LAERTES The treacherous instrument is in thy hand,
Unbated and envenomed. The foul practice
Hath turned itself on me: lo, here I lie,
Never to rise again. Thy mother's poisoned.
I can no more. The king, the king's to blame
HAMLET The point envenomed too!
Shakespeare wouldn't have had Hamlet speaking that line if he already knew the point was envenomed.
Boyd: Once Hamlet knows for certain that the duel is a plot to murder him, there is nothing to stop him killing Laertes. Indeed, he'll probably have to if he's going to kill the king.
The play exists in three early texts of greatly differing lengths, suggesting that it evolved in performance in Shakespeare's lifetime and that cuts were applied at various times. In cutting your text to a manageable length, did you have a set of principles or was it more a case of following your directorial instincts?
Daniels: Common sense, I suppose. A desire to keep the action immediate and exciting, to make sure the text was clear and accessible. And understandable.
Caird: A bit of both. There are obvious economies to be made whatever text you use. You don't need the play-within-the-play and the dumb show. One or other suffices. Playing them both means Claudius has to be peculiarly blind or arbitrarily distracted while watching the dumb show. Hamlet asking for his own lines to be inserted in The Murder of Gonzago must have been added by Shakespeare for performances where the subsequent soliloquy--"O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!"--was to be cut. If you include both, the former lines disable the climax in the latter--where Hamlet says "About my brain" and goes on to invent the idea of using the play as a means of discerning Claudius' guilt.
But the largest cuts I made were inspired by a clear principle. I took the view that Shakespeare's play is at heart a domestic and philosophical drama, not a history play. In many of the productions of Hamlet that I've seen, the scenes that seemed to be more like history play than domestic tragedy were always the dull points in the evening, where you could feel the audience switching off; the plot involving Cornelius, Voltemand, Fortinbras, and the Ambassadors; the mention of Norway or Poland seeming to distract the audience from the metaphorical power of the world that is Denmark. I started to feel as I studied the text leading up to rehearsals that there was a case for saying that the more political scenes may have been later additions, though certainly not by another hand. It is not too fanciful to think that Shakespeare may have been warned, or warned himself, that the language with which Hamlet describes the world was apparently so dangerously irreligious, even amoral in its tone, that his audience, and more importantly his noble sponsors, would find it impossible to accept, that it would behoove him to set it in a more political framework and especially to give some hope for the future at the end of the play.
In any event it seemed to me that Fortinbras has absolutely no moral right to say what has been written for him. We don't know him, we don't care about him, and yet he's given a moral authority at the end of the play, an authority he hasn't earned and that seems to be written without any irony. He isn't like Malcolm at the end of Macbeth, who has lived through the terrible events of the play and, cleansed by his experience, has every right to the crown. So I cut Fortinbras and all that goes with him, ending the play with Horatio's lines:
Now cracks a noble heart. Goodnight sweet prince,
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!
What more apposite words could there be to end a play about mortality, nobility, philosophy, and the meaning of earthly existence?
By the same toke
n, I felt I couldn't do better than begin and end the play on the relationship between Hamlet and Horatio. At the start of the play I had Horatio arriving on the scene as if returning to it after a long absence. The other characters were enshrined in their tombs, all long dead. Horatio's memory of the events of the play brought them back to life. At the end of the play while Hamlet lies dying Horatio threatens to kill himself, but Hamlet stops him. If Horatio dies, who will tell Hamlet's story? Horatio is the only living witness. We may even ask another question: who other than Horatio could have told Shakespeare the story? It is diverting to imagine a silent final scene to Hamlet that we, the surviving inhabitants of Elsinore, watch at a distance from the battlements. Horatio is leaving the castle to return to Wittenberg and falls in with the company of Players, starting on their long trip back to London. We see him deep in conversation with the First Player who listens intently. The story is being told for the first time. It has started on its own long circular journey. From Hamlet to Horatio, from Horatio to the Player, from the Player to the page, from the page to the stage. Horatio has survived for the same reason that Kent and Edgar survive at the end of Lear, to "speak what we feel, not what we ought to say."
Boyd: We exploited the brevity and directness of the First Quarto, which feels like a cut playing script and propels the action forward, particularly after the death of Polonius; but the suppleness, subtlety, and elegance of thought in the Folio reeks of the integrity of original authorship, and so we allowed its style to predominate.
I flirted until late in rehearsal with transposing "To Be" as a "suicide bomber" speech immediately before "Lights, lights, lights!," with the whole court frozen as Hamlet advanced slowly on Claudius, surrounded by Switzers. It worked as a thrilling dramatization of the difficulty of direct action, but it pushed the speech's vulnerability out the door, and so we restored it to the moment before Hamlet meets Ophelia.
REFERENCES
1. Anthony B. Dawson, Shakespeare in Performance: Hamlet (1995), p. 25.
2. Printed by J. P. Collier, Annals of the Stage, 1831, Vol. 1, in Gamini Salgado, Eyewitnesses of Shakespeare: First Hand Accounts of Performances 1590-1890 (1975), pp. 38-9.
3. John Downes, Roscius Anglicanus (1708, repr. 1969), p. 21.
4. Richard Steele, in an originally unsigned review of Hamlet in The Tatler, with Notes and a General Index: Complete in One Volume (1835), p. 154.
5. Colley Cibber, An Apology for the Life of Mr Colley Cibber (repr. 1889), p. 61.
6. Henry Mackenzie, The Mirror (Edinburgh), No. 99, 17 April 1780.
7. Walter Scott, "Life of John Philip Kemble," Quarterly Review, 34 (1826), p. 214.
8. Georg Lichtenberg, Lichtenberg's Visits to England, translated and annotated by Margaret L. Mare and W. H. Quarrell (1969), p. 10.
9. Mary Russell Mitford, The Life of Mary Russell Mitford (1870), Vol. 2, p. 336.