In the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, the words “playwright” and “dramatist” had not yet been coined. Marlowe, Middleton, and Shakespeare were known by the designation “poets,” and if Shakespeare is one of the great poets of the world, his four great tragedies, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear, are among the greatest poems. As I write Erlkönig I turn to Hamlet and the three other tragedies again — not to imitate them but to find encouragement in their imaginative linguistic worlds. Shakespeare’s poetry lies in the language, not the story, and despite the difficulty of this language to 21st century ears we find in both its significance and sound a new ways of looking at, and describing, daily experience, our own lives.
Once Goldie and Billie are old enough to watch and read Shakespeare (and I honestly dread to know what the public school system is doing with him these days), I hope there will continue to be things like Gregory Doran’s 2009 television version of Hamlet, a production from the Royal Shakespeare Company. Its opening scenes are brilliantly contemporary, but it’s the language too that shocks. Below, Act I Scene 1 from this Hamlet, with Peter De Jersey as Horatio and Patrick Stewart as the Ghost (who, in an intriguing bit of doubling, also plays Claudius). The production’s Hamlet, who doesn’t appear in this first scene, is David Tennant. The entire film, and associated documentary material about the production, is available at the Great Performances Web site here.
Excellent! This scene is too often ploddingly done or, worse, even skipped altogether (the Zeffirelli version with Mel Gibson). I love how the actors never stand still and show their agitation in their speech yet still manage to make the language come through. And close attention must be paid to the language, because the words establish the moral universe of the play.
Were this my blog I could go on for many paragraphs about Hamlet, but I’ll follow Gertude’s wishes and stop here. I’ll end on a sad but comic note: searching for “Hamlet” on Hulu gives a hit for a show called “Ghost Hunters.”
Interesting too how much of the play is telegraphed in this first scene, from the third line (Bernardo’s “Long live the King,” which is ironic in two or three different ways); the same character’s “Let us once again assail your ears” (30), fine imagery from Horatio in regard to the death of Caesar (“The graves stood tenantless and the sheeted dead / Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets”), which contributes to the establishment of an uncanny mystery; and the political context of the challenge between Fortinbras pere and Hamlet pere and the way in which this challenge has echoes for the next generation — only in part a red herring. A brilliantly constructed scene.
“[B]rilliantly contemporary”? Would you be kind enough to explain what’s gained by making the setting of the play modern-day contemporary — without, that is, using that vile word, “relevant”.
ACD
More of a contemporary approach rather than a contemporary setting — tense, anxious, foreboding. The scene is rendered very claustrophobically (easier to do with film perhaps than with theatre), rather than the broad open-air arena of the Globe theatre or even today’s contemporary large theatres; the insertion of the Ghost’s point-of-view perspective adds another dimension unavailable to traditional stagings of the play.
It’s not quite so evident here, but the costumes and settings in the rest of the production draw from a variety of eras, from 19th-century style military-themed costumes for Claudius, a simple black suit and tie for Hamlet, etc. While we don’t have a great deal of information about stagings in Shakespeare’s time, there is enough evidence to indicate that the Globe’s own stagings drew upon a variety of approaches to costume time-periods as well. And necessarily, I believe, for there was little research at the time to indicate how individuals may have dressed in Dark Ages England (King Lear), early 16th-century Venice (Othello), or 11th-century Scotland (Macbeth). Theatre practitioners of the time probably used their imaginations to cobble together how these individuals might be dressed (and because there was little scenery at the Globe, this was less of an issue). Like at the Globe’s productions, as a result, the general air might have have been that these plays took place at all times — or at none.
Thank you for your reply, but that didn’t quite answer my point, did it.
But perhaps this is not the proper place to duke this out.
ACD
My dukes are not what they used to be, in any event. But I didn’t use the word “relevant”!