The Making of a Successful Hamlet

Last night I had the pleasure of taking in a performance of Hamlet at the main Festival Theater at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario. There is a lot that can be said about the production, much of it positive, and a few things negative, and taken on the whole it was a fine theatrical experience. Rather than dally too long on the particulars that displeased me [1], I thought it would be better to meditate, for a while, on what goes into the successful execution of Hamlet as a role. Because whatever else may be good or bad in a production of Hamlet is going to ride or die on the performance of the actor playing the prince. So what is it that makes a performance successful?

Jonathon Goad, the actor who played Hamlet last night, is probably never going to be all that famous. He is not likely to be added to the list of immortal thespians who have played the part. That is alright. Talent is not enough to ensure fame, luck and opportunity are just as important, and these days not even playing Hamlet at North America's Premiere Shakespeare Festival qualifies as a big break. But Goad performed admirably in three portions of the role that are, to my mind, absolutely essential to an actor who would "pluck out the heart of [Hamlet's] mystery," and which are almost universally overlooked by critics who would tend to focus on the soliloquies as the benchmark for determining the success of a particular Hamlet. So what are these three portions of the role? I'm glad you asked!

1. Greeting the Players:

When the traveling players arrive at Elsinore, Hamlet greets their leader as "my old friend," but how he greets them is exceptionally important. Goad thrives here. The bear hug that he throws about the Player King, without a second thought to decorum, brought out, in that single gesture, the full history between the two men. It was possible to imagine Hamlet skipping classes to hang about the theater, of running through back alleys in Wittenberg with these players, breaking bread with them, drinking with them, working out a set of ideas about drama with them. It is one of the most important places where the text opens up for the space for the performer to give us insight into who this man was before he is bound up in "the trappings and the suits of woe."

2. Informing Horatio that he has been in "continual practice" with his weapons:

Critics who make comments on this scene tend to focus their attention on Hamlet's observations about Providence, rough-hewn ends, and sparrows, or on Hamlet's conclusion that "the readiness is all." This is not totally inexplicable. These are the most important lines of dialogue in the scene. But the most important character detail is Hamlet pointing out to Horatio that we have seen only moments of his life during a period that has lasted a significant period of time. When he has been out of our sight he has been preparing, practicing, working, making himself ready. The line is an opportunity for Hamlet to remind the audience that, like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, he is beyond their comprehension and beyond their judgment because they have not seen him in his entirety. The line pairs especially well if the performer links it, through subtly repeated gestures (as Goad does), to Hamlet's screed against his own virtue to Ophelia--another crucial moment for Hamlet to allow the audience to glimpse aspects of him (including ambition) that are otherwise never, or rarely, on the stage.

3. "Heaven hath pleased it so, to punish me with this and this with me."

As with the previous point, critics who right about the closet scene have a tendency to focus on the showier lines that come before this one. After all, the closet scene is rash, raunchy, violent, and frenzied. A chance for the performer to unleash pent up anger and disgust on Gertrude.

But this ignores a vital component of this scene, namely that Hamlet's first thought here is to point out that he is being punished by heaven (in the custom of the Elizabethan stage, the moment that Hamlet killed Polonius his own death becomes an unavoidable inevitability). The obvious question, then, is what crime is Hamlet being punished for? To say it is for his delay is silly. At the first moment after attaining his "relative" grounds for revenge (via the mousetrap) he has acted. I suspect, though this is just one man's opinion, that Hamlet's crime here, for which he is being punished, is allowing himself to sink so far into melancholy in the wake of his father's death that Claudius was allowed to seize the crown. Hamlet's further comment, that the death of Polonius places him in a situation "[where he must be] must be their scourge and minister," places his concern in the context of political destruction and restoration. In a play that opens with evil seeming to bubble out of the Earth because the wrong man has become king, a strong performance of this moment can offer invaluable insight into precisely how that situation came to be.

For anyone who is interested, check back tomorrow for my rundown of the top ten modern performances of Hamlet!


[1] I don't know if I have ever seen a performance of Ophelia that has moved me, for instance. Among Shakespeare's many wonderful women I find her to be a shadowy and unsympathetic figure, and while Adrienne Gould brought a commendable level of commitment to the role I thought it fell totally flat.

I found the few inconsistent moments in set design and costuming a bit jarring. The production had a way of bouncing between the hyper-modern and the traditional, even in something as small as the vacillation in the modernization of the weapons. Hamlet shots Polonius with a rifle, but fences with Laertes using traditional foils.These moments had a way of standing out, breaking the illusion.