I’ve seen Hamlet on the stage only once, in 1971. The prince was played by Dame Judith Anderson, unconvincing in her early seventies. Wrong sex, wrong age, wrong play – a stillborn theatrical stunt. My reaction was perhaps the worst that staged Shakespeare can inspire – boredom periodically interrupted by giggling.
Just two
years earlier, in senior A.P. English in high school, a friend had written an analysis
of Hamlet based on the mock-hypothesis
that the prince’s motivating problem was obesity. In a word, he was fat: “We
fat ourselves,” “O, that this too too solid flesh would melt,” etc. Of
Shakespeare’s major plays, Hamlet is
easily my least favorite, largely because of the title character. He is insufferable.
Hamlet is touchy, pretentious, utterly self-centered – an adolescent brat, a template for the modern intellectual. It’s
difficult to take his drama-queen emotional state seriously. My sympathies go
out to Polonius and, of course, Ophelia. They and others are merely toyed with by
Hamlet, never respected as individuals.
Historically,
Hamlet has been the subject of enormously
varying understandings. It’s a Rorschach test. W.H. Auden delivered his lecture
on the play at the New School for Social Research on this date, February 12, in
1947. “Hamlet is intensely self-absorbed,” Auden writes, “and that self-interest
continues to the very last minute.” He seems incapable of empathy, of
imaginatively projecting himself into others, even his mother. As Auden phrases it,
“Aversion keeps one related but detached.” He puts the play into the context of
Shakespeare’s career: “In this period, Shakespeare appears to be
tired of writing comedy, which he could do almost too well – he was probably
bored because of his facility in the genre.” True, but the comic spirit
lingers. His next play was likely The
Merry Wives of Windsor. Shakespeare succeeds in “transcending” comedy only
later with his finest plays -- Othello,
King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra,
Coriolanus.
Later in his
lecture, before closing with Kierkegaard and after saying, “Hamlet should be
played by an actor brought in off the street . . .,” Auden includes a seemingly
unrelated digression:
“It is no
longer possible for people to believe in something because a lot of other
people do. [A rare lapse in Auden’s understanding of human nature.] To believe
in something is not now a naïve act. The normal reaction is to try not to go
forward, but rather to retreat from desire and will back to passion, where one
can act. The cost, however, is the sacrifice of one’s reason, and you have to
invent a terrific kind of technique to arouse such a passion in reflective
people. The opposite of a passionate leap into fate is a gratuitous leap into
activity, like Iago’s.”
[See Auden’s
Lectures on Shakespeare (ed. Arthur
Kirsch, Princeton University Press, 2000).]
2 comments:
I think in any competently staged, well acted production, the audience will probably have more sympathy for Claudius than for the prince. I'm not condoning adultery and murder, mind - not that there's any thing wrong with that!
I always found Harold Bloom's Hamletolatry strange, Hamlet isn't so much the super-intelligent Uebermensch Bloom presents, as intensely self-aware. He seems either Machiavellian or inept with people, like a high functioning autist.
Shakespeare rarely has absolutely admirable or awful characters, however, even someone like Iago is memserising because of his language. The only character I dislike in Hamlet is your pal Polonius, and he's not even a bad man, just a born "press officer" or "media strategist" type, so unsurprising he'd be the Journalist's Choice, ho ho ho.
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