For good reason, Hamlet is considered by many to be one of if not the greatest play in the English language. It’s not my personal favorite (that would be King Lear), but it’s probably in my top five if I ever sit down to rank Shakespeare’s work in my mind, and I don’t plan on doing that any time soon. In my grad school days, some of my colleagues in the department were fans of an author whose name I wish I remembered that wrote comedic novels about life as an English professor. One scene described to me had a department playing a game where professors were stating which great works they hadn’t read. The Americans in the group were timid and named obscure works. The British were very enthusiastic and rather proudly stating what great works they never read. The winner was the Englishman who proudly proclaimed, “I have never read Hamlet!”
I really wish I remembered that author’s name. I think I want to read his stuff. Oh well. The BBC ended its second season of Shakespeare with the Bard’s most famous play.
Notable cast members: Well, any self-respecting nerd will probably love this cast. Yeah, there are a lot of familiar faces in this one. Derek Jacobi returns to the series to play Hamlet. Patrick Stewart in a wig is Claudius, a role he would play again opposite David Tennant’s Hamlet. Claire Bloom, last seen in this series as Katherine of Aragon in Henry VIII, is Gertrude. Lalla Ward, one of the more popular Doctor Who companions, is Ophelia, and another Doctor Who alumni is one of the Players, namely Geoffrey Beevers, one of the actors to play the Master. Ian Charleson, one of the leads from Chariots of Fire, plays Fortinbras. And one actor, playing a sailor, took on a woman’s pen name and wrote some romance novels. Really, this may be the cast with the most familiar faces…at least until we get to Othello.
Trivia: Denied a chance to shoot Hamlet on location, the production went for a more impressionistic and minimalist set design, something to really put emphasis on the actors and the script. That said, it is a little weird to see Patrick Stewart play Claudius here, mostly because he’s two years younger than Derek Jacobi.
The play: I am not certain, but I think Hamlet might be Shakespeare’s longest play. All I know for certain is this production clocks in at around three and a half hours. Get comfy if you put this on.
That said, there’s very little in Hamlet that feels like padding. All the scenes are at least a little necessary, and they fit in for a play about a young man who can’t bring himself to act. His uncle Claudius married his widowed mother, putting Hamlet in a position where he didn’t like the man anyway, and a part of me always thought Hamlet sounded like a child of divorce who couldn’t accept his mother remarried because his dad was so much better. Now, that’s something that the entire play seems to have figured out. Claudius is a bad king. In Shakespeare, any king who ascends to the throne through treachery or anything other than a battlefield victory or being the rightful ruler of the kingdom after the previous one died either of natural causes or in battle. Claudius got there through murder (like Macbeth), and while we might think sending ambassadors to prevent a war, we should consider that Claudius doesn’t even think to fight back, the more appropriate action for any king. Likewise, Claudius has surrounded himself with bad and incompetent advisors like Polonius. And there are multiple lines telling us that the people prefer other men to Claudius. That’s why Hamlet can’t be simply put to death and why Laertes can so easily build a rebellion after he returns home following the death of his own father.
But what can we say about Hamlet? Jacobi plays the role with a bit of a twinkle in his eye when he feigns madness, but at the same time, he can be callous and cruel. Now, Jacobi earned my eternal respect for his work as an actor (if not for his opinions on who wrote Shakespeare’s plays) when he, in Kenneth Brannagh’s cinematic version of Hamlet actually made Claudius, one of Shakespeare’s best known villains, a sympathetic figure. Likewise, Brannagh’s Hamlet seemed legitimately dangerous. Jacobi’s doesn’t, but most Hamlets don’t. That said, his Hamlet takes over the entire play-within-the-play rather than simply watch the action play out and comment on the side. It’s an interesting choice that makes me wonder why no one was onto Hamlet sooner.
Then again, Ophelia spends most of her time in the first three acts seeming to be on the verge of tears because Hamlet’s unwarranted abuse is bringing her down. Given how she ends up, that seems a bit more appropriate. Hamlet’s rage against all women due to Gertrude’s actions have always been one of the more problematic aspects of the character for me. I remember another incident in grad school where some folks asked who they would sleep with if they could have sex with a famous literary character. No one had really thought about it, but one young woman hazarded a guarded “Hamlet,” and, well, given what Hamlet does to Ophelia and what he thinks frailty’s name is, that didn’t seem to be a good answer to me.
Really, Hamlet is a play about what happens when the worst possible person is given the task of revenging a dead parent. It isn’t enough for his father’s ghost to tell Hamlet what happened. Hamlet has to confirm it, and then he needs to find the exact right conditions to get revenge, and for all that he’s supposed to be avenging his father, he only really acts when he thinks his mother (who he may or may not be angry with for much of the play) is in danger. Contrast Hamlet with Laertes, who would slit a throat in a church for revenge, thus condemning his own soul to Hell, or to Fortinbras, who will go to war for a worthless parcel of land, and Hamlet becomes the First Inaction Hero. He has to think and ponder over his fate and the truth and what he’s going to do, and when he finally does decide to act, well, by then it’s far too late for most of the main cast of characters.
By the by, Shakespeare’s audience, even if they didn’t see the play with the word “tragedy” in the title, would have known Hamlet was doomed when he stabbed Polonius through the curtain. Drama tropes and conventions of the time said a person can kill someone in an act if revenge if said person did do wrong to the revenger. However, if another innocent person dies, even accidentally, then the hero isn’t in a revenge drama but a tragedy, and that means that hero has to die because these dramas worked off the concept of karma. I remember one play, I believe it was called The Revenger’s Tragedy, where a man decided to avenge a dead love, but he couldn’t stop killing. Soon, most of the characters were dead and the protagonist turned to one survivor, the new ruler of the land, and confessed his many crimes as a potential service to the state. Naturally, he’s arrested on the spot to be executed later. If the protagonist had kept his mouth shut, he would have gotten away with it. Instead, he thought he was so cool and badass, he had to tell everyone what he did. But, them’s the rules for Elizabethan drama.
Grade: It’s a good production of Hamlet. Sure, there are bad ones, but this isn’t one. A.
Next: Next up is one of the Bard of Avon’s more controversial works, but it has one of the more recognizable actors from the era, and not in the sense that he’s famous now but was well known to British and American TV audiences even then. Be back soon for The Taming of the Shrew with a member of the Monty Python troop doing the taming.
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