Hamlet’s omelette

Many consider Hamlet to be Shakespeare’s most personal play, where uncharacteristically he bared many of the deep traumas and unresolved conflicts that drove him to create.  Others regard it as simply the greatest play ever written, where the most fundamental questions of human existence are examined exhaustively and – with a running time of around four hours – exhaustingly.

Certainly, in one respect, it is unique.  For the English-speaker, no other comparable work is so embedded in the consciousness, so integral a part of the culture.  Even those who have never seen it, never read it, and know nothing of its plot, will recognise instantly “To be, or not, to be…” and “Alas, poor Yorick”.

For the actors, this makes the play an obstacle course of famous set-pieces.  As they approach them, they are hemmed in by a thousand ghosts – not of Hamlet’s father, but of the previous interpreters and their famous interpretations, which in turn have been added to the great weight of tradition weighing heavily on every subsequent player.

Watching the play becomes therefore a strangely post-modern experience.  It seems embedded with hundreds of quotations, as if Shakespeare had simply assembled a mass of well-known phrases, and written some connecting dialogue to string them together in the great, sprawling work we know today.  As we listen, the famous lines – “There is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in your philosophy”, “Get thee to a nunnery”, and the rest – jump out in the verbal equivalent of neon.  Hamlet remains for us a supremely discontinuous experience.

As a result, few of us have ever really seen or heard the real Hamlet.  Instead it becomes a mix of ancient comedians’ catchphrases – “Very like a whale”, “A palpable hit” – which we applaud mindlessly like an audience at a game-show; bravura arias and ensembles straight out of opera seria at its most artificial – The Soliloquy above all, but also including the various dialogues of Hamlet with Fortinbras, Polonius and Ophelia; and a kind of inchoate, eternal pattern book, a mysterious and inexplicable precursor of a hundred paintings, symphonic poems, novels, operas, advertisement campaigns, jokes, and, ultimately and most disturbingly, of our own turn of phrases and thoughts.

Against this background, the most revelatory performance of Hamlet I ever saw was that of the national Romanian company.  There before me, in a tongue of which I understood not a word, was clearly the play I thought I knew so well, but which now seemed so alien.  The actions were there, the characters, the speeches; but for once I had to struggle to follow it.  And in doing so, it began to regain its for me long-lost flow.  Of course, the thrilling Romanian actors did have one tragic advantage apart from being isolated from the play’s historical and linguistic burden.  Shakespeare’s tale of a diseased state, of corrupt politicians and of the brutal reality of moral choice was, for those who still lived under Ceaușescu, nothing less than contemporary reality.  Something which we could never experience without a similar catastrophic social breakdown.

(21.3.92)

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