Creators (10 page)

Shakespeare’s mind was always fertile—full of ideas and ingenious ways of expressing them—but at this particular juncture in his writing life his creative impulses were so powerful, and his skill in expressing them was so rapid, sure, and inexhaustible, that he not only fills the hole but constantly enlarges it and pours in more so that it overflows. At some time during the play’s editing and its early history onstage he seems to have discarded passages, many of which are fine, to bring the performance time down to reasonable limits. Even so, the play is very long; if enacted in full and with suitable intervals, it lasts five hours or more. I acted Hamlet in my last year at school—it is, curiously enough, despite all its sophisticated subtleties, the one great part in Shakespeare that a schoolboy may perform with some chance of success—and at the time I came to know by heart not only the frighteningly long central part but virtually the entire play. I had to cut it for performance down to three hours or so, and found the cutting a painful, almost unendurable process. For the lines contain no fat, only meat, and meat of such quality that to cast any portion aside seems a crime against art.

What is required of the actor who plays Hamlet—and all actors, all over the world, strive to do so at least once in their
career—is a rare gift: the ability to speak his lines with all deliberate speed but in such a way so as to convey their meaning clearly to the audience, and lose none of their poetry. John Gielgud, whom I saw when I was a teenager and on whom I modeled myself, had this ability to an unusual degree, and grappled with the part most manfully and beautifully. But there is so much of it anyway, and the play is so rich in drama and fascinating mysteries, that a bad performance, despite its length, is rare. It was popular from the start and has remained so ever since, all over civilization, and beyond.

The play is doom-laden, atmospheric and dark, lit by flashes of light springing from its sudden scenes of vivid action. It opens in darkness on the battlements; the Chamberlain’s Men’s professional theaters, with their levels, were peculiarly well suited to platform scenes, and the skill with which Shakespeare makes use of them is admirable. Then comes the Ghost, a terrifying and tortured figure, the part Shakespeare chose for himself—and one can understand why. The Ghost’s appearance and words underline the message of foreboding the soldiers on the platform have already hinted at: “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark”—or England, or wherever
Hamlet
is played. We have here, right from the start, a general analysis and criticism of society, presented as a body subject to debilitating disease.

Hamlet is there to cure the ills of the state—to “reform it utterly,” to use his own term, but he deplores the fate which has given him this role: “O cursed sprite, that ever I was born to set it right.”
Hamlet
is a play of delays, and the delay in allowing the prince to appear is indicative of its whole tone: he misses the opening scene entirely; and in the big court scene that follows, he joins the dialogue late and reluctantly and brings the doom and gloom—and night—of the battlements right into the glitter of the royal circle. There is no sunlight in the play, except perhaps wan glimpses in the graveyard scene, and it takes place almost entirely in the interior, mainly within a medieval castle with its massively thick walls, small windows, and endless shadows. Hamlet emphasizes the darkness with his “customary suits of sable black” and he never smiles, except in mockery, contempt, or savage exultation.

It is vital to grasp that Hamlet is a magnetic figure: tall,
handsome, radiating the masculine glamor of his warrior father and the evident physical appeal of his sensual mother, still beautiful even in her forties (or fifties). He is clever, brilliant indeed, very knowledgeable over a wide range of subjects, graceful, eloquent, respected everywhere and by all for his appearance and talents as much as for his status. He is a paragon; and when Ophelia, a young girl indeed but with her father’s brains and sensitivities of her own, sees Hamlet in desperate mental agony, she is driven to exclaim:

This Hamlet, then, is a splendid personage, and the play is pervaded by a sense of waste and loss, first at his inability to act, then by death. The soldiers on the platform expect him to take charge, the king and queen expect him to enliven their court, the actors take it for granted he will direct them in their profession—all turn to him, waiting for a lead. But here’s the rub, as Hamlet puts it. He is a thinker. He lives and acts in his head, not his body. (And when he does act, it is on impulse, without thought and thus rashly.) He is aware of his besetting weakness; and early in the play, reflecting on the powerful state his father ruled, and deploring its dissipation, which “takes from our achievements,” he pounces on his own sin:

Of course, what Hamlet and the Ghost see as a fault, we—the audience, the readers—see as a virtue. It is Hamlet’s thoughts, the need to express which, with all his poetic power, inhibits his action, that make the play. His head contains a philosophy of the world, and he periodically delves into this interior well of reflection to raise copious vessels of crystal words.

He begins this process when the court retires to feast in Act I, scene ii, and Hamlet, already despairing and feeling impotent, reflects on suicide, the weariness of the world, the perfidy of his mother (“Frailty, thy name is woman”) and the wickedness of incestuous lust. In Act I, scene iv, he sees the Ghost and gives a shout of prayer and horror—“Angels and ministers of grace defend us!”—followed by an anguished and complex question about the meaning of a supernatural entrance into normal life. After the Ghost has spoken his message, Hamlet talks of memory, duty, the need to record resolution, the taking of oaths to action. He tells the men on the platform, his friend Horatio in particular, “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” and it is at this point that he decides on a policy of dissemblance, feigning madness, and bids his friends to swear silence and help. It is important to grasp that, throughout the play, Hamlet, while expressing often penetrating and highly rational sentiments, is in a highly disturbed state: his so-called madness is merely a hyperextension of his inner turmoil. Hamlet is on the brink of a breakdown but never over it, and his perilous and exposed position on his “cliffs of fall” gives him an extraordinary clarity of sight and expression, so that he blazes with insight.

Ophelia, as always, comes close to seeing what is happening, without understanding whence or why. He looked at her, she says, as if he would paint her portrait, then

He went out of the room, she relates, blindly but with his eyes fixed on her (“to the last bended their light on me”). Hamlet sees the innocent girl as the one point of virtue and grace in the decadent, soiled court, but he also, reflecting on the weakness of woman, fears that she is already corrupted; and in Act III, scene i, he speaks harshly to her and pours out of his overflowing anxieties a torrent of desperate fears about the wickedness of the world—especially for women—and bids her go to a nunnery to escape them.

Just before this he has baffled Polonius with his reflections on age (“Though this be madness,” the old man says, “Yet there is method in it…. How pregnant sometimes his replies are!”). Hamlet then greets the sinister Rosencrantz and Guildernstern with a number of shrewd and fascinating remarks (“There’s nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so”) and a magnificent discourse in prose—the most scintillating prose passage Shakespeare ever wrote—on how he sees the world as a “sterile promontory” and the air, “this majestical roof fretted with golden fire,” as “a foul and pestilential congregation of vapours.” There follows a passage on the nobility of human—“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, in apprehension how like a God”—and so forth. When Hamlet has dealt with the players, giving them a brilliant lesson in speaking and acting, he is led to reflect on his cowardice and inactivity, his inability to match a player’s passion with his own, though his anguish is real, not assumed. He rages at himself and at the king:

But he then bids his brain work and plot, and conceives the scheme of enacting a play to shock the king into admitting his guilt. He follows this, just before his fateful meeting with Ophelia, with the most painful of his soliloquies, again reflecting on suicide (“To be, or not to be, that is the question”) and the choice between life and death, decided more by fear than by reason. He tells the players how to perform his inner play, dispensing much wisdom—no professional actor can fail to learn something from Act III, scene ii—then speaks to Horatio on the virtues of friendship and the grace of simplicity of spirit (“Give me that man that is not passion’s slave”), then takes his friend into his confidence and bids him observe the king when the inner play is performed.

Then follows the heart of
Hamlet
, the play scene, and the king’s terror, his anguished cry of “Lights, lights!” to drive away the darkness which, as always in the play, is crowding on the scene. To Rosencrantz and Guildernstern, sent to summon him to attend his mother, Hamlet compares himself to a pipe, on which they are playing, “to pluck out the heart of my mystery,” adding “and there is much music, excellent voice in this little organ.” As the darkness becomes even more stygian, Hamlet says to himself:

But he also commands himself not to hurt his mother—“I will speak daggers to her, but use none.” On his way, he sees the king, unprotected, praying. “Now might I do it pat,” says Hamlet, but again stays his hand, as he fears that to kill Claudius now, in an odor of sanctity, will send the wicked man to heaven or at least save him from hell—“O, this is hire and salary, not revenge.” He cannot know that the king is unable to pray sincerely, and despite all his power and position fears divine retribution:

It is as though Hamlet’s subtle, sometimes confused but always honest, musings have inspired the king, too, to think in moral terms, even though he cannot repent materially by giving up all he has acquired by murder.
Hamlet
is a profoundly moral play, showing morality (as well as evil) to be contagious. The queen, intending to read Hamlet a lecture, is instead inspired by his passionate arrival (in which he kills the hidden Polonius) and his accusation that she has committed

He speaks with such power that she is transformed and cannot bear him to continue:

He gives her a pointed lesson on the subject of sexual continence, and admits, “I essentially am not in madness, But mad in craft.” Thereafter the queen edges away from her husband and toward her son.

The play now moves inexorably toward its conclusion. Hamlet is sent to England; discovers Claudius’s plot to have him killed; returns; and, in the graveyard, finds the drowned Ophelia about to be buried. His reflections on the dead, on death, on oblivion and the rotting of the proud, the successful, and the all-
powerful in the cold earth, and his exchanges with the grave digger, make one of the best scenes in the play—among the most pregnant Shakespeare ever wrote—working up to the moment of action when he leaps into the grave, gathers Ophelia into his arms, and quarrels fatally with her brother Laertes. This leads directly to the duel and the murderous climax of the play with all the principals—king, queen, Laertes, Hamlet himself—dead on the stage.

It is characteristic of this stupendous drama that the long passages of heroic reflection, which never bore but stimulate, are punctuated by episodes of furious action, the whole thing ending in a swift-moving climax of slaughter. No one can sit through
Hamlet
and absorb its messages—on human faith and wickedness; on cupidity, malice, vanity, lust; on regeneration and repentance; on love and hate, procrastination, hurry, honesty, and deceit; on loyalty and betrayal, courage, cowardice, indecision, and flaming passion—without being moved, shaken, and deeply disturbed. The play, if read carefully, is likely to induce deep depression—it always does with me—but if well produced and acted, as Shakespeare intended, it is purgative and reassuring, for Hamlet, the confused but essentially benevolent young genius, is immortal, speeding heavenward as “flight of angels sing thee to thy rest.” It is, in its own mysterious and transcendental way, a healthy and restorative work of art, adding to the net sum of human happiness as surely as it adds to our wisdom and understanding of humanity.