Mad About Shakespeare

9. Like Mad Hamlet

When it came to the A-Level Shakespeare exam that would play a big part in determining our university futures, we only had to write about two of the four Shakespeare plays we had studied. This was a good thing, because I loved Henry IV Part 1 and Antony and Cleopatra, but was indifferent to the third play and could not get on at all with the fourth.

Dr Johnson opined that Shakespeare’s natural instinct was for comedy, not tragedy. When we discussed this in class, most of us thought the idea was perverse. Wasn’t it generally agreed that the tragedies of Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello and King Lear were Shakespeare’s very greatest plays – the ‘four big ones’, as the influential critic A. C. Bradley had dubbed them? Did Johnson really think that As You Like It, our set comedy, was in that league? His own summary judgement didn’t sound especially enthusiastic:

Of this play the fable is wild and pleasing. I know not how the ladies will approve the facility with which both Rosalind and Celia give away their hearts … The character of Jaques is natural and well preserved. The comick dialogue is very sprightly, with less mixture of low buffoonery than in some other plays.

His own melancholy must have drawn him to the melancholy Jaques, whom I found a bit of a bore. And, for all JA’s patient explication of the analogy between a wit combat and a duel, we were all bored by the stand-up routines of the clown Touchstone. Then the four weddings at the end seemed just too good to be true. Shakespeare played the same trick in Love’s Labour’s Lost, a comedy I discovered later, but there he had the good sense to throw in a funeral.

Professor Christopher Ricks tossed off an aside in one of his dazzling lectures when I was at university: ‘Tragedies make us happy because we think life cannot be that bad, whereas comedies make us sad because we think life cannot be that good.’ My jaundiced view of As You Like It might have been due to the fact that my life didn’t seem that good at the time. We were supposed to laugh at the gloomy and verbose self-indulgence of Jaques. Fair enough, since he was in many ways playing the part of the melancholy man. But was depression really a laughing matter? Besides, real depression was characterized by silence, withdrawal into the shell of the self that feels itself empty, not sermons about the sorrows of the deer and the resemblance of human life to a seven-act play.

As for the love-plot, the class divided into two: the cynics who made jokes out of such lines as Rosalind’s My affection hath an unknown bottom and the frustrated romantics who, like Orlando, mooned around writing bad poetry but, unlike Orlando, never got the girl. Or, as in my case, got the girl and then made a mess of it and lost her. The only scene I really liked was the one where Rosalind, disguised as the boy Ganymede, pretends to be Rosalind training Orlando for his encounter with the real Rosalind. She has commissioned herself with the task of offering him a cure for love, since

Love is merely a madness; and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do: and the reason why they are not so punished and cured is that the lunacy is so ordinary that the whippers are in love too.

If we didn’t all find ourselves in thrall to the madness of love, we’d lock up those who succumb to it in a dark house – the place where Malvolio is confined in Twelfth Night when he is tricked into the presumptuous belief that the lady he serves is in love with him.

The good thing about a literary work, which is usually not the case with a love affair, is that you can give it a second chance at a much later date. As You Like It seems to me one of those Shakespeare plays that has to be seen to be loved. When it is staged well, you leave the theatre thinking that there could be no more life-affirming way of spending an evening. My relationship with the play was redeemed in 1994, courtesy of the touring company Cheek by Jowl.

Their production showed me how it was possible to be simultaneously true to Shakespeare in his own time and to make him our contemporary. The staging was in many respects authentically Elizabethan. No proscenium arch or realistic scenery; just an empty platform stage like that of Shakespeare’s Globe. The exiled Rosalind, Celia and Touchstone walked round and round the bare boards: that was enough to take them to the Forest of Arden. Dress was modern, but more colourful and larger than life than that of everyday – as it would have been in the 1590s, when costumes included the cast-off robes of courtiers, second-hand wear, but still of a lavishness beyond the purse of most playgoers. Touchstone wore different-coloured socks, in allusion to the fool’s motley. The eclecticism reminded me of the earliest surviving Shakespeare illustration, a drawing of Titus Andronicus, in which Titus wears a Roman toga and Tamora the Goth a medieval-looking robe, while the men-at-arms are ‘modern-dress’ Elizabethan halberdiers.

The irreverent style of performance, with frequent direct addresses to the audience and occasional improvised interjections on the part of Touchstone, an Elizabethan pun one moment, a bunch of flowers used as an interview microphone the next, answered to what Peter Brook in The Empty Space, my theatrical bible, called ‘rough theatre’:

It is always the popular theatre that saves the day. Through the ages it has taken many forms, and there is only one factor that they all have in common – a roughness … The arsenal is limitless: the aside, the placard, the topical reference, the local jokes, the exploiting of accidents, the songs, the dances, the tempo, the noise, the relying on contrasts, the shorthand of exaggeration, the false noses, the stock types, the stuffed bellies. The popular theatre, freed of unity of style, actually speaks a very sophisticated and stylish language: a popular audience usually has no difficulty in accepting inconsistencies of accent and dress, or in darting between mime and dialogue, realism and suggestion.

Le Beau touched up Orlando on the line I shall desire more love and knowledge of you. This was an all-male production, unashamedly gay at a time still scarred by the Aids epidemic. Best of all was Adrian Lester as Rosalind. With his beautiful voice and grace of movement, when he played the female Rosalind playing at being the male Ganymede, he seemed more like a woman playing a man than a man playing a woman. And when he played at Rosalind playing Ganymede playing Rosalind, one simply gave up trying to work out whether one thought he was a woman playing a man playing a woman or a man playing a woman playing a man playing a woman. When the text drew attention to the idea of the male actor, as in the Epilogue, one thought about it, but for most of the time the audience was held so spellbound by the strength and the wit and the pain of Rosalind that the actor’s gender, let alone the colour of his skin, was forgotten.

Some feminists condemned the production, arguing that it perpetuated the exclusion of women from the Shakespearean stage and that by flaunting its drag it reduced the play to a homosexual romp; a campy Celia and an obviously cross-dressed Phebe provided hostages to such an attack, but the androgynous delicacy and subtlety of Lester’s Rosalind seemed to me to nullify it. It probably helped, though, that the person I was sitting next to in the auditorium had the wit, intelligence, kindness and fortitude of Rosalind and that we were newly and madly in love. It was April when I wooed and, contrary to Rosalind’s warning, did not become December when we wed. How we feel about a Shakespeare play when we encounter it will usually be affected by – and have an effect upon – the way we are feeling about life.

The fourth play, the one I really didn’t like at all, was Hamlet. Oh God, how weary, stale, flat and unprofitable it seemed to me. The Prince of Denmark just droned on and on, in maudlin self-examination just like … me? That was the problem: it was all too close to the bone.

Hurdy guided us through the many possible interpretations of Hamlet’s character, working from a sheet of key quotations cyclostyled on pink paper. One was T. S. Eliot saying that the play was a failure because it lacked an ‘objective correlative’, whatever that was. Another was a brief extract from a poem called Daiphantus, or the Passions of Love, published very soon after the play was first performed, which parodied the affected behaviour of a lovesick university student who

Puts off his clothes; his shirt he only wears,

Much like mad Hamlet.

This was a clear allusion to Ophelia’s account of Hamlet coming to her chamber with his doublet all unbraced and no hat upon his head, in the style of the man affected with love-melancholy. It presumably also reflected the original staging of the play. But, as Hurdy pointed out, the undress may be a performance on Hamlet’s part, an attempt – which certainly convinces Polonius – to put everyone off the scent. It comes after he says that he will put an antic disposition on, pretend to be mad. That was the question: to what extent was Hamlet really mad?

It was easy to see that Hamlet ticked all the boxes for melancholy in the Renaissance equivalent of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: disillusionment with the world, propensity for satiric and misogynistic outbursts, dislike of sunshine, obsession with death as manifested by a tendency to lurk about graveyards and pick up skulls, simultaneous delight and scorn in the scholar’s life:

POLONIUS What do you read, my lord?

HAMLET Words, words, words.

Above all, inability to act. If JA resembled Dr Johnson, Hurdy’s avatar was Samuel Taylor Coleridge. His brilliant mind was tainted by the inability ever to finish the books he was planning, not least because of the irresistible lure of alcohol (at least he never turned to opium). Coleridge said that he had a smack of Hamlet himself, and so did Hurdy. He leaned very much to the interpretation offered in the passage from one of Coleridge’s lectures in our compendium of critical quotations:

Hamlet was the play, or rather Hamlet himself was the character, in the intuition and exposition of which I first made my turn for philosophical criticism, and especially for insight into the genius of Shakespeare … Man was distinguished from the animal, in proportion as thought prevails over sense: but in healthy processes of the mind, a balance was maintained between the impressions of outward objects and the inward operations of the intellect: if there be an overbalance in the contemplative faculty, man becomes the creature of meditation, and loses the power of action. Shakespeare seems to have conceived a mind in the highest degree of excitement, with this overpowering activity of intellect: and to have placed him in circumstances, where he was obliged to act on the spur of the moment. Hamlet, though brave and careless of death, had contracted a morbid sensibility from this overbalance in the mind, producing the lingering and vacillating delays of procrastination; and wasting in the energy of resolving, the energy of acting. Thus the play of Hamlet offers a direct contrast to that of Macbeth: the one proceeds with the utmost slowness, the other with breathless and crowded rapidity.

That was indeed the problem: my love of Shakespeare had been sparked by the breathless and crowded rapidity of Macbeth, doubled by the compression of the Marowitz remix, so I simply did not have the patience for the slow unfolding of Hamlet. I wrote an essay making this complaint. In response, Hurdy quietly rebuked me for using the word ‘prevaricate’ when I meant ‘procrastinate’.

In this case, the theatre did not help. The timing should have been propitious. Just as we were in the final run-up to exams, in the spring term of 1976, the long-delayed National Theatre building was supposed to open on the south bank of the Thames with a production of Hamlet directed by Peter Hall and starring Albert Finney. Snagging problems caused more Hamlet-like delay, so the company stayed in their old home, the Old Vic. Discounted seats were procured for our school group. Up went the curtain and on went the show. And on and on. It was nearly three hours before we even reached the interval. Hall, a textual purist if ever there was one, had elected to play the whole thing uncut. It lasted four and a quarter hours. Reviews were mixed. For some, Finney was the best Hamlet since Michael Redgrave in the 1950s, but I agreed with Harold Hobson in The Sunday Times:

In an age that puts only a low value on grace, style and subtlety, Mr Finney is an appropriate enough choice. His voice is monotonously rasping, his mind does not respond to the text, and his way of taking curtain calls suggests insufferable conceit.

I learned only one thing from the production: slow Shakespeare was the kiss of death to a young audience. Has anyone ever left one of his plays saying, ‘That was a great production, but I wish it had been longer?’

There was another problem. There seemed to be no emotional connection between Finney’s Hamlet and Angela Lansbury’s Gertrude. She never seemed to do anything other than wring her hands. The interpretative quotation that generated some discomfort in our class was the one from Freud about Hamlet’s alleged Oedipus complex: he wants to kill Claudius not because Claudius has killed his father, but because his uncle is in bed with Gertrude, which is where Hamlet would really like to be himself. I couldn’t see the incestuous desire, but it was obvious that the student prince had a difficult relationship with his mother. He is broken-hearted, grieving, isolated, indeed suicidal, before he meets the ghost and finds out about the murder of his father. That is because while he has been away at university, his mother has married his uncle with indecent haste. To say the least, she has let his father down. Which is enough to make Hamlet mad.

And what I could not forgive him for was the way in which his half-real, half-feigned madness makes Ophelia truly mad. I could not bring myself to sympathize with a hero who was so cruel to his girlfriend: dumping her, publicly humiliating her with his coarse jokes about lying between her legs and engaging in ‘country matters’, killing her father (albeit in a case of mistaken identity), ultimately driving her to distraction, to hysterical songs of sexual frustration and to a watery death.

Mark Rylance’s mad Hamlet for the RSC in 1989: the first production that held my attention