The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 20.0594 Friday, 11 December 2009
From: Aaron Azlant <
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
>
Date: Monday, 9 Nov 2009 18:47:07 -0500
Subject: Jude Law Hamlet
[Editor's Note: What follows is a long posting. Since we are in a
transitional state with the SHAKSPER server, rather than using the
Papers for Comments section, I have decided to distribute the essay in
whole here. I have not included the footnotes. Should you wish to read
them, contact the poster for a complete copy. If you are not interested
in reading this long post, please use your delete key. -HMC]
The current Jude Law production of Hamlet, which I saw a few weekends
ago, gave me an excellent excuse to write a brief essay containing some
ideas that had been percolating for some time. I am hoping to solicit
some comment from the list. The basic thesis of my essay is that the
dumb show in the Mousetrap scene, however inviting a cut for a director
(such as Michael Grandage, who oversees the Jude Law production), should
not be. This is because of the surprisingly complex workings of both the
Mousetrap scene and the play at large, which routinely invites its
audience to come to hasty conclusions that are incomplete in light of
the available evidence, including some unexpected implications of the
dumb show. I would be curious to hear what you all think of my brief piece.
IN DEFENSE OF THE DUMB
There are a number of things to recommend about the vigorous _Hamlet_
starring Jude Law that is currently galloping its way through the
Broadhurst Theater in New York City. Good pacing, lighting, staging, and
pantomiming (lots of pantomiming) -- the show is largely successful and
has earned good press and good business.
This production is already successful enough on its own terms, in fact,
that I can safely abuse it over a number of minor academic points, the
better to make some very pedantic editorial appeals.
I should emphasize that this production's errors, such as they are, all
begin with good intentions. In order to make athletic entertainment out
of the lengthy Frankentext that is _Hamlet_ as we have it, Michael
Grandage has done what any practical-thinking director might have done:
he has trimmed it. This is generally not much of an issue for his show.
No audience goes to the theater eager for the few Hamlet-less scenes in
the play's fourth act, for instance, and decisions to cut lines there
and to merge scenes together do not necessarily disrupt the play's
logic, even if those scenes do add much to the play.
However, Shakespeare's text is a subtle, intricate thing, and the wise
director looking for reductions must first make sure to do no harm.
Needless to say, my argument is that there are places where Grandage
might have been less bold with his excisions. For instance, he cuts
about five superfluous-seemingly lines belonging to Claudius before
Hamlet's first soliloquy in Act 1, Scene 2 that are perfectly healthy
and useful tissue. Here is the original, with the struck text emphasized:
CLAUDIUS. Why, 'tis a loving and a fair reply:
Be as ourself in Denmark. Madam, come;
*This gentle and unforced accord of Hamlet
Sits smiling to my heart: in grace whereof,
No jocund health that Denmark drinks to-day,
But the great cannon to the clouds shall tell,
And the king's rouse the heavens all bruit again,
Re-speaking earthly thunder. Come away.*
Exeunt all but HAMLET
HAMLET. O, that this too too solid flesh would melt
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd
His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
One would probably have to be a bit of a nitpicking ass in order to
express too much alarm at such editorial slicing. Fortunately, I am your
man here, because I think that these six lines actually contribute a lot
to the play, and that _Hamlet_ is diminished by their absence.
For one, they initiate an association between Claudius and drink that
carries throughout the play to his death, which is partly due to the
consumption of poisoned wine. And without this association, Hamlet's
acrimonious salutation to Horatio in the same scene ("We'll teach you to
drink deep ere you depart"), his later complaint that Danes are unfairly
slandered as drunkards, and his retort to Guildenstern's announcement
that Claudius is distempered -- "With drink, sir?" -- all become
essentially non-sequitoral.
The play's first soliloquy benefits greatly and subtly by the presence
of these lines for two additional reasons. One, Hamlet's speech, filled
as it is with the language of disease and decay, gets a bit of kick from
its obvious contrast with Claudius' sunny references to "jocund health,"
"smiling," and so on. And last, as Stephen Booth has noted, there are
complex textual relationships between the two speeches ("cannon" /
"canon", "heavens" / "the Everlasting", military language, etc.) that
likely contribute (among other things) to an overall feeling of cohesion
between them.
If these six lines of dialogue therefore serve unexpectedly important
purpose in the play, then the silent dumb show that precedes Hamlet's
staging of The Mousetrap is essential. This show, as well as the
characters' commentary upon it, must seem like an especially inviting
target for a director looking to trim excess for his production, what
with its explicit redundancy of the play about to be staged. The
importance of my argument here, however, is of such earth-quaking,
heaven-bending magnitude, that I have no choice but to set it apart on
its own line:
It is absolutely vital that a production of _Hamlet_ does not cut the
dumb show out.
To explain why will require a number of tangents. First: twos. From
"double, double, toil and trouble" to the plot of _Twelfth Night_,
Shakespeare's career-long obsession with doubling is of a degree
generally reserved for celebrity stalkers or the otherwise criminally
insane. _Hamlet_ is unusually pregnant with this repetition-as-motif,
which scales from "too too solid flesh" in the speech referenced above
all the way to the play's extended joke on the interchangeability of
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Many of the play's famous speeches, such
as Polonius' paternal advice to "neither a borrower nor a lender be,"
Hamlet's famous "to be or not to be" soliloquy or Claudius' speech at
prayer comparing his soul to his crown are either a comparison or a
contrast of two objects. Gertrude insists that Hamlet "hath cleft [her]
heart in twain" and he jests to Ophelia that the Queen looks merry
despite the fact that it has only been "two hours" since his father's
death. "Nay, 'tis twice two months," Ophelia corrects. And so on.
Secondly, Shakespeare delights generally in creating analogous
situations between the people in his plays and those people observing
them. Consider, for instance, the "Friends, Romans, countrymen" scene in
_Julius Caesar_ where the mob assembled on stage stands in for the
larger mob assembled to watch _Julius Caesar_, both of which are at last
persuaded by Marc Antony. One way that Shakespeare accomplishes this
special kind of experiential doubling in _Hamlet_ is to generate
questions of interpretation, the answers to which are as obscure to any
audience as they might be to the play's central characters. The question
of Hamlet's motivation is the largest of these and is a general problem
for most of the personalities on stage. Additionally, Hamlet himself
spends much of the play attempting to infer Claudius' guilt, in part to
establish whether his father's ghost is "a spirit of health or goblin
damn'd."
Ophelia's mad songs are another good case study on this point. They are
all localized in Act 4, Scene 5, and after their first verse is
delivered, Gertrude asks what the song that she is hearing "imports,"
and in doing so, speaks for the audience. Claudius soon enters and
provides a coarse, singular interpretation: the song is mere "conceit
upon her father" and nothing more. However, at this stage in the play,
Ophelia is mourning not just Polonius but also Hamlet, who, as far as
she knows, has been sent away to England for execution. Indeed, over the
course of the scene her verses are consistently about a lover who has
passed away, and she responds to Claudius about as directly as is
possible for a girl who is in the process of losing her mind. "Pray you,
let's have no words of this," she replies, "but when they ask you what
it means, say you this." She then launches into a final, bawdy song that
tells the story of a man who seduces a young lady by falsely promising
his hand in marriage before drawing a summary moral. She departs and
again Claudius insists single-mindedly that her grief has motivated her
insanity, that it "springs / All from her father's death." Yet although
Ophelia's songs do reflect her father's heavy-handed advice to her in
Act 1, Scene 3, Claudius is nonetheless much, much too narrow in his
interpretation. The play, however, barrels onwards.
I bring this up to emphasize the fact that interpretative work in
_Hamlet_ is a tricky business and that, like Polonius before Hamlet, one
must constantly be on guard against misdirection. "In what particular
thought to work I know not," says Horatio in the play's opening scene
when he, like the audience, fails to make sense of the first appearance
of the ghost. So too does an audience also struggle routinely throughout
_Hamlet_ to make full sense of the available evidence before it is
pressed onwards by the play (a push that is especially effective in a
brisk _Hamlet_ such as Grandage's). In this context, it is worth
examining Claudius' decision to send Hamlet away to England, which is
not an item that begs interpretation, but is nonetheless a point of
mischief in the play. Because Claudius later refers to Hamlet as the
"violent author / Of his own just remove," because he twice emphasizes
his need to deport Hamlet in the same breath that he also discusses the
murder of Polonius, because he also describes his plan as "sudden," and
because Act 4 also contains a number of related events -- the first
confrontation between Hamlet and Claudius over this plan, the first time
that Claudius' intention to have Hamlet killed is revealed as well as
the actual exile of Hamlet -- the King's decision is made to seem
entirely the natural consequence of Polonius' murder. This sense is
furthered by the fact that Hamlet reminds Gertrude that he will be sent
to England in the Closet Scene, with Polonius's fresh corpse in full
view on stage (an exchange that is also unfortunately cut by Grandage).
Yet Gertrude's response -- "Alack, / I had forgot: 'tis so concluded on"
-- might as well stand in for the audience's. In fact, Claudius' initial
decision to send Hamlet abroad arrives an act earlier, just after the
King covertly watches his nephew deliver abuse to Ophelia in Act 3, Scene 1:
KING CLAUDIUS. Love! his affections do not that way tend;
Nor what he spake, though it lack'd form a little,
Was not like madness. There's something in his soul,
O'er which his melancholy sits on brood;
And I do doubt the hatch and the disclose
Will be some danger: which for to prevent,
I have in quick determination
Thus set it down: he shall with speed to England...
Claudius repeats this intention once again after The Mousetrap is
staged, but the amount of time that elapses between these brief, almost
incidental mentions and the intense later focus on Hamlet's "just
remove" also helps along the misperception that Hamlet is entirely its
"author."
As noted, the related questions of Claudius' guilt and of the nature of
the Ghost are similarly challenging and, like Ophelia's songs, beg
interpretation, although over the entirety of the play. Indeed, the
point of The Mousetrap is that it is designed by Hamlet to test both of
these matters at once, since his assumption is that confirmation of the
murder will also establish the Ghost's benevolence. This confirmation is
necessary because, for much of the play, the sum of Hamlet's -- and an
audience's -- hard evidence in favor of the idea that Claudius has
murdered King Hamlet is the testimony of the Ghost.
However, if that testimony is not quite suspect, it is certainly to be
treated with skepticism. In the scene where Hamlet first encounters the
Ghost, he opens two possibilities, that its intentions are "wicked or
charitable," and the play preserves these options to the last. This
ambiguity actually begins well before Hamlet's encounter with the Ghost:
Horatio describes its final exit in the play's opening scene by noting
that "it started like a guilty thing / Upon a fearful summons." This
shading (so to speak) is reinforced in the first lines of the Ghost
during its meeting with Hamlet: he begins the conversation by noting the
inevitability of his own return to "sulph'rous and tormenting flames," a
description that both calls to mind and conflates the respective
landscapes and spiritual functions of Hell and Purgatory. Immediately
afterwards, the Ghost suggests that its soul is, in fact, waylaid in
Purgatorial fire:
I am thy father's spirit,
Doom'd for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confin'd to fast in fires,
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purg'd away.
The play, however, refuses to let its audience settle decisively upon
such a comfortable conclusion. These lines follow a brief scene where,
like the play's opening scene, the return of the Ghost is presented as
an event with ominous overtones. Hamlet's reference in this scene to the
"questionable shape" of King Hamlet's ghost is intended to mean that it
has returned question him, but this also accents the uncertainty of his
father's spiritual status. Additionally, at least part of Horatio's
cautionary speech -- that it might draw Hamlet toward madness -- turns
out to be at least partly fulfilled, if not necessarily in the manner
expected. Furthermore, any emphasis upon "sulph'rous flames" or "foul
crimes" in this context is likely to push an audience towards -- if not
to -- a worst-case conclusion.
Hamlet's instinct following the staging of The Mousetrap is to declare
that he will "take the Ghost's word for a thousand pound," echoing his
earlier declaration after his meeting on the platform, that "it is an
honest ghost" that he has seen. Like Claudius' interpretation of
Ophelia's songs, these are hasty, although unlike Claudius, Hamlet
ultimately reverses himself in both instances. And although the play's
audience does receive late confirmation from Claudius at prayer that he
has committed the murder, it is important to note that Hamlet never does.
This essay has been dancing around the topic of The Mousetrap and its
attendant dumb show for some time now and is at last ready to address
these issues directly. In a play filled with nuanced scenes, the one in
which the play-within-the-play is performed is perhaps the most
unintuitively complex, and it is worth examining just what is presented
on stage while it is performed. The Mousetrap is offered by the play as
a simple analogue to the action of Hamlet, though in reality it performs
double duty. Following the dominant motif of the larger play in which it
resides, each character in The Mousetrap maps to two different
characters in _Hamlet_. Lucianus, like Prince Hamlet, is both a regicide
and a nephew to the king, and like Claudius, he is a regicide who
murders by pouring poison into ears. The Player King, like Hamlet, is an
erratic melancholic, and like King Hamlet, he is poisoned in his ear
while reclining in his orchard. The Player Queen, like Ophelia, attends
to a character that is "far from cheer and from [a] former state"; like
Gertrude, she remarries a regicide. What Claudius observes, therefore,
in The Mousetrap is a complicated refraction of the world of _Hamlet_:
not just a simple depiction of his own crime, but among other
permutations, the illustration of a nephew (like Hamlet) murdering an
uncle (like himself).
An extremely late-breaking thesis of the current essay is that an
audience is likely to receive definitive interpretations by characters
in _Hamlet_ with some quiet uneasiness, even if it is not wholly sure
why in the moment. As noted, if Claudius' coarse pronouncement that
Ophelia's songs are all due to filial grief is too simple -- and is
likely to feel at least slightly so to an audience -- so too is Hamlet's
confident declaration that Claudius confirms his own guilt with his
abandonment of the play, which could very well stem from two possible
motivations. The fact, then, that Claudius sits without difficulty
through the dumb show, which also depicts his crime (and is thus a
doubling of the action of The Mousetrap), adds to a small but
non-negligible sense that Hamlet's ringing pronouncement is somehow
incomplete.
This may well be a lot of prose to expend in defense of a few moments of
dialogue-less action, but I also believe that this sense of
incompleteness is in fact a major virtue of _Hamlet_ and is to be
generally preserved. To phrase this another way, one of the greatest
strengths of the play is its ability to indefinitely prolong
interpretive questions both large and small. In this context, it is
another slight misstep of the Grandage production to have his Gertrude
decisively reject Claudius after the Closet scene; Hamlet begs her to
avoid the conclusion that it is his madness and not her "trespass" that
colors their meeting, but that option is still available to her all the
same. Along similar lines, it would take a much longer essay to discuss
the many motivations of Hamlet, which characters and audience alike seek
a definitive word upon in vain. That kind of seeking, I submit at last,
is one of the major reasons that a modern audience still attends regular
productions of a play that is over 400 years old, to include the one
presently playing in New York at the Broadhurst theater. And if, like
Polonius' man Reynaldo, I have oversold Mr. Grandage's faults in public,
it is only because, I am also convinced of his essential soundness.
_______________________________________________________________
S H A K S P E R: The Global Shakespeare Discussion List
Hardy M. Cook,
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
The S H A K S P E R Web Site <http://www.shaksper.net>
DISCLAIMER: Although SHAKSPER is a moderated discussion list, the
opinions expressed on it are the sole property of the poster, and the
editor assumes no responsibility for them.
|
