Word: hamlets
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...arcane terms that occur nowhere else in Shakespeare--such as neb, hoxes, callet, losel, pugging, dibble, caddises, barne, and pettitoes. Are these to be thrown out too? Let audiences do their homework, or suffer the consequences. (Some years back, Robert Graves announced that he was preparing a text of Hamlet with all the old words updated. Fortunately I never saw either him or the result. Graves indeed are fitting places for such scoundrels...
Madden has now been acting professionally for exactly 25 years. In 1961 I saw his long-running Hamlet in New York, which demonstrated marked talent. Here at Stratford, seven years ago, he gave us a fascinating but somewhat misguided Richard II. Even then there were signs of vocal gargling. But this has now developed into a most serious affliction, and I don't know whether it is too late to find a remedy...
...best things in life may be free, but so are some of the worst. Joseph Papp's New York Shakespeare Festival is offering Hamlet for nothing at Central Park's Delacorte Theater, and it is worth nothing...
...Waterston is the most maladroit Hamlet to appear on a professional stage in the past decade. He bears not the remotest resemblance to a prince. He is like a little boy throwing a nightlong temper tantrum. His twitchy gestures suggest those of a puppet on the strings of a drunken puppeteer. His voice is woefully devoid of resonance. He delivers the Shakespearean line like a squawk box in dire need of a lozenge. Add to this little humor and less thought, and Hamlet the Dane becomes Hamlet the Cipher...
...usurping king is a tin-pot fascist. Robert Burr plays the role like Dean Martin presiding at a "roast"; Andrea Marcovicci plays Ophelia like a stewardess in search of an Upper East Side singles bar; and if Ruby Dee's Gertrude is capable of loving either Claudius or Hamlet, it will certainly be news to them. Only Larry Gates, doubling as Polonius and the First Gravedigger, emerges from this fiasco with a modicum of merit...