

                     20050730.00

                   Notes on Hamlet

Went last night with the family to see the free Hamlet
production (Commonwealth Shakespeare Company - Wang Theatre)
on the Boston Common.

Outdoor stage, with braced pipe framing for gallery and lights.
State of the art, cordless sound system. Blaring loudspeakers
much as at a sports event. Audience seated randomly, reminiscent
of Bethlehem Bach Festivals, on a down-trodden lawn or on low
beach chairs.

Contemporary dress for the actors was very effective. Diction
was rapid, and where we were sitting too loud, so that the music
of the language suffered. Both the color of the words and the
rhythm of the sentences were frequently indiscernable.

Inasmuch as the original Elizabethan text would have been
accessible to this audience only with difficulty, the drama of
the plot was emphasized, for example: in the initial scenes,
the terror inspired by the ghost, Hamlet's ranting, Ophelia's
despair. Scenes which did not lend themselves to dramatization,
the dialogues between Hamlet and Ophelia, Hamlet and Gertrude
did not come across as well as they might.

Overall, I found the production very satisfying; an instructive
example of expressionism on the stage.

I was fascinated by Shakespeares geography: the climate
differences between Dunsinane (Macbeth) and Elsinore
(Hamlet). Dunsinane with sweet birds and flowers, Elsinore
drab and cold. England as the province of executioners,
where a Danish king might send his troublemakers to their
death, much as our CIA sends its prisoners to Egypt for
torture. Obviously, to have Hamlet executed in Denmark
would not have been politically feasible.  Denmark itself
as (nothing more than) a crossroads for invading/warring
Norwegians on their way to Poland. And most provocative
to my mind: Wittenberg as the Harvard where Hamlet's spirit
was forged in the flame of Martin Luther's claim on
inward conscience as the determinant of action. (Wittenberg
is the city on the Elbe, on whose church portals Luther
nailed his 95 Theses against the Roman Catholic Pope
in 1517, or about 90 years before Shakespeare wrote Hamlet.)
Thus Wittenberg becomes the geographic link between
Shakespeare's Elizabethan world, and the Haendel-Bach
atmosphere of the Baroque.

Shakespeare's genius erases the artificial distinction between
sanity and madness. Note that Hamlet and Ophelia are the two
characters in the play driven by conscience; and it is
conscience that drives men and women to madness. (Notice the
ambiguity in our language when one of us says "I am mad.")
Ophelia's madness is not to be construed as the result of her
rejection by Hamlet; that, she could have survived, in a
nunnery or elsewhere. I understand Ophelia's madness as the
expression of the conflict within her occasioned by the
circumstance that Hamlet (whom she loved) killed her father
(whom she loved), and the moral culture in which she lived
did not provide her with the spiritual tools to resolve
that conflict (and neither would ours.) Hamlet's madness
is only partially accounted for by the conflicting
obligations to kill and not to kill a king. The obligation
to avenge his father, and the prohibition against killing
God's anointed. More deeply, I think, Hamlet's madness is
the expression of Hamlet's incapacity to come to terms
with the fact that his mother had been accessory to the
murder of his father. Hamlet's colloqui with Gertrude is
the epitome of family argument and demonstrates its power.
That colloqui is responsible for saving Gertrude's soul,
if indeed it was saved. It also induces a change in Hamlet's
mental state; arguably, it cures him from his melancholy
and his madness. Psychotherapy was never more effective.

The strength of the bond between Gertrude and Hamlet is
dramatized in her affection for Ophelia. That bond
between mother and son was so strong that not only could
Hamlet not have survived the breaking of it; but even to
break it would have exceeded his power. I was impressed
by the reconciliation between Hamlet and Gertrude (Act III,
Sc 4), and by Gertrude's resolving her conflict of
loyalties against Claudius and in favor of Hamlet.
Remarkable about this play is that in the midst of the
carnage Hamlet's spirit (soul) did survive, as evidenced
by his reconciliation with Laertes. Shakespeare must have
learned from the Oresteia (Aeschylus), or he knew
intuitively, that a man's soul does not survive matricide.
(Orestes who killed his mother Clytemnestra for having
conspired with Aegisthus to kill her husband Agamemnon was
pursued by the furies and was cured of _his_ madness only
by the intervention of his sister Iphigenia. Note also
that Hamlet is able to kill Claudius only _after_ he himself
has been fatally wounded and is in the clutches of death.
Footnote: The performance was unfair to Polonius.

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Copyright 2005, Ernst Jochen Meyer
