Primrose Road

HyperHamlet is up and running. I saw an early version of this project presented at a conference in 2006, and its aims remain the same: it doesn't attempt to supply an edition in the sense of an editorial reconstruction, and it doesn't want to work backwards from the text. Instead, the project seeks to map the text forward, cataloguing references to Hamlet from all walks of life and culture.

When I first heard about the project, I asked myself what cataloguing every reference to Hamlet ever could do for us. Interestingly, the project page now explains that such an endeavor can serve as not only a research database but also as a means of questioning the point of bookish editorial reconstructions.


* Hattip to Shakespeare Geek, who found this before I did. *

Note: Very early in this review, I "give away" this production's ending. I've waited until the after the last performance (June 29th) to post my review, but I'm giving fair warning because I know how much Internetters viciously eschew "spoilers." (Yes, spoilerphobics, I *am* making fun of you.)

For the most part, there was little if anything that was utterly new-and-exciting about this Shakespeare in the Park production directed by Oskar Eustis.. (Then again, it is difficult-to-impossible to do anything new-and-exciting with Hamlet.) The Wooster Group's production at the Public last fall was, in my view, far more thought-provoking. Here at the Delacorte, we saw an early-to-mid-twentieth century military-based monarchy in which the older generation often wore military costumes from the previous century. Eustis, who told a Playbill interviewer that the character Hamlet faces "a nation run by a corrupt leadership at a time of generalized paranoia," seemed to want remind audiences that Hamlet is not simply Shakespeare's most character-driven play but also an important political drama.

The decision to give the production a dual focus -- Hamlet as grieving son and Hamlet as potential political figure -- likely contributed to the three-and-a-half-hour runtime. (Perhaps Eustis also did not want to cut any of onetime-Hamlet Sam Waterston's lines as Polonius.) The politics of Hamlet were most strikingly highlighted in the blocking of the play's very last line: Fortinbras' command, "Go, bid the soldiers shoot." In the playtext (though not in the First Quarto, which omits Fortinbras' last line altogether), the stage direction indicates that the soldiers should shoot a "peal of ordnance."

Here, one of Fortinbras' soldiers shoots Horatio, the character who is supposed to survive his friend Hamlet and tell his story.

This Fortinbras is not Hamlet's double; he is not the young man who also lost a father but chose to take action rather than brood. When he commands his soldier to shoot Horatio (has this possibility ever been addressed in the academic literature, I wonder?), it becomes clear that in this production, Hamlet's dying command to "give [his] voice" to Fortinbras is a mistake on Hamlet's part. In 4.4, when the Norwegian Captain tells Hamlet about Fortinbras' invasion of Poland, we hear bombs and realize that we are witnessing an air raid. Perhaps at this point, Hamlet -- quite confused, as his subsequent "what is a man" soliloquy suggests -- mistakenly decides that he needs to be more like Fortinbras.

I'm basically in full agreement with the New York Times' assessment of the Polonius family: Sam Waterston played a Polonius who was far more complicated than the doddering old man and protective father types that his character does indeed encompass. Often foolish and sometimes sadly lost in his own mind, Polonius loves his children but doesn't know how to help them. After a "get thee to a nunnery" scene in which Hamlet doesn't know that Ophelia's lying (it's refreshing to see it staged this way after a string of movie adaptations in which Hamlet's anger is definitively triggered by her lie) but continues to feign madness and anger in order to push her away, Ophelia reaches up to her father, who is way up on the "ramparts"; all he can do is reach back down. Later, when Ophelia's sanity is almost entirely gone, she reaches up to heaven in the same way, unable to connect with her out-of-reach father.

Lauren Ambrose played Ophelia's mad scenes with a surprising, intelligent aesthetic beauty. She could have easily gone with a sort of chemical-psychological-realism here, given that she spent some years with the mental-illness-fest television show Six Feet Under, but managed to play a sorrowful, regretful Ophelia rather than an uncomfortably terrifying Ophelia. I only wish that, because of the sometimes-political nature of this production, Ambrose and Eustis would have seen Ophelia as more of an astute political commentator. (After all, if she understands what Hamlet means when he tells her that all who are married "but one" will die, then she is the only character who knows that Hamlet is planning to kill Claudius.)

Michael Stuhlbarg plays Hamlet as a realistically grief-stricken thirty-year-old man (realism actually worked for his character much better than it would have worked for Ophelia's) who has a sense of humor and regularly makes a variety of groaning noises to express a range of emotions (and not only when he's feigning madness). This Hamlet is a good man who makes some awful decisions under the pressures forced on him by his mother, uncle, and dead father. I wondered, then, why the director made the decision to go the Zefferelli route with the scene in Gertrude's bedroom (i.e. suggesting that Hamlet might have raped his mother had Polonius not stirred behind the arras) when he'd otherwise sketched out a Hamlet who is not crazy or sexually problematized but rather simply overwhelmingly saddened by grief. This simplistically Freudian route offers, for me, very little payoff.

Stuhlbarg seems to have a very good sense of rhythm and how the Shakespearean line works. This became especially clear when the actor had to handle two unexpected situations, an overhead helicopter and a coughing fit. After Hamlet told Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that he could be bounded in a nutshell, a helicopter passed over us; instead of trying to finish the line over the sound of the helicopter, Stuhlbarg instead paused and followed the helicopter with his eyes, eliciting laughter from the audience. Of course, the crazed "oh-my-god-it's-a-flying-machine" look was an easy way out, but the break itself seemed to be exactly on rhythm, as if the iambic pentameter beat had kept going on regardless of the pause in speech. Later (I believe during the "what is a man" soliloquy), he handled a slight coughing fit well, even keeping his coughing on rhythm to some degree.

(NB: the above observations on rhythm may simply be the result of the fact that I'm currently working on a dissertation chapter about blank verse ...)

With the exception of the giant moths flying at our heads (perhaps the reason for Stuhlbarg's coughing?), the 5 1/2 hours of sitting on woodchips while waiting for tickets, and the 3 1/2 hours of sitting on rather uncomfortable seats, Shakespeare in the Park offered a lovely night and an entertaining -- and occasionally surprising -- Hamlet.

I am waiting on line. Please keep your fingers crossed that I can get through five hours without needing to make use of restroom facilities.

You know you've got issues when you're willing to sacrifice your bladder for Hamlet.

Duane at Shakespeare Geek brings to our attention yet another retelling of Hamlet: 1993's Super Mario Brothers Movie, a live-action flick starring, of all people, John Leguizamo, Bob Hoskins, and Dennis Hopper.

I'll buy a beer for anyone who writes an academic article on this.

Did anybody else catch last night's performance of Act I, Scene I of Hamlet in Second Life? I don't regularly "play" Second Life (way too much to manage in Life #1), but since I'm writing a dissertation on Early Modern drama and new media, I had to check this performance out.

(Hat tip to Intute Arts and Humanities Blog for sending this one our way.)

Convergence, convergence, convergence: Second Life avatars on a virtual stage playing for an audience of actors in a fairly accurate-looking replica of the Globe theater with an interface that permits users to view the scenes from a variety of "movie camera" angles.

A fellow audience member brought up an interesting logistical issue: performances should have taken place during the day, as they did in the "first life" Globe. Without any "natural" lighting (and despite the full moon), the area was somewhat difficult to navigate.

They have a slew of performances going on this week and next in case you want to take your avatar out for some Shakespearin'.

Quite a few sites about the Law of Attraction and The Secret reference the following quote from our favorite Nice Danish Boy:

"For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."

Talk about a contextotomy: the full line is "Why, then, 'tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so: to me it is a prison" (Ham 2.2). Hamlet's arguing that "Denmark's a prison"; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the 'friends' who will eventually participate in an attempt on his life, tell Hamlet it's not.

I'm not sure that a line from a scene in which a man who is having "bad dreams" because his uncle may have murdered his father tries to convince his not-very-loyal friends that his country is a prison.

This is why I tell my students not to refer to quotes as "quotes" in their papers: it tells their readers that they're performing contextotomies and reflecting on 'sound bites' instead of plot and character points. (College comp teachers, you've all seen it: "This quote says Hamlet thinks Denmark's a prison." Major pet peeve on my part.)

Meanwhile, I'm going to go manifest a dissertation.

Hamlet/Bart (after stabbing Polonius/Chief Wiggum): Polonius! What are you doing here?

Polonius/Chief Wiggum: I hide behind curtains because I have a fear of being stabbed. (To Laertes/Ralph) Laertes, I need you to do a big boy job for daddy. I need you to avenge my death.

I was going to add to Sunday's review of The Wooster Group's Hamlet a note that every ten minutes or so, there was a rumbling beneath our feet. But I need to check into that first, because it would be embarrassing to confuse A-effects with the 6 train.

I should start with the observation that at intermission, several disappointed audience members in front of me talked about leaving. And 80% of the row did leave. I suspect that these theatregoers were expecting a performance of Hamlet, and what they saw was a performance about Hamlet.

Throughout most of the play, a 1964 Broadway performance of Hamlet starring Richard Burton was projected onto the screen behind the actors on stage. The film had originally been intended to bring a genuine theatrical experience to moviegoers; the Wooster Group's performance commented on the impossibility of bringing a genuine theatrical experience to moviegoers.

The stage set was similar to the film's, as though the film was somehow projecting itself out on to the stage. The stage action followed the film's camera angles with the help of a table on wheels and the actors' movements. The actors moved, for the most part, exactly like the actors on film. This exposed how what would have looked "natural" (and perhaps even stagelike) on film was awkward and jerky on the actual stage.

During several scenes, the screen went blank (blue), with only the word "UNRENDERED" digitally imposed on it. These were definitely the moments where this performance became a play about Hamlet, not just about the 1964 attempt to bring theater to movie houses. First, when Polonius speaks to Ophelia and warns Laertes "neither a borrower nor a lender be," we see an "unrendered" screen interrupted, just for a moment, by an interior shot of Polonius' house from Michael Almereyda's 2000 film. The "unrendered" screen appears again after a second, but Polonius delivers his borrower/lender speech in Bill Murray's voice (the audio from Almereyda's film).

Later, the Player King concedes his speech to none other than Charlton Heston, whose melodramatic Trojan War tale from Branagh's 1996 film appears on the screen in Windows Media Player (hmm ... possibly a comment on the word "player" in the digital age?) as a file named "C_Heston.mov." The characters onstage watch, engrossed at first, but then start to get bored, turning away, laying down, chatting with each other.

There was a microphone placed downstage left, where Hamlet delivers (all, I believe) his more "famous" speeches. I wasn't sure whether this was meant to suggest a hackneyed Hamlet, a self-absorbed Hamlet, or perhaps a rockstar Hamlet.

The only decision that didn't work for me was having Gertrude and Ophelia played by the same actor, who made sure to leave parts of Gertrude's dress hanging out beneath Ophelia's following her purposefully hasty costume changes. The Gertrude/Ophelia conflation has been done before, and it is, in fact, the subject of (too) many psychoanalytic "Hamlet loves Mom/Hamlet's a misogynist" readings. The Wooster Group's production did, however, rather amusingly call attention to the fact that Gertrude and Ophelia couldn't be on stage at the same time -- at "The Murder of Gonzago," after Hamlet left his mother's side for "mettle more attractive," he noted to himself, "well, we'll have to skip over all this Ophelia stuff, won't we?"

Ultimately, I believe that what made this Hamlet "new" (something not easy to do with Hamlet) was the fact that it was neither a straightforward staging of Hamlet nor a straightforward "quoting" of Hamlet, but rather a play about quoting Hamlet.