T.S. Elliot once suggested that Shakespeare’s Hamlet doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, and is ultimately “a flop.”
But Edward T. Oakes argues that with the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Hamlet (first on stage, then on the BBC and PBS, now on DVD/streaming), “here is a Hamlet that finally makes sense.” He says it is “by far the freshest and most arresting interpretation I have ever seen of the play.”
David Tennant stars as Hamlet and Patrick Stewart as Claudius.
Here are the five attributes of the RSC Hamlet that Oakes believes set it apart from previous attempts.
First of all, each line is so freshly delivered that it sounds new (quite a feat for this play!).
Even minor roles come across with distinctive personalities, including, of all people, Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern, who are usually played as completely interchangeable for humorous effect (other characters in the play regularly confuse the two). Here Rosenkrantz is the ambitious toady who would do anything to curry favor with the king, while Guildenstern approaches his commission to spy on Hamlet with a reluctance prompted by his affection for his old school chum. One feels guilty and the other doesn’t.
Second (and this is a negative virtue), this production eschews any Freudian interpretation, which by now has become an empty cliché, and even an embarrassment.
Thus, in the famous “closet scene” in Gertrude’s bedroom, her son does not force his mother onto her marriage bed in a pose of feigned rape, and his rage against her is clearly prompted by her betrayal of a marriage that he had been depending on for his psychic health”and Gertrude herself feels so guilty about that betrayal that she too is already near a nervous breakdown. The scene is astonishingly powerful, and all without Freud’s extraneous kibitzing.
Third, the setting of the play is the contemporary national-security state, with CCTV cameras everywhere, and from whose tapes we see some of the action (interestingly, the ghost’s outline does not register on the tapes).
As world literature’s most famous neurotic, Hamlet’s unstable personality is already sufficiently known by almost any audience; but in this production there is an added reason for Hamlet’s incipient madness besides his own volatile temper.
“Even paranoids can have enemies,” goes the old line; and that’s certainly true of Hamlet here: closed-circuit security cameras are everywhere, and he knows it. (At one point, right before he says “Now I am alone,” he rips out a prying apparatus lurking in one of the corners of the throne room.)
Fourth, the soliloquies are not treated as the dramaturgical equivalent of operatic arias, but flow naturally out of the action.
In fact, the “to be or not to be” soliloquy is delivered almost offhandedly in a moment of philosophical reverie, while the other less famous speeches, especially the early ones, are made to reveal Hamlet’s deeply tormented soul.
Which brings me to the fifth and last great merit of this version: here Hamlet truly displays the dilemmas of his personality.
It is one of the great mysteries of this play how Shakespeare manages to get the audience to sympathize with his protagonist.
Even on the surface he really is a quite appalling cad: after killing Polonius, he “lug[s] the guts” from Gertrude’s closet and calls the dead man a “foolish, prating knave”; jilts Ophelia (who clearly loves him) in the harshest manner, driving her to madness and then to her death; arranges for the death of Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern without a pang of remorse (“They are not near my conscience,” he dismissively says, for which even his best friend Horatio upbraids him); and of course leaves the stage littered with corpses in the final scene.
Even Hamlet recognizes how abominable is his soul, as he avows to Ophelia:
I am myself indifferent honest [of middling virtue]; but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me. I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious; with more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. What should such fellows as I do crawling between heaven and earth? We are arrant knaves, all; believe none of us. Go thy ways to a nunnery. (III, i, 121-130)
And yet somehow the audience identifies with him, at least in the sense of seeing things from his point of view, which is due of course primarily to the soliloquies. But also to the acting.
Here, more than in any production I have seen, Hamlet truly suffers . He is caught in some unspecified trap of his own personality that long antecedes news of his father’s murder. (His first soliloquy, “Oh, that this too, too solid flesh would melt,” is spoken before he sees the ghost.) In what must be regarded as a tour de force of acting, Tennant forces the audience to identify with him because his suffering is so acutely displayed.
In this version, there are, to be sure, some judicious cuts: the scene with the pirates is omitted (thus Hamlet’s return to Denmark is left unexplained); a few lines from the “to be or not to be” soliloquy are cut (which might seem like sacrilege to the bardolaters, but it does help undermine its over-familiarity); and Fortinbras, the prince of Norway, does not show up at the end to perform the obsequies (it being, presumably, too unlikely for a national-security state like this one to be invaded by any foreign power, let alone super-mild contemporary Norway).
But most of the play is there, yet so well-paced that the action never flags, not least because one cannot take one’s eyes off Hamlet in his suffering. As I say, here is a Hamlet that finally makes sense. Eliot was wrong after all.
You can get the movie here.
