Hamlet

In 1965 David Warner played Hamlet as a man obsessed with his father, not only by the loss of him, but by his inability to match up to him in stature. In order to emphasize this the Ghost appeared as a tremendously tall figure. Roger Howells, the stage manager, explained that the device used to create this effect was like a "dalek." When staged in Stratford, two men, one standing on the ground and the other on the platform above him, maneuvered the Ghost from inside a "shell." The voice of Patrick Magee58 was sound-recorded and then boomed over the speakers to create an otherworldly effect. Critic Anthony Dawson remarked that

the sense of being outmanned was the dominant effect. The Ghost entered with raised arms through the doors at the back as the sentries and Prince huddled around the cannon downstage ... on "sweep to my revenge," he swept, ironically, to the long arms of his father, to be cradled within them for the remainder of the scene. He seemed to be "looking for the comforts of the nursery" (Times, 20 Aug.), and it was clearly his father rather than his mother, here and throughout, that fired his imagination. But the gap between heroic parent and inadequate child was overtly underlined by the stage image, generated as it were by Hamlet's inner compulsions: the father huge and protective, the son comfortless and unfit. Even after the Ghost's departure under the stage, as he reeled about getting his friends to swear their secrecy, Hamlet kept falling on the ground as if attempting to return to his father's protective embrace. How could such a man effectively take on the polished King or his politic prime minister?59

David Warner explained how the powerful image of the Ghost's embrace gave the scene a feeling of "total love and belief in the father." Warner "reacted quite violently to the Ghost's request for revenge even to shouting 'WHAT!' (not in text) and then sobbing throughout the Ghost's long speech."60

For the revenge [Hamlet] really wishes, and achieves, is on himself for not being the great Hamlet his father was.... As the hollow voice beneath the stage cries "Swear!," his son lovingly measures his length on the ground, as if on a grave; but the voice moves, he cannot cover it. Clutching violently at his mother on her bed he looks up to find the huge presence of his father towering between them.61

Obviously, Hamlet's sense of intense grief plays a large part in the way he perceives the world. Grief can often bring with it an exaggeration of the senses, a cruel self-awareness and feelings of isolation. As Stanley Wells points out, Shakespeare's central concern in writing Hamlet was "Reactions to death."62 For Hamlet, actor Michael Pennington believed,

Grief seems to have sharpened his sense of falsehood in the world around him, but in other ways the immeasurable shock he has received has sent him to sleep. The torpor is deep and disturbing to watch, lifting in utterances--"My father, methinks I see my father"--which are more hallucinatory than sentimental. Anybody familiar with bereavement can recognise the symptoms. In dramatic terms, until the news of the Ghost's appearance animates him, gives him something to believe in he is a dramatic hero of whom nothing much can be expected.63

In the production starring Pennington, the Ghost sat on a bench and quietly told Hamlet what had happened. Director John Barton's highlighting of theatricality also informed his Hamlet's reaction to the Ghost:

From Hamlet's viewpoint, perhaps even the Ghost is a Satanic actor, until the closet scene when Hamlet gently presses his mother's face round and, in a shared moment of stunned disbelief, she too sees the Ghost.64

Hamlet's grief stems from an acute awareness of the importance, the preciousness of human life. Anger at his mother's inability to see, to be aware, of the truth of her situation, prompts one of the most potent dramatic scenes ever written. In this production, Gertrude not only saw into her own soul, but in witnessing the Ghost became fully aware of what Hamlet saw and felt. The effect was s

o powerful that she fainted.

Michael Boyd's 2004 staging of the supernatural was striking and imaginative. The Ghost appeared with slow progression through the audience to the stage, skeleton-like with his mouth contorted into a silent scream. With its truly frightening visage, this nightmarish apparition was one of the few modern stagings of the Ghost to truly unsettle the audience:

Instead of the usual stern but fatherly figure, in the "fair and warlike form" of his living self, old Hamlet here hauls himself into the play as a bowed, deathly-white, half-naked spook, with hollow red sockets for eyes, scraping his broadsword along the ground to nerve-shatteringly ominous effect. He hawks up his speeches in an agonised vomit of vengefulness. That he seems to hail from an alien belief system as well as from another world is entirely deliberate.... Boyd has been inspired by Stephen Greenblatt's recent book Hamlet in Purgatory, which highlights the tragedy's unsettling premise: "A young man from Wittenberg, with a distinctly Protestant temperament, is haunted by a distinctly Catholic ghost." Or, as the director puts it, "There has been a political and intellectual revolution, and then Hamlet re-encounters the past in the shape of his father's spirit and has to negotiate with it."65

If we were in any doubt that this Ghost had suffered the terrors of hell, we had none by the end of the scene when a trapdoor opened to reveal intense red light, the fires of Purgatory. The Ghost fell forward, face first, into the awaiting pit.

From the first appearance of the Ghost there is a sense of inevitability in Hamlet's fate. As he progresses through the play, he undergoes an acceptance of his own mortality. Hamlet's acceptance and "readiness" for death was something which the designer for Boyd's production, Tom Piper, built into the characters' costuming:

Laertes changes from light, golden boy to black avenger. Hamlet begins as a black avenger and ends up in light grey, a sort of Everyman colour, because on his return in Act 5, Hamlet becomes more accepting, more at peace in a sense. Grey tones also give a sense of being half in and half out of the world. It's as though, at the end, Hamlet is beginning to accept that he's about to join the world of the ash people--the gravedigger is also in grey.66

Greg Hicks, who played the startling Ghost, also played the Player King and the First Gravedigger: "It's a great treble because there are resonances of Hamlet's father in each one of the roles, especially the gravedigger."67

Michael Boyd's doubling of roles provided a sense of the dead being present among the living and looking after their loved ones in spirit:

When I asked her [Meg Fraser, who played Ophelia] to play the second gravedigger too it was because I thought there was something very moving in the fact that, in that benign scene, Hamlet was with people who loved him: his father and Ophelia.68

Meg Fraser commented on this comforting but macabre idea: "I also play the second gravedigger--Ophelia digs her own grave!... And now I wear the same make-up for both parts because it's about making connections rather than being naturalistic."69

The references to grief and death were markedly used in the set for the Adrian Noble production in 1992:

The unweeded garden of Elsinore exists downstage in Bob Crowley's design. The right arm of the subterranean ghost pushes through like the arm in John Boorman's Deliverance, and Ophelia plucks her flowers here shortly before the gravediggers prepare her tomb. If Denmark is a prison, it is also, finally, a graveyard. The stage is littered with pink garlands and funeral mounds.70

As indicated, the Ghost in this production emerged from a garden, which formed the front part of the stage, and was later used for Ophelia's madness scene and the burial.

What you are left with after Hamlet's return from England is a landscape of grief. By the end the whole stage is a huge graveyard, not literally with tombstones, but just dead flowers everywhere.71

Love and Madness

Hamlet evokes the long-distance loneliness and isolation of three lost, young things--Hamlet, Laertes and Ophelia--caught up in a political and personal revenge that's the death of them. (Nicholas de Jongh)72

The parallel stories of two families and how their children cope with the death of their fathers is central to the plot of Hamlet. Hamlet's dilemma after seeing the Ghost lies in the fact that he is too aware of the possible consequences of his actions. The intelligence of his imagination is such that he knows that the Ghost's request for revenge has two possible outcomes for him: death or madness. As hot-blooded avenger he will provoke the punishment of the state, whereas not to act--to withdraw--would only compound and multiply his already unbearable grief and frustration to a state of madness. Both of these options are against his nature and his sensibility. However, Shakespeare demonstrates their tragic consequences in the reactions of Polonius' children, Laertes and Ophelia.

Most actors, although they may reach a peak of frenzy, do not play Hamlet as genuinely mad. In Ron Daniels' 1989 production, however, the disintegrating mind of Hamlet was evidenced in Elsinore's state of collapse.

Set in what appears as an exclusive sanatorium with extensive views over the North Sea, Ron Daniels's production presents a group of cheerfully contented inmates who all fall victim to a killer disease.... Antony McDonald's vertiginously angled, hydraulically operated set suggests that Elsinore is sliding into the sea.

Its opening court scene presents an image of harmony and political health, with only Mark Rylance's spiritlessly dejected Hamlet signalling the plague that will strike them down.73

The large planes of flat, subdued color and sparse detail have a two-fold effect. They highlight the characters and, at the same time, emphasize their littleness against the massive ruins and the stormy sea.