Word: hamleted
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Shakespeare’s Hamlet has not been a play for almost 300 years and everybody knows it. More studied, quoted and lauded than any other dramatic work in the Western canon, it has become something of a foundational myth for the European and American worlds. Harvard’s own Marjorie Garber asserts that one never really reads Hamlet for the first time; our culture is so permeated with the play that we grow up knowing it, even if were not aware of this knowledge. And I’ve even heard some Shakespeare enthusiasts...
...fact, while much of the Shakespeare cult of modern times can be seen as a relatively recent historical phenomena, the overwhelming reverence paid to Hamlet extends as far back as the late 17th century. While English dramatists of the Restoration were adapting Shakespeare’s plays left and right, altering them to fit the popular penchant for love triumphant and a happy ending, Hamlet remained untouched. Even King Lear got a makeover in the form of a glorious marriage between Edgar and the distinctly not-dead Cordelia. But the thwarted love, the suicides and the excessive carnage of Hamlet...
...performers, the mythic status of Hamlet poses something of a problem. The best actors approach the role as the great Greek tragedians did a myth: they provide a profound and deeply personal interpretation of it, but they never capture all of its possibilities. More so than with almost any other role, Hamlet is bigger than they are. It stands apart from them, even in the midst of their performance. Theirs is an approach to Hamlet, never a full embodiment. And for the worst actors, a performance of Hamlet is something even less than an approach; it is a type...
...seemed until last summer when London’s Royal National Theatre opened a new production of Hamlet starring Simon Russell Beale. I had the privilege of watching the show while it was still in previews, sitting flush with the right-hand wall in the very last row of the balcony. It was probably the worst seat I have ever had in a theater, but it was undeniably one of the most incredible theatrical experiences of my life. Charles Spencer of London’s Daily Telograph said that Beale’s was a performance...
...magic of Beale’s performance cannot be captured in newspaper reviews or theatrical awards. In fact, it is with great uncertainty that I even try to represent his great achievement in words. Reviewing this Hamlet is not a matter of reviewing a character or even an actor. The experience is instead like trying to review an actual human being who, after more than 300 years of hiding behind a colossal myth, has quietly and unassumingly stepped out to tell his story: Hamlet the man—not the character, the icon or the gimmick. The glory of Beale?...