O that this too, too solid flesh…

To be or not to be…

O what a rogue and peasant slave am I…

Now cracks a noble heart…

For he was likely, had he been put on, to have proved most royal…

We’re putting it on. Tonight.

Hamlet. Uncut. Hardcore.

It’s time to enter Elsinore…

As the 16th century came to a close, Shakespeare began to experiment with tragedy.

On the Elizabethan stage, there were two dominant forms of tragedy: First, the classical tragedy. Derived from the Aristotelian theatrical principles of Ancient Greece, a classical tragedy features a protagonist possessed of a “tragic flaw” which creates a catastrophe in which their fortunes are reversed and their lives are destroyed.

Second, the revenge tragedy. Derived from the Roman plays of the playwright Seneca, revenge tragedies featured secret murders, a ghostly visitation in which the victim demands that their death be avenged, a period of intrigue and deception, and ultimately a bloody finale which would typically decimate the dramatis personae.

Shakespeare’s tragedies are usually viewed primarily through the lens of classical tragedy. This is partly due to early Shakespearean scholarship coinciding with a resurgence of interest in Aristotle’s theatrical philosophy, but it is also an overly simplistic understanding of Shakespeare’s approach to tragedy that often warps and distorts our understanding of the plays.

For example, consider The Tragedy of Julius Caesar. The play long confounded critics because, when they went looking for its tragic hero, they failed to find it in Caesar and were instead forced to find it in the character of Brutus. For example, Charles Gildon wrote in 1710: “This play is called Julius Caesar, though it ought to be called Marcus Brutus; Caesar is the shortest and most inconsiderable part in it, and he is killed in the beginning of the Third Act. But Brutus is plainly the shining and darling character of the Poet; and is to the end of the play the most considerable person.” Tragic heroes aren’t allowed to die halfway through the play; ergo the play wasn’t about Julius Caesar.

But I would argue that the desire to cram the play into a pregurgitated outline is distorting Gildon’s interpretation. As I wrote in the program for our reading of Julius Caesar, the assassination of Caesar is the pivot on which the entire drama turns. And also the seam at which two different plays are welded into a greater whole. The first half of Julius Caesar is structured as classical tragedy: A great man suffers from the tragic flaw of Pride, and this flaw results in his destruction. The second half of Julius Caesar, on the other hand, is a revenge tragedy: Antony seeks revenge for the death of Caesar.

But this isn’t quite true, either: While the latter half may be a revenge tragedy for Antony, it’s also a classical tragedy for Brutus. And while the conspirators may see in the assassination a simple punishment for Caesar’s Pride, there is much in the play to cast doubt on this black-and-white interpretation. Caesar’s destruction comes from a nexus of outward agency rather than from pure self-destruction, creating an interesting variation upon the simplistic classical forms.

And in Hamlet we see Shakespeare continue to experiment with these forms. Here, I would argue, we see a play in which every character is the star of their own classical tragedy… except for Hamlet, who instead stars in a revenge tragedy. But Hamlet also completely subverts the revenge tragedy by insisting on the pursuit of justice instead of unbridled revenge. In the process he emerges as an unflawed hero… who is nevertheless caught in the inescapable web of tragedy woven by the interlocking tragedies of everyone around him.

THE TRAGEDY OF THE COMMONS

Claudius’ flaw is his ambition for the crown. The character clearly cries out for comparison to Macbeth, and like Macbeth his flaw brings about his death at the hands of revenge. Claudius identifies the flaw himself when he says, “Forgive me my foul murder? That cannot be since I am still possess’d of those effects for which I did the murder: My crown, mine own ambition, and my Queen.” His murder of Old King Hamlet, of course, sets in motion the entire sequence of tragic events.

Polonius‘ flaw is that of eavesdropping and meddling — a compulsive need to control those around him. Hamlet offers it as a fortune to his corpse (“Thou find’st to be too busy is some danger.”) and we see it manifest not only in the occulted schemes which cause hardship throughout the play, but also in his compulsive need to spy upon and control his own children. This, of course, brings about his own death in a quite literal fashion, and it is his death which irrevocably sets Hamlet on a path to his destiny from which he cannot escape.

Laertes‘ flaw is his lust for revenge. Although he has often been held up as the ideal of “what Hamlet should have been”, one can’t help noticing that Laertes is (a) repeatedly wrong; (b) has his over-zealousness endorsed by the villain; and (c) ends up getting everybody killed (including himself).

Ophelia’s flaw is that she shows more obedience to her father than to the man she expects to marry. The importance of Ophelia’s failure is demonstrated through what I refer to as the “Desdemona archetype”: Desdemona in Othello, Cordelia in Lear, Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and a half dozen other Shakespearean heroines are faced with the choice between loyalty to their fathers and loyalty to their future husbands. And every one of them transfers that loyalty without question (and are lauded for it). Ophelia is confronted with the same choice… and stays loyal to her father. In a figurative sense, therefore, she allows Polonius to murder the love she had for Hamlet; and then Hamlet quite literally murders the love she had for Polonius. In the end, she is broken into madness.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, of course, are destroyed as the result of betraying their friends.

Gertrude, on the other hand, presents an interesting enigma throughout the play. But I suspect that we are meant to view her as unfaithful to her husbands (or, at least, their memories). Note that her unfaithfulness to Claudius at the end of the play (“Gertrude, do not drink.” “I will, my lord, I pray you pardon me.”) directly causes her death.

A HERO WITHOUT FLAW

“This is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind.”

Oh, Olivier.

That’s the tagline he pasted onto the prologue of his 1948 film of the play and it has utterly defined the character for at least three generations.

Of course, Olivier isn’t alone. The search for Hamlet’s tragic flaw has been hot and heavy for a couple centuries how: He’s mad in truth and not in craft. He has an Oedipal love for his mother. He’s secretly a woman dressed in boys’ clothes. All kinds of crazy stuff.

But the indecisiveness seems to have stuck for the most part. The logic goes that he should be like Laertes: Take the Ghost at his word, rush into the throne room, and stab Claudius right through the heart. Since he doesn’t do that, the play is really just a long sequence of adolescent excuses that Hamlet makes up so that he doesn’t have to do his chores.

As I mentioned before, though, I think there’s some real problems with identifying Laertes as the paragon of the play.

And there’s also the effect that “Hamlet the Waffler” has on the performance of the play: It means, quite literally, that nothing happens for more than 80% of the play. This isn’t necessarily a problem. (I’m fairly certain Samuel Beckett made an entire career out of it.) But combined with the Hamlet‘s length, it’s usually disastrous: It takes a long play and turns it into an interminable one.

But if you take Hamlet at his word, then the play becomes a fast-paced battle of wits: Can Hamlet figure out a way to prove Claudius’ guilt before Claudius realizes what Hamlet’s doing? There are feints and ploys; suspicions and proxies; mistakes and missed opportunities.

Viewed in this light, Hamlet becomes a thrilling adventure story wrapped in the philosophy of life and built upon an incredibly complex scaffolding of interwoven tragedies.

That sounds like fun. Let’s see what happens.

The scene and act divisions in Hamlet pose a troubling scholastic problem.

A little history: The First Quarto and Second Quarto contain no separation of scenes or acts at all. In fact, the traditional five act structure that we typically associate with Shakespeare didn’t actually become popular until the reign of King James. In other words, at least half of Shakespeare’s plays (including Hamlet) weren’t written with the five act structure in mind.

By the time the First Folio was published in 1623, however, the five act structure wasn’t only popular, it had become the de facto standard of the theater. And someone involved in the publication of the first collection of Shakespeare’s plays decided to impose the five act structure onto his earlier works.

In the case of Hamlet they did a literally half-assed job of it: Scene and act divisions appear sporadically throughout the first act and a half of the play… and then they simply stop.

Full scene and act divisions didn’t appear in an edition of Hamlet until the 1676 Quarto. Unfortunately, these divisions are badly flawed.

The primary example can be found in the now-traditional division between scenes 3.4 and 4.1. To understand the error here, one must first understand that the 1676 Quarto was typeset from the Second Quarto, and the Second Quarto contained an error. After Hamlet leaves the stage with Polonius’ body, leaving the Queen alone in her closet, the Second Quarto has a stage direction which reads:

Enter King, and Queene, with Rosencraus and Guyldenstern.

The inclusion of the Queen in this stage direction is clearly in error: She’s already onstage and hasn’t left it. The First Folio corrects this error by removing the Queen from the stage direction. But the 1676 Quarto instead decided to start an entirely new scene and act (although it still neglected to provide an exit direction for the Queen).

Much like Hamlet’s ghost writing, this erroneous scene/act division has had an interpretive impact on the play. There have been many, many productions which have featured Gertrude leaving her closet to seek Claudius in some other corner of the castle. And among these, there have been more than a few that have taken an intermission at this juncture. This obviously disrupts Shakespeare’s intended pace for the play, but it also has a dramatic impact: Claudius entering Gertrude’s closet so closely on the heels of her meeting with Hamlet contributes to the pervasive sense of surveillance in Elsinore. And there is a significant performance difference in viewing the scene of the crime itself and only hearing Gertrude’s report of it at second-hand.

Most editors are leery of abandoning the traditional scene and act divisions in the text because it will mismatch scholastic references to the text. But since my primary concern is in providing an effective acting edition which is true to the original texts, I really felt I had no choice but to fix such an egregious error.

Of course, once I’d completely disrupted the act and scene numbering of the play, I couldn’t seen any good reason not to continue mucking about.

The scene divisions in the ASR script occur at any natural and indisputable clearing of the stage. This corrects the errors of the 1676 Quarto, but I’ve also taken the unusual step of eliminating the division between 1.4 and 1.5 to enforce my sense that these scenes are tightly knit in both time and place (and, furthermore, that Shakespeare intended the re-entrance of Hamlet and the Ghost to overlap with the exit of Horatio and Marcellus). (This also brings the text into agreement with the Folio divisions, which similarly “skip” from 1.4 to 2.1.)

The act divisions of the ASR script, however, are more radically divergent from the 1676 Quarto. In restructuring these divisions, I have chosen to adhere to the three-act structure inherent in the temporal arrangement of the play:

Act I: Two months after Hamlet, Sr.’s death. Ends after Hamlet speaks with Hamlet, Sr.’s ghost.

Act II, III, IV: Two months later. Ends when Hamlet is banished to England.

Act V: Some time later (perhaps two months again?). Ends when everybody in the play dies horribly.

The traditional scene/act divisions are still indicated in the text as emendations (for example, [Act I, Scene 5]) for those who need to reference them.

Hamlet offers an excellent example of why many modern editions of Shakespeare’s plays can’t be entirely trusted. While the traditions of emendation which have arisen around each play over the past 400 years have generally improved the texts, some of these traditions are both radically incorrect and yet rabidly stubborn in their persistence. It can be truly amazing to return to the original texts (imperfect as they may be) and discover that things you thought were fundamental to a play were, in fact, concocted out of whole cloth by an essentially random bloke in the 18th century.

(This is why preparing fresh scripts from the original sources is an important part of the Complete Readings of William Shakespeare.)

If you’ve got a copy of Hamlet handy, I invite you to flip it open to scene 1.5 and find these lines:

HAMLET My tables, my tables, meet it is I set it down
That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain!
At least I’m sure it may be so in Denmark.

I can virtually guarantee you that near these lines you will find the stage direction “Writing”, “Hamlet writes”, or the like. And if it isn’t on the line itself, then you’ll find it in the notes. (As with the third Arden edition, which reads in its notes: “Hamlet now produces a literal writing tablet or notebook.”)

Now, it is absolutely true that “tables” is an archaic term meaning “tablet”. But I can absolutely guarantee you that Shakespeare never intended for Hamlet to yank out a notebook and begin jotting down the minutes of his meeting with the Ghost.

Why can I do that? First, because the stage direction doesn’t appear in the original texts. Second, because this passage reads, in its entirety:

… Remember thee?
Yea, from the table of my memory
I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past
That youth and observation copied there,
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain
Unmix’d with baser matter; yes, by heaven.
O most pernicious woman!
O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain!
My tables; meet it is I set it down,
That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain,
At least I’m sure it may be so in Denmark.

“The table of my memory.”

Never has a clearer metaphor been written. And yet when the metaphor is reinvoked a mere 9 lines later, modern editors universally interpret it in the most literal of fashions and jam in the stage direction. The direction itself was originally created by Nicholas Rowe in 1709 as part of what can arguably be called the first modern edition of the play, and it’s stuck fast ever since. Arden, Oxford, Riverside, Yale, Folger, New Cambridge… You can even find it in the Klingon Hamlet. I have literally never seen a printed copy of the play that didn’t include the direction in some form (except facsimiles and other editions seeking to present the original text without editorial correction), and for ten years now I’ve made a habit of picking up any copy of the play I come across and flipping it open to the incriminating passage.

How is this possible? I surely don’t know.

What I do know is that this misguided editorial tradition has had a tremendous impact on the performance history of the play. As early as 1755 we have written records of an audience member complaining, “‘Tis absurd to suppose that Hamlet actually stood in need of tables to refresh his memory upon so affecting an occasion.” The jarring nature of Hamlet “stopping his action” to pull out pen and paper has often left performers seeking an alternative: John Gielgud apologized for excluding this bit of business from his performance. Mel Gibson seized his sword and attempted to carve the words into the stone walls of Elsinore. Others have writ the words in their own blood.

On the other hand, there are those who have fully embraced the direction. In the 2000 National Theater production of the play, for example, it became a central pillar of Simon Russell Beale’s performance as he carried a small notebook and pen throughout the play, jotting down notes as the moments suited him. While the conceit is fascinating (one could even imagine such a diary being given over to the charge of Horatio at the end of the play), there seems little doubt in my mind that it would not have arisen if not for this errant stage direction.

I think that anyone who spends a fair bit of time hanging out with Shakespeare’s plays ends up accumulating a few choice phrases that will restlessly bounce around the inside of their skulls. I’m not necessarily talking about the big quotes. (Those are pretty much culturally ubiquitous.) What I’m talking about are the snatches of lesser-known verse that just happen to velcro onto your subconscious.

One of these, for me, is “disasters in the sun”. It tends to bounce into my mind whenever I’m confronted with a bit of misfortune or tragedy. The phrase comes from Hamlet. Specifically scene 1.1, where it is usually printed as:

In the most high and palmy state of Rome,
A little ere the mightiest Julius fell,
The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead
Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets;
As stars with trains of fire, and dews of blood,
Disasters in the sun; and the moist star
Upon whose influence Neptune’s empire stands
Was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse.

That quote, I’m afraid, is not actually truncated. Feel free to read it again a couple or three times if you like: It’s not actually a sentence. Nor is it immediately clear how it could become a sentence. In fact, its so unclear how the passage could become a sentence that it has effectively baffled 400 years worth of Shakespearean scholars and is almost universally cut from performances (presenting, as it does, an almost undeliverable challenge for any actor).

Things might be easier if we could compare the line across multiple original texts, but this passage appears only in the Second Quarto. Many early editors of the play assumed that there must be a line missing (which would conveniently contain the verb so desperately required by the latter portion of the passage). In fact, a goodly portion of the 1700′s were filled with a variety of scholars writing new verse lines and sticking them into the play, while others simply contented themselves with lifting a line from a similar passage in Julius Caesar and jamming it into place.

Another popular emendation was to semi-arbitrarily choose a word from the passage and turn it into a plausible-looking verbs:

Ay, stars with trains of fire and dews of blood,
Did darken e’en the sun…

As stars with trains of fire and dews of blood
Did enter in the sun…

Stars shone with trains of fire, dews of blood fell,
Disasters veil’d the sun…

Astres with trains of fire and dews of blood
Disastrous dimmed the sun!

THE OXFORD EMENDATION

More recently, G.R. Hibbard, in the Oxford Edition of the play, hypothesized the following emendation:

…and the sheeted dead
Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets
At stars with trains of fire, and dews of blood,
Disasters in the sun; and the moist star
Upon whose influence Neptune’s empire stands
Was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse.

Hibbard’s assumption is that Q2 text comes from “the compositor’s mistaking t for final s“.

(Amusingly, if you do a Google Books search for “at stars with trains of fire” you will find several such uses which appear to precede Hibbard’s emendation… but they are all the result of Google’s OCR software misidentifying “as” to read “at”. A digital inversion of the human error Hibbard hypothesizes.)

Hibbard’s emendation is to be praised (and has proven quite popular; being adopted into Arden’s Third Edition of the play, for example). It is commendable in its simplicity, and by turning the “stars with trains of fire”, “dews of blood”, and “disasters in the sun” into the objects at which the sheeted dead are squeaking and gibbering it succeeds in granting at least some sense.

However, even with the emendation the wording of the passage is quite awkward. Writing “stars with trains of fire, and dews of blood, disasters in the sun” instead of “stars with trains of fire, dews of blood, and disasters in the sun” could perhaps be excused as poetic license and the necessity of proper scansion. But a construction which is awkward on its own merits suddenly runs wholly aground on the rockiness of the next clause: “… and the moist star, upon whose influence Neptune’s empire stands, was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse.”

If one squints closely enough, it is possible to pick out the larger construction: “The sheeted dead (did a whole bunch of stuff) and the moist star was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse.” But the seemingly mis-sequenced “and” in the listing of calamities makes it virtually impossible to actually say such a passage aloud and have it make any sense.

A NEW EMENDATION

In preparing our script from the Complete Readings of William Shakespeare, however, I realized that, while Hibbard was on the right track, he’d misidentified which word had its final character misread by the compositor. Here is the correct reading of the passage:

In the most high and palmy state of Rome,
A little ere the mightiest Julius fell,
The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead
Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets
As stars with trains of fire and dews of blood
Disaster’d in the sun and the moist star,
Upon whose influence Neptune’s empire stands,
Was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse.

Those who had groped to find the missing verb in this morass (darkening, dimming, and distempering the word “disasters” in their efforts) were also on the right track… they just didn’t realize that the verb was staring them in the face, cleverly hidden by a “d” that had metamorphosed into an “s”.

Of course, this means that Shakespeare never actually wrote the snippet of text that has been echoing around my head for the better part of a decade now. I might be a little sad about that, but check this out:

A survey of Hamlet texts and variorium seems to confirm that the correct reading of this passage has never been published, suggesting that it hasn’t appeared on a stage as Shakespeare wrote it in more than 400 years. (In fact, it may have never been performed on a stage, depending on whether or not the Q2 version of the script was ever staged by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men.)

But on Monday, at the James J. Hill House in St. Paul, it will be.

How cool is that?

Hamlet is almost universally acknowledged as Shakespeare’s greatest masterpiece. Among his plays it is also, without doubt, the most complicated of texts. (One might even say convoluted.) Some of its mysteries may never be truly unraveled, but I think we can achieve a fair degree of certainty in a great many matters. Doing so, however, is going to require a great deal of untangling. So before we tackle that seemingly overwhelming task, let’s get straight to the scripts:

HAMLET – FULL SCRIPT

HAMLET – CONFLATED SCRIPT

(If you want to follow along come Monday night, you want to grab the Conflated version. That’s the one we’ll be performing from.)

THE THREE TEXTS

We have three source texts for Hamlet. (More than any other play by Shakespeare.)

The First Quarto (Q1) was published in 1603. In addition to the date, its title page reads, in part: “As it hath been diverse times acted by his Highness’ servants in the City of London : as also in two Universities of Cambridge and Oxford, and elsewhere.” Although this text has been periodically identified as Shakespeare’s “rough draft” such theories seem to have little merit. Instead, this heavily corrupted text shows clear indications of memorial reconstruction: An actor (most likely one hired for the touring company) attempted to reconstruct the play from memory and possibly his sides (a written copy of his lines and his cues).

(The tour referenced on Q1′ s title page also may explain one of the most significant changes to the text: The characters of Polonius and Reynaldo are renamed Corambis and Montano. Robert Polenius was the founder of Oxford University and John Reynalds was the President of Corpus Christi College in Cambridge. The similarity of the names might have been interpreted as a veiled insult at the universities, which could explain why the names would be changed.)

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On November 22nd, in the lush opulence of the James J. Hill House in St. Paul, Minnesota, the American Shakespeare Repertory will present the play which has become a cornerstone of Western literature and philosophy: The Tragedy of Hamlet is an enigma of conflicting texts, centuries of dramatic legacy, and hundreds of famous quotations which have taken on a life of themselves.

But now, as part of the Complete Readings of William Shakespeare, there is a unique opportunity to view Hamlet in the context of its creation: As a play performed among many other plays. Merely one among equals.

And yet somehow greater nonetheless.

CAST
Justin Alexander – Hamlet
Tim Perfect – Claudius
Ann Carroll – Gertrude
Craig Johnson – Polonius
Phil D. Henry – Laertes
Maretta Zilic – Ophelia
Lucas Gerstner – Horatio
Rob Sieg – Rosencrantz
Allen Voigt – Guildenstern
Phil D. Henry – Ghost & Player King
Ann Rice – Bernardo, Reynaldo, and Player Queen
Janine Hegarty – Francisco & Fortinbras
Adelin Phelps – Marcellus & Others
Cara Kluver – Gravedigger & Others
Brigid Kelley – Gravedigger & Others

Put us on your calendar and tell your friends about our Facebook Event!

The simple strains of Much Ado‘s comic glee have danced through our hearts, but as the gloom of Minnesota’s winter gathers we turn our eyes to Hamlet‘s Denmark. On November 22nd, the melancholy prince strides through the lush opulence of the historic James J. Hill House in St. Paul. Join us for a pre-Thanksgiving feast of poison, treachery, and tragedy.

HAMLET

NOVEMBER 22nd, 2010
7:30 PM
Tickets: Pay What You Can!

James J. Hill House
240 Summit Avenue
St. Paul, MN
Directions to the Theater

Our November schedule for the Complete Readings of William Shakespeare is being shuffled to better accommodate a variety of schedules.

Much Ado About Nothing will be performing on NOVEMBER 10th at the People’s Center Theater.

Hamlet, which was originally schedule for that date, will be moved to a date later in the month. (Currently pending final schedule confirmation. This post will be updated as soon as the date has been finalized.)

UPDATE: Hamlet is now scheduled for November 22nd at the James J. Hill House!

Due to irreconcileable schedule conflicts, American Shakespeare Repertory regretfully announces that our May 12th reading of Hamlet will be cancelled. No alternative reading or event will take the place of this reading, but the Complete Readings of William Shakespeare will continue with The Second Maiden’s Tragedy on May 19th at the People’s Center Theater in Minneapolis, MN.