Hamlet

Some Hamlets don't kill Claudius while he is trying to pray after the play-scene because they really want to send him to hell rather than heaven, whereas other Hamlets seem to be looking for an excuse not to execute the action. How did you approach this key moment?

Caird: I think you have to take Hamlet at face value. In soliloquy Hamlet cannot lie to his audience. If the actor playing Hamlet is to have any moral authority he can't sometimes be telling the truth to the audience and sometimes not. Especially when in other soliloquies he debates the very nature of truth and reality.

I think the sight of Claudius praying sets up a moral perturbation in Hamlet that Shakespeare was fascinated by. Why else would he have created a scene in which Claudius prays? Much easier to have made Claudius an Iago, or a Richard III, a man incapable of remorse. In order to create added layers of moral complexity to the play, Shakespeare puts Claudius at the center of the drama for the first time. This creates sympathy for him. What would the audience think of their hero if he killed a man while he was praying? The debate in Hamlet's mind is echoed by a debate in the audience's mind.

Daniels: In performance terms, is it really possible to distinguish between these two approaches? And may not both approaches coexist at one and the same moment?

It seems to me that one of Hamlet's most astonishing qualities is his rigorous and unwavering honesty. Hamlet never lies to himself or to us--the soliloquies are moments of utter truth-telling. There is absolutely no equivocation as he lays before us his most secret doubts and fears.

So--and though Hamlet is clearly not alone on stage, his speech is another soliloquy, another moment of truth-telling!--does it not follow that we should believe him when he tells us his reason for not cutting Claudius' throat?

What's more, Hamlet is on his way to Gertrude's chamber. His mother stays! Claudius, now guilty beyond doubt, will keep for a more propitious moment.

In both practical and psychological terms, the closet scene presents problems, since Hamlet can see and hear the Ghost, but Gertrude can't. How did you deal with this?

Caird: The closet scene gives you the opportunity to see Hamlet and his parents together as a family. Just before the Ghost's final exit I had him and Gertrude move so close to Hamlet that just for a moment he could touch both their faces at the same time. This moment returned him to his childhood. From then on, things become much clearer for him in the play. He has killed Polonius and is therefore no better than Claudius, the man he sought to kill. He starts to understand what his mother has done and the limits of her culpability. He forgives her.

Earlier in the play, other people have seen the Ghost, so you know he isn't a figment of Hamlet's imagination. But he isn't real to Gertrude, or doesn't appear to her. This is psychologically apt. She can't "see" her husband any longer. If she could still see him she wouldn't have married his brother. It is Hamlet's perception of his father that brings her to her senses. He reminds her of her former happiness and her love for her husband and son. This is the beginning of Gertrude's madness. She never recovers from this scene.

Daniels: In one sense this presents no problem at all: Hamlet sees the Ghost and Gertrude does not. Those are the givens of the scene. It is a convention that the audience, possibly more trusting than actors and directors, completely and unquestioningly accepts.

Clearly, whatever difficulty we have with the scene, it did not suit Shakespeare's design that Gertrude should see the Ghost--it would probably have taken the scene into a completely different direction were she to have done so.

Perhaps for our benefit, if we cannot accept Shakespeare at face value, we need to ask why is it that Gertrude does not see the now not so monstrous and rather piteous apparition--in night attire? Are only those characters who are guilt-free capable of seeing the Ghost? Is that explanation enough? Sufficient to lay that question to rest?

Did you discuss whether or not Gertrude is having an affair with Claudius before the murder of Old Hamlet? Or is that not a useful question for director and actors?

Caird: I don't think it's a useful question on its own. Better to link it with another. Does Gertrude know that Claudius has murdered her husband? The

re's no textual evidence to suggest that she does. At no point does Hamlet accuse her of being complicit. And at no point does she assert her innocence. It's not explored. The question could be rephrased. If Gertrude was having an affair with Claudius before he murdered his brother, is it more likely she was complicit in the murder? One would certainly think the more advanced the affair between Gertrude and Claudius, the more morally blind Gertrude must have been to what Claudius was up to. But Gertrude is to some extent the portrait of a morally blind person, so the question of complicity is an interesting one for the actress to consider. The actor playing Claudius also has a stake in the question. Has an affair with Gertrude propelled him to the murder of his brother?

It is difficult to imagine that Shakespeare intended Gertrude to be complicit in the murder. It would make everything she subsequently says to Hamlet impossibly hypocritical. It would also make Claudius and Gertrude into the Macbeths. Claudius is certainly a sketch for Macbeth, but the crucial difference between Gertrude and Lady Macbeth is complicity. Gertrude is far more interesting a character if her flaw is moral blindness rather than downright amorality.

Daniels: As useful as asking how many children does Lady Macbeth have? These are questions that fill in the psychological history of the characters and that create performance texture. Questions the actor will answer only for him-or herself in whatever way he or she finds most stimulating to the imagination. The answers will inevitably remain a secret since there is no textual evidence for them. They are the actors' private fantasies that the audience can never partake in, but these secrets will inform in subtle but important ways every moment of the characters' lives on stage.

What kind of man was the Old King when he lived? Was he always busy at the office (or off fighting wars) and did he neglect his wife? How unhappy was she and did she turn to Claudius for consolation? Is Gertrude now, on her wedding day, a happy and sexually satisfied woman? How close were Hamlet and his father who, truth be told, seems so forbidding and so aloof, an irascible and bitter old man? And how much time did Hamlet spend as a little boy, playing in his beautiful mother's closet? Do the memories of his innocence, of her motherly love--and of her subsequent betrayal--color the way he now enters the chamber? The way he speaks to her?

Certainly this is a story about kings and queens and princes and it may feel that questions like these tend to "suburbanize" the narrative. And it may be that academics feel impatient if not infuriated by such banality. But beyond all the poetry, all the spiritual aspirations and deepest meanings of the plays, the personal relationships between fathers and mothers and their sons and daughters lie at the heart of most if not the entire canon. How many plays center around the death of a father (or the king, which of course is the same thing)? How many daughters disobey their fathers (or, like Ophelia, pay the price for their obedience)? How many sons struggle with the desire or the need to kill their fathers? Bringing these relationships to life in the most intimate and truest way possible is the task that befalls the director and the actors--and if in doing so the questions asked and strategies adopted (along with a most rigorous analysis of the text, of course) may appear at first to reduce the scope and magnitude of the narratives, these are the very strategies that bring heartfelt immediacy and credibility to the plays and make them leap off the page and pulsate with life.

In many readings, Hamlet seems to have undergone a huge change during the fourth-act rest when he is away at sea: was it like that in yours?

Daniels: Yes, the change is indeed huge. It is as if for Hamlet the agonizing inner struggle is over. His thoughts have indeed become bloody--he may not have actually wielded the knife, but he has sent his old friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their death and they are not near his conscience. There is a curious serenity about him. The landscape of death is now awesomely familiar to him (no accident that at this moment he encounters Yorick once again) and he is not so much resigned as ready to face his own.

Caird: Yes, I think it has to be. The temperature of his language is so different from earlier in the play. It's to do with what happens to his mind immediately after he kills Polonius. He's such a deeply moral creature that once he has murdered someone he forfeits the right to his moral superiority over his uncle and his mother. He cannot thereafter decide how his own story should be resolved.

This is a philosophical discovery, and the metaphor for his subsequent mental development is a voyage. As in Pericles, The Tempest, and Twelfth Night, a journey by sea is an escape into a different world, a different way of life, or way of thought. Discovering that Ophelia has died unhinges him for a moment, but it does so only temporarily. In the very next scene he has recovered his equilibrium and seems quite sanguine when Horatio faces him with the possibility of his own death.

There's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come: if it be not to come, it will be now: if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all. Since no man has aught of what he leaves, what is't to leave betimes? Let be.

The "Let be" is not in the folio, but Simon Russell Beale and I both thought it indispensable. It is the perfect spiritual punctuation for that speech and it must, surely, be by Shakespeare's hand. No other writer could have been at the same time so bold and so succinct.

Boyd: By the time of his return to Denmark, Hamlet has pondered on the resolute leadership of Fortinbras, killed two men, and arrived at a readiness to die. All of which seems to have stilled his bad dreams, and none of which bodes well for Claudius.

The exchange of rapiers in the duel is sometimes played as a matter of chance, sometimes with Hamlet knowing exactly what he is doing: how did your production handle it?

Daniels: My sense is that Hamlet perceives very quickly what is happening in the course of the duel. He is no longer an innocent in the face of worldly treachery and he can now give as good as he gets.

Caird: Hamlet can't know what's going on when the duel is happening. The text is very clear. As Laertes is dying, he tells Hamlet what he's done and he speaks with what seems like genuine remorse.