A M E R I C A N CO N S E RVATO RY T H E AT E R

Carey Perloff, Artistic Director • Peter Pastreich, Executive Director

P R E S E N TS

Hamletby William ShakespeareStarring John Douglas ThompsonDirected by Carey Perloff

The Geary Theater September 20–October 15, 2017

Words on Plays Volume XXIV, No. 1

Simon Hodgson Editor

Elspeth Sweatman Associate Editor

Elizabeth Brodersen Director of Education & Community Programs

Michael Paller Resident Dramaturg

Taylor Steinbeck Publications Fellow

© 2017 AMERICAN CONSERVATORY THEATER, A NONPROFIT ORGANIZATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Made possible byJewels of Charity

Additional support provided by Bank of America, Bank of the West, Deloitte, Kimball Family Foundation, PG&E, The Sato Foundation, The Stanley S. Langendorf Foundation, Theatre Forward, Union Bank Foundation, US Bank, the Vermut Education Fund, and Wells Fargo

1 Overview of Hamlet

5 At the Editing Table An Interview with Director Carey Perloff and Dramaturg Michael Paller By Simon Hodgson

12 A Mirror Up to Nature The Enduring Power of Hamlet By Elspeth Sweatman

19 Into the Maelstrom An Interview with Actor John Douglas Thompson By Simon Hodgson

23 “You Would Pluck Out the Heart of My Mystery” Five Mysteries about Hamlet By Michael Paller

29 Double Identity Doubling in Shakespeare’s Hamlet By Elspeth Sweatman

34 Intimate Yet Foreign An Interview with Scenic and Costume Designer David Israel Reynoso By Elspeth Sweatman

38 A Hamlet Glossary

44 Questions to Consider/For Further Information

Table of Contents

COVER John Douglas Thompson. Photo by Nigel Parry/CPi Syndication. Design by Kimberly Rhee.

OPPOSITE The first page of the First Quarto (1603) of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Photo by Kathleen O. Irace.

Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

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Overview of HamletScholars believe that Hamlet by William Shakespeare was first performed around 1601 by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men at the Globe Theatre in London. It has been in almost constant production ever since. A version of the script was first published by Nicholas Ling and John Trundle in 1603.

Creative TeamComposer .................................................................................................David CoulterAssociate Director ..............................................................................Stephen Buescher Dramaturg ............................................................................................... Michael Paller

Scenic and Costume Designer ..................................................... David Israel ReynosoLighting Designer ................................................................................. James F. IngallsSound Designer ...................................................................................... Jake Rodriguez

Characters and Cast (in order of appearance)Barnardo, Guildenstern, Priest .......................................................Vincent J. RandazzoFrancisco, Rosencrantz, Gravedigger 2 ...................................................Teddy SpencerHoratio ...................................................................................................Anthony FuscoMarcellus, Captain, Osric, Player, Messenger ........................................... Peter FanoneClaudius, Ghost ..........................................................................Steven Anthony JonesGertrude ......................................................................................... Domenique LozanoPolonius ..........................................................................................................Dan HiattLaertes, Lucianus ...............................................................................Teagle F. BougereOphelia ........................................................................................................Rivka BorekHamlet ................................................................................... John Douglas ThompsonVoltemand, Player Queen ..................................................................Adrianna Mitchell Player King, Gravedigger 1 ................................................................... Graham BeckelFortinbras .................................................................................................Jomar Tagatac

OPPOSITE John Douglas Thompson in Long Wharf Theatre’s 2012 production of Satchmo at the Waldorf.

Photo by T. Charles Erickson.

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Synopsis

Act I

Midnight on the ramparts of Elsinore Castle, Denmark. Sentinels Barnardo and Marcellus, along with Prince Hamlet’s friend Horatio, assume their positions and wait. Suddenly, it appears: the ghost of the recently deceased King Hamlet. Horatio plucks up the courage to speak to the spirit, but it disappears. Marcellus asks if this omen might relate to the country’s recent arming for war. Barnardo speculates that it has to do with King Hamlet’s territorial gains in the last battle with Fortinbras, king of Norway. Fortinbras’s son, also called Fortinbras, is raising an army to recover these lands and avenge his father’s death. Their musings are interrupted by the return of the Ghost, which starts to speak, but dawn breaks and it disappears again.

In the castle, everyone is celebrating the marriage of the new king, Claudius (the late king’s brother), to Gertrude, the widow of King Hamlet. Everyone, that is, except Hamlet, Gertrude’s son, who baits and insults the newlyweds. Horatio enters and tells Hamlet of the apparition he has seen on the battlements. The pair vow to meet the following night to await the specter’s coming.

Laertes, Hamlet’s peer, is preparing to return to France. Before he leaves, he warns his sister Ophelia not to be swayed by Hamlet’s recent attention. Hamlet is a prince, he says, who cannot marry whomever he wants. Ophelia’s reputation will be tarnished. She promises not to be swayed by Hamlet, only if Laertes promises to behave himself too. When Ophelia tells her father Polonius about Hamlet’s affection for her, he orders her to break off contact with the prince. She agrees to comply.

The following night, Hamlet, Horatio, and Marcellus are on the battlements when the apparition returns. This time, it beckons Hamlet to follow. Horatio and Marcellus beg him not to go; they fear the Ghost will lead Hamlet to his death or drive him mad. Unafraid, Hamlet follows his father’s ghost. Only when they are alone does the Ghost reveal why he haunts the castle: he was poisoned and his murderer now wears his crown.

“Revenge my death,” commands the Ghost. Hamlet is still struggling to make sense of this information when dawn breaks and

the Ghost vanishes. Hamlet swears Horatio and Marcellus to secrecy about what they have witnessed. Alone, he thinks over what he has just learned. Did Claudius, his uncle, really kill his father?

Ophelia runs to her father in distress. A disheveled Hamlet has just been in her room, sighing and staring at her. Hearing this, Polonius believes that love is the cause of Hamlet’s melancholy and love’s denial the cause of his madness.

Claudius and Gertrude welcome two of Hamlet’s childhood friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and sends the two men on a surveillance mission to find out why Hamlet is acting strangely. Polonius suggests that Hamlet might be love-sick; Ophelia reads a love letter from the prince as evidence. Claudius wants more proof, so he and Polonius devise a plan: they will spy on Hamlet and Ophelia when they meet next.

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Polonius, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern all try to determine the cause of the prince’s behavior, but Hamlet dodges their inquiries. They tell Hamlet that some traveling actors have arrived. This gives him an idea.

Hamlet welcomes the players and invites them to perform for the court the following night. He asks to insert a small speech into the text, intending to use their play to get the evidence that proves his father’s ghost was telling the truth about his murder.

Frustrated that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have not discovered what is grieving Hamlet, Claudius and Polonius hide to overhear the meeting between Hamlet and Ophelia. Hamlet declares that he has never loved her. Claudius doesn’t believe that Hamlet’s madness is caused by love. Polonius suggests that Gertrude talk to her son. If she can’t get to the bottom of this, he argues, send Hamlet to England.

Before the players’ performance, Hamlet lets Horatio in on his plan: he and Horatio will watch Claudius’s reactions during the play to see if it strikes a nerve.

The play begins with a dumb show (a mimed performance that summarizes the main plot). The Player King and Player Queen enter and embrace. When the Player King falls asleep, another man enters, poisons him, and takes his crown. Initially, the Player Queen is inconsolable, but she is soon swayed by the murderer’s protestations of love.

The play itself begins. When the players reach the murder scene, Claudius leaps up and exits. In the upheaval that follows, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern tell Hamlet that his mother wishes to see him. For Hamlet, Claudius’s actions are all the proof he needs, and he vows revenge.

Act II

An irate Claudius orders Hamlet be sent to England with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. But first, he and Polonius will hide behind a curtain and overhear the conversation between Hamlet and Gertrude. Alone, Claudius tries to pray away his guilt for killing his brother, but without real repentance, the right words won’t come. Just then, Hamlet enters and sees his uncle. He moves to strike him, but stops; killing Claudius when he is praying will send him to heaven instead of hell, and so the late king’s murder will not be avenged. Hamlet vows to kill him when is doing something more disreputable, to damn his soul.

Hamlet confronts his mother about her hasty marriage to Claudius. Thinking that Hamlet means to kill her, Gertrude calls for help. Polonius, hidden behind a curtain, responds and Hamlet kills him, believing that he is Claudius. As Hamlet pleads with his mother to see Claudius for who he truly is, the Ghost appears and scolds Hamlet for his inaction. Not seeing this spirit, Gertrude thinks that her son is mad. Hamlet begs his mother to spurn Claudius’s love, but also to reveal to his uncle the nature of Hamlet’s madness.

A castle-wide search is made. Hamlet is easy to find, but it takes a lengthy battle of wits to discover where he stashed Polonius’s body. Claudius berates himself for having let things get this far; he vows to have Hamlet killed as soon as he sets foot on English soil.

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En route to their ship, Hamlet, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern see the king of Norway’s soldiers on their way to Poland, commanded by the king’s nephew, Fortinbras. This spurs Hamlet into action; he declares that from this moment forward, he will devote all his energy to avenging his father’s murder.

Back at the court, the shock of her father’s death and Hamlet’s exile has driven Ophelia mad. Claudius and Gertrude try to comfort her, but she is inconsolable. Her brother Laertes returns from France, accusing Claudius of killing his father. Laertes is taken aback when he sees his sister’s transformation.

Horatio receives a letter from Hamlet. Pirates attacked his ship and he was taken prisoner. However, they have released him and he has returned to Denmark.

Laertes demands to know why Claudius didn’t deal with Hamlet sooner. For his mother’s sake, the king says. A messenger arrives with letters from Hamlet: he has returned to Denmark and wants to speak with his uncle. Claudius asks Laertes to take his advice in the young man’s actions to avenge his father’s murder.

Gertrude enters, wailing that Ophelia has drowned. Claudius is annoyed at the timing of this news; Laertes is now too distracted by grief to plot against Hamlet.

Hamlet returns to Elsinore in time to see Ophelia’s burial. Laertes is so overcome that he jumps into the grave with his sister’s body. This provokes Hamlet to come out of hiding and declare that he loved Ophelia the most. Laertes and Hamlet almost come to blows.

Claudius invents a scheme to bring about Hamlet’s death—he will wager that Hamlet can beat Laertes in a duel, then poison Laertes’s weapon so that Hamlet is sure to die. And in case that doesn’t work, he will prepare a poisoned drink that he will offer to Hamlet during the duel.

Hamlet tells Horatio about the note he found with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that ordered his death as soon as he set foot in England, and how he escaped. Osric, one of the court’s messengers, informs Hamlet about his uncle’s wager. Uneasy, Horatio tries to warn Hamlet. Laertes is too skilled a fighter; Hamlet will lose, or even die. He begs Hamlet to wait for him to come up with a plan, but the prince refuses.

The bout begins, with Hamlet earning the first hit. Claudius offers Hamlet a cup to quench his thirst. Hamlet refuses. He wins the second bout. In celebration, Gertrude takes the cup and drinks. It’s the poisoned cup! She swoons and dies. Hamlet and Laertes fight; Hamlet is wounded, but in a scuffle he switches weapons with Laertes and wounds him. Laertes reveals that his weapon was poisoned and that it was the king’s idea. Hamlet kills Claudius. As both fighters begin to feel the effects of the poison, they ask for each other’s forgiveness. Laertes dies, and Hamlet, with his last breath, begs Horatio to keep his name alive.

Fortinbras and his troops arrive at Elsinore. Horatio tells them what has occurred, and the new King Fortinbras orders that Hamlet be given a royal burial.

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At the Editing TableAn Interview with Director Carey Perloff and Dramaturg Michael Paller

By Simon Hodgson

The table in Carey Perloff ’s office is strewn with paper: photocopied versions of Hamlet, a black-covered Arden Shakespeare edition peppered with Post-It notes, and volumes by Shakespeare scholars Harold Bloom and Stephen Greenblatt. Perloff and dramaturg Michael Paller have finished the first cut of Hamlet and there is a palpable sense of excitement around the table. We sat down to get a glimpse into their process, their passion for Shakespeare, and the story of producing Hamlet at A.C.T.

What was your first experience of Hamlet?

Michael Paller: Seeing it on television with Richard Chamberlain in the 1970s. I must have been in ninth or tenth grade. Michael Redgrave was Polonius. It was cut for television, so it was probably two-and-a-half hours. The philosophy I didn’t know, but the story about a man who’s been told by a ghost to take revenge, and the glittering court with all these brilliant, smart people, was just exciting to watch.

Carey Perloff: I’d studied it and explored it way before I saw it. I still have my copy from high school and college. My first Hamlet was in England, a student production when I was at Oxford University. Then I just kept seeing it wherever I could. The draw for me was the language. It was unbelievably seductive. I’ve seen the play twice at the Stratford Festival in Ontario, once with Jonathan Goad. I saw Jude Law’s Hamlet on Broadway, Diane Venora’s at The Public Theater, and Adrian Lester’s in Paris. I just kept seeking it out.

But this is the first time that you’ve directed it?

CEP: Oh yes.

MP: The readiness is all.

CEP: Are we ready? No. [laughs] But you’re never truly ready.

MP: The day will come on August 14 and we will start rehearsals.

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CEP: I felt this way when I did Phèdre (2010). It’s a much bigger thing than we will ever conquer. It’s like climbing a mountain. The great thing about cultures like Stratford that have a real classical tradition is that by the time Goad played Hamlet, he’d been in the play multiple times. That is an incredible gift when you get to journey through your life and Hamlet is the touchstone for it. We don’t have that in the United States. I have to tell myself this won’t be the last time I will direct it or I will be paralyzed.

Although A.C.T. hasn’t produced Hamlet since 1990, before you both started at A.C.T., is this a play you’ve been thinking about for a while?

CEP: One of the wonderful things about being at A.C.T., which is a teaching theater, is that there are plays that we work on regularly. Hamlet is one of them. Michael and I have done a number of workshops of Hamlet, pairing our M.F.A. Program actors with professionals to see what we could learn about different versions of the play.

MP: I think 2009 was the first time. We did a workshop based on the First Quarto, the “bad quarto.” That version is mostly just the melodrama—most of the philosophy and the soliloquies are gone.

CEP: Then we came back to the play three years ago when we started talking to John Douglas Thompson.

When he was preparing for Satchmo at the Waldorf (2016)?

CEP: Before that. Any great Shakespearean actor wants to play Hamlet. John’s done nearly every Shakespearean role; Hamlet is the one that’s eluded him. So that’s what he came to me with. Hamlet is a journey you take with a great actor. But to get John to leave New York is always a huge question, particularly when he knew he was going to do Jitney on Broadway [which earned Thompson a Tony Award nomination].

If you’re a great actor, you’re not going to enter into a play like Hamlet without the collaborators you truly believe are going to help get you there. When he was here with Satchmo, he started to get to know our team and how we approach work. During a reading last year of Don Carlos, which featured M.F.A. actors including Rivka Borek [Ophelia], he got to know Domenique Lozano [Gertrude] and loved her. He saw The Hard Problem and met Anthony Fusco [Horatio], whom he was also excited about. And he went to see The Taming of the Shrew directed by Stephen Buescher, whom he really got to know. Stephen will be a crucial collaborator on Hamlet. John started to see how A.C.T. functions, as a lab, a school, an organization, and a producing wing. He understood that this would be a world in which Hamlet would be richly embraced, a great collaboration with major players.

OPPOSITE Director Carey Perloff and Dramaturg Michael Paller discussing A.C.T.’s 2017 production of

Hamlet. Photo by Elspeth Sweatman.

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Some of the Geary audience will have seen multiple Hamlets and will know the play well. How do you balance that expectation against your storytelling?

CEP: It can be paralyzing to think, “What do I have to add to this play?” until you start to work on it. And then the play is so rich, you respond to it in the only way you can as human beings living at this moment in the world today. Michael has sent me so many interesting books, articles, and footage. We’ve watched Peter O’Toole and Orson Welles talking about it. We’ve seen Simon Russell Beale and . . .

MP: And Peter Brook’s very small Hamlet with Adrian Lester.

CEP: We would have thought about it very differently if it hadn’t been John Douglas Thompson, because that’s who’s going to lead the journey.

MP: In some ways Hamlet can be harder on actors than directors, to think about how do I do “To be or not to be.”

CEP: How is an audience ever going to hear “To be or not to be” fresh again? But that doesn’t mean that you rush through it, mock it, or comment on it. You have to figure out what is the catalyst that makes this character need to say these words at this moment. What you want to do for an audience is give them a window into how capacious, enormous, complex, rich, and extraordinary the play is.

MP: So far, all it’s been for me is fun. I mean, to grapple with this play—who wouldn’t want to work on Hamlet? What’s exciting is that we are now part of this tradition that goes back to 1601. That’s exciting and our version will be what it is—right for these actors and this city at this time with these sensibilities.

At four thousand lines long, Hamlet is quite a play to grapple with and far too long for most theaters to tackle at its fullest length. How did you approach adapting it?

MP: The three of us, John and Carey and I, did the cutting. It’s great to work with two really gifted people, because it makes you raise your game. At one stage, Carey went off to a meeting, and I turned to John and said: “There’s no place else in the country I’d rather be than here with you, cutting Hamlet at A.C.T. Where else would that happen?”

What is your rationale for producing Hamlet in 2017?

CEP: The day after the Trump election, I pulled Hamlet off the shelf. I felt incredibly unsettled by the play. As Jan Kott says in Shakespeare: Our Contemporary, Hamlet is a sponge that absorbs all that’s happening politically, socially, and spiritually in a culture. When I read the play the morning after that election, I could see the landscape of a prince who goes to bed in an ordered kingdom and wakes up in a world where everything is fake news and nothing is to be trusted. It feels resonant. That said, I’m not interested in easy equivalencies, in making Claudius Trump or turning Polonius into Jeff Sessions. You have to absolve yourself of clever comparisons: this is my Trumpian Hamlet, this is my Elizabethan Hamlet, this is my postwar Hamlet.

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MP: All that does is make the play smaller.

CEP: Our challenge as artists is to keep the metaphors of the play as alive as possible within the landscape of our own experience. Hamlet asks how we understand the relationship of our inner landscape to the world around us. Shakespeare was the first to explore this question. When Romeo falls in love with Juliet, the feelings he has for the first time—the complexity and seductiveness of love—conflict with the external reality, which is that she represents someone he’s not permitted to love. Our inner landscape and the external world are always at odds with each other. That collision is what makes for drama.

The reason we have to fight to go back to the great plays now more than ever is that this is a moment that demands complexity and ambiguity, not simplicity and two-dimensional points of view. We make instant decisions on no information, with no nuance—you’re either a red state or a blue state. What drama gives us is real nuance, real complexity. Is Hamlet a good man? There is no way to answer that. He does terrible things.

From our first look at the set design images, it looks like you have a world that reflects that complexity. Can you talk about your collaborators on the creative team?

CEP: David Israel Reynoso is a young, brilliant guy who does sets and costumes. I was looking through a lot of portfolios, and Darren West (my beloved sound designer from Fatherville and The Tosca Project) said to me, “You should work with David. He’s got an incredible mind. If what you want is a complete environment, which feels resonant and truthful and disturbing, but isn’t literal, then he’s your man.” When David and I discussed the set design, we spoke about the vulnerability of humanity against the toxicity of the world. We’ve done something to destroy this environment. We talked about images in the play of pollution, burned bodies, not being able to breathe.

MP: And rot.

CEP: Yes! So we looked at images of Fukushima, Chernobyl, toxic waste, and train tracks going nowhere. Once you have that kind of imagery, you can start a dialogue with your collaborators, including associate director Stephen Buescher. While Buesch is one of several old friends involved in this production, I’ve never worked with Reynoso before, either as a set designer or costume designer. He just felt right for this. He’s an amazing supple mind and I love the way he thinks. He had some incredible ideas for the costumes, from a Comme des Garçons outfit to an Australian outback coat to a beautiful image of Kanye West in a white suit. James Ingalls, our lighting designer, is a longtime collaborator of mine who did The Invention of Love here and many others. He had really interesting thoughts about transitions, something Michael and I talked about a lot, as Hamlet is incredibly fluid and fast-moving.

MP: This play was written for a particular kind of theater. Because it was outdoors and there was this natural curfew of nighttime, and also because it was illegal to be on the

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streets after dark, the plays had to move. They were constructed in a way that they didn’t need to have scenery. There might be a throne for a king to sit on; that was pretty much it, we think. It was very much like the Greek theater that way.

CEP: That’s why you have to create an environment that’s there all the time, which is what David did. His design is turned on an angle, which makes it really interesting. It has entrances and exits in odd places, a corner that can be very private, and the grate of the Geary trap beneath the stage.

How do contemporary images of polluted worlds translate into other aspects of A.C.T.’s production?

CEP: Working with Jonathan Rider, our fight consultant, we got interested in close-quarter combat, which is what you learn in antiterrorism training. In Shakespeare’s time, fighting was part of the cultural landscape. People dueled. People killed each other. Now we’re fighting in this weird world of terrorism and we’re back to knives. We thought it was going to be anthrax and now it’s a knife. By the time we get to Act Five, I want the audience to feel that combat is organic to the play. We looked at Filipino stick-fighting and eskrima sticks. We love that image, rather than fencing.

A.C.T. Artistic Director Carey Perloff, Dramaturg Michael Paller, Associate Director Stephen Buescher,

and actor John Douglas Thompson at the first rehearsal for Hamlet. Photo by Elspeth Sweatman.

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MP: And it’s something that is much more visceral and right for this world than foils. It’s violent in the way that a lot of the world of this play is violent, sort of sub rosa.

CEP: That sense of physicality also applies to the sound, which is being designed by Jake Rodriguez, with David Coulter [composer of A Thousand Splendid Suns] creating magical sounds. We got interested in this idea of prepared piano. I said to Jake, the music should feel really physical—kinesthetic, percussive.

MP: And immediate. And again, visceral.

CEP: Right. Jake is amazing because he can just make your skin crawl using an incredible collection of synthesizers. David is the Foley artist, he can create sounds out of anything. And Peter Fanone, the M.F.A. student who’s playing Marcellus, is also a pianist, so we became interested in the idea of the dumb show as a silent movie, with melodrama music like in a Chaplin film, which Buescher could choreograph.

For some San Franciscans, this may be the first time a new generation sees Hamlet. What do you want them to take away?

CEP: First of all, we cannot overestimate what it is for this major African American actor to play Hamlet on that stage. John’s as good as it gets. And with actors like Steven Anthony Jones and Teagle Bougere, you’re going to see an incredible and diverse cast. It is also of enormous joy to me that it’s a cast for whom the language will feel rich and comprehensible. This production will not diminish the language, or send it up, or make

“To be or not to be” ironic. For a new generation, one of the thrills is hearing things for the first time. I heard it

when I saw Julius Caesar in New York’s Central Park this summer. Young people don’t know that when somebody says “It’s Greek to me,” that the phrase was actually coined by a character in Shakespeare. There is nothing like Shakespeare for making those discoveries. Hamlet is full of those. That’s the thrill of it.

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A Mirror Up to Nature The Enduring Power of Hamlet

By Elspeth Sweatman

For over 400 years, William Shakespeare’s Hamlet has provided creative fodder for generation after generation of artists. Its most famous moments (an actor holding up a skull, the “To be or not to be” soliloquy) have entered the lexicon, referenced and parodied in novels (David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, Kurt Vonnegut’s God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater), movies (The Lion King, Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back), television shows (The Simpsons, Sons of Anarchy, Star Trek, Gilligan’s Island), and even a 1994 Calvin and Hobbes comic strip featuring Shakespeare-spouting green mush.1 More than any other Shakespeare play, the tragedy of Hamlet, prince of Denmark, has remained a touchstone. Why?

At the heart of Hamlet’s enduring appeal is the eponymous character himself. Hamlet is a juggernaut of a role. He has the greatest number of lines (approximately 1,500) of any Shakespearean character. He ranges from philosophical verse to bawdy comedy to biting satire. He is at once scholar and soldier, actor and critic, rebel and philosopher. No wonder that many leading stage and screen actors—Benedict Cumberbatch, Mel Gibson, Jude Law, Adrian Lester, Daniel Day-Lewis, and David Tennant, not to mention female actors from Sarah Bernhardt to Diane Venora—have tested their mettle with this character.

Part of the reason for this character’s grip on the imagination of actors and audiences alike is that Hamlet is a man of contradictions. He looks up to men like Fortinbras and the Player King who can express their passion and anger—and, crucially, act upon these emotions—yet he hesitates when presented with the opportunity to act upon his own desires and kill Claudius. And then, moments later, he strikes impulsively, killing Polonius. Hamlet also spends much of the play railing against acting and the theatricality of the world around him. He resents the roles—dutiful son, avenger, madman—that are forced upon him. Yet when the actors arrive at Elsinore, he has nothing but praise for them and he’s clearly moved by the leading player’s soliloquy about Hecuba.

1 Other references include To Be or Not to Be (a 1942 Ernst Lubitsch comedy starring Jack Benny and Carole Lombard), The

Bad Sleep Well (a 1960 film directed by Akira Kurosawa), Bugs Bunny meeting Michael Jordan in Space Jam (1996), and a

comedic sketch entitled “A Small Rewrite” by Rowan Atkinson and Hugh Laurie.

OPPOSITE John Barrymore as Hamlet, 1922. Photo by Frances Bergman. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

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What makes Hamlet so intriguing is that not one of these contradictions feels out of character. Hamlet is “a dramatic character who changes every time he speaks,” says literary critic Harold Bloom, but he “maintains a consistent enough identity so that he cannot be mistaken for anyone else.” Hamlet may be a philosopher, a rebel, a madman, and a critic, but he is always Hamlet. His contradictions make him who he is. It is Hamlet’s ambiguities that have made it possible for David Garrick (1717–79) to play Hamlet as an active, energetic man; John Philip Kemble (1757–1823) as a melancholic sufferer; and Edwin Booth (1833–93), Henry Irving (1838–1903), and John Barrymore (1882–1942) as an increasingly sensitive brooder. They have generated Maurice Evans’s World War II transformation of Shakespeare’s prince into a G.I. Joe2 and Laurence Olivier’s 1937 and ’48 Freudian interpretations of Hamlet as a man driven by an Oedipus Complex.3 They have created the agitated Hamlet of David Tennant (b. 1971) and the heroic—even rebellious—Hamlets of John Gielgud (1904–2000) and Kenneth Branagh (b. 1960). Romanian actor Ion Caramitru played this latter interpretation of Hamlet with such conviction in a 1985 production that when the Romanian Revolution began in 1989, many looked to him to lead them in storming a television studio.

Caramitru’s leap from the theatrical stage to a political one highlights the other main reason Shakespeare’s Hamlet continues to be a touchstone for theater artists around the world: the play’s ability to speak to the events, anxieties, and innovations of each new era.

“Hamlet is like a sponge,” wrote Polish theater critic Jan Kott. “It immediately absorbs all the problems of our time.” These “problems” include politics, the instability caused by a change in leadership, theory versus practice, the purpose of one’s life, the tragedy of love, family psychology and relationships, revenge, morality, theatricality, the powerlessness of reason, and the absurdity of life. While it is impossible to cover all of these topics in this article, below is a brief look into Hamlet’s relationship to contemporary politics.

Directors and producers have been using Hamlet to discuss a current political situation (or dodge it) almost since its first production around 1601. During the Restoration period in Britain (1660–88), all references to the play’s larger political chess match between Denmark and Fortinbras were excised because they aligned too closely with the events of the English Civil War (1642–51). The threat of a foreign prince staking his claim to the English throne was genuine—and became a reality in 1688 when William of Orange, the stadtholder of the Netherlands, ousted James II and became William III. The political threat of Fortinbras continued to be regularly cut from British productions of Hamlet until 1897.

By contrast, most of the productions of Hamlet in twentieth-century Germany were political. In 1926, director Leopold Jessner used Shakespeare’s play to criticize

2 Evans’s “G.I. Hamlet” played to enthusiastic military audiences in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The production went on to play for

nearly 150 performances at New York’s Columbus Circle Theater after the war ended in 1945.

3 The Oedipus Complex is a concept coined by psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud (1856–1939). Based on the protagonist and plot

of the Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex, it asserts that males often develop sexual desires for their mothers during childhood and as

a result are jealous of their fathers. Freud believed that the reason Hamlet cannot kill Claudius is that Claudius is living out

Hamlet’s repressed desires.

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the country’s increasing militarism and former kaiser Wilhelm II. These critiques were so blatant that the German National People’s Party proposed a motion in the Reichstag that the production be shut down. Seven years later, a very different German government—the Third Reich—used Hamlet for its own ends. Hamlet’s Aryan Danish roots were held up as an example of superior genetics, and the play was co-opted by Nazi propagandists to support the Reich’s eugenics program, a system designed to promote the Aryan race by sterilizing or killing those deemed genetically inferior. At the encouragement of propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, there were no fewer than 94 officially sanctioned productions of Hamlet in Germany between 1933 and 1945.

This association between the Third Reich’s policies and Shakespeare’s play did not prevent German theater artists from turning to Hamlet after World War II. For many, such as Bertolt Brecht, the play spoke to their contemporary world, a world filled with the aftereffects of totalitarian regimes and wars of aggression. Hamlet, Brecht wrote in his A Short Organum for the Theatre (1949), was an example of how individual lives could be made insignificant by large political shifts. What could Hamlet do, he argued, when faced with the actions of his father, the king of Norway, Claudius, and Fortinbras on the battlefield? Hamlet’s feeling of powerlessness, Brecht suggested, mirrored the feelings of German theater audiences when confronted with the shifts of World War II and the rise of socialism.

As Germany divided into West and East, pro-democracy and pro-socialism, Hamlet became part of the national rhetoric of both countries. In West Germany, the story

Carole Lombard in a publicity still for To Be or Not to Be (1942). Paramount Studios. Courtesy

Wikimedia Commons.

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of the prince of Denmark was one of a revolutionary fighting against a socialist-style government. Vili Tsankov and Roman Zawistowski’s productions—both in 1956—railed against a world of surveillance and government oversight. Heiner Müller used Hamlet as a jumping off point for his groundbreaking Hamletmachine (1977), a play which pits one man against the might of communism. In East Germany, on the other hand, Hamlet was used to champion this same system of government. A 1964 production directed by Hans-Dieter Mäde argued that Hamlet’s humanist ideals could not be realized in his Elizabethan world, but could now under socialism.

Following the events of September 11, 2001, and the resulting, renewed attention on the Middle East, Hamlet’s relationship with contemporary politics has shifted again. In a world gripped by terrorist activity, migration crises, and the homogenization of global culture, theater artists are turning to this play as a way to explore the concept of national identity. In The Al-Hamlet Summit (2002) by Kuwaiti playwright Sulayman Al-Bassam, Hamlet is the heir to a crumbling Arab dictatorship while Ophelia is driven by grief to become a suicide bomber. In a recent 2017 production directed by Tom Ridgely at the Sheen Center for Thought & Culture in New York, Hamlet is a man caught between his Western upbringing and his traditional Persian heritage. Not only is he faced with the decision of killing Claudius, but he also must decide whether to throw off his western trappings and readopt those of Persia.

Byron Jennings in A.C.T.’s 1990 production of Hamlet. Photo by Ken Freidman.

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Confronted with four hundred years of productions and analysis, it can be difficult to think that one has anything new to say about Hamlet. It has been picked apart and reassembled in every possible configuration, performed in every possible setting, time period, and language. “It’s paralyzing to think, ‘What do I have to add to this play?’” says A.C.T. Artistic Director Carey Perloff. “Until you start to work on it. And then the play is so capacious, complex, and rich. You just respond to it in the only way you can as human beings living at this moment in the world today.” For Perloff, this means exploring the toxicity of Hamlet’s world and the pervading feeling of mistrust in those closest to him and in his society’s institutions. It also means exploring this text with this specific group of actors and collaborators.

“There will always be as many Hamlets as there are actors, directors, playgoers, readers, [and] critics,” says Bloom. No production is the same because each production involves a new group of artists, a new audience, and a new actor guiding us through this tragic tale of duplicity, revenge, and psychological investigation. “And so we go to see [Hamlet] again and again,” says author Margaret Atwood, “wondering which of his selves he will be this time, and which of our selves he will speak to.”

SOURCES Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998); Ben Brantley, “A ‘Hamlet’ Poised Between Cultures (and Languages),” The New York Times, May 22, 2017, goo.gl/BzQeo9 (accessed June 5, 2017); Hal Burton, ed., Great Acting (New York: Bonanza Books, 1967); H. R. Coursen, Shakespeare in Production: Whose History? (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1996); Andrew Dickson, “‘Deutschland ist Hamlet’: Shakespeare in Germany,” British Library, February 8, 2016, goo.gl/UqI06s (accessed June 1, 2017); Michael Dobson and Clare Brennan, “Is Hamlet staged too often?,” The Guardian, March 29, 2014, goo.gl/tPFe7L (accessed May 8, 2017); Sigmund Freud, “On Repression in Hamlet,” The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. A. A. Brill (1911), April 2, 2008, goo.gl/FJ4Be7 (accessed June 28, 2017); J. Lawrence Guntner, Redefining Shakespeare: Literary Theory and Theater Practice in the German Democratic Republic, eds. J. Lawrence Guntner and Andrew M. McLean (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998); Jan Kott, Shakespeare: Our Contemporary (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1964); Theresa MacNaughton, “Hamlet in Pop Culture: Tales of Motorcycle Clubs, Lion Cubs and Klingons,” Hartford Stage, 2014, goo.gl/W6yWF8 (accessed May 22, 2017); Laurence Olivier, On Acting (New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1986); William Shakespeare, Hamlet, eds. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, (New York: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016); Robert Speaight, Shakespeare on the Stage: An Illustrated History of Shakespearian Performance (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1973); Patrick Spottiswoode,

“Friends, Germans, Countrymen: The Long History of ‘Unser Shakespeare’,” The Guardian, October 6, 2010, goo.gl/EZMsAF (accessed June 5, 2017)

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Into the MaelstromAn Interview with Actor John Douglas Thompson

By Simon Hodgson

Ever since graduating from drama school, John Douglas Thompson has been thinking about playing Hamlet. Other great Shakespearean roles arrived—Othello, Antony, Richard III, Macbeth—followed by audience acclaim and critical plaudits. But of the many offers and entreaties from the great US theaters, not a single one was for the prince of Denmark. Over the years, as his star continued to rise, Thompson never gave up hope of Hamlet. When he came to A.C.T. in 2015 to prepare for Satchmo at the Waldorf, Thompson talked at length with Artistic Director Carey Perloff about playing the role. This fall, two years after those conversations and two decades after his original yearning, Thompson will step out onto the Geary stage in Hamlet. “Now it’s a question of being careful what you wish for!” he says, laughing. “It was so much more romantic with the play being that thing I hadn’t gotten to yet. But now it’s all set. I have to do it. And that’s terrifying.” When Thompson flew in to San Francisco to discuss the play with A.C.T.’s creative team, we met with him to talk about the process of building a character, the pain of preparation, and the feeling of returning to The Geary.

What is it about Hamlet that draws you toward it?

It’s everything. Hamlet offers the fullest exhibition of Shakespeare’s powers, and as an actor I want to test myself against that. It’s not just the play but the part itself, because the part is so iconic and synonymous with the journey that the character goes through. It’s been written about more than any other work of literature apart from the Bible, in terms of what people have written about the role, the play, its meaning, and what we can learn from it. There’s something about wanting to be a part of something so massive and universal but so very specific and so very human. To want to throw yourself into that maelstrom. How is Hamlet going to manifest through me? I don’t know, but because Hamlet is such a large thing, I want to see what I will be like in that storm.

When I did Tamburlaine the Great, people would ask me, “Why are you doing it?” That’s a play in which I had 1,700 lines, more lines than Hamlet, a larger role than

OPPOSITE John Douglas Thompson. Photo by Nigel Parry/CPi Syndication.

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anything in Western literature. Part of the attraction was that it was this huge mountain which was in front of me—I wanted to see if I could climb it and see what was at the top. It was arduous, physical, and intellectually rigorous work, but I did it. Had I tried to climb the Tamburlaine mountain and failed, I probably would have had second thoughts about trying to do Hamlet.

This is a role traditionally associated with a younger actor. How do you feel about taking it on in your fifties?

Recently I was reading in my Arden Shakespeare about English actors playing Hamlet when they were 70. We’re talking early days now, centuries ago, but certainly there were actors who played it from early in their career to when they were in their sixties and seventies. It may not have been a full run, maybe two or three performances, but you can do it. I’ve seen a Juliet who was 60. It’s possible, because Shakespeare’s works are so dynamic and universal that sometimes age doesn’t really matter. It’s about playing the situation—whether that’s about anxiety, love, loss, joy—and the specificity of handling that situation. The more specific an actor can make something, the more universal it becomes.

When I went to drama school at Trinity Repertory Company I knew I wanted to focus on the classics. I consider myself a classical actor, although that term is almost out of fashion now. People may write about it, but people don’t say, “I’m going to school to become a classical actor.” Stage is just a stepping stone before television or film. For me, stage was never a stepping stone. It was the stone. When I came out of drama school at 29, Hamlet was always in my purview. It was just a question of when. After I did five Othellos, I thought it was too late—I can’t go back and do Hamlet. I must go forward and do Richard III and Macbeth and think about Lear down the road. While I was always looking for the opportunity, I also knew that I was maybe too long in the tooth and that the opportunity had passed me by.

How do you begin the process of preparing for a role like this?

I begin by reading the text over and over, searching for clarity of thought and clarity of relationships. That is part of the intellectual work, where you’re thinking about it, you go see productions, you’re reading about it, you’re constantly flipping through another edition of Hamlet to see what new emendations have come out. But the hardest part of doing it is actually doing it physically. Moving the work from the mind to the body.That’s really hard for me and a very slow process. Tortoise-like.

When we talked before Satchmo at the Waldorf, you mentioned the idea of practicing your lines while you’re doing your laundry.

Oh yeah. There’s something about that whole ten thousand–hour rule. I want to say these lines ten thousand times. When I’m walking down the street, when I’m at home doing laundry, when I’m watching television—it’s always good to do another activity at

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the same time because it allows you to multifocus and see how much you can retain. And the more you can do that, the better preparation for the pressure of doing it in front of a live audience. The whole thing becomes routine.

Which other Hamlets have you seen or researched?

I saw Simon Russell Beale do it twice. That might be the production that affected me most because he’s a phenomenal actor and he brings a great deal of humanity and passion to his work. It wasn’t Hamlet the prince. He was Hamlet the guy. I like that. I’ve seen Ralph Fiennes do it. Other productions of Hamlet that I have researched include Richard Burton and Laurence Olivier. I’ve seen a taping of Adrian Lester in the Peter Brook production. He’s the only black male Hamlet I’ve ever seen. I’ve seen one black woman play Hamlet, Zainab Jah, in an excellent production at The Wilma Theater in Philadelphia. There needs to be more diversity, not only in Hamlet, but in Richard. We need to see these roles played by all kinds of people. I’m not just talking black, Latino, I’m talking disabled, gender-blind casting. We need to really mix it up. It’s ridiculous that we haven’t and the fact that I’ve only seen one black man playing Hamlet in my lifetime—and I’ve been an actor for over 20 years—is pathetic. And that’s as much of a statement about myself for not taking up the challenge as it is to the institutions who failed to do those productions. Shakespeare is awesome. The way he addresses our core humanity means that anyone who has the chops, the imagination, and the force should be able to do it.

Where else do you get inspiration for creating characters?

What makes acting wonderful is that we’re constantly doing research on the streets of our lives. I walk around the street. I look at people. In my mind, I’m thinking, “This person moves like a Hamlet or they’re dressed like a Hamlet or they’re posed like a Hamlet, or they’re talking to someone like Hamlet would be in a state of anger or joy or anxiety.” I’m always on the lookout for little things that I can bring into the patchwork of the character. It can be an item of clothing, a gesture, or a piece of music that speaks to me. I went over to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and I was struck by the Richard Serra installation Sequence, those massive steel walls with space for maybe five people to move around. There’s something architectural but also symbolic that spoke to me of the spiraling nature of Hamlet’s dilemma.

What part of the production process are you looking forward to?

Finding Hamlet’s journey for myself. And then knowing that I can go back and do it again and again and again. There’s something about finding the parameters of performance and testing those boundaries. It will take me until the actual performance to find that and be confident about it. So the joy of this is finding my way. I look forward to it, but it’s a painful, arduous, joyful, anxiety-ridden process.

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Oftentimes I look at characters like Hamlet or Tamburlaine and say to myself, “You’re not going to be able to climb this mountain. You’re in over your head. You’re going to be discovered as a phoney.” That’s in the artist’s mind—I’m not going to succumb to it but that’s the built-in fear. When I start a project it can feel like I don’t understand what it means. I’ve been reading this play, I’ve been talking about it for years, and now I’m doing it and I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. That’s a good place to start. Then you hope to get to that moment in rehearsal when you see something in your mind’s eye and it can be manifested through your physical and emotional life in the play. And that’s a great moment, because the work paid off.

Having performed in Satchmo at the Waldorf at The Geary, what did you take from your first experience at American Conservatory Theater?

It’s not only the theater but it’s also the director. I wanted a theater-maker to do this play. Carey Perloff ’s had 25 years creating theater at A.C.T. as well as her years in New York, not only directing, but running a company, writing plays, writing nonfiction. For a play like Hamlet, which is so all-encompassing, I wanted a mind that is almost Renaissance-driven, that can see the big picture and notice the intimate details, that has a little of everything and can put it all together. From the small to the large, Carey’s approach fits the nature and size of The Geary.

When we did Satchmo in The Geary—that was the biggest place we’d ever performed it—I realized that in that kind of a house ideas can start small but grow big. So by the time you get to some of the other major aspects of the play, these ideas have been rooted and they’ve been growing with the audience. The Geary is the kind of theater that a classical actor dreams of performing in because it really provides the actor with a relationship to the whole. It’s like you’re speaking to the world.

John Douglas Thompson during an A.C.T. M.F.A. Program Conservatory Hour in October 2016. Photo

by Shannon Stockwell.

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“You Would Pluck Out the Heart of My Mystery”Five Mysteries about Hamlet

By Michael Paller

The Mystery of the First Performance

The first recorded performance of Hamlet didn’t take place in London, Cambridge, or Oxford. It didn’t occur in England or, for that matter, on any continent. It happened onboard a trading vessel belonging to the East India Company called the Red Dragon, anchored off modern-day Sierra Leone on September 5, 1607. The play was acted by sailors not only (or not necessarily) for its intrinsic merit, but, as the ship’s captain noted in his journal, “to keepe my people from idleness and unlawful games or sleepe.”

As for the date of the first official performance, we can only guess, but it was certainly several years before its maritime debut. Working backwards, we know it happened before 1604,1 by which time Hamlet was sufficiently well-known for references to it to begin appearing in other plays. A year earlier it had been published in a suspect text (more on that to come), the title page of which reported that it had already been performed “diverse times.” In 1602, a play titled Hamlet was listed in the Stationers’ Register (the first legal step toward publishing a book in Elizabethan England), an indication that it had already been performed, as plays were rarely published before being produced. Other evidence points to a first performance in either 1600 or 1601, but it’s all circumstantial.

The Mystery of the Source

As was his habit, Shakespeare borrowed from existing sources to create Hamlet. The principal one, about a prince whose uncle murders his brother and marries his widow, is an ancient Norse legend recorded in Latin by Saxo Grammaticus (or Saxo the Grammarian) in about 1200 CE. It’s unlikely that Shakespeare knew it, but the critical consensus is that he read a French version of it by François de Belleforest in his popular Histoires tragiques (1570). In both, the hero is called Amleth, and both contain almost all of Hamlet’s crucial characters and plot points.

1. Presumably at the Globe Theatre by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, the acting company of which Shakespeare was a member

and prominent shareholder.

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Horwendil, who rules Jutland with his brother Fengo, slays the king of Norway in combat and marries a princess named Gerutha, who gives birth to Amleth (which means “stupid,” or “fool” in multiple Nordic languages). Horwendil is murdered by Fengo, who then marries Gerutha. Amleth feigns madness to shield himself from Fengo, who suspects that Amleth wants revenge. Fengo enlists a young woman to seduce Amleth and learn his plans; when this fails, he assigns a spy to eavesdrop on Amleth and his mother, but Amleth kills him and throws the body in a sewer, where it is eaten by pigs. Fengo then sends Amleth to England with two companions and a letter instructing the king of England to kill him. After switching the letter with another that calls for executing the escorts, Amleth returns home, kills Fengo, and is declared king. This is almost the plot of the Hamlet that we know. There is, however, one phantom character missing.

The Mystery of the Unknown Hamlet

Any competent Elizabethan playwright could have written a hit play from this raw material. The popularity of revenge dramas was rising around 1600, thanks to Thomas Kyd, whose Spanish Tragedy had given birth to a genre that fed the Elizabethan appetite for entertainment combining shock, grotesquerie, and violence.

In fact, someone did write a play called Hamlet, perhaps as early as 1589. The play and the name of its author are lost, but it was popular enough in its day to remain in the repertory until at least 1596, when it was performed by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. In that year, playwright Thomas Lodge recalled seeing a play called Hamlet featuring a pivotal character not found in Saxo or Belleforest: a “ghost [who] cried so miserably at the Theater, like an oyster-wife, ‘Hamlet, revenge.’”

For years, scholars have assumed that this mysterious ur-Hamlet, as it’s known, was the final source from which Shakespeare created his own Hamlet, and that Kyd was the playwright most likely to have written it. Recently, however, scholars such as Peter Alexander and Harold Bloom have argued that the ur-Hamlet’s author was Shakespeare himself. Bloom believes that Shakespeare wrote a first version of Hamlet no later than 1589, before such works as Titus Andronicus, Richard III, and the Henry VI trilogy. He imagines this initial Hamlet to have been more a revenge drama than a tragedy, in line with Shakespeare’s early work—thrilling in its crude energy, crude in its thrilling melodrama. However, Bloom believes the deaths of Shakespeare’s 11-year-old son Hamnet (a variant of the name Hamlet) in 1596, and of his father in 1601, sent the harrowed playwright back to this early play. Shakespeare then transformed a conventional revenge drama into a “poem unlimited,” the totality of which has yet to be fully encompassed in any single production after more than four hundred years.

OPPOSITE The “To be or not to be” speech in the Second Quarto of Hamlet. Photo by

Georgelazenby. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

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The Mystery of the Two Quartos

In the Elizabethan era, the texts of new plays were among acting companies’ most valuable assets, and it was in their interest to keep them out of circulation. There was no copyright protection for either playwrights or the companies that commissioned their plays; any company that got its hands on the text of a popular play could produce it and deprive the original producers of significant income.

Companies would publish plays only reluctantly, perhaps if they had some desperate financial need (for example, prolonged inactivity due to the plague, as happened between 1592 and 1594). They might also do so to correct a corrupted text that had surreptitiously found its way into print. To replace these butchered editions, the more powerful playwrights, such as Shakespeare, might demand that the company provide the public with a more accurate version.2

This may explain the existence of the first two, quite different editions of Hamlet: the First Quarto of 1603 and the Second Quarto of 1604–05 (called “quartos” because the large sheets on which they were printed were folded into four parts before being bound into small books).

The First Quarto (Q1 in scholars’ shorthand) is about a third as long as the Second Quarto (Q2). Some of the characters’ names are different from those we’re used to from later editions: Polonius is called Corambis, while two others are called Rossencraft and Gilderstone, rather than Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Some of its language feels garbled or gauche. The most famous dramatic speech in the world:

To be, or not to be—that is the question;Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to sufferThe slings and arrows of outrageous fortuneOr to take arms against a sea of troublesAnd by opposing, end them

is rendered in Q1:

To be, or not to be—ay, there’s the point. To die, to sleep—is that all? Ay, all. No, to sleep, to dream—ay, merry, there it goes

It also occurs much earlier than it does in the later, better-known editions. Several theories try to explain the origins of Q1. One suggests that it was Shakespeare’s first draft, another that it was an adaptation of another play by someone else (again, Thomas

2. One such playwright was Thomas Heywood. He explained his reasons in a prologue to a 1605 play, If You Know Not Me,

You Know Nobody:

. . . some by Stenography drew

The plot: put it into print: (scarce one word trew:)

And in that lameness it hath limp’d so long,

The Author now to vindicate that wrong

Hath tooke the paines, upright upon its feete

To teach it walke . . .

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Kyd is a candidate). A third posits that it was based on a shortened production that toured the provinces. Yet a fourth theory holds that Q1 is a “memorial reconstruction”—based on the inaccurate memory of an actor who sold his services to a printer happy to publish a popular play. The trouble with this last theory is that there are scenes in Q1 that have no equivalent in later versions, including one in which Horatio reveals to Gertrude Claudius’s plot to have Hamlet executed in England. Of course, this isn’t to say that Q1 isn’t a somewhat garbled memorial reconstruction of a first version that Shakespeare later revised, or of a shorter touring version.

In any event, a second version of the play was published in 1604–05. Perhaps Shakespeare wanted to replace Q1 either with a more accurate text or with one that included revisions to an earlier draft. Q2’s title page informed book buyers that this new Hamlet was “enlarged to almost as much again as it was, according to the true and perfect copy.” This suggests that the shorter Q1 originated in something less than a true and perfect copy but begs the question of what that “true and perfect copy” from which Q2 derived was. Most scholars believe that the source was Shakespeare’s own manuscript, but when it was written or copied are yet other mysteries.

Angela Paton (Gertrude) and Ray Reinhardt (Claudius) in A.C.T.’s Hamlet (1968). Photo by Ganslen Studios.

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The Mystery of the First Folio

In 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death, his actor colleagues John Heminges and Henry Condell published another version of Hamlet, along with 35 other plays attributed to Shakespeare, in what became known as the First Folio (F1)—a folio differing from a quarto in that the paper the book is printed on is folded only twice, resulting in a larger volume. The Folio gives us yet a third version of the play, lacking 230 of Q2’s lines (while Q2 lacks 70 of F1’s) but adding hundreds of word and phrase changes.

Some scholars believe that the First Folio versions of Shakespeare’s plays are either the ones his company performed, or at least very close. But not Hamlet. Both the Folio and Q2 versions are too long to have been performed in the three or so daytime hours that an Elizabethan performance lasted (typically from 2 p.m. until 5 p.m.). Scholars such as James Shapiro note that after a decade of playwriting, Shakespeare knew how to deliver a script that could be performed in two-and-a-half hours, leaving time for the jig that ended every performance. So why did Shakespeare and his colleagues publish not one, but two texts unperformable in their full versions? Some have speculated that Shakespeare didn’t want to publish a performable version that could be stolen by other companies and easily mounted. Others argue that he produced an edition that, while too long to be performed, wasn’t too long to be read—and that Q2 represents the play as he wished it to be perceived, in the parlor if not the playhouse.

What do these mysteries about the text mean for today’s audiences? For one thing, virtually no two productions of Hamlet are the same. Directors tend to choose either Q2 or F1 as their basic text. Since both texts would take close to four hours to play, they’re then likely to make cuts, and also some small additions from the other text. For this production, Carey Perloff has chosen Q2 with some variants from F1, and, before rehearsals began, placed “To be or not to be” where it occurs in Q1, the equivalent of Act Two, scene two in Q2.

A director’s point of view on the play is usually made clear by these cuts and additions—what she includes, what she excludes. Not until the twentieth century, for instance, was the political plot, represented by Fortinbras, retained in most productions. Today, many directors still opt to cut it and focus on the family drama of the Danish court. There are myriad other examples of directorial choices that differentiate one production from another, which together ensure that none of us will ever see the same Hamlet twice, let alone the definitive Hamlet, with all of its mysteries solved.

SOURCES Peter Ackroyd, Shakespeare: The Biography (New York: Anchor Books, 2005); Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998); William Shakespeare, Hamlet, eds. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London: Thomson Learning, 2006)

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Double IdentityDoubling in Shakespeare’s Hamlet

By Elspeth Sweatman

On the surface, William Shakespeare’s Hamlet seems like any other seventeenth-century revenge tragedy. In a world populated with ghosts and unhinged characters, the protagonist plots to avenge someone’s death—a quest that he completes only to die alongside his victim. But Hamlet is somehow different from other revenge tragedies. It is richer, more complex, universal. Its characters have become yardsticks that artists return to again and again. Its language grips us anew each time we hear it. What gives Hamlet this ability? How does Shakespeare accomplish this? In Hamlet, Shakespeare uses many devices to make his characters and the world of Elsinore intriguing and explore the themes of identity, power, and truth at the heart of the play. This article will focus on the technique of doubling—the mirroring of characters, situations, plot points, themes, and rhetorical devices.

Characters: The Avengers

In Hamlet, there isn’t just one man avenging his father’s death; there are three. Hamlet, Laertes, and Fortinbras all lose their fathers: Hamlet at the hands of his uncle Claudius, Laertes at the hands of Hamlet, and Fortinbras at the hands of Hamlet’s father. Although all three vow to avenge their fathers’ deaths, they go about accomplishing this task in completely different ways. Hamlet gathers evidence of his uncle’s guilt before acting. Laertes returns from France immediately and demands to know who killed his father; he is only stalled in his quest for vengeance by his grief at his sister’s death and Claudius’s urgings to wait for an opportune moment. And Fortinbras raises an army to reconquer the territory his father lost to Hamlet’s father before the start of the play.

By surrounding Hamlet with other sons avenging their fathers’ deaths, Shakespeare intensifies the latter half of Hamlet, as the audience wonders which avenging son will accomplish his mission first. Will it be Fortinbras with his assembled masses marching on Elsinore? Will it be Hamlet, who has arguably had the most time and opportunity to exact his revenge? Or will it be Laertes, whose anger is profoundly mixed with grief?

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The addition of Laertes and Fortinbras also makes Shakespeare’s protagonist more multifaceted and emphasizes one important theme in the play: identity. Hamlet is Hamlet because of the choices he makes when confronted with the news of his father’s murder. Hamlet is a charismatic, dynamic prince; he could have raised an army, as Fortinbras does, and deposed his uncle through force and rhetoric. But Hamlet is not just driven by a desire to right a wrong, but by a desire for the truth. He wants to be certain that Claudius did in fact kill his father. Only then will he act. This choice—to seek the truth rather than take immediate action—sets him apart from the other two avenging sons and makes him a much more complex and nuanced character than the heroes of other seventeenth-century revenge tragedies.

Characters: The Deranged

Another way Shakespeare makes Hamlet a richer play is through the double depiction of madness. Both Ophelia and Hamlet are labeled as mad by the other members of the court (whether they are mad, and to what extent, depends on the actors’ characterizations, the director’s vision, and the audience’s opinion). Following the murder of her father at the hands of her lover, Ophelia unravels. In Act Four, she enters singing bawdy songs and passing out flowers. A few scenes later, we learn that she has drowned in a river. Hamlet’s “madness,” on the other hand, takes the form of an “antic disposition”—behaving playfully and wildly—and is a major topic of conversation for much of the play. A great deal of time and energy is devoted to discovering the cause

Ophelia by John Everett Millais, 1851–52. Courtesy Google Art Project.

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of Hamlet’s madness. Is it the agony of love? The agony of love denied? Grief at his father’s death? All these theories give the audience different angles—a lovesick Hamlet, a grief-maddened Hamlet—through which to reexamine the character of Hamlet and the world he inhabits.

While the doubling of madness is not as clean-cut as the avenging trio of Hamlet, Laertes, and Fortinbras, it does make the play richer by providing an insight into the dangerous political landscape that Hamlet and Ophelia inhabit. With all of Hamlet’s wordplay and Ophelia’s songs, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that madness was at Shakespeare’s time politically dangerous. Hamlet and Ophelia’s “mad” rantings could cause popular opinion to turn against Claudius; they could even cause open rebellion.1 Shakespeare emphasizes this point in Act Four when we first hear of Ophelia’s madness. Gertrude’s first thoughts when Horatio describes Ophelia’s current state are, “’Twere good she were spoken with, for she may strew / Dangerous conjectures in ill-breeding minds.”2 Gertrude is concerned that Ophelia’s songs could spread troubling ideas among the people and court of Denmark.

Seeing the court’s reaction to Ophelia gives the audience a perspective on the political minefield that Hamlet navigates during the first half of the play when he feigns madness in front of Polonius, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern. Whether or not he is mad, he is committing a perilous and political act by being identified in such a way. Just as the addition of two other avenging sons intensifies the conclusion of Hamlet, Ophelia’s madness asks the audience to reexamine Hamlet’s behavior and heightens the tension as the play hurtles towards its conclusion.

Language: Doublespeak

Shakespeare doesn’t just use doubling in his characterizations—even the language he uses is filled with it in the form of repetitions, paradoxes, and oxymorons. Claudius’s opening speech at the beginning of Act One, scene two is filled with paradoxes and oxymorons: “defeated joy,” “mirth in funeral,” and “dirge in marriage.” Hamlet uses several paradoxes, particularly in reference to his new familial arrangement. His opening line—“A little more than kin, and less than kind”—plays upon the fact that his uncle Claudius has married Hamlet’s mother, making him both Hamlet’s uncle and his step-father. Later in the play, when Hamlet confronts his mother over her hasty marriage to Claudius, he employs paradox again, referring to his mother as “your husband’s brother’s wife.” Not only do these paradoxes make the language of Hamlet richer, but crucially, they also illustrate the use of language as a weapon. Hiding behind double meanings,

“biting sarcasm, salacious puns, brutal satire, and diseased imagery, [Hamlet] assaults his enemies,” says Louisiana State University professor Anna K. Nardo. These linguistic doublings contribute to the world of Hamlet, where tension and suspicion hang in the air.

1. This threat was very real for Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Robert Devereaux, the earl of Essex—buoyed by his pop-

ularity and charisma—had recently sparked open rebellion against Queen Elizabeth I. When he was apprehended, he claimed

he committed this treasonous act because he was mad.

2. These lines are ascribed to Horatio in some versions of Hamlet. In A.C.T.’s 2017 production, they are given to Gertrude.

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One rhetorical doubling device that is more prominent in Hamlet than in any other of Shakespeare’s plays is hendiadys—the conjunction of two separate things to make a single, complex image (like “house and home” or “kith and kin”). Shakespeare’s use of this technique peaks in his five great tragedies written around the turn of the seventeenth century: Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and King Lear. But Hamlet contains twice as many hendiadyses as any of these other works (66, versus Othello’s 28). They are a feature of almost every character’s lines, to the point that they become a defining characteristic of the Elsinore court.

The hendiadyses used in Hamlet aren’t always as straightforward as “house and home” or “kith and kin.” For example, in Act Three, scene four, Hamlet says:

For this same lord, I do repent, but heaven hath pleased it so To punish me with this, and this with me, That I must be their scourge and minister.

The pairing of two unrelated words—a negative word, “scourge” (an instrument of punishment), and a positive one, “minister” (an instrument of aid and service)—creates the image of a minister not of love and affection but of pain, criticism, and punishment. This hendiadys paints a richer picture than if these two words had been used individually. Hendiadyses like “scourge and minister” not only make Hamlet’s language distinct and more complex, but they also contribute to the overall tension of Hamlet. “The play has many doublings,” argues scholar Frank Kermode, “but those [passages] which exhibit hendiadys are marked by identifiable tension or strain, as if the parts were related in some not perfectly evident way.” Not only is there tension created by the task placed on Hamlet’s shoulders, his confusing family dynamics, and his precarious position at court, there is also tension in the very words that he speaks.

Structure: The Play-within-a-Play

The most visible form of doubling in Hamlet is in its structure. In the middle of Hamlet is another play, The Murder of Gonzago, or The Mousetrap, or simply the play-within-a-play. This is an entertainment that the traveling players put on for the court at Elsinore and that Hamlet uses to prove Claudius’s guilt. It is preceded by a dumb show that depicts the murder of a king by his brother and the courtship between the widowed queen and the murderer. Its plot doubles that of the play-within-a-play, which itself doubles the plot of Hamlet.

Shakespeare may have included this dumb show before the play-within-a-play for multiple reasons. It is a way to remind the audience of the crime Hamlet believes Claudius has committed. It frees the spectator to watch Claudius’s reaction—and Hamlet’s response to Claudius’s reaction—during the play-within-a-play. But perhaps the biggest reason for the dumb show is that it ratchets up the tension of this scene as it builds towards the moment that Claudius storms out of the room.

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Double upon Double upon Double

The layers of doubling in Hamlet—from the characterizations to the language to the play-within-a-play—all point to Shakespeare’s fascination with the tension between artifice and truth. In this Danish court, it’s difficult to discern right from wrong, true from false. This is a world where characters say one thing and do another. And in this unmoored environment, one man struggles to hold onto his true self, and discover his own terra firma. By weaving doubling into the very framework of his play, Shakespeare throws Elsinore into relief, spurring the audience into reevaluating everything we see, hear, and believe.

SOURCES Karin S. Coddon, ““Suche Strange Desygns”: Madness, Subjectivity, and Treason in Hamlet and Elizabethan Culture,” in Essays on Dramatic Traditions: Challenged and Transmissions, ed. Mary Beth Rose (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1990); Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: Secrets of the Perfect Turn of Phrase (New York: Penguin, 2014); Frank Kermode, Shakespeare’s Language (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000); Dieter Mehl, The Elizabethan Dumb Show: The History of a Dramatic Convention (New York: Routledge, 1964); Anna K. Nardo, “Hamlet, ‘A Man to Double Business Bound,’” Shakespeare Quarterly 34, no. 2 (Summer 1983); “Revenge Tragedy,” Encyclopedia Britannica Online, March 31, 2016, goo.gl/kD2Jzx (accessed July 11, 2017); William Shakespeare, Hamlet, eds. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (New York: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016); Diana Major Spencer, “Revenge and Double Revenge,” Utah Shakespeare Festival, 2017, goo.gl/rsLIJb (accessed June 20, 2017); Gillian Woods, “Hamlet: The Play Within the Play,” The British Library, March 15, 2016, goo.gl/xvxk58 (accessed June 20, 2017); George T. Wright, “Hendiadys and Hamlet,” PMLA 96, no. 2 (March 1981)

Children acting the ‘Play Scene,’ Act II, scene ii from Hamlet, 1863, by Charles Hunt. Courtesy Google

Art Project.

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Intimate Yet ForeignAn Interview with Scenic and Costume Designer David Israel Reynoso

By Elspeth Sweatman

Growing up in Guadalajara, Mexico, Obie Award–winning designer David Israel Reynoso spent his childhood creating theme parks, not theater sets. His designs made out of construction paper and masking tape frequently took over the family living room and staircase. But it wasn’t until his family moved to San Antonio, Texas, that the 12-year-old Reynoso discovered another means of creating new worlds: theater.

“I loved creating spaces that you could get lost in, that transported you,” he says. “That’s what I love about theater, that you can for a moment feel like you are somewhere else, that you can reach out and take the hand of a performer.” After studying scenic design at Boston University, he began designing sets and costumes at American Repertory Theater, La Jolla Playhouse, The Old Globe, and other regional theaters throughout the United States. Fresh from the opening of Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More in Shanghai (for which he designed the costumes), Reynoso gave us an inside look at the world he is creating for Hamlet at The Geary Theater.

This production of Hamlet is set in a world that is polluted, but the inhabitants of this world don’t seem to know it. What was your inspiration for this?

I was on a plane looking through one of the magazines in the seat back and came across a screen shot of a film called Red Desert, directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. This image was of a woman in an early 1960s green coat, holding the hand of a little boy in a mustard coat. The landscape she’s in is very gritty. She’s standing on what look to be train tracks, but dirt has overtaken some of the tracks. Behind her is an enormous plume from a factory. The film became an incredible resource in terms of a landscape that has this perpetual pollution, these great plumes of poisonous smoke emanating.

I also looked at images of what Chernobyl looks like now. The potential for those spaces got stopped in its tracks. Everyone abandoned them. There was an image of an overgrown amusement park that never got to host any visitors. The idea that something invisible is poisoning the landscape is interesting too. You never feel it, but if all of a sudden you brought out a Geiger counter, there’s a great sense of that vibration in the air. That felt like an interesting point of departure.

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How do you translate these images and ideas into a set?

Carey and I wanted to create a space that we felt we knew intimately and yet also felt completely foreign. We got this feeling when we looked at industrial landscapes, so we created a set that could be the inside of a factory or a warehouse, but isn’t so tied to one thing that it couldn’t be anything else. It needed to be a space like a fortress—where someone could wield a weapon—or a royal court, where someone could throw a fabulous party. We’re never able to peg what the space is. There’s just something about a big empty space; it’s full of possibility.

Shakespeare does this great thing in his plays where you go from interior to exterior. The landscape changes from scene to scene. In our set, you aren’t quite sure if you are looking at it from the inside looking outward, or the outside looking inward. The space has a lot of partitions, nooks and crannies where people can hide and spy on each other. This idea that you don’t know where you are in relationship to anything and anyone is at the core of this play’s world.

What are the challenges of doing Shakespeare in a space like The Geary Theater?

It’s a daunting space. It’s a space of a certain scale, wonderfully deep and wonderfully tall. It lends itself to big broad gesture and cinematic wide shots. It’s allowed us to

Set rendering, by scenic designer David Israel Reynoso, for A.C.T.’s 2017 production of Hamlet.

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create a set that has a sense of drama, a greatness—the verticality of the walls, the large windows—that dwarfs the performers. It’s also enabled us to use the theater to its full advantage, with the guards coming up on ladders through grates in the stage floor and the Ghost being revealed in an interesting way. That being said, The Geary also has the ability to let Hamlet’s smaller moments pack an incredible punch. Those intimate moments happening in a space of this scale will be incredible.

How does this setting relate to the costumes?

The only reason we are going this far in terms of structure in the space is because we have the counterbalance in what we are doing with the clothing. We want the clothing to feel grounded in a sense of reality. People are wearing clothes that we recognize. When it’s a grand space, it’s tempting to think about doing something very couture or post-apocalyptic. This is not Mad Max. These are buttoned-up, well dressed, semi-sophisticated men and women—in juxtaposition to this space. You don’t know why these people allow themselves to reside in this polluted space when they’re trying to hold court. There’s something about having something soft and glamorous in a space like this. That tension is definitely implied.

Set rendering, by scenic designer David Israel Reynoso, for A.C.T.’s 2017 production of Hamlet.

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What discussions have you had with the other designers?

[Lighting designer] James Ingalls, [sound designer] Jake Rodriguez, and I had a discussion a few weeks ago about how the sound landscape is presented within the space. In addition to having something that feels ambient, do we add visible speakers, like air-raid horns or old radios that are stashed away forgotten in the corner but that come to life and then are able to project? It’s not strictly a soundtrack; it really feels like it’s springing forth from this space. We’ve also been discussing the stage combat of this world. How do we create weapons that feel in keeping with this space? And when we stage what is traditionally a sword fight in this play, what does that look like in the space? Additionally, Mr. Ingalls and I have talked extensively about using the perforations of the space to create interesting shafts of light and unsettling shadows.

There are moments in Hamlet that have become so familiar as to be ironic. How do you fight against these well-known tropes to create something new?

We tend to think of Shakespeare as being lofty, romanticized, or inaccessible. But no matter what time period you set it in—from full-fledged Elizabethan to something much more contemporary—if you ground it in something that you recognize as an audience member and feel like you can relate to, it makes Shakespeare feel like it belongs to you. You as an audience member should always feel like you’re invited to the party. What resonates for you as a designer must also resonate for someone who has no context for what you are presenting. That is a great challenge, to make sure that your ego, sense of flourish, and desire to create aren’t ever getting in the way of the play. My hope with the world we’ve created for Hamlet is that it feels like there is enough visually to support the play but that it doesn’t encumber it.

You’ve worked on productions of Othello and The Comedy of Errors, as well as Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More (based on Macbeth). What is it about Shakespeare that draws you back to his work?

Shakespeare lends itself to infinite possibilities. As much as you think you might know a play, when you go back to revisit it, you will always discover something new. It’s like when you go to the optician’s and they adjust the lens to your eyes. When you look back at Shakespeare and his plays—specifically plays that you’ve done before—you just shift the oculus a bit and then you suddenly see it from a wonderful new perspective. There’s so much to be discovered in Shakespeare because we as humans are always shifting in the way that we function. Yet there are things about what Shakespeare touches on that will be truths, that will always be relevant, despite the fact that we shift so much.

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A Hamlet Glossary

Aeneas is the mythical hero and protagonist of the Roman poet Virgil’s epic ode, the Aeneid. Aeneas is a Trojan warrior who witnesses the Greeks’ deception of the Trojans with

“th’ominous horse,” a large wooden horse. Greek soldiers hide inside the horse and wait until the Trojans pull the horse inside the besieged city, before they spring out and attack. During the fighting, Aeneas witnesses Achilles’s son Pyrrhus kill Priam, the Trojan king, as revenge for Achilles’s death at the hands of Priam’s son Paris.

After the fall of Troy, the ghost of Aeneas’s dead wife commands him to sail west to form a new city (Rome). On his journey, he travels to Crete, Sicily, and Carthage. In Carthage, he meets Dido, the queen. They fall in love, but when Aeneas remembers his quest, he abandons her. Distraught, she hurls insults at him—including that he was raised by Hyrcanian beasts, tigers that are synonymous with cruelty and bloodthirstiness—before killing herself.

Alexander the Great (Alexander III, 356–23 BCE) was the king of Macedonia, a kingdom in ancient Greece. He is most famous for his military conquests in Asia

and Africa; he captured territory from Egypt to India, resulting in one of the largest empires in the ancient world.

“Antique Roman” refers to Marcus Junius Brutus (85–42 BCE), a Roman senator who was one of the leaders in the assassination of politician Julius Caesar in 44 BCE. Following this action, civil war broke out. After Brutus’s troops were defeated by Caesar’s grandnephew Octavian, Brutus committed suicide.

“Brevity is the soul of wit” is a line that is usually interpreted to mean that witty speeches should be short. It is a funny line because Polonius is a character known for using ten words when two will do.

Cain is the first-born son of Adam and Eve in the Book of Genesis in the Bible. When his brother Abel’s sacrifice to God is met with favor—and his is not—Cain kills his brother. As a result, he is punished to a life of wandering and is seen as the originator of evil.

A chameleon is a lizard with independently mobile eyes and a long tongue. Some of the 202 species can change their skin color to match their surroundings. In Shakespeare’s time, there

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was a prevalent myth that chameleons lived on nothing but air. For this reason, they were often referenced by poets when describing lovers; when in love, you don’t need anything but that love to sustain you.

“Conscience does make cowards of us all” refers to how people are often afraid to do something when we are fearful of the punishment or of the unknown. This phrase appears in the “To be or not to be” soliloquy in which Hamlet expresses his fear of the unknown (death and the afterlife) and of the potential spiritual punishment for committing suicide.

Cyclops’ hammers refer to the Cyclops, one-eyed giants who work in the Roman god Vulcan’s blacksmith shop. They are said to have crafted the armor for the mythical warriors Achilles and Aeneas.

Fortune, or fate or luck, was an important aspect of secular and religious life during Shakespeare’s time. The medieval concept of a wheel of fortune—that a person’s luck could change dramatically right at the pinnacle of his or her good fortune—dominated political texts (Machiavelli’s The Prince), literature (Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales), and plays (Everyman).

“Frailty, thy name is Woman” is a line spoken by Hamlet when he is expressing his disgust at his mother’s actions. By today’s standards, it is a misogynistic line; it infers that women are inherently frail, fickle, and capricious. Author James Joyce plays upon this phrase in Ulysses (1922), when Bloom says “Frailty, thy name is marriage.”

Illustration from John Lydgate’s mid-fifteenth-century poem Siege of Troy, showing the wheel of fortune.

Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

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“Full thirty times hath Phoebus’ cart gone round / Neptune’s salt wash and Tellus’ orbed ground / Since love our hearts and Hymen did our hands / Unite commutual in most sacred bands” are lines that need unpacking. Phoebus’ cart refers to the chariot of the sun god (otherwise known as Apollo). Neptune’s salt wash refers to the sea (Neptune is the god of the sea), and Tellus’ orbed ground refers to the earth (Tellus is the goddess of the earth). Hymen is the god of marriage. In short, the Player King is saying that the sun has gone around the earth 30 times and so 30 years have passed since he married the Player Queen.

Hebona (or hebenon) is a poison first mentioned in Hamlet. Scholars argue over whether Shakespeare is referring to hemlock (used to kill Socrates in ancient Greece), yew, ebony, or henbane. All are plants extremely poisonous to humans.

Hecate is the ancient Greek goddess of light, magic, witchcraft, poisonous plants, ghosts, crossroads, and the moon. She is often depicted in triple form, corresponding to three major stages of the lunar cycle: full moon (Selene, a heavenly goddess), half moon (Artemis, an earthly goddess), and new moon (Persephone, a goddess in the underworld).

Hecuba is the wife of King Priam of Troy. In Book 24 of Homer’s Iliad, Hecuba gives a famous speech in which she grieves for the loss of her son Hector. This is what the leading Player recites when the traveling players first arrive in Elsinore.

Hercules is the Roman name for a Greek hero renowned for his superhuman strength. The son of the god Zeus and the human woman Alcmene, Hercules is charged with 12 labors to atone for killing his wife and children. These tasks include

Statue of Julius Caesar at the Louvre in Paris, France. Photo by Ian Dolphin. Courtesy Flickr.

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killing the Nemean lion and nine-headed Hydra, and capturing the Cretan bull.

“Hoist with his own petard” means “blown up by his own bomb.” In Shakespeare’s time, a petard referred to the casing around an explosive or a firework. Hamlet knows about Claudius’s plan to have him killed while in England. He plans to turn the tables on Claudius and make his uncle’s plan blow up in his face.

Hyperion was one of the 12 Titans in Greek mythology who were overthrown by the Olympian gods. When Hamlet compares his father to his uncle, he says “Hyperion to a satyr.” A satyr is a creature that is half-human and half-goat, often associated with drunkenness and overindulgence. So Hamlet is saying his dead father is like a god compared to his uncle, who is a venal man.

“I must be cruel only to be kind” is spoken by Hamlet as he prepares to confront his mother. He means that he must be blunt and harsh with his mother to get her to see the consequences of her actions. This phrase has been shortened into the idiom

“cruel to be kind,” still used today.

“In my heart of heart” is a phrase Hamlet uses to show his friend Horatio that he values him highly. This phrase is often misquoted as “in my heart of hearts.”

“In my mind’s eye” means in my memory or imagination.

Jove is the king of the gods in ancient Rome (also known as Jupiter, or Zeus in ancient Greece). He is also the god of the sky and thunder. Hamlet compares his late father’s face to that of this god.

Julius Caesar (Gaius Julius Caesar, 100–44 BCE) was a Roman general, politician, and statesman who was assassinated in the Roman senate. He spearheaded the transformation of Rome from a republic into an empire.

Mars is the ancient Roman god of war.

Niobe is a mythical Greek woman who mourned her children’s deaths for so long and with such passion that she turned into a weeping stone statue. She is often referenced by poets as the archetype of true mourning. Hamlet uses this reference to show that his mother’s grieving for her husband (by marrying his brother) is in direct contrast to Niobe’s grief.

Normandy is a region in the northwest of modern-day France. Due to its location, it passed back and forth between France and England from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries.

Plautus (Titus Maccius Plautus, c. 254–184 BCE) was a Roman playwright renowned for his comedies, especially Amphitryon and Pseudolus. Of his 130 plays, 20 survive. Plautus is often cited in contrast to Seneca (the Younger/Lucius Annaeus Seneca, c. 4 BCE–65 CE), a Roman philosopher and playwright. Seneca was known for his revenge tragedies, specifically Medea and Thyestes.

Poland in the seventeenth century covered much of modern-day Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, and Poland.

Rhenish refers to the Rhine region in southwestern Germany.

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Roscius (Quintus Roscius, c. 126–62 BCE) was a Roman actor who turned popular taste from the coarse clowning of the Roman theater to the restrained Greek method of acting. By Shakespeare’s time, Roscius was synonymous with dramatic excellence.

Saint Patrick (c. fifth century CE) was a Christian missionary and bishop. At the age of 16, he was captured by pirates and taken to Ireland as a slave. He escaped six years later but returned to the country to preach Christianity. Through his miraculous deeds (including the legend that he banished snakes from the country), he became the patron saint of Ireland.

For Seneca—see Plautus.

“Something is rotten in the state of Denmark” is a phrase that continues to be used in literature, politics, and the media, usually in reference to a corrupt leader or boss. The 2015 Tony Award–nominated musical Something Rotten! gets its name from this line.

“Speak daggers” describes Hamlet’s method of confronting his mother about her behavior since her first husband’s death. Hamlet will not physically harm her, but will reach her heart and conscience with his pointed and incisive words.

“The lady doth protest too much, methinks” is Gertrude’s assessment of the play-within-a-play. She is saying that the Player Queen’s vehement protests that she will never remarry if the Player King dies cast suspicions on that fact.

“The play’s the thing” is one of the most famous phrases from Hamlet. It means that the play-within-a-play is the key to exposing Claudius’s guilt. The phrase is frequently used by journalists and writers when referring to the crux of an argument or a pivotal event.

“The rest is silence” are Hamlet’s last words in the play. These words have been used as the titles of songs, books, and films. This phrase can also be found in the lyrics for the song “Flesh Failures/Let the Sun Shine” in the musical Hair (1967).

“There are more things in heaven and earth, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio” means that there are things in the world that are beyond human understanding. This phrase inspired the title of a short story by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges in 1975.

“Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t” is spoken by Polonius as he observes Hamlet’s “antic disposition.” One interpretation of the phrase is that, though Hamlet is acting mad, Polonius can see the purpose of it (he knows that Hamlet is faking). This is often shortened to “method in the madness” today.

“To be or not to be” is the most famous dramatic soliloquy in Western drama. Some actors and scholars interpret this speech as an exploration of life, death, and suicide. Finding himself in a world that he suddenly no longer recognizes and burdened with the task of avenging his father’s murder, Hamlet considers taking his own life. He is stopped in this

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thinking by the fear of what may come after death: “For in that sleep of death what dreams may come / When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, / Must give us pause.”

Others argue that Hamlet is considering the consequences of killing his uncle, an action that could result in his own death. “Conscience does make cowards of us all,” he says; knowing the consequences of this act, Hamlet hesitates.

“To the manner born” means “accustomed to this tradition from birth.” Over the years, it has been misheard as “to the manor born;” this idiom has entered the lexicon too. It refers to someone who is born into wealth and privilege.

Saint Patrick at the Smith Museum of Stained Glass. Photo by Thad Zajdowicz. Courtesy Flickr.

“To thine own self be true” has several possible meanings. First, always be truthful to who you are as a person: your values, thoughts, and feelings. Second, when evaluating a situation or problem, think first of yourself and how something will benefit you.

Vulcan’s stithy refers to the workshop of Vulcan, the ancient Roman god of volcanoes and metalworking. Because Vulcan is associated with lava, magma, and liquid metal, he is also associated with hell.

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Questions to Consider1. Theater critic Jan Kott wrote that “Hamlet is like a sponge . . . it absorbs all the problems of our time.” What is it about Hamlet that makes it so enduringly relevant?

2. Hamlet is filled with characters who face similar situations but deal with them differently. Why do you think Shakespeare did this? What effect does this have on the story?

3. With the set and costume design removed from the Renaissance to a more modern period, how does your understanding of the play and Shakespeare’s language change?

4. The “To be or not to be” speech has been referenced throughout pop culture. How does hearing the soliloquy in context change your relationship to it?

5. Shakespeare drew from several existing sources to create Hamlet, but the inclusion of one phantom character is his own invention. How does the addition of King Hamlet’s ghost affect the storytelling?

6. Actors have interpreted Hamlet in many different ways. If you were to play Hamlet, what would you bring to the role?

7. How does seeing an African American man in his fifties affect your interpretation of Shakespeare’s play?

For Further InformationAckroyd, Peter. Shakespeare: The Biography. New York: Anchor Books, 2006.

Alexander, Peter. Hamlet: Father and Son. London: Oxford University Press, 1970.

Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York: Riverhead Books, 1998.

Grebanier, Bernard. The Heart of Hamlet: The Play Shakespeare Wrote. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1960.

Kermode, Frank. Shakespeare’s Language. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000.

Kott, Jan. Shakespeare: Our Contemporary. Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1964.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. New York: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016.

Shapiro, James. 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare. London: Faber & Faber, 2005.

Have an answer? We’d love to hear from you. Email your thoughts to shodgson@act-sf.org. You may even see your answer published on our blog at blog.act-sf.org!