Boyd: We saw the play being driven by the possible actions of a usurped prince in a dangerous court, rather than by a "given" of Hamlet's state of mind. We chose to celebrate Hamlet's brilliant control of language under extreme pressure rather than relax into a "state" of introspection. This felt more active, true and exciting. That said, as the production matured, Toby [Stephens, playing Hamlet] was able to give more space to the lyrical wonder in Hamlet's thought, without losing the prevailing sense of danger.
The Ghost appears to come from Roman Catholic Purgatory, whereas young Hamlet is studying at Wittenberg, a university synonymous with Martin Luther and Protestantism: did the religious controversies of the age play any part in your production?
Daniels: These religious controversies are indeed fascinating but they are perhaps of more interest in the study than in the rehearsal room, where what matters is human behavior and motivation. What makes Hamlet, who perhaps understands that he is the protagonist of a revenger's tragedy, incapable of carrying out his obligation to revenge his father's death? What other imperative is short-circuiting his will to action? What is forcing him to deviate from the destiny imposed on him?
Caird: Religion had a great deal to do with my interpretation but not religious controversies. The main reason I set the play in a dis-cernibly Renaissance period is that I don't think the play works if it's set in a post-Enlightenment world. The central characters are deeply concerned with the mortality of their souls. Without the religious and spiritual context in which Shakespeare was writing it's hard to make sense of the play philosophically and intellectually.
I don't think the difference between Protestantism and Catholicism is so crucial to the meaning of the play and Wittenberg itself is relatively unimportant. Ostensibly the company of players comes from Wittenberg, because one assumes that's where Hamlet and Horatio must have met them. But that would make Wittenberg a town with troupes of child-actors taking over from adult companies and we know that wasn't the case in Wittenberg. As always Shakespeare is using his own experiences and playing fast and loose with geography and chronology. Shakespeare's Wittenberg is more like Oxford than a Lutheran university, and when the Players arrive on the scene it suddenly becomes London.
Boyd: Shakespeare is clearly writing about the deep damage caused by the English Reformation, the suppression of the old Church, and the resulting schism in the country. Hamlet is of the new "Protestant" generation, but is forced to learn that "there are more things in heaven and earth ... than are dreamt of" in the reformed thinking of Wittenberg. The fact that "the time is out of joint" runs through the middle of Hamlet and all of Shakespeare's work.
8. Greg Hicks: Michael Boyd's terrifying Ghost from Purgatory.
Greg Hicks was truly supernatural--chalk white, nearly naked, agonized and burdened with a giant broadsword from a bygone heroic age, which he slowly dragged with painful Shinto precision across the metal grating on the floor. It was genuinely frightening and gave Toby Stephens a powerful problem to solve.
Was your Hamlet's "antic disposition" always a performance or were there moments when he veered into genuine madness?
Daniels: I don't think the "antic disposition" was ever a performance. Certainly, Hamlet out-clowns Polonius in the Fishmonger scene, giving the foolish old man a taste of his own foolishness, and Hamlet's fury and his pain in the nunnery scene are almost beyond his control. However, these are different responses, one humorous and the other unbearably violent, to specific instances within a larger continuum of despair, a despair that is utterly disabling.
9. Mark Rylance as Ron Daniels' pajama-wearing Hamlet, berating Gertrude (Clare Higgins) in the closet scene: she holds the pictures of the two brothers who became her two husbands.
For this production we used the Bad Quarto structure, in which the nunnery scene is placed well before the Fishmonger scene: the first time Hamlet appeared after the battlement sequence was when he came on stage, a forlorn, suicidal figure still dressed in his pajamas, to agonize over whether he should be or not be--a man in the throes of an unbearable inner crisis, genuinely "transformed" and very far from the "understanding of himself."
Caird: I see a lot of Hamlets where the actor plays the madness card in order to escape a proper investigation of the part. Of course it's exciting for an actor to walk onto the stage looking or acting completely nuts, but there's nothing in the language of the scenes to suggest madness at all. Hamlet doesn't say anything mad. I came to the view, after rehearsing it and extrapolating all the sense I could from what Hamlet says in each of his scenes, that Hamlet is the only sane person in the play. Almost everyone else is to some extent mad, with the obvious exception of Horatio. Polonius says and does mad things. Ophelia, Gertrude, Claudius, Laertes ... they all find themselves in truly mad situations and react madly to them. What's amazing about Hamlet is that in the circumstances in which he finds himself, he doesn't go mad. Instead he gets saner and saner as the play continues. By the time he returns from England he's extraordinarily balanced and wise. He has moments of rashness and anger in the play, one of which results in the death of Polonius, but I can't think of a single thing he does in the play that would suggest for one moment that he's mad.
Boyd: Hamlet begins the play under great mental stress, but it is the world that is mad. He is in mourning and has been effectively usurped with the collusion of his mother, and yet is being forced to celebrate his mother's wedding to his usurper.
He is probably at his wildest with his dead father, Ophelia, and his mother, i.e. when he is most profoundly emotionally threatened, but he is not mad. As the victim of the mad time and the one born to set it right, he bears the imprint of the madness of the time. The antic disposition is a time-honored camouflage employed by Hieronimo (in The Spanish Tragedy) and Arbella Stuart (in her cousin Elizabeth I's court) to make themselves seem harmless to a watchful and oppressive state.
How did you deal with the brutality of Hamlet's behavior toward Ophelia in the "nunnery" and "country matters" exchanges?
Daniels: In the most brutal way possible. The scene became quite physically as well as verbally explosive. Much as Hamlet believes Gertrude has betrayed the memory of his father by posting "with such dexterity to incestuous sheets," he also believes Ophelia has betrayed him by obeying her father's orders that she "lock herself from his resort, admit no messengers, receive no token ..."--and I've always been fascinated by Hamlet's strange encounter with her when he breaks into her chamber and falls "to such perusal of my face as he would draw it." What did Hamlet mean to convey by such a mysterious encounter--and what did Ophelia understand by it that caused her to be so terrified? Did he look into her soul and did he see her guilt at her act of betrayal?
"Frailty, thy name is woman." All women. Does this then not refer as much to Ophelia as to Gertrude? And what horror does this reveal, of Woman merely as the painted seductress, ambling and lisping and awakening dangerous and uncontrollable desires in all men that can only lead to murder and incest? Tormented and pathological reasoning, certainly, which can only lead to violent and irrational behavior.
Caird: I don't think he is being brutal, or certainly not intentionally. The character of Ophelia has to be seen in thematic terms. She's not a fully drawn character. She represents the possibility of a future life. She is the only nobly born woman in the play of childbearing age and therefore the only available person for Hamlet to marry and have children with. Hamlet's father was called Hamlet, and for all one knows his father was called Hamlet too. The state of Denmark is one in which kings called Hamlet get married and have boys called Hamlet, and so life continues. Claudius aborts this natural order.
The crucial line in the nunnery scene is "I say we will have no more marriages." It's a tragic utterance. It says "I cannot go on pretending with this woman that we're in love and that we're going to get married and have children and everything's going to be happy. It cannot be. The world is diseased, mad and dead. No more children must be born into it." "Get thee to
a nunnery" means precisely that. It's nothing to do with a whorehouse, as some scholars have suggested. Whorehouses in Shakespeare are bawdy, complicated places, full of life. Look at Measure for Measure and the Henry IV plays. The Denmark of Hamlet is no place for a whorehouse. The nunnery here is the same place as the cold unproductive cloister with which Theseus threatens Hermia in the opening scene of A Midsummer Night's Dream.
It is germane that when Ophelia dies, Gertrude brings the news of her death. Gertrude is the other woman in the play; a woman who won't have any more children, and who has forgotten her duty to the child she already has. Ophelia is the woman who should one day have taken over the role of wife and mother from Gertrude as Hamlet should have become his father's successor. Gertrude says this very clearly at Ophelia's obsequies. She had believed that her son would marry Ophelia and life would thereby continue into the future, but by marrying Claudius and forgetting her love for her husband and son she has made a horrible miscalculation, albeit for very human reasons.
If Gertrude was present while Ophelia was drowning, why didn't she help her? If she is reporting what she was told by someone else, who then told her? And why doesn't Shakespeare use that character to report the news to us? Why didn't he use a shepherd or the Gentleman from Ophelia's madness scene? The reason is thematic. If Hamlet is not to marry Ophelia and have children with her, then everything Gertrude has lived for dies with Ophelia. Nothing that she's ever done has any future value. The death of Ophelia contains her own death and ultimately the death of her son. By making her the bearer of these tidings, Shakespeare gives the actress playing Gertrude a pivotal moment in the development of her role.
Boyd: Hamlet suspects that Ophelia is being abused and reduced to a political chess piece by her father (and therefore his master the king), but Ophelia is also clearly lying, and Hamlet cannot tell the degree to which she is compliant in an attempt to entrap him. Remember also that Hamlet is under observation in both the nunnery scene and the Players scene, and taking pains to appear mad.
How did you distinguish between the style of the play-within-the-play and that of the main drama?
Daniels: Clearly a style has to be found for the play-within-a-play which places it outside the boundaries of realistic action. Our solution was to perform it as a shadow play.
Caird: Hamlet's advice to the players is so specific and apt and modern--it's what any director of any age would want to say to his actors. To have the players in the play-within-the-play acting in a different style from the main protagonists you would have to have one or other of the casts ignoring Hamlet's, and therefore also Shakespeare's, instructions!
I used a staging trick. The play-within-the-play was performed at the very edge of the stage with Claudius, Gertrude, and Polonius watching from upstage. The two audiences--for The Mousetrap at Elsinore and for Hamlet at the National Theatre--became reflections of one another. By the device of building false prosceniums on either side of the stage, I created "wings." Hamlet stood in the wings reacting as a director or author would in the wings of an actual theater. The National Theatre audience could thereby watch Hamlet watching the play while he simultaneously observed the reactions of Claudius and Gertrude as they watched from their own auditorium. This solved the problem of Hamlet having to whisper things quietly enough for Claudius and Gertrude not to hear them, but loudly enough for Ophelia and the National Theatre audience to hear.
10. Toby Stephens and Meg Fraser as Hamlet and Ophelia in Michael Boyd's production.
Boyd: Our players were brilliant, prone to coarseness, and seemingly harmless cousins of the mechanicals, but they were led by Greg Hicks, who carried with him the awful authority of the Ghost. Like the inhabitants of Purgatory, they had been driven out of town. Like Shakespeare's own companies at times, they were being used as a political weapon.