Avant-Garde Hamlet
Shakespeare and the Stage
The Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Series on Shakespeare and the
Stage publishes scholarly works on the theatrical dimensions of the plays of
Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Both individual studies and collections
of previously unpublished essays are welcome.
Series Editors: Peter Kanelos (Valparaiso University, peter.kanelos@valpo.
edu) and Matthew Kozusko (Ursinus College, [email protected]).
Publications in Shakespeare and the Stage Series
R. S. White, Avant-Garde Hamlet: Text, Stage, Screen (2015)
Kathryn M. Moncrief, Kathryn R. McPherson and Sarah Enloe, Shakespeare
Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (2013)
Related Recent Publications
Kristine Johanson, Shakespeare Adaptations from the Early Eighteenth Century:
Five Plays (2013)
Laury Magnus and Walter W. Cannon, Who Hears in Shakespeare?: Shakespeare’s Auditory World, Stage and Screen (2011)
Peter Kanelos and Matt Kozusko, Thunder at a Playhouse: Essaying Shakespeare and the Early Modern Stage (2010) (Susquehanna University Press)
James C. Bulman, Shakespeare Re-Dressed: Cross-Gender Casting in Contemporary Performance (2008)
Frank Occhiogrosso, Shakespearean Performance: New Studies (2008)
Paul Menzer, Inside Shakespeare: Essays on the Blackfriars Stage (2006).
(Susquehanna University Press)
Nancy Taylor, Women Direct Shakespeare In America: Productions From The
1990s (2004)
James E. Hirsh, Shakespeare And The History Of Soliloquies (2003)
Hardin L. Aasand, Stage Directions In Hamlet: New Essays and New Directions
(2002)
Susan Young, Shakespeare Manipulated: The Use of the Dramatic Works of
Shakespeare in Teatro Di Figura in Italy (1996)
On the Web at http://www.fdu.edu/fdupress
Avant-Garde Hamlet
Text, Stage, Screen
R. S. White
fairleigh dickinson university press
Madison • Teaneck
Published by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
Co-Published by Rowman & Littlefield
A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706
www.rowman.com
Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB
Copyright © 2015 by R. S. White
Cover Image Copyright © 2015 Olga Sankey
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by
any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval
systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who
may quote passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
White, R. S., 1948Avant-garde Hamlet : text, stage, screen / R. S. White.
pages cm.—(The Fairleigh Dickinson University Press series on Shakespeare and
the stage)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-61147-855-6 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-1-61147-856-3 (electronic)
1. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616. Hamlet—Dramatic production. 2. Shakespeare,
William, 1564-1616.—Stage history. 3. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616.—
Adaptations. 4. Hamlet (Legendary character) I. Title.
PR2807.W425 2015
822.3’3—dc23
2015020926
™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
Acknowledgments
vii
Chapter 1
Aspects of Avant-Garde
1
Chapter 2
Avant-Garde Hamlet: Then and Now
29
Chapter 3
Hamlet as Avant-Garde Text
51
Chapter 4
Hamlet and Avant-Garde Literature
91
Chapter 5
On Stage: Hamlet and Avant-Garde Theatre
111
Chapter 6
On Screen: Hamlet and Film Genres
135
Epilogue
183
Bibliography
187
Index
203
211
About the Author
v
Acknowledgments
It is an integral part of the argument of this book that Hamlet is not one play
but several, but for purposes of quotation I must nominate one edition. The
one used for references in this book is the Arden Edition edited by Harold
Jenkins (1982). This is also conveniently available in the single-volume
Arden Shakespeare Complete Works (Arden 2001), and I use this edition for
quotations from other plays. I was tempted to use the more recent Arden editions that reproduce, in separate volumes, a text based mainly on the Second
Quarto and a second text based on the First Quarto and the Folio, but such
textual finesse did not seem necessary for this particular book.
I am grateful to the Australian Research Council for funding some of
the time that went into the research (Project number DP0877846) as well
as the agreeable research environment of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions 1100–1800 (Project
number CE110001011). The British Film Institute allowed me to use their
invaluable library resources relating to the history of movies. My friend Olga
Sankey created the artwork on the cover of the book, which I think is stunning. The late, and sadly missed, John Willett gave permission to use his
translations of Brecht. Philippa Kelly, Scott Newstok, Mike Nolan, Ciara
Rawnsley, and Penelope Woods provided practical help and many helpful
suggestions along the way and, more important, bolstered my morale when
it flagged. In supervising Marina Gerzic’s valuable PhD dissertation, my eyes
were opened to some recent Shakespeare films that otherwise would no
doubt have slipped my attention. Harry Keyishian and June Schlueter at the
vii
viii • Acknowledgments
Fairleigh Dickinson University Press are wonderful to work with. Successive
generations of students at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne and the
University of Western Australia have, over many years, helped constantly to
revitalize Hamlet for me with their thoughtful and excited insights, proving
that the play embodies the curious paradox I have tried to describe, an avantgarde classic or a classic avant-garde work. I dedicate the book to them, in
the hope that it will enthuse new students and readers to look afresh, in the
light of their own lives, at this remarkable and maddeningly elusive play,
which sometimes looks to me like a weasel, sometimes a camel, and sometimes just a cloud.
CHAPTER ONE
Aspects of Avant-Garde
Jan Kott, in his influential book Shakespeare Our Contemporary, suggested
that “Hamlet is like a sponge. Unless produced in a stylized or antiquarian
fashion, it immediately absorbs all the problems of our time” (Kott 52). The
question “why?” immediately presents itself. Plenty of critical accounts dwell
on the play’s profundity of thought, its theatrical effects, and its dramatic and
poetic power—enough to give it the respectable status of “classic.” However,
I am interested here in a different, creative group who find themselves sucked
in to the “sponge” in order to understand and express the problems of their
time in a more immediate, personal context. Just as readily as Hamlet stands
for many as a high-water mark of canonical art, it equally attracts rebels
and experimenters, those avant-garde writers, dramatists, performers, and
filmmakers who seek new ways of expressing innovative and challenging
thoughts in the hope that they can change their own world. One reason for
this, I will suggest, is that the source text that is their inspiration was written
in the same spirit. Hamlet as a work of art exhibits many aspects of the “vanguard” movements in every society and artistic milieu, an avant-garde vision
of struggle against conformity that retains an edge of provocative novelty.
Accordingly, it inspires similar unorthodox adaptations and can be known
by a neglected portion of the company it keeps, the avant-garde in every age.
What kind of a play is Hamlet? To what genre does it belong? For many
people, the answer to both questions is “tragedy” or, perhaps with more
historical precision, “Elizabethan revenge tragedy.” More cautious critics
have hedged their bets and suggested it is a “problem play,” placing it in
1
2 • Chapter One
the same category as Measure for Measure, All’s Well That Ends Well, and
Troilus and Cressida. They suggest that in these cases audiences feel “excited,
fascinated, perplexed, for the issues raised preclude a completely satisfactory
outcome” (Boas 345), and rest their judgment on the troubled “temper and
atmosphere” of the four plays. However, this does not seem to do justice to
the uniqueness of Hamlet in its own form, matter, and tone, since its particular difficulties are very different from those in the other plays. While the
others are among the least performed and loved of Shakespeare’s plays, this
one is the most performed and most famous play in the history of the world.
Moreover, to brand a play a problem suggests it is deficient, and although
some have argued this—T. S. Eliot for one—it is still inconceivable that an
inferior or badly finished work would gain such stunning celebrity in all ages
since it was written, down to the present day. Better, it seems, to speculate
that the problems make the play what it is and, far from requiring solutions or
evasion, may be intrinsic to its success as an alluringly enigmatic work of art.
With some trepidation, I shall argue that a capacious and untried way of
revealing Hamlet’s recalcitrant but powerful potential is to place it in the
company of avant-garde aesthetics. This approach is intended to build into
our analysis the full range of problems and to suggest that the play is marked
by, among other things, an audaciously experimental form and adversarial
stance, unlike other plays of its period, and subsequently appealing to fellow
dissident spirits in the centuries since it was written. I do not use this term
with any formal exactitude, and indeed I suspect that no such agreed upon
and agreeable definition is possible. I generate my own sense of the term to
suit my purposes of opening up a way of looking at Shakespeare’s play to account for its strange capacity to inspire extreme innovation in later writers,
performers, and filmmakers.
“Vanguard” as a military term in both French and English dates back to
the fifteenth century, but the first recorded use of “avant-garde” in the sense
of advocating radical reforms in society seems to have come in 1825, in Saint
Simonian Olinde Rodrigues’s essay “L’artiste, le savant et l’industriel” (trans.
Calinescu). According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term was used for
the first time in English in 1910, with the sense of the “pioneers or innovators in any art in a particular period.” An immediate objection lies in the apparent anachronism of applying to a work written in 1600 a term postdating
Shakespeare and used to cover a host of diverse artistic movements in the
twentieth century. I propose several answers. First, aspects of modern avantgardism were anticipated and influenced by a range of earlier works that, I
suggest, include Hamlet. Even modern movements claiming unprecedented,
pioneering originality have not been created in a vacuum, and they freely
Aspects of Avant-Garde • 3
borrow elements from the art of the past (Aronson 2): such is the lesson of
intertextuality. Second, the work (or works) known today as Hamlet cannot
be considered without tacitly incorporating multiple points of view that have
evolved over the four centuries since the play’s first coming, crucially in the
last hundred years, and these perspectives include avant-garde thinking. A
veritable ocean of criticism and adaptations bears witness, and even audiences
who have never heard of Brecht or Müller are tacitly exposed to some of their
insights whenever they watch a less than orthodox performance or filmed
version, or read reviews and commentaries. Hamlet’s “afterlife” among scholars, in the theater and on film, has, in effect, created the play for us, whether
we approve of the plethora of interpretations or not, in ways that cannot be
uncreated. Third, even if the so-called avant-garde movements in Europe,
America, and elsewhere are arguably dated from the 1890s onward, these
periods have often been called products of “a new Elizabethan age,” (Aronson
21-2) recalling and drawing upon artistic and even industrial conditions associated with the stage in the period from about 1590 to 1620 in London. In
some ways, the radical developments over the last hundred and twenty years
or so may have attuned us to ways of thinking about theater that were closer
to the Elizabethans’ and further from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
counterparts, with their own contemporary conventions of staging and editing. Obvious examples would be the open stages, minimal settings, and close
audience involvement advocated by William Poel, Harley Granville-Barker,
Peter Brook, and others, alongside developments such as original practice acting and Shakespeare’s Globe in London. Less obvious but just as significant
would be Brecht’s “alienation” or defamiliarizing effects derived from his study
of the “epic theater” of Shakespeare and the Elizabethans. Hamlet and the
context of its writing has helped to create the modern avant-garde. Finally,
there are plenty of words and terms that have been applied with retrospective
effect. “Emotions,” for example, is a word that was not used in its modern
sense before the late seventeenth century, but this does not prevent us from
assuming that people earlier than this had emotions.
I might have made my approach less theoretically vulnerable by adopting
some catchy title such as Hamlet on the Wild Side, and admittedly there are
plenty of wild, wacky, and strange versions mentioned in the chapters that
follow. However, what I am trying to explore is more conceptually based
than simply listing alternative versions and unusual adaptations, and the
idea of the avant-garde, with its theoretical underpinnings, spirit of radical
experimentation, and impatience with conventions, seemed more fitting.
Avant-garde suggests something arrestingly new that continues over time to
convey this quality of challenging novelty, which can never fully be tamed
4 • Chapter One
into submission or assimilated into a single school of thinking. The description of a writer as “in the vanguard” is more of a metaphor than a specific
term of art, suggestive in its connotations rather than literal in denotation,
and describing an often disturbing quality that continues to defy easy categorization. Thomas Cartelli and Katherine Rowe, aiming to capture similar
connotations when describing new movie adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays,
use terms from film theory: “new wave” and “nouvelle vague” (Cartelli and
Rowe ix). My aim is to place Hamlet and its continuing influence in an unaccustomed frame of reference, which I hope will help to explain the paradoxical nature of this play. Self-evidently, it appeals equally to conservatives who
hail the play as a historic classic, rooted in an earlier historical period and
to that extent culturally reactionary; but my interest lies in its reception by
artistic experimenters and fringe-dwelling artistic malcontents.
In this book, I seek to locate the perennial appeal of Hamlet not in some
“universal” quality nor in its iconic status as a confirmed masterpiece, but
instead in its inherently experimental and revisionist qualities that make it
always, by its very nature, an oppositional, avant-garde work of art—in some
ways an anticlassic that denies universals in favor of constant change, allowing it to be grafted onto the moving bead of the present. Even superficially,
the content invites such an approach. For example, it depicts the challenge
of an alienated young man against shackling political circumstances and
prevailing attitudes, his unique experience reconnecting him with a ruptured
continuity from past times, presented as a cause for revenge in the present;
it shows madness as a radically different way of critiquing normative experience; it traces a passionate impulse toward political change, pitted against
opting out by fatalism or even dramatic gestures such as suicide. Stylistically,
it exhibits elements of disjunctive absurdism, numinous symbolism, surrealism, dark humor, and theater of cruelty. In performance (including movies),
it has clearly invited the kind of technical devices usually associated with
modern media, such as psychological internalization through soliloquy, flashbacks posed by the Ghost’s interventions referring to the past experiences of
its own former bodily incumbent, non-linear narrative, and the reflexivity
of a play-within-the-play designed to provoke audience engagement and
participation. At least one man in the stage audience finds himself morally
implicated and drawn to the perilous brink of self-incrimination in a murder,
exactly as Hamlet envisages: “The play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the
conscience of the king” (2.2.600–601). Philosophically, the play challenges
us with contemplations of an “undiscover’d country” (3.1.79) on the other
side of death, and a host of other metaphysical and existential problems that
have preoccupied progressive thinkers in every age. Affectively and in tone,
Aspects of Avant-Garde • 5
multiple discrepant and clashing notes are struck, ranging in just one speech
from the idealism of “What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason,
how infinite in faculty, in form and moving how express and admirable, in
action how like an angel” (2.2.303–6) to the radical skepticism of seeing the
world as “a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours” and nihilistically dismissing man as “this quintessence of dust” (2.2.302–3, 308). In a sensationalist vein, sentiments such as the following are not the stuff of comfortable art
but instead are delivered as grand guignol based on a burning sense of injustice
and an angry desire to right wrongs in the world, as well as tapping a strain
of graveyard imagery that later finds itself literalized beside an open grave:
’Tis now the very witching time of night,
When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out
Contagion to this world. Now could I drink hot blood,
And do such bitter business as the day
Would quake to look on. (3.2.379–83)
The words encapsulate an unsparing, emotional rebelliousness driving those
who periodically seek to challenge authority and the trappings of power.
Alongside such lucidly angry outbursts—equally the expression of revenge
and of political revolution, and evocative of modern horror movies—we
also hear the same speaker described as “patient as the female dove. . . . His
silence will sit drooping” (5.2.281–83), introducing a note of psychological
dysfunction. Stylistically, there are passages that have been described as “a
kind of weirdly surrealistic jumble” (Raffel vx) beside the dreamlike “out of
time” poignancy of Ophelia’s mad scenes. Such components are tailor-made
to attract and absorb an avant-garde artist in any era.
Moreover, as we shall see in more detail, the play’s textual state, its metatheatrical strategies, and its generic indeterminacy are problematical in the
very ways envisaged by experimental writers in all ages in their attempts to
break conventions of aesthetic form. The early section of the book concentrates on these and other aspects of the play itself that make Hamlet an antiformalist, politically subversive, and artistically experimental work, founded
on qualities that have always appealed to writers positioning themselves as
an independent vanguard, seeking consciously to break boundaries and challenge the status quo. Later chapters explore how similar attitudes inform the
more groundbreaking and unusual readings and performances of the play, on
stage and in movies, demonstrating its apparently compulsive allure to artists
reaching beyond the conventional in all ages. The book presents, as evidence
of its central argument, many examples of avant-garde writers, performers,
6 • Chapter One
and filmmakers finding themselves drawn to adapt this play above all other
works—engaged, intrigued, and inspired by its unique and generically open
aspects. The result, I trust, will be the emergence of a new set of understandings and range of potential meanings, deriving from a play that is always in
danger of being smothered under the mantle of familiarity that more conventional and historical analysis and adaptations have cast over it.
Although I hope to open up ways of reconceiving Shakespeare’s play and
the art it has inspired and to explore unexpected areas of potential meanings
that may be realized into audaciously conceived and innovative forms, this is
not presented as a study of the reception of Hamlet but of the dynamic driving
its recreations. The aim is not to analyze adaptations on stage or screen for
their own sake, but instead to uncover the extraordinary diversity of Hamlet
in generating such plural revisionings capable of shedding retrospective light
on the play as a foundational yet destabilizing work of art. Its already hybrid
genre and nature can be, has been, and no doubt will continue to be wrenched
in different directions, endlessly reshaped by experimental artists in every age.
Straightforward and valuable accounts already exist of the reception of
Hamlet in criticism, theatrical productions, and films, alongside books on
“straight” and conventional adaptations, and certainly more will continue to
be written. Among the most recent and comprehensive is David Bevington’s
Murder Most Foul: Hamlet through the Ages. Specifically dwelling on stage and
screen versions, we have, for example, Anthony B. Dawson’s Hamlet: Shakespeare in Performance. Ruby Cohn’s Modern Shakespeare Offshoots contains
a wealth of information on cinematic adaptations, though it was published
fifty years ago and has been supplemented by the more recent scholarship
of Kenneth Rothwell and the encyclopedic endeavours of Richard Burt’s
team in Shakespeares After Shakespeare. Many others are referenced in the
bibliography. I shall be drawing on these works in the chapters that follow,
but my aim is more interpretive than informational. The account offered
here chooses an oblique point of entry and seeks “By indirections” to “find
directions out” (2.1.66), using the more nonconformist, experimental, and
often contentious appropriations to see what new light they can shed on a
play that, through sheer exposure, has risked becoming domesticated and
regarded as cliché-ridden and that deserves to be returned to its uncanny
properties and radical novelty.
Retrieving the Past
The thematic perspective to be used rests on the notion of the avant-garde
as referring not to stylistic experimentation (or not solely to that) but in-
Aspects of Avant-Garde • 7
stead to a set of broader issues concerning the fraught relationship between
art and life, artist and community. At the heart of avant-garde aesthetics,
unlike other recognized schools of art, lies not a specific skill, style, subject
matter, material, or historical period, but a distinctive point of view that, by
its nature, is opposed to the fashion, accepted rules, conventions, authority,
and unity provided by sequential narrative or essentialism. Paradoxically, the
idea is not entirely different from the Renaissance insistence on imitation,
the activity of taking an established model from antiquity and making it new
by the artist’s invention. However, in this case, the aim of the imitation is to
include destabilization and critique, not simply venerating but challenging
the source in an adversarial, inspired fashion, in order to bring alive some of
its neglected and unexpected aspects. It is the spirit, not the form, that matters. Renato Poggioli, still perhaps the most prominent theorist of the avantgarde in general (as distinct from specific, historical manifestations), in
describing it in The Theory of the Avant-Garde, uses terms such as “concept”
(3), “movement” (25), “program” (132), evocative of place in “the spirit of
la rive gauche, of the Latin Quarter and Montparnasse, Soho or Greenwich
Village” (21), and “a historical concept, a center of tendencies and ideas”
(3). In other words, the essence of avant-garde lies not in a particular style
or aesthetic principle but in something like a philosophy of living in society,
a characteristic stance and set of attitudes, as these inform the creation of a
work of art. United by their very disunity as unruly bedfellows, those works
emanating from an oppositional position can be seen as forming a unique
genre of their own, those that do not fit into any other group.
Another strand of Poggioli’s account takes on special significance for this
study of Hamlet, a text from an earlier period that self-evidently has acquired
the status of classic. He explains avant-garde attitudes as rooted not only in
revolutionary intentions or a desire for change for its own sake, but also, and
paradoxically, in a resolute commitment to overturn the present, which is
equated with complacency, in order to restore continuity with great art from
the past, which is conceived as still in some way relevant and disturbing. In
other words, an avant-garde artist, in the very act of distancing him- or herself
from contemporaries, seeks to emulate and appeal to the example of chosen
path-breakers from the past in their originality, novelty, and continuing provocation to thought. Such an artist pursues a profound act of historical delving
and recuperation, a questing project that is distinguishable from the topical,
derivative, and modishly “popular” (Poggioli, 1968 ch. 2). It can represent an
attempt to retrieve the purity of creativity by rejecting the encumbrances of
contemporary expectations and instead learning from past examples. A part of
the incitement may be to bring back past greatness in an act of revenge on a
8 • Chapter One
pettier present, and here Shakespeare’s play becomes relevant in its two most
memorable additions to its sources, the Ghost and Yorick, both of whom in
some sense come back from the grave to haunt this book, as they do the play.
Romanticism would be an analogy for this notion of an avant-garde
literally leading but going back, retrieving and recuperating the past in an
attempt to forge a path into the future, since it began as a revolt against
eighteenth-century art and literature but in time acquired a “group manifestation” (Poggioli, 1968 17–19) that was later named the Romantic Revolution. Within that historical process, the gothic revival, for example, was
considered au courant from 1764 to about 1820, but it constituted a return
to an earlier strand of medievalism. Similarly, early modern humanism from
the time of Erasmus provided a revolution in educational practice in Europe
based on rediscovering the classics, long lost and retrieved only through
records kept in the scholarship of Islam. The examples of such group manifestations as Humanism and Romanticism emerged from the vanguard work of
individuals who reexamined and sought to learn from and emulate long-lost
exemplars. Their enlightened radicalism steadily gained supporters, and the
rest, as they say, is history. Avant-gardism, then, can come at any point in
the past and is often motivated by locating a historical rupture, a significant
cultural loss, and attempting to repair it. It can be expressed through any
art form, whether music, painting, architecture, or literature. Schoenberg,
for example, returned to and adapted the lushly melodic music of Brahms,
which appears far from an appealing model for the atonal twentieth-century
composer, and no less surprising than Cage’s choice of Ophelia as a vehicle
for restoring the past through radical innovation. Hamlet attracts writers, artists, and filmmakers largely because its central character and also its conception as a play—the kind of play it is—can be interpreted, should we wish, as
adopting the set of attitudes associated with successive waves of avant-garde
art. Such attitudes characteristically present experimentation alongside the
desire to restore continuities with the past, and it is this combination that
adapters have found in Hamlet as a kind of “Ur-text.” Such later cultural assimilations and revisions turn the light back onto Hamlet itself, redefining
and defamiliarizing, liberating the play, with its multiple texts, from interpretations that result from routine genuflections to it as a canonical text raising
routine themes and familiar critical cruces.
Genre
There is a question of genre at issue when we come to discuss avant-garde
art as a collective concept. It can be described first and foremost as a stance
Aspects of Avant-Garde • 9
or set of attitudes, but the works can also be regarded collectively as a kind of
art that is not neatly included in the genre-based approaches stemming from
Aristotle. It can appear across different mediums and across different genres
within each medium. What links such works, apparently perversely, is that a
part of the raison d’être of avant-garde art is a refusal to be neatly contained
within conventional frames. They form a genre of their own based on a mutual determination to challenge and undermine genres. Creating a genre out
of anti-genre may seem an odd and even self-destructive exercise, calling to
mind Groucho Marx’s “I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept
me as a member” or asking a group of anarchists to agree to a set of rules, but
skepticism about genre itself and the desire to break such bounds do seem to
be among the defining aspects of the avant-garde. Among other things, they
may have the value of saving some works from the critical oblivion to which
they might be consigned simply because they do not fit in a neat box.
Genre in its most general sense represents a formal way of grouping, classifying, or aggregating material into categories considered appropriate to a
unified ambience based on repetition and recognizability of conventions (see
Frow). More specifically, each cultural area has acquired through history its
own generic divisions. For example, literary theory dating from Aristotle
has led to triads such as epic, dramatic, lyric; and tragedy, comedy, pastoral.
More recently, films have been classified in a variety of ways, the most familiar being dedicated genres such as western, musical, thriller, melodrama,
science fiction, and so on. Video libraries have created yet more subgenres,
so that borrowers can find what they want. Genres of painting and musical
forms point to distinctions in each medium. However, many works escape
the usual formal kinds because they seek to do so as part of their enterprise.
They may radically disrupt expectations based on genre conventions or cross
boundaries between various art forms like visual art, literature, film, music,
and architecture. The result is a self-conscious violation of rules and regulations seen as appropriate to a particular kind—an attempt to subvert and
escape from the straitjacket of rule-bound, confining genres. Ironically, the
motivation may be not dissimilar from the aim to provide mimesis—holding
up a mirror to life—in more orthodox works, but for avant-garde artists, life
as they see it does not conform to the artifice and regimentation of genres. It
is the vanguard mission to see farther than the foot soldiers following behind
and, where necessary, to break the rules in order to effect their purposes. This
kind of antigeneric mission is so insistent in some works that they can be
seen as forming an admittedly odd, renegade, and adversarial genre of their
own, sometimes experimental and sometimes hybrid. This is not to prevent
an avant-garde work from falling also, or superficially, within some familiar
10 • Chapter One
generic class as well—Sterne’s Tristram Shandy is both a novel and an antinovel, and as such it is an example of the paradoxical avant-garde classic.
In their own exercise of genre categorization, the First Folio editors of
Shakespeare’s plays classified Hamlet as tragedy, and so would most people,
without reflection. However, as many examples will demonstrate, “the
Hamlet experience” has been presented diversely as parody, farce, comedy,
and a host of other types. It began life as a play, yet it has also been adapted
into a bewildering variety of mediums and into novels and film genres such
as thrillers and westerns (both the Hollywood and “spaghetti” varieties).
Studies of its cultural reception and multifarious adaptations bear witness
to this uniquely extensive generic porousness of Hamlet. Its malleability and
shape-shifting tendency is not just a matter of ingenious adaptation but a
consequence of its inhabiting a space not bounded by circumscribed genres,
thereby creating a new kind altogether. To adapt the words of its hero,
“There is nothing either tragedy or comedy [western or thriller] but thinking
makes it so” (cf. 2.2.249–50), an explicit challenge to all groups adhering to
a theory, even one so apparently obvious as distinguishing between good and
evil. Such generic subversion stands as a central tenet, perhaps a defining
characteristic, of avant-garde art more generally.
None of this is intended to suggest that Hamlet is only experimental and
nonconforming to generic containment. Far from it, since the evidence of
the frequent conservative stage performances, critical interpretations, lavish
filmed productions claiming authenticity, and hundreds of affectionate local
and orthodox performances attest. It can be performed within the decorum
of a genre such as revenge tragedy or “fall of princes.” The loving amateur
theatrical group depicted in Branagh’s In the Bleak Midwinter (also known as
A Midwinter’s Tale [1995]) stands for many, providing ample evidence that
the play retains a confirmed cultural capital that establishes its status in the
eyes of some as the acme of traditionalism and conformity. Hamlet has a
strangely double status as both high art and underground, both conservative
and radical, just as it inhabits both scholarly and populist cultural spaces. It
paradoxically embodies exactly what it seeks to dislodge, just as its protagonist seeks to kill the king, partly in order to become king.
Avant-Garde Attitudes
The word “stance” is at the heart of the matter: “a standing-place,” “a mental
or emotional position adopted with respect to something,” or “an attitude
adopted in relation to a particular object of contemplation; a policy, ‘posture,’” as dictionaries tell us. Avant-garde as a term can be applied to artists
Aspects of Avant-Garde • 11
who work with any material—sculpture, painting, music, words—and in
any field—literature, theater, music, film—and even in broader movements
of mind—psychiatry, philosophy, politics, criticism. It is more like a value
system, a point of view, a mode of perceiving the world and one’s place in
the world rather than a consistent subject matter, style, or technique. Invariably, it is the product of a largely self-fashioned position of distancing and
rejecting the authority of the status quo—a perspective of one in exile, such
as Hamlet’s on being sent to England. The temptation is to equate such an
embattled isolation with youthful rebellion, which may have its origins in
family dynamics and a resistant, even vengeful attitude toward perceived parental tyranny. Among other things, there lies within Hamlet a fable of family fragmentation and alienation, which psychologically is a context often
used to explain the behavior of the avant-garde radical. Extended to public
spheres, such a spirit also fuels political uprisings and civil resistance, as well
as antiestablishment, cutting-edge creativity in literary, theatrical, and artistic cultural contexts. Whether finding its origins in rejection of a dominant
group such as family, government, or academy, the spirit of avant-gardism
lies in a painful and usually lonely task of confronting the status quo in order
to oppose, avenge, dismantle, and finally bury the authority of its stultifying
influence. We can detect here the contours of a paradox that Shakespearean
critics have debated for centuries, the seeds of which lie in Hamlet’s own
definition of his position as simultaneously a misunderstood, sensitive, and
politically maladroit soul who tends toward passive inaction and a political
malcontent whose feelings feed into civil disobedience and potentially violent
political opposition:
Yet I,
A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak
Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause,
And can say nothing—no, not for a king,
Upon whose property and most dear life
A damn’d defeat was made. Am I a coward?
Who calls me villain, breaks my pate across,
Plucks off my beard and blows it in my face,
Tweaks me by the nose, gives me the lie i’th’ throat
As deep as to the lungs—who does me this?
Ha! ’Swounds, I should take it: for it cannot be
But I am pigeon-liver’d and lack gall
To make oppression bitter, or ere this
I should ha’ fatted all the region kites
With this slave’s offal. Bloody, bawdy villain!
12 • Chapter One
Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain!
Why, what an ass am I! (2.2.561–78)
Can a man actively “prompted” to “revenge by heaven and hell” be reduced
to “unpack” his “heart with words” and impotently curse instead of crying
“vengeance” and striking? The answer is yes, not only in the unique set of
predicaments in which Hamlet finds himself, but also in the representative
kinds of situation faced by heretics in any age. Impotence and anger are
tightly connected through the volatile combination of the felt legitimacy,
“the motive and the cue for passion” (2.2.555), and resentment stemming
from disempowerment.
Bearing in mind Poggioli’s insight that avant-garde artists may seek to
revive the greatness of the past as an attempt to overturn perceived cultural
mediocrity in the present, often such artists’ motivation is to go back in time
to reestablish continuity with some admired lost role model. In effect, they
attempt to restore a “true” father who is in danger of being forgotten by the
world and overturning a “false” one, a kind of usurping stepfather who has
seized control of power and now dictates fashion. These are the essential elements of Hamlet’s deadly conflict and task, and he tries to make his mother
see the contrast that is so palpably obvious to him:
Look here upon this picture, and on this,
The counterfeit presentment of two brothers.
See what a grace was seated on this brow,
Hyperion’s curls, the front of Jove himself,
An eye like Mars to threaten and command,
A station like the herald Mercury
New-lighted on a heaven-kissing hill,
A combination and a form indeed
Where every god did seem to set his seal
To give the world assurance of a man.
This was your husband! Look you now what follows.
Here is your husband, like a mildew’d ear
Blasting his wholesome brother. Have you eyes?
Could you on this fair mountain leave to feed
And batten on this moor? Ha, have you eyes? (3.4.55–67)
The terms used by Hamlet have an educational resonance in the humanism
of Shakespeare’s age, since all the allusions used to valorize the old regime of
the dead King Hamlet are classical references—Hyperion, Mars, Mercury—
contrasted with the petty tawdriness of the incumbent on the throne who
Aspects of Avant-Garde • 13
attracts no such comparisons from antiquity. The particulars of the situation
may be uniquely Hamlet’s, but the nature of the conflict he delineates is, in
its broad contours, perennial, and it can refer just as pertinently to art history as to familial paternity. Petrarch, writing to Boccaccio, uses the analogy
of father and son to describe the process of original composition in terms
of imitation and invention as the resemblance of a son to his father (Emrys
Jones, 1977 19). A playwright in 1600 returns to a ghostly “Ur” predecessor
to bring Hamlet back to life, and to stand in recriminating contrast to the
“eyrie of children, little eyases” as “the fashion” now on stage (2.2.337, 339),
as though “real men” have been replaced by children, just as a king likened
to Hyperion has been replaced by “a mildew’d ear” of a man. Along the same
lines, the central character refers to an “excellent” but unacted old play
about Aeneas and Dido (recalling the dead Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage), which is considered too good for its contemporary audience. Then,
in order to shame an audience consisting primarily of a corrupt king in the
present, he revives an older, superseded form, the “dumb show,” to comment
on the present. Despite antiquity, the grander past remains mysteriously present, haunting and overshadowing the diminished present, used as a contrast
to demean the present and finally to expose current corruption.
Modern, Modernism, Contemporary, Avant-garde
Our vocabulary contains several variously and sometimes loosely defined
words, used according to context, to describe what is regarded as new or
“presentist” in literature and art in general. “Modern” and “contemporary,”
for example, are not timeless but relative. Notions of what is broadly modern
obviously operate on a sliding scale depending on when the term is used. The
Oxford English Dictionary’s meaning, “of or relating to the present and recent
times, as opposed to the remote past,” has been used since the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries in English: “The writings of the auncient and moderne
Geographers and Historiographers” was used in 1585. Shakespeare, with his
propensity for neologisms and unfamiliar language, used the word at times
with a meaning like “modish” or “fashionable”: “a modern invocation” (King
John 3.3.42); “the justice, / . . . With eyes severe, and beard of formal cut,
/ Full of wise saws, and modern instances” (As You Like It 2.7.153–56). In
literary history, it has been taken to refer to anything created during and after
the early modern period, which is usually said to run from the early sixteenth
century. Sometimes the modern is dated from the English Restoration of
1660, and at other times from Romanticism, after 1789. However, the word
is also used in a much more limited fashion to refer in the English-speaking
14 • Chapter One
world to post-Victorian, or the culture ushered in by the so-called Great War
in 1914–1918, which again marks a historical watershed between one kind of
world and another. University courses called “Modern Literature” and books
like W. W. Robson’s Modern English Literature generally cover twentiethcentury works, finding precursors and anticipations in earlier periods but not
including them. In other fields, modern art or modern music is similarly movable, sometimes describing the whole terrain from 1660 or 1800 but often
a more limited span, say from about 1850 to the 1970s or ’80s (after which
postmodernism is said to kick in). Despite such terminological relativities,
“modern” is used to denote a historically bounded period, though necessarily
its boundaries keep shifting. To complicate things further, the appearance of
Hamlet has been hailed as the beginning of “the modern world” in Western
history, with claims of the emergence of a distinctively modern sense of self.
“Modernism” is generally understood to refer to a particular set of artistic movements between the two twentieth-century wars or running from
the First World War through to the 1970s. Certain styles and attitudes are
claimed to characterize modernist literature—free verse breaking away from
the regularly metrical, symbolism, interior stream of consciousness instead
of third-person narration, tones of disillusionment and irony, a degree of abstraction, critique of empire, and others (Childs 3–6). Beyond this, however,
critics can again disagree markedly. Some claim that modernist artworks are
organized and unified organically and built on master narratives of progress
toward a better society as defined in political thought, and that they still rely
on narrative and presuppose symbolic codes of meaning and present premeditated, generic closures. Others, however, insist that modernism rejected and
attempted to discard such notions of unity, emphasizing instead the qualities
most evident in modernist art, such as abstraction, fragmentation, eclecticism, and relativism rather than belief in “universal truth,” and questioning
of form, unity, and narrative. Those who argue for the first definition create
the next category, postmodernism, to distinguish what followed, while supporters of the latter do not feel the need for such a term, instead finding it
more useful to speak of early and late phases of modernism. Given its extreme
relativity, variations on “modern” are not the words I want to describe the
special newness of Hamlet.
The other term to be considered is “contemporary,” defined by the Oxford
English Dictionary as “living, existing, or occurring together in time,” literally “with time.” Although also relative and on even more of a sliding scale
along a spectrum of indeterminate time, this term is more tightly time-bound
than “modern.” Once artists die or fall out of living memory, they usually
cease to become contemporary and instead are predecessors who may be
Aspects of Avant-Garde • 15
consigned to the “modern” ranks. What happened to people around the time
of Hamlet’s first performance was contemporary in 1600 but obviously is not
now, and we happily speak of “Shakespeare’s contemporaries” knowing they
are not ours. However, what links the modern and the contemporary is an
element of eventual obsolescence, making them equally subject to time and
the later addition of a prefix like “post-” or a qualifier like “after” or “later.”
Besides, the term in aesthetic history does not necessarily include the senses
of cutting-edge and politically adversarial that characterize avant-garde; contemporary art and literature can be just as bland and conformist in any age.
Although Shakespeare Our Contemporary was Kott’s striking phrase, it is still
not the term I am seeking, unless we expand its reach to say Shakespeare is
always a contemporary.
Yet another term to describe the now of a temporal present is “avantgarde.” Borrowed from French, it came to England with the Norman
Conquest and was used, for example, by Malory in the sense of an army’s
vanguard, those who come at the front and in many ways are ahead of their
followers. Its use evolved to describe leaders in artistic, philosophical, and
political fields as pioneers and innovators, those who usher in the new waves
of thinking and creating. The Oxford English Dictionary is surprisingly limited
on meanings here, in fact almost silent, not even conceding that the word
can be noun or adjective, as if the very concept is somehow non-English
and suspiciously francophile. Admittedly, it has been used more often on
the European continent and in Russia to describe aesthetic movements that
have not managed to put down deep, growing roots in England: abstract expressionism, art nouveau, surrealism, constructivism, futurism, Dada. There
is an honest argument that can be mounted to deny the existence of the
avant-garde—like the unicorn or bunyip, it can be said simply not to exist
except in mythology—because any text or self-proclaimed work of art is inevitably built upon existing conventions and understandings, even when the
relationship is constructed as oppositional. “Counterculture” is often used to
describe the latter, although this limits the ambit to just one facet of avantgarde intentions. In a different sense, it is probably depressingly obvious to
many ambitious artists that what they present as avant-garde very rapidly becomes dated, its envisaged radical newness either absorbed into mainstream
art or revealed as not so revolutionary as the artist had thought. More often
than not, it can be dismissed as simply voguish and fashionable. The kind of
works I am considering here have the rare quality of maintaining their newness through time, often over centuries.
Given the doubts surrounding this and associated terms, and some understandable critical skepticism about its existence as something definable, I feel
16 • Chapter One
justified in devising a possibly idiosyncratic but serviceable meaning for my
own purposes here. I find avant-garde useful because it can be understood as
lying outside the shifting relativisms of modern and contemporary in a realm
of its own, if we accept as central the idea of radical experimentation that
makes some works always unfamiliar, always new, and always different from
what is popular or fashionable in any age. By experimentation, I mean not
just in surface facets of form or convention but in a reconceptualization of
fundamental attitudes toward art itself. It is the “ever-now” and the “evernew.”
Although in this sense of remaining new to following generations it may
exist outside time, avant-garde works also are created in time, as products
of a historical moment. Therefore, the term has been applied, often by
practitioners themselves, to an identifiable set of movements in art from
roughly the 1890s up until about 1925 (see Cimorelli). The spirit driving
such movements, however, was not unprecedented, though the availability
of the term allowed such art to be signaled as unconventional and different
and subjected to theorization in a collective sense. Although most countries
have generated their own versions of avant-garde culture (Japan, the United
States, Germany), the heyday is often understood to be in Bolshevik Russia
under Malevich and Mayakovsky and in Italy under Marinetti. The disparate
movements shared (if that is the right word for such centrifugal groups) a
determination to break down the conventions of academic art and to radically change not only aesthetic expectations but ways of thinking about life
(see Philips). There were specific groups of avant-garde artists known under
the explicit title Secession Art, since they ostentatiously withdrew from and
attacked academic conventions and institutions. To some extent, all avantgarde social, artistic, and political movements might be termed secessionist
and nonconformist, down to the evocatively named “dropouts” from the
1960s onward. There were precursors, as the currency of such terms as “Byronic” and “Wildean” suggest, with their connotations of a recognizable mode
of clothing and style of living, including defiance of conventional morality,
taken to signify cultural rebels in their eras. The stance became associated
with a lifestyle: bohemian, anti-bourgeois, nocturnal, and rejecting canons
of conventional taste in every conceivable way. Among its most direct, modern sources was Cezanne’s pictorial cubism with its self-conscious fracturing
and distortions of reality, which evolved into abstraction. Advance guards
quickly spread into all art forms, including sculpture, literature, and ballet,
through Diaghilev and Stravinsky, who took Russian ballet to Rome in 1916
and set the seeds there, combining music, theater, architecture, and cinema.
Vanguards developed in all the arts, with practitioners taking on different
Aspects of Avant-Garde • 17
names to denote their varying approaches: futurism, abstract expressionism,
suprematism, surrealism, cubo-futurism, constructivism, alogism (“a-logism”
or nonlogical thinking), and minimalism, to name but a few. Dada was especially influential from 1915 onward, with its wit and shock value. It was
revived in the later twentieth century by neo-Dadaists, such as the artists
Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, and incited other loosely defined
movements, each having its own unwritten manifesto and revolutionary
rhetoric and fervor.
An initial example of Hamlet and the twentieth century avant-garde
might help to anticipate the territory being explored here. The composer recognized as quintessentially avant-garde, John Cage, wrote Ophelia (1945) for
the piano and as a ballet performance, which was recorded (and can now be
seen on YouTube). Music may be nonreferential in a literal sense, and dance
may have only an obliquely presented narrative, but the title of Cage’s work
indicates something of the mingled emotional tones associated with Shakespeare’s character. By turns it is lyrical and melodic, atonally agitated, assertive, apparently incoherent or discordant, and at times serene in moments of
stasis. In its quite different set of mediums, then, Cage’s work is both inspired
by Shakespeare’s Ophelia and provides a particularized interpretation of the
character and the play in which she appears. Once this explicit reference is
noted, others more implicit might come to mind. It is a whimsical thought,
but not entirely improbable given the literary reference, that Cage’s notorious but immensely influential work 4’33” (consisting of four minutes and
thirty-three seconds without musical content) may have been suggested, in
part, by Hamlet’s last words, “the rest is silence” (5.2.363). Both references
in their different ways demonstrate that the rest is not silence but is instead
filled—in the case of Cage’s piece—with extraneous, unrelated, and arbitrary
noise from inside and outside the venue, while in Hamlet the line is soon followed by audience reaction such as applause.
Cage has been credited as one of the inventors of the 1960s “Happening” as an impromptu performance, often with an absence of narrative and
indeterminate content. Such events are at the mercy of circumstances in
ways that emphasize the operation of chance (Aronson 40), and this in itself
is a frequent characteristic of avant-garde art. There is much in Hamlet that
can be construed as arbitrary chance. The killing of Polonius, for example,
happens as an impetuous, impulsive action rapidly regretted by Hamlet, and
it is at best based on mistaken identity. The “rash, intruding fool” (3.4.31)
was simply in the wrong place, behind an arras, at the wrong time. To the
bitter end, such mischances happen, as when the queen dies by drinking
from the wrong glass. Even carefully planned plots go bizarrely wrong, with
18 • Chapter One
equally fatal results. The deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Hamlet’s
close friends at some time in the past, are not only as inexplicably unjust as
Cordelia’s death in King Lear but turn on something like a callous, vindictive
joke by Hamlet, after his chance reading of a letter, the contents of which
are unknown to them. In these ways, the play’s world seems an absurdist’s
universe, governed not by tragic destiny or considered actions but by adventitious accidents and happenstance. Horatio emphasizes this dimension in
his final summation by speaking of “accidental judgments, casual slaughters”
and “purposes mistook / Fall’n on th’inventors’ heads,” and he warns against
“more mischance / On plots and errors” (5.2.387, 389–90, 399–400). Far
from a beloved “well-made play” running along Aristotelian lines of tragic
destiny, it sounds like a catalogue of mistakes and just the kind of randomness of chance that has drawn the attention of twentieth-century avantgarde artists as reflecting the world as they see it.
The term avant-garde is sometimes used to describe literary qualities, but
rarely including Shakespeare’s. It has been attached to the use of symbolism
in the poetry of Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé in the 1890s, but it is
more familiar in art history circles. A host of subgroups emerged and named
themselves, or were named by critics, either sympathetically or pejoratively:
Fauvism, “wild beasts”; Rayonism, from rays of light; Bauhaus, which planned
to bring all avant-garde art forms into creative relationship; kineticism, describing art that moves; Fluxus, art that flows between art and life, dissolving
boundaries between them; as well as many more. Some of these movements
were preoccupied with matters of technique, but all stemmed from a vision
and an overarching concept that centrally included the desire to break down
boundaries, to problematize habits of vision and perception, to challenge the
notion of the “real” by substituting new constructions of what reality is, or
by frontally denying its existence as a unified entity. Madness is a recurring
trope, since the concept of normative sanity is questioned and the metaphor
of society as a prison to be escaped recurs. Some issues and preoccupations of
Hamlet and its many adaptations are coming into view.
There has also, generally speaking, been a common political motivation
at work in self-avowed avant-garde works and movements. Artists, in some
cases at least, are drawn together by shared beliefs in political ideologies such
as socialism or anarchism in rejecting all party politics, instead believing in,
on the one hand, a morally based perception of organizing the state and,
on the other, art for art’s sake. Others declare themselves nihilists, believing in no form or values at all, since they are coercive. The link between
avant-garde art and left-wing politics seems confirmed by a corollary, to be
perceived in the irritation and hostility such works provoke in prevailing
Aspects of Avant-Garde • 19
power structures, often to the point of censorship. As an extreme case, Hitler’s notorious “Degenerate Art” exhibition in 1937 encouraged spectators
to ridicule all nonnaturalistic modern art and to condemn the artists as mad.
Again, this demonstrates an aspect of the avant-garde that Harding sees as
defining, its oxymoronic intersection of the “vanquished vanguard.” An art
was created by those “scattered as they were in exile, having fled Germany
and Europe while the fascists shut down their performance spaces, burned
their books, and exhibited their works as examples of ‘degenerate art’” (Harding 18). Deriving this position from implications in Walter Benjamin’s work,
Harding points out that “the building blocks of the avant-garde are always
multi-sided: innovation is always tied to the experimental, which, in turn, is
tied to risk, which in turn is tied to potential success and potential failure”
(Harding 19). More often, it tends to begin—and often end—in failure
rather than success: “the radical histories of the vanguard . . . are written from
the standpoint of the vanquished and of those who, in daring to experiment,
have failed” (Harding 19). It is worth noting that Hamlet as a figure in the
political context of the court of Elsinore is, from first to last, the vanquished.
He is a loser right to the end of his own play, and the ending, arguably,
neither vindicates nor celebrates his struggle, but simply gives it closure in
the death of his uncle and himself, in a scene dominated more by random
chaos than planned revenge. There is simply nobody left alive to perpetuate
the cycle of revenge. Worse, and most ironic, the only winner is the invader
Fortinbras (“Strong-arm”), in spite of the fact that he played no part in the
politics of Elsinore that have enmeshed Hamlet. His role is often seen as so
irrelevant as to be cut from performance. There is no sense in terms of poetic
justice that gives him the right to be anointed as monarch by Hamlet, except
the right of successful invader, and again his luck to be in the right place at
the right time.
Although each avant-garde movement in art, literature, and theater had
its own particularized set of theories, many also exhibited an emotional
antipathy to the twentieth-century world around them, often expressed as
“angst.” Herbert Read wrote and painted from a professed anarchist position and commented appreciatively and extensively on avant-garde art,
including in his anthology on surrealism (Read, 1936). He impressionistically defined the artist’s affliction as “undefinable anxiety, fear of the reality
behind appearances which they are nevertheless compelled to reveal—what
Kierkegaard, who was the first to have this kind of vision, called the despair
of immediacy, of not willing to be oneself, of not willing to be a self, of willing to be another than himself—demoniac despair, nihilism” (Read, 1951
35). There are certainly moments in Hamlet that exemplify such recogniz-
20 • Chapter One
ably modern anxieties based on overpowering existential fear and, indeed,
Read could almost have written his description with the play in mind: “it
harrows me with fear and wonder”; “distill’d / Almost to jelly with the act
of fear” (1.2.204–5); “A blanket, in the alarm of fear caught up”: “for there
is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison”
(2.2.249–51). The Ghost’s testimony of his own emotional state may be the
best description we have of such paralyzing and all-encompassing anxiety
that seems beyond ordinary human comprehension:
But that I am forbid
To tell the secrets of my prison-house,
I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes like stars, start from their spheres,
Thy knotted and combined locks to part
And each particular hair to stand an end
Like quills upon the fretful porpentine.
But this eternal blazon must not be
To ears of flesh and blood. (1.5.13–22)
As we shall later see, Paul Valéry inserted Hamlet as a jaundiced, angstridden observer into his view of a steady cultural and intellectual degeneration in Europe from 1600 to when he wrote in the 1930s. Alongside angst
as a frequent description of an emotion afflicting radical artists is ennui, a
listless despondency that finds no value in life, and again Hamlet anticipates
the condition:
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on’t, ah fie, ’tis an unweeded garden
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. (1.2.133–37)
One other term needs to be considered besides “modern,” “contemporary,” and “avant-garde.” In reading reviews of performances and films
for this book, many times I encountered examples that are referred to as
“postmodern.” Perhaps disappointing some readers, I include postmodernism not as an independent theoretical position but as the most recent
among avant-garde movements, emerging from deconstructionism in the
1970s. Similar in essence to the other movements mentioned above, postmodernism poses a rebellion against modernism, denying the existence of
Aspects of Avant-Garde • 21
truth-referents, emphasizing fragmentation of forms, pastiche, flattening of
emotion and affect, and rejection of inclusive metanarratives. At best, it
tolerates contradictions in a spirit of irreverence and subversiveness while
breaking down boundaries between high art and the popular. These are
basic tenets of many, perhaps most, avant-garde manifestos. What makes
postmodernism different, however, is that it also denies the concept of
originality and artistic authenticity that has driven avant-garde individuals
into creativity. Instead, there is a skepticism about the concept of individuality itself, encapsulated in Roland Barthes’s famous pronouncement
of “the death of the author.” Texts are regarded as a depressing tissue of
material inevitably borrowed and recycled from other texts. Some have
taken this to the next stage, arguing that postmodernism is in fact the
end of all avant-garde movements, a denial of their fundamental premise
of individuals expressing their autonomous uniqueness with sincerity, asserting instead a worldly wise resignation that there is nothing new under
the sun. There are various ways out of such a conundrum, I suggest, by
seeing postmodernism not as a singular and unique movement but as a different manifestation of the avant-garde. In asserting its various positions,
postmodernism is, like other avant-garde aesthetic theories, itself seceding
from an establishment—preeminently that of modernism—and in some
cases from the avant-garde itself, which paradoxically places postmodernism in the company of the very thing it rejects. It seems no coincidence
that the position emerged historically at the very time when it may have
looked like all art was claiming to be avant-garde, designed to shock and
to undermine conventions. Furthermore, Fredric Jameson, in his thorough
reconsideration of postmodernism, asserts as one of his guiding beliefs that
the constant references to history (what he calls “the random cannibalization of all the styles of the past”) combined with a rejection of that very
past, reveals an underlying dystopian yearning for “the radical past,” based
on a frustration and discontent with the contemporary (see Krauss). This
is one of the facets that links most, if not all, avant-garde movements and
modes of thinking, and ironically there may be more similarities than meet
the eye between postmodernist thought and T. S. Eliot’s nostalgic laments
for the loss of tradition alongside his poetic experiments in fragmentation.
For both, Hamlet becomes a reference point for such a position.
The example of Pop Art is especially intriguing in this debate since it celebrates visual icons identified with mass conformism. Equally paradoxically,
this may mean postmodernism need not be radical at all but on a conservative wing of the avant-garde concept—for example, pronouncing kitsch as
indistinguishable from art for art’s sake (Greenberg, Calinescu passim). At
22 • Chapter One
the same time, in its claim that all art is a form of appropriation and relies
on intertextuality, postmodernism can collude in seeing Hamlet as catalyst
for the subsequent centuries of its own diverse recreations—hence the many
performances and literary adaptations that have attracted the description
of postmodern. Pop Art and kitsch have been claimed, paradoxically, as the
epitome of mass and even philistine culture while also holding potential
manifestations of the avant-garde spirit. The practice of Andy Warhol
might be seen as pivotal in this apparently contradictory evaluation, since
in a sense he brought kitsch images and commodities within an avant-garde
context. (Usually the process is the opposite, as when a famous painting like
Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is brought within the realm of reproducible mass commodities, the role envisaged for film in Walter Benjamin’s 1936 essay, “The
Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” [see also Coates 1–5]).
At least two recent plays based on Hamlet exemplify these styles, described by
Aneta Mancewicz in an article on deconstructive rewritings, or what she dubs
“dewritings.” Igor Bauersima’s Factory (2002) plays with the idea of Warhol’s
New York City studio known as the Factory (which shifted its physical location three times) to present a version in which “Hamlet functions purely as a
trace in the memory” (Mancewicz 163). The world is conceived as a realitytelevision setting modeled on Big Brother, a program that in turn seems to be
an extension of Warhol’s egalitarian creed, that everybody will have fifteen
minutes of fame. Hamlet emerges as the kind of silkscreen print that Warhol
made of celebrities like Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, and others. Warhol
himself, a high priest of avant-garde art in the 1960s, designed a silkscreen
image in 1962 consisting of garishly colored repetitions of the Droeshout
portrait of Shakespeare, implying the commodification of the writer who,
three years before the quatercentenary of his birthday, had become as ubiquitous in the world of popular culture as Campbell’s soup. One of Warhol’s
cohorts, the musician Lou Reed of the Velvet Underground, made several
references to Shakespeare. In an interview for The Telegraph (November 5,
2013), he revealed that he aspired to be Shakespeare rather than Elvis and
recited the “Out, out, brief candle!” speech from Macbeth (5.5.17–28), while
his song “Romeo Had Juliette” draws Shakespeare’s play into a rock-and-roll
narrative of fleeting love that disappears as quickly as it ignites. Meanwhile,
Kitsch Hamlet, a production by Saverio La Ruina in 2004, depicted a dysfunctional, matriarchal Italian family in which “Hamlet” remained offstage
and silent while “Ophelia,” his fiancée, yearned to reach him. According to
Mancewicz’s account, the tragic hero and heroine were reduced to burlesque
in a debased, quietly violent, entrapping modern world of kitsch.
Aspects of Avant-Garde • 23
All these innovative art movements, some short-lived and some more
enduring, may never have invoked Hamlet among their sources and may
seem worlds away from Shakespeare’s play, but I will argue that the spirit
driving them can also be detected in the play as its avant-garde stratum.
However, unlike other art movements that often rise, flourish, and die in
a definable time span, avant-gardism entered the vocabulary of art to refer
to a more cyclical concept, a label that could be attached at least initially
to earlier and later cultural revolutions. Once the term had been invented
and propagated, it was found to have utility in describing retrospectively the
impact of previous movements based on initial novelty and experimentalism.
Pre-Raphaelite art, for example, has been described as the avant-garde of its
time. Millais’ painting “Ophelia,” 1851–1852, thus had a place in the ranks
of avant-garde statements even half a century before the term was generally
applied to art. Although finding its way into popular art, the avant-garde is
more frequently associated with the defiantly exclusive “pleas[ing] not the
million” and, instead, “caviare to the general” (2.2.433).
Given the history of the concept, it is not surprising that an avant-garde
work will defy easy accommodation within any mainstream of fashion, since
its war is against fashion itself, and it is by extension usually intrinsically
against imperialism and capitalism since these are perceived as centralizing
and homogenizing ideologies. Experimentation in the world of independent
cinema has often been considered as consciously defying Hollywood mass
consumerism in films. While mass culture presupposes endless replication
with minor variations, the art of an elite prides itself on uniqueness, radical
originality, and often a conceptual impenetrability except to the initiated.
As part of the initial reception, there has often been a desire to shock,
though over time this aspect becomes dulled as public perceptions change.
Dadaists’ films nowadays seem tame rather than shocking, since some of
their innovations, such as those in Hans Richter’s Rhythmus 21 (1921), have
been appropriated into mainstream forms—for example, music videos using
abstract images moving to music. Others can, in retrospect, be seen as experiments in techniques that are now familiar, such as montage in Richter’s
Ghosts Before Breakfast (1927). Fragmentary works by Man Ray and Fernand
Léger, for example Entr’Acte (1924), were made in response to an invitation
to Francis Picabia and Erik Satie to make a film that would “make the public
head for the exits.” Throughout works in this “anti-art” movement of Dada
runs a theme that we would now call “deconstruction,” since they subvert
attempts to find a subject or a unifying general principle, whether narrative,
representational, or otherwise. The subject is simply the visible content, no
more and no less, often consisting of lines and shapes created by pure chance
24 • Chapter One
or random selection. Even surrealism, as in Dali’s work, is not so radically
free of representation, since it gives a “recuperation of the subject, fractured
or otherwise, by means of the unconscious” (Michaud 23). Though such
works have lost much of their capacity to unsettle and are more interesting
historically than performatively, they are still unique enough to challenge
the viewer as to how to interpret them. Shock value may have receded
with time, but conceptual puzzles remain. Such an aesthetic may seem far
removed from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but it has been used in avant-garde
productions by the Wooster Group and others.
As another example, the cinematic techniques of some early avant-garde
filmmakers may have been imitated so much that they have become conventions or even clichés, yet their work, in its challenging spirit of conceptual
autonomy, will continue to defy emulation and will always be innovative in
vision. It is surely not the style but the content and the idea behind it that
continues to shock and disturb viewers of the close-up scene in Buñuel’s
short film Le Chien Andalou in which it appears that an eyeball is being
slit by a razor. Cocteau is another who continues to intrigue through such
movies as Orphée and La belle et la bête, and he holds a place in the development of avant-garde versions of Hamlet, as we shall discover (see Halpern).
In this sense, some other works can be said to be perennially experimental.
Although influential and inspiring others, they are not imitable in their own
terms, and they remain, in their own right, cutting edge. In earlier times, we
might have cited Plato’s The Republic and two books shared almost as jokes
between friends, Erasmus’s Praise of Folly and Thomas More’s Utopia; and
later, Tristram Shandy, Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, Gertrude Stein’s unique writings, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, music by Messiaen and John Cage, buildings
by Le Corbusier, paintings by Van Gogh, Mark Rothko, and Jackson Pollock,
plays by Brecht and Beckett—all vehicles for avant-garde thinking in their
respective fields. The continued respect for such works makes a phrase like
“avant-garde classic” less of an oxymoron than it seems, and their existence
lends some justification to placing them within an overarching group that
crosses different art forms. My aim is to place Hamlet in this company.
Generally speaking, the topical reference and particular targets for criticism in such works might become dated, but not the aesthetic assumptions,
because they are positioned in opposition to the conventions of art contemporary with them. Such conscious adversarialism is adopted by avant-garde
artists who, as Peter Bürger (despite restricting the term to the early modernist period) puts it, “not only intend a break with the traditional representational system but the total abolition of the institution that is art. This
is undoubtedly something ‘new,’ but the ‘newness’ is qualitatively different
Aspects of Avant-Garde • 25
from both a change in artistic techniques and a change in the representational system” (Bürger 63). Lying beyond popular fashion, their appeal is
(more often than not) to an élite: an understanding of avant-garde art can
be limited to a cult enclave rather than mass reception; in fact, this is part of
the intention. Always, in aesthetic, political, and even social terms, a central
motivation behind avant-garde movements like surrealism is a struggle for
freedom from constraints of all kinds—nonconformism in the deepest and
widest sense. Part of an avant-garde aesthetic approach is to mistrust and reject formal conventions and rules of composition as much as of living, which
makes it elusive and difficult to define. It is, once again, a motivation expressive of Hamlet’s particular desire for freedom, both psychic and physical: “O
God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite
space—were it not that I have bad dreams” (2.2.254–56); “Denmark’s a
prison” (2.2.243). Only radical reform and removal of constraints can change
institutions, and for Hamlet the means lie in revenge for past transgressions.
Although it is in the nature of the avant-garde to produce individual
works that are sui generis, we can observe, paradoxically, some reasonably
regular properties emerging. In Raymond Rohauer’s collection, issued as a
DVD under the title Avant-Garde Experimental Cinema of the 1920s and ’30s
(2005), we find repeated disruptions of linear narrative, a consequential raising of questions that are deliberately unanswered or deflected, and apparently
random and repetitive images. All suggest techniques drawing attention to
the machinery of the medium itself, in strategies that critics of Elizabethan
drama call metatheater. In manifestos and practices of Dada and surrealist
writers and artists, we find an interest in psychological states concerning
what is mad in human behavior and thought, and insanity is often redefined
as a critique of what is conventionally considered to be sane. Chance rather
than imposed programs of action is characteristically highlighted. We find
iconoclasm and political radicalism, and a rejection of war in particular,
which owes something to the context in which modern avant-garde art was
at its height as a named movement from the middle of the First World War
to the Second World War in Europe. However, such works invariably react
consciously against the times in which they are created and are thus in spirit
radical and free-thinking, and they seek—not always successfully—to escape
from the contemporary, as Peter Eckersall notes in his interesting book on
avant-garde performance and politics in Japan from the 1960s onward:
What is more, the avant-garde simultaneously ruptures with the past and is
an arbiter of the future. Its reflex is to explore hitherto unknown forms of
expression and representation. Paradoxically though, there can be no innova-
26 • Chapter One
tion without context, for the avant-garde is dependent on an object of resistance for its act of revolt. That is to say, something can only be avant-garde
in relation to something that it has moved away from. The subversive transgressive potential of the avant-garde is tempered by this notion of continuum.
(Eckersall xv)
In many unexpected ways, a play like Hamlet—perhaps the most indisputably canonical of all—provides for provocative artists their ideal “object of
resistance for its act of revolt,” while holding within itself the very grounds
on which that resistance and provocative transgression are based.
One counterargument to the one I am proposing might be that the avantgarde should not be claimed as having a unitary meaning in its own right but
instead should be seen as a set of historically specific and often completely
unrelated movements, occurring at different times, in different art forms, and
for different reasons. This is expressed most categorically by Susan Rubin
Suleiman: “there is no such thing as the avant-garde; there are only specific
avant-garde movements, situated in a particular time and place” (Suleiman
18). The statement may be true in the “particular time and place” where it is
expressed as part of a larger argument, but from other points of view it seems
less helpful. We can readily agree that a part of the avant-garde stance is to
challenge notions of artistic hegemony represented by collective terms like
genre, movement, reductive theory, and other forms of synthesizing logic
that may seem to disrespect uniqueness. The impulse to challenge authority
is itself a linking bond, even if the reasons for attack and the target are different in each case. Intention is not always a reliable marker of achievement,
and much rebel art is not necessarily artistically avant-garde or subversive.
However, given a group of works as diverse as those I am dealing with, it
does explain something of their genesis in a distinctive stance or vantage
point rather than an aesthetic program held in common. Stephen Chinna
puts this succinctly, while also incidentally distinguishing the avant-garde
from postmodernism:
[T]he crux of the argument is the notion of a dialectical response, or a dialectical relationship. The “historical” avant-garde can be interpreted as a dialectical response—to Aestheticism, to Modernism, to technological warfare, to
patriarchal power, to Imperialism, to Naturalism, and so forth—but it is always
in terms of a response, or reaction. (Chinna, 2003 111)
Moreover, although historians distinguish between named movements
such as Dadaism, futurism, surrealism, and the Russian avant-garde, each of
which holds its own topical and tropical points of difference from the others,
Aspects of Avant-Garde • 27
this elides many creative catalysts common to them all. It seems reasonable
not to leave the story at the level of different technical devices to achieve
their varied ends and instead to find points of similitude that link the different movements, again largely on the grounds of common attitudes and
a shared intention to break rules. If we replace the word “movement” with
either manifestation of a like-minded spirit, a common stance, or, more simply, a shared disposition, then we shift the emphasis to a level that allows
us to make some generalizations about avant-gardism as a genre, in spite of
its own potential hostility to hallowed genres and conventions. Ironically,
a central and fairly basic aspect of the collectivity would be a desire to be
unique, heterogeneous, individual, different, and sharing little in common
with anything else. This may seem counterproductive as a defining element,
but it is not something that can easily be applied to any other body of works
claimed as belonging to a movement.
Another argument concerning definitions of the avant-garde lies at the
other end of the spectrum: avant-garde is a term that, far from applying
meaningfully to historically diverse and aesthetically discrete groups of artists, can be loosely used to describe anything that seeks to overturn prevailing
norms and is too broad to have any useful meaning. For example, if abstraction happens to be in fashion, then avant-garde might take the form of naturalism or realism, neither of which has been considered avant-garde. Further,
there is no monopoly on individual techniques such as fragmentation,
montage, abstraction, or disruption of narrative, since we find such things in
many works that would not be called avant-garde, and they are nowadays in
cinema considered conventions in their own right. However, there was once
a vanguard who were first to forge such methods of expressing their artistic
ends, and they did so as part of a more coordinated plan to shock audiences
in a spirit of experimentation and rejection of conventions. It is the artist’s
place in time and history that defines radicalism, as the “now” shifts from being contemporary and is later consigned to the ranks of the modern, which,
in turn, becomes the past. Eisenstein’s movies are an example—nobody can
deprive him of the status of pioneer, even though virtually all his discoveries in cinema have now been accommodated in mainstream practice. His
films will always hold the freshness of discovery. The “ever-now” is not just
a bundle of new techniques but a questing originality that has a broader capacity to undermine current modes of thinking at any time. Beneath this lies
a historically longer point—that even abstraction and fragmentation have
traditionally been driven by the same basic motivation as the naturalism and
representationalism they may reject, namely, mimesis, “likeness to truth,” or,
as Renaissance humanists put it, “following nature.” Impressionism and ex-
28 • Chapter One
pressionism were created as radical alternatives to naturalism, yet both make
claims to form a close fit with the observable world as it is seen by the artist, roughly in terms of sensory perception in the former case and emotional
responses in the latter. The avant-garde seeks to regard the observable world
in dramatically new ways, though the artist’s individual aim may still be to
see that world as it really is through his or her unique eyes.
I hope to have sketched a frame of reference that will enable us to view
Hamlet as an avant-garde work, “ever-now,” “ever-new,” positing that avantgarde is a set of attitudes and perhaps even a paradoxical genre, depending
on a rejection of stable or traditional genres. It characteristically incorporates
a political stance of rebellion against artistic and social norms and worldly
authority in general, an aesthetic preference for fragmentation and disruption of unitary narrative (or melody in music), a philosophical interest in the
role of chance, and an imposition of new views of the world and of art. The
avant-garde also challenges narratives of progress, substituting an alternative, cyclical view of art history based on repairing a rupture with the past by
denying the tyranny of ephemeral fashions in the present. In Hamlet, a ghost
“come from the grave” (1.5.131), critiques the play’s tawdry present and
sets a task for the hero, just as its own sources determine and also unsettle
Shakespeare’s play, and the drama itself continues to pursue its future adaptations down to the present day. By placing Hamlet in the company of artistic
renegades, we may create an estranging context through which to reassess its
abiding strangeness.
CHAPTER TWO
Avant-Garde Hamlet, Then and Now
Even when Shakespeare wrote Hamlet in about 1600, there was nothing especially new about the story, and for the play’s first audiences it would have
been as traditional and familiar as it is for us. The basic narrative had been
around since the twelfth century, when Saxo Grammaticus wrote down the
Norse legend in Latin as Amleth as part of his History of the Danes, printed in
1514. This was used in the Histoires tragiques by François de Belleforest, reissued in French five times from 1570 onward. A few brief references suggest
that it had apparently been staged in the time of Shakespeare’s dramatic apprenticeship in the late 1580s and the 1590s, in a play now referred to as the
Ur-Hamlet, which some have attributed to Thomas Kyd. Evidence for this
mysterious “lost” play is scant but difficult to explain away. Thomas Nashe
in 1589 wrote, “English Seneca read by candle-light yields many good sentences, as Blood is a begger, and so forth; and if you entreat him fair in a frosty
morning, he will afford you whole Hamlets, I should say handfuls of tragical
speeches.” In 1594, the theater entrepreneur Philip Henslowe recorded a
performance of Hamlet in his diary, and in 1596 Thomas Lodge described a
performance he had seen where “the ghost cried so miserably at the theatre,
like an oyster-wife, Hamlet, revenge!” It is perhaps the greatest unsolved
mystery of the Elizabethan age, what exactly this Ur-Hamlet was and who
wrote it. One suspects that by 1600 the dramatic genre of revenge tragedy
had been almost done to death by Kyd’s own The Spanish Tragedy, an exceptionally popular play on the London stages in the 1590s, though it was far
29
30 • Chapter Two
from exhausted, since there were several more to come from Marston, Tourneur, and Webster. The ingredients of Shakespeare’s example of the genre
must already have been considered old hat when Hamlet was performed, and
Shakespeare himself must have racked his brains as much as modern directors do as to how to “make new” such overworked material.
Editors of the play have sifted through the presumed sources to discover
the many tiny changes Shakespeare made, and Alexander Welsh in the
first chapter of Hamlet in His Modern Guises provides a convenient critical
summary. We find elements from the early stories retained (revenge: a king
is killed by his brother, Feng, who marries the former queen, and is in turn
avenged by the king’s son, Amleth, prince of Jutland); some elaborated (the
hero’s feigned madness and riddling as a stratagem to avoid danger, and
very sketchy versions of Polonius, Ophelia, and Horatio); and some elements added (the Ghost, Laertes, the gravediggers, Yorick’s skull, Osric, and
Fortinbras). We see Shakespeare also building on the tiniest of hints. The
name Amleth seems to have derived from a word meaning “fool” (Welsh 8).
While Hamlet is certainly no fool in the modern sense (although he does
describe Polonius thus), he has not unjustly been described as the “witty”
prince whose roles include the trickster and one who lashes folly (Bell ch.
6). Many of his gnomic observations adopt the role of the “holy fool” who
speaks truths camouflaged by jokes in order to protect himself (White, 1985;
Ghose 1008–10). Even his opening line is an aside “quibble” of the kind one
might find unexpected in a tragedy—“A little more than kin, and less than
kind” (1.2.65)—and the spectrum of his joking stretches to broader effects
that invariably get a laugh in the theater, as when he suggests “nosing” the
body of Polonius under “the stairs into the lobby” (4.3.36–37). Even the cunning way in which he dispatches Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, by reversing
the orders they bear to have him killed when he reaches England, is a kind
of private, macabre joke that appeals to Hamlet’s sense of the ridiculous.
To the strains of laughter, black humor, and witty conceits, we can add (as
Shakespeare did in both cases) comic characters such as Osric, the preening,
fashionable “water-fly” who is the handy butt of Hamlet’s mockery, and the
remains of the court jester Yorick. Already we find some hints that in this
play Shakespeare is experimenting with potentially discrepant tones and
consciously disrupting tragic decorum when dealing with a well-worn story.
Shakespeare also made some functional changes, no doubt for reasons of
dramatic economy, which incidentally add important atmospheric intensification. He begins in medias res after the coronation of King Claudius, confining the action to the court at Elsinore instead of wandering geographically.
The resulting claustrophobia focuses the emphasis on political machinations
Avant-Garde Hamlet, Then and Now • 31
and a brooding sense of menace evocative of a state that is preparing for
war without and engaged in surveillance over its own citizens within. All
of this makes Polonius as Claudius’s “spymaster” a figure of sinister power,
despite his superficially amusing, fussing manner. He sets a spy, Reynaldo,
on his own son, as well as (presuming it is his idea) “sending for” Hamlet’s
friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to winkle out the prince’s plans and
state of mind, and perhaps also the Players to cheer up the sullenly grieving
figure. Later Laertes, another character added by Shakespeare, is, after his
own father’s death, manipulated by Claudius to become a willing pawn in
one of several plots to assassinate Hamlet. All this immeasurably enhances
the sense of an isolated young man angrily at odds with the prevailing political order in the oppressive milieu of Elsinore, which he gradually deduces
results from a regicide, dubious legitimacy, and a suspected state cover-up in
the highest quarters. Shakespeare does not make clear what an orderly succession to the throne would have required in this state, so that “election” is
left unexplained in Hamlet’s “Popp’d in between th’election and my hopes”
(5.2.65), a phrase that, if nothing else, reveals a grievance. All reassurances
made to Hamlet of his eventually becoming king are undermined by the
fact that in his eyes the promisers are so untrustworthy that he is “promisecrammed” (3.2.95) with dubious guarantees. His resentment is compounded
by the implication of his mother, since it seems that Claudius has succeeded
not on any grounds of primogeniture but through marriage to the queen.
Claudius is aware also of popular unrest—“the people muddied, / Thick and
unwholesome in their thoughts and whispers” (4.5.81–82)—although he
cunningly links this to Hamlet’s murder of Polonius rather than anything
tainting his own legitimacy. We have, then, the political groundwork for
the emergence of the avant-garde hero, who sees his lonely mission as one
of challenging and dismantling the public fraud in revenge for his father’s
reported murder.
Elizabethan Rebels
Two plays known to Shakespeare may be comparable in their unsettling,
rebellious, and confronting nature, and both were linked fairly closely with
Hamlet. They were written by two playwrights who evidently shared lodgings, since they wrote “in the same chamber.” Both fell foul of authority,
one dying under very suspicious circumstances and the other imprisoned and
tortured for his association. First, Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (1589–1592?),
depicting the doomed revolt of a man over a possibly tyrannical “God the
Father,” may find some direct references in Shakespeare’s play. The question
32 • Chapter Two
asked by Faustus at the outset is the one also raised by Hamlet: If God gave
us curiosity, why would he intend us not to exercise it?
Sure he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and godlike reason
To fust in us unus’d. (4.4.36–39)
This dangerous reasoning is exactly that used by the learned Doctor Faustus
in wanting to go beyond conventional knowledge, thereby being drawn into
the devil’s party. Another premise underlying the two plays concerns the
ways in which the devil might tempt us, and the point is raised acutely by
Hamlet:
The spirit that I have seen
May be the devil, and the devil hath power
T’assume a pleasing shape, yea, and perhaps,
Out of my weakness and my melancholy,
As he is very potent with such spirits,
Abuses me to damn me. (2.2.594–99)
Faustus does indeed meet a representative of the devil and spends much
time debating with him, and the consequence is his “hellish fall,” a lesson of
which Hamlet is well aware.
Doctor Faustus was evidently the most controversial play of the period,
with its dangerous proximity to blasphemy, satanic revelation, more generally antiauthoritarianism and antischolasticism, and its defiant confrontation with metaphysical injustice. Of course Marlowe, no doubt to evade the
censors, also allows the opening and closing Chorus’s lines, and some other
sections of the play, to present a conventional and edifying moral, thus
providing a built-in ambiguity (Duxfield) as cover for the playing troupe.
However, in performance, it would be difficult to prevent audiences from
sympathizing, at least to some extent, with the central character’s dangerous curiosity. Hamlet in its own way deals with comparably controversial
material, and the question of whether its Ghost comes from heaven or
hell would inevitably have resonated with audiences who had a memory
of Marlowe’s notorious work. Shakespeare’s line seems so apt that it may
well have been written with a memory of his friend’s Faustus in mind: “the
devil hath power / T’assume a pleasing shape” (2.2.595–96). Since suicide
was regarded as a mortal sin and motivated by despair, even to ask the
Avant-Garde Hamlet, Then and Now • 33
question “To be, or not to be” (3.1.56) hovers close to blasphemy in the
Christian cosmology of the time. For any Christian, the actions required
“not to be” would simply not be an option, and the very utterance would
have been as dangerous as Faustus’s questioning of the limitations placed
by God on human intellectual exploration and the satanic temptations
of Mephistopheles. Although it is not Hamlet but Laertes who voices the
(again) near-blasphemous “I dare damnation” (4.5.133), he is not only recalling the gist of many scoffing utterances by Faustus, such as “Why, dost
thou think that Faustus shall be damned?” (2.1.135) but is also voicing a
recurring strain in Hamlet itself. Politically, the play held subversive potential in Elizabeth’s England, depicting no less than four acts of regicide:
old Hamlet, Claudius, Gertrude, and Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, after his
brief accession to the throne at the end, just long enough for him to nominate an illegitimate invader, Fortinbras, as his successor. The complicated
textual status of Marlowe’s play is not especially relevant here, but it was
almost certainly the result of censorship (Hopkins 28–29) because of the
work’s iconoclasm, while the various texts of Hamlet pose problems that
have never been answered satisfactorily, as we shall soon see. What we do
know, however, from Philip Henslowe is that The Jew of Malta and one of
the Henry VI plays were performed on successive days in 1592 (Logan 3).
At least one expert on authorship has suggested that there is a case to be
made for Marlowe as a collaborator in writing 2 Henry VI (Craig, 2009 71).
We have also been reminded that “among those contemporaries of Shakespeare that we know about, Marlowe had the strongest continuing impact
on Shakespeare’s psychology as he composed his works” (Logan 8), from
1592 right through to The Tempest.
There is one more significant and obvious link between Marlowe’s Faustus
and Shakespeare’s Hamlet, their association with the University of Wittenberg. Shakespeare emphasizes the point by repeating it, first at the beginning
of the play when we have just been introduced to the young prince:
King: For your intent
In going back to school in Wittenberg,
It is most retrograde to our desire,
And we beseech you bend you to remain
Here in the cheer and comfort of our eye,
Our chiefest courtier, cousin, and our son.
Queen: Let not thy mother lose her prayers, Hamlet.
I pray thee stay with us, go not to Wittenberg. (1.2.112–19)
34 • Chapter Two
And again, when it is established that his friend Horatio, whom we have
already met on the battlements, is also “truanting” from the university:
Horatio: Hail to your lordship.
Hamlet: I am glad to see you well.
Horatio, or I do forget myself.
Horatio: The same, my lord, and your poor servant ever.
Hamlet: Sir, my good friend, I’ll change that name with you.
And what make you from Wittenberg, Horatio?—Marcellus.
Marcellus: My good lord.
Hamlet: I am very glad to see you.—[to Bernardo] Good even, sir.—
But what in faith make you from Wittenberg?
Horatio: A truant disposition, good my lord. (1.2.159–69)
It is not an arbitrary or gratuitous reference. Compared with the older medieval universities, Wittenberg, founded in Germany in 1502, was decisively
new. In the first generation after its inception, it gained a reputation for
the most radical and important change in the history of Western religion,
for it was here, in its first decade, that one Martin Luther graduated with a
doctorate and was appointed to teach theology, a position he held for the
rest of his life. In 1517, he began his “disputation” with the Roman Catholic
Church with a letter known as the Ninety-Five Theses, and on refusing to
repudiate his criticisms of the papacy and church practices, he was excommunicated. With the equally modern invention of the printing press on hand,
translations of the Theses had, by 1519, spread throughout Europe, including
France and England. The rest, as they say, is history, since Luther had ignited
the Reformation through which Protestantism steadily spread over northern
Europe. Luther had an equally radical collaborator, though his name is now
less familiar: Philip Melanchthon, who had equal claims to the founding
of Lutheranism and who independently preached pacifism, a cause no less
controversial, and one that Hamlet espouses. He was recruited by Luther and
became a professor of Greek language at Wittenberg. The period in which
Hamlet is set is indeterminate (sources go back to medieval times), but unless
the references are a deliberate anachronism, a young man could have been
a student at Wittenberg University only after 1502, and throughout the sixteenth century the reputation of radicalism or notoriety (depending on one’s
religion) remained.
However, even more to the point, Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus had been
awarded a doctorate from Wittenberg (“Wertenberg”), having studied the
whole curricula of divinity, law, medicine, and logic. Marlowe’s source was
the chapbook known as the Faust Book, written and translated in the latter
Avant-Garde Hamlet, Then and Now • 35
half of the sixteenth century, retelling stories that may or may not have had a
basis in truth. The historical figure, if there was one, is unlikely to have been
Luther’s contemporary but instead an ancient heretic from North Africa, but
the connection with Wittenberg seems to have come through the similarity
of his thinking to Luther’s on central issues. The Faust Book firmly places
Faust or Faustus in the province of Weimar, and as one who studied at Wittenberg, dabbled in sorcery, conversed with a diabolic spirit called Mephistopheles, renounced the church, signed in blood his soul to the devil, and
was damned. To explore all these links through Luther, Faustus, Marlowe,
and Hamlet would take another book, and it would need to factor in such
questions as whether purgatory exists. Luther changed his mind from yes to
no (Greenblatt 33–34), but he added that it could be experienced while a
person was still alive, which seems to be Faust’s (and Marlowe’s) position.
Melanchthon said no, as he regarded the concept as unnecessary (Walls
40). The question of whether ghosts can speak truth or are inevitably of the
devil’s party was also hotly debated, as was their very existence. The fifth of
Luther’s ninety-five theses of things wrong with the Church of Rome is a
cryptic claim suggesting the superstitious fictionality of poltergeists, since the
living and dead were not supposed to be able to communicate (Schmitt 20).
But the overarching point to be made here is that, by the simple stratagem
of making his young hero a student at Wittenberg, Shakespeare has imported
associations with some of the most radical and dangerous figures and issues
of the sixteenth century.
Secondly, Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (1584–1590?) was so familiar to
audiences that it invited and endured the kind of parody to be inflicted on
Hamlet in later times. It underwent one of its many revivals in the newly
built Fortune Playhouse in 1600, at the very time Shakespeare was composing his play. Two years later (eight years after Kyd’s death), an edition of
The Spanish Tragedy was published, and in recent detective work worthy of
Hamlet’s confirmation of the hand of Claudius in a murder, scholars seem
to have confirmed Coleridge’s hunch that the hand of Shakespeare himself
was in some “Additional Passages” to the play (Stevenson, Craig, Vickers,
Bruster). The two works were immediately recognized as companion pieces,
since Shakespeare’s play seems to have been sometimes referred to as Hamlet,
Revenge, echoing the way Kyd’s was sensationally renamed Hieronimo’s Revenge. They are linked also in that Richard Burbage played both characters,
“young Hamlet, old Hieronimo.” In both plays, the central motivation is
revenge, in the one a father’s revenge for the murder of his son, in the other
two sons’ revenge for the murders of their respective fathers. Both interrogate
the morality of revenge as a “rough justice” (in Bacon’s words, “a kind of
36 • Chapter Two
wild justice”) or, as Catherine Belsey puts it, “An act of injustice on behalf
of justice” (Belsey, 1985 115), an illegal activity pursued in both Kyd’s play
and Hamlet to counteract an unjust society and expose a murder. Both plays
involve madness, feigned and true, suggesting multiple levels of awareness
and perception in worlds where truth is institutionally suppressed. They both
present on stage a ghost and use a play-within-the-play, as well as a host of
mirroring details that make it clear that the earlier play was in Shakespeare’s
mind as he wrote. They are equally fueled by the frustrated, vengeful anger
of an aggrieved protagonist against authority and convention, the basic
stance of avant-gardism, and in both the tragic matter is also leavened with
streaks of cruel humor. Inevitably, Kyd has always been the prime suspect as
author of the elusive Ur-Hamlet. Whether or not he was, his Spanish Tragedy,
alongside Marlowe’s Faustus, may have unleashed in Shakespeare some kind
of rebellious impulse to write Hamlet in emulation. Among them, the three
plays provide an unholy trinity of early modern avant-garde drama, pushing
against artistic conventions, religious restrictions, and political orthodoxies.
Marlowe and Kyd, of course, not only knew each other but were indicted
as partners in crime when “papers were found” in their shared chamber that
seemed to incriminate them in treason. Kyd was tortured and Marlowe arrested. Meanwhile, hovering close to Shakespeare’s theatrical world were the
other two courtiers most dogged by controversy and accused of treason and
dark learning, Sir Walter Raleigh and the Earl of Essex. Essex was executed
in 1601, and he had certainly been supported by Shakespeare about the time
when Hamlet was on the stage. In Henry V (1599), Shakespeare had famously
offered his encouragement to Essex before the ill-fated military expedition to
Ireland, which later led to his execution. Others who hovered on the margins
of respectability were the University Wits John Marston, a bitter satirist who
made revenge tragedy his main dramatic genre, and Thomas Nashe, whose
Terrors of the Night dealt with demonology. Although usually writing in a
skeptical and ironic tone, he concluded that terror in nightmares is caused
by sin and guilt. Even if a “School of Night” around the mysterious figure of
Giordano Bruno did not exist, as earlier critics have suggested, one can easily
see why it would be surmised (see Acheson, Bradbrook, Yates) on the basis
of men such as these meddling in dark subjects and forming the intellectual
avant-garde of their day.
Soliloquies of the Damned
Nor are the more dangerous and diabolical references the only aspects that
link Doctor Faustus, The Spanish Tragedy, and Hamlet. Others are more formal
Avant-Garde Hamlet, Then and Now • 37
and rhetorical points of comparison; for example, their mutual reliance on
what we call soliloquies. The fact that Hamlet is punctuated regularly—seven
times, to be exact—with the hero’s self-communings is probably the main
thing known by everybody who has heard of the play. Their first lines are
as familiar as any poetic utterance in the language: “O that this too too sullied flesh would melt” (1.2.129); “O all you host of heaven! O earth! What
else?” (1.5.92); “Now I am alone. / O what a rogue and peasant slave am I!”
(2.2.543–44); “To be, or not to be, that is the question” (3.1.56); “’Tis now
the very witching time of night” (3.2.379); “Now might I do it pat, now a
is a-praying. / And now I’ll do’t” (3.3.73–74); “How all occasions do inform
against me, / And spur my dull revenge” (4.4.32–33). However, once again
the familiarity may be our biggest stumbling block to recognizing the novelty
of Shakespeare’s use of the convention of a character speaking in the first
person without any other characters able to hear. It was certainly nothing
new in drama, since Aristotle in ancient times had mentioned the soliloquy
and Shakespeare himself had used it in early plays such as The Two Gentlemen of Verona and the Henry VI trilogy. By common consent, the first of
his great soliloquies belongs to the Duke of Gloucester as he begins to plot
his murderous way toward becoming Richard III (3 Henry VI 5.6.61–93).
However, in the case of Hamlet especially, sheer repetition and frequent
comparisons with the Sonnets may have distracted us from understanding
what Elizabethans were doing with soliloquies on stage, or recognizing how
radical Shakespeare’s could be.
The Romantics started what may be a false trail. Coleridge’s taste was for
sonnets (he was among relatively few since Shakespeare’s time to admire
them), which he assumed were intended to be read silently by a solitary
reader. By an understandable chain of reasoning, he could see the soliloquies
as comparable to sonnets for a reader, assuming they were intended as a
direct communication between a writer expressing his inward thoughts to a
receptive listener or reader. Charles Lamb in his writings often indicated a
distinction between live actors and theater audiences and reading plays in
solitude. Though a great theatergoer, he preferred reading the plays, sometimes even asserting they were “unstageable,” as in the case of King Lear
(Lamb 13–14). Again, a habit of thought turns the soliloquies into interior
monologues intended to be read silently by a solitary reader. Hazlitt, as a
professional theater critic, could not ignore actors and audiences, but he did
nonetheless puzzle over soliloquies, and he wrestled with the problem of their
function. He responds most often to striking theatrical effects, judging their
success or failure by their momentary power rather than inquiring into the
formal properties of convention (Hazlitt 202–4). However, in his day, the
38 • Chapter Two
actual staging of plays, and soliloquies in particular, had changed radically
since the Elizabethan open stage with its proximity of audience on all sides.
The audience by the later period had been placed behind a “fourth wall” and
was expected to more passively observe and eavesdrop on the scene in front
of them (literally), and, once again, to be placed in the position of individual
readers rather than a collective and responsive audience. As Margreta de
Grazia reminds us, after the Restoration, when the stage was raised above
the standing audience’s eye-line, audiences were kept at a distance on the
assumption that “To be life-like, the illusion of Hamlet thinking requires
privacy and silence, but the presence of an audience precludes both” (de
Grazia, 2007 185). The phrase “the illusion of Hamlet thinking,” mirroring
Lamb’s description of “solitary musings,” reveals the change that eventually
guided Romantic preconceptions and, later, modern ones. In post-Romantic
times, the soliloquies have been taken to operate like thought bubbles indicating self-communing “inwardness” (Clemen passim) and, by extension,
“subjectivity” (see Belsey, 1985), where in a sense the subject itself is the object of contemplation. In speaking about itself, such a revelation of identity
has been even more ambitiously described as “the discovery of the modern
individual” (Mousley 95–100) and complicit with the rise of Western individualism (Holbrook). These readings locate the soliloquy in the territory of
post-Freudian psychology, unlocking or prying open the inner self, revealing
repressed psychic material and latent motivations of a character who claims
to have “that within which passes show” (1.2.85). However, being mindful
that the Elizabethan stage was very different, against this lies the argument
that there is nothing within the actor Shakespeare wrote for, who exists as
a character only in the words written for him, no more and no less. Though
as an audience we know Hamlet is withholding a great deal of information
from his interlocutors at most stages of the play, his prime aims in doing so
are either self-preservation or to elicit information from others. In this sense,
they inform the plot rather than necessarily revealing an inner life, and they
need not be interior monologues in the post-Romantic sense.
Unfortunately, there is little or no evidence, external or internal, that
any of the more modern explanations of soliloquies would have been in the
minds of Elizabethan dramatists or their audiences, as the most systematic
account of the subject by James Hirsh concludes:
I have not discovered any evidence that any soliloquy in any European play before the middle of the seventeenth century was designed as an interior monologue or was perceived as one by playgoers. Thus, before the middle of the
seventeenth century there were only two kinds of soliloquies, audience address
Avant-Garde Hamlet, Then and Now • 39
and self-address, both of which represented speeches by characters. The history of soliloquies until the end of the seventeenth century was a history of the
alternation between these two as the dominant convention. (Hirsh, 2004 18)
In a subsequent publication, Hirsh is categorical in stating that it was only
in the late seventeenth century (after the Restoration) that a new kind of
soliloquy that could be called “interior monologue” emerged, in which “the
words spoken by the character represent not words spoken by the character
impersonated by the actor, but rather the character’s unspoken thoughts”
(Hirsh, 2012 22). By this post-Commonwealth period, theater in England
was radically different from staging in 1600, which had been in daylight,
in open air, and with audiences up to 2,000 in close proximity on all sides.
Many audience members were within touching distance and no doubt noisy
and intrusive in the style of “hallelujahs” at a Gospel church service, even
throwing objects such as “tiles and pears,” as Andrew Gurr reports (Gurr,
2004 78). Success and failure in such a challenging context would depend
on the kind of active collaboration that could be generated between actors
and audience. In the Folio edition of Richard III, where the stage direction
for 1.3 reads “Speakes to himself,” we find an understanding of the soliloquy
as representing “words spoken by the character impersonated by the actor
rather than the character’s unspoken thoughts” (Hirsh, 2012 17), but also
surrounded by a responsive audience. The actor would need to cajole or persuade the audience to share the subject position of the fictional speaker, not
(as in television, for example) persuade an unseen audience to believe they
are overhearing the unspoken thoughts of the character. The ground is laid
for one of the conditions behind avant-garde thinkers as diverse as Gertrude
Stein, John Cage, and Bertolt Brecht, that the existence of a responsive, unpredictable, and sometimes resistant audience should be built in as a crucial
element in the creation of art.
Some scholars and critics have, by implication, suggested interpretations
that amplify Hirsh’s findings to take greater account of the audience’s active
presence. Ruth Lunney, for example, argues that Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta
was “revolutionary” in expanding the ways in which forms of audience address, such as prologues, epilogues, asides, monologues, and even soliloquies,
“open up new possibilities for the relationship between player and spectator.”
After 1585, monologues in general, she suggests, “become more eloquent, enriched by Kyd’s Senecan rhetoric and Marlowe’s ‘mighty line.’” (Those two
again!) “These speeches increasingly lead the audience to share at length in
some emotional or spiritual crisis” (Lunney, 2010 115). Following the lead
of others, Lunney argues that these radical and experimental “innovations,”
40 • Chapter Two
in the case of Marlowe, stem from an expanded use of the traditional Vice
figure’s addresses to the audience, designed to lure them into complicity with
their scheming (Lunney, 2010 113; 2002 103). Meanwhile, speaking from
her experience of modern versions of Hamlet in the theater, Bridget Escolme
finds in the Q1 version a pronounced tendency toward direct audience address than operates in the more literary Q2 and Folio (Escolme 55-57), giving
us a practical example where audience response matters in understanding the
text.
It may also be possible to envisage a hybrid form of the soliloquy, combining functions of both direct address and an actor speaking of himself and
suggesting further that in the more innovative plays the two are thus fused.
In other words, such speeches could be intended by the dramatist to be addressed directly to the audience as well as showing the character speaking to
himself, thus combining the latter convention with the former, carrying a
new and complex function in the theater. The direct “address to the audience,” as by a chorus or in a prologue or epilogue, was so well known that
by 1590 it “came to seem outmoded and amateurish” (Hirsh, 2012 18), but
rather than being abandoned, it could be adapted. The other type, “speaking
to himself,” was newer and may even have been more or less invented by
Marlowe and Kyd. Since we know that Elizabethan audiences were sophisticated enough to process what they heard and saw on stage on multiple levels
at once (“Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts” [Henry V 1.0.23]),
it does not seem impossible that a character may in one speech speak to the
audience and speak to himself, while being overheard by the audience but
not by other characters. In our modern terms, this would be something like
the audience itself being asked to impersonate the character, something
we might find impossible within the limitations of our own “either/or”
understanding of Elizabethan conventions. However, such a fusing would
explain how and why Hamlet’s soliloquies can be understood, however
anachronistically, in a modern psychological sense of observed operations of
the inward self, even though this would not have been the understanding of
Shakespeare’s audience. The unexpected elision of two possibly antithetical
understandings is the main subject of Katharine Eisaman Maus’s account in
Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance. It does not seem implausible
that those of Hamlet’s soliloquies beginning with a question or an interrogative exclamation could operate in this double functionality: “To be . . . ?,”
“O that . . . ,” “O what . . . ,” while others draw attention to some present
imperative of the narrative: “‘Tis now . . . ,” “Now might I . . . .” Significantly,
the fusion of soliloquy and audience address, although it may not appeal to
a Stanislavskian method actor, seems close to the desire by Bertolt Brecht
Avant-Garde Hamlet, Then and Now • 41
(whose fascination with Hamlet will be discussed) to challenge audiences
with moral and political questions that provoke them to think instead of
allowing them to bathe passively in emotion or identify through empathy
with only one character’s viewpoint. Emotion may be part of the context
for a character’s quandary, but it is not the only factor thrown before the
audience’s attention. Such complexity of reception and interaction between
character and audience gives an expanded meaning to Ophelia’s pitying and
paradoxical description of Hamlet as “Th’observ’d of all observers” (3.1.156),
a description that resonates both within the interplay of characters and between players and ever-present audience.
In Hamlet, I suggest, Shakespeare was developing a new and complex kind
of utility for the soliloquy. It may hold the function of a conventional character speaking to himself, though not yet presenting a revelation of an inner
self in the modern psychological sense, while also presenting the audience
with a dialectical point or an affective problem to ponder—perhaps even to
respond to, with cheers, groans, yes or no—as we still observe vestigially in
pantomime. The road leads back again to Marlowe and Kyd. The soliloquies
in Hamlet recall, and are based, I suggest, on the two most electrifying moments in all Elizabethan theater outside Shakespeare’s own plays and that,
significantly, were certainly known to Shakespeare, since he quotes them.
One is the moment in The Spanish Tragedy when Hieronimo enters “in his
shirt” to begin his dismayed soliloquy upon discovering the body of his son
hanging in the garden (2.5.1–33). His opening line, “What outcries pluck me
from my naked bed,” is surely quoted, or echoed, or even parodied, in Titania’s lyrical but ridiculous “What angel wakes me from my flowery bed?” (A
Midsummer Night’s Dream 3.1.123). Hieronimo’s utterance is not a “simple”
soliloquy, since although he is alone, he thinks he is speaking to somebody,
having heard Bel-Imperia’s “Murder! murder! Help, Hieronimo, help!”
(2.5.62). But the main thing that emerges from his spellbinding speech is
its alternation of unanswered questions and frustrated exclamations, exactly
as in several of Hamlet’s soliloquies. Even though the speeches are spoken
to themselves—in Hieronimo’s case addressed respectively to his dead son,
the absent murderer, and the heavens and earth—all are inevitably and insistently registered by the audience as collective addressees. Statements that
otherwise would be considered purely rhetorical can be performed as if they
demand some kind of response from the audience—answers, tears of pity, or
outrage at the crime and the ensuing injustice.
I am thy father. Who hath slain my son?
What savage monster, not of human kind,
42 • Chapter Two
Hath here been glutted with thy harmless blood,
And left thy bloody corpse dishonoured here,
For me, amidst this dark and deathful shades,
To drown thee with an ocean of my tears?
O heavens, why made you night to cover sin?
By day this deed of darkness had not been.
O earth, why didst thou not in time devour
The vile profaner of this sacred bower?
Oh poor Horatio, what hadst thou misdone,
To leese thy life ere life was new begun?
Oh wicked butcher, whatsoe’re thou wert,
How could thou strangle virtue and desert?
Ay me most wretched, that have lost my joy,
In leesing my Horatio, my sweet boy! (The Spanish Tragedy 2.5.18–33)
This is a far more mixed mode than the soliloquy where a character merely
intones self-descriptively (like Richard III), providing information that “I am
this” or “I am that,” but rather it draws the audience into a debate or affective relationship by asking of the only auditors, the literal audience, “Who?,”
“How?,” or “Why?” or exclaiming “O” to them. The audience itself now
stands in the place of “the gods” appealed to for information or help. This is
a prototype, I suggest, for the Elizabethans’ avant-garde use of the soliloquy
as it is used in Hamlet. There would be nothing to stop a player inflecting the
most famous stage question of all (“To be, or not to be”) as a representative
subject both asking questions of himself and also pleading with the audience
to provide some answers.
The Marlovian example in Hamlet is signaled explicitly by semi-quotation,
though it comes not in Hamlet’s own words but in the soliloquy that is more
neglected, Claudius’s “O, my offence is rank, it smells to heaven” (3.3.36).
This gives us yet another variation—Claudius is overlooked by Hamlet but
not overheard, and the king’s soliloquy envelops Hamlet’s own (“Now might
I do it pat” [3.3.73]). That neither hears the other has profound dramatic
irony and narrative consequences and shows both, primarily, arousing audience awareness. I have not seen any edition that makes the suggestion (nor,
so far as I can see, does Robert A. Logan in his excellent study of Marlowe’s
influence on Shakespeare [Logan 2007]), but it seems to me clearly arguable
that Claudius’s sentiments and words recall the other most memorable dramatic speech of the time, Faustus’s final anguished cries for time and redemption, beginning “O Faustus! / Now hast thou one bare hour to live / And
then thou must be damned perpetually” (Doctor Faustus 5.2.140–70). The
Avant-Garde Hamlet, Then and Now • 43
dramatic context is, after all, precisely the same—an initially unrepentant
sinner now crying in vain for mercy—and the central image is unmistakably
identical. Faustus’s “O, I’ll leap up to my God! Who pulls me down?” is, at
least in sense if not in actual words, as close as it could be to Claudius’s feelings and fevered questions:
Whereto serves mercy
But to confront the visage of offence?
And what’s in prayer but this twofold force,
To be forestalled ere we come to fall
Or pardon’d being down? Then I’ll look up. (3.3.46–50)
and
My words fly up, my thoughts remain below.
Words without thoughts never to heaven go. (3.3.97–98)
Shakespeare may well have expected his audiences to remember Faustus’s
famous lines and import a recollected context into their understanding of the
scene. Once again, Faustus’s soliloquy is not so single-noted as its opening
suggests (“O Faustus! / Now hast thou”), but instead it proceeds and yeasts
itself up to the same kind of frenzied questioning and exclamations that
cannot have failed to draw an audience into a kind of collaborative speculation with the damned man about the undiscovered country from which no
traveler returns:
See, see where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament!
...
Oh, spare me, Lucifer!—
Where is it now? ‘Tis gone . . .
No?
Then will I headlong run into the earth.
Gape earth! O no, it will not harbor me.
You stars that reigned at my nativity,
Whose influence hath allotted death and hell,
Now draw up Faustus like a foggy mist
Into the entrails of yon laboring cloud,
That when you vomit forth into the air,
My limbs may issue from your smoky mouths—
So that my soul mount and ascend to heaven!
The watch strikes (Doctor Faustus 5.2.153–70)
44 • Chapter Two
Another facet of the distinctive and comparable soliloquies by the three
writers is a preoccupation with temporal immediacy and urgency. Attention
is drawn to the inescapable pressure and predicaments of the present moment, especially by repetition of the word “now.” It is, in Macbeth’s words,
“this bank and shoal of time” (1.7.6) upon which theater exists, a present
with an unknown future. I am not suggesting that Claudius’s soliloquy is the
only example in Hamlet of Marlowe’s dynamically new, supercharged use of
the soliloquy, nor that the example is an end in itself. Rather, it is a vital clue
that can lead us to read the more famous soliloquies by Hamlet, since they
all proceed in a similar vein, as simultaneously an address from the character
to himself and from the dramatist to the audience who may represent greater
forces. We cannot be quite sure who is learning from whom in these cases,
whether Marlowe from Kyd or Kyd from Marlowe, but what is certain is that
Shakespeare in Hamlet is learning from both: “This bodes some strange eruption to our state” (1.1.72).
Jump forward three centuries and we find Hamlet still keeping dangerous,
rebellious company, while its terrible twin companions, Doctor Faustus and
The Spanish Tragedy, hold less potency. This is partly because Shakespeare’s
play presents an audacious challenge not just to a particular religion and a
cosmology that may be outdated but also to the state apparatus behind them
and the kind of illegitimate or tyrannical political power that is still with us.
At heart, most if not all avant-garde movements are political, in the sense of
rebelling against conformity and established authority, whether wielded by
church, state, or academies. Such Faustian challenges, grafted onto a motive
for revenge and several hints of popular uprising, provide a volatile brew for
those inclined toward subversive thought, so it is not surprising that Hamlet
has figured in political movements. Tyrants at least are acutely aware of the potential threat from populist challengers to the establishment from subversives:
King: The other motive
Why to a public count I might not go
Is the great love the general gender bear him,
Who, dipping all his faults in their affection,
Work like the spring that turneth wood to stone,
Convert his gyves to graces; so that my arrows,
Too slightly timber’d for so loud a wind,
Would have reverted to my bow again,
But not where I had aim’d them. (4.7.16–24)
As an initial example, one country where, for several hundred years, Hamlet has been accepted as an especially potent radical text is Poland, as has
Avant-Garde Hamlet, Then and Now • 45
been documented at length by Krystyna Kujawinska Courtney and Katarzyna
Kwapiscz Williams:
Creative and literary responses have been inclined to remake the myth of
Hamlet as the archetype of a Pole entangled in the fight for the national cause.
Common reworkings of the play reflect Polish national mentality, complexes,
inhibitions, obsessions, and inclinations. . . . The play assumed a crucial role
in the birth and propagation of Romantic ideas in Polish culture and its political agenda: the liberation of Poland from foreign domination. (Courtney and
Williams 3, 4)
Jan Kott, whose words open this book, was a Pole, and his valuing of Hamlet
has been shared by generations of his countryfolk. For example, the major
theater and film director Anderzej Wajda directed four stage productions
during the politically charged period between 1980 and 1989, the last of
which (Hamlet IV) was widely perceived to be less politically involved than
the others, during the year of Solidarity’s victory (Fabiszak). This production
was aesthetically radical in casting a woman in the title role and setting part
of the play in the dressing room, but it lacked the earlier critical edge in
terms of national politics. However, his earlier film Man of Iron (1981), made
at the vulnerable start of Solidarity’s rise, has elements of Hamlet, since the
central figure discovers his father was murdered and revenge against political
tyranny is part of his private mission.
Down to the present day, Hamlet as the “Polish Prince” remains a freedom
fighter for his country’s autonomy over centuries of invaders. And no wonder, since Hamlet himself anticipates the problems they have faced:
Hamlet: Goes it against the main of Poland, sir,
Or for some frontier?
Captain: Truly to speak, and with no addition,
We go to gain a little patch of ground
That hath in it no profit but the name.
To pay five ducats—five—I would not farm it;
Nor will it yield to Norway or the Pole
A ranker rate should it be sold in fee.
Hamlet: Why, then the Polack never will defend it.
Captain: Yes, it is already garrison’d.
Hamlet: Two thousand souls and twenty thousand ducats
Will not debate the question of this straw!
This is th’impostume of much wealth and peace,
That inward breaks, and shows no cause without
Why the man dies. I humbly thank you, sir. (4.4.15–29)
46 • Chapter Two
Hamlet and his famous question, “To be, or not to be,” became Polish because the Poles understood it as a burning political issue, “To fight or not to
fight” for the country’s independence from usurping rulers, and the final invasion of Fortinbras exemplifies the potential endlessness of the process for a
country whose history reveals a depressing vulnerability to foreign invasion.
One of these invaders also found the play inextricably entwined in its
national history, but in different ways. In Russia, after Hamlet was introduced
in 1748, the play and its hero held a set of central but ambivalent positions
in cultural, political, and literary life. The story, at least up until the 1970s,
is told by Eleanor Rowe in Hamlet: A Window on Russia (Rowe 1976). Like
the hero of his play, Shakespeare always attracted firm admirers, from Pushkin and Dostoyevsky to Kozintsev, and also debunkers, such as Tolstoy, who
was an equivalent of Bernard Shaw in caustically challenging adulation. The
bifurcation of views took on a charged political significance, which reached
the highest levels of the state bureaucracy after the Bolsehvik Revolution.
While some furtive intellectuals and directors continued to value the sensitivity, psychological complexity, and moral scrupulousness of Hamlet, these
were the very qualities that were anathema to advocates of social realism
designed to underpin an ideology favoring active heroism. Unlike Poles,
who saw Hamlet as aligned with the proletariat, the Russian cultural arbitrators at certain times condemned him as representing an effete aristocracy
and the corrupted humanism and individualism reminiscent of their own
Czarist ancient regime. Pro-Hamlet theatrical realizations with revolutionary
undertones continued to be performed during the 1930s and 1940s but at
increasing personal and political risk, while other productions, toeing the
official state line, presented the Prince and the play as a whole, in ways that
ridiculed both. The debate was considered so inflammatory and important
that “editorials were written and public meetings were organized” (Rowe
132) over the “Hamlet question.” Stalin’s personal antipathy toward the
play, based on orthodox Marxist-Leninist lines, was enough to close down
rehearsals. Pasternak clearly internalized the conflict, his translations and
writings shifting from an early espousal of freedom of expression toward noncommittal orthodoxy under Stalin, and, after Stalin’s death in 1953, back to
a liberal attitude when he allowed Kozintsev to adapt his translation freely.
Pasternak’s poem “authored” by Yuri Zhivago seems to reveal the tensions, as
the Prince’s monologue can be seen either as a lonely revolutionary’s lament
at the impossibility of direct political action or, conversely, as a confession
of impotence by an outmaneuvered aristocrat trying to evade the disgrace
of historical oblivion. Such ambivalence would not be inappropriate for a
fictional character who was descended from a noble family but got caught up
Avant-Garde Hamlet, Then and Now • 47
in the experiences of the Russian Revolution. The result was paralysis of one
who, while initially accepting his role as an actor in a different play, comes to
beg for release. The stance bears comparison with Hamlet’s in the situation
that faces him early in the play. Plural possibilities gradually reemerged after
Stalin’s death, from 1954 to 1964, the period known as “the Thaw.” During
this period, Kozintsev was working on the play in the theater and then on
film and, in the words of Mark Sokolyansky, “Hamlet’s non-conformism was
interpreted by Kozintsev as resistance” rather than as passivity. We shall
look in more detail at his film later in this book. So, isolated anarchist,
conscience-driven proto-revolutionary, or ineffectual representative of a defeated regime? The history of the reception of Hamlet in Russia reflected the
debate publicly throughout the twentieth century.
Meanwhile, in the construction of another national myth or set of myths,
the poet Ferdinand Freligrath in 1844 famously wrote, “Deutschland ist Hamlet” (“Germany is Hamlet”), but just as there have been several Germanys
so there have been many Hamlets (Pfister). The process of “naturalization”
began with the translation in 1800 by Schlegel and Tieck, and Hamlet soon
became merged with Goethe’s Werther as the melancholy intellectual. In
the twentieth century, he was appropriated as much by the right, for example
by the Nazi Carl Schmitt, who wrote a book about him, as by the left, for example by Brecht. The dualisms splintered into pluralities with the partition
of the country in 1945, when the Berlin Wall separated not only a population but also a Shakespearean hero and the profession of scholars dedicated
to his works. Depending on the time, place, and political regime, Hamlet
could be produced optimistically as a triumph of socialism or pessimistically
and cynically as the death of liberalism, taking its cue from Marcellus’s ominous “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark” (1.4.90) and Hamlet’s
“The time is out of joint. O cursed spite, / That ever I was born to set it right”
(1.5.196–97). The respective academies in the German Democratic Republic and West Germany produced their own Shakespeare journals, marked
by different artistic assumptions and fraught political struggles between and
within both (Jahnson). However, the one factor that united them was the
powerful belief in Shakespeare’s “ever-nowness” and the abiding ability of his
play to refocus and reframe whatever contemporary issues and problems face
different and divided societies at any one historical moment.
One more example may, on the face of it, seem even more startling.
Shakespeare was not especially complimentary to the Muslim world in, for
example, The Merchant of Venice and Othello, and if any group could be forgiven for positive hostility to his nation and his plays it would be the Arab
world. However, quite the reverse is the case, and the claim is sometimes
48 • Chapter Two
made—for example, by Col. Muammar Gaddhafi in 1989—that Shakespeare
was in fact an Arab writer called Shaykh (Sheik) Zubar. Although possibly
not offered fully seriously, the suggestion that Shakespeare understood the
Arab soul grows out of a historical context of sympathetic reception and political usage dating back to the early nineteenth century. Since then, Hamlet
in particular has been especially valued by Arab progressive intellectuals,
nationalists, and political radicals in the twentieth century. Margaret Litvin
charts the reception in Hamlet’s Arab Journey: Shakespeare’s Prince and Nasser’s Ghost. She shows how Hamlet in the second half of the twentieth century
held a stable and continuing supremacy on stage and screen, due partly to
the fact that Kozintsev’s version was especially influential in Arab countries.
However, the play has undergone different kinds of appropriation in different periods. It is constantly read as politically charged and, at certain times
(the 1970s, for example), the character was interpreted by radical agitators
as their prototype of political agency and activism. His question whether
“to take up arms against a sea of troubles” was decisively answered in the
affirmative. Using adaptations from Egypt and Syria, Litvin shows “how the
1970s Hamlet became a Che Guevara in doublet and hose.” Even afterward,
“this agitprop effort, too, quickly hit a dead end,” and Egyptian, Syrian, and
Iraqi dramatists have for the last thirty-five years, somewhat bitterly, generated a different stereotype of Hamlet as an ineffectual antihero pitted against
the “protean and all-powerful force” of Claudius standing for the tyranny of
dictators and state machinery while “the ghost of Nasserism, discredited but
not replaced, settles into the role of Hamlet’s father’s ghost” (Litvin 11–12).
As in other countries, Hamlet is the catalyst for opposition, whether as active freedom fighter or as resistant intellectual, the kind of character who is
“ever-now” in the world of politics. Arab playwrights have persistently used
Hamlet in ways curiously similar to Hamlet himself when he presents The
Murder of Gonzago as an occasion for political allegory in order to uncover
injustice and lead to radical change. Litvin’s book finishes during George W.
Bush’s war against Iraq and on the eve of the national uprisings known as the
Arab Spring, and although Litvin confesses on the last page that she cannot
predict whether Hamlet will continue to be such a potent force, so deeply
influential has the Arab experience been, and for such a long time, that she
believes adaptations will continue to reflect the times.
The story could be repeated with local differences in many countries—
Hamlet is a Japanese Noh story (Kishi and Bradshaw); a fable for India, visible in the journal Hamlet Studies, which lasted for twenty-three years under
the editorship of R. W. Desai (and which could have lasted much longer but
for his retirement); a call to revolution in Africa (Johnson). However, the
Avant-Garde Hamlet, Then and Now • 49
examples, especially of Poland, Russia, Germany, and the world of Islam, can
stand as evidence that there is something about this hero and his play that is
not always explicable in simple terms of British colonization of educational
systems around the world. Well beyond the British empire, there is evidence
of appropriation of the figure of Hamlet by political factions to express their
own contemporary and local attitudes and issues. Most prominent are those
who oppose the established authority and governments of their own countries, who see Hamlet as perennially an incitement to both those who rebel
openly and those who work underground in clandestine fashion. The latter
might take their catch cry from the words of the play itself, “Well said, old
mole. Canst work i’th’ earth so fast?” (1.5.170), and in a sense the continuing
political relevance of Hamlet itself has steadily advanced in a similarly covert
but powerful way. More than this, the textual status of Hamlet is problematical, always incomplete and coming into being, never realized until it has
been put to some new use, whether psychological, social, or political, as we
shall soon see.
CHAPTER THREE
Hamlet as Avant-Garde Text
“Both at the first and now.”
—Hamlet 3.2.21
It is in the sense of always experimental and contemporary that I will be arguing that Hamlet looks likely to remain one of the great avant-garde works of
drama and literature. Its experimentalism is deep in its lining and generates
constant new claims to uniqueness in its multifarious manifestations. Unlike
Romeo and Juliet or Macbeth, Hamlet cannot be reduced to a basic formula
that can be endlessly replicated, partly because it contains many different
potential points of focus that can deflect attention from a central character
or plot strand. Ironically, it is possible to envisage a Hamlet without the
prince, but it would be impossible to imagine Macbeth without its tyrant or
Romeo and Juliet without its lovers, no matter how apparently infinite are
their realizations in different cultural, ethnic, and social settings. A similar
point is historically verified when we realize, as Margreta de Grazia amplifies, that although we know little or nothing about the way the character of
Hamlet was played in Shakespeare’s time and for a couple of centuries afterward, we know for sure that styles changed drastically during and after the
late eighteenth century (de Grazia, 2007). The foundations were laid for a
“modern” Hamlet by writers in the Romantic age, who focused attention on
“that within,” claimed as a new kind of dramatic personage who is presumed
to have an inner life. Shakespeare’s audiences may not have recognized this
figure as the same one they had watched on the Elizabethan stage, just as
51
52 • Chapter Three
a pre-Romantic audience would not have recognized an actor deploying a
twentieth-century Stanislavskian style (see McGillivray 5).
The appeal of Hamlet to the avant-garde artist can be stated in terms of
both its content and its form. The protagonist is unusual in that he is neither
a military hero nor a king but a mere student, perhaps of philosophy, a young
man without worldly power who is more acted upon than acting. He is admittedly a prince-in-waiting, but one, it becomes apparent, who may never
succeed to the throne and who ends the play named for him with only a few
seconds of power, just long enough to nominate his successor. The hundreds
of learned discussions on his delay attest to the limitations placed upon his
personal agency in effecting events, to the extent that it has clearly been
recognized as an issue central to the play as a whole. It is not difficult to see
many ways in which Hamlet’s role would be familiar to an avant-garde artist at any time. He represents the dilemmas of an intellectual engaged in a
struggle to change the world in righting an injustice, attempting to assert personal integrity and agency in an uncaring society, and he is a youth holding a
hostile attitude toward prevailing authority in both his family and the state.
From the beginning, the play itself positions Hamlet as an outsider. Even
his introduction to the stage shows this. There is no other tragedy—in fact,
no other play by Shakespeare—that takes such a long and circuitous route to
the introduction of its protagonist. We first have a scene on the battlements
in which Marcellus, Bernardo, and Horatio discuss and then witness the apparition that returns each night, and the first mention of the name “Hamlet”
is in reference to this figure and in the context of secretive preparations for
war in Elsinore, against forces invading on behalf of another dead king:
[O]ur last King,
Whose image even but now appear’d to us,
Was as you know by Fortinbras of Norway,
Thereto prick’d on by a most emulate pride,
Dar’d to the combat; in which our valiant Hamlet
(For so this side of our known world esteem’d him)
Did slay this Fortinbras (1.1.83–89)
This is followed by the abortive encounter with the Ghost, who retreats as
the cock crows. At this stage of the play, an insouciant audience can be forgiven for thinking that the ghost of the old Hamlet will be the eponymous
subject of the play, and in a certain sense this turns out to be true. In the
common Elizabethan description of actors as “shadows,” Prince Hamlet is a
kind of shadow for his dead father, and in our modern sense, he continues to
Hamlet as Avant-Garde Text • 53
stand in the shadow of his father, compelled to carry out orders issued from
an ethically improper state of purgatory, his sins not yet atoned:
Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin,
Unhousel’d, disappointed, unanel’d,
No reck’ning made, but sent to my account
With all my imperfections on my head.
O horrible! O horrible! most horrible! (1.5.76–80)
It is only at the very end of the second scene, which is peopled by minor
characters, that we even hear there is a “young Hamlet” (1.1.175) who should
be told of the nocturnal visitation. Then follows a populous and lengthy scene
at court, orchestrated by Claudius, “dear brother” of the recently deceased
King Hamlet, who opens with a formal explanation of his new position as
king and as husband of the queen. After courtesies from the ambassadors from
Norway, Cornelius and Voltemand, we hear Laertes and his father, Polonius,
craving leave for the former to return to France. Even this digressive domestic
matter takes priority over the suspended introduction of the person the play is
supposed to be about. We have still not been introduced to the play’s central
character and its major narrative issue, and we may well ask what, and who,
is this play all about? It is only now, over 400 lines into the play (in the Folio version), that the character called Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, is drawn
into the proceedings by the king, who turns to him in a spirit of casual afterthought, or at best as the “other business” on the agenda of the public meeting: “But now, my cousin Hamlet, and my son” (1.2.64). The reply is little
more than a muttered aside and a black joke: “A little more than kin, and
less than kind” (1.2.65), followed by similar lugubrious quibbles. After such a
long wait, he seems resentful or suspicious of the sudden attention, punning
that he is “too much in the sun” (1.2.67). As soon as he starts to hint at understandable expressions of grief, since his father is only two months dead, he
is reproved by both his uncle and his mother, and his words are broken off by
the new king. The court disperses, and he is abruptly left alone to address the
audience at last, or speak to himself, again with words that suggest he does
not want to be there but instead would prefer to be literally invisible: “O that
this too too sullied [solid? soiled?] flesh would melt” (1.2.129). It is an inauspicious entrance, to say the least, by an apparently diffident and self-effacing
presence, hardly what we would expect from the prince whose name adorns a
play billed as the greatest tragedy ever written. But it does fit precisely the role
and stance of the misunderstood, isolated figure that we would associate with
an avant-garde artist of detached and caustically witty demeanor.
54 • Chapter Three
In subsequently being alienated, suspected of treason, exiled, and later
considered a lunatic, an accidental perpetrator of a murder and a target for
assassination, Hamlet is the avant-garde artist’s perfect role model, epitomized, for example, in Camus’ existentialist outsider figure, L’étranger, who
faces comparable dilemmas and social stigmas, though ironically because
he does not show grief for his mother’s death. Philosophically speaking, it
emerges from Hamlet’s soliloquies that he vainly seeks to have the agency of
a free individual yet faces an overwhelming sense of impotence in the face
of circumstances. These include, on the one hand, an importunate ghost
charging him with avenging the murder of his father, who was the king, and,
on the other (if the Ghost’s advice is to be trusted), a deadly adversary in
the person of the current king, an undetected murderer who will ruthlessly
do anything to prevent knowledge of his crime, even to the extent of committing another murder, of his own stepson and the future heir to the realm.
In his situation, Hamlet provides a point of sympathetic identification for a
certain kind of artist, uncompromisingly trapped in impossible and dangerous dilemmas, trying to discover “truth” in a state based on lies and secrecy,
precariously surviving in an antipathetical family and society, accused of
being mad and offending against conventions and institutions in a spirit of
anarchism and political sedition (Bürger ch. 3). The audience is placed close
to the vantage point of such a rebel and social outcast. Again, this stance is
one etched for Hamlet as his role in the play itself, but the frequency with
which we overhear his self-communings and hear of his model of a personality as one who has “that within which passes show” (1.2.85) allows audiences
to speculate on his feelings that are held in reserve and not revealed publicly.
It is this kind of self-styled privacy that has repeatedly struck the modern critics who proclaim Hamlet’s modernity as a subject with inwardness: “Since the end of the nineteenth century, Hamlet has been hailed as
Shakespeare’s most modern play, as the play that itself breaks out of the
medieval and into the modern. Hamlet’s consciousness, it is said, as dramatized through his soliloquies, is what makes it so precocious” (de Grazia,
1995 80–81). De Grazia’s careful notes of qualification (“since the end of
the nineteenth century”) and intransitive syntax (“has been hailed . . . it is
said”) hint that this way of looking at Hamlet is a “modern” construction, as
though we are looking at ourselves in a mirror, not necessarily Shakespeare’s
Hamlet with words inscribed in an early modern play. Apart from Romantic
critics like Coleridge and Schlegel, a potential culprit in reinforcing this
approach is Sigmund Freud, who used the play to advance his most radical
theories of the unconscious mind and his theory of the so-called Oedipus
complex, which in their own ways are as close as psychiatry has ever come to
Hamlet as Avant-Garde Text • 55
a conceptual avant-garde or vanguard formulation: “In January 1909, [Jung]
wrote [to Freud]: ‘little by little your truth is percolating through the public.’
Ten months later, he was jubilant: ‘One must let the forest fire rage, there’s
no stopping it now’” (Makari 236). By Freud’s time in the early twentieth
century, the model of a modern self had been born, largely through his efforts and with some help from Hamlet. The result has been a mountain of
speculation on the specific issue of whether Hamlet’s “I have that within
which passes show” (1.2.85) is an acknowledgment of the literal subjectivity
of the early modern subject or bears some other, less familiar, Elizabethan
meaning. For example, Catherine Belsey sees in the early modern period the
creation of a distinctively modern self, though one that is not necessarily
unified, interior, continuous, or, in Hamlet’s case, even there at all (Belsey,
1985 41). John Lee likens Hamlet to Proteus; Stephan Laqué finds surprising
links between Hamlet’s version of the passions and selfhood and Descartes;
Daniella Jancsò approaches selfhood through Wittgenstein; and Christopher
Tilmouth follows the philosopher Susan James and the critic Nancy Selleck
in preferring to speak not in terms of selfhood as such but of intersubjectivity. A small library could be assembled of books and articles of philosophy
or literary criticism dealing with selfhood, either explicitly or implicitly
referring to questions raised by Hamlet. Since virtually all possible points
of view have been espoused by somebody or other at some time, it may be a
little late in the day to claim originality for a suspicion, activated especially
acutely after contemplating Hamlet’s problems, that we may have no self at
all except the one known through, by, and for others. Even this surmise has
a kind of built-in avant-gardism, since our own existence can be established
with any certainty only in the present moment, ever-changing as it is—now
and ever-now.
Meanwhile, in terms of form, many of the technical aspects of Hamlet as
a play that have struck critics and scholars as problems can be seen to resemble techniques consciously adopted by avant-garde writers and artists as
part of their repertoire and consistent with their vision. There is a curiously
persistent strain in the play indicating its status as a self-destroying artifact,
subverting and blowing up its own plots:
Let it work;
For ’tis the sport to have the engineer
Hoist with his own petard, and’t shall go hard
But I will delve one yard below their mines
And blow them at the moon. O, ’tis most sweet
When in one line two crafts directly meet. (3.4.208–12)
56 • Chapter Three
In a self-reflexive image of the play’s plotting, we see here the playwright’s
craft at odds with the material he works with as he seeks to disrupt narrative
continuity and explode expectations of the outcome. “Under-mining” can be
a literal and dramatic act, as well as a political strategy, and the odd image
offers clues to the ways in which Hamlet has generated a host of unexpected,
creative adaptations, many of them subverting the source play. There are
many more.
Multiple Texts
Hamlet as a play (or, rather, plays, as we shall see) is haunted by its own
textual ghosts from the past come back to take revenge on the present, just
as every performance later than Shakespeare’s day is equally haunted by
the existence of the original still speaking to us from some literary version
of purgatory. The play that we now call simply Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
is one of the most notoriously unstable and problematic works in the history of recorded literature and drama, to the extent that we can question
its very existence as a single, definable, and autonomous text. It exists in at
least three quite different early published versions: the First (so-called bad)
Quarto, Q1 (1603); the Second (so-called good) Quarto, Q2 (1604), which
is twice as long as Q1 and also longer by 200 lines than the third version,
that printed in the First Folio, F (1623). We can be reasonably confident,
though not certain, that none of these was approved or authorized for publication by Shakespeare himself, and no scholar has definitively established
the relationship between and among the different versions in terms of authorial intentions. Editors handle this problem in different ways, according to
their own theories and principles, which adds to the proliferation of variant
texts. For example, the latest editors of the Arden edition in its Third Series,
Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, have published two volumes, one based
on Q2 but not exclusively, the second containing separate editions of Q1
and F—making up three substantially different plays. Then we should add to
these the earlier Arden texts, three of them culminating in a meticulously
edited “conflated” version by Harold Jenkins, choosing the “best” readings
(in the editor’s view) to add up to what Shakespeare might have intended.
However, as Thompson and Taylor admit, even they, the most recent of the
Arden editors, are none the wiser about the relationships among the texts,
for example that between Q1 and F:
Most believe that the original form of the text of Q1 post-dates the original
form of the text of F, but find it difficult to agree whether it is a memorial
Hamlet as Avant-Garde Text • 57
reconstruction or an adaptation—or a memorial reconstruction of an adaptation, or an adaptation of a memorial reconstruction—and whether what is being reconstructed or adapted is the text behind F or a performance of the text
behind F. (Thompson and Taylor, eds., Texts 9)
Got that? It sounds like we might as well throw a deck of cards into the
air and arrange them where they fall into three or more piles. These days,
with the possibilities opened up by digital hypotexts, many permutations
are possible, and the textual situation looks more like the experimental
cut-up novels devised by B. H. Johnson, which at one stage threatened to
offer the future of the novel. To these can be added the most ghostly of all,
the positing of a common ancestor that critics dub the Ur-Hamlet, which is
often invoked to explain, or explain away, problems (Smith, 2000 [Ghost
Writing]). For at least the last twenty years, scholars have regarded textual
transmission of early modern drama, and Shakespeare’s plays in particular,
as more fluid, unstable, and uncertain than was thought in previous times,
a concession now entrenched in critical views of King Lear but made exponentially more difficult in the case of Hamlet. Collaboration between and
among playwrights, and play texts revised for specific occasions, are countenanced more regularly. Even experts can be reduced to wringing their hands
in puzzlement, unable to reach agreed conclusions on such matters as which
text to publish where there are more than one, or how to treat the separate
texts of the Quarto Lear (“history”) and the Folio Lear (“tragedy”), which
are nowadays often published alongside each other. Othello and Romeo and
Juliet are others that raise comparable problems, though none so intractable
as Hamlet. The conundrums of the different texts are not simply of academic
interest, since they raise literally impossible questions about the nature of “a
text.” They seem to indicate a deeper mystery at the heart of the play’s identity, its very existence as a thing to be performed and talked about, throwing
into question all stable referents of truth and creating what Anthony Dawson
terms a “crisis of indeterminacy” (Dawson 5). It is a state that borders on an
existential problem: to what extent and in what state does Hamlet even exist?
There may be simple explanations for the textual uncertainties, if only
we knew more of the practicalities of performance and publication in Shakespeare’s day. One plausible suggestion is Andrew Gurr’s, when he reminds
us that, once a play text had been approved by the licensing Stationers’
Register, it could be cut for individual performances but not augmented. It
seems logical, then, that the writer would supply, and the company submit,
a self-evidently overlong script that includes everything that might at some
point be needed, in the knowledge that it would be frequently cut in the
58 • Chapter Three
performative events (Gurr, 1999). The longest of the three versions is Q2,
which seems far too long ever to have been staged in its entirety on the
Elizabethan stage, suggesting this may have been the all-inclusive version. It
would help to explain not only the existence of several texts for some plays,
including Hamlet, but also why Shakespeare’s plays in their surviving written
forms vary so much in length. One hypothesis relied upon by early textual
scholars seems to have faded away these days, the idea that texts that are
shorter and appear corrupt may have been “memorial reconstructions” by
a rogue actor seeking to make money out of a pirated edition. Q1 was the
notorious example, but performances have proved the version does work on
the stage, and as Leah Marcus points out, it would not have been considered
corrupt at all if we did not also have Q2 and F. The apparent authority of
the line “To be, or not to be, that is the question” is little more than a fact
stemming from its familiarity to modern ears, and without it we may have
found perfectly reasonable Q1’s reading, “To be, or not to be; ay, there’s the
point” (7.114), which scans and fits into the context nicely. After all, the
“point” of a poisoned rapier is what will end the play.
Beyond these factors, we do not know with enough precision about the
various processes by which different printed texts of early modern plays came
to be published, since print media involved a different profession and modes
of transmission that are altogether separate from the stage. Over the centuries, for obvious reasons, editors have presented their own versions as conflated texts, claiming to be what Shakespeare intended to write, or “authoritative” in some way. Despite the immense industry devoted to the impossible
task of producing a “clean,” ideal, authorially sanctioned, and universally
agreeable text of Hamlet, we seem to be further away than ever from what
Shakespeare had in mind, which may well have been not a single play at all.
The multifarious textual problems tend to make a mess of Kenneth
Branagh’s claim—or that of his publicists—to have filmed “the complete
text” of Hamlet. As in eclectic editions, he cobbled together bits and pieces
from three plays (four if we include as a single genre the multitudes of conflated versions) that, despite having an eponymous hero in common, are
in reality quite different texts—not to mention the wraith-like Ur-Hamlet.
There is convincing evidence that playing troupes of the time would adapt
scripts constantly, depending on where, when, and for whom the play was
being performed. Furthermore, literally every single modern edition of “the
play” will differ from the other, in smaller and larger aspects, and scholars are
no closer to producing one edition of a single play by Shakespeare that will
satisfy all experts. In fact, we seem to be heading in the opposite direction,
since nowadays there is a tendency to print the different versions separately.
Hamlet as Avant-Garde Text • 59
Even the notorious reluctance of early modern theater companies to let
scripts of successful plays out of their hands, let alone be published, is not
enough to explain such multiple and insoluble textual problems in the case
of Hamlet. The options seem infinitely more open and significant than those
raised by another text, from that age or any other.
To make explicit the jump to the theories of avant-garde art summarized
in the first chapter of this book, we seem to have a series of occasions, potential “Happenings” awaiting realization, disruption, and reconfiguration,
inherently conceding the provisional nature of all art and its dependence
on changing contexts: not unlike John Cage’s 4’33”, more a time and space
to be filled by whatever happens in its immediate and ephemeral environment than an artifact with substance. At first, it looks like an odd thing to
conclude that the most famous text of all time is in fact not a text at all,
but in terms of my argument concerning its experimental and avant-garde
nature, this fact turns out to be symptomatic of the radically paradoxical
and “ever-new” nature of Hamlet. It can continually be remade in diverse
and unrepeatable ways. Invoking the analogy of “Happenings” is not entirely frivolous. If some future scholar seeks to identify such issues as dating,
authorship, potential collaboration, and repeat performances (with their
differences) of an apparently spontaneous 1960s act of hippie performance
art by famous exponents like Cage’s students at Black Mountain College or
Claes Oldenburg, then s/he would be asking pretty well exactly the same
questions we are asking about Hamlet and taking into account the same kinds
of fragmentary evidence. This would be even more so if the performance is
a twenty-first-century flash mob, which cannot possibly be spontaneous or
improvised, since it is highly choreographed in advance, while keeping open
the possibility of bystanders joining in or police deeming the dancers to be a
public nuisance that must move on.
To make a related point in a different way, we might consider an article
by E. A. J. Honigmann that, although published in 1956, is still a classic on
the subject of the date of Hamlet. Honigmann comes to a firm conclusion:
“All in all we may say that Hamlet seems to have been written after late 1599
and before the summer of 1601, perhaps before February 1601; and the most
likely date of composition seems to be late 1599 to early 1600” (Honigmann
33). However, by cannily limiting himself to “date of composition” and assuming we are talking about a single play, he chooses to evade the extraordinary tangles we get into in contemplating that simple phrase “the date of
Hamlet.” First, if we are speaking only of written artifacts, which Hamlet? The
lost script of Ur-Hamlet, the very different versions in the First Quarto, the
Second Quarto, or the Folio, or the dating on the Stationers’ Register (July
60 • Chapter Three
26, 1602) (even though, again, we do not know what this refers to)? And is
the date we seek simply the first writing, or the first conception, or the source
potential, or the first staged performance, and if so, staged where, the universities, as the title page of Q1 nominates, or the public theater? Once we reach
stage performances, we need to assume that every night the play was different
on the stage, each night an adaptation, perhaps containing improvisation as
a concession to the conditions of a stage open to the elements, a selection
of words from a much longer script, reduced from something like a potential
five-hour playing time to “the two hours traffic of the stage.”
Multiple Genres
Eighteenth-century English writers like Dryden and Nahum Tate found
Shakespeare suspect in breaking time-honored rules of dramatic propriety,
but they were tolerant enough of the underlying talent shown to redeem
the plays by rewriting and “correcting” them. It took the less sympathetic
French to denounce trenchantly the generic monstrosity of Hamlet. Voltaire, in 1761, admittedly reading the play in a defective translation but
recognizing its subversiveness, declared it “barbarous” (Lounsbury 143). He
realized it ignored or flouted the canons of Aristotelian tragedy, rules of
unity and decorum, and he condemned its breaches of propriety, structure,
and “proper” style, banishing it—to the very margins of orthodox drama and
good taste—as a “huge dunghill.” Michèle Willems has described such a reaction as revealing “the dialectic of rejection/attraction, repulsion/fascination”:
Just as Shakespeare is both a genius and a barbarian, his most famous play is a
fascinating monster. Oxymoron and unresolved contradictions are constants
in the critical appraisal of the time. This is particularly manifest in the reactions to such forbidden ingredients of tragedy as the supernatural, the mixing
of genres, or madness on the stage. (7)
As for the introduction of a ghost, contrary to all the play’s sources and timehonored stage conventions, ludicrous! But according to eighteenth-century
experts in classical genres, who were more attuned to formal decorum than
later generations, if Hamlet is not a tragedy, nor even a well-made play, then
what is it?
Heminge and Condell, as editors of the First Folio, apparently with confidence placed it among the tragedies, entitling it The Tragedie of HAMLET,
Prince of Denmarke. However, a book was entered in the Stationers’ Register
on July 26, 1602, described as “A booke called the Revenge of Hamlett Prince
Hamlet as Avant-Garde Text • 61
of Denmarke as yt was latelie Acted by the Lord Chamberleyne his servants,”
which was on sale for sixpence (Chambers 1:408). “Revenge” was a specific
subgenre within tragedy, now sometimes known as Tragedy of Blood, not only
because it is marked by the shedding of blood but also because it typically
involves “blood-lines” of family genetics. It was apparently distinctive enough
to be named as a category since it raised audience expectations of a certain
kind of plot. This book was presumably the First Quarto recorded in 1603 as
“The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet Prince of Denmarke By William Shakspeare,” as acted by the King’s Men in London, at the two universities of Oxford and Cambridge “and else-where.” The Second Quarto in 1604 was billed
as a “Tragicall Historie.” Like revenge, history was a specific genre based on
historical records, made famous by Shakespeare himself, whose examples were
classified in the First Folio as histories. As episodes selected from continuous
chronicle narration, a history play could have a comic outcome, like Henry
V, contain a comic plot such as Falstaff’s, or else be named in its own right a
“tragedie,” like Richard II. Tragedy and history had different structural principles and expectations, the former being end-stopped through death and
focused on one central protagonist, the latter leaving open the potential of
a sequel, since groupings of characters and the always unfinished business of
succession to the throne provide their central narrative momentum.
The third genre offered by the editors of the First Folio is comedies. At
first sight, this is the one we can discard from consideration, but the content
of the play itself suggests that it is not so irrelevant. It is interesting that some
of the plays written by others in the immediate wake of Shakespeare’s and
alluding to it were not solemnly reverential but rather parodic and comic
(Thompson and Taylor, eds. 57), as though they are picking up some strand
of the play itself. Hamlet certainly cannot be claimed as having a happy ending, but this does not exclude generic aspects of comedy being prominent.
Even Samuel Johnson, normally a stickler for Aristotelian unity of action,
praises the play’s “various forms of life and particular modes of conversation,”
with scenes “interchangeably diversified with merriment and solemnity”
(Woudhuysen 243). As I have already briefly mentioned, the hero often
demonstrates, more often than any other tragic protagonist in Shakespeare’s
plays, the kind of witty punning that drives the dialogue in his comedies.
Many, perhaps most, comments he makes about, or directed to, Polonius, for
example, are outright jokes, as is his black humor in the mock epitaph to the
government spy:
Hamlet: A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the
fish that hath fed of that worm.
62 • Chapter Three
King: What dost thou mean by this?
Hamlet: Nothing but to show you how a king may go a progress through the guts
of a beggar.
King: Where is Polonius?
Hamlet: In heaven. Send thither to see. If your messenger find him not there,
seek him i’th’other place yourself. But indeed if you find him not within this
month, you shall nose him as you go up the stairs into the lobby.
King: Go seek him there. (4.3.27–38)
A uniformly melancholy Hamlet, whose inky black clothing signals an emotional state of sustained grief, is largely a nineteenth-century invention of
German critics (Pfister), but the common term “the witty prince” applies just
as well, if not better. He plays the court jester himself in the absence of the
long-dead Yorick, whose spirit in some ways is still a presence in the court of
Elsinore, working in the same underground fashion as the “old mole” of the
Ghost. Not only does Yorick’s spirit speak through Hamlet’s bitter puns and
riddling, but the equally quibbling presence of the Gravedigger is also one
who literally exists below ground level, in the grave newly dug for Ophelia:
Hamlet: Whose grave’s this, sirrah?
Gravedigger: Mine, sir.
[Sings] O, a pit of clay for to be made—
Hamlet: I think it be thine indeed, for thou liest in’t.
Gravedigger: You lie out on’t, sir, and therefore ’tis not yours. For my part, I do
not lie in’t, yet it is mine.
Hamlet: Thou dost lie in’t, to be in’t and say ’tis thine. ’Tis for the dead, not for
the quick; therefore thou liest.
Gravedigger: ’Tis a quick lie, sir, ’twill away again from me to you.
Hamlet: What man dost thou dig it for?
Gravedigger: For no man, sir.
Hamlet: What woman, then?
Gravedigger: For none neither.
Hamlet: Who is to be buried in’t?
Gravedigger: One that was a woman, sir; but rest her soul, she’s dead. (5.1.115–
31)
Catherine Belsey has pointed out how indebted this scene is to earlier depictions of the Dance of Death with its mingling of the grotesque and macabre
(Belsey, 1999 129–74). Earlier writers condemned the jocularity about death
as indecorous, and Garrick even cut the scene from performance (Ghose
1005). The commonplace reference to comic relief seems somehow to miss
the main point, because the scene does not distract or relieve the tone but
Hamlet as Avant-Garde Text • 63
adds a harsh intensity and sharpness underlying many of the play’s “grave”
preoccupations.
It was a surrealist, André Breton, who first drew attention to black humor
as a distinctive typology, in compiling his Anthology of Black Humor. This was
initially banned in occupied France, and the form has always been part of
the avant-garde artist’s armory, as a way of turning scorn against demands for
realism and the oppressive nature of reason: “It is the mind’s superior revenge
against the law and order of the Real; it is an authentic escape beyond the
four walls of logical duplicity” (Rosemount 63). The tragic recent example
of the satirical cartoon magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris serves as evidence
of the controversial nature of such a mode, showing that black humor does
not travel well between cultures. It can be the humor of anger, cynicism, or
disappointment, based on alienated recognition of hypocrisy and incongruity
in the world—a common stance for the avant-garde thinker. Of this there is
plenty to be found in Hamlet’s words and in the grave humor of the delvers.
Even in Elizabethan generic terms, then, we could see Hamlet as any one
of several dramatic kinds (if not wholly comic) (Eliot, 1936 98–103), perhaps
to be classified among the “mongrel tragi-comedies” deplored by Sir Philip
Sidney in his Defence of Poetry as a contemporary fashion (Duncan-Jones
114). A filmic equivalent might be melodrama, or even Bollywood movies,
which constantly shift genres, and Hamlet has been filmed in both styles.
Trying to fix upon a single genre to apply to Hamlet is as futile as insisting
upon one stable text. In both cases, each possibility is undercut in turn by the
others, until Hamlet itself becomes ostentatiously the kind of mixed drama
that the author seems to satirize through his pedant:
Polonius: The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history,
pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited. Seneca cannot
be too heavy, nor Plautus too light. For the law of writ, and the liberty, these
are the only men. (2.2.392–98)
At the very least, then, Hamlet shows signs of being something of an
experiment in genre. Even if not a comprehensive wrecking operation performed on the very notion of genre itself, at least it is too mixed to be what
Bradley called a “pure” tragedy. It needs little emphasis to recognize this as
another conscious tendency of the avant-garde, typified as it is, in Arnold
Aronson’s words, by “the dual impulses to eliminate boundaries between
genres or forms . . . and the related attempt to eliminate boundaries between
art and life” (Aronson 20).
64 • Chapter Three
Metatheater, Metadrama, Metatext
Meta- as a prefix to English words has the sense of “beyond, above, at a higher
level” and is often described as self-reflexive or self-reflective. The first of
such terms in literary theory seems to have been “metafiction,” coined in
1960, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, and defined there as “Fiction in which the author self-consciously alludes to the artificiality or literariness of a work by parodying or departing from novelistic conventions (esp.
naturalism) and narrative techniques; a fictional work in this genre or style.”
Lionel Abel, in Partisan Review, also in 1960, used “metatheater” in a
similar fashion, defined again by the OED as “Theatre which draws attention
to its unreality, esp. by the use of a play within a play; (also) those particular
parts of a drama which exemplify this device.” Abel subsequently published
in 1963 a book titled Metatheatre, which ranged across drama from Sophocles
to Wilde and Genet, establishing this and related coinages like metadrama as
terms of art in literary theory. They are often associated with self-consciously
experimental works that draw attention to their own artifice as a way of
challenging assumptions about reality. In the world of Shakespeare studies,
the search for metatheatrical elements in the plays became the province
especially of J. L. Calderwood, who published books and articles on a range
of plays from this point of view. On the play in question, he wrote To Be and
Not To Be: Negation and Metadrama in “Hamlet.” Essays by others followed,
even one focused on a single metadramatic event, the play-within-the-play,
The Murder of Gonzago, or, as Hamlet enigmatically renames it, “The Mousetrap” (Humbert). His nomination in itself is metatheatrical since it shifts attention away from content onto the effect of the action on its auditors, or at
least one. Kate Flaherty shows that in performance metatheatrical elements
can be presented in a variety of ways, as adumbrations upon “play,” in manners characterizing more modern works: “Metatheater as a form of self-referentiality might more normally be considered the province of post-modern
cultural production. In Hamlet, though, as in many of Shakespeare’s plays,
metatheater functions to provide space for the ‘moving parts’ integral to
drama” (Flaherty 17). We might amend this statement by changing “though”
to “therefore,” since Hamlet in many ways has been incorporated within “the
province of postmodern cultural production,” as we shall see later in this
book. As incidental points, metatheatrical references can also come close
to comedy in dramatic effect, and it is significant that Hamlet is at his most
relaxed and innocently amusing when he converses with the Players.
Just as Hamlet comprehensively destroys any reliance on textual stability
and authority and equally subverts notions of fixed genre categorization,
Hamlet as Avant-Garde Text • 65
so its frequent metatheatrical moments have the disconcerting capacity to
interrupt any easy assumption of a self-consistent illusion or mimesis of the
kind that Hamlet himself advocates: “the purpose of playing, whose end,
both at the first and now, was and is to hold as ’twere the mirror up to nature”
(3.2.20–22). One property of mirrors that Philippa Kelly has explored is that
they can break and thereby offer a distorted or cracked view of what is being
reflected, as Shakespeare readily acknowledged in Richard II:
Give me that glass, and therein will I read.
...
A brittle glory shineth in this face;
As brittle as the glory is the face;
[Dashes the glass against the ground.]
For there it is, crack’d in an hundred shivers.
Mark, silent king, the moral of this sport—
How soon my sorrow hath destroy’d my face. (Richard II 4.1.276, 287–91)
The moments when the play draws attention to theatrical illusion operate, as in avant-garde fiction, theater, and cinema, when the medium itself
is highlighted, self-referentiality taking precedence over its emotive or
narrative functions, and the work draws attention to its status as fiction or
artifact. They include not only the play-within-the-play but also Hamlet’s
instructions to the actors about how to act, his critical discussions with the
ex-thespian Polonius about drama, and Hamlet’s reflections upon how effectively the actor can create grief in an audience when playing Hecuba more
convincingly than a man can feel in a state of “real” grief as Hamlet is (even
when he himself exists only in a play):
Is it not monstrous that this player here,
But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his own conceit
That from her working all his visage wann’d,
Tears in his eyes, distraction in his aspect,
A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
With forms to his conceit? (2.2.545–51)
The points of difference between art and life, by being brought into high
relief, are integral to the ways in which works such as Tristram Shandy and
Waiting for Godot are conceived, and they have powerful precedents in Hamlet. Such moments, when suspension of disbelief is challenged by the disruptive recognition of illusion as artifice, occur through to the end, when the
66 • Chapter Three
dying Hamlet begs Horatio to “tell my story” (5.2.354), followed by Horatio’s
beginning his expected recounting in a way that strikes us as markedly missing the point of what we have seen enacted:
And let me speak to th’yet unknowing world
How these things came about. So shall you hear
Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,
Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters,
Of deaths put on by cunning and forc’d cause,
And, in this upshot, purposes mistook
Fall’n on th’inventors’ heads. All this can I
Truly deliver. (5.2.384–91)
The doubtful verity of Horatio’s account, so different from the story we
have witnessed, compounds the effects created by shifting metatheatrical
references in the play. Even this apparently final summary is in some sense
divorced from the represented reality of Hamlet’s fictive existence.
Experimentalism and Fashion
Another explanation for the puzzling proliferation of texts of Hamlet may
not have so much to do with revisions to suit different playing conditions as
with the dramatist’s method of composition, his “quick forge and workinghouse of thought” (Henry V 5.0.23). We might whimsically speculate that
Shakespeare may have made several attempts at writing this play, and in
each rewriting, as James Shapiro suggests, the composition may have been
conducted in a spirit of the author “allowing his writing to take him where it
would” (Shapiro 312). There is a later example in the works of John Keats,
who made at least two attempts to write an epic based on the story of Hyperion and ended up with two magnificent but very different “fragments.” Such
a mode of composition would partially account for the obvious problems of
transmission and execution and address some of the crucial but unanswered
questions that one would expect to be answered. (“I’ll fix that up later,” he
may have thought, anticipating many a PhD student in the throes of composition.)
They are important questions. Why, for example, did Shakespeare introduce the Ghost, whose very status renders his evidence suspicious, when all
the sources made it clear that the Claudius figure was guilty of murder since
there were witnesses? Was Gertrude implicated in the murder? Is Polonius
covering up the crime, or is he an ignorant tool? Why is Horatio in the play
at all, since he is so ineffectual and shadowy? Why does he apparently make
Hamlet as Avant-Garde Text • 67
no attempt to contact his friend from university before the sighting of the
Ghost? Does Horatio sympathetically understand Hamlet’s interpretations of
events, or is he merely being agreeable and placatory; could he indeed have
been “sent for”? What is Denmark’s procedure for royal succession, and how
is it that Claudius “Popp’d in between th’election and [Hamlet’s] hopes”
(5.2.65)? Was the system based on primogeniture so that the son should
succeed, or is it marriage to the queen that confers monarchical authority?
Is the marriage between Claudius and Gertrude incestuous, as Hamlet seems
to suggest, and was the relationship adulterous in its inception before the old
king died? Was Gertrude complicit in the murder? (Proudfoot) Why exactly
does the Ghost instruct Hamlet not to harm her, since several answers suggest themselves? Why does Shakespeare invent that irrelevant but strangely
conspicuous figure of Yorick, visible only through a filthy skull dug up to
make way for a new grave? What feelings lie between Hamlet and Laertes,
who are presumably acquaintances from childhood? Does Ophelia deserve
a Christian burial, or did she forfeit this honor by committing suicide? In
terms of Hamlet’s actions toward Ophelia, A. C. Bradley gives several pages
of such questions, asking them as examples of instances where the actor
playing Hamlet must “make up his mind,” but at the same time implying
that it is a mystery why the dramatist did not give closer guidance on such
important issues (Bradley 152–59). Bradley, one of the most astute readers
of Shakespeare, confesses that he does not know the answers to most of
the questions, since the text does not provide enough information, and he
concludes also that some actions appear to be irrelevant to the plot or to
character revelation.
One question is in fact answered, though the problem here is why the
question is relevant and why Shakespeare is in this case at pains to be so exact: how old is Hamlet? Early in the play, Horatio calls him “young Hamlet”
(1.1.175): the Ghost promises to “freeze thy young blood” (1.5.16); Polonius
advises his daughter “that he is young” (1.3.124); also referring to Ophelia
herself as “my young mistress” (2.2.140); Laertes warns his sister not only
that Hamlet is well above her station in life but also that his protestations of
love are “a toy in blood, / A violet in the youth of primy nature” (1.3.6–7).
After Hamlet kills Polonius, Claudius describes him as “This mad young
man” (4.1.19). He is, emphatically, young, there seems no doubt. However,
by Act 5, scene 1, we are given more exact figures. The Gravedigger again
uses the phrase “young Hamlet” (5.1.143), but this time he seems to mean
“younger” to differentiate him from “our last King” (5.1.140), his father. In
answer to direct questioning, he reveals that he has been a sexton “man and
boy, thirty years” (5.1.156) and he began work “that very day that young
68 • Chapter Three
Hamlet was born” (5.1.143). He goes on to say that Yorick’s skull “hath lien
you i’th’ earth three and twenty years” (5.1.166–67), so the jester died when
Hamlet was seven. In 1600, life expectancy (though not necessarily old age)
was thirty-five, and thirty was considered the age of perfect maturity, the age
that Christ began his mission. The overwhelming impression is that by this
stage of the play, Hamlet is now no longer young, with the inference that
about a decade has passed since he killed Polonius and was sent to England.
It does make a difference to consider that Claudius has reigned apparently
successfully for ten years and that Hamlet has been in exile for such a lengthy
period. The problems here are not ones that are tantalizingly insoluble, but
rather they lie in why Shakespeare appears to be so careful to solve them
without revealing their relevance. And, consequentially, what of Ophelia?
Is she also now ten years older, her mind having deteriorated not suddenly
but over a lengthy period, pining for so long in grief at her father’s death and
her former lover’s traumatic rejection, when he had brusquely advised her to
join a nunnery in order to avoid conceiving, and his murder of her father?
All these are not simply questions asked by pedantic scholars; they are crucial to the plot, and we are not told the answers. And so on through a long
list of problems that might seem embarrassing for the most famous play ever
written. Are they loose ends that might in time have been explained, or is it
important that they remain unanswered?
We find also lacunae, shifts of emphasis, switches from self-searching soliloquies in an Elizabethan contemporary theatrical mode to old-fashioned
sword fights and resurrection of an old and forgotten play. The entrances of
the deranged Ophelia are in a mode completely different from the rest of the
action, conspicuous since they occur just as the political plot is at its thickest and hastening toward its conclusion, when Claudius is steering Laertes
toward killing Hamlet. Ethically pondered scruples held by the central character suddenly give way to reckless homicide. All these may attest to either a
series of incomplete attempts at writing a play or deliberate experimentation
in a new kind of drama based on loose ends, “shreds and patches,” helping to
make Hamlet, in T. S. Eliot’s suggestive and much-quoted phrase, “the Mona
Lisa of literature.” If we take such a tack, then Eliot’s apparently perverse
judgments in his essay “Hamlet and His Problems” in The Sacred Wood (Eliot 1921) may not have been so wide of the mark: “that Hamlet the play is
the primary problem, and Hamlet the character only secondary.” Or further,
“that Hamlet is a stratification, that it represents the efforts of a series of men,
each making what he could out of the work of his predecessors,” or at least a
set of attempts made by the same man at different times of his career, never
quite achieving resolution. Eliot concludes that “so far from being Shake-
Hamlet as Avant-Garde Text • 69
speare’s masterpiece, the play is most certainly an artistic failure. In several
ways the play is puzzling, and disquieting as is none of the others,” and “that
Hamlet’s bafflement at the absence of objective equivalent to his feelings
is a prolongation of the bafflement of his creator in the face of his artistic
problem” (Eliot, 1921). Although most critics link such statements primarily
with Eliot’s stated theory that successful art has a fully articulated “objective
correlative” lacking in Hamlet, it might also be argued that Eliot as fellow
craftsman, writer of the purposefully and spectacularly disjointed The Waste
Land, found in Shakespeare’s work a kind of fragmentation that also suited
his own experimental art.
However, for Shakespeare, not everything new was exciting. “Newfangled” is derogatory in Shakespeare’s vocabulary: “Some [glory] in their
garments, though new-fangled ill” (Sonnet 91). In Love’s Labour’s Lost,
“spruce affectation” of language is derided (5.2.407) and the example of
Armado is given: “A man in all the world’s new fashion planted / . . . A
man of fire-new words, fashion’s own knight” (1.1.162, 176). In Hamlet,
he makes a sharp distinction between “fashion,” a word used several times,
especially by the Polonius family (Boose), and qualities more to the taste of
educated cognoscenti that seem closer to artistic seriousness. The play seems
to be written in conscious resistance to this kind of fashion, and Hamlet
himself is inclined to dismiss populist tastes: “He’s for a jig or a tale of
bawdry, or he sleeps” (2.2.496), he says derisively of Polonius’s philistine
taste in entertainment, and he parodies and ridicules the “water-fly” Osric
(5.2.82–83), who tries to emulate the modish Parisian behavior of Laertes:
“Thus has he—and many more of the same bevy that I know the drossy age
dotes on—only got the tune of the time and, out of an habit of encounters,
a kind of yeasty collection, which carries them through and through the
most fanned and winnowed opinions; and do but blow them to their trial,
the bubbles are out” (5.2.184–91). Impromptu repartee from a jester is
condemned as pandering to mass taste:
And let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them—
for there be of them that will themselves laugh, to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh too, though in the meantime some necessary question
of the play be then to be considered. That’s villainous, and shows a most pitiful
ambition in the fool that uses it. (3.2.38–45)
In terms of theatrical fashion, most sharply criticized is the vogue of companies of children’s actors, the “little eyases” that “are now the fashion, and so
berattle the common stages” (2.2.337, 339–40) “and are most tyrannically
70 • Chapter Three
clapped for’t” (2.2.38–39). The contrast is drawn with more serious players
whose stocks have fallen since the rise of the new fashion:
Rosencrantz: Even those you were wont to take such delight in, the tragedians of
the city.
Hamlet: How chances it they travel? Their residence, both in reputation and
profit, was better both ways.
Rosencrantz: I think their inhibition comes by the means of the late innovation.
(2.2.326–31)
Behind Hamlet’s question and Rosencrantz’s cryptic answer lies the actuality
of companies in Shakespeare’s own day, the assumption that, if successful
“both in reputation and profit” (2.2.328-29), they would play in the capital
rather than having to take second best and travel in the provinces. Rosencrantz’s reply means little to modern audiences, and the details seem to refer
more to “the war of the theaters” in London than to Elsinore. The “inhibition” on the theater company probably refers to the Privy Council decree of
June 22, 1600, that many London playhouses be limited to two performances
per week on pain of imprisonment (Honigmann 27–28). The “late innovation” (“novelty” in Q1) evidently refers to the rise to popularity of the children’s companies. The concern seems to be that serious, original, adult drama
is under siege from both government decrees and a new fashion, whether in
Claudius’s Denmark or London, and that, as a result, reprehensibly “new
fangled” fashions dominate entertainment. Not only that, but Hamlet takes a
keen and critical interest in more general cultural changes, citing the recent
habit of “equivocation,” of giving ambiguous answers to direct questions for
fear of incrimination: “this three years I have took note of it, the age is grown
so picked that the toe of the peasant comes so near the heel of the courtier he
galls his kibe” (5.1.135-38). Times and fashions have changed, for the worse.
The overall implication is that this play, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, is not
intended to be fashionable in “the drossy age” (5.2.186) but instead be more
like a play that, though gleaned from the past, is elitist in nature and decidedly not fashionable, like the play he recalls from the past: “for the play, I remember, pleased not the million, ’twas caviare to the general” (2.2.431–33):
Hamlet: I heard thee speak me a speech once, but it was never acted, or, if
it was, not above once—for the play, I remember, pleased not the million,
’twas caviare to the general. But it was, as I received it—and others, whose
judgments in such matters cried in the top of mine—an excellent play, well
digested in the scenes, set down with as much modesty as cunning. I remember
one said there were no sallets in the lines to make the matter savoury, nor no
Hamlet as Avant-Garde Text • 71
matter in the phrase that might indict the author of affectation, but called it
an honest method, as wholesome as sweet, and by very much more handsome
than fine. (2.2.430–41)
It was too good for its audience and required the discriminating cognoscenti
for full appreciation. Like Claudius’s subterfuge and deliberate strategy to
conceal his motives and actions, Hamlet finds, in the face of conspiracy,
that meaning must be actively sought and found and hypotheses tested, since
very little is given. It is appropriate, then, that the play requires decoding
and leaves loose ends dangling, since it represents an experience through
which we must “By indirections find directions out” (2.1.66), which is not
the regular strategy of an Elizabethan “well-made play.” Simultaneously,
Hamlet must himself refuse to indulge in straightforward communication,
since at times his life depends on calculated evasion and the adoption of an
“antic disposition”:
Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me. You would play
upon me, you would seem to know my stops, you would pluck out the heart of
my mystery, you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass; and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ, yet cannot
you make it speak. ’Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a
pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you fret me, you cannot play
upon me. (3.2.354–63)
At the same time, the fragmentary and garbled speeches of an undoubtedly
unhinged Ophelia after her father has been murdered by her desired but estranged lover reflect the same disjunctions between meaning and expression
that pervade the play as a whole and link it with a subversive authorial desire
to disrupt any impression of surface coherence.
Certainly one thing exercising the mind of Shakespeare around the time
of the 1600s is something that struck other writers and thinkers at the time,
a turbulent confluence of old ideas and innovation. The period was seen
as poised between philosophical world views looking before and after early
modern times, back to the medieval Catholic religious machinery of ghosts,
purgatory, confessions, and older theatrical conventions such as the dumb
show used by Hamlet in his improvised play-within-the-play, and forward to
the machiavellian political subterfuges, the kind of enlightenment emphasis on scientific and secular ontologies encapsulated in Donne’s aphorism
“the new philosophy calls all in doubt.” Even the clearly imminent death
of Queen Elizabeth and her destabilizing refusal to name a successor must
have evoked profound uncertainty about the future in England’s collective
72 • Chapter Three
imagination. Such considerations, taken as a whole, support the possibility
that Hamlet was in many aspects avant-garde in its own time. The soliloquies
have become so celebrated that we are tempted to forget that this is the only
play in which Shakespeare used the device with such frequency—with a
dramatic effectiveness unrivaled by himself since Richard III and by any other
writer of the time. To his own audience, they may have smacked more of an
entirely different form of literature than drama, akin to the familiar essay being developed by Montaigne and Bacon, itself a new, à la mode genre in 1600
(Shapiro ch. 14), and revelation of a new kind of sensibility represented in
the theater. Time has blunted awareness of the experimental edge here and
has made it impossible for us to appreciate that audiences may have been
taken aback by such an audacious and unprecedented prioritizing of private
thoughts over public action in a play.
The repeated and striking device of self-reflexiveness and metatheater,
almost a signature of Shakespeare himself, is also driven further in this play
than in any other by him or another. Mixing genres, comedy and tragedy,
which offended not only eighteenth-century critics but even theorists in
Shakespeare’s own time, like Sir Philip Sidney, was not done so extensively
and so structurally as in this play until the later Antony and Cleopatra and the
tragicomedies. Equivocations of genre also hover around the amalgamation
of different traditions of tragedy, revenge and Aristotelian “fall of princes,”
and the formally indecorous inset tragedy of the innocent victim and lowly
commoner Ophelia, who, Marguerite A. Tassi has argued, exacts a kind of
revenge herself (Tassi ch. 3). Paradoxically, a revenge plot becomes a vehicle
for interrogating and undermining the moral propriety of pagan vendetta
(“an eye for an eye”) when it is urged in a Christian world (“vengeance is
mine, saith the Lord”). It is a cruel choice imposed upon Hamlet, a morally
scrupulous student who is placed in a stereotyped revenge situation by no less
than a ghastly presence afflicted with a terrible skin complaint and claiming to be a ghost in purgatory (see Keyishian, 1995 53–67). Shakespeare
admittedly found hints—though not taken to such bizarre extremes—of all
these things in Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, in which Burbage, Shakespeare’s
Hamlet, played the “mad” Hieronimo. But he extended that play’s data into
an “undiscovered country,” subjecting the conventions to moral scrutiny and
presenting them with strange theatrical innovations. Even madness itself is
made a far more complex psychological issue than it had been in Kyd, or than
it would become in any of the successve revenge tragedies into the Jacobean
period, such as those by Marston. Its presentation as an ambiguously feigned
or felt state is comparable to the often hallucinatory presentations in avant-
Hamlet as Avant-Garde Text • 73
garde films, when it is used to challenge boundaries between insanity and
sanity, a distinction to which we now turn.
Madness
So far we have considered mainly textual, generic, and structural aspects of
Hamlet, but now to “More matter with less art” (2.2.95): what of its themes?
Claudius describes the kingdom of Norway after the death of old King
Hamlet as “disjoint and out of frame” (1.2.20), and Hamlet echoes him in
reflecting at the end of Act 1 that “The time is out of joint” (1.5.196). As
the play proceeds, these words begin to apply to character behavior rather
than the plot itself and in ways other than the political one suggested by the
new king or the conspiratorial situation suspected by the prince. Elsinore,
as represented in the play, is a setting in which multiple perspectives and
personal, emotional situations clash, to an extent that reference to any
reliable touchstone of truth or reality—whether the apparently harmonious
social fabric of Claudius’s smooth-running court or the claims of the Ghost
that not all is well—becomes uncertain, contested, and suspect. Reliance on
perceptions of reality are called into question and fractured, leaving morality
and even meaning to be constructed in a framework of mental relativity: “for
there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so” (2.2.249–50).
In a moment of rich dramatic irony, for example, Hamlet refrains from killing Claudius while he is praying, since that would mean he would not be
condemned to purgatory like his murdered brother; yet the audience is privy
to Claudius’s thoughts, and we know that in fact he feels so guilty that he
cannot pray effectively. Both are thinking, and also feeling, different things,
which makes a profound difference to the narrative at this turning point.
Hamlet’s phrase took on new resonance in the twentieth century with
Einstein’s theory of relativity, which eroded belief in the objectivity of individual perception, a fundamental tenet of avant-garde theory (Aronson
23–24). Hamlet’s formulation lies behind aspects of the Romantic Revolution when new worlds were imagined, and it is taken to be a central reference
point for both modernism (Childs 72–78) and postmodernism. It provides
a pillar in the philosophy of Foucault, in the progressive psychoanalysis of
Lacan, and in the uncertainty principle of quantum physics. It was equally
significant for the philosophical underpinnings of poststructuralist theories
of language and literature (Mousley 95–100), and it has influenced literary
theory (Rabkin). Meaning becomes a matter of subjective individual positioning and framing, which inevitably leads to variable interpretations, often
74 • Chapter Three
wrenched into some kind of unified meaning from incoherent fragments, like
Ophelia’s “distract” speech:
[She] speaks things in doubt
That carry but half sense. Her speech is nothing,
Yet the unshaped use of it doth move
The hearers to collection. They aim at it,
And botch the words up fit to their own thoughts. (4.5.6–10)
Prevailing uncertainty of single interpretations is, to some extent, built in
to the medium of drama, with its succession of conflicting interlocutors
contradicting each other, and certainly into Shakespearean drama, a mode
in which differing perceptions inform the warp and weft at every level. However, it is especially acute, accentuated, and disturbing in Hamlet, in ways
that are foregrounded:
Hamlet: Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel?
Polonius: By th’mass, and ’tis—like a camel indeed.
Hamlet: Methinks it is like a weasel.
Polonius: It is backed like a weasel.
Hamlet: Or like a whale.
Polonius: Very like a whale. (3.2.367–72)
The exchange may operate as a comic exposure of Polonius’s inferior wit,
and yet, in its very irrelevancy otherwise, it seems to be Hamlet’s comment
on the way thoughts fashion reality rather than the reverse. As the farcical
but perceptive example of Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
shows, even the characters within the fiction have no real idea of where
anything like stable truth or facts lie, as each viewpoint is relative to others
and appears to make little overarching sense, just as a cloud can be seen as
a camel, a weasel, or a whale. This wide margin for error in understanding,
and extreme degree of uncertainty, must have resulted in perplexed responses
from Shakespeare’s actors, who had to learn their parts between cues and exit
lines, knowing as little of what was happening as Stoppard’s hapless characters, in those sequences in which they were not involved. Even the practice
of doubling parts must have compounded rather than clarified confusion
(Palfrey and Stern), since an actor would have had to ask himself at any one
point, “Who am I supposed to be now?,” “Why am I here?,” “What have I to
do with the people I’m speaking to?,” “What are they feeling?,” and “What
do they know that I don’t know?”
Hamlet as Avant-Garde Text • 75
The disruption and relativity of meaning adds up to a constantly shifting
view, both within and of the work of art, as well as a strong sense that it is
unreliable in its referential foundations. Shakespeare highlights this dimension by forcing his central figure to confront it squarely—how can he trust
statements made by a ghost who may even be a mouthpiece for the devil, and
how can he verify with empirical evidence where the truth lies? Truth claims
by many characters are variously heightened, distorted, and undermined,
especially when the man at the center of the justice system in the state is
suspected and then confirmed as a liar, in ways that seem more like surrealism or mannerist distortion than a transparent mimesis based on holding up
the mirror to nature. It all seems alarmingly akin to a psychological state
commonly called madness.
A preoccupation with insanity is a convention of one dramatic family to
which Hamlet belongs, Senecan or revenge tragedy. “Hieronimo’s mad again”
were the famous words in Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, and there is a madhouse
at the center of Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling and other Jacobean
revenge plays. But Shakespeare makes it far more than a commonplace. As
always when he uses a convention, he infuses it with new levels of appropriateness to the context. Seen from this point of view, Hamlet is a mad play
about a mad world and at least potentially mad people, a vision that questions the existence of sanity itself. It mirrors a crucial conundrum faced by
the avant-garde artist: given my radically unusual perceptions, am I mad and
the rest of the world sane, or is the world mad and I am sane? It is not surprising that Foucault had Hamlet partly in his thoughts when he formulated
his own theories of madness and reason as complementary and shifting social
constructs, relative to the society in which one happens to live (Schad 45).
When we discover more of the political situation, where the legal system
is controlled by a murderer of the previous incumbent intent on covering up
his crime, then the predicament confronting the individual whistleblower
who is discredited by having his sanity questioned becomes an even more
sinister form of mental coercion. Insanity as a rupture of rational connections between the perceiver and the perceived, or mind and external reality,
is not only a central part of the subject matter but is the very basis for the
structure and shifting points of view in Hamlet. In later times, a play that
harps so much on insanity, it seems, licenses adapters to utilize some kind of
nonrational logic built in to their treatment. Theatrically speaking, we might
think of the apparent absence of stable meaning and the unresolved indeterminacy evident in Theater of the Absurd, which acknowledged sources
not only in Shakespeare but also in the avant-garde Dada and surrealism.
Alternatively, we recall the words of a pioneer in experimental performance,
76 • Chapter Three
Jerzy Grotowski, who claimed in his “Statement of Principles” in Towards a
Poor Theatre that the higher purpose of art is to strip away deceit and reveal
truth, though not the truth of “reason” alone. Theater itself can be a catalyst or microcosm for examining the various versions of sanity and insanity
pervading Hamlet.
Roy Porter was the foremost historian of madness, in books such as
Anatomy of Madness (as co-editor), Mind-Forg’d Manacles: A History of Madness in England from the Restoration to the Regency, Madness: A Brief History,
and Madmen: A Social History of Madhouses, Mad Doctors and Lunatics. The
one most pertinent here is A Social History of Madness: The World through
the Eyes of the Insane, a nonjudgmental study of the lives of some people
certified as mad, especially those who were artists, through their own words.
The very credo of the book is introduced in the opening paragraph, referring to the wary words of Polonius, which Porter no doubt thought were so
well known that they needed no explicit acknowledgment: “Madness may
be typically incomprehensible or just badly comprehended; but a glance at
those writings by mad people which have come down to us from previous
centuries confirms that even if we diagnose their condition as madness, yet
there is method in it” (Porter, 1987 2). What is immediately striking about
the dozen or so people chosen by Porter for analysis is that they are conspicuously creative in some way. This need not be a surprise, since creative artists,
and writers in particular, leave eloquent records of their thoughts in their
art as they imaginatively question the reality others see, but it is also not a
coincidence that, from the time of the ancient Greeks down to Shakespeare
and beyond, madness and creativity have been seen as going hand in hand:
“The lunatic, the lover and the poet / Are of imagination all compact . . . /
Such tricks hath strong imagination” (A Midsummer Night’s Dream 5.1.7–8,
18, and passim) or in Pope’s “Great wits to madness nearly are allied.” More
particularly, however, we find an array of people who were not merely skillful artists but were often at the very vanguard of their art, and without much
doubt avant-garde in anybody’s sense. Through their lives and statements,
there are implicit links and analogies to be drawn with Hamlet, although
Porter does not choose to draw comparisons in so many words. We meet Nijinsky, who “enjoys playing with the paradox of his own prophetic madness,”
sometimes denying that he is “mentally sick as diagnosed by the doctors”: “I
do not think, and therefore cannot be mad,” he says. Sometimes he “claims
merely to be acting mad, performing another stage part” in order to test the
sincerity of those he meets, while sometimes he unashamedly triumphs in his
madness—“I like to speak in rhymes, because I am a rhyme myself” (Porter,
1987 74)—which has the gnomic quality noted in Hamlet by Polonius, “a
Hamlet as Avant-Garde Text • 77
happiness that often madness hits on, which reason and sanity could not so
prosperously be delivered of” (2.2.219–21). These parameters are surely those
of Hamlet, at one point adopting an “antic disposition” (1.5.189–90) to test
out others, “essentially am not in madness, / But mad in craft” (3.4.189–90),
sometimes “but mad north-north-west” who “When the wind is southerly,
[knows] a hawk from a handsaw” (2.2.374–75), and at other times apparently
genuinely mad or hallucinatory, at least in his mother’s opinion, when he
claims to see the Ghost in Gertrude’s “closet.”
This is the very coinage of your brain.
This bodiless creation ecstasy
Is very cunning in. (3.4.139–41)
As Porter suggests, however, Nijinsky “out-Hamlets Hamlet” (Porter,
1987 74). Ophelia certainly does not think Hamlet is cunningly simulating
madness: “O what a noble mind is here o’erthrown” (3.1.152). Now that the
long arm of Freud’s Oedipus complex, along with many of his other theories,
has loosened its grip on the psychiatric establishment, Hamlet might be
provisionally diagnosed with schizophrenia (others see the Ghost but only
he hears, and his mother neither sees nor hears) or severe bipolar disorder,
judging from Gertrude’s description of his “ranting”:
This is mere madness,
And thus awhile the fit will work on him.
Anon, as patient as the female dove
When that her golden couplets are disclos’d,
His silence will sit drooping. (5.1.279–83)
The dramatist Antonin Artaud, who was seen more or less from childhood as
mentally disturbed, in his study of Van Gogh described him as “the authentic
madman” who was “suicided by society.” For Artaud, in Porter’s words, “madness . . . was a mantle which he adopted from his youth onwards, of which
he never divested himself” (Porter, 1987 142), like a badge of victimhood.
When Artaud’s name is mentioned, it is invariably in the context of his
belief in avant-garde theater and, more specifically, the innovation in 1927
that he called “theatre of cruelty.” His aim to use theater as “a cleansing and
purifying force, stripping away rationalization and artifice” (Porter, 1987
142-43) inadvertently or perhaps knowingly echoes the words of Hamlet:
“I must be cruel only to be kind” (3.4.180). Hamlet’s play, The Murder of
Gonzago, in its dramatic context, is an example and perhaps exemplar of the
kind of theatrical event that Artaud advocated, designed to make an active
78 • Chapter Three
intervention in real life in order to precipitate change in people and situations—in both senses of “dramatic.”
In other books by Porter, Hamlet continues to be a frequent and at least
tacit reference point. Madness: A Brief History (Porter, 2002), the running
theme of which is that the eighteenth century as the age of reason formed a
watershed between different conceptions of insanity and radically different
public policy, begins thus: “To ‘define true madness’—the speaker is Polonius, laboring, as ever, to be wittily wise—‘what is’t but to be nothing else
but mad?’ Shakespeare’s greybeard pedant hit the nail on the head this time:
isn’t insanity the mystery of mysteries?” (Porter, 2002 1) The case of John
Perceval in the nineteenth century is an interesting and revealing one. He
may not have been avant-garde, but he spent long periods in an asylum and
involved himself in the Alleged Lunatics’ Friend Society, which lobbied on
behalf of people improperly confined, and he wrote some large books on the
subject speaking from personal experience. What is striking is how closely
Perceval’s life followed Shakespeare’s art. His father was murdered when he
was a child, and his mother quickly remarried. In his maturity, Perceval continually saw his father’s ghost everywhere. He never seems to have noticed
the “Hamlet plot” running through his own life, nor did his editor, Gregory
Bateson, but it seems an inescapable comparison for a literary critic (Bateson,
quoted in Porter, 1987 172–73). So do Porter’s words as he contemplates the
“antic gesture” of the traditional fool in the sense of Shakespeare’s comic
figures: “In time, the medicalization of insanity, the move to lock mad
people up, and the sensibilities of the age of reason undermined and rendered obsolete the old figure of the ‘witty fool’ with his riddling truths and
carnivalesque freedoms” (Porter, 2001 76). Feste in Twelfth Night and Lear’s
Fool may not be mad in any pathological or clinical sense, but in some ways a
favorite conceit of Shakespeare’s is to draw a link between folly and licensed
madness. In emulating Erasmus’s mouthpiece in Praise of Folly, they draw on
the kind of ironic perspective that stands apart from social norms and challenges coercive authority, criticizing the normal and rational as though they
more truly represent the insane and irrational: “The more fool, madonna, to
mourn for your brother’s soul, being in heaven. Take away the fool, gentlemen” (Twelfth Night 1.5.67–69).
Fool: The sweet and bitter fool will presently appear;
The one in motley here, the other found out there. (King Lear 1.4.139–40)
Lear: Dost thou call me fool, boy?
Fool: All thy other titles thou hast given away; that thou wast born with.
Kent: This is not altogether fool, my lord. (King Lear 1.4.150–57)
Hamlet as Avant-Garde Text • 79
In the same spirit, when the Restoration playwright Nathaniel Lee was committed to Bethlem, he quipped, “They called me mad, and I called them mad,
and damn them they outvoted me” (Porter, 2002 88). The tradition persisted
through to Catch 22, although periodic attempts have been made, as ironically in Heller’s novel, to redefine such figures as marginal and themselves
mad: “The instituting of the asylum [in the eighteenth century] set up a cordon sanitaire delineating the ‘normal’ from the ‘mad,’ which underlined the
Otherhood of the insane and carved out a managerial milieu in which that
alienness could be handled” (Porter, 2001 122). The Romantic age brought
artists like the visionary William Blake and writers such as Coleridge and
de Quincey, both addicted to opium as a medical necessity in a time when
anesthetics did not exist, while later in the fin de siècle, absinthe became
the preferred narcotic and stimulant of the European avant-garde movement, whereupon “works of genius were hammered out on the anvil of pain”
(Porter, 2001 81). Such works of genius we now evaluate as associated with
artistic vanguards in different ages.
Because of the apparent modernity and complexity of attitudes toward
insanity expressed in the play, Hamlet became a happy hunting ground for
psychologists in the twentieth century. As for the approach favored by Freud
and followers like Ernest Jones and Olivier, that Hamlet evidences an oedipal conflict in his relationship with his mother, once again it can be seen as
explicable in twentieth-century terms rather than attitudes in Elizabethan
England. Like many of Freud’s theories, the construction of the oedipal
complex and its application to Hamlet have proved controversial, but he may
have been on stronger ground if he had developed another, later idea, since
its central term, melancholy, was central to the early modern medical world
and Hamlet itself. His essay “Mourning and Melancholia” has only one parenthetical reference to Hamlet when expressing self-loathing: “(an opinion
which Hamlet held both of himself and of everyone else),” which his editors
footnote with reference to the quotation “‘Use every man after his desert,
and who shall ’scape whipping?’ (Act II, Scene 2)” (Freud, vol. xiv 246).
However, despite the scantiness of allusion, it would be possible to argue
that the theory Freud is advancing here, that the two conditions—mourning,
which is considered normal, and melancholia, which is pathologized—were
generated from his reading of Hamlet. There is so much in the play that bears
out this notion of psychological ambivalence, from the state of mind of Hamlet, reproved for his grief for his dead father and being considered increasingly as mad, to the comparable but different history of Ophelia after she has
lost her lover to rejection and her father to death. These are exactly the two
situations dealt with in Freud’s essay. Both are in profound mourning, both
80 • Chapter Three
are frustrated in love, both turn their feelings inward and become morbidly
melancholy, and both are perceived as insane. Freud’s basic argument is that
the line between the two states is by no means cut and dried, since normal
grief, if it is regarded as unreasonably long in duration, is confused with the
illness, which appears to be exactly how Gertrude in particular perceives her
son. Since Freud came out of a German tradition of thinking, his linking of
Hamlet with melancholia must surely have been derived from the figure of
the Werther-like melancholy prince. William Kerrigan is another critic who
is influenced by post-Freudian psychology, although he pursues the implications in different and more disputable directions, and occasionally other
psychologists locate the central mood of the play in Shakespeare’s own unresolved grief for his only son, Hamnet, who died at the age of eleven in 1596.
It is by no means unique for philosophers to turn Shakespeare into a philosopher and psychologists to turn him into a psychologist, since it aggrandizes their profession, and the same mode of thinking also enables neglected
post-Romantic artists and writers to identify with a strain of lone and embattled integrity in Hamlet’s role. However, the noteworthy thing is that it is
Hamlet itself that has generated such clearly anachronistic but powerful and
influential readings based on psychological methodologies, prompted by the
representation of madness in the play, and philosophical meditations on the
implications for truth inherent in the same insistent references to aberrant
states of mind. The phenomenon is at least prima facie evidence of the play’s
capacity for generating new ways of thinking, endless redactions capable of
“making new” in radical and often contradictory ways. In every generation,
Hamlet seems to acquire a quality that is attractive to the new avant-garde,
not only in the field of creative arts but in branches of science.
Madness is not only an issue relating to individuals in the play. More generally, it becomes a spatial metaphor underpinning some of the oddities and
disjointednesses in the play’s narrative construction. With some intrinsic
appropriateness, this aspect can be observed most clearly in Act 4, scene 5,
where clinically definable and undeniable insanity intrudes with the appearances of Ophelia. Once again, familiarity with the play as a whole has mollified the impact and sheer strangeness of the scene. Up until this moment,
Shakespeare seems to be involved in brisk and functional stage business
hastening the play to closure in terms of the primary narrative. Hard on the
heels of each incident in turn, Polonius is stabbed by Hamlet, who is in a
state that the queen describes as “Mad as the sea and wind” (4.1.7), but that
we assume is motivated by his assumption that it is the king behind the arras.
Then we have a scene in which Fortinbras announces his intention to march
across Danish territory, and Hamlet’s reflections on the military and politi-
Hamlet as Avant-Garde Text • 81
cal implications, ending with his moment of resolve to avenge his father’s
murder and take power in the state himself: “O, from this time forth / My
thoughts be bloody or be nothing worth” (4.4.65–66). It is at this moment,
as events proceed briskly to their conclusion, that we have the eruptive and
scene-stealing entrance of Ophelia, which is in some way literally spellbinding in terms of the play’s structure, disconcertingly suspending its forward
movement. Here the “plotting” in both senses goes awry, and attention is
momentarily wrenched off-course from its inexorable direction, not once but
three times, if we include the report of her drowning. The “distract” Ophelia,
who has up until now seemed a demure, self-effacing, and minor character,
suddenly frightens the queen into a state of shocked avoidance, and the confrontation shows Ophelia to be boldly and bawdily unhinged. Her snatches
of song suggest that she is both grief-stricken for her father’s death and
traumatized by the apparent change of identity of her lover, who is himself
the murderer of her father. Behind Gertrude’s opening “I will not speak with
her” (4.5.1), there might be detected an authorial self-admonition not to be
sidetracked from the play’s narrative course, but the sheer emotional power
of the new presence takes over: “She is importunate, / Indeed distract. Her
mood will needs be pitied” (4.5.1–2). The dramatist must face the inevitable
consequences for having neglected one of his characters, who is trapped as
much as Hamlet in the train of events the playwright has set in motion. In
terms of dramatic pacing, the scene in which Ophelia sings, departs, and
returns with flowers to distribute, flanked and intersected as it is with functional and political business allowing Claudius to manipulate Laertes against
Hamlet, suddenly slows everything down to a point of sleepwalking stasis,
as if events are arrested. The madness of Ophelia is an astonishing scene,
not only in its capacity to move audiences by her mingling of vulnerability
and sexual boldness, but also in its sheer capacity to distract us from the
plot and stage business in more ways than one. Hamlet’s story, Claudius’s
machinations, the queen’s anxiety—all are forgotten in a curiously sidetracking episode. We do not know what diverted Shakespeare into this touching
cul-de-sac, whether it is what Shapiro describes as the playwright “allowing
his writing to take him where it would” (Shapiro 312) or his unwillingness
to lose the opportunity to interpolate an affective scene with a previously
marginal character, or even his feeling unable, in the integrity of a writer, to
shirk a part of the emotional pattern he has generated, no matter how much
a singular diversion it might create. Whatever the explanation, Ophelia’s
scene is one where madness is not simply a state of mind exposing the pettiness, political expedience, and confusion of those around her, but also a
structural impingement of the irrational upon the logical in the play’s design.
82 • Chapter Three
Suicide and the Metaphysics of Death
“Suicide Is Painless” is a song dating from 1970, with lyrics written by Mike
Altman and misleadingly serene and melodic music composed by Johnny
Mandel. It gained fame as the theme song for the film M*A*S*H, directed
by Robert Altman, who was the father of the lyricist, and then for the
television series of the same name from 1972 to 1983, now re-released on
Netflix. These were based on a novel by Richard Hooker (pen name of Dr.
H. Richard Hornberger) published in 1968, and although set in the Korean
War, the film especially was claimed as a sly satire on the Vietnam War,
along the lines of Heller’s Catch 22, though less acerbic. Its mode was a version of mordant, black comedy that suited the times. More because of the
television series, which was gentler still, the song became enormously popular, but it continued to have special resonance for the antiwar movement.
The song’s refrain expresses apparent fatalism and quietude, suited especially
to the flower power generation, the nonviolent wing of the counterculture
and peace movement, which advocated “dropping out” rather than engaging with war by actively opposing it. Morally speaking, the slogan “make
love not war” is consistant with “’tis nobler in the mind to suffer / The
slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” rather than “to take arms against
a sea of troubles / And by opposing end them” (3.1.57–60). The reference
to Hamlet’s famous speech is not imposed but mentioned explicitly in the
song, when the singer speaks of being asked about questions such as “Is it to
be or not to be?” This leads to the final iteration of the refrain that suicide is
painless, an observation on which the song remains placidly indifferent on a
take-it-or-leave-it basis.
The first lines of the most famous passage in the world, translated into
every language, warrant some close attention, especially since they have suffered the fate of so many quotable phrases in Hamlet in being worn down by
constant quotation into a numbing vacuousness.
To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them. (3.1.56–60)
Or, in the much maligned but still cogent Q1 version, “To be, or not to be;
ay, there’s the point” (7.114). For a start, the sequence of thoughts could
form a chiasmus or an equation setting up a set of quandaries that, as we shall
see, have teased the thoughts of avant-garde thinkers:
Hamlet as Avant-Garde Text • 83
To be [exist, live] OR not to be [die]
X
To accept [suffer] OR to oppose
Active opposition by arms to “th’oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, / . . . the law’s delay, / The insolence of office” (3.1.71–73) and other
injustices leads to survival, whereas the kind of silent acquiescence advocated in the song may involve suffering and death. On the other hand, the
lines could form a parallelism of choices:
To be [exist, live] OR not to be [die]
= =
to accept [suffer] OR to oppose
Here, accepting wrongs without trying to right them allows one to survive,
while to rebel is to die. Hamlet continues the train of thought to a new set
of considerations. To die is “to sleep” and opt out of “the thousand natural
shocks / That flesh is heir to,” which is “a consummation / Devoutly to be
wish’d” (3.1.62–64). One meaning is that Hamlet is repeating his own earlier
wish “that the Everlasting had not fix’d / His canon ’gainst self-slaughter”
(1.2.131–32) and contemplating suicide as a way out of his dilemmas. Suicide on this reading is a “quietus,” literally an economic reckoning or squaring of the account, but also suggesting a peaceful, reconciled release from
life—not an active choice, but a passive acceptance of death.
However, the nagging, puzzling, and ambiguously unattached phrase “No
more” remains, posing for any editor a severe problem of punctuation. Q2
leaves the question open by withholding any clarifying punctuation, printing
“to die to sleepe / No more,” while F offers a slight degree of disambiguation
but no more clarity: “to dye, to sleepe / No more.” Jenkins punctuates thus:
“To die—to sleep, / No more; and by a sleep” (3.1.60–61). The Oxford edition,
edited by Wells, Taylor, and Jowett, chooses “To die, to sleep— / No more,
and by a sleep.” An internet editor (plucked at random from the many editions
available) chooses a noncommittal “To die: to sleep; No more; and by a sleep
to say we end.” Is “no more” simply an attempt to “think no more about it” (as
in Lady Macbeth’s “consider it not so deeply” [2.2.29]), or does it mean “To die
[is] to sleep no more,” as a return to the defeatism of the parallel “to accept is to
die”? Astonishingly, the phrase “no more” is repeated twenty-four times in the
play, mostly at emotionally significant moments, and “sleep” recurs twenty-one
times, as though there is some subliminal drive toward Hamlet’s eventual fatalism in his “There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow” (5.2.215–16).
84 • Chapter Three
At the very least, equating death and sleep sets up another troubling, potentially nihilistic thought process: if death is like sleep—and, as Prospero said,
“our little life / Is rounded with a sleep” (The Tempest 4.1.157–58)—then
Hamlet may paradoxically and literally mean “to sleep no more,” since such
a state opens up a new fear of what lies beyond the grave, “that the dread of
something after death, / The undiscover’d country, from whose bourn / No
traveller returns” (3.1.78–80). The sufferings might include a guilty conscience
over what one has not done in life, conscience that “makes cowards of us all”
(3.1.83), and we recall that Hamlet has actually met a returning traveler from
purgatory, one who died, he says, “Cut off even in the blossoms of [his] sin”
(1.5.76), with conscience still unbearably pricking. This in itself might encourage once again the option of suffering in silence, bearing “those ills we have”
(3.1.81) rather than forcing issues and courting the horrible consequences in
purgatory if the task is not completed in a state of virtue.
However, the opening section of the soliloquy has been read in a completely
opposite way, as favoring action through self-assertion, defiance, and political
activism. This is the meaning drawn from Hamlet’s words by activists in many
political struggles, as we have seen, in countries as diverse as Egypt and Poland.
It was raised in the campaign for black equality and civil rights in America in
1964, by no less a figure than Malcolm X, in a speech delivered at the Oxford
Union, which can be viewed on YouTube. He makes clear his discomfort in
quoting from a white writer, but nonetheless quotes Hamlet’s words to justify
the use of violence in a just cause, ending with this statement:
I read once, passingly, about a man named Shakespeare. I only read about him
passingly, but I remember one thing he wrote that kind of moved me. He put it
in the mouth of Hamlet, I think it was, who said “To be or not to be.” He was
in doubt about something—whether it was nobler in the mind of man to suffer
the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune—moderation—or to take up arms
against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them. And I go for that. If you
take up arms, you’ll end it, but if you sit around and wait for the one who’s in
power to make up his mind that he should end it, you’ll be waiting a long time.
Malcolm X is building on other references in Hamlet’s speech that are taken
to advocate revolt against oppression—“Th’ oppressor’s wrong, the proud
man’s contumely . . . / The insolence of office” (3.1.71, 73)—and the wrongs
of inequality are made even more politically explicit in Q1’s catalogue of
wrongs, “The widow being oppressed, the orphan wronged / The taste of
hunger or a tyrant’s reign” (7.125–26). This one speech in Hamlet, then,
paradoxically played its part in the civil rights movement in America and
offered a pacifist intervention in the Vietnam War.
Hamlet as Avant-Garde Text • 85
It could be argued that Hamlet himself eventually resolves his conundrum
with extraordinary intellectual acuteness, somehow managing to make his
final moments both acquiescent and active in a resolution based on simple
expedience and opportunism. He literally takes up arms with a rapier equated
with a “bare bodkin” (3.1.76), but facing death so certainly that it amounts
to a suicidal wish, as Horatio clearly foresees: “You will lose, my lord”
(5.2.205). Even this dire “augury” (5.2.18) inspires Hamlet to understand
the kind of mortal compromise he is making: “Not a whit. We defy augury.
There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to
come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come.
The readiness is all. Since no man, of aught he leaves, knows aught, what is’t
to leave betimes? Let be” (5.2.215–20). In other words, leave it to fate and
the demands of circumstances to answer the question for us. The question
Hamlet raised in his first six lines in the famous passage are unresolved at
this time, but they reverberate through the play. They set chiming all these
profound and apparently irreconcilable conundrums, in a paradoxical form
that Aronson, without actually mentioning Hamlet, has described as central
to twentieth-century avant-garde thinking, “a battle between nihilism and
rationality—both exist within the movement” (Aronson 40). No wonder
the set of questions has “puzzle[d] the will” (3.1.80) down through the centuries, not least among those existentialists, freedom fighters, rebels against
conformism, and all others who live with conscious deliberation along the
edges of life and death.
We do not hear where Hamlet’s earlier self-communion would have led,
let alone its conclusion, which is deferred to the end of the play, since he is
interrupted by the discreet intrusion of, significantly, Ophelia. In some ways
yet to be revealed, this entrance at this particular moment is fateful and fatal,
as though she is already marked as one who will choose “not to be,” even in
Hamlet’s own gentle but also ominous words, “Nymph, in thy orisons / Be
all my sins remember’d” (3.1.88–89). In the light of her own unlived future,
these words of his are true. It is his sins that are visited upon her and lead
directly to her own choice (if it is a choice) between being and not being. He
rejects her love and murders her father, the two traumatic events that will
precipitate her final actions and in the meantime haunt her deranged songs.
First, she sings of her father:
He is dead and gone, lady,
He is dead and gone,
At his head a grass-green turf,
At his heels a stone. (4.5.29–32)
86 • Chapter Three
And second, of the man whose apparently sincere protestations of love she
had trusted:
By Gis and by Saint Charity,
Alack and fie for shame,
Young men will do’t if they come to’t—
By Cock, they are to blame.
Quoth she, “Before you tumbled me,
You promis’d me to wed.” . . .
“So would I a done, by yonder sun,
And thou hadst not come to my bed.” (4.5.58–66)
When death comes to her, “suicide is painless,” perhaps the end of pain,
and the scene painted by the queen (mysteriously, since we wonder how she
could have seen it or heard it reported without somebody intervening to save
Ophelia) is another of those memorable and much-quoted parts of the play:
There is a willow grows askant a brook
That shows his hoary leaves in the glassy stream.
Therewith fantastic garlands did she make
Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples,
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do dead men’s fingers call them.
There on the pendent boughs her crownet weeds
Clamb’ring to hang, an envious sliver broke,
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide,
And mermaid-like awhile they bore her up,
Which time she chanted snatches of old lauds,
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element. But long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pull’d the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death. (4.7.165–82)
The question of whether or not Ophelia committed suicide is raised and
discussed in the play as a point of religious controversy. One of the diggers
of her grave thinks so; in his homely words, the woman came to the water,
and the water did not come to her. He interprets this as evidence of religious
injustice, since she should not have been buried on sanctified ground in a
graveyard but in the open fields. Officially, however, she is given the benefit
Hamlet as Avant-Garde Text • 87
of the doubt by intercession of the king. This is confirmed by the priest, a
stern theological stickler for protocol, who presides over her “maimed rites”
(5.1.212). He clearly implies that he believes choosing not to live, however
passive, is still a decision and is symptomatic of the mortal sin of despair. He
appears to reflect that the coroner has probably returned an “open verdict” of
suicide while not in her perfect mind—“Her death was doubtful,” he says—
but that given the doubt, she “should in ground unsanctified have lodg’d /
Till the last trumpet” (5.1.220, 222–23) (perhaps implying a savage pun on
“last strumpet”) so that God could determine her fate on the day of judgment, without even requiems being sung in the meantime lest they might
“profane the service of the dead” (5.1.229). The priest is clearly worried by
the whole sordid affair and uncomfortable about his role. As if to anticipate
modern speculations that Ophelia was pregnant, Shakespeare specifies that
she is worthy of “virgin crants” (5.1.225), a crown hung in the church to
signify her chastity. In another interpretation, however, judging from Gertrude’s words, her drowning was fairly clearly an accident, a misadventure,
rather than willfully inflicted self-harm. Ophelia stretched out to hang flowers on a branch over the brook and fell. Her only sin seems to have been
one of fatalistic acceptance due to mental distraction. “Incapable of her own
distress” (4.7.177), or unaware of the danger, she chose not to save herself
but sang “snatches of old lauds” (4.7.176) and accepted her watery death.
In Q1, she even “sat / Smiling” (15.45–46) (Clare). In Hamlet’s formulation, she arguably chose “not to be” rather than choosing “to die,” which
makes her demise doubtful in motivation in a different sense and more like
the fatalism of Hamlet’s “Let be.” While it was Hamlet who philosophically
raised the questions of what constitutes suicide and what is its ethical status,
it is Ophelia’s poignant fate to risk the practical consequences of deciding
whether “To be, or not to be.”
The fame of Gertrude’s beautiful description obviously owes most to its
own out-of-time lyricism, but also to Millais’ painting of Elizabeth Siddall in
1851. The story is as famous as the image, of how the model caught a cold
in the bath in which she posed and subsequently died. The Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood was considered the artistic vanguard of its day, and in turn
strongly influenced the Symbolists. Despite the respectability conferred
on Millais himself by election to the Royal Academy (and elevation to its
presidency in 1896) and a baronetcy, the group constituted artistic rebels and
included the clinically insane Holman Hunt and flamboyantly bohemian
Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Its manifesto was to break down the establishment
view of art epitomized in the works of the artist they lampooned as Sir Joshua
(“Sloshky”) Reynolds: further evidence, if we should need any, of the persis-
88 • Chapter Three
tent presence of Hamlet in the company of avant-garde artists, madmen, and
intellectuals down through the ages.
Images of Death
If to conceive a typically or quintessentially avant-garde artist were not such
a contradiction in terms, that bohemian figure would most likely be imagined as one who wears inky black, stalks by night and hides by day, reads
voraciously, and compulsively records his thoughts in a notebook, as Hamlet
does, reading—“What do you read, my lord? Words, words, words” (2.2.191–
92)—one who plots or dreams of insurrection and revolution, and broods on
death. Hamlet exemplifies all these, especially a preoccupation with death,
which in the play is attached to some of the most memorable visual images
in all literature. At issue in his mind, as in our stereotypical avant-gardist’s,
is authenticity of experience set against the hollow sham, deceptions, and
hypocrisy of the world around: a contrast emphasized in Hamlet by the recurrent imagery of disease in the body and the body politic (Charney 120–30),
and finally realized in death itself.
The play begins with the appearance of the ghost of a dead king, followed
by the aftermath of his funeral rapidly giving way to the remarriage of his
erstwhile queen. We later see onstage a grave destined to be the resting place
of Ophelia. Not only is the gravediggers’ scene among the most recognizable in drama, soon after it we see the two representatives of the younger
generation, Prince Hamlet and Laertes, literally in the grave itself, fighting.
We know this first from the Folio’s stage directions that Laertes “Leaps in
the grave” and is almost immediately “Grappling with Hamlet” and also from
Hamlet’s words:
Dost come here to whine,
To outface me with leaping in her grave?
Be buried quick with her, and so will I. (5.1.272–74)
It is easy to overlook the fact that these two were almost certainly boyhood
playmates, another intriguing detail that is not amplified or emphasized in
the play. Among these visual reminders of death, most significant of all,
there is the skull unearthed by the Gravedigger and manhandled in almost
cavalier fashion: “now my Lady Worm’s, chopless, and knocked about the
mazard with a sexton’s spade” (5.1.87–88). Far from being the remains of
some noble courtier or even an unsung commoner, it is the skull of the
court jester to old King Hamlet, who bore the child Hamlet on his back
Hamlet as Avant-Garde Text • 89
twenty-three years previously. A reminder of carefree days, in a role given
professional license to challenge and criticize the highest in the land, Yorick
now exists only in lifeless, skeletal starkness, embodying all that is leveling,
undiscriminating, and even ridiculous about death.
[Takes the skull.] . . .
Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath bore me on his back a thousand times, and now—how
abhorred in my imagination it is. My gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that
I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now, your gambols, your
songs, your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not
one now to mock your own grinning? Quite chop-fallen? Now get you to my
lady’s chamber and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must
come. Make her laugh at that. (5.1.178–89)
What was once a living person who could make the company laugh is now
an inanimate object so repulsive that Hamlet’s gorge rises at it: a disturbingly
visual memento mori and symbol of the ultimate futility of witty dissidence,
age-defying cosmetics, and life itself.
As an imaginatively rich yet also literally hollow signifier of the vanity
of human wishes, a grinning skull resting on the desk is the most loaded
symbol we might find in our imaginary cloistered avant-garde artist’s garret,
representing all that is absurd and yet deadly serious about human existence
and imminent nonexistence. In its presence, the overwhelming question
“To be, or not to be” is painfully and silently posed in the very object itself.
“This is what you choose if you choose not to be,” it silently proclaims. For
an apparent image of finality and closure, Yorick’s skull has had an afterlife
as astonishing as the description of Ophelia’s death and the fictional life of
the Prince of Denmark. As we shall see, it was to be given new life by Sterne
in Tristram Shandy.
CHAPTER FOUR
Hamlet and Avant-Garde Literature
Characteristics of the literary avant-garde are epitomized in Laurence
Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, a novel published in nine volumes that appeared
between 1759 and 1765, that broke the rules and conventions governing
novels up to that time. Hamlet was also in the author’s thoughts. In one
allusion, Sterne refers to the entrance of the stained and bloodied male
midwife, Doctor Slop, who is said to have “stood like Hamlet’s ghost, motionless and speechless” (Tristram Shandy 1, ch. 34). Parson Yorick appears
not as a simile but as a character in the novel, and he was used again as
the authorial persona in A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy. He
is introduced in Tristram Shandy as a reverend gentleman full of “whim”
with “an invincible dislike and opposition in his nature to gravity”; Sterne
himself was an Anglican minister but clearly an unusual one. Yorick is said
to be descended from a man who had an unspecified post at the court of
Denmark that had subsequently been “totally abolished, as altogether unnecessary, not only in that court, but in every other court of the Christian
world.” The implication is that the mirth of a professional fool is altogether
unnecessary in the world of politics, if narrator Tristram’s hunch is correct:
“It has often come into my head, that this post could be no other than that
of the king’s chief Jester;—and that Hamlet’s Yorick, in our Shakespeare,
many of whose plays, you know, are founded upon authenticated facts,
was certainly the very man” (Tristram Shandy 2, ch. 10). Such “facts,” says
Sterne, are shown in the complete fiction of Saxo Grammaticus, to which
we are referred if we can “easily get at the book.” Beneath Tristram Shandy,
91
92 • Chapter Four
which is so subversively and recalcitrantly resistant to formal or historical
categorization, lurks a character from Hamlet whose jester’s “world upside
down” perspective lies twenty-three years in the past and is conspicuously
absent in Claudius’s humorless and sinister court. When brought to the
reader’s attention, the allusion has the strange capacity to unsettle the play
Hamlet, turning it into the same kind of sprawling story as Tristram Shandy,
a book that ends enigmatically with the first use of the word “bull” to denote
“nonsense” and with a reference unsettlingly reminding us that the crowing
“cock” has, all to itself, about fifty intrusive, disruptive, and largely digressive lines in Hamlet (1.1.154–70).
“L—d!” said my mother, what is all this story about?—
A Cock and a Bull, said Yorick—And one of the best of its kind, I ever heard.
(Tristram Shandy 4, ch. 92)
This image may be unconnected with Hamlet, of course, but in the hands of
Sterne as master of innuendo, veiled suggestion, and slyly placed lacunae, one
can never tell. Certainly there is something mischievous about Tristram’s
way of attributing to Hamlet a foundation in “authenticated facts” while
undermining his own first-person account of his experiences as a cock-andbull story.
An extra joke is that the descendant of a jester no longer needed at any
Christian court is a parson, an irony suggesting that the church has taken the
place of the fool and now represents folly. In A Sentimental Journey, Sterne
characterizes Yorick as more of a jester than a parson, suggesting that the
qualities of the original Yorick descended through the family line. In A Sentimental Journey, the character himself muses on his genealogy when asked
directly who he is by a French count:
There is not a more perplexing affair in life to me, than to set about telling any
one who I am,—for there is scarce any body I cannot give a better account of
than myself; and I have often wished I could do it in a single word,— and have
an end of it. It was the only time and occasion in my life I could accomplish
this to any purpose; —for Shakespeare lying upon the table, and recollecting I
was in his books, I took up Hamlet, and turning immediately to the gravediggers’ scene in the fifth act, I laid my finger upon Yorick, and advancing the
book to the Count, with my finger all the way over the name,—Me voici! said I.
Now, whether the idea of poor Yorick’s skull was put out of the Count’s
mind by the reality of my own, or by what magic he could drop a period of
seven or eight hundred years, makes nothing in this account;—’tis certain
the French conceive better than they combine;—I wonder at nothing in this
Hamlet and Avant-Garde Literature • 93
world, and the less at this; inasmuch as one of the first of our own Church,
for whose candour and paternal sentiments I have the highest veneration, fell
into the same mistake in the very same case:—“He could not bear,” he said,
“to look into the sermons wrote by the King of Denmark’s jester.” Good, my
Lord said I; but there are two Yoricks. The Yorick your Lordship thinks of, has
been dead and buried eight hundred years ago; he flourished in Horwendillus’s court;—the other Yorick is myself, who have flourished, my Lord, in no
court.—He shook his head. Good God! said I, you might as well confound
Alexander the Great with Alexander the Coppersmith, my lord!—“’Twas all
one,” he replied. (Sentimental Journey, “The Passport. Versailles” i)
As well as playing upon ambiguities of identity in terms of history and fiction, Yorick is alluding to Hamlet’s own reference to the “noble dust” of
Alexander ending as the plug in a “bung-hole” (5.1.197–98). In a typical
self-debunking, he implies that his interlocutor is both indifferent and uncomprehending. Far from pious or even conventionally moral, the narrator
here is always on the lookout for pretty women, potentially for sex with
them. Even Shakespeare becomes an occasion for his flirtation: “What the
old French officer had delivered upon travelling, bringing Polonius’s advice
to his son upon the same subject into my head, —and that bringing in Hamlet, and Hamlet the rest of Shakespeare’s works, I stopp’d at the Quai de
Conti in my return home, to purchase the whole set” (Sentimental Journey,
“The Fille de Chambre. Paris”). He is thwarted in this endeavor since the
only complete works of Shakespeare in the bookshop are being bound for
somebody else, but, as it happens, the person delegated to pick them up is a
“young decent girl about twenty,” so the mission then turns from acquiring a
copy of Hamlet to seducing her.
There is no evidence that anybody earlier than Coleridge would have
agreed with the assumptions behind his statement “I have a smack of Hamlet
myself, if I may say so,” or Hazlitt’s “It is we who are Hamlet” (Hazlitt 123),
or Keats’s “axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved on the
pulses . . . you will know exactly my meaning when I say, that now I shall
relish Hamlet more than I have ever done” (Keats 1:279). It was some German Romantic writers and critics who developed the habit of internalizing
the character, preeminently Goethe in The Sorrows of Young Werther (1775)
and, more specifically, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795-96), in which
Wilhelm plays and ponders the role of Hamlet. This book deeply influenced
Schlegel, who, in turn, through his Shakespeare criticism, consolidated the
impression of a temperamentally melancholic Hamlet, a figure later to be
amplified by Nietzsche into a representative modern man full of rejective
disgust for the world. Such Romantic origins explain what Alexander Welsh
94 • Chapter Four
has described as the making of Hamlet into “a distinctly modern hero”
(Welsh x), a figure he traces through nineteenth- and twentieth-century
novels such as Scott’s Redgauntlet (1824), Dickens’s Great Expectations
(1861), and Melville’s Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (1852), and through Chekhov’s works, among others. Thomas Mann in Tonio Kröger (1901) describes a
group of Hamlet the Danes as “those typical literary men”: “der Fall Hamlets,
des Dänen, dieses typischen Literaten” (Mann 37).
“Words, words, words,” Hamlet scoffs in response to Polonius’s question
“What do you read, my lord?” (2.2.191–92), while “These are but wild and
whirling words, my lord” (1.5.139) is Horatio’s rejoinder to his companion’s
gnomic and opaque statements. This chapter concerns the writers who creatively engaged with Hamlet, treating it generally as a work of words, not for
active performers but for individual readers—a distinction that in some ways
is invited by the text of the play itself. (Stage practitioners will follow in the
next chapter.) Some French writers, for example, were associated with selfproclaimed avant-garde movements. The symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé
was claimed as an influence by surrealists, futurists, and Dadaists. Martin
Scofield, in his brief but pertinent book The Ghosts of Hamlet: The Play and
Modern Writers, demonstrates that Mallarmé developed in his writing “a
kind of Hamlet of the mind.” Breaking away from tradition, he was “inspired
by the play but rendering its problems in a totally new form” (Scofield 23).
Similar claims are made for Paul Claudel, himself influenced by Rimbaud’s
symbolism, and Valéry, who was mentored by Mallarmé, both of whom
found Hamlet important to their work. Scofield also includes Kafka, another
uncategorizable and groundbreaking writer, as one who repeatedly associates
Hamlet with his own deeply ambiguous attitude to his own father and also
with the sexual disgust that afflicted him. A strong, intertextual link between
Baudelaire’s poetry and Hamlet has also been argued (Bailey), and the play
was translated by André Gide, who found in it “a state of poetic trance where
reason enters but feebly” (Holzberger and Waldock 229). Hamlet inspired in
1919 two letters from Gide’s friend Paul Valéry that are now known as the
two-part essay Crisis of the Mind. Valéry, writing in a mood of dispirited neartrauma after World War I, makes high claims for the play and its protagonist,
whom he sees as a kind of spokesman for the cultural and philosophical history of Europe. He is imagined standing on an Olympian peak in Elsinore,
surveying the ruins of Europe after the war, brooding on what has been lost
by way of knowledge. He picks up the skulls of Leonardo, Leibnitz, Kant,
Hegel, Marx, and others, all envisaged by Valéry as heirs to Shakespeare’s
Hamlet. The figure is tempted to abdicate his position embodying the European intellect and instead, like Polonius, become editor of a newspaper or,
Hamlet and Avant-Garde Literature • 95
like Laertes, be employed in aviation. For Valéry, war has spelled the end
of history, art, intellect, and creation, and it is the fate of Hamlet that tragically displays this. The play, then, has not lacked admirers among European
avant-garde writers and dealers in verbal experimentation, who use Shakespeare’s character as a vehicle for their own contemporary preoccupations.
Jules Laforgue, the poet who introduced free verse into French poetry,
“made of Hamlet an ironic decadent of the late nineteenth century . . . a
figure who could stand for the poet himself,” through the character’s frequent stance of irony, self-criticism, and mockery (Scofield 34). His work in
this vein influenced Eliot in writing “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
and also Joyce, both of whom we shall soon look at. Laforgue held a strong
“obsession” with Hamlet for a significant period of his life (see Sonnenfeld),
even making a pilgrimage to Elsinore as a response to being haunted in his
imagination by Hamlet’s ghost. The creative result was his own Hamlet ou
les suites de la piété filiale, composed in 1886–1887, which later spurred the
Italian writer Carmelo Bene to write Hamlet Suite: Version-collage d’après
Jules Laforgue. Laforge’s writing is notoriously difficult to translate (Eliot
gave up the attempt [Soldo 141]), but we can find summaries of what he
does with Hamlet (Sonnenfeld; Lòpez-Vázquez 99). His work is a sustained
interior monologue (as in “Prufrock” and Ulysses), drawing on subplots of
Shakespeare’s play—the narrator, or Laforgue himself, meets the players
and is later killed outside the tomb of Ophelia (though she has become an
actress called Kate). Among other things, Hamlet as persona wrings the neck
of a chicken to prove his existence, for which he apologizes, then he writes
a manuscript, wanders in the cemetery, discovers from the gravediggers that
his father “through his bounteous favors, redoubled the population of his
fine city” (Sonnenfeld 98), and extemporizes brilliantly on Yorick’s skull.
However, although bald summary of these and other sections suggest that
Laforgue’s Hamlet is meant to be savage parody, the effect is to present the
figure and the writer as quintessentially avant-garde symbolist poets, expressing a kind of mad joy and ironically aware of their helpless subjugation to
“words, words, words.”
Jean Cocteau was another French writer, intellectual, artist, playwright,
and filmmaker considered a central figure in the avant-garde pantheon, and
he too was drawn to Hamlet in formulating his own philosophies of art and
life. His play The Infernal Machine (1934) (an audio version can be found on
YouTube) purports to be a version of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, but it is clearly
also influenced by Freud. Simply linking these two references creates an
equation pointing inevitably to Hamlet, which was in Freud’s mind when he
formulated the oedipal complex in The Interpretation of Dreams. The link is
96 • Chapter Four
also strongly present in Cocteau’s play, which begins with a discussion, held
on the ramparts of Thebes, concerning appearances of a mysterious ghost of
the former king begging to be avenged for his murder. However, in Cocteau’s
play, Thebes is so skeptically accustomed to such surprises that the whole
unfolding story of the royal scandals is treated with amusement rather than
shock. There is, no doubt, a jaundiced observation here on French politics
in the early 1930s and an anticipation of where it was leading. In addition,
Richard Halpern interprets this theme as Cocteau’s own disillusioned reflection on the way that avant-garde art, while seeking to shock, has come to
a point of overfamiliarity where the intended “unassimilable newness” is
annulled against “the deadening power of repetition” (Halpern 248–49).
This version of the fable creates analogies with its primary literary referents:
both Oedipus and Hamlet represent a startling kind of artistic newness, the
confrontational edge of which has become numbed over centuries of repetition. Furthermore, this pattern seems to be enacted within Hamlet itself,
since Hamlet can be seen not as avenging the murder of his father but simply
repeating the same kind of murder (Halpern 250). Cocteau, therefore, is
weaving Shakespeare’s creation into his own sense of the avant-garde in the
1930s and envisioning his own future place as an artist in history, partially
through Hamlet.
T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence are three English writers associated with avant-garde concepts, and all were strongly influenced in
different ways by Hamlet. In some ways, it may appear odd to include Eliot
among avant-garde writers, since in hindsight the term hardly seems to fit
the tradition-bound and patrician attitudes expressed in his essays and elsewhere. However, although the social opinions behind the poems may not be
politically progressive or radical, the works themselves seem to be a kind of
triumph of the unconscious imagination over the controlling mind. Artistically, Eliot’s poems were viewed by his contemporaries as startlingly original,
and they drew consciously on the French poets mentioned above. They are
also oppositional in the sense of roundly ridiculing the status quo of wealth
and popular culture in general, as Eliot saw them, satirizing nouveau riche
wealth and cultural vulgarity embodied in characters like Mr. Eugenides, the
Smyrna merchant, unshaven; Lil and Albert; Bill and Lou; and other people
regarded as uncouth who linger in pubs until closing time. There are “the
loitering heirs of City directors” and the epicurean bathers who flock to Margate Sands. Ironically, the odd rotunda in which Eliot wrote The Waste Land
Hamlet and Avant-Garde Literature • 97
now incongruously bears his name on maps but not on any commemorative
plaque, despite—or perhaps because of—his dismissive outburst that on
Margate beach he could “connect Nothing with nothing.” The value system
Eliot uses as measuring stick is a conservative, artistic tradition that includes
Dante and Shakespeare as touchstones of a grander past, as well as classical
mythology and ancient Sanskrit texts that he had studied at Harvard. His
poems are also unashamedly obscurantist in the formally experimental avantgarde mode, trying ostentatiously to deter and forbid entrance to the crassly
commercially minded and also the hoi polloi, such as the gross Sweeneys of
the world. A poet who uses words like “polyphiloprogenitive” and “sapient
sutlers” in a short comic poem (“Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service”) is
hardly reckoning on appealing to a mass reading audience. Eliot is a kind
of creative polyglot, and although his social attitudes were conservative and
elitist, sanctifying “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (as the title and
leading essay in his book The Sacred Wood [1921] proclaim), his own works
are paradoxically radical in their idiosyncrasies, surely always experimental
and “ever new,” judging from the number of readers still attracted to them
but still mystified. He is the writer who most clearly fits Poggioli’s definition
of the avant-garde artist as one who attempts to sidestep contemporary art
and rejoin himself to a superior culture of former times. Among other writers,
Shakespeare is the embodiment of such a tradition.
Consistent in his inconsistencies, Eliot had problems with Hamlet, but in
his characteristically Olympian fashion, he projected them onto the work
itself: “Few critics have ever admitted that Hamlet the play is the primary
problem, and Hamlet the character only secondary.” The “few critics” approved by Eliot boil down to just two, J. M. Robertson and E. E. Stoll, and he
archly regrets that “Hamlet the character has had an especial temptation for
that most dangerous type of critic: the critic with a mind which is naturally
of the creative order, but which through some weakness in creative power
exercises itself in criticism instead,” a sin of identification that presumably
Eliot believes he does not commit himself. He believed that Hamlet was
Shakespeare’s unsatisfactory attempt to rewrite Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy,
and, judging it as such, he felt that Kyd’s play did not give scope to include
the theme that in Eliot’s eyes was Shakespeare’s central preoccupation, “the
effect of a mother’s guilt upon her son.” His objections to the play as an
“artistic failure” are partly on formal grounds, since he feels the poetry is of
uneven quality and that “both workmanship and thought are in an unstable
position.” Pursuing his idea that at the center of the play is the intention to
portray the feelings toward the mother of a son who sees her as fallible and
errant, Eliot finds that the subject itself cannot be brought into the sunlight
98 • Chapter Four
of polished art: “Hamlet, like the sonnets, is full of some stuff that the writer
could not drag to light, contemplate or manipulate into art” (Eliot, 1953
98–104). He asserts that “The only way of expressing emotion in the form
of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects,
a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular
emotion.” It is this he finds lacking in Hamlet, absent from both creation
and creator:
Hamlet the man is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because
it is in excess of the facts as they appear. And this supposed identity of Hamlet
with his author is genuine to this point: that Hamlet’s bafflement at the absence of objective equivalent to his feelings is a prolongation of the bafflement
of his creator in the face of his artistic problem.
Hamlet’s disgust for his mother exceeds the woman as fact and what she has
done: “It is thus a feeling which he cannot understand; he cannot objectify
it, and it therefore remains to poison life and obstruct action.”
It is interesting that when Eliot speaks not as a critic but through his poetry, he says something similar of his own creation: “It is impossible to say just
what I mean!” the persona in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” protests,
and his deepest fear is that the woman he yearns to impress and propose to
will respond to his romantic statements with languid indifference, throwing
off her shawl and turning toward the window with a shrug of disdain at the
imperfect communication. The poem “Prufrock” is the dramatic monologue
of an acne-suffering “carbuncular” young man immersed in the language and
expectations of great poets of the past but painfully aware that these will not
effectively woo the woman he wishes to marry nor impress anybody else in
his dreary society, those who “measure out their lives with coffee spoons.”
The ideals of this persona are out of tune with the modern world, and they
are solipsistically maintained in past times with a willed determination, “Till
human voices wake us, and we drown.” If we visualize such a figure, then the
poem does have its credible objective correlative, but what marks Prufrock
himself as a character is his own unsuccessful search for a correlative to express the depth of his own emotions. The disgust he expresses at the sordid
cheapness of contemporary life is the kind of characteristic ennui expressed
by many avant-garde artists, perhaps stemming from the precise sentiment
voiced by Hamlet:
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on’t, ah fie, ’tis an unweeded garden
Hamlet and Avant-Garde Literature • 99
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. (1.2.133–37)
As Scofield puts it, in both Hamlet the character and Eliot the writer, “there
is a similar mood of irony, bitterness, disgust, alleviated by wit and comedy”
(Scofield 50), but in addition, the positive touchstone lies, as in The Waste
Land, in the ghosts of past glory and writers like Shakespeare. They are always Eliot’s litmus test of lost grandeur in contrast with the impoverished
cultural present, and the valedictory quotation in The Waste Land of Ophelia’s “Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies; good night, good night”
makes the point clearly.
Furthermore, the “overwhelming question” Prufrock wants to put, as well
as presumably being a doomed proposal of marriage, evokes the memory of
the most famous question ever posed in a work of literature: “To be, or not
to be, that is the question.” Eliot’s antihero wishes to be the hero of his own
play, as Hamlet is of his, but his adolescent self-consciousness and crippling
self-criticism do not allow him this imaginary sanctuary. Sadly, he accepts
that he is “not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be.” Instead, it is only Polonius who comes to his mind, an attendant lord who is easily manipulated,
prolix, and obtuse. Written in 1917, just two years before his essay on Hamlet
was published, “Prufrock” mulls over the same territory, and in essence it is
not simply a fictional character’s lament but also the actual author’s contemplation of his uneasy and adversarial position as a poet condemned to live in
what he sees as a depressingly mundane existence that will never provide an
adequate vehicle to express his emotions. Eliot’s repeatedly implied contrast
between an older, grander civilization in which Shakespeare wrote and the
cultural “waste land” of the twentieth century once again mirrors Poggioli’s
concept of the avant-garde impulse, an attempt to return to the past in order
to restore continuity of its values and quality and mend the rupture that led
to a diminished present. “Prufrock” is Eliot’s “portrait of the [avant-garde]
artist as a young man,” and these are concomitantly the terms in which he
interprets Hamlet. In fact, it is Hamlet itself, in its perceived imperfections,
that has ironically provided him with the perfect objective correlative in his
own poem.
James Joyce
Apart from Eliot’s portrait of Prufrock, the other, even more famous portrait
of the avant-garde artist as a young man from the same period is of Stephen
Dedalus, as his thought is more fully developed in Ulysses (1922). To the
100 • Chapter Four
Dedalus of this book, Hamlet the character and his creator are obsessions,
and they haunt his thoughts and speeches as the Ghost haunts Hamlet. This
becomes literally so, since a central part of Joyce’s, or Dedalus’s, view of
Shakespeare’s play is that it is not the son’s disgust for his guilty mother that
motivates the work (Eliot’s preoccupation in his critical essay) but the son’s
tangled relationship with his lost or estranged father. In Joyce’s view, the fiction and the creator of that fiction are intertwined, no matter how carefully
the author might try to withdraw his presence and remain aloof, “paring his
fingernails.”
James Joyce was himself virtually obsessed with the life of Shakespeare,
and he constantly returned to the subject of that writer’s relationship with
his father. It is the leitmotif running through what we know of his lost
lectures, entitled “Amletto di G. Shakespeare,” given at the Università
Popolare in Trieste from November 1912 to February 1913. Two groups of
Joyce’s notes for these lectures exist, one a notebook entitled Quaderno di
Calligrafia di Shakespeare, and the other sixty unbound notesheets, all now
deposited in the Joyce Collection at the Cornell University Library (Quillian
1983). The lecture clearly fed into Dedalus’s lengthy discussion of Hamlet in
the “Scylla and Charybdis” section of Ulysses. It is clear from the notes he
took in preparing the lecture that Joyce read voluminously on Shakespeare’s
biography, especially as it relates to Hamlet. He consulted most of the biographies available at the time, especially those by Frank Harris and George
Brandes, and works on the history of the time, such as John Dover Wilson’s
still enlightening anthology, Life in Shakespeare’s England: A Book of Elizabethan Prose. As well as these background materials, he also consulted works
on Shakespeare’s sources and went back to original documents such as those
by the Earl of Leicester, John Heywood, Philip Stubbes, Sir Philip Sidney,
Christopher Marlowe, John Earle, Robert Greene, William Harrison, and
many others, taking notes from each. Whatever we may nowadays think of
the perceived deficiencies of the scholarship on which he depended, we must
acknowledge that, for his time, Joyce was consulting the most reputable of
them and clearly taking great care to absorb their findings and acquire some
inwardness with the Elizabethan period’s way of life and thinking. All the
research was conducted in a manner far in excess of what one might expect
from a creative writer rather than a professional scholar.
The creative outcome was Stephen Dedalus’s lengthy discussion of Shakespeare and Hamlet in Ulysses, not just in that section but elsewhere in his
writings (Borger 2002). Master Dignam, “in mourning,” likens himself to
Hamlet without actually naming or even knowing him:
Hamlet and Avant-Garde Literature • 101
Never see him again. Death, that is. Pa is dead. My father is dead. He told me
to be a good son to ma. I couldn’t hear the other things he said but I saw his
tongue and his teeth trying to say it better. Poor pa. that was Mr Dignam, my
father. I hope he is in purgatory now because he went to confession to father
Conroy on Saturday night. (Joyce, 1968 251)
Whereas Eliot’s Prufrock allusively suggests an identification with Hamlet as
a young man, Joyce’s near fixation on the play lies in terms of father-son relationships and ghosts. For example, he was struck by the fact that Shakespeare
acted the role of the Ghost in Hamlet, like a self-authoring artist. To some
extent, like Stephen Dedalus’s father, he is very much alive but estranged,
and there are no sentimental attachments between this drunken father and
his artistically inclined intellectual son, to the extent that Stephen speaks
dismissively, “a father is a necessary evil” (9.301). In many ways, Simon
Dedalus takes the place of a disreputable and neglectful, if not actually evil,
stepfather, comparable to Claudius rather than Old Hamlet, who is more like
Dignam’s deceased father. Bloom might be seen as a temporary father figure
to Stephen, but this is arguably more in his own eyes than those of the son.
Episode 9, “Scylla and Charybdis” (not numbered in the Penguin edition
but lying between pages 184 and 218), presented sometimes in monologue,
sometimes dialogue, and sometimes as a play dialogue between Dedalus and
others, is an extended reflection on the relationship between art as “ideas,
formless spiritual essences” and the life of the artist: “The supreme question
about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring” (185). Many
facts about Shakespeare’s life, whether provable or apocryphal, are invoked,
but the examples that keep recurring are taken from Hamlet: “The deepest
poetry of Shelley, the words of Hamlet bring our mind into contact with the
eternal wisdom, Plato’s world of ideas” (185); “Our Father who art in purgatory. Khaki hamlets don’t hesitate to shoot. The bloodboltered shambles in
act five is a forecast of the concentration camp sung by Swinburne” (187):
His free hand graciously wrote tiny signs in air.
HAMLET
Ou
LE DISTRAIT
Pièce de Shakespeare
which is Laforgue’s title, facetiously translated by Stephen as “The absentminded beggar” (187). He imagines an Elizabethan performance of Hamlet
beginning with the line “Hamlet, I am thy father’s spirit” and continually returns to the figure and the subject of the Ghost. “Methinks I see my father”
102 • Chapter Four
(1.2.184) is a key line. A part of Stephen’s theory is that Shakespeare wrote
Hamlet for his own father, who died in 1601, and also for his son, Hamnet
(the name a common variant of “Hamlet”), who died in 1596, leaving
Shakespeare sandwiched between the two as both son and father himself.
There is also a graveyard in Ulysses in which Paddy Dignam is buried, and the
witness is Bloom, whose thought processes about the physical facts of bodily
dissolution echo Hamlet’s and the Gravedigger’s: “I daresay the soil would
be quite fat with corpse manure, bones, flesh, nails, charnelhouses. Dreadful.
Turning green and pink, decomposing. Rot quick in damp earth. . . . But they
must breed a devil of a lot of maggots” (136–38). Later, as Stephen stands
outside Bloom’s house, he invokes Hamlet: “To enter or not to enter. To
knock or not to knock” (779). The fact that Joyce supplies no question marks
suggests that Dedalus is not so much asking but self-consciously quoting from
the play that underpins the novel as insistently as does the myth of Ulysses. It
would be a distraction to provide a full analysis of the theory, whether Joyce’s
or Stephen’s, but it is clear that Hamlet is a constant and recurring reference
point in Joyce’s avant-garde work.
D. H. Lawrence
D. H. Lawrence’s view of Hamlet is the most hostile of these writers’, not so
much toward the play as toward its material. He is just as obsessed with the
play and its hero—to my knowledge, nobody has suggested, for example, that
Sons and Lovers is influenced by contemplation of the relationship between
Hamlet and Gertrude—but he lacks any trace of the bardolatry underlying
the attitudes of Eliot and Joyce. It is intriguing to contemplate that, although
unlike Eliot in many ways, Lawrence detected something similar in Hamlet.
In his well-known remarks in “Introduction to These Paintings Puritanism
and the Arts,” Lawrence locates in the Elizabethan age and especially in
Hamlet a regrettable psychological schism in attitudes to sex in England, “a
terror, almost a horror of sexual life”: “The real ‘mortal coil’ in Hamlet is all
sexual; the young man’s horror of his mother’s incest, sex carrying with it a
wild and nameless terror which, it seems to me, it had never carried before”
(Lawrence, 1956 53).
Lawrence does not quote, but clearly has in mind, among other things in
the play, Hamlet’s lines to his mother:
Hamlet: O shame, where is thy blush?
Rebellious hell,
Hamlet and Avant-Garde Literature • 103
If thou canst mutine in a matron’s bones,
To flaming youth let virtue be as wax
And melt in her own fire; proclaim no shame
When the compulsive ardour gives the charge,
Since frost itself as actively doth burn
And reason panders will.
Queen Gertrude: O Hamlet, speak no more.
Thou turn’st my eyes into my very soul,
And there I see such black and grained spots
As will not leave their tinct.
Hamlet: Nay, but to live
In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed,
Stew’d in corruption, honeying and making love
Over the nasty sty! (3.4.81–94)
Lawrence is adamant on the cultural significance of syphilis, “the pox,”
in the late sixteenth century and its continuing influence on the future of
Europe. He may not concentrate on the Ghost as Eliot and Joyce do, but he
is equally focused on the ways the past influences and even infects the present. In his view, syphilis set up the kind of fatal split or duality in attitudes
to sex, taking away the “instinctive-intuitive consciousness” and replacing
it with a horrified recoiling from physicality, which he blamed on fears of
the disease. More generally, the kind of self-disgust based on the body’s fallibilities noted by Lawrence is expressed in the play in tones both disgusted
and fascinated: as Hamlet speaks with the Gravedigger, and especially
as he is meditating over the skull of Yorick infested with “Lady Worm”
(5.1.87), in his questions about “this quintessence of dust” (2.2.308), and
in several of his soliloquies. The literary consequences of this perception
for Lawrence’s writing give the play profound significance for his creativity,
as it does for Eliot and Joyce in different ways, for one way of reading all
of Lawrence’s novels is through this distinction between English people’s
attitudes toward sex. Lawrence may not feature in many lists of avant-garde
writers, because he did not experiment so much with the form of the novel,
but in ideas he himself would claim avant-garde status, oppositionalist and
in rebellion against social norms—and once again, it is Hamlet that partly,
in this case centrally, stimulates his thought.
Lawrence argues that the play is a symptom of European horror of syphilis,
but in the description of a provincial performance of Amleto in the chapter
entitled “The Theatre” in Twilight in Italy, he represents it as even more culturally repellent in itself. He enjoys observing and describing the audience
104 • Chapter Four
but ridicules the performance, and it unleashes in him something of a tirade
against the play and its hero:
I had always felt an aversion from Hamlet: a creeping, unclean thing he seems,
on the stage, whether he is Forbes Robertson or anybody else. His nasty poking
and sniffing at his mother, his setting traps for the King, his conceited perversion with Ophelia make him always intolerable. The character is repulsive in
its conception, based on self-dislike and a spirit of disintegration. (Lawrence,
1992 58)
This is clearly written in a spirit of provocation and is not meant as measured
literary judgment, and the description becomes somewhat opaque as it goes
on. Hamlet is seen in Lawrence’s eyes to epitomize “this strain of cold dislike,
or self-dislike [running] through much of the Renaissance art, and through
all the later Shakespeare” (Lawrence, 1992 58), and he sees this as both the
cause and result of Christianity through its deifying of a concept of the infinite that is “not man” and not flesh, a turning away from carnal existence to
what he regards as vacuous spirituality. The central reference point in Lawrence’s reasoning, though he does not quote it, is Hamlet’s desire to slough
off his body: “O that this too too sullied flesh would melt, / Thaw and resolve
itself into a dew” (1.2.129–30): “In Shakespeare it is a kind of corruption in
the flesh and a conscious revolt from this. A sense of corruption in the flesh
makes Hamlet frenzied, for he will never admit that it is his own flesh” (Lawrence, 1992 58). Speaking of Hamlet’s famous question—or rather its Italian
version, “Essere, o non essere, è qui il punto”—he calls Hamlet “the fashionable young suicide” who declares “his self-destruction is the final proof
of his own incontrovertible being” (Lawrence, 1992 62). Meanwhile, “The
Ghost is one of the play’s failures, it is so trivial and unspiritual and vulgar,”
and Ophelia is “pathetic, demented,” because Hamlet, in his loathing of his
own body, has turned his “too too solid flesh” away from her: “What then
of her young breasts and her womb?” (63) To Lawrence, Hamlet’s dismissal
of Ophelia to the enforced chastity of a nunnery is a crime against instincts.
In his poem “When I Read Shakespeare,” Lawrence is equally rejective, but
he uses ridicule rather than polemic, musing that petty people should speak
“such lovely language,” citing Hamlet in particular as boring, mean, and
self-conscious yet full of “wonderful speeches” (Lawrence, 1971 494). One
could easily see Lawrence’s condemnation of overcerebral artists as itself a
manifestation of an aspect of the avant-garde spirit in its iconoclasm and
antiauthoritarianism. The tone is reminiscent of the kind of visceral, perhaps
morbid and angry bitterness that can be detected in the more fringe stage
versions of Hamlet that often emerge.
Hamlet and Avant-Garde Literature • 105
W. B. Yeats
W. B. Yeats was another writer who wrote extensively on Shakespeare and
was influenced by all the plays, including Hamlet (Desai). We see this influence demonstrated at its most elusively subtle in the brief but intensely symbolist play Purgatory, the last, most experimental, and perhaps best work of
drama Yeats wrote. I include it here rather than in the next chapter because
Yeats is first and foremost a writer rather than a theater practitioner, and his
plays are extensions of his poetry and criticism. A play involving ghostly apparitions, a father and son, and the notion of purgatory, inevitably leads us
back to Hamlet. Here, the recollection of Shakespeare’s play opens up new
insight into the two plays brought into imaginative collusion. Peter Ure’s
descriptions of Purgatory apply also to Hamlet, since they are both plays about
“hauntings” or the consequences of the past on the present, and “polluted
blood” of heredity (Ure 103–12). Both works also focus on a self-destructive
family in which the sins of the past can never be undone, since in Hamlet
revenge leads only to further revenge, while in Purgatory the Old Man lives
on, even after murdering his own father in the past and killing his son in the
play’s present.
The allusive crossover between the works goes deep. In each case, the
father is in purgatory, “A dead, living, murdered man!” (Yeats 225) In both
plays, a mother is warned by her son not to let her husband touch her, in
Yeats’s case to avoid procreation (Yeats 223), while Hamlet says, “Refrain
tonight, / And that shall lend a kind of easiness / To the next abstinence”
(3.4.167–69). Hamlet’s father is in purgatory because he was taken with
unshrived sins on his head, possibly ones of fornication of the kind that
begat his son: “Cut off even in the blossoms of [his] sin, / Unhousel’d, disappointed, unanel’d” (1.5.76–77); while the father of Yeats’s Old Man returns
repeatedly to a nightly narrative tableau of ghosts reliving the night of his
birth. The Ghost in Hamlet is not only intent on using his son as an agent
for revenge from beyond the grave, but also remorseful of his sins, so that the
consequences of his unsatisfied life have consequences for the future; while
in Purgatory the Old Man feels vengeful toward his father’s sin that led to his
own conception for giving birth, and the ghost of his mother is filled with remorse for her willing part in the act. The consequences of the past are foisted
by old Hamlet upon the son he begat, Prince Hamlet, whose life becomes a
misery and also ends prematurely because of his mission to appease his father.
Yeats’s words are just as relevant to Hamlet, when his Old Man says the dead
now at last know the consequences of their transgressions, upon themselves
and others (Yeats 220), and it becomes the theme of his play. His Old Man
106 • Chapter Four
must repeatedly relive his parents’ wrongdoings, and he is condemned to live
the “death-in-life and life in death,” a phrase describing the state of purgatory, inheriting from his father not the title of king but the unending state of
unappeased, intergenerational disappointment. Both Hamlet and Yeats’s Old
Man are similarly stuck between generations, and between purgatory and life.
The latter continues to relive vicariously the tale of his own conception by a
drunken bridegroom upon a noble lady, and his own act in creating the apparently pointless life of his son, a bastard begot “upon a tinker’s daughter in
a ditch” (Yeats 226). He too is locked in a personal purgatory, since it is too
late to prevent his own existence. By killing his son, he hopes to break the
cycle, since he knows his son, in turn, would have inevitably begotten a child
and passed on the “pollution” (Yeats 226), but instead he now must continue
to live out all the consequences of his own actions as well as his father’s. It is
not difficult to apply his cry of anguish, “Appease the misery of the living and
the remorse of the dead” (Yeats 227), to the stifling, circular situation facing
Hamlet. Just as Shakespeare’s play is stalked by an unquiet, wronged soul, a
“perturbed spirit” who began and perpetuates a vicious circle for his descendants, so Yeats’s Purgatory is haunted by Shakespeare’s play, and his own
protagonist’s spiritual and emotional entrapment in the predicament of his
play can be ended only by his own death. Characteristically, Yeats located
his own imaginative stance in relation to Hamlet and put it to creative use.
Deconstructionist “Hamlet”
Jacques Derrida, admittedly as much an abstruse poet as an avant-garde
philosopher, acknowledges the influence of Shakespeare’s play on crucial
parts of his own theories and, like the other writers, he highlights the ghostly
imprint. In Specters of Marx (1994), he focuses on the Ghost in Hamlet to
make distinctions about the “spectre” of communism in Marx and Engels’s
Communist Manifesto. He builds upon this a conception of “hauntology,”
seeing the Ghost’s radical indeterminacy as both thing and no-thing, flesh
and spirit, embodied and disembodied, which in its theatrical representation raises questions about the relations between past and future, action and
non-action, and ultimately destroys any notion of ultimate justice. Derrida
also dwells on Hamlet’s phrase “The time is out of joint” followed by “O
cursed spite, / That ever I was born to set it right” (1.2.196–97) to amplify
his concern with a state of “disjointure” marked by destabilizing injustices.
Christopher Prendergast in “Derrida’s Hamlet” explains the major significance of the play:
Hamlet and Avant-Garde Literature • 107
Hamlet’s tragedy is that he is arbitrarily chosen by the fact of birth to remedy
the irremediable. Hamlet does not just curse the corruption of the world,
but also the mission to redeem it. He is thus punished by virtue of being appointed as the punisher, the avenger, inserted into the impossible chain of
violent reprisals against actual, alleged or perceived wrongs, the chain that
has no beginning and no end, and so in turn he is no different—apart from
his consciousness of the dilemma—from anyone else caught up in the cycle of
violence. (Prendergast 47)
Prendergast argues that Derrida is extending Hamlet’s brooding on revenge
and Bacon’s aphorism “revenge is a wild justice” “into the further reaches of
deconstructive speculation on the ethico-political” (Prendergast 47). In the
play there is no ultimate ground of justice, nor is there, Derrida implies, in
the world. It is significant to him that Hamlet, after killing Claudius, offers no
reflection on justice, injustice, or revenge, the very issues that have preoccupied him throughout. In fact, “the rest is silence” (5.2.363), and the problem
of justice remains inchoate. In Ernesto Laclau’s cryptic words, “so deconstruction inscribes itself in a secular movement of decentring” (Laclau 85). Beyond
whatever Derrida does or does not mean in his foray into Shakespearean
commentary, it is significant in itself that he sees the play and the passage
as important, since elsewhere he is staunchly incorruptible on the point that
only the French language is pure enough for him to think through—James
Joyce is the other favored writer in English deemed worthy of his attention.
If Hamlet is important to this central figure of avant-garde postmodernism, it is not surprising that we find the play reviewed as deconstructionist
in the popular media, for example in the context of Thomas Ostermeier’s
production by the Berlin Schaubühne Theater, in its “daring and innovation”: “Tradition is defied as he plays havoc with the format, ruptures the
norms and alters and eliminates sequences. . . . He makes a deliberate assault
on our expectations” with “outrageous liberties” that somehow “work” (Blain
2010). A final point in this context: it seems somehow fitting that the only
reference to Shakespeare in a book by Christopher Norris, Deconstruction:
Theory and Practice (Norris 99), is to Hamlet, and it comes by way of quoting
Geoffrey Hartman, another deconstructionist who by allusion highlights one
of the many experimental qualities of the play invoked in this chapter, its
capacity to interrogate the interrogators: “It should be the interpreter who
unfolds the text. But the book begins to question the questioner, its qui vive
challenges him to prove he is not a ghost. What is he then?” (Hartman 19).
The most systematic analysis of deconstructive versions of Hamlet is in an
essay by Aneta Mancewicz that concentrates paradoxes, contradictions, inconsistencies, and voids in the text and its stage adaptations since the 1960s.
108 • Chapter Four
Adaptations in novels continue to appear, even if not all are deconstructionist in tendency. One is John Updike’s bawdy and witty novel Gertrude
and Claudius (2000), based on the author’s considerable scholarly and critical
reading (acknowledged in an afterword). The novel is offered as a prequel to
Hamlet, designed to explain and lead up to the events of the play in its last
section. Updike goes back to the source of the story (though not necessarily
Shakespeare’s version of it) in Saxo Grammaticus, thus, in the words of one
reviewer, “cleverly undermin[ing] the perception of Shakespeare’s text as the
definitive version of the tale, while also paying homage to his creative appropriation of the original sources” (Hopkin). It also emphasizes the point that
Shakespeare’s work was itself an adaptation of an old story, and a very late
one at that (Sanders 58). Hamlet has only one line in the whole of Updike’s
novel, and Gertrude—Gerutha as she is initially named in this version—is
presented as a woman partly driven into remarriage by her sexual desire, and
also understandably motivated in her adultery by the fact that her second
husband is far more sensitive and appealing than her first was. She is also
something of a victim of her own father’s dynastic ambitions (Sanders 57).
This could open Updike up to the accusation of misogyny, except for the fact
that, as Julie Maxwell has suggested, he is rescued by having moral imagination enough to take seriously the sexual life of Gertrude instead of patronizing her by attributing docile subservience, as critics from Bradley onward
have tended to do. Judged as a novel in isolation, Getrude and Claudius may
not seem especially experimental, but in terms of its relationship to Hamlet,
it pushes adaptation into new territory.
Even the absent (deceased) Yorick, although one invention of Shakespeare’s over his sources that is superfluous to the plot, has lent more than
just his name to novels that are unquestionably motivated by experimentation. In a quite different way, his presence in Hamlet is analogous to the
Ghost’s, as a figure unexpectedly returned to the present from the past, this
time through the material existence of his skull rather than as a spirit in
purgatory.
We have already encountered Yorick’s family successor as a parson in
Sterne’s novels, which are, to some extent, driven by that elusive character’s
putative world view. He appeared also in Salman Rushdie’s short story entitled simply “Yorick,” published in East-West (1994), in which he is given
a wife called Ophelia. Like Stoppard and Updike, Rushdie takes a character
and tells the events in the play from an alternative point of view, one that
“differs from Master Chackpaw’s,” though in this case the joke is that the
Hamlet and Avant-Garde Literature • 109
character, unlike Gertrude, makes no living appearance at all in the play
and was not alive at the time. Rushdie comically undercuts the whole by
adverting to Sterne’s ending, that it is all “a cock and bull story.” Despite
its lightheartedness, serious claims have been made for this story’s exhibiting a postcolonial stance, one among works that offer “alternative views to
imperialist histories, that is, Western Histories” and sees the world from the
“colonized” point of view rather than the colonizer’s; and that it also questions the Western notion of fixed identity in favor of hybridity. It seems
possible, then, to claim Shakespeare as the father of postcoloniality avant la
lettre in more plays than just The Tempest.
A more recent manifestation of a spirit of Yorick is in Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (1996), which takes its title from Hamlet’s description of
his boyhood companion. In this lengthy and controversial book, Yorick is
little more than “the skull fragment out of the Hamlet graveyard scene” but
presumably the phrase “infinite jest” is intended by Wallace to describe the
kind of effect he hopes his writing will create in readers—a matter that is
more than debatable. Even Melville’s catalogues of whale lore are strangely
compulsive, and Burroughs made the intricacies of drugs interesting, yet
some have seen Infinite Jest as wearying and linguistically overblown—and
too self-consciously avant-garde to deserve the sobriquet. It does, however,
have its cult followers, who hail it as a postmodern masterpiece. The most
insistent trail of allusions to Hamlet in the book is through the subject of
family, especially father-son-uncle relationships. The same can be said of
another contemporary novel with pretensions to experimental status, Brett
Easton Ellis’s Luna Park, published in 2005, where the narrator is rung on the
telephone by the spirit of his deceased father.
These writers’ Hamlet, then, takes central cognizance of the Ghost of old
King Hamlet to an almost alarming degree. Marjorie Garber in Shakespeare’s
Ghost Writers plays nicely on the way in which Shakespeare holds authority
over the very people who congenitally deny authority, and she vests much of
the reason for this in Hamlet’s father’s ghost:
The Ghost is Shakespeare. He is the one who comes as the revenant, belatedly instated, regarded as originally authoritative, rather than retrospectively
and retroactively canonized, and deriving increasing authority backward, over
time. . . . The Ghost’s command, his word, is ‘Remember me!’ and we have
done so, to the letter, avant la lettre, moving our remembrance further and
further back until it becomes an originary remembrance, a remembrance of
remembrance itself. (Garber 176)
110 • Chapter Four
Joyce’s fictitious Leopold Bloom, for example, comes close to anticipating
the preoccupation of a later real-life critic. Harold Bloom’s notion of “the
anxiety of influence,” with a first chapter subtitled “The Return of the Dead”
(see Bloom), afflicting writers who have come in a spirit of la piété filiale in
the wake of Shakespeare, is given a disturbing spokesman in this character,
and, after four centuries of his haunting, the spectral figure seems as potent
as ever, at least to writers with avant-garde pretensions. Ironically, the other
presence important to writers, Yorick, is at the opposite end of the social
spectrum but equally dead and also Shakespeare’s original contribution.
Turning to theatrical practitioners, however, we find more active attention
paid to the living than the dead.
CHAPTER FIVE
On Stage
Hamlet and Avant-Garde Theater
“The actors are come hither, my lord.”
—Hamlet 2.2.388
A procession of books have been written on Hamlet in the theater, but in
keeping with this one’s theme, I will concentrate with necessary brevity on
only one strand of the performance history: the avant-garde and experimental. These are the kinds of performance that begin life on some fringe of
respectability but may end up creating new approaches, interpretations, and
imitations on a much wider scale. I do not intend to summarize the prevailing and changing ways in which Hamlet was performed over the centuries
as each generation made it reflect contemporary preoccupations and styles.
Critics referred to elsewhere in this book provide ample information about
the different interpretations of Hamlet and his play by earlier actors, whose
performances may be regarded now through a historical lens as incremental
adaptations rather than radical rethinkings. Some, however, produced what
could be seen in their time as landmark versions, the innovativeness of
which became dulled over time as their ideas settled into orthodoxy. Garrick, for example, steered theater away from the prevailing fashion of using
revised texts and back toward Shakespeare’s, which does not seem all that
revolutionary now but was in the later eighteenth century. Similarly, Garrick’s near reverence for Shakespeare, to the extent of elevating him to the
status of national poet and his consolidation of bardolatry, strikes us as the
height of conservatism and even regrettable in some ways, but at the time it
111
112 • Chapter Five
galvanized a new kind of interest in the plays, which has never really waned
(see Dobson).
Another point that needs to be kept in mind is that live theater is fleeting and necessarily exists only in the time it takes to be played, and always
in a specific context under unique conditions, with an audience that is different at each performance. Even a version filmed on the very night of a
performance becomes a different experience through the transfixing medium
and without a live audience. It is possible, then, that from time to time
avant-garde and revolutionary productions of Hamlet have been mounted
that “Leave not a rack behind” (The Tempest 4.1.156) in terms of evidence,
except as increasingly dimming memories of mortal audiences. However,
traces of some have survived as witnesses through time past.
After Garrick’s pioneering efforts, the cultural revolution now known
as Romanticism produced its own radical acting star, Edmund Kean. In his
time, he was contrasted, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse, with
the stately, conservative tragedian Philip Kemble, who specialized in “noble
Romans” and tragic heroes. Kean was short in stature, fiery in acting style
and temperament, and unpredictable. The contrast of styles might have some
similarities to those between the mellifluous Gielgud and the abrupt Olivier
in the twentieth century. Kean initially made himself famous in villainous
roles such as Iago and the deformed Richard III, and he rapidly “established a
reputation for novelty” (Hillebrand 122). When he took the part of Hamlet
at Drury Lane, the choice was considered provocative, an affront not only to
Kemble’s admirers but also to audiences who expected Hamlet to be serenely
noble. The performance polarized reviewers and audiences, between radicals
who found it brilliant and conservatives who condemned it as execrable.
Again, because theater was ephemeral in the days before mechanical reproduction was possible, Kean’s brilliant “flashes of lightning” can no longer
be appreciated for their audacious novelty, though in his case we have the
broadly sympathetic descriptions by the equally radical reviewer William
Hazlitt, who wrote:
Mr. Kemble plays it like a man in armour, with a determined inveteracy of
purpose, in one undeviating straight line, which is as remote from the natural
grace and refined susceptibility of the character, as the sharp angles and abrupt
starts which Mr. Kean introduces into the part. Mr. Kean’s Hamlet is as much
too splenetic and rash as Mr. Kemble’s is too deliberate and formal. His manner is too strong and pointed. He throws a severity, approaching to virulence,
into the common observations and answers. (Hazlitt 124)
On Stage • 113
Hazlitt, while regarding Kean as the most brilliantly original actor of his age,
clearly does not entirely approve of this eruptive style, since his vision of
Shakespeare’s Hamlet is of a man “full of weakness and melancholy. . . . He
is the most amiable of misanthropes” (Hazlitt 128), but his impressionistic
description does offer evidence of Kean’s audacious willingness to shock.
Reading reviews of more recent productions, especially in the twentieth
century, shows how the play is perpetually being presented in different
ways to suit the times, and we shall later see in films how this has operated,
sometimes in fundamentally new versions that reveal new potential and
meanings, “new readings” as Hazlitt described Kean’s. The truly avant-garde
performances may in fact be relatively limited, and even within these my account will be highly selective, omitting some which deserve attention. This
section will accordingly be brief and allusive in the context of the long and
tangled theatrical realizations of Hamlet. By definition, earlier examples can
be known only through report and reviews rather than witnessed first-hand,
as films can. If there is some truth in my argument that Hamlet is an inherently experimental and unorthodox play, then subsequent “ever-new,” “evernow,” and always-changing productions have proceeded down the centuries
since the first ones on Shakespeare’s stages at the turn of the seventeenth
century.
The first radical performance in modern times came ironically as a conscious return to those very Elizabethan staging conditions. A starting point
for an identifiably modern theatrical production, at least in Britain, came in
1881 at St. George’s Hall, with William Poel’s version of Hamlet. Controversial in contrast to the prevailing lavish Victorian stage spectacles, Poel’s ideas
were developed from the newly discovered Elizabethan drawing of the Swan
Theatre. Seeking authenticity, he began to concentrate on minimalism by
using an open stage without curtains and very little scenery, generating
pace in the acting, mindful of Shakespeare’s “two hours’ traffic of our stage”
(Romeo and Juliet 1.0.12), and working from uncut versions of Shakespeare’s
scripts. Since the Q1 version of Hamlet is the shortest of the three texts, he
deduced that it could have been shortened for the reason of speedy performance. Poel used this rather than the familiar Folio text, and he brought
back Fortinbras, whose role had been excised from the play since the days of
Betterton (Taylor 194). His first production used amateur actors, while Poel
himself played Hamlet, but he staged the play three more times with professionals, in versions that were considered experimental. Poel is referred to as
“the most revolutionary Shakespearian of the 1880s” (Taylor 194), and he
helped to turn the tide away from “revised” and corrupt texts toward modern
114 • Chapter Five
textual editors’ practices (see Lindstrom). In all these choices, Poel foreshadowed (and helped to initiate) the future of staging Elizabethan plays and,
through his theories and examples, he stimulated Harley Granville-Barker’s
celebrated “plain style” productions in the early twentieth century. Through
these developments emerged the respective approaches to theater adopted by
Brecht and Beckett that have become influential. With some irony, given
the controversy Poel courted by his choices, he helped return theater to
its Elizabethan roots, and in doing so he restored Hamlet to the spirit of its
avant-garde origins.
If we want to identify a specific moment when Hamlet met the avantgarde as a self-aware movement, it would be the production of the play by the
Moscow Art Theatre in 1909–1912. This was a collaboration between two of
the most radical and important men of theater at the time, Constantin Stanislavsky and Edward Gordon Craig, who had met through Isadora Duncan
in 1908. The two were already known—notorious even—for breaking away
from received orthodoxies. Craig, son of Ellen Terry, who had been Henry
Irving’s leading lady, worked in all facets of theater, backstage as a child,
later as an actor, scene designer, innovator in stage lighting, director, and
theoretician through his revolutionary essay The Art of Theatre (1905), later
retitled On the Art of the Theatre. He was deeply influenced by the symbolist movement, the evidence still visible in photographs of his monumental
sets of Hamlet, and he strove to make all visual elements of a performance
cohere to produce an integrated intensity of affect. Craig’s primary contribution to the production of Hamlet was a stage design consisting of minimalistic, geometrical shapes, which he devised as a development of his interest
in marionette theater and its Bergsonian reduction of human behavior to
mechanical reflexes. The connection in his mind was evidently Hamlet’s
outburst to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that they wished to treat him as
an “instrument” and “play upon” him (Halpern 243), an early theatrical link
with the driving idea behind Heiner Müller’s Die Hamletmaschine, or The
Hamlet Machine, and its successor. Stanislavsky was known for his controversial theories of acting based on psychological realism, probing the human
mind down to its disturbing inner workings. Unashamedly, he relied on the
idea that even when a fictional character is portrayed, there is “that within
which passes show” (1.2.85), an inner life informing the external gestures.
Where he and Craig coincided was in the belief that theater should be a
distilled emotional experience preeminently for performers and secondly for
audiences. The result was, for better or worse, a sensation, a performance pilloried by Russian reviewers but fêted in Britain and France, and it has always
been referred to by theater historians as a revolutionary watershed produc-
On Stage • 115
tion, not just among Hamlet performances but in theater in general. Or, to
put it the other way around, there is some internal logic in the fact that this
particular play caused such a sensation and had such a profound effect on
the future of theater on a wider scale. The production also was a landmark in
linking Western and Eastern avant-garde movements, due to the presence of
the Japanese observer Kaoru Osanai, who was an avid follower of both Craig
and Stanislavsky and incorporated many of their ideas into his New Theatre
in Tokyo.
There would be general agreement that among the most profoundly innovative figures in twentieth-century theater was Bertolt Brecht, whose changing ideas about Hamlet revealed fresh potential in the play. Shakespeare
was always central to his theorizing, though pinning down the extent of the
influence has proved notoriously tricky. For one who placed at the heart of
his thinking and writing notions of dialectic—“the art of arriving at the truth
via statement and counter-statement” (Brecht, 1993 371)—Brecht’s attitude
to Shakespeare’s play is fittingly argumentative and has in turn provoked
in commentators many contradictory evaluations. Some critics attempt to
deny ambiguity and, as a consequence, seem to cancel each other out; some
suggest that Brecht was entirely negative about Shakespeare (Hultberg),
others that he was entirely positive (Symington). More measured approaches
also seem at odds with each other, suggesting on the one hand that Brecht
changed his mind during his career and shifted away from an early antipathy
to a later admiration (Fuegi), and on the other hand that he maintained an
attitude of some equivocation from first to last, a “determined ambivalence”
to Shakespeare (Whall 126). The latter reading acknowledges Brecht’s admiration for the Renaissance dramatist’s form, which was a model for his own
“epic theater,” but a revulsion from the content, which he saw as exemplifying an earlier barbaric world of heroic individualism, which as a Marxist he
rejected. Yet another persuasive approach suggests that the negative aspects
in Brecht’s attitude were not directed toward Shakespeare’s plays themselves
but rather the orthodox ways in which they were invariably presented in
contemporary German theaters and the attitude of conservative reverence
in which the bard was held. Doc Rossi traces a creative dialectic in its own
right through Brecht’s comments and adaptations of such plays as Richard
III, Macbeth, Coriolanus, Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure, King Lear,
Antony and Cleopatra, and others: “There is a dialogue, a working out of ideas
through Shakespeare which is vitally important to Brecht’s development”
(Rossi 160).
However, even within this babel of disagreement, the importance of
Hamlet to Brecht emerges as a kind of test case for the modern dramatist
116 • Chapter Five
(Montironi). This play especially is the cultural ghost that keeps returning
as the stimulus for his own experiments and theories. The significance of
this to the evolving trajectory of Brecht’s aesthetic theories and theatrical practice offers one of the clearest examples of this book’s theme, that
Shakespeare’s play holds the seeds for radical experimentation, rethinking,
and endless change. We recall Poggioli’s definition of the motivation behind
the avant-garde as a fundamental commitment to preserving or repairing a
continuity with the classics by constantly using them as inspiration for innovation and renovation. Or, as Brecht himself put it, the classics will remain
potent but must be made modern for “a contemporary public that earns real
contemporary money and eats real contemporary beef” (Willett, 1964 6–7).
Furthermore, such experimentation is not minor tinkering, anachronistic or
irrelevant to Shakespeare’s plays, but fundamental and intrinsic to them. As
the Dramaturg in The Messingkauf Dialogues (expressing a position close to
Brecht’s) suggests, “I feel they were experimenting. They were experimenting
just as Galileo was experimenting in Florence at that time and Bacon in London. And so it is right to stage the plays in a spirit of experiment” (Brecht,
1965 60). Hamlet as an avant-garde work in its own time, comparable to
Galileo’s and Bacon’s “experimenting,” would not have surprised Brecht in
the least.
If Brecht had maintained a stance of ambivalence bordering on the
negative, he would not have returned so often to Shakespeare in a state of
puzzled and sometimes pugnacious contestation. Early on, he adapted Macbeth (1927) and Hamlet (1930–1931) for radio, and he returned throughout
his career to Shakespeare, adapting Coriolanus in the 1950s (unfinished). He
used Measure for Measure to critique Hitler’s racialism in Round Heads and
Pointy Heads (1931–1932), presented Richard III as a basis for The Resistible
Rise of Arturo Ui (1941) (Hitler again), and perhaps spliced aspects of Macbeth with Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera in writing The Threepenny Opera. More
subtle use is made of comedies: As You Like It and A Midsummer Night’s
Dream in The Good Person of Szechwan and A Man’s a Man (Whall 139).
To these examples could be added the influence of The Merchant of Venice,
which, at least to my eyes, strongly anticipates the “trial” at the end of The
Caucasian Chalk Circle. It is clear from the evidence of The Messingkauf
Dialogues that Brecht was thinking actively about King Lear when he was
writing Life of Galileo. The Shakespearean influence on Brecht’s plays is a
substantial legacy.
Brecht perceived that the older plays held strong potential for contemporary applications, despite his initial opinion that Shakespeare’s own vision is
locked into a patriarchal and feudal world, the passing of which Shakespeare
On Stage • 117
lamented and regarded as tragic. But such medieval historical trappings can
be transcended:
“But Shakespeare is a great realist, and I think he’d stand the test. He always
shovels a lot of raw material on to the stage, unvarnished representations of
what he has seen. And there are those useful junction points in his works where
the new in the period collided with the old.” (Brecht, 1965 63)
Brecht made a similar point in his Journals: “plays like SHAKESPEARE’S
histories, dramatizations of chapters of chronicles, always seem to me closest
to reality. There is no ‘idea’ in them, no concern to shape a plot” (Brecht,
1993 167). More formal aspects of Shakespeare’s plays, which Brecht found
and acknowledged as useful in his own practice, are the scenic structure lending itself to the episodic basis of his own “epic theater” and incitement of an
audience sitting closely on all four sides, required to use their imaginations
and invited to join the process of dialectic. As Shakespeare had pleaded
with his audience through the Prologue to Henry V, “Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts. . . . / And make imaginary puissance” (Henry V,
1.0.23–25), so did Brecht. Brecht was also attracted to the Elizabethan stage’s
lack of distracting artificial lighting and other forms of “illusion” (Brecht,
1965 58–59). He found in the raw material provided by Shakespeare’s plays
the capacity to deter audiences from empathizing with the central protagonist’s emotional state and point of view, thus creating the Verfremdungseffekte
(“alienation effect,” distancing, defamiliarization), “making the audience
stop and think” (Brecht, 1965 63) instead of wallowing in an uncritical emotional experience. All these and more profound compatibilities underlined
Brecht’s fundamentally sympathetic attitude to Shakespearean drama, even
as he squabbled with historical and political details of Elizabethan times.
Hamlet provides a good example not only of Brecht’s irreverent, experimental use of Shakespeare but also of his sense that this play is far more
diverse than the conservative German theater and reverential scholarship
of his own time offered. In A Short Organum for the Theatre (Willett, 1964),
Brecht gives a sustained description of his view of the play at the time he
wrote, likening its underlying vision to what he calls “the dark and bloody
period in which I am writing—the criminal ruling classes, the widespread
doubt in the power of reason, continually being misused” (Willett, 1964,
201). One aspect of Brecht’s defamiliarizing technique is to take literally
Gertrude’s description of Hamlet as “fat and scant of breath” (5.2.290), an
image far from that of the conventionally young and handsome actor invariably chosen for the role. Richard Burbage, he pointed out, had played the
obese Falstaff, and Hamlet came some three or four years later. Furthermore,
118 • Chapter Five
in this version, the scholar-prince becomes brutalized by the “age of warriors”
in which he lives, and he is sucked in by Fortinbras’s bellicosity:
Overcome by this warrior-like example, he turns back and in a piece of barbaric
butchery slaughters his uncle, his mother and himself, leaving Denmark to the
Norwegian. These events show the young man, already somewhat stout, making
the most ineffective use of the new approach to Reason which he has picked
up at the university of Wittenberg. In the feudal business to which he returns
it simply hampers him. Faced with irrational practices, his reason is utterly
unpractical. He falls a tragic victim to the discrepancy between such reasoning
and such action. This way of reading the play, which can be read in more than
one way, might in my view interest our audience. (Willett, 1964 202)
Such a view might seem perverse, but it is important to take into account
two prevailing appropriations Brecht faced in Germany, both of which he
profoundly resisted. The first was the Romantic reading in which “Hamlet
was conceived as a sort of young Werther” (Montironi 22), alongside Freiligrath’s stirring “Deutschland ist Hamlet!” The other, even more pernicious
to Brecht, was the construction of Nazi critics, who turned Hamlet into an
Aryan hero whose Nordic identity made him an ideal figure. By seeking to
prevent empathy and instead arouse an ironic, even hostile perspective on
the play’s hero, Brecht employs the kind of distancing Verfremdungseffekte
that he feels the text can sanction if it is “made new” with an antinationalist
slant for contemporary audiences. Montironi finds Brecht to be relatively
consistent to the interpretation, apparent also in an early sonnet that presents Hamlet as one who lets people die senselessly in a pointless battle:
Adopting this anti-war perspective, Brecht states that when Hamlet hesitates,
he acts correctly, since his hesitation is due to reason. When Hamlet decides
to fight and kill, he acts wrongly, since he loses the guiding principle of reason
and is driven by irrationality, due to a chance encounter. Hamlet puts himself
in the hands of fate, so he cannot be a hero in Brechtian terms. (Montironi
28–29)
One might object to Hamlet’s being turned into such a warmonger, since
in Shakespeare’s play it is he himself who voices pacifist sentiments (4.4),
though Brecht seems to suggest that, by the end of the play, he has renounced
this position and denied its rationality. At the very least, the approach opens
up consideration of the significant antiwar content in the play, which usually goes unnoticed. Margot Heineman puts the matter in a more measured
way: “He sees Hamlet historically, between two worlds, unhappy with the
On Stage • 119
dark revenge duty, yet unable to find another way to act” (Heinemann
241). Revenge, she points out, would have been one of the things denied as
irrational by the enlightened Protestantism of Wittenberg University. We
might quibble with Brecht’s suggestion that Hamlet’s approval of war stems
from the lines of Fortinbras, himself a professional soldier who barely knew
the student from Wittenberg: “and for his passage, / The soldier’s music and
the rite of war / Speak loudly for him” (5.2.403–5). In his later, more famous
sonnet (“Here is the body, puffy and inert”), Brecht turns the knife even further by using inverted commas to caustically ironize Fortinbras’ lines about
Hamlet (“For he was likely, had he been put on, / To have prov’d most royal”
[5.2.402–3]), which seem to offer an admiring eulogy but, in Brechtian terms,
firmly tie Hamlet to the brutal feudal values of monarchy. He is seen as a
potentially “royal” figure in the worst sense, no better than his uncle or even
his militaristic father, who had been killed in a sinful state in a society, the
pervading backdrop of which consists of “carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts”
(5.2.386), and he ironically echoes Fortinbras’ grudging eulogy that Hamlet
“was likely, had he been put on, / To have prov’d most royal” (5.2.402–3; see
Brecht, 1975 321).
Brecht did at one point give a more nuanced view that incorporates aspects of the romantic view of Hamlet. Commenting in his journal on a Swedish production (which he found wanting), Brecht distinguishes between the
play as a whole, which he regards as Shakespeare’s “crudest plot” apart from
Titus Andronicus, and its protagonist, who is “his most sensitive hero, his
vulnerability constantly leads to wounds.” He disagrees with interpretations
that Hamlet is a “hesitant intellectual” and instead sees him as “simply an
idealist thrown out of kilter when he collides with the real world, the idealist
who is turned into a cynic. The question is not: to act or not to act, but to
keep silent or not to keep silent, to give approval or not to give approval”
(Brecht, 1993 118). In this context, Brecht also makes clear that it is not so
much the play that he has reservations about but its modern performances:
“nothing is funnier than the serious way our theaters perform Shakespeare.
He may be theatrical, but he is never ceremonious. Our philistines are unable
to contemplate naivety and complicity together.” He interestingly amplifies
his general attitude to Shakespeare’s drama at this time, referring in particular to Hamlet:
This stage was what we would call surrealistic, without, of course, the shockeffects surrealism goes in for, it is innocent surrealism. . . . HAMLET is a fairy
tale even for shakespeare’s time, a confused and bloody one, with ghosts,
thrusts with poisoned swords, armies on the move etc. the end, though it may
120 • Chapter Five
be a compromise with kyd’s hamlet play, is a piece of amazing boldness from
shakespeare’s point of view: all that thinking and planning, all the cramped
contortions of his conscience finish up uncertainly, fortuitously, in a shambles
of intrigue and planlessness. still waiting for corroboration of his suspicions that
they are plotting against his life, hamlet dies, with several murders to his own
credit. this woeful butchery, devoid of morality, the self-destruction of a clan,
only a theater like the elizabethan could have produced. (Brecht, 1993 118)
The teasing phrase “innocent surrealism,” however enigmatic and suggestive,
seems another way of expressing Brecht’s sense that Hamlet chimes with the
concerns of challenging modern art movements.
One more facet of Brecht’s attitude to Shakespeare, and to Hamlet especially, stems more directly from his Marxist disposition: the inherent danger
that if a “hero-centered” approach is adopted, then Shakespeare gives unfortunate images of “great individuals” pitted against the masses (Fuegi 293). He
had seen Coriolanus as “an enemy of the people.” Even here, however, Brecht
could see that this is a danger that lies not in the “raw material” of the plays
but in the prevailing partial ways of presenting them. In The Messingkauf Dialogues, he reiterates the conviction that the plays can be read and performed
as depicting the downfall of increasingly isolated, corrupted individuals. The
moral weaknesses of these figures are exposed by contrast with the communal
and compassionate values of commoners whose brutal victimization is often
enacted in the action of the plays. He sees this principle working most clearly
in King Lear, the particular play his interlocutors are considering in the Dialogues. It is repeated several times that it is important to the play’s design to
notice and emphasize the lamentable fate of servants who resist aristocratic
bullying and violence, then pay for this with their lives.
The desire to defamiliarize the plays led to Brecht’s composition of “Practice Scenes for Actors” (variously known as “Practice Pieces” and “Intercalary Scenes”), which are appended to Messingkauf. With these short scenes,
Brecht intended to induce actors to attune their attitudes before playing but
not to include them in the play itself. In those written for Macbeth, Romeo
and Juliet, and Hamlet, actors and audiences are encouraged (even coerced) to
distance themselves from sympathy with the central characters and diminish
any attempt to heroize them by revealing their often sordidly commercial
class interests. The “exercises” conspicuously shift attention to the righteous
grievances of “little people” who become casualties of arbitrary power. An
English translation of the Practice Piece for Hamlet is somewhat hard to find
(it appears in Brecht, 1976 349–51), but we do have a rare and precious video
recording made in 1964, which includes the pieces on Hamlet and Romeo and
On Stage • 121
Juliet, the latter featuring no less a figure than Lotte Lenya, who also contributes her memories of Brecht. In the Hamlet Practice Piece named “Ferry
Scene” (to fit between scenes 3 and 4 of Act 4), Brecht implies that, far from
Hamlet’s being too hesitant to act, he acts precipitately as a “butcher” who
kills his family without reason, “Running amuck in one horrendous race.” He
is presented as comparable to his dead father, a warmonger preferring “honor”
before “disgrace,” while the current king, Claudius, is reported as a circumspect statesman who has negotiated a diplomatic settlement with Norway to
end the war and facilitate trade. All this, Brecht implies, is in the people’s interests, unlike Hamlet’s preference for continuing war and revenge. Although
“a scoundrel breathes easy, and turns almost / Into a good man,” it is seen as a
peaceful solution in contrast to Hamlet’s gratuitous vendetta. It is clear that,
from first to last, Brecht struggled creatively with Hamlet, but his consistent
engagement with issues in the play is clear, in ways that reveal profoundly
unconventional and often disturbing perspectives. As with all the avant-garde
productions, we find that the play itself is not one thing but many.
1960s and Beyond
A landmark among avant-garde Hamlets is Charles Marowitz’s version,
staged first in Berlin in 1965 and filmed for television in 1969 in a condensed
version by the BBC (a record that still exists on faded sixteen-millimeter
film). It has been restaged regularly. Marowitz had come to public attention
through his work on the experimental fringe theater scene in Britain. He
was renowned for his ferocity toward reviewers and his involvement with
the journal Encore, writing as a self-proclaimed enfant terrible influenced by
Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty. Initially associated with the radical
Open Space fringe theater in the 1960s and 1970s, Marowitz’s adaptations
of several plays became causes célèbres. His Macbeth (1969) attempted “not
a linear development of his protagonist’s character but a series of tableaux
showing the disparate and conflicting personality traits that made up the
man Macbeth” (Schiele, 2005 18). Later came Variations on The Merchant
of Venice and Othello (the latter I saw in 1972 in a small, dingy basement in
Tottenham Court Road, at that time the home of the Open Space), as well
as Hamlet. Not surprisingly, his Hamlet was predictably controversial for its
provocative experimentalism.
Marowitz used violent images and visually shocking confrontations to stir
audiences out of any complacency. Most characteristically, he developed
what became known as a “collage” style in which lines from Shakespeare’s
text are transposed between speakers and rearranged as sets of disjunctive
122 • Chapter Five
episodes. In the case of Hamlet, he turned the narrative into a fragmented
stream of consciousness, a dream—or nightmare—of the dying protagonist.
Jinnie Schiele has described Marowitz’s deliberately disconcerting approach
in this way:
An emphasis on speed which necessitated a film-like technique to enable
him to switch from one image to another, often dazzling an audience with its
unexpectedness and lack of rational explanation. This gave a natural place to
the evocation of dream or nightmare, in turn a method of exposing what was
happening in the mind of a character. (Schiele, 2005 40)
Marowitz himself has been equivocal about the effect of his most central
experiment, the collage method, asserting that even in its fragmented state
his version of the play is comprehensible to those who do not know Hamlet
itself, while at other times hinting that the method can only really operate
for plays that are already well known. It may be an issue he never settled in
his own mind.
Clearly influenced by Brecht, Marowitz more reflectively declared in
“some Shakespearean Scraps” that he felt a personal conflict with the play’s
protagonist:
I despise Hamlet. / He is a slob. / A talker, an analyser, a rationalizer. / Like the
parlor liberal of paralyzed intellectual, he can describe every face to a problem,
yet never pull his finger out. / Is Hamlet a coward, as he himself suggests, or
simply a poseur, a frustrated actor who plays the scholar, the courtier and the
soldier as an actor (a very bad actor) assuming a variety of roles to which he is
not naturally suited. / And why does he keep saying everything twice? / And
how can someone talk so pretty in such a rotten country given the sort of work
he’s got cut out for himself? / You may think he’s a sensitive, well-spoken and
erudite fellow, but frankly, he gives me a pain in the ass. (Marowitz, 2001 157)
This is no doubt a provocation aimed at critics and scholars who praise
Hamlet in the ways Marowitz derides, although ironically his own attitude
comes close to colluding with the views of the most conservative of all, those
who argue obsessively over whether an overly intellectual Hamlet delays.
Brecht had pushed the issue into a dynamic reconceptualizing of the play,
but Marowitz’s attitude is relentlessly negative. Elsewhere, he speaks of the
character Hamlet as “the supreme prototype of the conscience-stricken but
paralyzed liberal: one of the most lethal and obnoxious characters in modern
times” (Marowitz, 1978 13). However, he admits that the staging of his production may have distracted audiences from the message: “I now accept that
On Stage • 123
the stylistic innovations in the work were so overwhelming it was difficult to
insinuate this idea very lucidly, and I fully accept the fact that most of the
public which responded to the collage were more taken with the theatricality
than its thesis” (Marowitz, 1978 14). Marowitz is equally if not more contemptuous of Horatio, to whom he addresses an “open Letter” as the “rotter”:
You are the most obnoxious Yes-man in the Shakespearean canon. I suspect
that, at base, you are a careerist. . . . You lack the moral gumption that makes
a man forsake fruitless intellectual roundabouting for the sharp, straight path
of direct action. . . . I hope you will not take this personally, but the fact is
that until further notice, your services will no longer be required. (Marowitz,
2001 159–60)
There may be something in Shakespeare’s patchy presentation of Horatio
that could be seen as an uncritical eagerness to please Hamlet, but Marowitz
sees no subtlety in the questions raised by the text. For example, it is not
entirely clear just how much Horatio really knows about Hamlet’s suspicions
and knowledge of events and how closely Hamlet has in fact confided in him.
Again, one senses that the intrusive director is primarily challenging conservative critics who accept Horatio as Hamlet’s trusted friend—to Marowitz,
he is no longer required and is cut from the production.
Ironic restructuring and reimagining turn to savage satire of the modern
world in Heiner Müller’s notorious performance piece Die Hamletmaschine,
or The Hamlet Machine, reflecting the fractured world represented by the
East Germany in which Müller lived. Although allowing, even necessitating,
considerable improvisation, it is structured verbally around monologues by
Hamlet, represented as the intellectual in a communist system, and Ophelia,
who is a terrorist chanting “Long live hate and contempt” (Thompson and
Taylor, 2006 118). Bevington describes the conception as “not an adaptation so much as a strenuously avant-garde disquisition” (Bevington 159).
Filmed from the stage several times in the years since it was written in 1977,
a different spectacle every time, this version is regarded as being synonymous
with avant-garde performance art, as devastating social criticism in the late
twentieth century, and something of an assault course for an audience. Its
undoubtedly shocking mode and tone can be gleaned from its opening, suggesting effects described by Dawson as “nihilistic” and reliant on “bizarre and
discontinuous scenography,” in an experience sustained for seven hours in
the original production. Translations into English are hard to come by, but
there is one online by Dennis Redmond (Müller). Like Valéry after the First
World War, Müller after the Second envisages Hamlet bitterly lamenting
124 • Chapter Five
the scenes he witnesses while recalling in feverish broken dramatic monologue his memories of the family events that led up to his vision of a ruined
Europe, the adultery, murder, funeral, and corpse all standing for more general butchery, dehumanization, and destruction.
The “script” is a starting point for the action rather than a specific visual
realization of what should happen on stage. The piece was intended to be
performed differently every time—one sense in which Müller offers his work
as avant-garde in vision—while also gesturing toward Hamlet as being a
similarly changeable experience through time and circumstances. Müller
may have taken his title from Shakespeare’s one and only use of the word
“machine,” glossed by editors as “body parts,” in a puzzling phrase in Hamlet’s
letter to Ophelia: “Adieu. Thine evermore, most dear lady, whilst this machine
is to him, Hamlet” (2.2.121–23) (Thompson and Taylor 246n). We can see
also from the words that they allude to passages and episodes in Hamlet but
in a style that relies on montage, distortion, and bricollage. We see identifiable constructions of “the Hamlet mood”: Lawrentian obsessions such as
those with flesh, the mother, corpses, disease, and tones of rejective anger,
vengeful action, and concentration on bodily putrefaction. References to
Denmark as a concentration camp and to a wall dividing a city unmistakably
place the action in politically divided post-World War II Europe, Germany
specifically, and more generally in a world shadowed by the likelihood of
nuclear warfare. Gender difference evokes savage elisions of the mother and
the lover in misogynistic outbursts by the speaker, sources for which can
be found obviously in Hamlet’s bitter “nunnery” passage and his sexually
charged tirade against his mother. In her own words, Ophelia declares herself
a woman who slashes her arteries and overdoses on drugs, in a tone with the
self-destructive intensity of a persona in a poem by Sylvia Plath, whose stock
was high in university literature courses at the time. Radical theories about
the psychology of families espoused by R. D. Laing—the relativity of insanity as a prevailing social and familial condition rather than an individual
affliction—are also clearly at work in this version and date the composition.
Dead philosophers hurl books at Hamlet, Claudius is made up as a whore,
Ophelia stripteases, while a woman with breast cancer is on a swing. Imagery
of the macabre and the grotesque abounds. Hamlet is not the only source,
for mangled quotations and allusions refer to other Shakespearean plays
like Richard III and Macbeth, alongside T. S. Eliot’s poems and Pasternak’s
Dr. Zhivago—all pointing to different intertextual constructions of Hamlet.
Urban rebellion calls for the overthrow of government, while props of radios, a refrigerator, and Coca-Cola, pitch us into the contemporary world,
and the “I” is the rejective, revolutionary consciousness. Hamlet lapses into
On Stage • 125
inaction, tirades of body hatred, and finally a wish to be a machine without
pain. Ophelia ends the play chanting bitter slogans from a wheelchair, and a
stage direction points toward fish skeletons, dead bodies, and body parts. All
this is analyzed by Aneta Mancewicz as “deconstructive writing,” inherently
contradictory and full of voids and absent meanings, offered by Müller as a
myth of human destruction in ravaged postwar Europe (140–42).
Marowitz and Müller were of their time, just as surely as Kean and Poel
were commenting on their own contemporary culture, expressing rebellion
against comfortable platitudes and accepted ways of performing and of conceptualizing the world. We find, however, a difference in preoccupations between writers for the theater and the literati covered in the previous chapter.
This difference has marked consequences for what radical theater practitioners find important in Hamlet. Writers of poetry and fiction like Eliot and
Joyce, as we have seen, found the role of the ghost of Hamlet’s father a major
issue in both driving and inhibiting action in the present, burdening the
intertextual, nondramatic author with “the tyranny of influence.” To them,
the Ghost can represent the pressure of the past on the present, whether as
remembrance, exhortation, appeals for revenge, inspiration, or driving motive for action in new writing. Such writers are also aware of the fact that, if
they are successful in their craft, their books will outlast their lives and take
their turn in the future as ghosts for future writers to be forced to remember
and grapple with. Their absorption lies in the ambiguous power of dead writers over living ones. On the other hand, writers for the theater are inevitably
and by their very occupation aware of an almost opposite pressure, a need
to be true to the present moment rather than haunted by the past. Plays are
necessarily of the moment, immediate in the circumstances faced equally by
players and their audience. Neglect by contemporary or future readers would
not necessarily deter an avant-garde poet or novelist—in fact it might be
seen as vindicating a belief in profound originality that was before its time—
but for a playwright who has no audience beyond the specific production,
being ignored by a living audience is worse than the sound of one hand clapping; it is silence itself that obviates memory. For a dramatist, even one who
is challengingly experimental and avant-garde, both the haunting of the past
and hopes for future validation by posterity are academic considerations, less
significant than making some kind of impact on the living. Shocking audiences into responsiveness, however negative—manifested in the anger and
hostility of Claudius in watching The Murder of Gonzago—might well be a
price to be paid, and at least the play has done its intended work. For all they
know—and, once again, unlike writers whose only tools are “words, words,
words”—theater practitioners are in a more urgent sense dealing in a medium
126 • Chapter Five
that, by its very nature, is bodily and time-bound, and its importance is likely
to be “now or never.” In this sense, the Ghost is less important, and perhaps
less interesting, than imperatives for action in the present, just as Hamlet’s
primary task in his bounded life is in some way to change the society in
which he lives through present action.
If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not
now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. Since no man, of aught he leaves,
knows aught, what is’t to leave betimes? Let be. (5.2.216–20)
Ghosts who come from heaven or hell to tell us what to do are to be regarded
as potentially untrustworthy, compared to the beleaguered individual’s
agency in addressing present problems: “The time is out of joint. O cursed
spite, / That ever I was born to set it right” (1.5.196–97). For such reasons,
workers in the theater are drawn less to the Ghost (and also to Yorick) than
to the play’s interrogation of madness and the role of the players and, following this lead, they are inducted into the world of another characteristic
avant-garde theatrical form, or anti-form, that of agitprop.
The term “agitprop” in popular usage combines “agitation” and “propaganda.” Its origin, according to the OED, was “A department of the Central
Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union . . . responsible for
‘agitation and propaganda’ on behalf of Communism; the activities of this
department. Also: a person engaged in agitprop.” Although it could refer to
writing, its more common association has been with live theater, especially
street performance, giving an air of spontaneity and improvisation in a variety of urban contexts. It is an enactment of guerrilla action, eruptive and
purposive. Since the 1920s agitprop has referred to a certain kind of theatrical presentation and experience, which characteristically fuses experiment, a
conscious intention to provoke and demand audience response, and a desire
to engage with political realities in the contemporary world—in brief, it is
fueled by a need to change people. “Agitprop theater” came to refer to the
kind of improvised drama, usually in a street setting rather than inside a
theater, with the explicit intention to “agitate and propagandize” in political
and cultural senses, to awaken unwitting audiences to injustices in the world,
with the hope of infecting them with a will toward passionate activity to
rectify the wrongs. As a theory of art in general, it was originally a product of
Soviet Russian and, more generally, Marxist aesthetics, influential for Brecht
and for several generations of avant-garde artists and actors, especially in the
1960s when many such counterculture improvisations were termed “Happenings,” as earlier discussed. It might at first seem to be an odd connection,
On Stage • 127
but what is Hamlet’s concept of “The Mousetrap” but a practical experiment
in agitprop, in the senses described above?
Hum—I have heard
That guilty creatures sitting at a play
Have, by the very cunning of the scene,
Been struck so to the soul that presently
They have proclaim’d their malefactions.
For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak
With most miraculous organ. I’ll have these players
Play something like the murder of my father
Before mine uncle. I’ll observe his looks;
I’ll tent him to the quick. If he do blench,
I know my course. The spirit that I have seen
May be a devil, and the devil hath power
T’assume a pleasing shape, yea, and perhaps,
Out of my weakness and my melancholy,
As he is very potent with such spirits,
Abuses me to damn me. I’ll have grounds
More relative than this. The play’s the thing
Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King. (2.2.584–601)
Improvisation by adapting and augmenting an old, familiar play as an explicit strategy of extracting a revealing response from at least one member of
the audience, and motivation stemming from solving a real-world problem,
mark the genre to which The Murder of Gonzago belongs, a form of agitprop.
One other modern production, or series of productions, carried out over
several decades certainly falls under the mantle of avant-garde in style and
vision. The Wooster Group, formed in 1975 and still working, as a trademark
of their approach begin with and then improvise upon a source text. This
was the case with not just Shakespeare’s Hamlet but the Broadway production in 1964 caught on ghostly film, with Richard Burton playing the lead
and John Gielgud the Ghost. That production had been recorded and played
in cinemas across America virtually simultaneously for two days, in a form
immediately dubbed “Theatrofilm.” (Considered a radical innovation at the
time with its intersection of live theater and moving images, this concept
had a revival sixty years later with recorded performances at the Metropolitan Opera in New York and Shakespeare’s Globe and the National Theatre
in London watched in movie houses around the world, misleadingly billed
as “live performances.”) The Wooster Group, in its own words, “attempts
to reverse the process, reconstructing, challenging, and re-contextualizing a
128 • Chapter Five
hypothetical theater piece from the fragmentary evidence of the edited film.
We channel the ghost of the legendary 1964 performance, descending into
a kind of madness, intentionally replacing our own spirit with the spirit of
another” (Wooster Group). The result, which can be viewed on their website
in episodes from different performances, is chaotic but powerful, mingling
with their own idiosyncratic style not only the Theatrofilm recording of
the original stage play, presented like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, but also
their own live mimicking and acting, using visible technology of video and
electronic equipment. The experience is almost a literal realization of the
title of Walter Benjamin’s influential essay “The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction.” Like Benjamin’s essay, it dwells on how the past
bears on the present in radically different, dislocating, and ever-changing
ways. Presented with the group’s own unique approach, these preoccupations run through avant-garde films, giving them an unexpected and perhaps
unintended thematic complicity. More to the point here, they are raised in
Shakespeare’s various initial source texts that variously include the iconic
name of Hamlet in their titles.
Poel, Brecht, Marowitz, Müller, and the Wooster Group could all in their
different ways be described as genuinely revolutionary in their revisionings
of theatrical practice, and Hamlet played a significant role in their thinking.
Many others have followed different branches of this vanguard in localized
productions. David Bevington describes as “postmodern” some stage productions from the 1980s, such as the Romanian version directed by Alexander
Tocilescu (1985), in which Claudius is a thinly disguised replica of the
dictator Nicolai Ceauşescu, and similar brave and radical performances in
Germany before the Berlin Wall fell, directed by Peter Zadek (1977), Otomar Krejca (1977), and Jürgen Flimm (1986), as well as one in Beijing by
Lin Zhaohua (1989–1990). He describes a British equivalent from the RSC
in 2001 based on the invasion of Iraq, which depicts Hamlet as belonging
to “a youth culture rebelling against an unfeeling world in a state that is in
turn belligerent, reliant on surveillance of its own citizens, and ruled by ‘spin
doctors’” (Bevington 181). Anthony Dawson describes in considerable detail
and regards as postmodern the controversial production directed by Adrian
Noble for the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Barbican (Dawson 11–22),
and he enumerates other challenging productions performed in different
countries before publication of his book in 1995:
In Germany Peter Zadek’s provocative display of boldly discontinuous images
(1977) and Hansgunther Heyme’s wildly electronic, surveillance-oriented version (1979) extended the iconoclasm of Jessner or Brecht; in France, Daniel
On Stage • 129
Mesguich mounted an “intertextual” Hamlet (1977), strongly influenced by
French literary theory, which spliced into the main text a series of other
Hamlet-influenced literary and critical texts; in Czechoslovakia in 1978, a
landmark production spoke to audiences of the bitter, anti-heroic, even grotesque deterioration of humanist ideals in the aftermath of the Prague spring.
(Dawson 225)
These seem not profoundly innovative in their own right but swimming
in the wake of those mentioned above, but they provide more evidence to
consolidate the argument that Hamlet, apparently mesmerically, attracts experimenters and is constantly both undergoing and precipitating changes in
avant-garde theater practice.
Creative rewritings of Hamlet for performance abound, each revealing
some new potential meaning and application in the play itself. A fertile
ground is providing independent life to characters other than the prince
himself. Tom Stoppard’s cleverly conceived Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are
Dead (written 1966, filmed 1990) is evidence of this, placing on center stage
two figures who, in Shakespeare’s version, are haplessly minor characters that
end up being murdered because of a casually revised letter. The script for this
play, more famous in its filmed version, dwells on hypothetical or imagined
quandaries of people trapped within a fiction, unaware of being fictions
themselves at the mercy either of some invisible master-dramatist or just
random circumstance. They are interchangeable since they have no claim to
individuality in the eyes of anybody else, which is ironic in the light of their
task to “pluck out the mystery” of Hamlet’s unique identity (cf. 3.2.356–57).
Despite their insignificance in the scheme of things, the characters emerge
as inadvertent and unrecognized geniuses without realizing it, casually making, in Coursen’s words, such profound discoveries as “gravity, the principle
of harmonics, the law of acceleration, the aerodynamic application of Bernoulli’s principle, steam power, the laws of equal and opposite reaction and
of conservation of energy, and aspects of vector theory and convection”
(Coursen 78). All of these were profoundly revolutionary and contentious
ideas when first mooted, but ones that changed the way the world is perceived, and they are also concepts that, as Stoppard’s film version suggests,
are eerily anticipated in some of Shakespeare’s passages. Besides Hamlet itself,
the conceptual source for this play/film is Beckett’s great avant-garde play
Waiting for Godot (first performed in 1953), since the whole action is effectively taken up with the antiheroes “waiting for Hamlet” as for their hero.
Julie Sanders quotes Stoppard describing it as, “Two Elizabethans passing the
time in a place without any visible character” (Sanders 56). The final phrase
130 • Chapter Five
here points to the central strategy Stoppard is employing, since “character”
in any conventional sense is not relevant to the depiction of these two virtually identical fictions; rather, it is their arbitrary roles in an unexplained plot
that drives the action. The presentation reduces Hamlet to a diminished,
almost nonexistent position, a ploy that Sanders notes has been described
by critics as “an exercise in postmodernism, fragmenting, defamiliarizing,
and displacing” of “one of the most canonical texts of English literature and
Western culture” (Sanders 56–57). Maurice Charney in Hamlet’s Fictions
makes a good argument that many of the theatrical and metaphysical effects
in Pirandello’s play Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921) are directly
anticipated in Hamlet: “The Shakespearean and the Pirandellian are two
analogous modes of a theatrical probing of reality and the ontological status
of the play as a fiction, so that the plays of Shakespeare [especially Hamlet]
and Pirandello can be made to comment on each other” (Charney 26). It
does seem more than likely that Pirandello’s play was in Stoppard’s mind
when he conceived his own, just as Hamlet was in Pirandello’s mind when
he devised Six Characters.
Nor does Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead stand alone as a “peripheral vision” adaptation. Augusto Boal, the radical Brazilian theatrical practitioner, built his Theatre of the Oppressed on taking disempowered people
seriously, a concept put into action in his famous production of Hamlet with
the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1997. In his book Hamlet and the Baker’s
Son: My Life in Theatre and Politics, Boal testifies to the importance of Hamlet in his practice. Another example of character displacement in drama is
Howard Barker’s Gertrude The Cry (2002), which is not exactly framed as
“Gertrude’s version” of events but as an experiment where she is placed at
the center (Chinna, 2010 103–14). Barker takes away any ambiguity left
by Shakespeare, clearly showing her implication in the murder of the old
king and depicting the court as one where compulsive rapacity of libidinous
desire is rife. Similar adaptations could be made by choosing to focus on
any one of several characters—Claudius, Horatio, and Polonius would be
obvious candidates, since each is presented as a character privy to secrets
the audience wants to know. It would be quite possible, in the same vein,
to read or perform the play by presenting as the central consciousness the
conscience-racked criminal as king, as Shakespeare was to do in Macbeth,
or by building a play around the ill-starred and innocent family of Polonius,
each member guilty of nothing seriously wrong other than being prone to
manipulation by others. The history of their single-parent family violates
poetic justice, since they all end up dead without having committed any
particular wrongdoing.
On Stage • 131
While Stoppard’s play and some other similar treatments have a game-like
quality based on playing with Shakespeare’s text and stem most obviously
from the sheer fame of the play leading to its familiarity to many audiences,
there does seem something more to the existence of such adaptations than
this. It is hard to think of, or envisage, even a play as famous as this one—
Romeo and Juliet or Macbeth, for example—generating quite these kinds of
creative rewritings around minor characters, radically alternative versions,
or palimpsests. With the possible exception of Falstaff, dramatic characters
are too fixed within their narrative roles to allow the same kind of apparent
freedom to be imaginable in other circumstances. Directors can bring other
plays up to date by providing a modern situation and setting, but it would
be difficult to reconceive the narratives in such radical ways as Hamlet has
invited. Performance history of Macbeth shows that the parameters for playing the two central characters allow an unusually broad spectrum from young
to old, sympathetic to diabolical, but even so, this hardly opens up multiple
possibilities for constructing their backstories, and there is not much implied
beyond the text itself for others like the Macduff family or Malcolm—certainly not as much latitude as that given to figures in Hamlet. The apparently
irresistible temptation to rewrite Hamlet from an individual character’s limited but implicated perspective surely stems from a unique quality in this play
and no other. There is no suggestion that Shakespeare wrote the play with
such considerations in mind, but the kind of ground-plot he follows involves
mysteries and evasions, spying and concealments, unexplained narrative
lacunae, and unanswered questions, all of which seem to inveigle us into providing explanations by rewriting or filling in gaps. “Who’s there?” (1.1.1) is
the phrase that opens the play, and it has often been taken as the emblem of
an interrogative mode that provokes speculation about individual consciousnesses running through the action. The stage personages are never quite sure
of the truth about anybody else, and the audience is similarly positioned.
Although obviously there is no more to a character in an extra-diegetic
sense than we get in the writing itself, as we shall see, in many films the way
that each personage is portrayed includes a component of authorial secretiveness and withdrawal of intimate revelation. Many details defy final explanation; why is it Horatio who is so concerned that Ophelia be silenced? “’Twere
good she were spoken with, for she may strew / Dangerous conjectures in
ill-breeding minds” (4.5.14–15). We might plausibly surmise it is because
he is concerned not to spoil Hamlet’s chances of becoming king by revealing that he is a murderer, but even this possibility somehow needs a missing
hypothetical logic to be supplied, the construction of yet another backstory
behind the words given us. Hamlet has to winkle out of Rosencrantz and
132 • Chapter Five
Guildenstern the information that they have been sent for as spies, and we
never discover, for example, whether Gertrude was complicit in the murder,
or even knew about it, and whether she was adulterous in her marriage to
King Hamlet. Just as Hamlet spends a lot of the play trying to find out the
truth behind the Ghost’s allegations, so audiences and readers are constantly
drawn into the effort of trying to pluck out the heart of mysteries withheld
by different characters—Claudius, Gertrude, Polonius—or at least endlessly
speculating about them, yet invariably deterred and frustrated in the search.
This is an almost necessary consequence of the “whodunit?” basis of the
plot, in which a state cover-up of a suspected murder means that the answers to many obvious questions will remain mysteries, and some will never
conclusively be answered. Even the sleuth who suspects the truth must act
only upon a rumor delivered by a disaffected ghost who may come improbably from heaven, hell, or purgatory. As a consequence, virtually all the
characters give a nagging impression that they have some kind of imputed
but undisclosed history, motives, experiences, or undivulged knowledge that
informs their present situation. They appear fictively to hold inside knowledge that the dramatist does not share with the audience, leaving us instead
to “botch the words up fit to [our] own thoughts.” Inviting interrogation,
the play withholds vital information, so that we are left at liberty to freely
construct or fabricate, which is just what dramatists and novelists have done
and will continue to do with Hamlet.
Peter Brook’s Qui est lá?, performed in Paris at the Bouffes du Nord in
2000 (though prepared from 1995 onward), takes its theme from the play’s
habit of raising questions only to leave them unanswered. The apparently
simple question that begins the play, “Who’s there?,” is repeated by Brook
at the end of his adaptation, with the effect of making the play experience
an interrogation of its own identity. Who is there, after all? Actors, roles,
or characters? Director? Audience? Or famous dramaturgs from the past
who have engaged with Hamlet in the theater, such as Poel, Stanislavski,
Meyerhold, Artaud, and Brecht, all of whose views are intruded on in the
performance? All possibilities are evident in Brook’s minimalist, pareddown version of Hamlet, and the play itself is subjected to the same kind
of interrogation about its provenance and existence, since the program
notes did not mention Shakespeare’s play at all (Lavender 66), but instead
focused on the issue of playmaking and theater itself. The fact that many
of the political issues were excluded in this production forces attention
onto metatheater and away from the most recurrent use to which the play
has historically been put, underwriting some contemporary power struggle
or other.
On Stage • 133
In a sense, the opposite of the premise that each character is independent
and has a withheld personal history and set of unique perceptions on the action of the play is to assume that the whole play is in fact a revelation of the
single psyche of one character—Hamlet. Several dramaturgs have followed
this line, none more consistently and famously than Robert Wilson, whose
Hamlet: A Monologue premiered in 1995 at the Alley Theatre in Houston,
Texas. Wilson has been described as “fastidiously avant-garde” (Lavender
155): “Wilson’s theatre is the apogee of many definitive twentieth-century
artistic developments—surrealism, anti-psychologism, the free-form styles
of the 1960s, the chic minimalism of modern design disciplines” (Lavender
156). His work is also regularly described as “paradoxical” in that it combines
radicalism with political conservativeness. In Hamlet: A Monologue, as the
title suggests, all the lines are spoken by the one character, and although
from Shakespeare’s play alone, they are taken from the mouths of different
personages. What is presented is a kind of sustained flashback as Hamlet, at
the moment before his death, recalls episodes from his life. Another one-man
performance was Robert LePage’s Elsinore (1997), although the premise here
is not that the play is the emanation of one consciousness but its teasingly
opposite ontology of existence and identity, that one actor can play all the
roles.
Of course, many more performances of Hamlet could be cited as evidence
of its capacity for adaptation into radical forms and for serving new social,
political, and artistic purposes. Asian theater in particular has contributed
multicultural and intercultural collaborations utilizing dramatic traditions
from different countries and creating something culturally new in its hybridity (Asian Intercultural Archive). The Singaporean Ong Ken Sen’s intercultural production is one example, known partly because it was performed at
the Kronborg Castle in Elsinore, Denmark, in 2002. A five-minute snippet
of this can be viewed on YouTube, enough to establish its avant-garde credentials in form and spectacle while drawing also on traditional Asian dance
and performance conventions. The production was inserted into a long and
distinguished tradition, since famous performances had been mounted at the
castle in 1916 by Denmark’s Royal Theatre Copenhagen and several by the
Old Vic Company, in 1937 with Laurence Olivier, in 1950 with Michael
Redgrave, and in 1954 with Richard Burton. Yet another celebrated production came in 1964 for television, as a collaboration between the BBC and
Danmarks Radio, and many others have followed.
More homogenously located in forms of cultural traditionalism, though
new and arresting for Western audiences, are the Japanese Noh performances
by Kuniyoshi Munakata, one version of whose Hamlet I was privileged to
134 • Chapter Five
see in 1994 in Australia (Kuniyoshi 1991). Another is Kupenga Kwa Hamlet
(The Madness of Hamlet), performed in English and Shona on a replica of
the original Fortune Theatre (the New Fortune Theatre) at the University
of Western Australia and based on Q1, which here triumphantly proved its
theatrical coherence and power. The Two Gents Productions version consists of only two actors, political exiles from Zimbabwe, who, not surprisingly,
foreground themes of exile, displacement, state control and corruption, and
succession. This playfully subversive production, which constantly and in
Brechtian fashion breaks conventions of theatrical illusion to encourage audience participation, was finely described and interpreted by Colette Gordon
in a review. She emphasizes the unique contexts of Shona storytelling and
language and the localization of Shona culture, in which ancestor worship
is very immediate, evoking “a world of belief where the dead are very much
with us (either as ancestors guiding the community or as unappeased malevolent spirits)” (Gordon 66–67). The “little patch of ground / That hath in it
no profit but the name” (4.4.18–19) is in this case specified as Bulawayo in
1888, when “the race for Zimbabwe is on.” The avant-garde aspects of this
quirky and memorable performance lie not simply in the uniqueness of playing Hamlet with just two actors, nor in the constantly changing defamiliarizing process of playful, theatrical dynamics between actors and audience,
nor in the experimentalism and openly improvisatory nature of an unfamiliar
crosscultural content, nor even in the urgently contemporary application
and recontextualizing of Shakespeare’s well-worn play, but in all these facets.
The production confirms that experimentalism need not be obscurantist,
elitist, or inaccessible, since it is also one of the most entertaining productions imaginable. Global Shakespeare (or Shakespeares) is now big business
existing on an international scale—some of it avant-garde and some not—
and it is being steadily documented in many open access website archives
(Global Shakespeares). It is the boast of Shakespeare’s Globe in London
that, from 2014 (450 years after his birth) to 2016 (400 years after his death),
they are performing Hamlet in every country in the world. There is here a
paradox initiated by Shakespeare’s plays themselves: the global is localized,
the local is globalized. The development ensures that the list of Hamlets is
endless, since it is being added to virtually every day. “Ever-now,” “ever-new”
indeed—or, as Hamlet says, “both at the first and now” (3.2.21)—and, we
can say with confidence, “every-where.”
CHAPTER SIX
On Screen
Hamlet and Film Genres
Live theater can engage audiences with an immediacy that cinema can never
match, at least not in the same way. Even apart from the fundamental differences between a medium that places live actors with fallible voices and audiences in the same room in real time and one in which a previously recorded
image is projected before the audience, there are distinguishing factors.
Stage directors can often assume a relatively committed and homogeneous
audience, however small or large, who reside in a particular geographical
vicinity and have willingly chosen to attend a particular performance. Patrons usually pay hefty prices to cover the considerable costs of live theater,
and these need to be recouped in a matter of weeks or even days to keep a
theater company afloat. Film financiers and directors, however, cannot rely
on any such cultural consensus based on geographical proximity or shared
taste, since they seek to reach far-flung, socially diverse viewers speaking different languages, from Tokyo to Moscow, Auckland to Greenland. Cinema
audiences generally pay less than they would for live theater, making them a
more heterogeneous class, and although the costs of making a film are usually
astronomical, there is a much longer period in which to recoup the outlay,
since movies are endlessly replayable in cinemas or on home devices and do
not require the presence of anybody other than a projectionist. The apparent
advantage of potentially mass audiences, however, can cause filmmakers to
be cautious, to aim at a cultural middle ground rather than experimenting for
a coterie. This can tend to make mainstream cinema in general a conservative medium, designed to please as wide a demographic as possible in terms
135
136 • Chapter Six
of geography, class, social circumstances, and language. At the same time, independent (“indie”) filmmaking can create more radical productions where
expense and profits are not considered so important as artistic integrity and
the vision of an individual director or ensemble. There are, of course, other
major differences, such as the immediacy and physicality of live theater,
its element of risk in the context of equally live and critical audiences, the
constant danger of accidents, illness, or the simple forgetting of lines, and
the obvious fact that the performances will be either subtly or markedly different from night to night—all contrasted with the endless repeatability of
never-changing films.
Such considerations raise interesting tensions and questions about the relationship between audiences and playmakers in different mediums and even
within the same medium, and, as this chapter will show, even for what appears to be the same story told in the single medium of cinema. The place of
Shakespeare in the history of the film industry holds complexities of its own.
The title of a book (not otherwise of relevance here) encapsulates the position: Film at the Intersection of High and Mass Culture (Coates). The origins of
cinema lie in working class, mass, or popular culture, whereas Shakespeare’s
plays identified with education and high culture. There have been many
consequences of this kind of intersection of contradictory characteristics,
from the use of Shakespeare to add a cultural luster to cinema through the
generation of a specific, generally conservative genre of “Shakespeare adaptations” to a more hybrid mingling when Shakespeare became accepted as
contributing to the entertainment side of the medium. We shall see different
examples of these intertwining categories in this chapter, though attention
will be drawn mainly to the more radical examples where such categories
become further complicated by the emergence of new audiences during the
twentieth century and new digital media in the twenty-first.
David Bevington concludes that, ever since Olivier’s film version of Hamlet in 1948, “The four major films are, as one would expect, considerably less
avant-garde than the stage productions of the same era” (Bevington 182);
however, his own final chapter on “Postmodern Hamlet” canvases a richly
eclectic number of films, some admittedly less than major but all significant
in some way, and I shall suggest others. There are, of course, many movies
filmed in different languages and countries and cultures that are harder to
find—for example, I have not been able to see two 2006 film adaptations,
the Chinese Hamlet, The Banquet, and the Tibetan Prince of the Himalayas,
both described by Mark Thornton Burnett in Shakespeare and World Cinema.
The plethora of independent and low-budget versions, free adaptations, offshoots, spinoffs, parodies, and transpositions listed by contributors in Burt’s
On Screen • 137
encyclopedic Shakespeares After Shakespeare also make the point about the
play’s protean afterlife in film. While the stage might have a history of regularly presenting radical and even shocking performances (among the many
tamer ones), on screen we find that the diverse versions of Hamlet allow
more avant-garde elements than we might initially expect. Ira Jaffe, in Hollywood Hybrids: Mixing Genres in Contemporary Films, has observed that acute
hybridity and shifts of genre mark, in particular, avant-garde and Dada films:
[T]he prominence of any one genre may vary from one moment to the next
in a particular film. Now comedy may rule, then melodrama, farce, tragedy,
horror, sci-fi, kung fu, film noir, or the Western: now realism, then surrealism or expressionism. Possibly hybrid films are inherently subversive, since in
mingling genres and styles instead of keeping them separate, these films choose
heterogeneity over homogeneity, contamination over purity. Further, as these
films embrace incongruity and incidents that “just come out of nowhere,” they
verge on disorder and chaos. They may be regarded as not just disorienting, but
as destructive and nihilistic . . . unsettling, disorderly, and absurdist aspects of
hybrid cinema faithfully reflect as well as influence contemporary life. (Jaffe 6)
Jaffe does not mention Shakespeare at all, but the descriptions of indeterminate tone mingling comedy and death-consciousness, the latent potential for
adaptation into different genres, and the proximity of the serious and the parodic are reminiscent of Hamlet and the diverse perceptions it has provoked
and movies it has inspired.
Cinema has been chosen here for extended treatment for several reasons,
three in particular. First, the history of cinema is coterminous with the duration of those twentieth-century literature and art movements explicitly
described in some sense or another as avant-garde. Rebellious visual artists
created niches for themselves in abstraction, futurism, constructivism, abstract expressionism—all declaring their impulse toward radical experimentation—and film as a medium, new at the time, encompassing the visual
and auditory, was chosen by some avant-garde artists to express their unique
visions. As a corollary, the more radical films in turn came to influence the
mainstream. Second, cinema is a problematic medium in terms of its relation
to aesthetic, industrial, and political issues, to the extent that Shakespeare
can be an uneasy presence. One end of the spectrum celebrates cinema’s populist and demotic roots, while at the other end we find defiantly independent
and unorthodox practice by auteurs, individualists, and loners who reject
conventions, flout formal constraints, and defy generic expectations. Film as
a medium has always reflected the full creative spectrum, and its diversity of
evolving technology encourages this plenitude, ranging as it does from cheap
138 • Chapter Six
handheld equipment and amateur actors to feature films with star actors and
budgets in the millions. Third, Shakespearean adaptation has always mirrored these very tensions between popular and esoteric, traditional and countercultural, reactionary and revolutionary, conventional and iconoclastic.
These tensions are especially evident in adaptations of Hamlet, as I hope to
show. We might also add the obvious point that, for many people, movies are
their initial and sometimes only mode of acquaintance with Shakespeare’s
plays, perhaps alongside studying the texts at school or university.
Film is a particularly interesting medium in terms of genre considerations
and avant-garde priorities, deserving its own space, since by its nature it
stands at a kind of cultural crossroads between the old and the new, the
conservative and progressive, live theater and the replayable moving image. Adaptation of a time-honored classic of drama or literature into a new
medium creates conditions for exploiting and incorporating simultaneously
the populist and the traditional, the experimental and the conformist, the
normative and the abnormal, closet or cult and box-office parameters. Such
ambivalence inhabits the medium and, from its origins in the 1890s, both
respectability and innovation were conferred by Shakespeare’s plays themselves, since they were used both to give legitimacy to the new entertainment
medium and to break new ground in its development. An individual film
may well be an eclectic fusion of conventional styles used as a vehicle to
present radical attitudes, or it may equally be made in an experimental style
presenting an essentially conservative message. In this formulation lies one
of the many defining contradictions unique to Hamlet.
The story told here is one of constant generic transformation and displacement. An apparently representative example of Elizabethan tragedy, which
had been influenced by the classical example of Seneca and the dramatic
theories of Aristotle and based upon earlier narrative sources, is repeatedly
adapted into other genres, to the extent of challenging the concept of fixed
genre altogether. Theorists of adaptation study have not fully explored these
dimensions. As Simone Murray has pointed out, explorations into the nature
of adaptation have been limited by older assumptions about the importance
or otherwise of fidelity to the source text, which does not centrally concern
me here. Her approach is equally peripheral to my purposes, the modern
industry of appropriation with its various stakeholder institutions and agencies in the chain of creating and distributing movies. Closer to my interests
(though still not identical) are those critics who base their analysis of adaptation on some kind of organic metaphor. H. R. Coursen was one of the first to
employ the word “offshoots” to describe films consciously derived to a greater
or lesser extent from Shakespeare’s plays even when they are not explicitly
On Screen • 139
announced as adaptations. Julie Sanders speaks of subgroups of “adaptation
and appropriation . . . which deploy a source text as a creative springboard
for another, often wholly different, text.” She adds to the springboard an image like Coursen’s from nature, “The rootstock is conjoined to a new textual
form, or scion,” before changing her terminology to the drier “adaptive relationship between hypotext (original) and hypertext (recreation)” (Sanders
55). These descriptions go part of the way toward describing my enterprise
here, except that, once again, I return to genre as the primary concern, along
with where its presuppositions and fracturings may lead us, rather than the
minutiae, strategies, and enterprise of adaptation as a process.
To summarize the earlier sections of this book, Hamlet both is and is not
avant-garde, or rather it can be regarded as avant-garde in its central concerns but need not be read or performed in this way. Self-evidently, it is a play
that has often been reduced to a narrative formula that can then be absorbed
into dominant culture and made so recognizable that it can be parodied and
used in advertising for products like cigars, beer, and orange drink. However,
this kind of cultural appropriation is at the expense of the play’s own core
of radical experimentation. The process of turning it into a traditional or
conventional (albeit contemporary) work is one that involves suppressing
many of the challenges inherent in the original, forcing it instead to conform
to media paradigms operating at the particular time of performance. There
are obviously hundreds of performances and many films that tame the play’s
artistic subversiveness, turning it sometimes into a much-loved but toothless
classic of drama, to be treated with reverence rather than a spirit of experimentation. But this chapter will not focus on these. Instead, we shall look
at some of the movies that take up the challenge set by the play, respecting
and adapting its experimental modes into new idioms, making it “ever-now,”
“ever-new.”
Given the focus of this section upon processes of adapting the text of
Hamlet into film genres that are regarded equally as texts, my concentration is not on film itself as a specialized medium. Theorists and historians of
cinema will obviously have different things to say by way of specific analysis
of such filmic considerations as mise-en-scène and the use of distinctively cinematic techniques. One stimulating example that does address such concerns
is Courtney Lehmann’s study, Shakespeare Remains: Theater to Film, Early
Modern to Postmodern. In tracing the origins of “hauntology” (the word we
have encountered from Derrida) in film theory’s analysis of auterism, Lehmann argues “that it begins in the seventeenth century with Hamlet.” She
reads the play “like a film,” showing its anticipation of cinematic techniques
such as montage, and she sees anticipation of cinema in the play’s habit of
140 • Chapter Six
“disrupting the ‘logico-temporal’ dimensions” of theater (Lehmann ch. 3).
In a way, Hamlet’s role can be interpreted as that of a director in something
close to the sense of the word as used by film theorists.
Modern film adaptations confirm that the experience of Hamlet is at best
undecidable in genre. The play obdurately defies coercion into neat categorization. Leaving aside for the moment the unique one-off versions, it is astonishing to note the range of different slots for feature films in a video library,
where we might find shreds and patches of Shakespeare’s text, whether of
the full text, episodes from it, spinoffs, or allusive references to its plot and
themes. Naturally, we will find some under “drama,” “tragedy,” “heritage,”
and “festival,” even “action,” which is ironic in light of the ongoing debate
about Hamlet’s supposed delay, but it is the other classifications (or resistance to classification) that are intriguing. In an observant and suggestive
essay on the issue of genre in film versions of Hamlet, Harry Keyishian points
out that more often than not the Shakespearean source needs to be adapted
to prevailing film genres:
When “Shakespeare” meets “The Movies,” two mighty entities converge. And
while Shakespeare’s texts are conceptually and linguistically powerful, and
carry with them a tremendous weight of critical commentary and literary/theatrical tradition, their force is matched, and perhaps exceeded, by the power
of film—its aesthetic, social and commercial power—to create and convey
meanings. (Keyishian, 2000 73)
One example he gives is the way in which Hamlet has been adapted using
film noir conventions, even in the apparently quintessential Shakespeare
movie, Olivier’s Hamlet. Following this logic, we can trace the presence of
Hamlet in the accepted film genres of even westerns and musicals, a phenomenon briefly mentioned below. But more prominent in this chapter are
films that significantly break conventional generic codes and boundaries to
create their own unruly, sometimes outlier, and even outlandish grouping,
representing the avant-garde.
Silent Movies
Many, perhaps all, films from the early days of cinema can be seen as accidentally avant-garde, since the medium was being explored and its resources
discovered for the first time. By definition, it was experimental, since filmmakers were feeling their way through the potential for illusionism offered by
the new and apparently magical technology. Obviously, those shot indoors
On Screen • 141
with a fixed camera on a tripod in front of a stage, with actors trained in
nineteenth-century styles, have lost whatever impact of freshness they may
have had for their original audiences, but others were more technologically
experimental and less conventional as the medium rapidly developed. The
camera was taken out of doors, for example, in the Vitagraph As You Like It
from the United States in 1912, and early cinematographers realized the ability of the camera to be switched off and back on at different points in time
to make people disappear and reappear, as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream
(1909). The close-up shot emerged to catch nuances of emotion—Werner
Krauss in the German feature film Othello (1922), perhaps beguiled by the
novelty of the technique, rather overuses it in his histrionic leering—alongside a variety of other stratagems that make films increasingly diverse in their
effects and even at times unnerving and disorienting (see Rothwell, 2000).
New ways had to be found to compress long stories into eight- or twelveminute reels and to imply a narrative thread using mainly images rather
than words. The imprimatur of Shakespeare was used to dignify the downmarket cinematic medium in its infancy, and filmed versions of his plays
accompanied the technical innovations (see Ball). His plays as commodities
were paradoxically situated as traditional and conservative yet modern and
cutting-edge—an ambiguous role that in many ways they have continued to
play to the present day. In the Italian Cines production of Amleto, the new
medium itself becomes a source of self-reflective illusionism, since Hamlet’s
father shows him a projected film that depicts the circumstances of his murder (Buchanan 80). The 1907 German film, with Georges Méliès in the lead
role, may have been the first to give the play a modern setting, in this case
being filmed in the Ruhr coal mining area, according to the Internet Movie
Database.
Ever since these early films, there have been other unintentionally avantgarde adaptations as the technology became more sophisticated, many of
which will be mentioned later in my discussion. They are brief, cheap, and
obscure. Generally speaking, however, full-length feature films are less likely
to be uncompromisingly experimental, since on such a scale producing a
film is so expensive that few producers would risk millions on works that
are likely to be appreciated by only a handful among audiences. Occasionally, a subversive or challenging movie, initially made on a modest budget,
unexpectedly attracts a cult following, but these are rare. Nonetheless, some
more ambitious feature films do retain an aesthetic or political connection
with avant-garde concerns, even though the links will usually be submerged
or obscured in order not to deter a potentially mass audience. This chapter
deals with movies that, even if not great box-office successes or expected to
142 • Chapter Six
be popular, did have sufficiently large budgets to require significant returns
on the investment to cover costs. This factor in itself constrains directors
and producers who have experimental and avant-garde credentials from fully
following their radical instincts, and it forces a degree of formal conformity to
familiar movie genre and style conventions. In other words, there is a built-in
tendency toward the conventional even where the intention is more experimental, and often we find avant-garde elements in an otherwise generically
straightforward movie. The films in this section demonstrate a tension between radical intentions and often conservative practices, thus mirroring in
a fascinatingly intrinsic way the central ambiguity I am tracing in Hamlet and
its appropriations, between the poles of audacious novelty and safe familiarity. Each realization lies somewhere on a spectrum between the two.
Asta Nielsen as Hamlet (1920)
Often described as “bizarre,” the 1920 German film of Hamlet starring Asta
Nielsen has now gained cult status. It was entirely the choice of Nielsen
herself to make it in the way it appears, since this was the first film she
chose to make when she formed her own production company. Even apart
from the novelty of the medium itself, this film was made under the influence of an avant-garde art movement of the time, German expressionism.
One of the contemporary criticisms made was that Nielsen’s performance
was “over-intellectual” and there was a “conspicuous modernity” about the
film as a whole that is still visible (Buchanan 229; Thompson). One of the
progressive aspects of the film is the acting style of Nielsen. She was among
the first to realize that the medium of film, even in its silent form, required
a different, more naturalistic style of acting than had been a staple on the
stage. The camera, with its abilities to probe facial expressions through
close-ups and to be moved around so as to focus on different visual details,
demanded more attention to fleeting peripheral images that would either
go unnoticed or be distracting on the stage but could, in the new medium,
establish mood and suggest nuanced interpretations. As Kenneth Rothwell
has shown, Shakespeare, through the intimacy of his soliloquies, played a
part in the early cinematic development of the close-up (Rothwell, 2000),
and Nielsen fully exploited the power of the device. Her face is remarkably malleable and expressive, her eyes large and intense, often described
by reviewers as “haunted” and “dreamy,” ready-made for close-ups and “iris
fades,” with her capacity to depict with subtlety a range of moods. Her body
is presented as androgynous, and her role mirrors social movements toward
liberation of women in the flapper age at the beginning of the 1920s. There
On Screen • 143
is certainly a suggestion of sexual ambivalence as pronounced as Rosalind’s
in As You Like It, and in this sense the casting is no more provocative than
that of a boy actor playing a woman in Shakespeare’s day. Another actress
who was regarded in a similarly ambiguous light was Greta Garbo, who is
said to have claimed that Nielsen taught her all she knew about film acting;
there is a similar intensity in both. Those around Nielsen in this film act
in the manner common to the nineteenth-century stage, so that whatever
the intended effect might be, there is an overlay of broad melodrama that is
incongruous beside Nielsen’s style—though, for all we know, audiences in
the 1920s might well have found her the more difficult to accept because
of her uniqueness in not following acting conventions. The discrepancy is
especially noticeable in the actors playing Gertrude and Claudius. They are
clearly trained in a style more conventional for their times, marked by rolling
eyes and histrionic gestures, for example when Claudius accepts the crown.
Their style is less naturalistic and to our eyes less effective in film terms than
Nielsen’s, whose style, although it too would be markedly out of place today,
is a step toward more modern film acting. Unlike her co-characters, she
heeds Hamlet’s advice to the players as he rails against theatrical “fashion”:
Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the
tongue; but if you mouth it as many of your players do, I had as lief the towncrier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus,
but use all gently; for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, whirlwind
of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it
smoothness. O, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated
fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings,
who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb-shows
and noise. I would have such a fellow whipped for o’erdoing Termagant. It
out-Herods Herod. Pray you avoid it. (3.2.1–14)
However, in contrast to the conditions on Hamlet’s stage, these actors had
to achieve whatever effects they aimed at with images alone and a modicum
of intertitles. Within these limitations, what is remarkable is the emotional
range of Nielsen’s acting through her facial gestures, swinging rapidly from
grief to rage and hilarity, and in this sense she provides a genuine interpretation of the multidimensional nature of Shakespeare’s character. Her Hamlet
is not mad but devious and exaggerates the character’s open contempt for
Claudius and Polonius, whose scenes are played with broad farce.
The most obviously provocative decision was to cast a woman in the lead
role. There had been a history of female actors being cast as Hamlet (Howard, 2007 ch. 7), dating from Sarah Siddons in 1775 through Eleonora Duse
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and Sarah Bernhardt (1899), who played the role several times in England,
Europe, and America, and who was even captured on film in 1900. She
positively preferred playing men because she saw the roles as more complex,
interesting, and demanding than those conventionally allotted to women.
Audiences and reviewers were not unanimous in their admiration. Nielsen’s
own justification was more challenging, since she felt that a young man did
not have the “understanding and maturity of mind” to play the role, whereas
a woman did. Such cross-dressing for the most famous male role on the stage
has always carried an element of daring and taboo, which in itself raises the
deeper questions about gender and sexuality that often provide themes for
avant-garde cinema and theater: “Crossing boundaries, contesting convention, disrupting or reflecting the dominant sexual politics, this regendering of
Hamlet has involved repeated investigations into the nature of subjectivity,
articulacy, and action—investigations with radically different consequences
depending on the cultural situation” (Howard, 2007 1). As Lisa S. Starks
points out in a psychoanalytically informed essay, the woman disguised
as a man is used as a vehicle for exploring a “painful yearning to express
her hidden identity” and “the ghostly trace of the uncanny, the return of
the repressed” in the film, which “challenges dominant notions of gender
and war while exploring desire, repression, and memory” (Starks 192-93).
However, the political, social, and psychological significance of gender have
been endlessly reformulated from generation to generation, and responses to
the periodical revivals of Nielsen’s portrayal are evidence of this, as well as
testament to an aspect of the “ever-now” status of its Shakespearean model.
The choice of Asta Nielsen (apart from her being Danish) to play Hamlet was astonishing in more ways than just her gender. She was famous not
only for her remarkable acting abilities but for the erotic and sexually forward roles she played, which were often censored. To have her play Hamlet
seemed at first sight nothing short of perverted. In practice, there are a few
vestiges of this reputation evident, among them the camera’s fascination
with her legs in tights. In the final scene over the dead body of Hamlet, a
cleavage is revealed, and Horatio, to his surprise, feels what he deduces is a
definitely female breast. The casting is justified by the decision to base the
plot on a peculiar book published in 1881, The Mystery of Hamlet by Edward
P. Vining, who is named in the credits. Beginning with what he perceives as
Hamlet’s odd behavior, Vining’s explanation is that “he” is in fact a woman
in disguise, making Nielsen’s role doubly complex and rather different from
that of a female actor playing a male character. She is more like Rosalind
in As You Like It. Horatio then becomes an object of Hamlet’s romantic
attention, and although all this might seem strange to our eyes, the gender
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reversals and homosexual and lesbian overtones anticipate the deluge of recent critical approaches that focus on gender issues in Hamlet and in Shakespeare generally (see Rose). The transvestism in the film accounts at least
for Hamlet’s coldness toward Ophelia and capitalizes on the companionship
of Horatio, who makes Hamlet jealous when Ophelia pays romantic attention to him. Hamlet is deemed to be in love with Horatio, and a homosexual
attachment between the two is more than hinted at. Likewise, Fortinbras
embraces Hamlet with what seems like more than brotherly enthusiasm,
perhaps made by an impetuous actor who is seizing his chance of embracing
a famous actress before it disappears. Another radical change is that Gertrude
rather than Claudius is chosen to be the one who conspires, and she is driven
by a dynastic desire to keep the throne in her family by suppressing the fact
that her child is female, bringing Hamlet up as though “she” were a man.
At the very least, the dominance of female agency in the film would have
made it seem avant-garde in its time, and the permutations playing on gender
identity and some filmic effects make it still seem so today. The production
has been analyzed by Charles Marowitz, who was identified in his time as an
underground experimental actor and director whose own free adaptations
of Shakespeare are routinely described as “provocative.” Even without the
unusual premises of the plot, understanding this version of Hamlet, with its
German intertitles in Gothic script, is akin to the stage audience in Shakespeare’s play deciphering the story and significance of the inexplicable dumbshow directed by Hamlet as part of The Murder of Gonzago. At the same time,
as Samuel Crowl points out, the director Svend Gade shows “a willingness to
let visual details tell the story” (Crowl 6). There is a repeated, unforgettable
vignette of a pit of vipers, one of which is used by Claudius to kill Hamlet’s
father, while the final scenes are remarkable in moving from an atmosphere
of drunken tipsiness to nightmarish smoke in a dizzying, terrifying vision of
chaos. Such moments would be powerful and expressive at any moment in
cinematic history. It is a major film and an intriguing interpretation of Hamlet, enhancing some of the psychological mysteries and fragmented narrative
confusions in Shakespeare’s original.
Olivier’s Hamlet
Laurence Olivier’s version of Hamlet (1948) has been mentioned already
for having been influenced by popular Freudianism, an interest not quite so
daringly avant-garde by the 1940s, since by then Freud’s works were widely
available in English through Penguin Books. They were popularized also
in many films noirs in the 1940s. Nonetheless, the movie’s experimental
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qualities, both as film and as an interpretation of the play, are often overlooked because it has become so familiar itself, and indeed it is often regarded
as synonymous with the play. It is a test case of the classic actor and text
meeting the modern and intellectually voguish style. It was, perhaps unexpectedly, a great success, winning Academy Awards, and it was one of the
earliest to be accompanied by a handsome promotional volume about the
making of the movie. Famously, Olivier opens with a quotation, Hamlet
speaking to Horatio, printed on screen and spoken over and shortened. The
result is to suggest a psychological approach:
So, oft it chances in particular men
That through some vicious mole of nature in them,
By the o’ergrowth of some complexion
Oft breaking down the pales and forts of reason,
Or by some habit grown too much; that these men—
Carrying, I say, the stamp of one defect,
Their virtues else—be they as pure as grace,
Shall in the general censure take corruption
From that particular fault. (cf. 1.4.23–36)
The quotation, which in context is informed by Elizabethan theories of humors and the passions and by Aristotelian notions of tragedy as the fall of a
great man, is recontextualized into Freudian concepts of behavior driven by
psychological repressions and needs. There follows the famous interpolation,
“this is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind,” a phrase that
must have had some political overtones in 1948, in the nature of a ghost
reminding war-weary audiences of the appeasement policies by Chamberlain
that many thought were the cause of Hitler’s international adventurism:
“Remember me” (1.5.91), these words would have suggested. But they also
create a reading of a man afflicted by psychological paralysis and in need of a
good analyst. We might also question the underlying motivations of Olivier
himself, who was forty, in casting Eileen Herlie, twenty-eight, as his mother,
especially in light of the overt eroticism in scenes between them. The oedipal
connection between mother and son was the central Freudian element in
the interpretation, following the leads in chapter 5 of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) and Ernest Jones’s essay “The Oedipus-Complex as
an Explanation of Hamlet’s Mystery: A Study in Motive,” published in The
American Journal of Psychiatry (January 1910). He later wrote “The Problem
of Hamlet and Ophelia and the Oedipus-Complex” as an introduction to
Hamlet by William Shakespeare with a Psycho-analytical Study, in 1947. The
collaboration dated back to the production at the Old Vic in 1936–1937,
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starring Olivier and directed by Tyrone Guthrie, in which Jones’s ideas were
incorporated. This was a production that traveled under tempestuous and
remarkable circumstances to Elsinore Castle or, rather, the Marienlyst Ballroom in Denmark (Gaines 1998).
However, it is not only as a Freudian interpretation but in cinematic terms
that Olivier’s movie stamps its avant-garde credentials. Among other accolades, it deserves a place among the greatest British arthouse films noirs, a
generic amalgam that, once again, allows a prevailing high-culture aesthetic
(Shakespeare) to intersect with a popular mode usually equated with thrillers
and gangster movies. (I have elsewhere dealt with the influence of Hamlet
in films noirs and crime movies of the 1940s [White, 2012 111–44].) The
ever-moving camera seems to have a mysterious identity of its own as both
“I” and “eye,” as if it were the visual equivalent of a soliloquy, simultaneously
enhancing the sense of a psychologically intense exploration of the human
mind and heightening the suspense and mystery that drive a whodunit. The
choice to film in black and white, even though color was ubiquitous at the
time, enables effects of chiaroscuro and deep focus and special effects of
swirling fog, which become the visual symbols of murkily shifting emotional
states. As the camera tracks endless corridors and stairways, architectural
peaks and troughs, glimpsing occasional passing figures, the effect is one
of following the processes of the mind caught in self-exploration. Epithets
like “brooding” and “haunted” recurred as reviewers sought to describe the
way the film captures “the play’s unique, enigmatic mixture of emotional
turbulence and intellectual austerity” (Rafferty), and the effects are created
by technical as well as thematic preoccupations. Images are used to underpin
the Freudian approach. It is a true collaboration between Olivier as artistic
director and Desmond Dickinson, the director of photography. As an informed review by Michael Jacobson of the Criterion re-issued DVD puts it:
The camera itself becomes like an ominous character, with its deliberate,
consistent moves within unfolding scenes, constantly changing the points of
view within single shots. It makes the viewer feel like a stalker haunting this
troubled family, and adds to the sense of foreshadowing. . . . He chose to focus
on the internal conflicts that drove and molded the leading character: how
he goes from melancholy prince to dark avenger over the course of the tale.
A proverb variously attributed to either Aesop or Apuleius, “familiarity
breeds contempt,” a phrase that we half expect to have first been used in
Hamlet and later to have been applied to it, might explain why Olivier’s version is not praised nowadays as much as it deserves. Branagh’s version quotes
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fulsomely from it, but more usually the version is seen as ripe for parody.
However, viewed with an open mind, this film is, like the play, “ever-now,”
“ever-new,” showing signs of avant-garde experimentation in both its approach and its cinematic techniques.
Grigori Kozintsev (1964)
Grigori Kozintsev was, in his early career, a self-proclaimed exponent of
eccentricism and a member of the Factory of the Eccentric Actor (FEKS),
which was positioned in Russian aesthetics as an avant-garde movement
incorporating aspects of futurism and constructivism. A contemporary theater director in the same group, Nikolai Akimov, had in 1932 directed an
experimental stage version of Hamlet that presented Ophelia as an inebriated
prostitute, among other radical moves, such as turning the Ghost into a ventriloquial effect created by Hamlet. He was drawing on the development in
1915–1930 of Soviet montage, which claimed cinema as a form of abstract
art. Although Kozintsev’s involvement with avant-garde theater was well before he made the film of Hamlet in 1964, his commitment to radical positions
and to making Shakespeare’s plays topical, in the sense of speaking to and for
the times in which they were performed, remained firm. The Director’s Diary
he wrote from 1953 onward repeats the point many times: “Hamlet interests
me mainly by its proportion and conformity with contemporary life. . . . The
tragedy must be played in sixteenth-century costume but must be dealt with
as a modern story” (Kozintsev 237; see also 211-–76).
Kozintsev’s films are avant-garde not through technical disruptions of the
medium or fragmenting of the narrative or playing with gender roles as in
Nielsen’s film, but in a more political sense. Although Marxists have perennially quarreled with artists believing in art for art’s sake, regarding them
as deploying bourgeois images without a social, political, or realistic purpose, the groups often share common ground. Both socialism and cultural
anarchism position themselves against top-down politics and repressive
authority in general. Both groups have characteristically been active under
regimes of dictatorship, as explained by Eric Hobsbawm, a Marxist historian
who is also addicted to jazz. He points out that socialists and avant-garde
artists converged in their interests in the pioneering period 1880–1914,
then diverged over the aesthetic issue of modernism but found each other
again, quite passionately, under the impact of the rise of fascism and the
approach of war. There is no necessary or logical connection between the
two phenomena, since the assumption that what is revolutionary in the arts
must also be revolutionary in politics, or the other way around, is based on
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a semantic confusion of the various senses of the term “revolutionary” or of
analogous terms. On the other hand, there is or was frequently an existential connection, since socialists—Marxist, anarchist, or other kinds—and
the artistic and cultural avant-garde were both outsiders, opposed to and
by bourgeois orthodoxy. We might also mention the youth, and quite
often relative poverty, of many members of the avant-garde and bohème
(Hobsbawm 171–72).
Avant-garde movements themselves have usually existed as politically
oppositional and resistant to the authority assumed by prevailing regimes
and systems. In the case of a film made in Soviet Russia soon after the death
of Stalin in the 1960s, some degree of subterfuge and encoding was required
to avoid censorship. Just as Shakespeare himself, in writing his plays, dealt
with controversial and inflammatory issues like succession to the throne
and state repression by distancing them into a safely historical frame, so
does Kozintsev’s Hamlet display the same adroitly strategic skills. To make
the fit even tighter, the play itself deals with exactly the problems faced by
Kozintsev while working under the Soviet system, since Hamlet is mired
in the spying, the corrupt machinations, problems of political succession,
and attempted assassination that characterize the secretive and murky state
machinery in Denmark under King Claudius. “Something is rotten in the
state of Denmark” (1.4.90) is understood in political terms, and Hamlet feels
responsible for dismantling corruption while using strategies to remain under
cover himself, with fingers on his lips to ensure discretion:
Let us go in together.
And still your fingers on your lips, I pray.
The time is out of joint. O cursed spite,
That ever I was born to set it right. (2.1.194–97)
It is clear from Kozintsev’s notebooks that he felt this level of the play was
relevant to his own times—“For Hamlet, there must be sequences that show
the sinister power of the state” (Kozintsev 236)—and he could see that those
who become tools of the state are often not in themselves evil but moderate
collaborators: “Polonius, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern are by no means
villains. They are not even evil people. The horror is that they are ordinary
people, moderately reasonable, moderately honest, moderately kind” (Kozintsev 219). The apparently innocuous decision to film a respectable and
time-honored old play is used as a political act and contemporary statement,
and Hamlet becomes a vehicle for subversion. This version provides the prototype for many others to follow.
150 • Chapter Six
In filming Hamlet, Kozintsev chose not to use an academically sanctioned
Russian script but instead the free translation by Boris Pasternak, whose
novel Doctor Zhivago had been condemned by officials. He had himself been
denied freedom to accept the Nobel Prize in literature around the same time
that Kozintsev was producing his stage version of Hamlet in 1956. Dmitri
Shostakovich, a composer who to this day is regarded as musically progressive and experimental, was chosen to contribute the film’s music, which is
undoubtedly magnificent and won awards. In such artistic choices, Kozintsev
pinned his colors to the radical edge of artists in his own times. Even the
young man’s choice as a student of drama to work on Hamlet from the time
of his apprenticeship days in FEKS, when he intended to rework the play
as a pantomime (Kozintsev 211), was politically charged, as was his later
production, since Stalin disapproved of the play for its violation of social
realism and its material, which he considered potentially critical of the state
machinery.
The context in which Kozintsev worked on his film version not only explains the topicality that he strived to achieve but also proved a challenge
to his own political independence. Mark Sokolyansky explains that the
years 1963–1964 marked in Russia a transitional period of post-Stalin thaw
under Khrushchev, when many prisoners of conscience were released from
concentration camps, but this apparent new liberalism did not extend to dismantling a state apparatus that was to remain institutionally repressive, particularly in its continued reliance on secret police so feared by the populace.
Although Stalin was being officially discredited, the institutions of secret
police and official surveillance remained in place. Sokolyansky explains how
this context informed the film’s conception:
Kozintsev felt the play’s topicality keenly and defined the dominant theme
of his film very clearly. “Conscience is the main theme of our age,” he wrote
in his notebook, and identified the theme in his favourite tragedy. As for the
central character, the director apprehended him as a man who can “say No”
to all kinds of lie. But the revealing of falsehood in social order and human
relations appeared also to be a kind of struggle. In other words, Hamlet’s frank
non-conformism was interpreted by Kozintsev as resistance by the person “who
gave too much vent to his mind.” (Sokolyansky, 2000 199–201)
Politically as well as artistically, Kozintsev refused the temptation to make
an academic production, writing that “Shakespeare needs a kind of new,
individual interpretation. Every new generation creates a new aspect of this
character. A new aspect of history, the spirit of poetry, the sense of humanity, should be modern and absolutely lifelike for audiences today.” At the
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same time, this insistence on topicality was not, at least primarily, intended
to appeal to a mass audience in populist fashion but instead to a nonconformist intelligentsia that could recognize deeper and more questioning
strains in Hamlet’s persona and in the state of Elsinore. Even the portrayal
of Hamlet as an intellectual, a philosopher resisting the politics of his day,
however justified in the text it may seem to us, was a political decision made
by Kozintsev, in that it subtly questioned the basis of Soviet state collectivism. It also eschewed the Lukacsian party line position among critics who
saw Hamlet from a social realist perspective as a representative of an effete,
corrupt aristocracy whose power was based on indiscriminate slaughter. This
interpretation, based partly on a literal reading of Gertrude’s motherly and
indulgent assessment of her dueling son as “fat and scant of breath” (5.2.290),
was the one that Brecht in East Germany seemed to voice in his poem “On
Shakespeare’s Play Hamlet,” describing the character as “puffy and inert,”
an “introspective sponger” tainted by a mental “virus” (Willett, 1976 311).
In Kozintsev’s treatment, the “To be, or not to be” soliloquy takes on a
directly political significance, showing the protagonist not so much contemplating suicide as wrestling with the decision whether to rebel against
an unjust system—“Th’oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely”
(3.1.71)—or continue to “hold [his] tongue” (1.2.159) and take the secrets
of corruption to his grave. By judiciously cutting the speech and contextualizing it, this version subtly alters the familiar concentration on suicide, making the effect of the soliloquy more directly political. In fact, throughout the
film, many references to Christianity are deleted, not only as a concession to
the public atheism of Soviet Russia but, more important, to redirect attention to secular issues of corruption in public life. Similarly, great emphasis
is placed on the various uses of the word “honest” in the play and also on
Hamlet’s claim to political authority in his own right:
Hamlet: Sir, I lack advancement.
Rosencrantz: How can that be, when you have the voice of the King himself for
your succession in Denmark?
Hamlet: Ay, sir, but while the grass grows—the proverb is something musty.
(2.2.331–35)
A similar emphasis in the same scene is placed upon Hamlet’s realization
that he is being spied upon and “craftily” manipulated:
Hamlet: I do not well understand that. Will you play upon this pipe?
Guilderstern: My lord, I cannot.
Hamlet: I pray you.
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Guildenstern: Believe me, I cannot.
Hamlet: I do beseech you.
Guildenstern: I know no touch of it, my lord.
Hamlet: It is as easy as lying. Govern these ventages with your fingers and
thumb, give it breath with your mouth, and it will discourse most eloquent
music. Look you, these are the stops.
Guildenstern: But these cannot I command to any utterance of harmony. I have
not the skill.
Hamlet: Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me. You would
play upon me, you would seem to know my stops, you would pluck out the
heart of my mystery, you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of
my compass; and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ, yet
cannot you make it speak. ’Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on
than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you fret me, you cannot
play upon me. (3.2.341–63)
Alongside this direct challenge to state spies, we see affairs of state, such
as preparations for war in Denmark, Fortinbras’ belligerent approach across
Poland as interpreted by a pacifist Hamlet, the assassination plot against
Hamlet when he is sent to England with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern,
Laertes’s open rebellion with a troop of armed soldiers, and Claudius’s calculated manipulation of Laertes to deflect his aggression toward Hamlet. All
are shown in visual detail by Kozintsev as more evidence of his interest in
the political “hugger-mugger” dominating both Denmark and Soviet Russia.
These kinds of issues are often downplayed in orthodox Western performances of the play and regarded as mere background context rather than crucial to the play’s design. Kozintsev’s choices of what to highlight and what to
cut make it difficult to see this Hamlet as representing existential or religious
crises besetting a humanist subject; instead, they portray a man trapped in a
deadly political situation. Even appeals to lingering superstition are erased,
since there is no Ghost visible to the audience when Hamlet confronts his
mother in the bedroom, and the issue of madness is fairly rationally treated
since Hamlet is consistently “mad in craft” (3.4.190), adopting an evasive
stratagem rather than manifesting insanity. Ophelia, however, is mad “in
deed,” and her plight as another victim of the situation is shown with graphic
poignancy. Each time she appears, she is framed as in a cage, mirroring her
own caged bird in the scene where she was introduced. The line of imagery
built around Hamlet’s line “Denmark’s a prison” (2.2.243) starts wordlessly
from the opening scene, where the surging sea gives way to Hamlet’s return
on horseback entering the castle, followed by the moat being drawn up and
the toothed portcullis descending. It does not relent during the film (Crowl
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49). Kozintsev was to repeat a similar thematically and politically significant opening sequence later in his King Lear (1971), as hundreds of beggars
struggle up the hill toward the armed fortress of a royal court.
Kozintsev’s Hamlet is a great film in its own right, since it respects the medium of cinema itself. He readily accepted Pasternak’s advice—“In general,
dispose of the text with complete freedom; it is your right”—recognizing that
a film can present a “silent, or laconic equivalent to these lines of the drama”
(Kozintsev 215). Kozintsev based the “cinematographic poetry,” as Bernice
Kliman describes it (Kliman 87), on visual images of the four elements. The
sea washes constantly around the cliffs of Elsinore, cued by lines in the play
such as “The ocean, overpeering of his list” (4.5.99), “Whether in sea or fire,
in earth or air” (1.1.158), “take arms against a sea of troubles” (3.1.59), and,
most graphically, Horatio’s warning to Hamlet:
What if it tempt you toward the flood, my lord,
Or to the dreadful summit of the cliff
That beetles o’er his base into the sea,
And there assume some other horrible form
Which might deprive your sovereignty of reason
And draw you into madness? Think of it.
The very place puts toys of desperation,
Without more motive, into every brain
That looks so many fathoms to the sea
And hears it roar beneath. (1.4.69–78)
The scene in which the Ghost and, by contrast, a diminutive Hamlet are
stalking each other and silhouetted against the battlements and sky is an unforgettable and haunting filmic image, comparable with gothic scenes using
chiaroscuro in German expressionist masterpieces still hailed as examples of
the avant-garde, such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), Nosferatu (1922),
and M (1931). Most pertinently, Kozintsev in this film opens up a general
reading of the play that fundamentally takes account of a political situation,
and in this he created a model for many other filmmakers to follow.
Kadin Hamlet (1976)
Variously known as Intikam Melegi, Kadin Hamlet, The Female Hamlet, and
The Angel of Vengeance, this Turkish film was directed by Metin Erksan, a
former art student and film critic for journals who became known as an enfant
terrible of the social realist and National Cinema movements. His reputation
grew for films demonstrating a social conscience, though for political reasons
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he was gradually compelled to work with more commercial intentions in
mind. In the West, this film readily attracted epithets like “weird,” “quirky,”
and “unique” (though these admittedly come from random amateur reviews
plucked from the internet), a consequence of casting Hamlet as a woman
but also no doubt because of unfamiliar Turkish film conventions and
styles. This impression is misleading, since it is essentially a straightforward
rendition of Hamlet set in a different national context. As we saw in the
case of Asta Nielsen, the gender change of the hero-heroine, played here
by the striking Fatma Girik, who later became a politician and the mayor
of Istanbul, had precedents dating back to the eighteenth century. Here,
however, it is more extensive, since the Ophelia character becomes a man,
Orhan, the gardener’s son, who is a gentle painter, while Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern are women, Rezzan and Gul. Hamlet retains the same name,
since it is not gender-specific in Turkish. Modern-dress productions are
obviously not uncommon, but here the clothes are eclectic and bizarre, to
the extent that most viewers would accept them as avant-garde. The movie
was hailed and decorated in the Soviet Union, nominated for the Tenth
Moscow International Film Festival, and was no doubt partially inspired by
Kozintsev’s version, which was highly influential in the Arab world. Some
parts of the musical score are again by Shostakovich, other parts by Turkish
composers. The movie is valuably contextualized in a 1976 article by Gülşen
Sayin, “Shakespeare in Turkish Cinema: A Cultural Transfer from Hamlet to
The Angel of Vengeance” (Sayin 17–37), which follows a brief account of the
reception of Shakespeare in Turkey and a survey of the director’s work, with
an illuminating, critical account of the film itself.
Kadin Hamlet condenses the text—for example, by eliminating the
impending invasion by Fortinbras and limiting the role of Ophelia—but
otherwise the basic storyline is relatively similar to the play’s. It starts with
the killing of the old King Hamlet by his brother, carried out with a rifle
rather than poison, anticipating an ending where the various deaths are also
by shooting rather than with rapiers. By being given “ocular proof” of the
initial murder, viewers are left with no doubt that, when the Ghost enters
swathed in gusts of dry ice, he is telling the truth. Someone more knowledgeable than I am in Islamic law, customs, and language would no doubt know
if conscious reference to jihad is made, but the concept would surely fit the
revenge undertaken by Hamlet, as does the emphasis placed by the alternate
title, The Angel of Vengeance. The old king’s gravestone is inscribed “Ahmet
Evren 1920–1975,” which sets the action in the exact present when the film
was made. After the murder, we see the sequence of funeral and then wedding feast in quick and brief succession, played outdoors in glorious color, as
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is most of the action, and watched at a distance by a baleful Hamlet home
from her studies in the United States to attend the funeral. Leaning against
a tree, she wears a white suit, striped shirt, and red tie, carrying sartorially on
her sleeve an air of nontraditional, westernized cosmopolitanism. Throughout, the wardrobe worn by the female Hamlet ranges from extremely stylish
and elegant suits to increasingly outlandish outfits, as madness overtakes her.
She takes part in The Murder of Gonzago dressed in atsuita, a wide garment
reminiscent of the Japanese Noh costume, in this case embellished with
black-and-white skulls. Once again, since we know the truth of the murder, the function of the play-within-the-play is not so much to test Kasim’s
(Claudius’s) guilt but an opportunity for Hamlet to show the usurping king
that she knows of the murder and to flush out behavior that will reveal his
guilt to others. It is presented as tuluat, a Turkish form of improvised drama
associated with youthful rebellion (Sayin 33–34), in keeping with the intention behind Hamlet’s presentation. Initially a musical comedy, it increasingly
becomes more serious and sinister to the stage audience, rather like the ominous concert in Bob Fosse’s Cabaret (1972). Hamlet’s developing madness
seems more real than feigned and resembles some kind of defiant but traumatized mental state. She sets herself up outside with very strange props, feigning an orchestra conductor at one point; surrounded by propped-up musical
instruments without musicians, she conducts loudly amplified music. Later,
she enters wearing a retro military band uniform and playing the trumpet,
and then dressed as a medieval avenging knight, lolling in nightwear on a
bed—still out in a field. Another time, she stands in prison garb within an
erected cage, no doubt owing its origin to the phrase “Denmark’s a prison”
(2.2.243). The “To be, or not to be” speech is changed to “To be insane or
not to be insane.” All this is seen as strange behavior not only by the besuited, bureaucratic Claudius and Polonius figures and her elegant mother
but also by the movie viewer.
The mise-en-scène is surrealistic at some times and deliberately risible at
others. Hamlet, Rezzan, and Gul appear on the beach wearing bikinis,though
given the gender changes there is nothing inherently incongruous about this.
Other touches of imagery are allusive but functional: at the turning point of
the plot, and echoing Hamlet at this stage, a bird is shot in flight, recalling
the fatalism in Shakespeare’s words:
Hamlet: Not a whit. We defy augury. There is special providence in the fall of
a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if
it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. Since no man, of aught he
leaves, knows aught, what is’t to leave betimes? Let be. (5.2.215–20)
156 • Chapter Six
It is an example of the economy that film can achieve in allowing a brief
image to represent a sentiment delivered lengthily in words in the text.
The ending echoes the beginning. The Laertes figure, incited by the king to
avenge his father’s and brother’s deaths, has a gun battle with Hamlet, and
the spectacular white flowing dress that the latter wears becomes drenched
in blood. The king accidentally shoots his wife, mistaking her in the woods
for Hamlet. Despite the alarming amount of blood, Hamlet does not die until
she has in turn shot the king dead. The visual presentation reminds us that
this is the way the uncle had killed his brother, returning us to the beginning
of the film and neatly resolving and closing the revenge plot. Hamlet dies
avenged, bloody, and wild-eyed.
How functional is the decision to cast the central character as female
in this case? Sayin confirms that the director is not making a feminist film
on the representation or status of women in Turkey. However, the article
stresses that the primary genre of the film is family melodrama, which was
“popular among women audiences in small towns and slum areas of big cities” and in which a woman as central consciousness is generically appropriate. This is suggestive, since it allows the movie to emphasize the side of
Shakespeare’s Hamlet that makes it a fable of family dynamics rather than
Kozintsev’s portrayal of national and political destiny. For example, Hamlet’s
mother, Gonul, seems to be portrayed as an aging woman who feels in competition with her daughter, dressing just as fashionably and youthfully—a
tension that would not operate between mother and son in the same way. It
is a kind of female-to-female equivalent of Freud’s oedipal complex. Hamlet
herself is no tortured intellectual but extravagantly performative—her subject of study is drama, and she continually “acts” in all senses of the word
rather than brooding introspectively. Since she has no doubt of the murder,
from the beginning she is freed from self-doubt, and she unequivocally takes
up the cause of revenge while also flamboyantly opting out of the corrupt
moneyed class into which she was born. No doubt closer knowledge of Turkey’s language, family conventions, and cinema history would reveal more
nuanced understandings of the film’s subtexts, but, since it proclaims itself
as an adaptation of the English Hamlet, it emerges as one of the stranger
examples of the company the play attracts and keeps in international avantgarde culture.
Celestino Coronado (1976)
Celestino Coronado’s Hamlet (1976) was filmed when the director was a
student at the Royal College of Art in London, and it shows a radicalism
On Screen • 157
that would never desert him as a director. A young Helen Mirren plays both
Gertrude and a sexually knowing Ophelia; Hamlet and Laertes are played by
the twins David and Antony Meyer to indicate the double-sidedness of both
characters; while a sinister, monocled, and mincing Quentin Crisp plays Polonius, always balefully watching over in voyeuristic fashion. “Avant-garde”
is decidedly the right word for this production, in the sense that it was ahead
of its time—indeed, so far ahead that its time will never come in terms of
popular appreciation. It will surely remain “caviar to the general.”
Coronado was to gather around himself a group of favored actors as fellow
spirits in his uniquely individual auteur films, which continue to reach out
to an admittedly limited audience of appreciative cult followers. Stylistically,
Coronado applies his own characteristic use of the circling and constantly
roving camera, involving extreme close-ups on eyes and superimposing
one face onto another as means of dissolving notions of stable identity. He
employs visually confronting tactics, such as the nakedness of the Ghost,
and incongruous montage images such as a bloody hand, all fitted to words
that come straightforwardly if selectively from Shakespeare’s play: “This
is the very coinage of your brain. / This bodiless creation ecstasy / Is very
cunning in” (3.4.139–41). They are disruptive techniques typical of earlier
avant-garde movies and, in some cases, direct visual quotations from them,
for example Cocteau’s films. Coronado, even in this early and experimental
film, already reveals, and revels in, elements that will recur in his few other
films. The palette of colors—pinks, greens, and flesh tints—came to be used
later in the gorgeous and joyously high-camp version of A Midsummer Night’s
Dream (1985), starring Lindsay Kemp and Jack Birkett (The Incredible Orlando).
Although the film is initially confusing, it is not difficult to see where in
Shakespeare’s play Coronado found germs for his ideas. The twinnings are
based first on the shifts of mood in Hamlet, which suggest he has at least two
identities—for example, in treating Ophelia affectionately one minute and
angrily the next:
Hamlet: I did love you once.
Ophelia: Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so.
Hamlet: You should not have believed me; for virtue cannot so inoculate our old
stock but we shall relish of it. I loved you not.
Ophelia: I was the more deceived. (3.1.115–20)
Similar techniques literalize the ideas of a soliloquy as a communing with
self, of multiple personalities, or of madness as specifically schizophrenia
158 • Chapter Six
and hearing voices. The device can uncover parallels between Laertes and
Hamlet, both sons whose fathers are murdered and who equally acquire responsibility for revenge. Doubling of roles such as Ophelia’s and Gertrude’s
highlights Hamlet’s equal fascination and disgust for both female characters,
as part of a more general misogynism in the play’s world, as well as an opportunity for homosexual readings. More generally, such twists of casting are
fitted to a play that par excellence deconstructs ideas of reliable appearances
in a world where all can “seem” one thing while “being” another:
Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not ‘seems.’
’Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,
Nor customary suits of solemn black,
Nor windy suspiration of forc’d breath,
No, nor the fruitful river in the eye,
Nor the dejected ’haviour of the visage,
Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief,
That can denote me truly. These indeed seem,
For they are actions that a man might play:
But I have that within which passes show,
These but the trappings and the suits of woe. (1.2.76–86)
The phrase “actions that a man might play” is obviously relevant in a work of
drama, and the metathearical references in Hamlet are used by Coronado to
legitimize such fracturings of actors’ roles, as well as rendering problematical
any notions of consistent characterization or gender. The narrative itself is
also violently disrupted, repetitive, even in its shortened sixty-five minutes,
and dreamlike to the extent that it would be impossible to follow without
knowing the play in advance. It pushes the bounds of cinema as well as of
Hamlet, and it has been variously described by the few critics who have
commented on it as surrealistic, expressionist, “post-modernist,” and “poststructuralist” (Rothwell, 1999 202). However, Coronado’s version defies
such categorization and remains sui generis, curiously proving that not only
does Hamlet inspire avant-garde artists but also that they in turn may be best
equipped to reveal some of the more hidden secrets of the play.
Withnail and I (1985)
Barbara Everett, in her essay “Young Hamlet,” concentrates on the fact
that, at least up until the gravediggers’ scene, Hamlet is little more than an
adolescent in age (Everett). She sees as centrally significant the fact that the
hero starts off the play as a student at the University of Wittenberg, one who
On Screen • 159
can be seen as a typical undergraduate who is predominantly cerebral and assumes the freedom to speak his mind and sow wild oats: “Hamlet’s dangerous
subversive humor—which is neither madness nor sanity, but a denial of the
authority of the society that holds him—permanently defines a freedom and
impotence of the young” (Everett 22). By the end of the play, he is thirty,
no longer young, implicated in dark and treacherous adult business indeed,
and he knows there is a death threat on his head: “for Hamlet, ‘growing up’
is also growing dead” (Everett 33). Unlike Prince Hal, another Shakespearean character who is curiously comparable to Hamlet, instead of assuming
kingship in his maturity (except for a matter of seconds), he is murdered.
The comparison between the two is suggestive, since both are depicted as
young and each defines himself in relation to a father figure, in one case
Henry IV, in the other the dead King Hamlet, and also a surrogate father,
Falstaff and Claudius, respectively, both of whom must be rejected to reaffirm the authentic father. In Hal’s case, the father has been a target for filial
rebellion but one who is finally embraced before he dies, while in Hamlet’s
case the true father returns as a ghost from the grave to assert his paternal
legitimacy. Shakespeare’s ambiguity over the conflict between sons and true/
false fathers interested not only Freud but also, for example, Gus van Sant,
the director of My Own Private Idaho (1991), a film that shows obvious traces
of both plays, though it is based mainly on the two parts of Henry IV. Two
movies in particular reflect the reading of Hamlet as a young man rebelling,
the British Withnail and I and the American version of Hamlet directed by
Michael Almereyda. In their rather different ways, they deal with aspects of
avant-garde cultural attitudes (Lanier, 2002) without being experimental in
a cinematically technical way.
Withnail and I (1985) has become a cult film for students, with its setting
in the kind of self-professed bohemian lifestyle that holds the amalgam of
hedonism and worldly failure that Everett describes as “the freedom and
impotence of the young.” The two main characters, Withnail (Richard E.
Grant) and “I” (Paul McGann), who is named Marwood in the (unpublished) source novel by Bruce Robinson, are out-of-work actors who have
recently been to drama school. In the film’s historical present in 1969, they
live in a disgustingly neglected flat in Camden Town, London, surviving
on drugs, cigarettes, alcohol, and coffee drunk from a soup bowl. In order
to escape the depressing urban surroundings and the boredom of waiting for
jobs, they travel to Penrith in the Lake District and stay in a cottage belonging to Withnail’s wealthy, obese, and openly gay Uncle Monty (Richard
Griffiths). Monty, Montague H. Withnail, is a wealthier and older version
of his nephew, a Falstaffian and parodic surrogate father figure, and his tastes
160 • Chapter Six
are aesthetically alternative rather than mainstream or conventional. He
enthusiastically quotes Baudelaire, regrets lost opportunities in his student
days at Harrow and Oxford, drinks expensive French vintage wine as excessively as Withnail drinks anything alcoholic (even lighter fluid), and lives
in a plush flat in Chelsea surrounded by extremely valuable paintings and
furniture and sculptures reflecting his homosexuality. As an aging amateur
thespian himself, he is now regretful that he “will never play the Dane,” to
which Withnail replies, “It’s a part I intend to play, uncle!,” which he does
go on to do, in unexpected ways.
The sojourn in the north has typical pastoral aspects, except that the
weather is dreadful, they are surrounded not by romantic shepherds but by
dotty locals, and they are chased by a randy bull. Uncle Monty unexpectedly
turns up in the middle of the night, equally randy, and pursues “I,” mistakenly thinking him Withnail’s rejected homosexual partner. Finally, the
young men flee back to London. At the end, “I” rebels against the codependence of the relationship and, now dressed respectably, regretfully leaves a
distraught Withnail to undertake an acting commission—another buried allusion to Hal’s relinquishing the companionship of Falstaff when he ascends
the throne. If nothing else, this modest, winsome film, with its gentle black
humor, joins the two Shakespearean characters in a series of unexpected
parallels in ways no critic has done.
Withnail, who had earlier announced himself to be “thirty in a month,”
like Hamlet by the graveside, spends the last few minutes of the movie (mis)
quoting Hamlet to an audience of two quite moldy, hangdog, indifferent
wolves behind bars at Regent’s Park Zoo:
I have of late—but wherefore I know not—lost all my mirth . . . and indeed
it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems
to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this
brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why,
it appeareth nothing [sic] to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculties [sic]! . . . how like an angel in apprehension! how like a god! the beauty
of the world! . . . paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence
of dust? man delights not me: no, nor women [sic] neither, nor women neither.
He walks off disconsolately in the rain. In the novel on which the film is
based, Withnail commits suicide. However, the important placing of Hamlet’s speech, although fulfilling Withnail’s prophecy to his uncle that he will
play “the Dane,” sums up the kind of melancholic, existential ennui based on
On Screen • 161
a spiritless sense of vacuity that afflicts Hamlet (at the time of the play when
the quotation occurs) and provides Withnail and I its dominant tone of bleak
comedy. Aaron Kelly and David Salter, in a critical analysis linking the two
works, movingly evoke the mixed mood of the film, comic and melancholic,
“decidedly bittersweet in nature”:
Withnail is certainly a brilliant comic creation, but his is a comedy of frustration, stagnation, inertia, and ultimately of failure . . . alongside the strongly
celebratory element . . . there is also a powerful strain of sadness. . . . Hamlet
can be said to haunt Withnail and I . . . creating a tangible sense of disillusionment and melancholy. (Kelly and Salter 100)
They also use another of Hamlet’s phrases, “The time is out of joint”
(1.5.196), to explore the sociopolitical significance of the film, set in 1969
but made in the 1980s, as an affectionate critique of the youthfully dissident counterculture of the 1960s, likening the hindsight view to Hamlet’s nostalgia for his father’s reign, which has given way to a Denmark
of “repression and entrapment” in Thatcher’s Britain of 1985, after the
miners’ strike. Derek Jarman’s The Tempest was historically positioned in
a comparably reflective and dismayed way, at the juncture of two cultural
moments, celebratory and repressive. Made in 1979, the year that Margaret
Thatcher rose to power, seeing as her mission to dismantle any remaining
vestiges of youth rebellion in Britain, Jarman’s Tempest escapes into a highly
aestheticized escapist version of “stormy weather” rather than confronting
the moment. However, the contemporary impulse behind it seems similar to
the one behind Withnail and I. In the terms I have used here, such a viewpoint also opens up a mingling of fond and amused attachment to youthful
avant-garde values, alongside darker and self-destructive elements within
them that emerge through dawning adult disillusionment. The “submerged
resonance” of Hamlet in the film extends to other touches, such as the fact
that Shakespeare’s play gives a vignette of the insecure life of the traveling players, who might just as well be this film’s out-of-work actors, living
hand-to-mouth in domestic squalor. The movie derives inspiration from,
and provides an interpretive gloss on, one strand in Shakespeare’s play—a
distinctive mood of its hero, which mingles idealism of youth with worldlywise cynicism and something approaching despair. With its emphatic placement as a paradoxically anticlimactic climax, the resigned quotation from
Hamlet gives a retrospective signal that Shakespeare’s play, or at least one
of its distinctive tones, is the dominant source and raison d’être behind this
distinctly odd but winning movie.
162 • Chapter Six
Hamlet Goes Business (1987)
The Finnish Hamlet Goes Business is hybrid in genre—a pastiche or even
parody of Hamlet set in the modern corporate world, a revival of film noir,
a satire on big business from a socialist point of view, and a black comedy
with disconcerting elements. It may have been a source for Almereyda’s film.
Although difficult to access, enough of its scenes can be viewed on YouTube
to give an impression of the film as a whole. A comprehensive critical account has been published by Melissa M. Croteau, and a briefer one by Tony
Howard (2002). The film portrays Hamlet as lazy, rich, and unlikable, heartless in all his dealings, not only with Ophelia, who commits suicide by taking
sleeping tablets and sliding into her overflowing bath. Hamlet’s coldness is
conspicuous even in his laconic exchange with the ghost of his father, the
director of a Finnish company that sells, among other things, rubber ducks
and is under takeover siege by a Swedish corporation:
Ghost: I have a low opinion of you, but I believe you loved your father enough
to avenge his murder.
Hamlet: Murder?
Ghost: Of course, you fool. The inquest was a farce, only good for the doctor’s
bank balance.
Hamlet: Get on with it. I’m cold and I don’t want to be late for dinner.
Ghost: You seem eager. Morning comes. I must return to hell before dawn. Just
do as I say.
The characterization becomes significant for the plot, since we discover that
it was in fact Hamlet himself who poisoned his father in order to get control
of the company. In a further, unexpected turnabout, the last scene shows
Hamlet being poisoned by his apparently loyal but “depressed” chauffeur,
Simo, described by Croteau as a “proletarian hero,” who now takes over the
executive’s chair. Croteau’s conclusion may be overoptimistic: “They have
all been released from the evil threat and oppression of the capitalist thugs of
the corporation.” On the contrary, there seems no reason to doubt that the
power struggles and corporate wars will go on. Anticipating the versions by
Almereyda and the Derry Initiative, Hamlet Goes Business is set in a world of
technological dominance over human feelings, freedom, and choice, though
the devices are not so much the mobile phones and electronic surveillance
techniques of the twenty-first century, but rather things like phone bugs,
closed-circuit television, an audiotape machine, and a jukebox. In a moment
of extreme black humor, the character approximating the role of Laertes is
shot, and is seen in his death throes with a radio jammed on his head, still
On Screen • 163
playing music. It is a clever film, in many ways comparable in style and tone
to the Coen brothers’ The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001), in which equally
random “accidental judgments” rule people’s lives and the bizarre becomes
almost commonplace. Like the other diverse and distinctively independent
movies canvassed in this chapter, Hamlet Goes Business provides a mutually
illuminating and enlivening comparison with Hamlet, leading us to meanings
in the play not always available through accounts by scholars and critics.
Let the Devil Wear Black (1999)
This independent film directed by Stacy Title lifts off Hamlet and identifies
itself as an offshoot by key plot elements. Using modern language and transposing the action into contemporary America, it is a challenging R-rated
movie. The title is taken from Hamlet’s inscrutable, sarcastic, and somehow
chilling words:
Hamlet: O God, your only jig-maker. What should a man do but be merry? For
look you how cheerfully my mother looks and my father died within’s two hours.
Ophelia: Nay,’tis twice two months, my lord.
Hamlet: So long? Nay then, let the devil wear black, for I’ll have a suit of sables.
O heavens, die two months ago and not forgotten yet! Then there’s hope a great
man’s memory may outlive his life half a year. (3.2.123–30)
In this film, it might be hard to appreciate the reasons for twists in the narrative and some of the references without knowing the play.
The words quoted above encapsulate the basic situation. Jack Lyne, a
doctoral student previously hospitalized for psychological problems, has lost
his father, apparently to a heart attack. He cannot get over his grief, visits
the grave at night, and repeatedly has flashbacks to his childhood idolization
of his father. Along with his mother, he has inherited his father’s business
empire running bars and strip clubs, but effective control over them is retained by the long-term administrator Sol Hirsch, who clearly fills the role
of Polonius. Jack’s bumptious uncle Carl, we gradually learn, has become
suspiciously intimate with Jack’s mother, bringing him conveniently close to
taking over the business once he has disposed of Jack. A mysterious presence,
wearing the recognizable black shoes of his father, informs Jack that he is his
father and was killed by his brother, Carl. On learning that his father’s heart
pill was substituted with adrenaline, which would have killed him, Jack finds
the ghostly tipoff confirmed, and the action moves toward its inevitable end.
There are many equally clear analogies with Hamlet, such as his girlfriend,
164 • Chapter Six
Julia, who fills the bill as “demented” Ophelia and eventually steps in front of
traffic; his two friends designated to kill him but who are themselves “Hoist
with their own petard” (3.4.209); the scene in the bedroom between mother
and son; and many others. A prominent addition consists of two shady plainclothes policemen who act as ambivalent saviors for Jack, some kind of dei ex
machina though not competent enough to save him at the end.
Bruce Wyse, in a clever and detailed analysis of the film’s relation to
Hamlet, begins by making the point that is central to this book, that the
source play itself is generically “multifarious.” He suggests that the film is
likewise marked by “generic hybridity or heterogeneity” in “a stylish, knowingly eccentric amalgam of film genres” (Wyse 244). However, in suggesting
the different genres that he finds in Let the Devil Wear Black, Wyse might
(Polonius-like?) overdo it: “satire, parody, and burlesque,” a montage shifting
between “the road movie, the neo-noir thriller, the televisual murder mystery, the mobster film, the soap opera, social satire, black comedy, and the
ghost story” (Wyse 244); “occult thriller, even a horror film” (and more); and
generally permeated by a “carnivalesque and ludic” spirit. While not denying that there are elements of Wyse’s taxonomy here and there, I feel that
it may be overingenious as an overall characterization and that some of the
effects are momentary rather than sustained. In particular, words like “carnivalesque” and the emphasis on satire and parody seem to misrepresent the
film’s generic makeup that, although mixed, also creates a reasonably unified
impression. Once again, the points relate as much to Hamlet with its unity in
apparent disunity, and its potential for translation into an array of different
genres. In this case, we are in the moody and gritty atmosphere of corporate
neo-noir, and the touches of heightened grotesquery, sexuality, and subdued
violence are consistent with this. Furthermore, the most succinct way of describing the effect is to invoke the only genre that Wyse does not mention—
the avant-garde—though his descriptors, such as “a whole-scale postmodern
transformation” (Wyse 241), suggest this lies behind his general analysis of
the film’s relation to Hamlet. Wyse’s analysis is peppered with phrases such
as “an homage and a travesty,” “opaque,” “irreverent and impertinent,” “frequently half-baked, banal, bizarrely contrived, and baffling,” “outrageous,
often hilarious indecorum,” “the outlandishness, incomprehensibility, or
mind-blowing weirdness of it all,” and so on. Most pertinent in this spirit,
Wyse describes the film as exhibiting “subversion, inversion of cultural
authority” (Wyse 254), and summarizes it finally as “a seriously ‘fucked up’
Hamlet” (Wyse 260). However, The Devil Wears Black is not so chaotically
fragmented that it is incomprehensible at the level of plot and characterization. It seems more an exercise in creating a dominant atmosphere that has
On Screen • 165
been associated also with the revenge tragedies that came at the same time
as Hamlet, an air of “horrid laughter” (Brooke 1979), undoubtedly a mixed
effect and drawing on different genres, but in itself holding a consistency
that might even be described as one of many “Hamlet effects,” the one most
associated with film noir.
Michael Almereyda (2000)
It may be coincidence, or an example of intersource, that the Hamlet directed
by Michael Almereyda (2000) begins with the very speech that Withnail and
I ends on, recited by Hamlet (Ethan Hawke) as he watches his own face on
a computer, superimposed over images of skeletal figures and scenes of war.
Almereyda, whose most successful film to date has been Hamlet, is referred to
sometimes as an avant-garde and, more frequently, a postmodern filmmaker.
He clearly follows the line of Hamlet as the adolescent rebel. Living through
the computer, his human interactions are few and invariably abrasive. Even
if this film, in technique and style, is not presented as visually experimental,
the issues it deals with are self-consciously contemporary, critical of social
conservatism, politically antiauthoritarian, and countercultural. In its concentration on communications technology, as Thomas Cartelli and Katharine Rowe suggest, “The media allegory in Almereyda’s Hamlet focuses on
technologies of memory, particularly the ways that film and video mediate
the past” (Cartelli and Rowe 59).
Almereyda’s is the American version of “Hamlet as student.” Heir to
the Denmark Corporation based in the Elsinore Hotel in New York, he has
come back from school to attend his father’s funeral and the marriage of his
mother and uncle, now CEO of the corporation. True to the twenty-firstcentury moment, he is addicted to electronic devices and never without his
video camera, staying misanthropically in his room, which is festooned with
posters of rebellious writers and political revolutionaries like Che Guevara.
Holding a gun against his head, he records the “To be, or not to be” soliloquy
on video, which he then plays back. His girlfriend, Ophelia, is a photographer, equally enmeshed in a world of digital simulacra equivalent to Hamlet’s
computers and video cameras. She is an equally disaffected teenager, played
by Julia Stiles, who later starred in The Prince and Me (2004), a film in which
her character also falls in love with the Prince of Denmark, though this time
the character seems to have little connection with Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
She is depicted in Almereyda’s Hamlet as the depressed and misunderstood
teenage daughter of an overworked single father. Her portrayal is perhaps
based on Marianne Faithfull’s performance in Tony Richardson’s film
166 • Chapter Six
(1970), which is described by Coursen as “brilliant,” with Ophelia “played
as a subversive force undermining the smooth regime of Anthony Hopkins’s
Claudius” (Coursen 61). Like Hamlet, she is a victim of “the gaze” of omnipresent spycams and treated as a potential threat to the efficient running of
the Elsinore Corporation. It may be an open question whether the reliance
of Hamlet and Ophelia on technologies of representation is “emancipatory”
and empowering, as Mark Thornton Burnett suggests (Burnett, 2006 38), or
merely an alternative and ineffectual strategy of seeking to escape the mirroring destructiveness of the corporate state.
The story needs no retelling here, since despite its contemporary setting
and recognizably twenty-first-century roles, with Hamlet as a media student
while Ophelia studies art, it is in essence a straightforward version of the play
transported into contemporary Manhattan. It is clearly designed to capitalize
on the stunning commercial success of Romeo and Juliet, which had appeared
four years earlier. Just as Baz Luhrmann turned the Montagues and Capulets
into rival corporations in modern America, so this film makes Claudius the
CEO of the Denmark Corporation in Manhattan. Michael Anderegg sums
up the film’s attempt to be a cutting-edge contemporary experience, describing it, if not as avant-garde, again as postmodern:
Almereyda’s Hamlet exhibits all of the “tics” of postmodernity: the mise en
abime of images within images, including “quotations” from other Shakespeare
films; allusions to cultural icons, high and low (John Gielgud, James Dean);
an eclectic score that cites Brahms and Tchaikovsky as well as Bob Dylan and
Morcheeba; and, in general, a deliberate and conscious self-referentiality that
puts everything into quotes, including, especially, Shakespeare himself. This is
a Shakespeare “After Mass Media.” (Anderegg 178)
Many other critics have used “postmodern” to describe it (for example, Sanders, 2005 54–55), and the references to popular teenage culture in the 2000s
are evident in almost every shot. Scenes move from the multistoried modern
hotel with its New York skyline and indoor pool (one of many explicit references to Luhrmann’s film), a night club, and a video library where Hamlet
wanders up and down the new releases aisle, meditating upon his own situation through Shakespeare’s words. All these are interspersed with the imagery
of surveillance of personal lives that enables spying and deprives everybody of
privacy. Samuel Crowl, like Anderegg, speaks of the film’s “postmodern aesthetic” and, in particular, he describes Hamlet’s obsessive activity of moviemaking as that of “an amateur filmmaker absorbed with making a home movie
of his emotional angst and dysfunctional family” (Crowl 142–44).
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However, a different point that might be made is that the play-withinthe-play presented by Hamlet, predictably in film form rather than staged, is
stylistically unlike the rest of the movie. It is a consciously fragmented recollection of older movies that are placed beside juxtaposed montage images
and abstract patterns, all metacinematic references directly reminiscent of
avant-garde films from the period 1920–1940. Even the fact that it is shot in
black and white makes the comparison clear, as does its fragmentation, upon
which the audience—Claudius as much as we—needs to impose a concept
in order to construct a narrative from it. Apart from this insert, the ideology
driving Almereyda’s film is clear, rejecting the values of big business with
its obsessive spying upon socially isolated and potentially disruptive youths.
More generally, it shows two students rebelling against parental authority
and a world fashioned to coerce and enforce docility. It is Romeo + Juliet with
a twist, and angled toward an audience who shares the demography of the
young characters, teasing out some unexpected territory between two plays
that are usually seen as so different and rarely considered together as plays of
rebellious youth.
The Derry Film Initiative (2005)
The Derry Film Initiative’s Hamlet, starring and directed by Steven Cavanagh, is another twenty-first-century version, this time located firmly in
the context of Northern Ireland’s politics. Even though the language is
entirely Shakespeare’s, though sometimes delivered in Irish Gaelic, no attempt is made to make it look or feel like an Elizabethan adaptation. The
mode of distribution is unusually democratic, since it has been made freely
available on the internet, while the technology is palpably low budget and
lacks the trappings and trimmings of commercial film studios. This in itself
makes several political points, especially since the society it reveals is nothing if not controlled and driven by electronic devices. The film begins in
a sense at the end, with a voice-over by Horatio—“What is it you would
see? / If aught of woe or wonder, cease your search” (5.2.367–68)—speaking
instead of “carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts” (5.2.386), then showing an
ominous helicopter hovering overhead. It returns to the opening of the play
as Bernardo, in modern military garb, describes the visitation of the Ghost,
and we see a swiveling security camera that, with the helicopter, heralds the
insistent theme of this interpretation: a police state that depends on surveillance of its citizens, highlighting Claudius’s description “lawful espials, / . . .
seeing unseen” (3.1.32–33). A handheld black-and-white camera, semidarkness lit by flashlights, and rapidly switching montage images all highlight
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the film’s low budget and enhance the air of realism and documentary presentation. Media references abound, especially news commentary. Reporters
and cameramen record the opening speech by Claudius, a dapperly dressed,
bespectacled politician, alongside a smiling Gertrude. Then the voice of the
young Hamlet, “seeing unseen” for much of the action, comes over, expressing bitter skepticism at the sanctimonious press conference: “O God, a beast
that wants discourse of reason / Would have mourn’d longer” (1.2.150–51).
Some vestiges of textuality are used, such as a close-up of the image of a page
of what is presumably the First Folio, zooming in on the word “Treason.”
When we come to the players’ visit, the action takes place on a darkened,
bare stage—“The play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the
King” (2.2.600–601)—and there are no distractions.
Spying is ubiquitous, and even a moment of intimacy between Hamlet
and Ophelia before the “nunnery” speech is overseen by a camera as well as
by the hidden overseer. The political level is highlighted throughout, and
the identifiable location in Londonderry gives a nuance more politically
loaded than usual to the king’s “quick determination” that Hamlet “shall
with speed to England” (3.1.171). In a twist echoing Hamlet’s comments on
the affective acting of the role of Hecuba, the first scene of the play-withinthe-play, backed with the serenity of music from Bach’s “Sheep May Safely
Graze,” is presented so as to evoke the feeling of genuine tenderness and
love between the Player Queen and her first husband, one of the very few
moments in the film of unguarded innocence. However, as the usurper pours
poison in the ear of the king, an explosion of footage from hidden cameras
erupts on screen, suggesting that the state of surveillance was initiated after
the murder by Claudius. Ironically, his “confession” and plea for forgiveness
in soliloquy comes in the toilet, filmed from above by a security camera presumably installed on his orders, giving a partially comic flavor to his line “O,
my offence is rank, it smells to heaven” (3.3.36) as he flushes the cistern. In
the scene in Gertrude’s bedroom, Hamlet kills Polonius with a pistol rather
than a rapier, another decision to erase most traces of early modern imagery
in an effort to set the play in contemporary times, as is the choice to show
the deranged Ophelia in a psychiatric hospital bed.
Generally speaking in the film, the language, including occasional Irish,
is delivered with low-key naturalness. The way Laertes is insidiously manipulated by Claudius, in the context of the Northern Ireland situation, reflects
the politicization of a younger generation, incensed to avenge the wrongs
done to their fathers, a mirror image of Hamlet’s own situation. In a startling
scene after Ophelia’s burial, we see Hamlet in an alleyway shooting both
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern with the casual air of a terrorist slaying. In this
On Screen • 169
version, they are presented as unredeemable spies who “did make love to this
employment” (5.2.57). In the final scene, the duel is still with swords rather
than pistols, though an interspersed image shows Hamlet holding a gun beneath an Irish republican political symbol. Just as the first speech came from
the end of the play, the last is early in Shakespeare—“But look, the morn in
russet mantle clad” (1.1.171)—heard ironically over a scene of a blazing fire.
Everything about Cavanagh’s intense production is orchestrated to embed
it in contemporary political issues in a specific, notoriously troubled place.
Hamlet represents the Catholic republican cause, doomed to be thwarted as
the party of historical legitimacy by a usurper whose status is as tainted as the
foreign invader Fortinbras. Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be” speech is spoken
in Irish rather than English. As Mark Thornton Burnett suggests in a perceptive essay on the film as adaptation, the portmanteau name Londonderry,
pointing east toward England and south toward Eire, embodies the religious
and political conflict (Burnett, 2006 46). Furthermore, I would suggest that
there is a parallel—perhaps even the source—in Shakespeare’s reference in
Hamlet to Wittenberg, which, as we have seen, was known to the Elizabethans as both the cradle of Luther’s Protestant Reformation and the former
home of Doctor Faustus. In both cases, a geographical place is a symbol of
divided loyalties and also, very suggestively to both Hamlet and the Northern
Ireland situation, a site where the sins and the ghosts of the past bear upon
a present turmoil, requiring the repeated injunction to remember and to
avenge. Meanwhile, as Burnett repeatedly points out, the main characteristic
of Derry/Elsinore lies in its sophisticated and sinister state surveillance, using
hidden cameras, circling helicopters, heat-seeking technology, and all the
rest of the paraphernalia that might denote the political side of the postmodern world more truly than any appeals to existential freedom.
Haider (2014)
Two more film adaptations of Hamlet deserve inclusion here, both products
of the great cinema industry in India. Eklavya: The Royal Guard (2007) is
a deservedly acclaimed arthouse movie directed by the celebrated Vidhu
Vinod Chopra, and it is a film that comes as close to an avant-garde aesthetic as the Indian film industry is likely to produce. It has been described
by reviewers as a version of Hamlet, but the relationship between the two
works is a complex matter of allusion and analogy rather than one-to-one
correspondences. At least equal in status as a source is the Indian epic The
Mahabharata. Eklavya splices the two in a creative fashion that brings to the
surface the mythlike status of Hamlet. The film’s opening words are “In the
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ancient times of the Mahabharata,” and almost immediately the opening line
of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18, with an emphasis on the transience of beauty, is
quoted: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” A contiguity between The
Mahabharata and Shakespeare is thus immediately established, and gradually
Hamlet is linked to the chain of references. The central character, Prince
Harshwardhan, or Harsh, early on quotes “the rest is silence” (5.2.363),
indicating an aspect of his literary heritage. A common thread of emphasis
reveals itself, dwelling upon the ways in which the past bears on the present
and the present bears on the future, in terms of personal destiny and filial
duty, the quality at the heart of the film’s philosophical core:
If your father learns that I’ve revealed this secret, he will believe I violated
our vow, I failed my dharma. My sacred duty. . . . Dharma is born from reason.
Dharma is born from intellect. It is what your heart, your mind feels is right.
Dharma is what your soul accepts as true and sacred. I have fulfilled my dharma.
Now son . . . you must fulfill yours.
The line spoken by Polonius, “This above all: to thine own self be true”
(1.3.78), seems to encapsulate an aspect of dharma, and although in the play
it is spoken platitudinously by an untrustworthy character, it could lead us
to make implicit comparisons with Hamlet’s duty to avenge. Unexpectedly,
Eklavya ends happily, with the protagonist reconciled with his true father
and his stepfather-uncle killed.
Because I have written at some length on this lyrical and impressive movie
elsewhere (White, 2012 147–61), I shall concentrate on the more recent
Haider, released in 2014. It is the third adaptation of a Shakespearean play
by the director Vishal Bhardwaj, following his successful Maqbool (Macbeth)
(2003) and Omkara (Othello) (2006). This powerful movie makes at least
three important contributions to the kinds of fresh perceptions avant-garde
cinema can offer about Hamlet: first, by applying its political plot to a current, unresolved international conflict involving at its core the twenty-first
century’s preoccupation with terrorism; second, by providing one of the most
searching and complex treatments of the relationship between mother and
son; and third, in portraying a remarkable twist in the ending that places the
central motif of revenge in a new light. (Those wishing to avoid a spoiler
should not read the paragraphs below dealing with the ending!) Although
there is much else to praise and explore in this movie, I shall focus on these
three aspects as significant to our ongoing exploration of how Hamlet can be
timely and new every time it is adapted.
The action is set in Jammu and Srinigar on the Indian-Pakistani border
in 1995, when there was a flare-up in the longstanding territorial dispute
On Screen • 171
dating back to 1947 before the Partition. I did not realize how current this
conflict still was until I visited Jammu in 2014 and read in newspapers that
there had been political assassinations and kidnappings in the area during
that week. For Western readers, the crucial element is that the southern
area is administered by India and northern Kashmir by Pakistan, but local
autonomy along the border is still contested both by armed insurgents and
by nonviolent Indian attempts to reform and defuse the issue, countered by
an equally peaceful protest movement from Kashmir. A particular source of
grievance for both sides has been the controversial historical involvement
of Indian military forces during the conflict, and they have been accused of
holding prisoners without trial and “disappearing” people suspected of sympathizing with the insurgency (claims that have been denied by the security
forces, though mass graves have been found). Since the rival claims are far
from resolved, Bhardwaj’s decision to set Haider in the midst of all this has
divided viewers, his film being hailed as courageous or criticized as a provocation. This is particularly so since he, an Indian citizen educated at a Hindu
college, makes it an assumption of his plot that the Indian military was guilty
of the charges leveled against it.
Before we know anything else, we are presented with a flashback of a
doctor, neutrally following the Hippocratic oath in operating on the leader
of a pro-separatist group who has appendicitis. In a military raid, the doctor
is taken for questioning and subsequently disappears, and his house is blown
up. Much later in the film, we discover that the doctor’s brother, Khurram,
was the police informant who incriminated him and led him to his fate,
which is being held in detention (concentration) camp, tortured, and finally
drowned in the Jhelum River in the Kasmir Valley, his body buried in the
graveyard in which the movie violently ends. Khurram takes up with the
doctor’s widow, they marry, and he wins an election on the deceitful claim
that he will uncover the mystery of his brother’s disappearance and seek
justice. Haider (Hamlet) returns from his university studies in revolutionary
poets of British India to try to find out about his father’s disappearance, and
the rest of Shakespeare’s narrative unfolds. Haider’s love interest is Arshia,
an investigative journalist whose father is the head of the military and from
whom she becomes increasingly estranged. A mysterious figure called Roohdar, who is either a freedom fighter or an insurgent, depending on one’s point
of view, approaches Haider through Arshia, offering news of Haider’s father
and likening himself to a ghost, or at least “the doctor’s soul.” The message
from Haider’s father is “revenge my murder.” The narrative proceeds with
surprisingly close correspondences to Hamlet, including brothers equating
to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern who intone a comic version of the “To be,
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or not to be” speech, “To go, or not to go?,” repeated with a more serious
tenor later by Haider as “To free or not to free Kashmir.” Haider is trained
as an armed insurgent, returns to avenge his father, kills Arshia’s father and
later her brother, feverishly recites politically satirical poetry in public in the
persona of a jester (the actor Shahid Kapoor was known mainly for comic
roles before this film), mounts a spectacular song-and-dance performance
to confront Khurram publicly with knowledge of his guilt, and is branded
as insane and incarcerated. Through all these events, although the Hamlet
analogies are clear, the immediate contemporary situations are so plausibly
depicted that we are more aware of the alarming dangers than the plot’s affinity to its literary source.
By common critical consent, the show is stolen by Haider’s mother,
Ghazala. This is not only because of Tabu’s extraordinary acting, but also because of the sheer complexity of the role, which goes far beyond Gertrude’s.
As a character, Shakespeare’s Gertrude is somehow straightforward (Bradley
even demeans her as “very dull and very shallow” [Bradley 167]) and, as a
dramatic personage, enigmatic and mysterious in the light of questions that
cannot be answered, as mentioned in Chapter 3. In Haider, she is less an
enigma, since most of the questions are answered, but more of a many-sided
character. Following Olivier’s lead, the actress is young to be Haider’s mother
(only eleven years older than Kapoor), in order to accentuate an erotic
component to the relationship that others, including Freud, have detected
in Shakespeare’s depiction and that leaves physical traces in the film. The relationship is marked by emotional codependency, latent incestuous feelings,
and love-hate ambivalence. The intensity of the mother’s grief is matched
by her son’s dual feelings of attachment and betrayal. More than this, and
perhaps more centrally, the character’s implication in the political plot is
inscribed in detail, since she had, admittedly unknowingly, “informed the
informer” of her first husband’s apparent harboring of a terrorist and is therefore partly responsible for his death. We are shown through flashbacks that
in Haider’s childhood she had threatened to kill herself in order to impose
her will on him, and this is spectacularly repeated at the end when, strapped
with terrorist bombs, she blows herself up after failing to persuade Haider to
surrender. The explosion blows off Khummar’s legs. Ghozala’s final gesture
is full of symbolic meaning, as she partially responds to a sense of guilt for
her past and also is responsible for the maiming of the man she now realizes
betrayed her first husband.
A clue to Haider’s compelling revision of the ending to Hamlet is revealed
by the fact that Bhardwaj chose to release his film on Gandhi’s birthday (October 2), a national holiday throughout India, and this gives an unmistakable
On Screen • 173
sign of a new interpretation of the bloody violence that concludes Hamlet.
Haider had been informed of his father’s wish that he avenge the betrayal by
shooting Khurram between the eyes, and up until the final seconds, in a spectacular and emotionally wrenching scene, this appears to be the inevitable
outcome. However, at the last minute, Haider recalls his mother’s words that
overlay his father’s “avenge me”—“revenge only begets revenge . . . revenge
does not set you free . . . freedom lies beyond revenge”—and he spares the life
of his stepfather, who is left in an agony of pain, guilt, and self-recrimination
for causing his brother’s death. This surely is the Gandhian way, suggesting
that conflict cannot be resolved by further deaths but only by some kind of
peaceful means, including hard-won and painful forgiveness. It is the movie’s
final advice to those perpetuating the Kashmir conflict and, more generally,
terrorism in the wider world, and the element of surprise in changing the
expected ending of the famous source play is crucially important to the effect.
The yellow explosions and fires and red blood spattered over the white snow
of the graveyard, strewn with bodies and body parts, epitomize something of
the clash between violence and pacifism that offers rival solutions to end the
cycle of revenge. Before the credits roll, we see, as a kind of epilogue, “In the
last two decades thousands of lives have been lost in the Kashmir conflict,”
followed by a message of hope in increasing tourism and the help of the Indian army in saving lives during recent devastating floods.
Genre Displacements
There are many other films in which Hamlet is defamiliarized by adaptation
into less obvious genres than ones like tragedy, murder mystery, or even
parody. Some emerge in versions akin to quite unexpected genres, while
even more are unclassifiable, reflecting something about the porous boundaries of the source text itself. Among westerns, for example, the earliest was
the American A Sage Brush Hamlet (1919), just forty minutes long but packing into its brief compass a surprising number of incidents from the play, all
turning on the hero’s mission to avenge his father’s murder. The Arizonian
(1935), again from the United States, this time directed by Charles Vidor,
opens with an impromptu performance of the Ghost scene in a saloon bar,
played by an actor who is understandably nervous in such a tense environment and made even more uncomfortable by some of the bar patrons
shooting their guns to intimidate him. The most famous among westerns
containing Hamlet references is My Darling Clementine (1948), directed by
John Ford, which culminates in the gunfight at the OK Corral. In the saloon,
a drunken actor forgets his significant line from the play—“to make cowards
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of us all” (cf. 3.1.83)—and Doc Holliday, refusing to show cowardice, takes
over. Although suffering from tuberculosis, he completes the speech in a fit
of desperate coughing. There are other, indebted, spaghetti westerns from
different countries: Johnny Hamlet (1968) from Italy and Dans La Poussiere
du Soleil or Lust in the Sun (1971) from France, which is a reasonably identifiable remake of Hamlet in the new context. In Un Uomo Chiamato Apocalisse
Joe or Apocalypse Joe (1971) from Spain and Italy, the hero is an actor who
shoots five men with a pistol he conceals behind Yorick’s skull in a performance of Hamlet. The Italian Quella Sporca Storia del West, known as Johnny
Hamlet (1968), shows a confederate general in the Civil War who returns
to the ranch to discover that his father has been murdered and his mother
remarried to his uncle. The presence of Hamlet in westerns is on the surface
unexpected if not inexplicable. Possible reasons include their shared motifs,
such as revenge for injustice in a lawless social environment and individual
hand-to-hand battle over succession to power. Both Hamlet and westerns
tend to hark back in different ways to a sense of grander times in the past,
presided over by the warlike dead king who ruled at a time free from such domestic intricacies such as intrafamily murder, intrigue, and sexual infidelity,
as in the western Jubal (1956), whose source is Othello. Often the allusions
simply trade on the familiarity of Shakespeare’s play to audiences, especially
college graduates in America.
Film noir is another generic receptacle for versions of Hamlet, most famously Olivier’s version of the play but also “corporate noir” like Kurosawa’s
The Bad Sleep Well (1960) and the earlier American movies Strange Illusion
(1945) and House of Strangers (1948), and I have written on these and others elsewhere (White, 2012). Because of the prominence of the Ghost in
the source text, these films also incorporate elements from Hamlet that have
proved ripe for adaptation into a ghost or horror story. The link is not only
the supernatural content, it also stems from a clue in what can be seen as
the Ghost prophetically describing the intended audience responses to this
genre, several centuries before midnight movies had been invented:
I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres,
Thy knotted and combined locks to part,
And each particular hair to stand an end
Like quills upon the fretful porpentine.
But this eternal blazon must not be
To ears of flesh and blood. (1.5.15–22)
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It is the classic statement of the intended affect of the horror genre. However, even if the similarities with the play may not run especially deep, the
examples among many others are further evidence of the play’s borderless,
unusually open form, in the term adopted by Umberto Eco, lending itself to
extension into many—potentially all—cinematic genres. The same point
emerges from the multitude of those films classified as comedies or black
comedies that are in some way indebted to Hamlet. Since most of the less obvious film adaptations are difficult to access or track down, in recording some
of these I am indebted to the British Universities Film and Video Council’s
catalogue, available online (see Bibliography), augmented by the Internet
Movie Database and the monumental two-volume Shakespeares After Shakespeare: An Encyclopedia of the Bard in Mass Media and Popular Culture edited
by Richard Burt. The internet is a continually expanding source, and I can
recommend the activity of whiling away a few interesting hours on YouTube
and Vimeo using “Hamlet” and “Ophelia” as search terms.
Adaptations into different genres date back to the earliest days of cinema
history, when genres were still emerging in a then experimental and new
medium, before it settled into familiar repertoires of groupings based on
the industry’s increasing marketing preference for genre movies. Among
comic silent movies, we get short reels such as the German Martin as Hamlet
(1914), running for eight minutes, in which the central character in Elizabethan costume begins rehearsing the role of Hamlet in an arcane language,
before being promptly whisked off to the police station under suspicion of
being mad. Madness is a motif that can be treated in a serious or comic
spirit, as appeared to be the case for Elizabethan dramatists themselves. In
When Hungry Hamlet Fled (1915), a melodramatic production of the play is
sabotaged by a young man who seems as mad as Hamlet himself. Incompetent or histrionic performances are considered more exclusively comic and
are accepted as fair game for lampooning in the early movies. In the British
Hamlet (1915), taking ten minutes, a series of real-life comical disasters occur
during the Mudford Amateur Dramatic Society’s production of the play. In
1916, there appeared more comedies, such as Freddy Versus Hamlet, To Be Or
Not To Be, and Hamlet Made Over, while in 1919 One Night Only (twenty
minutes) showed another disastrous performance by a traveling company.
Such comedies and parodies seem in part to reflect the uneasy and ambiguous
status of Shakespeare in the early history of film, an icon of high culture but
inviting affectionate mockery. Historically, they may also represent a kind of
power struggle waged by cinema as a medium claiming mimetic superiority
over stage practices, which by late Victorian times had come to be regarded
by contrast as outmoded in their overelaborate scenes and broad acting. An
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“antic disposition” of mockery is often adopted to satirize theatrical conventions, as though the early vanguard of cinema was conscious of a future role
in superseding traditional live theater—and Hamlet is drawn into the fray.
Yorick’s skull might stand as the endlessly ambiguous signifier of the play’s
capacity for comedy or tragedy exemplified in such early generically indeterminate or arbitrary filmic works.
This kind of ambivalence continued down through the history of film in
the twentieth century and is to be found in the many comedies related, in
sometimes minor ways, to Hamlet, again throwing concepts of genre into disarray. Probably the most famous is Ernst Lubitsch’s celebrated To Be or Not
to Be (1942), in which the repetition of the famous line acts as a signal for
a lovers’ rendezvous and precipitates comic consequences in Nazi-occupied
Poland. The title also suggests a different way of glossing the line from
Hamlet, since Lubitsch’s film plays constantly and humorously with disguise
and appearances of the actors in the Polish company. Whether one “is”
or “is not” becomes a matter of changeable identity rather than existence
itself. There is also a functional link drawn between the motif of revenge in
Hamlet and the Jew’s justification for revenge in The Merchant of Venice, an
especially sensitive issue in Hitler’s war. A film that was considered daring in
the 1960s but now looks dated, The Magic Christian (1969) showed Laurence
Harvey as a Shakespearean actor performing a striptease while reciting one of
Hamlet’s soliloquies. There may be some intertextual reference here to Pure
Hell in St Trinian’s (1960), in which a student does the same. Such examples
once again extract from the play a streak that might be dubbed “Yorick’s
perspective,” and even this absent but fondly remembered character had his
moment in the sun, when he was played by Woody Allen in Everything You
Always Wanted To Know About Sex but Were Afraid To Ask (1972) and, less
famously, in Yorick Revisited (1970), which was apparently an experimental
student film. The ceaseless taste for turning Hamlet into offbeat comedy in
films continues, as evidenced, for example, by the Italian Assassino e Quello
con le Scarpe Gialle (1995) or, in English, The Assassin Wore Yellow Shoes.
According to accounts, this is a comedy thriller involving a small theatrical
repertory company that replays a forgotten murder during rehearsals of the
play. Comedy and murder mystery are not uncommon as bedfellows in filmic
genres, and a part of the linking in this case is drawn through Hamlet.
More surprising even than its comic manifestations is the way in which
Hamlet has been incorporated or adapted into musical comedy. The British Melody and Romance (1937) contains an audition for a part featuring
the recitation of “To be, or not to be,” while Top of the Town (1937) is a
Manhattan musical, set in a ballroom on top of a skyscraper in which the
On Screen • 177
same speech is rendered, denuding it of serious import in roughly the way
condemned by Hamlet himself when speaking to the actors. Even if such
examples reflect a populism aimed at “barren spectators,” the filmmakers’
deliberate flouting of orthodox bounds of genre to which Hamlet could be
expected to conform is at times brashly abrasive, as the demotic form of the
musical asserts itself in open opposition to what is perceived as elitism in
what was dubbed legitimate theater. At other times, the references benignly
cash in on the transferred prestige of Shakespeare’s cultural associations. Red,
Hot and Blue (1949) features a condensed four-minute musical comedy version of Hamlet containing a gruesome but comical pastiche of the death of
Polonius. Both Dreamboat (1953) and Hamlet 2 (2008) are musical comedies
that feature college professors who teach Shakespeare, a reminder that when
filmmakers adapt Shakespeare into films like West Side Story and She’s the
Man, they keep a shrewd eye on the vast potential audience among college
students studying his plays. Such a demographic not only has a vested interest in knowing in some detail texts such as Hamlet but can also be marked by
a degree of resistance to irksome study that adopts a youthfully iconoclastic
attitude toward such literary ghosts from the past. In the rock musical Hair
(1979), more famous than its original Broadway version (1967), two songs
quote from Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, while in The Lion King (1994) the
relationship between the young Simba and his dead father has often been likened to that of the two Hamlets. While none of these films could be claimed
as avant-garde, the ways in which they shoehorn Hamlet into unpredictable
genres is tirelessly ingenious.
There are many other possibilities for adapting Hamlet into specific movie
genres. Laurence Olivier morphs into Arnold Schwarzenegger in the satirical
action movie Last Action Hero (1993). An American college lad suddenly
realizes that Hamlet might hold some interest, after all, as a decisive terminator, an ironic fate for a hero often remembered for apparent inaction and
procrastination (Mallin; Lanier, 2006). The play is turned into a ghost story
in Alexander Fodor’s supernatural thriller version, Hamlet (2006), unsurprising given the actual appearances of the Ghost in the play; and it fuels a spy
thriller in Hitchcock’s North By Northwest (1959), in which Stanley Cavell,
for one, has seen more echoes of the play than simply the enigmatic quotation that provides the title: “I am but mad north-north-west” (2.2.379).
Beyond the Fringe: Experimental and Underground Films
The films mentioned above, in their spirit of irreverence and iconoclasm,
show progressive tendencies against tradition and orthodoxy, as though the
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ghostly play from the past exists now to be mocked. At the same time there
are dozens—perhaps hundreds—of others that presuppose knowledge at least
of the existence of Hamlet, and are sui generis and unrepeatable, fitting no
known genre. Like the “old mole” (1.5.170), they allow the play to work underground. In Sweden, Ragnar Lyth’s made-for-television Den tragiska historien om Hamlet, prinz av Danmark (1984) takes to an extreme a reading of the
play based on adolescent rebellion (Rothwell, 1999; Kliman). The play’s the
thing that invites alternative and sometimes cabalistic treatments that are
never expected or intended to become box-office hits. Examples aimed less
at the mass populace but at minorities so tiny that the films are inaccessible
in more ways than one appear in lists under the classification of “experimental.” Many are made by students, another reminder that Shakespeare’s place
in the educational system around the world provides him with a built-in and
sometimes ambivalently situated clientele. Such films and videos are mostly
amateur and are unavailable in any accessible form, proving impossible to
view even by the compilers of such comprehensive databases as the British
Universities Film and Video Council’s catalogue. The Last Moment (1928)
is described as “an experimental and impressionistic film, which records the
thoughts of a drowning actor,” apparently conflating the roles of Hamlet
and Ophelia. Hamlet Act (1982) is listed as “an avant-garde, postmodern
film” made at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and is said to offer “a
visual exploration of epistemological puzzles in Hamlet.” The Estonian Miski
on Mada Ehk Kogu Vale Hamletist (2000), also known as Something is Rotten:
Or, The Whole Lie About Hamlet, appears as an experimental version of the
play about which no other information is available. Likewise, an Australian
film also described as an “experimental version,” Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of
Denmark (2007), seems to have left behind neither an available archive copy
nor a distributor, although at a hundred and twenty minutes long, one would
assume it was an ambitious effort. We do know that it was based on a stage
production at the Poor Theatre Company in 2004 and was performed in a
Sydney shopfront to a maximum audience of fifteen. It was even screened at
the 2007 Melbourne International Film Festival, so its makers must have had
some high hopes. Meanwhile, Hamlet Goes Pop (1994) was an underground
film made in Germany, of which all traces have disappeared except the information that it was sixty minutes long. The tendency to take Hamlet into
a new “undiscovered country” knows no geographical bounds.
Ophelia has carved out a niche of her own. She has inspired not only
fiction writers like Angela Carter (Sage 33) but also filmmakers, dating
from the artistically innovative Ophélia (1963) directed by Claude Chabrol,
who is often credited as the first New Wave filmmaker. The hero is called
On Screen • 179
Yvan and, on watching Olivier’s film of Hamlet, he deludedly believes that
there are similarities between the story and his own family situation. Nearing insanity, he begins to identify with the role, calling his girlfriend, Lucie,
Ophélia, much to her discomfort. The plot of the film, set in rural France, is
based on the murderous intrigue of Shakespeare’s play, though in fact Yvan
is wrong and his uncle did not kill his father. This could be said to raise
interesting questions about the play itself and the extent to which it may be
a projection of Hamlet’s consciousness, if we choose to believe he is mad,
and not a reflection of any dimension of stable truth (Howard, 2000 301–2).
The titular heroine is not so central as the morbid hero, and she is by turns
docile and seductive while he rages. From Denmark itself, home of Hamlet,
comes Ofelias Blomster (1968) or, in English, Ophelia’s Flowers, a movie short
set in sylvan nature and juxtaposing the knocking together of two wooden
blocks with an endlessly repeated recitation of her speech “There’s rosemary,
that’s for remembrance” (4.5.173). She finally throws herself into the lake.
Many recent productions are in some way feminist, even while feminists are
divided on whether Ophelia is a plausible construction of a complex woman
or merely a male writer’s stereotype of female vulnerability. I have elsewhere
traced some of the poignant afterlives of this tragic character (White, 2007).
Amateur films reflect the diversity of images. Ophelia Learns to Swim (2000)
is described in the catalogue as a “feminist satirical low-budget film appropriating the character of Ophelia as a metaphor for a young, unassertive
woman.” She has nightmares about the film Titanic and is dominated by her
father and boyfriend. The plot summary in the Internet Movie Database
suggests that it is intended as a comedy, albeit chaotic, but the argument
of her subservience in a patriarchal world is familiar feminist territory. Finally (although surely not finally), on the Vimeo website we can find many
flower-crowned Ophelias, some daubed with blood and most voluntarily
and peacefully drowning, in a river, a swimming pool, the ocean, or a bath
(“Too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia” [4.7.184]). Soulful music and
images of Millais’ famous painting are usually accompanied by the words of
the queen’s imagined description, “There is a willow . . .” (4.7.165f). Such
tearful presentations clearly strike an emotional chord among their young
makers and all the signs show that they are presented with naïve seriousness
as personal identification with Ophelia’s fate. Some depict disturbing images
of self-harm and anorexia, reminding us of the association that led to the creation of such resources as the Ophelia Project to counteract bullying of girls
in schools and the Ophelia Network for anorexic adolescent girls. Both were
inspired by Mary Pipher’s bestselling book Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves
of Adolescent Girls. We can even follow the whole play in terms of only Oph-
180 • Chapter Six
elia’s story in a skilful YouTube montage of five actresses in the best-known
modern versions of Hamlet, under the title “Hamlet—the Life of Ophelia
in 5 Different film versions.” The more amateur efforts are as frequently
influenced by Millais’ painting as by Shakespeare, often referencing both.
Feelings of rejection, betrayal, and isolation dominate, and a somnambulistic
acceptance of “easeful death” in suicide by drowning. Many are clearly free
adaptations, some quite painfully personal, and others just painful in one
way or another. An exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Arnhem in
2009 entitled “Ophelia, Desire, Melancholy in the Death Wish” was (and
remains) publicized by a disturbing colored print of the (dead?) body of an
anorexic girl, Xteriors VIII by Desiree Dolron (2004). The curators’ statement
by Krien Clevis and Flos Wildschut says that the intention was
to translate the universal themes represented by Ophelia into a modern,
multicultural context. “Ophelia is a contemporary metaphor for the modern
romantic who wrestles with conflicting feelings of reciprocal incomprehension, unrequited love, and desperate longing, and who seeks ultimate release
in death. Not only does she represent the deeper layers of the feminine being,
but also the indefinable desires of this side of life, to which nature ascribes
symbolic meaning.” (Arnhem)
As in the play itself, there is a curious feeling that Ophelia’s story is not so
much a subplot but an unrelated and independent narrative floating alongside the play.
Worse is to come. The record of Hamlet as fair game for filmmakers creating works that are “independent,” “experimental,” and “strange” continues
down to the present day. Again, in the database of the British Universities
Film and Video Council, we find brief descriptions of recent examples such
as Kitchen Hamlet (2009); Intermission (2009), in which Hamlet is played by
a “real” madman; Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Undead (2008), a vampire
comedy as the title suggests; Oscar Redding’s Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of
Denmark (2007); and many others. More easily found are the many short
films on Vimeo such as a French one filmed before an audience in a studio,
directed by Sophie Laly (2007), which is minimal in speech and features a
nude Hamlet (Laly). Set first in a cluttered room and then an empty space,
it is clearly low budget but evidently an artistically ambitious and serious
avant-garde work depending on dance and mime rather than pastiche,
though the relation of the action and images to the play are enigmatic. On
the same website, there is an animated “indie game” proudly presenting itself
as parodying Hamlet (mif2000, Hamlet trailer), and another, more serious
On Screen • 181
French version called HAMLET—creation made by “Groupe Rictus/David
Bobee,” a record of a performance in Poitiers staged balletically in a pool of
water in semidarkness (Groupe Rictus). Ophelia responds to Hamlet’s tirade
by spiritedly slapping him, going on to sing Shakespeare’s mad words and
finally slipping into the pond to drown. These are examples out of literally
dozens from several countries to be found on the Vimeo site, which is largely
dedicated to independent and amateur short films. Some are made by semiprofessional but unknown auteurs, and others by amateurs, many of them
students. Some are straightforward, but most are in some way experimental
in intention. Taken together, they attest to the capacity of scenes from this
play to be taken out of context and used as the basis for autonomous creations in different performance mediums—drama, dance, music, mime. True
to the central character’s occupation, the play is a popular one for student
parodies and adaptations, and a group at my own university, filming in my
office, made it into a “mockumentary” called The Elsinore Deception. Written and directed by Trevor Thompson and Nick Miller (1991), it is a clever
parody that portrays investigative journalists probing the murky truth about
sensational fatalities in the court of Denmark, where the prince is a drugaddled hippie.
Satires and parodies abound among Hamlet references and adaptations,
perhaps adapting the adage that familiarity breeds at least mockery, if not
contempt. Comedy shows, especially those with a cult following, seem almost
obliged to include a reference at some point. For example, Hamlet appears in
The Simpsons series 13. In a rapid retelling of the story, Bart plays Hamlet,
with a banner in his bedroom reading “Danes do it melancholy.” Homer is
the Ghost, who finds it too cold to stay outside, Marge is Gertrude, and a
shifty-looking Mo the barman is Claudius. He gives away his guilty secret
when watching the play-within-the-play by blurting out, “I didn’t use that
much poison.” Lisa is Ophelia: “Oh great, now Hamlet’s acting crazy. Well,
nobody outcrazies Ophelia.” Laertes is the hapless and witless Ralph Wiggum,
who, given a free “practice stab” in the duel, skewers himself, oddly recalling the First Quarto reading, “Foolishly slain with my own weapon” (17.83)
(Thompson and Taylor, 2006 169), to the irritation of Claudius: “Boy, did
I bet on the wrong horse!” It is remarkable how much of the play the brief
parody manages to include, even a cameo from “Rosencall and Gildenlily”
not so different, really, from Q2’s Rosencraft and Gilderstone. Monty Python
set the prince on the psychiatrist’s couch, assailed by several bogus analysts
insisting that his problem is sex. He speaks lines from the play that might
suggest such a diagnostic context—“I am myself indifferent honest, but then
I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne
182 • Chapter Six
me” (3.1.122–24)—interspersed with expressions of being fed up with his
role: “It’s just that everywhere I go it’s the same old thing. All anyone wants
me to say is ‘To be, or not to be’” (Monty Python’s Flying Circus). The sketch
is a parodic homage to Olivier’s Freudian-based film and also derives its
point partly from the play itself. The film South Park: Bigger Longer & Uncut
intersperses dialogue from the play with modern language and raucous singing. The “To be, or not to be” speech is immediately followed by Hamlet’s
rejection of it: “Why am I doing this? This is ridiculous.”
In the United Kingdom, there used to be an advertisement for a brand
of Danish beer showing Hamlet and Horatio playing football with Yorick’s
skull, followed by the tagline “Heineken refreshes the parts other beers cannot reach.” All these and others comically exploit the immediate brand
familiarity of at least some well-trodden scenes and passages from the play,
placing them in incongruous circumstances and disconcertingly turning
Hamlet into a multidimensional, globally commodified meta-Hamlet. To
grace such versions with the description “avant-garde” probably confers a
false dignity on them, but they are certainly taking Hamlet to places other
classics cannot reach.
Epilogue
“Thou livest. Report me and my cause aright
To the unsatisfied.”
—Hamlet 5.2.344–5
How does it enhance our understanding of the meanings and significances of
Shakespeare’s play to know that Hamlet has been seized upon with apparent
alacrity by avant-garde creators of literature, drama, and film as an occasion
to express their own idiosyncratic and unique views on life and art? And how
does it illuminate their endeavors as vanguards to know that such resolute individualists, committed to originality, refer back to a text or set of texts now
some four centuries old? I hope some answers have emerged, mostly centering
on the issue of the intrinsic subversiveness of Hamlet itself. Like Whitman,
it “contain[s] multitudes.”
We began with what literary history used to claim as a self-sufficient and
singular artifact, a play called Hamlet written by William Shakespeare. Yet
the work itself undermines and unsettles such a singular, assured status by
existing in variants of the original, even generating a lost Ur-Hamlet that
is known only through a few references and harks back still further to its
historically distant sources. Since then, literally hundreds of edited texts
have been published, each claiming to be authoritative if not authorial. It
is an artifact that subverts its own status, taking revenge on those who wish
to capture it in a single edition as though it is “formulated, sprawling on a
pin” (Eliot, “Prufrock”), only to find its manifest variousness slipping beyond
183
184 • Epilogue
grasp. Interpretation is similarly self-defeating, as a myriad of critics have
sought to pluck out the heart of its mystery, only to be displaced by others.
It seems difficult to see such a play as a “thing,” as it is manifestly myriad.
In its potential meanings and interpretations, the play builds into its narrative a political fable, representing a deadly struggle between a defensive
regicidal tyrant and an apparently legitimate claimant who is “lov’d of the
distracted multitude” (4.3.4), thus encapsulating and anticipating virtually
every political struggle enacted in human history by those who seek to overthrow a tyrant or corrupt regime. The protagonist on the side of justice faces
plots to assassinate him, even while he plots to kill the king who has usurped
his father; in the sequence of revenge, murder begets murder until nobody
of consequence is left. This in itself raises philosophical and ethical issues.
In such a situation of compromised virtue, Hamlet is led to ask the most
fundamental set of questions about existence that can be asked by a sentient
and morally conscious human being, whether it is better to exist or not exist,
live or die, to assert oneself defiantly as an active agent or to capitulate docilely and let circumstances take their course. Urgent images of the looming
grave and the grinning skull as memento mori provide memorable emblems of
what is at stake in an existential crisis. Psychology becomes involved, as the
mirroring struggle takes the issues into the family structure, asking whether
filial hierarchy is a natural order or imposed by convention. Relationships
between son and mother, son and father, stepson and surrogate father have
become the stuff of psychoanalysis over the last century. These are surely
among the possible circumstances that fashion the mindset of all avantgarde artists who feel the need to resist and rebel against convention and
authority, whether within the state or the family—or in any circumstance
that may limit their freedom. The impulse operates from a bridling at family ties that can become stifling bonds, a sense of social ostracism and often
political persecution, and even accusations of insanity. Inhibiting authority
extends also to the past as a generalized temporal space in which tradition
operates as a hampering presence and may impose oppressive demands that
amount to pursuing vendettas. This is figured in the play by an ambiguous
wrathful ghost who demands immediate revenge for past misdeeds, raising
questions about the legitimacy of respective claims made as moral conflicts
in the past and the present. Time itself, alongside questions of chance and
determinism, is pulled into the net of themes in Hamlet, and such questions
are characteristic topics for debate and representation in avant-garde art.
One other conceptual area that would have been especially contentious to
the Elizabethans, invoking their own avant-garde figures such as Marlowe
and Giordano Bruno, is not especially prominent in modern adaptations,
Epilogue • 185
namely religion. The controversial overlaying of Catholic beliefs in purgatory, in a play written in Protestant England, seems to have lost the frisson it
once held, although Stephen Greenblatt has managed to give the topic new
life in our more secular age.
Generically and textually, Shakespeare’s play is a thing of shreds and
patches, setting up expectations of a solemn “Tragedy of Hamlet Prince
of Denmark” and also giving its obverse, mocking the pretentiousness of
worldly ambitions, mingling kings and clowns, tragedy and comedy, madness
and sanity. Enfolded within the tissues of the story, on a different narrative
plane altogether, lies a poignant story of blighted love, with its own heroine,
a victim of her gender and class, who nevertheless has the dramatic power
to steal whole scenes, sidetracking the violent, masculinist revenge plot and
once again deconstructing the narrative shape of an apparently unified artifact. The whole package provides—creates—a comprehensive formula for
recognizably avant-garde subjects, stances, attitudes, and views of art to be
pillaged and echoed by generations since its first performance. Equally, the
task of reading Hamlet through avant-garde preoccupations can bring into illuminating relief many perspectives on the play that have not yet been made
visible, in an “ever-now,” “ever-new” struggle, simultaneously to recuperate
and to subdue the past. The “perturbed spirit” (1.5.190) has not yet been laid
to rest, and its “adieu” is at best contingent on its insistent “Remember me”:
Remember thee?
Ay, thou poor ghost, whiles memory holds a seat
In this distracted globe. Remember thee? (1.5.95–97)
Memory does indeed continue to hold a seat for the “poor ghost” (1.5.4) in
the play Hamlet, not only in the reconstructed Shakespeare’s Globe in London and the thousands of other theaters that have housed the characters,
but in the “distracted globe” (1.5.97) of the world itself. The dying request
of Hamlet has been granted:
Had I but time—as this fell sergeant, Death,
Is strict in his arrest—O, I could tell you—
But let it be. Horatio, I am dead,
Thou livest. Report me and my cause aright
To the unsatisfied. (5.2.341–45)
It may not be Horatio’s version that is endlessly repeated (or is it?), but the
Prince’s fear that he and his cause will be forgotten is far from being realized, since the circular logic of the play, ending with a request that it be
186 • Epilogue
replayed, has proved a self-fulfilling prophecy. The play always begins every
time it ends, time and time again, down through the centuries and into the
future. It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that the sun never sets
on rehearsals and performances of Hamlet, ranging in conception from the
conservative to the outlandish. In light of the astonishing proliferation of
performances and adaptations, and the babel of criticism, it is a forlorn hope
to think that “the rest is silence” (5.2.363). Compulsive, unending replication of his story is the peculiar purgatory to which the Prince of Denmark
is condemned, as surely as was the state of his father, who started the play.
Both are “ever-now,” “ever-new” each time their play returns to intrigue and
challenge the unsatisfied.
Despite the many conventional productions of Hamlet that continue to be
staged, the play itself never seems to lose its radical edge. Part of the reason
lies in its protean quality, what Kott called its spongelike capacity for adaptation to new historical problems and circumstances. However, a conclusion
emerging from this study suggests that the play also stimulates avant-garde
groups in diverse ways that reach down to their fundamental but different
reasons for creating. First, writers see the play as an opportunity to reflect on
their own literary sources and inspirations, which may be as much an inhibition as a motivating inspiration. For them, Hamlet is dominated on the one
hand by its ever-present Ghost acting as a troublesome model and source of
recrimination called by the past upon the present, the tyranny of influence,
and on the other hand by the spirit of Yorick, as an abiding, mocking, but
nostalgic allure of the distant past of lost childhood and a reminder of mortality. Second, for radical theater practitioners, the play presents a different
stimulus, a body of raw material to be shaped to circumstances in the present
using theater itself both to disrupt and to change contemporary realities.
It represents rebellion against orthodoxy outside the theater. The desire to
shock drives radical playmakers in the immediacy of live theater and draws
them to the metaphor of madness depicted in the play, as an alternative
way of seeing reality. Third, many filmmakers are attracted to the youthful
hero himself, out of tune with society around him and determined to right
wrongs—the eternal student from Wittenberg (or Princeton, or Harvard, or
any other college) daring damnation and defying the state of parental restrictions to pursue new, challenging thought wherever it will lead.
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Index
acting, Stanislavskian method, 40, 52
advertising, Hamlet used in, 139;
Heineken, 182
agitprop theater, 48, 126–27
Akimov, Nikolai, 148
Allen, Woody, 176
Almereyda, Michael, 159, 162, 165
Amleth, 29–30
Amleto, 103, 141
Anderegg, Michael, 166
The Angel of Vengeance, 154. See also
Kadin Hamlet
anxiety/fear, 19–20; in avant-garde art
and writing, 19; in Hamlet, 20
Apocalypse Joe. See Un Uomo Chiamato
Apocalisse Joe
Aristotle, 9, 37, 138, 146
The Arizonian, 173
Aronson, Arnold, 3, 63, 85
Artaud, Antonin, 77, 121, 132
The Assassin Wore Yellow Shoes. See
Assassino e Quello con le Scarpe
Gialle, 176
audience, 38–40, 54, 112, 125-26, 135–
36. See also agitprop theater.
avant-garde, 2–4, 6–12, 15–28, 79,
149; and angst/nihilism, 18, 19, 123;
arguments against anachronism, 2–3;
challenging boundaries/conventions,
7, 9, 11, 12, 16, 18, 25, 28, 87–88,
143–44; and experimentation,
16, 19, 23–24, 27, 28, 137; and
revolutionary sentiment, 16–17,
18, 25, 28, 88, 148–51; movements
in Europe, 15–16, 18, 26; and
postmodernism, 20–21; recuperating
the past, 8, 12, 99
The Bad Sleep Well, 174
The Banquet, 136
Barker, Howard:; Gertrude The Cry, 130
Barthes, Roland, 21
Baudelaire, Charles, 160
Bauerisma, Igor, 22
Beckett, Samuel, 24, 114; Waiting for
Godot, 65, 129
Belsey, Catherine, 36, 55, 62
Bene, Carmelo, 95; Hamlet Suite:
Version-collage d’après Jules Laforgue,
95
203
204 • Index
Benjamin, Walter, 22
Bernhardt, Sarah, 144
Bevington, David, 123, 128, 136
Bhardwaj, Vishal, 170
Blake, William, 79
blasphemy, 32–33
Bloom, Harold, 110
Boal, Augusto:; Hamlet and the Baker’s
Son: My Life in Theatre and Politics,
130
Bradley, A. C., 63, 67, 108
Branagh, Kenneth, 10, 58, 147
Brecht, Bertolt, 3, 24, 39–41, 47, 114–
20, 132, 151; The Good Person of
Szechwan, 116; Life of Galileo, 116; A
Man’s a Man, 116; The Messingkauf
Dialogues, 116, 120; “Practice Scenes
for Actors,” 120; The Resistible Rise
of Arturo Ui, 116; Round Heads and
Pointy Heads, 116; A Short Organum
for the Theatre, 117; The Threepenny
Opera, 116
Breton, André, 63
Brook, Peter:; Qui est lá?, 132
Burbage, Richard, 35, 72, 117
Burnett, Mark Thornton, 169
Burton, Richard, 127, 133
Cage, John, 8, 17, 24, 39, 59; 4’33”, 17,
59; “Happening,” 17; Ophelia (1945),
17
Calderwood, J. L., 64
Camus, Albert, 54
Carter, Angela, 178
Cavanagh, Steven, 167
Cézanne, Paul, 16
Chabrol, Claude, 178
Chekhov, Anton, 94
Chopra, Vidhu Vinod, 169
cinema:; genre in, 140–82; diverse
audience of, 136–38; overarching
conservatism of, 135, 141–42
Claudel, Paul, 94
Claudius, character, 31, 53, 73
Cocteau, Jean, 24, 95–96, 157; The
Infernal Machine, 95–96
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 37, 79,
93
Coronado, Celestino, 156–58
counterculture improvisations/
“Happenings,” 15, 59, 82, 126
Coursen, H. R., 138–39, 166
Craig, Edward Gordon, 114
Crisp, Quentin, 157
cross-dressing, 143–44
Crowl, Samuel, 145, 166
cubism, 16
dadaism, 15, 17, 23, 25–26; and
‘deconstruction’, 23
Dance of Death/macabre imagery, 62,
124
Dans La Poussiere du Soleil, 174
Dawson, Anthony, 6, 57, 123, 128
De Belleforest, François, 29
De Grazia, Margreta, 38, 51, 54
De Quincey, Thomas, 79
Dedalus, Stephen. See Joyce, James
Den tragiska historien om Hamlet, prinz av
Danmark, 178
Derrida, Jacques, 106–7; Specters of
Marx, 106
Derry Film Initiative, 167
Dickens, Charles, 94
Dickinson, Desmond, 147
Dolron, Desiree: Xteriors VIII, 180
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 46
Dreamboat, 177
Dryden, John, 60
Duse, Eleanora, 143
Eco, Umberto, 175
Einstein, Albert, 73
Eklavya: The Royal Guard, 169–70
Index • 205
Eliot, T. S., 2, 21, 68–69, 95, 96–99,
102–3, 124; “The Love Song of J.
Alfred Prufrock,” 98, 99; “Mr. Eliot’s
Sunday Morning Service,” 97; The
Sacred Wood, 97; The Waste Land,
96–97, 99
Ellis, Brett Easton, 109; Luna Park, 109
The Elsinore Deception, 181
ennui/despondency, 20, 98, 160
Epic Theater, 3, 115–17
Erasmus:; Praise of Folly, 24
Erksan, Metin, 153–58
Escolme, Bridget, 40
Essex, Earl of, 36
Everett, Barbara, 158–59
Everything You Always Wanted To Know
About Sex but Were Afraid To Ask,
176
expressionism, 15, 27–28, 137, 142
fascism, 19, 148
Factory of the Eccentric Actor (FEKS),
148
family, 11–13, 61, 79, 85, 100–106, 109,
124, 156, 159, 166, 170, 172, 184
fashion, 7, 13, 15, 23, 27, 66–73, 111,
143
The Female Hamlet. See Kadin Hamlet
film noir, genre, 147, 162, 165, 174–75
Flimm, Jürgen, 128
Fodor, Alexander, 177
Ford, John, 173
Fortinbras, character, 19, 80, 113, 145
Foucault, Michel, 73, 75
Freddy Versus Hamlet, 175
Freligrath, Ferdinand, 47
Freud, Sigmund, 54–55, 79, 95, 145–47;
Oedipus complex, 54, 77, 79, 95, 146
futurism, 26, 148
Gade, Svend, 145
Gandhi, Mahatma, 172–73
Garbo, Greta, 143
Garrick, David, 62, 111
gender reversals, in film adaptations,
143–45, 154, 156
Gertrude, character, 77, 108, 130, 132,
172
The Ghost, character, 20, 32, 52, 54,
104, 105, 125–26, 132, 174–75, 186
Gielgud, John, 112, 127
Girik, Fatma, 154
Global Shakespeare, 134
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 47, 93;
The Sorrows of Young Werther, 93;
Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 93
Gordon, Colette, 134
Grant, Richard E., 159
Granville-Barker, Harley, 114
Gravedigger, character, 62, 88
Greenblatt, Stephen, 185
grief, 79–80
Grotowski, Jerzy, 76
Guildenstern, character, 18, 30, 74,
129, 132, 151–52, 154
Haider, 170–173
Hair, 177
Halpern, Richard, 96
Hamlet, character, 11, 19, 20, 30, 52–
54, 61–62, 67, 77, 85, 104, 118–21,
122, 133, 152, 157, 159, 162, 165; as
avant-garde role model, 53–54
Hamlet, the play:; adaptations and
recreations of, 3, 5–6, 10, 20, 22,
40, 45–47, 74, 91–110 (literature),
111–32 (stage), 135–82 (film); and
traditionalism, 10, 29–30; appeal
of, 4, 5–6, 8, 44–49, 54–56, 84–85,
87–88; black humor in, 30, 61–63;
chance in, 17–18, 19; classical
references in, 12–13; corruption/
tyranny in, 13, 31, 44, 184;
critical reception, 6, 45–49; and
experimentalism, 51, 59, 63, 66–72,
116, 121–23, 134; genre, 1, 10,
206 • Index
60–61, 63, 72, 137–40; and
nationalism, 45–48, 118; and
political conflict, 11, 44–48, 184;
and psychological dysfunction, 4–5,
20. See also madness; and religion,
34, 44, 71–72, 86–87
Hamlet, film (1915), 175
Hamlet, film (1920), 142–45
Hamlet, film (1948), 145–48
Hamlet, film (1976), 156–58
Hamlet, film (2000), 165–67
Hamlet, film (2005), 167–69
Hamlet, film (2006), 177
Hamlet 2, 177
Hamlet Act, 178
HAMLET—creation, 180
Hamlet Goes Business, 162–63
Hamlet Goes Pop, 178
Hamlet Made Over, 175
Happening, 59
Happenstance, 17, 28, 59
Hartman, Geoffrey, 107
Harvey, Laurence, 176
hauntology, 106, 139
Hawke, Ethan, 165
Hazlitt, William, 37, 93, 112–13
Henslowe, Philip, 29, 33
Herlie, Eileen, 146
Hirsh, James, 38–39
Hobsbawm, Eric, 148–49
Honigmann, E. A. J., 59
Horatio, character, 18, 34, 52, 66, 123,
131, 144–45
House of Strangers, 174
humanism, 8, 12, 46
humors/passions, 146
Hunt, Holman, 87. See also PreRaphaelites
impressionism, 27
In the Bleak Midwinter, 10
Intermission, 180
Intikam Melegi. See Kadin Hamlet
Jaffe, Ira, 137
Jameson, Fredric, 21
Jarman, Derek:; The Tempest, 161
Jenkins, Harold, 56
Johnny Hamlet, 174
Johnson, Samuel, 61
Jones, Ernest, 146–47
Joyce, James, 24, 95, 99–102, 107,
110; Finnegans Wake, 24; Portrait of
the Artist as a Young Man, 99–100;
Quaderno di Calligrafia di Shakespeare,
100; Ulysses, 99–101
Kadin Hamlet, 153–56
Kafka, Franz, 94
Kean, Edmund, 112
Keats, John, 66, 93
Kelly, Aaron, 161
Kelly, Philippa, 65
Kemble, Philip, 112
Kerrigan, William, 80
Keyishian, Harry, 140
Kierkegaard, Søren, 19
Kitchen Hamlet, 180
Kott, Jan, 1, 15, 45, 186
Kozintsev, Grigori, 46–48, 148–53
Krauss, Werner, 141
Krejca, Otomar, 128
Kurosawa, Akira, 174
Kyd, Thomas, 29; The Spanish Tragedy,
35-36, 41–42, 72, 75, 97
La Ruina, Saverio, 22
Lacan, Jacques, 73
Laertes, character, 30, 53, 67–68, 88
Laforgue, Jules, 95, 101; Hamlet ou les
suites de la piété filiale, 95
Laing, R. D., 124
Laly, Sophie, 180
Lamb, Charles, 37
Last Action Hero, 177
Index • 207
The Last Moment, 178
Lawrence, D. H., 102–4, 124;
“Introduction to These Paintings
Puritanism and the Arts,” 102; Sons
and Lovers, 102; Twilight in Italy, 103;
“When I Read Shakespeare,” 104
Lee, Nathaniel, 79
Lehmann, Courtney, 139–40
LePage, Robert:; Elsinore, 133
Let the Devil Wear Black, 163–65
The Lion King, 177
Lubitsch, Ernest, 176
Lunney, Ruth, 39–40
Lust in the Sun. See Dans La Poussiere
du Soleil
Luther, Martin, 34–35, 169
madness, 4, 18–19, 25, 72–81, 126, 155,
157, 175, 186
The Magic Christian, 176
The Mahabharata, 169–70
Malcolm X, 84
Mallarmé, Stéphane, 18, 94
Mancewicz, Aneta, 22, 107, 125
Mann, Thomas, 94
Marcellus, 52
Marlowe, Christopher, 13, 31–35;
Doctor Faustus, 31–35, 42–44, 169;
The Jew of Malta, 33, 39
Marowitz, Charles, 121–25, 145:; “Some
Shakespearean Scraps”, 122
Marston, John, 36
Martin as Hamlet, 175
McGann, Paul, 159
Melanchthon, Philip, 34–35
Méliès, Georges, 141
Melody and Romance, 176
Melville, Herman, 94
metafiction, 64
metatheater, 5, 25, 64–66, 72, 132, 158
Meyer, Antony, 157
Meyer, David, 157
Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 132
Middleton, Thomas, 75
Millais, John Everett, 87. See also PreRaphaelites
Mirren, Helen, 157
Miski on Mada Ehk Kogu Vale Hamletist,
178
modernity/modernism, 13–14, 54, 73,
79, 142; modernist literature, 14; and
relativism, 14
Monty Python’s Flying Circus, 181–82
More, Thomas:; Utopia, 24
Moscow Art Theatre, 114–15
Müller, Heiner, 3, 114, 123–24; Die
Hamletmaschine/The Hamlet Machine,
123–24
Munakata, Kuniyoshi, 133
The Murder of Gonzago, play-within-theplay, 48, 64, 77, 125, 127, 145, 155
Museum of Modern Art, Arnhem, 180
My Darling Clementine, 173
My Own Private Idaho, 159
Nashe, Thomas, 29, 36
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 93
Nielsen, Asta, 142–45
Noble, Adrian, 128
North By Northwest, 177
Ofelias Blomster, 179
Old Vic Company, 133
Olivier, Laurence, 112, 133, 145–48
One Night Only, 175
Open Space Theatre, 121
Ophelia, character, 8, 67–68, 71, 79,
81, 85–87, 104, 125, 148, 152, 154,
165–66, 178–80; painting by Millais,
23, 87, 179–80
Ophélia, 178
Ophelia’s Flowers. See Ofelias Blomster
Ophelia Learns to Swim, 179
Osanai, Kaoru, 115
Osric, character, 30, 69
Ostermeier, Thomas, 107
208 • Index
Pasternak, Boris, 46, 150, 153; Dr.
Zhivago 46, 124, 150
Perceval, John, 78
Pipher, Mary:; Reviving Ophelia: Saving
the Selves of Adolescent Girls, 179
Pirandello, Luigi:; Six Characters in
Search of an Author, 130
Plato:; The Republic, 24
Poel, William, 113–14, 132
Poggoili, Renato, 7-8, 12, 97, 99, 116
political conflict:; in Northern Ireland,
167–69; in India, 170–71
Polonius, character, 17, 31, 53, 69, 74,
76
pop Art, 21–22
Pope, Alexander, 76
Porter, Roy, 76-79
Postmodernism, 14, 20, 73, 107–9,
128–30, 164–66
poststructuralism, 73
Pre-Raphaelites, 23, 87–88
Prendergast, Christopher, 106–7
Prince of the Himalayas, 136
purgatory, 35, 53, 71-73, 105-6, 108,
184–86
Pushkin, Alexander, 46
Quella Sporca Storia del West. See Johnny
Hamlet
Raleigh, Sir Walter, 36
Read, Herbert, 19–20
Red, Hot and Blue, 177
Redgrave, Michael, 133
Reed, Lou, 22
revenge, 4-5, 30, 35, 44, 61, 107, 119,
121, 170, 173, 176, 184
Richter, Hans, 23
Robinson, Bruce, 159
romanticism, 8, 37–38, 51, 73, 79, 93,
118
Rosencrantz, character, 18, 30, 74, 129,
132, 151–52, 154
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Undead,
180
Rosetti, Dante Gabriel, 88. See also PreRaphaelites
Rossi, Doc, 115
Rothwell, Kenneth, 142
Royal Shakespeare Company, 128, 130
Royal Theatre Copenhagen, 133
Rushdie, Salman, 109:; “Yorick,” 109
A Sage Brush Hamlet, 173
Salter, David, 161
Sanders, Julie, 139
Saxo Grammaticus, 29, 91, 108
Schiele, Jinnie, 122
Schlegel, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich, 93
Schmitt, Carl, 47
Scofield, Martin, 94
Scott, Sir Walter, 94
self, sense of, 14, 38, 51, 54–55, 132
Sen, Ong Ken, 133
Seneca, 138
Shakespeare, Hamnet, 80, 102
Shakespeare, William:; A Midsummer
Night’s Dream, 76, 116, 141, 157;
All’s Well That Ends Well, 2; Antony
and Cleopatra, 72; As You Like It,
13, 116, 141, 143, 144; Coriolanus,
116; Hamlet. See Hamlet; Henry IV,
159; Henry V, 36, 61, 117; Henry
VI, 33, 37; King Lear, 18, 57, 78,
116, 120, 153; Love’s Labour’s Lost,
69; Macbeth, 51, 116, 120, 121, 124,
131, 170; Measure for Measure, 2,
116; Othello, 47–48, 57, 121, 170;
The Merchant of Venice, 47–48, 116,
121; Richard II, 61, 65; Richard III,
39, 116, 124; Romeo and Juliet, 51,
57, 120–121; The Tempest, 84, 109,
161; Titus Andronicus, 119; Troilus
and Cressida, 2; The Two Gentlemen
of Verona, 37; Twelfth Night, 78
Shapiro, James, 66, 81
She’s the Man, 177
Shostakovich, Dmitri, 150, 154
Siddons, Sarah, 143
Sidney, Sir Philip, 72
Index • 209
The Simpsons, 181
Sokolyansky, Mark, 150
soliloquies, 37–44, 54, 72, 142, 157; in
Hamlet, 37–38, 40–41, 42, 54, 72,
151, 165; in The Spanish Tragedy,
41–42; in Doctor Faustus, 42–43
Something is Rotten: Or, The Whole Lie
About Hamlet. See Miski on Mada
Ehk Kogu Vale Hamletist
sonnets, 37, 170
South Park: Bigger Longer & Uncut, 182
Stalin, Joseph, 46–47, 150
Stanislavsky, Constantin, 114, 132
Stein, Gertrude, 24, 39
Sterne, Laurence, 91–93, 109; A
Sentimental Journey through France
and Italy, 91–93; Tristram Shandy, 65,
89, 91–92
Stiles, Julia, 165
Stoppard, Tom:; Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern Are Dead, 74, 129–30
Strange Illusion, 174
suicide, 32–33, 82–87, 160
surrealism, 24, 25, 26
syphilis, fear of, 103
Tassi, Marguerite A., 72
Tate, Nahum, 60
Taylor, Neil, 56
technology, digital, 165–68
Thatcher, Margaret, 161
Theater of the Absurd, 75
theater of cruelty, 4
Theatrofilm, 127–28
Thompson, Ann, 56
Title, Stacy, 163
To Be Or Not To Be (1916), 175
To Be Or Not To Be (1942), 176
Tocilescu, Alexander, 128
Tolstoy, Leo, 46
Top of the Town, 176
tragedy, genre, 1, 10, 29–30, 36, 53,
60-3, 72, 75, 137–38, 146
Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark,
178, 180
Two Gents Productions:; Kupenga Kwa
Hamlet/The Madness of Hamlet,
134
Un Uomo Chiamato Apocalisse Joe,
174
Updike, John, 108; Gertrude and
Claudius, 108
Ur-Hamlet, 29, 36, 57, 58, 183
Valéry, Paul, 20, 94, 123
Van Sant, Gus, 159
Vidor, Charles, 173
Vining, Edward P.:; The Mystery of
Hamlet, 144
Voltaire, 60
Voltemand, 53
Wajda, Anderzej, 45; Hamlet IV, 45;
Man of Iron, 45
Wallace, David Foster, 109:; Infinite Jest,
109
War, 14, 48, 52, 82, 94, 118–19, 121,
124, 148
Warhol, Andy, 22
Welsh, Alexander, 93–94
West Side Story, 177
Western, genre, 173–74
When Hungry Hamlet Fled, 175
Wilson, Robert, 133; Hamlet: A
Monologue, 133
Withnail and I, 159–61
Wittenberg, University of, 33–35,
118–19, 158, 169
Wooster Group, 24, 127–28
Wyse, Bruce, 164
Yeats, W. B., 105–6; Purgatory, 105–6
Yorick, character, 30, 62, 67, 89, 108–9,
110
Yorick Revisited, 176
Zadek, Peter, 128
Zhaohua, Lin, 128
About the Author
R. S. White, MA (Adelaide), D.Phil (Oxford), FAHA, is a chief investigator for the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for the
History of Emotions and Winthrop Professor of English at the University
of Western Australia. He has published books and articles on Shakespeare
and the Romantics; among his recent works are Pacifism in English Poetry:
Minstrels of Peace (2008) and John Keats: A Literary Life (2010). He is a past
president of the Australian and New Zealand Shakespeare Association and a
fellow of the Australian Humanities Academy.
211