadly it simply doesn’t look like a product of the Shakespearean age or earlier. There’s a reason for this. Much of the castle was destroyed by fire in 1629, so it had to be rebuilt. The Royals haven’t lived here since the 1780s, but the Danish army did take up residence for about 300 years. There’s a blunt, hard aspect to the edifice that stands today – it’s like a French château that’s been lifting weights. During Shakespeare’s lifetime however, the castle was very different. In the 1570s, Denmark’s King Frederick II set about remodelling it to the finest standards of the day. One of the architects, Hans Hendrik van Paesschen of Antwerp, also worked on some London landmarks Shakespeare would have known, such as the Royal Exchange. Although the name Kronborg is not mentioned in Hamlet – a shame, since it literally means ‘King Castle’ – it’s likely that Shakespeare would have been aware of it. King Frederick himself was a dynamic and ambitious ruler who came to the Danish throne at the age of 24. He was also King of Norway, and was active in the politics and warfare of the wider region. Indeed, it’s tempting to imagine that Frederick may have inspired some facets of the characters in Hamlet. He died in 1588, the year the Spanish

Helsingør

Armada sailed against England, and also the year that Shakespeare turned 24. So it’s very much Frederick’s Kronborg in my head now, as I enter the castle, noting that it would be fairly difficult for sneaky Fortinbras and his army to gain entry unless invited. The next couple of hours are a blissful blur of courtyards and battlements, banqueting halls and bedchambers, nooks and crannies. There’s a plaque which graciously celebrates Shakespeare and, rather brilliantly, there’s an actor in period costume playing Hamlet’s faithful sidekick Horatio, who tells us the events of the play from that character’s perspective. I even stumble across a pile of dirt left behind by some builders, inspiring me to hammily intone “What is this quintessence of dust?” I’m disappointed to have missed the annual HamletScenen festival which stages Shakespeare productions in the castle, but there’s a terrific photographic exhibition of the festival’s greatest hits, dating back to the 1930s. Here are British theatrical legends aplenty – Gielgud, Olivier, Leigh, the rock star swagger of Richard Burton, Canadian luminary Christopher Plummer (with Michael Caine as Horatio). There’s also a plethora of European actors with every bit as much charisma, and even a smattering of new, young talents including rising star (and occasional Shakespeare Magazine contributor) Jade Anouka. I’ve been so fascinated by the exhibition that I

forget I’ve abandoned my partner and child in the castle’s frankly amazing gift shop. It’s a treasure trove of Shakespearean swag, and I would happily spend all my kroner here, but I’ve just realised that there’s no sign of my family and I’m alone. I search the castle, the courtyard and the battlements. I retrace my steps and peek into the quaint tea rooms we stopped at earlier. I return to the Culture Yard. I’m leaving voicemails and sending texts with increasing anxiety, but there’s no response. I suddenly recall that terrifying 1980s film The Vanishing. Eventually, with rising panic, I return to the station, and there they are. It transpires that they had decided to visit the castle’s dungeon, assuming I was right behind them. The dungeon sounds like a suitably spooky experience, lit only by the glow of visitors’ phone screens – but I’ll have to save that for another time, as our train is about to depart. It’s been a brilliant visit to Elsinore. And, unlike Hamlet, we made it out alive.

Visit Kronborg Castle Above: Horatio tells his side of Hamlet’s story. Above right: Shakespeare swag in the gift shop.

More information on HamletScenen

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! Alice Barclay

Hamlet in the heat of the night The culmination of a Shakespeare acting course for adults run by the Bristol Old Vic, a remarkable abridged version of Hamlet was performed in the room above a community arts venue in Bristol. Words by Alice Barclay

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Alice Barclay

“One of us was stranded in London, waiting for a Megabus instead of playing Ophelia” Participants were ordinary people in everyday clothes. But in performance they became their characters.

group of actors preparing for a performance is a wonderful thing. The cocktail of nerves, adrenalin and concentration is like pure potential energy, and it’s impossible to replicate. When you share with an audience your telling of a Shakespeare play for the first time, things happen that you can’t ever predict. A date has been set, lines have been learnt, people have come to “hear a play”, and there’s an alchemy between the performers, the audience and the words that can take you to another place. That’s why it’s thrilling and empowering and brilliant. Thursday nights at the Southbank Club were busy. On this hot June evening, the Hamlet company waited downstairs for the African drummers to end their rehearsal in the room above that would soon become a theatre. Meanwhile the South Bristol Running Club arrived back in sweaty dribs and drabs to stretch and rehydrate. Perhaps

the only time and place in history where running, drumming and Shakespeare have met in this way? We didn’t know quite what was going to happen that night in the low ceilinged room with the broken fan upstairs. We’d had very little time to practically prepare our Hamlet, we had no set blocking or carefully rehearsed action. The audience would be seated around us in a rectangle, but beyond that it was all up for grabs. We did know that we’d been on an incredible journey to get to that day. I’d led the course and we’d spent ten weeks getting to know, feel and discover as much about Shakespeare as we could, making sure we were match fit for an audience. We’d lost one or two of our number through immovable work commitments and more significant life events. And that night, one of the company was stranded in London after a day at Wimbledon, with all trains to Bristol suspended shakespeare magazine

! Alice Barclay “The alchemy between the performers, audience and words can take you to another place” Polonius awaits his fate at Elsinore.

indefinitely. He was waiting for a Megabus instead of playing Ophelia, so instead of buying a gin and tonic, as I had planned, it meant that I began to look at Act II, Scene 1 with some sense of urgency! My true belief in the need for spontaneity and playfulness, my insistence that good acting is responding truthfully to an impulse (without necessarily needing to know what was going to happen) was to be tested. I would be playing Ophelia without any rehearsal at all. One of the things that the group had hooked onto was the use of cue scripts, which they found to be a quick way into this sense of spontaneous playfulness. Listening is a given when you’ve got a script with only your own lines and the three or four words someone else says before you have to speak. There’s no zoning out, safe in the knowledge that your line isn’t coming up for a while. When we

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first used these scripts (the kind that Shakespeare’s actors used for purely practical reasons), the reaction to the experience had been so profound that all scripts since then had been cue scripts. I had often heard the response from actors that cue scripts alter your quality of listening entirely, and I was used to seeing something intangible occur in an actor’s physicality when that was happening. I was less used to the reflection from one of the actors that the sense of everyone listening intently to him (because they had to, because he might be speaking their cue) was something he’d never felt before, on stage or off. Our Hamlet ran at about 50 minutes, so of course it was missing much of the narrative. The scenes were selected to tell the arc of the story and give everyone something challenging to do, but the sense of it was there, and so were all the best

Alice Barclay

Alice directs the company.

bits. Liberated from the need to perform anything approaching the entire play, we could concentrate on the individual moments the characters found themselves in. We had none of the usual casting limitations of gender and age, but I had tried to give the actors parts that I thought suited their natural energy. Without that literal characterisation, the words seemed to resonate on a different level, and I heard things that night that I’d heard hundreds of times before sound different and new. Over the weeks leading up to the performance we’d been playing around with different ways into soliloquies, and the results were so powerful we decided to maintain them for the audience to see. “O that this too too sullied flesh” became a vibrant conversation between two actors positioned at opposite corners of the space. It was like one

of those heightened discussions with someone who believes in the same politics as you, when everything you say serves to validate and fuel each others’ position. “O what a rogue and peasant slave am I” was shared between three actors, all widely different ages. This time they were speaking directly to the audience, but without deciding beforehand who would say which lines. Some thoughts came out spoken by three voices chorally, some with two voices emphasising different things, and some as a single voice, at once incredibly vulnerable. We decided to make “To be, or not to be” the most intimate, so every actor in the company, staggering their start, spoke it very quietly but directly to the person next to them. These multiple Hamlets needed to be heard and understood by the one person they had chosen to reveal their thoughts to. As we couldn’t predict where people would shakespeare magazine

! Alice Barclay “There’s something about the struggle that makes performing Shakespeare so unique and exciting”

Above: Bathed in post-performance euphoric glow outside the venue. Left: One of the evening’s many Hamlets, cue script in hand.

be sitting by then, it meant some actors crossed the space and knelt at the audience’s feet. With around 17 voices talking, there was a combination of one-to-one intimacy and a wave of words that you could make occasional sense of. Most of all, there was the sense of Hamlet having a very important and desperately personal conversation directly with a member of the audience, which was extraordinary. When the ensemble came to an end after 14 lines and a single Hamlet continued the soliloquy alone, and then went on into the next scene with Ophelia, it was breathtaking. Afterwards, I was able to drink that gin and tonic, and join with the rest of the company in celebrating the performance, feeling rather lucky that I’d been able to be part of it too. Perhaps it was the runners who made me think of it, but there’s something about the struggle that makes

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performing Shakespeare so unique and exciting. Not that it should feel effortful in the end, but it’s tricky to truly get inside all those complex thoughts. When you perform Shakespeare, you speak words that you would never utter in everyday life, and tell stories that are beyond your own experience, which is an extraordinary thing. And the drummers reminded me that we were all performing it with a collective heartbeat, an elemental sense of rhythm in the words that drives you forwards. And we were doing it together. Performing Shakespeare is like nothing else. Perhaps everyone should experience it at least once in their life.

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Our college girl takes on The Taming of the Shrew

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Shakespeare’s Sisters & JADE ANOUKA

Plus Benedict Cumberbatch Փ Hugh Bonneville Փ Reduced Shakespeare Company

PERFORMANCE DVDS FROM ILLUMINATIONS

2016 • DVD £17.99 • 150 minutes

2015 • DVD £17.99 • 191 minutes

2012 • DVD £14.99 • 180 minutes

2012 • DVD £14.99 • 109 minutes

2011 • DVD £17.99 • Blu-ray £19.99 • 180 minutes

2003 • DVD £17.99 • 172 minutes

2010 • DVD £17.99 • 217 minutes

2005 • DVD £17.99 • 50 minutes

www.Illuminationsmedia.co.uk

2012 • DVD £17.99 • 191 minutes

Next issue

We hope you’ve enjoyed Issue Fourteen of Shakespeare Magazine. Here’s a taste of what we have coming up next time…

Shakespeare Films

! ! ! !

Are low-budget indie Shakespeare movies the future?

Every Inch a King

Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson in King Lear.

Fans And Fiction

The contemporary authors reimagining Shakespeare.

Julius Caesar And Me Paterson Joseph’s Shakespeare memoir.