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Maddy Does Hamlet

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Interested in parallels of Lear's madness and Ophelia's, and how she uses historically feminine language in the hope of immunity and riddling through it, but her womanhood doesn't offer any protection, as a Fool's license did.

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Oedipus - Religion - Family - Renaissance - Conflict -  Repentance - Guilt - Remorse - Controlling - Violence - Domestic Violence - Seduction? - (Awkward) Murder

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Description

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, this text contains the first quotation in which 'nunnery' is used as slang for 'brothel' - the ironic opposite of a virginal community of nuns. In his book, Christs Teares over Jerusalem (1593), Thomas Nash or Nashe (1597-1601) refers to prostitutes who 'give free priviledge' to gentlemen in 'theyr Nunnery' (pp. 79r-v).

Christs Teares over Jerusalem (1593)

The reference appears in a tract in which Nash takes on the voice of a pious religious reformer. Writing in a 'clean different vaine' from his earlier witty pamphlets, he now presents an apocalyptic vision suggesting that, just as Christ said Jerusalem would fall, London will also suffer if its people continue their sinful ways. Nash was later imprisoned for this harsh description of London as a 'seeded garden of 'sinne' - a line which echoes Hamlet's disillusioned description of the world as 'an unweeded garden / That grows to seed' (1.2.135-36).

Imagery of prostitution in Hamlet

In Act 3, Hamlet repeatedly tells the innocent Ophelia to 'Get thee to a nunn'ry' (3.1.120; 128-29; 136-37; 139). Critics have debated whether this simply implies that she should enter a convent to escape corruption, or whether it also hints ambiguously that she should go to a brothel - because the world will inevitably corrupt her with its impure ways.

Misogynistic imagery of sexual corruption and prostitution is pervasive in . Gertrude, according to Hamlet, has been 'whor'd by Claudius (5.2.64); tainted by her 'incestious' relations with her former husband's brother (1.2.157). This language then extends to other women, but also to some of the men in the play. Hamlet claims that Ophelia has been prostituted by her father Polonius, who he calls a 'fishmonger' or pimp (2.2.174). Hamlet compares himself repeatedly to a 'whore' or 'drab' (2.2.585-86) and Claudius first admits his own guilt by comparing it to a 'harlot's cheek' (3.1.50). Even fortune is said to be a 'strumpet' (2.2.236).

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First use of the word 'nunnery' to mean 'brothel', 1593

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According to the Oxford English Dictionary, this text contains the first quotation in which 'nunnery' is used as slang for 'brothel' - the ironic opposite of a virginal community of nuns. In his book, Christs Teares over Jerusalem (1593), Thomas Nash or Nashe (1597-1601) refers to prostitutes who 'give free priviledge' to gentlemen in 'theyr Nunnery' (pp.

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If we split Hamlet into 2 parts, before the midpoint and after the midpoint the question or his objective/ goal changes.

PART ONE- Hamlet's goal is to find out the truth about his fathers death. Who killed my father?

PART TWO - Hamlet's goal is to figure out what action to take and take it. What do I do about it?

Once Hamlet discovers the truth he has a choice, accept it and take action or reject it and continue in this existence.

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Act 1) Occasioning of impending struggle
Act 2) preliminary moves and counter moves
Act 3) Opposition make chief assault. Seeming defeat.
Act 4) Preparation for counter attack
Act 5) Victory

OR / ALSO

Act 1) Set up and call to action
Act 2) Things go well (initial objectives achieved)
Act 3) Things start to go wrong (midpoint) as odds increase the forces of antagonism gather strength
Act 4) Things go badly wrong precipitating crisis
Act 5) Final battle with antagonist. matters resolved for good or ill.

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Every story has
- A protagonist
- An antagonist
- An inciting incident
- A desire
- A crisis
-A climax
- A resolution

Beginning - Thesis
Middle - Antithesis
End- Synthesis

Act 1 - Protagonist has a character flaw
Act 2- They are forced to confront the opposite
Act 3 - Synthesis of qualities

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The Relation of Shakespeare to Montaigne

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The Relation of Shakespeare to Montaigne

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The Relation of Shakespeare to Montaigne on JSTOR

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Elizabeth Robbins Hooker, The Relation of Shakespeare to Montaigne, PMLA, Vol. 17, No. 3 (1902), pp. 312-366

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Resolve - Chaotic - Acting - Theatre - Questions - Questioning - Observing / Observer - Over Hearing - Listening - Power - Silence -

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ahhhh the Russians

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Subterfuge - Indecision - Cowardice - Loneliness - Humanism - Frustration - Existentialism - Voyeurism - Activity/Passivity - Act -Meta - Riddling - Madness - Discovery - Playing - Reflections

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Ian McKellen will be playing Hamlet 50 years after he first played the role! (Can't remember who talked about an older version of the character Hamlet last week but it's happening!)

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Sir Ian McKellen's return to the role of Hamlet, 50 years after he first took on the part, has been keenly awaited by theatregoers as a post-lockdown treat. It has now been confirmed that the production, announced last year, will open this summer at the Theatre Royal Windsor with a company of actors - also including Steven Berkoff, Jenny Seagrove and Francesca Annis - who will then present The Cherry Orchard. Both plays will be directed by Sean Mathias in a season produced by Bill Kenwright.

McKellen, who turns 82 in May, will begin previews for Hamlet in June. It is billed as an "age, colour and gender-blind production" and will offer a number of audience members the opportunity to sit on stage. Shakespeare's tragedy will be followed in September by Chekhov's classic, adapted by Martin Sherman and starring McKellen as Firs, Annis as Ranevskaya and Seagrove as Gaev.

"I've acted in both these masterpieces before - and seen them scores of times," said McKellen. "They are in that select group of classic plays which bear, even demand, a regular look, even reappraisal. By actors, directors, producers - and audiences."

Covid-secure rehearsals for Hamlet first began last summer. It would never have crossed his mind to play the role again, he has said. "Young Hamlet", as he is referred to in the play, is generally thought to be no older than 30. McKellen said that portraying the prince of Denmark now provided a way to "look into how much we need to see what we're hearing". Rehearsals for the production will recommence next week.

'I didn't reckon I was any good' ... Ian McKellen as Hamlet in 1971. Photograph: Donald Cooper/Alamy Stock Photo

Kenwright said: "Sean, Ian and I started this journey during the first lockdown last summer. At that time it was not to be, but while we will continue to work in steadfast accordance with government and scientific guidelines, and the safety of all our priority, we are hugely optimistic that our rehearsals will lead us to a pretty historic opening on 21 June."

Tickets for the first three weeks will be on sale for a reduced capacity as a precaution until further guidance and clarification of dates for the easing of social distancing is provided by the government. Performances from 12 July to 4 October will be available with no social distancing in place. Tickets go on general sale on Saturday.

McKellen played Hamlet in a UK and European tour in 1971 with Prospect theatre company. "I didn't reckon I was any good," he has remarked.

On Friday new dates were also confirmed for another major staging of Hamlet: the Young Vic's production, starring Cush Jumbo and directed by Greg Hersov, will run from 27 September to 13 November. It had been due to open last summer.

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Ian McKellen's long-awaited return as Hamlet set for June

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Sir Ian McKellen's return to the role of Hamlet, 50 years after he first took on the part, has been keenly awaited by theatregoers as a post-lockdown treat. It has now been confirmed that the production, announced last year, will open this summer at the Theatre Royal Windsor with a company of actors - also including Steven Berkoff, Jenny Seagrove and Francesca Annis - who will then present The Cherry Orchard.

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https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2021/mar/29/teacher-kenneth-rea-the-outstanding-actor?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other&fbclid=IwAR1e07r5FE0PiTu3SOrF_pTM4B2ASj8WtQUBygXPoDJbIB_aBbT_RCYUaR0

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New Directions: Hamlet and Gender by Catherine Belsey

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New Directions: Hamlet and Gender by Catherine Belsey

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n 2014 the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester put on Hamlet with Maxine Peake in the title role. There was a good deal of cross-casting in this production, set in the 1970s. The text was adapted to accommodate Polonia as the mother of Laertes and Ophelia; the gravediggers were women, as were Rosencrantz, Marcella and the Player. But Peake’s Hamlet was male – or perhaps closer to the ambiguity of the young David Bowie, whose haircut he also modelled. Her prince was angry, courteous, agonized, calculating and comic by turns, but always clear-headed and absorbed in the moment, a Hamlet in all respects for the twenty-first century.

It is increasingly common to see women play men. Shakespeare, who wrote for an all-male theatre, offered his boy actors complex and demanding parts as Rosalind, Viola, Juliet or Cleopatra. But sexual politics have now opened the grand male roles to women too and Peake met the challenge with conviction. What many of her audience would not have known without recourse to the programme note was that, although modern women in the role had been relatively
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uncommon, the tradition of actresses as Hamlet goes back to the late eighteenth century, when Sarah Siddons took the part. Some of the most famous Victorian Hamlets were women. There was then, as now, some resistance, if for slightly different reasons, but the Hamlets of Charlotte Cushman, Alice Marriott and Sarah Bernhardt were highly regarded by most critics.

The part was held to benefit from an injection of femininity. That view evolved from an understanding of the tragedy developed by the Romantics and still in evidence now, if only residually. Meanwhile, a new flexibility in our own understanding of gender roles expands the possibilities for Hamlet. In 2009 Blanca Portillo played the prince in modern dress in Madrid. Her androgynous Hamlet was athletic and vengeful, but torn between masculine and feminine identities. In this experimental production, Portillo delivered ‘To be or not to be’ naked, as she contemplated her own image in the water that formed a crucial part of the design (González 2014: 281). The story of Hamlet’s interpretation unfolds in line with the history of gender relations. Sarah Frankcom’s production of Maxine Peake’s Hamlet has its place in a continuing narrative that has also had implications for the perception of Gertrude and Ophelia, as well as Horatio.

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Death - Ruin - Unnatural - Uncanny - Unsettling - Atmospheric - Adulterate -  Seeming - Integrity - Smoke and Mirrors - Parental - Fog - Rotten - Unmanly

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on Hamlet 1954

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Hamlet explained by John Gielgud - 16 May 1954

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Making Ken's Hamlet

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Benedict Cumberbatch  - Hamlet Interview [42 mins]

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Paul Cantors- Shakespeare and Politics - HAMLET LECTURES

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Orson Welles and Peter O'Toole on Hamlet

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This is en excerpt from the program "Monitor" (recorded in October 1963 at the BBC). Right around this time O'Toole was playing Hamlet at the National Theatre, under the direction of Laurence Olivier. Also in the conversation are Huw Wheldon (the host) and veteran actor Ernest Milton.

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Ken on Hamlet..urg

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Kenneth Branagh interview on "Hamlet" (1996)

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Harold Bloom on Hamlet

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Harold Bloom interview on "Hamlet" (2003)

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The chapel at Elsinore

Now might I do it pat

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O-Ophelia

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Hamlets

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Elsinore Main Hall

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Ken's Hamlet Programme

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Hamlet meets a kitty Kat

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reflections of yourself, your father, who you used to be. who do I see in there?

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To be...

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(excuse sausage fingers!)

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Picture for a moment Hamlet, the melancholy prince of Denmark. Chances are, you're imagining a dashing gentleman who looks like one of the many famous actors who've played him. Kenneth Branagh, say, or Laurence Olivier, or Jude Law or David Tennant. You might even picture Benedict Cumberbatch, who is drawing crowds to London to see him play the role. As the Guardian's Michael Billington put it, "Cumberbatch has many of the qualities one looks for in a Hamlet. He has a lean, pensive countenance, a resonant voice, a gift for introspection."

Billington is right: One does look for a Hamlet that is lean and pensive or, failing that, an action hero like Mel Gibson or Keanu Reeves, who both played the role in the 1990s. Cumberbatch combines aspects of both, having recently played both Sherlock Holmes and a genetically engineered supersoldier in Star Trek Into Darkness.

But what if our mental image of Hamlet is wrong? What if the grieving, vengeful prince is actually fat? Just because you've never considered the possibility doesn't mean that Shakespeare scholars haven't argued about it, just one front in a centuries-old debate about how you determine meaning in Shakespeare's plays.

The most straightforward way to figure out whether Hamlet is fat is to look at the text itself, in which Hamlet's own mother calls him fat. During the play's final sword duel, King Claudius turns to Queen Gertrude and says that Hamlet will win the duel, and Gertrude replies, "He's fat and scant of breath," before turning to Hamlet and telling him to "take my napkin, rub thy brows."

Oh, great! you might think. Hamlet's fat! Someone get Benedict Cumberbatch on the phone and tell him to start pounding the Big Macs. But just when you thought Shakespeare might, for once, make things easy, it turns out this line doesn't prove anything. For one thing, there is no definitive text of Hamlet. Most versions of Hamlet we see or read are cobbled together from multiple editions, none of which had Shakespeare's direct involvement. Gertrude's line about her son being fat and scant of breath, for example, doesn't appear in the earliest published edition of the play. We're also not entirely sure where that first edition (called the " first quarto," or "the bad Hamlet ") came from. It may be a first draft written by Shakespeare, or it could be pirated by an audience member furiously scribbling the play down as it was performed, or reconstructed by one of the actors who played a minor role in the show.

Maybe the line's absence doesn't matter. After all, the bad Hamlet is bad. It's the version of Hamlet where the play's most famous speech begins, "To be or not to be, aye, there's the point." But its absence in an early version could also demonstrate that Shakespeare added the line about Hamlet being "fat and scant of breath" later, as Richard Burbage, the actor playing Hamlet, like so many of us in our late 30s, got a little fat and scant of breath.

Looking at Burbage-Shakespeare's leading man and business partner-is another way we can determine if Hamlet is fat. The problem is that we have only one portrait of Burbage, and it dates from later in his life. (He doesn't look that fat.) We know from a funeral elegy that Burbage's "stature" was "small," but although there's a tradition that holds that he was somewhere between 14 and 17 stone (200-240 pounds), there's no real evidence that this is true. Some scholars feel Julius Caesar might hold a clue; Burbage almost certainly played Brutus and Hamlet in the same year, and Caesar famously describes another character as too skinny to be trusted, implying perhaps that Brutus, on the other hand, isn't skinny. At this point, though, we're grasping at the leanest and hungriest of straws.

We can also look at the history of scholarship of Hamlet, as University of Wisconsin-Whitewater professor Elena Levy-Navarro does in this wonderful essay on the subject of Hamlet's fatness. Levy-Navarro documents how, during the Victorian era-a time of fad diets and fitness crazes where one's weight was mistaken for an indication of one's moral fiber-a vocal minority of Shakespeare scholars, following the lead of Goethe, believed Hamlet was fat and that his fatness indicated weakness. A Victorian actor named E. Vale Blake declared in an 1880 article for Popular Science Monthly that Hamlet was "imprisoned in walls of adipose," which, "essentially weakens and impedes ... the will," leading to his inability to, as Levy-Navarro puts it, "act decisively to avenge his father."

We also live in a time of fad diets and fitness crazes where one's weight is mistaken for an indication of one's moral fiber. Today, however, Hamlet's heroism is taken for granted, and very few people believe that the text of Hamlet definitively shows he is fat. According to Levy-Navarro, some scholars claim "the word must be a printer's error. Shakespeare must have written 'hot,' 'faint,' or 'fey.' " Plumbing the depths of Shakespearean listservs, we find similar arguments. Harvard's Eric Johnson-DeBaufre suggested, for example, that " 'fat' is Shakespeare's truncation of 'fatigate,' an adjective [meaning weary] in regular use during the period," including in texts Shakespeare likely read.

Even if it's not a printer's error or a truncation, fat might not mean what we think it means. In Elizabethan times, fat also meant sweaty. Since Gertrude offers Hamlet her napkin to wipe his face, perhaps context reveals that fat refers to his perspiring brow. This begs the question: How can anyone ever definitively say what the meaning of a word is in Shakespeare?

I decided to get to the bottom of this with some help from John-Paul Spiro, a Shakespearean scholar who teaches at Villanova. According to Spiro, investigating the meaning of specific words in Shakespeare is particularly fraught because Shakespeare was the Ornette Coleman of language. Beyond inventing more than 1,700 words, Shakespeare was "deliberately coming up with new meanings of words, and opening up new conceptual spaces," Spiro said. The play invents the contemporary definition of the word success, for example, and Shakespeare was the first person to use crown as a verb.

In order to figure out what fat means at this specific moment of Hamlet, then, we must look not only at how Elizabethans understood the term, but how his contemporaries used the term, how Shakespeare uses it in his plays in general, and how Shakespeare uses it in Hamlet. To the Elizabethans, fat could indeed mean sweaty, but "sweaty in the way fatty meat is sweaty when you cook it," Spiro said. "Even in Elizabethan times, you would never say, 'I went for a run, and now I'm fat.' "

But how did Shakespeare use it? At my urging, Spiro dug out his concordance and looked up every single usage of the word fat in Shakespeare. Of the 80 or so times Shakespeare uses fat, there are two usages outside of Hamlet where the Bard could be referring to sweat, but in general " 'stuffed' is really what it's used to mean," Spiro told me. "Not just heavy. Overfull, teeming, something fatted and overfed, like livestock."

It has other connotations as well, particularly around clumsiness. "If you have a fatted goose, it's not going to walk well," he says. "If you go back to references to Falstaff and a few other characters, there's also a hint of calling someone effeminate. You're clumsy the way a very pregnant woman is clumsy."

In Hamlet itself, fat is used in ways that reference fullness and death. Fat appears first in Act I, when the Ghost tells Hamlet that if he is not interested in the Ghost's story, he will be "duller ... than the fat weed/ That roots itself in ease," on the banks of the river Lethe, which cleansed newly dead souls of their memory in Greek myth. In the Queen's bedchamber scene, Hamlet expresses his horror at his mother sleeping with her husband's brother/murderer, ranting, "forgive me this my virtue/ For in the fatness of these pursy times/ Virtue itself of vice must pardon beg."* Hamlet is declaring Denmark so stuffed with corruption that virtue is subservient to vice.

The most explicit linkage of the word fat with both fullness and death comes in Act IV. When Claudius asks Hamlet-who has just murdered Polonius-where Polonius is, Hamlet responds that he is currently being eaten by worms, before saying:

Your worm is your only emperor for diet: we fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots: your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service, two dishes, but to one table: that's the end.

Here we see Shakespeare's joy in multiple meanings on glorious display, using fat as both adjective and verb to describe a grimly comic circle of life in which everything and everyone is doomed and, in a worm's belly, equal.

Less than an hour later in stage time, Gertrude's line about Hamlet's fatness appears. According to Spiro, Hamlet's use of the word in Act IV and Gertrude's in Act V are connected. Claudius says that Hamlet will win, and Gertrude replies, in essence: "Look at him, he's heavy, he's not moving well, he's already out of breath, he's going to get carved up." This line both recalls for the listener Hamlet's speech about death and paves the way for Hamlet's own demise. This link doesn't work unless fat carries with it the connotations of overfull livestock about to die.

So most of the evidence indicates that when Gertrude uses the word fat referencing Hamlet, she means, well, fat. There's even additional-although, of course, ambiguous-evidence elsewhere in the play that Hamlet is fat. Ophelia, who gives the most detailed physical description of Hamlet in the play, talks about a sigh "shatter[ing] all his bulk" while he's pretending to be mad. The word bulk is used elsewhere by Laertes when he describes Hamlet's love for Ophelia waxing and waning like the moon in its bulk. Yet not only is Hamlet's fatness a minority position within Shakespeare studies, but in the past 15 years, only two high-profile productions of Hamlet-one with Simon Russell Beale, the other Paul Giamatti-have starred actors who weren't svelte. Perhaps the more pertinent question, then, is why we assume-or even need -Hamlet to be thin.

Shakespeare performance and study, of course, relies on tradition in the absence of primary sources. As Spiro put it in our interview, "Most of what we 'know' about Shakespeare comes from a couple of centuries after his death." Our traditional idea of what Hamlet is like-thin, melancholy, a bit dashing, like an Oedipally fixated sexy Ph.D. candidate-is at this point bolstered by both centuries of questionable scholarship and a long line of memorable performances on stage, television, and film.

There's a darker underbelly here, however. In the age of the gym body, we expect our heroes to look like this. Hamlet gets to romance (and doom) a young woman, and kill people, and escape from pirates, and think deep thoughts about life and death, and recite gorgeous poetry, and die in the midst of a spectacular sword duel. At no point in any of this is his fatness a source of pain or mocked the way that, say, Falstaff is mocked.

These two problems reinforce each other. Tradition holds that Hamlet is lean and pensive; this jibes with our ideas of what a hero is and feels right; the tradition is then bolstered further. Reviews of both Beale's and Giamatti's performances, for example, tended to mention their unconventional bodies, with the Boston Globe's Don Aucoin noting that Giamatti's age, height and "paunch" made him "far from the heroically dashing Laurence Olivier model of the melancholy Dane."* An interview from the time of Beale's Hamlet reveals how the actor's body shaped his career, confining him to both the stage and comic roles at the beginning of his career while contemporaries like Ralph Fiennes decamped for Hollywood. The only way to break this cycle is to create a counter-tradition of overweight Hamlets, opening up the role to actors we would not have normally considered. Some lean actors will be disappointed, I'm sure. But they can comfort themselves knowing that nearly every other leading role ever written was made for them.

*Correction, Sept. 22, 2015: This article originally misquoted Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 4. Hamlet's line is "Forgive me this my virtue," not "Forgive my this my virtue." This article also misidentified the Boston Globe critic who reviewed Hamlet, starring Paul Giamatti, as Dan Aucoin. It was Don Aucoin.

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Picture for a moment Hamlet, the melancholy prince of Denmark. Chances are, you're imagining a dashing gentleman who looks like one of the many famous actors who've played him. Kenneth Branagh, say, or Laurence Olivier, or Jude Law or David Tennant. You might even picture Benedict Cumberbatch, who is drawing crowds to London to see him play the role.

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The Way of Transformation (The Laban-Malmgren System of Dramatic Character Analysis) by Vladimir Mirodan.

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The Way of Transformation (The Laban-Malmgren System of Dramatic Character Analysis) by Vladimir Mirodan.

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For an intense character analysis read....

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YAT MALGIM (Jungian) basic Character Analysis (for acting)

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YAT MALGIM (Jungian) basic Character Analysis (for acting)

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MENTAL FACTORS AND INNER PARTICIPATIONS
Sensing (intending): Presses out the sensuous energy of weight creating movement with or against gravity.
Thinking (attending): Expresses itself as mental energy traveling through space. Thought 'moves' creating bodily movement in space.
Intuiting (deciding): Expresses temporal relationships creating connections between past and future with movement occurring in time.
Feeling (adapting): Presses out emotional energy, which pervades all other forms of movement and perceived as co-ordination or flow.

INNER ATTIDUTES

STABLE (Sensing/Thinking) - Unadaptive (intelligent ruler)
MOBILE (Intuiting/Feeling) - Adapting (highly emotional)
NEAR (Sensing/ Intuiting) - Relating (classic mother figure)
REMOTE (Thinking / Feeling) - Solitude (ascetic) HAMLET?
AWAKE (Thinking / Intuiting) - Awareness (the intellectual)
ADREAM (Sensing / Feeling) - Unawareness (the lover) Romeo and Juliet

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My name is:
I am: (age)
I am from:
My Profession is:
5 facts I know from the text are:
5 things I intuit but which are not stated in the text are:
A telling action I perform in the play is:
A telling line I speak in the play is:
My greatest fear is:
My greatest longing is:
Odd habits I have are:
My likes include:
My dislikes include:
CREATE:
Action with a TEMPO expressing character
Action with DURATION expressing character
Action with a FLOOR PATTERN expressing character
BEHAVIOURAL GESTURES expressing character

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It created Holy waves in my acting soul - A Russian I can't remember the name of

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I hated Physics because I stopped becoming God. - S. Sonnabend

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You've got to stay with the idea that he's a week coward - G. Sowerby

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Paapa Essiedu

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Top 10 modern Hamlets (according to the Guardian....?)

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Top 10 modern Hamlets (according to the Guardian....?)

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1 Michael Redgrave (1958) The best all-round Hamlet of the last half-century, played with passion, intellect, violence and stoic resignation

2 Innokenty Smoktunovsky (1964) Brooding, smouldering and exuding a Nureyev-like charisma

3 David Warner (1965) Frail, bedecked with a long scarf and acquired pop-star status as an epitome of 1960s youth

4 Derek Jacobi (1979) Defeated the elements at Kronborg Castle

5 Michael Pennington (1980) Dissected the text with postgraduate vigour

6 Jonathan Pryce (1980) Produced the Ghost’s voice from his innards

7 Stephen Dillane (1994) A sardonic, hawk-eyed joker who stripped to the buff

8 Kenneth Branagh (1996) Full of humour and buoyant athleticism

9 Angela Winkler (2000) The latest in a long line of female Hamlets, played with tenderness

10 Simon Russell Beale (2000) A perfect Hamlet for the age of irony, expressing disgust at the surrounding corruption

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Several readers have complained that in the review of the RSC's Hamlet, below, Michael Billington quoted the prince's opening soliloquy as saying: "O that this too too sullied flesh would melt." "Sullied", they objected, should have been "solid". In fact there are three respected versions of this text. In the first quarto: "O that this too much grieu'd and sallied flesh / Would melt to nothing"; In the second quarto: "O that this too too sallied flesh would melt, / Thaw and resolue itselfe into a dewe,"; and in the first folio: "Oh that this too too solid Flesh, would melt, / Thaw, and resolue it self into a Dew". "Sallied" nowadays is usually given as "sullied". No version is more decisively authentic than the others. Michael Billington could not discern which one Tennant was using.
*

It's a sign of our star-crazy culture that there has been months of speculation about David Tennant's Hamlet. The big news from Stratford is that Gregory Doran's production is one of the most richly textured, best-acted versions of the play we have seen in years. And Tennant, as anyone familiar with his earlier work with the RSC would expect, has no difficulty in making the transition from the BBC's Time Lord to a man who could be bounded in a nutshell and count himself a king of infinite space. He is a fine Hamlet whose virtues, and occasional vices, are inseparable from the production itself.

Doran's production gets off, literally, to a riveting start: the first thing we hear is the sound of hammering and drilling as Denmark's night-working Niebelungen prepare the country for war. And our first glimpse of the chandeliered, mirrored, modern-dress court gives us an instant clue to Hamlet's alienation. Patrick Stewart's superb Claudius insultingly addresses Laertes's problems before those of Hamlet. And, urging Hamlet not to return to university, Stewart has to be publicly reminded that Wittenberg is the place in question. Immediately we sense Claudius's hostile suspicion towards, and cold contempt for, his moody nephew.

Tennant's performance, in short, emerges from a detailed framework. And there is a tremendous shock in seeing how the lean, dark-suited figure of the opening scene dissolves into grief the second he is left alone: instead of rattling off "O that this too too sullied flesh would melt", Tennant gives the impression that the words have to be wrung from his prostrate frame. Paradoxically, his Hamlet is quickened back to life only by the Ghost; and the overwhelming impression is of a man who, in putting on an "antic disposition", reveals his true, nervously excitable, mercurial self.

This is a Hamlet of quicksilver intelligence, mimetic vigour and wild humour: one of the funniest I've ever seen. He parodies everyone he talks to, from the prattling Polonius to the verbally ornate Osric. After the play scene, he careers around the court sporting a crown at a tipsy angle. Yet, under the mad capriciousness, Tennant implies a filial rage and impetuous danger: the first half ends with Tennant poised with a dagger over the praying Claudius, crying: "And now I'll do it." Newcomers to the play might well believe he will.

Tennant is an active, athletic, immensely engaging Hamlet. If there is any quality I miss, it is the character's philosophical nature, and here he is not helped by the production. Following the First Quarto, Doran places "To be or not to be" before rather than after the arrival of the players: perfectly logical, except that there is something magnificently wayward about the Folio sequence in which Hamlet, having decided to test Claudius's guilt, launches into an unexpected meditation on human existence.

Unforgivably, Doran also cuts the lines where Hamlet says to Horatio, "Since no man knows of aught he leaves, what is't to leave betimes? Let be." Thus Tennant loses some of the most beautiful lines in all literature about acceptance of one's fate.

But this is an exciting performance that in no way overshadows those around it. Stewart's Claudius is a supremely composed, calculating killer: at the end of the play scene, instead of indulging in the usual hysterical panic, he simply strides over to Hamlet and pityingly shakes his head as if to say "you've blown it now". Oliver Ford Davies's brilliant Polonius is both a sycophantic politician and a comic pedant who feels the need to define and qualify every word he says: a quality he, oddly enough, shares with Hamlet. And I can scarcely remember a better Ophelia than that of Mariah Gale, whose mad-scenes carry a potent sense of danger, and whose skin is as badly scarred by the flowers she has gathered, as her divided mind is by emotional turmoil.

That is typical of a production that bursts with inventive detail. I love the idea that Edward Bennett's Laertes, having lectured Ophelia about her chastity, is shown to have a packet of condoms in his luggage. And the sense that this is a play about, among much else, ruptured families is confirmed when Stewart as the Ghost of Hamlet's father seeks, in the closet scene, tenderly to console Penny Downie's plausibly desolate Gertrude.

Audiences may flock to this production to see the transmogrification of Dr Who into a wild and witty Hamlet. What they will discover is a rich realisation of the greatest of poetic tragedies.

Top 10 modern Hamlets

1 Michael Redgrave (1958) The best all-round Hamlet of the last half-century, played with passion, intellect, violence and stoic resignation

2 Innokenty Smoktunovsky (1964) Brooding, smouldering and exuding a Nureyev-like charisma

3 David Warner (1965) Frail, bedecked with a long scarf and acquired pop-star status as an epitome of 1960s youth

4 Derek Jacobi (1979) Defeated the elements at Kronborg Castle

5 Michael Pennington (1980) Dissected the text with postgraduate vigour

6 Jonathan Pryce (1980) Produced the Ghost's voice from his innards

7 Stephen Dillane (1994) A sardonic, hawk-eyed joker who stripped to the buff

8 Kenneth Branagh (1996) Full of humour and buoyant athleticism

9 Angela Winkler (2000) The latest in a long line of female Hamlets, played with tenderness

10 Simon Russell Beale (2000) A perfect Hamlet for the age of irony, expressing disgust at the surrounding corruption

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From Time Lord to antic prince: David Tennant is the best Hamlet in years

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Several readers have complained that in the review of the RSC's Hamlet, below, Michael Billington quoted the prince's opening soliloquy as saying: "O that this too too sullied flesh would melt." "Sullied", they objected, should have been "solid". In fact there are three respected versions of this text.

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Kronborg Castle - AKA Elsinore

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Hamlet's Kronborg Castle - Helsingør / Elsinore -  Denmark - 4K

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Sir Ian on Acting Shakespeare

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Besties Ian McKellen & Patrick Stewart on Envy

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Full Film

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Full film

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Hamlet at Elsinore - William Shakespeare.

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Atkinson and Laurie

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Rowan Atkinson & Hugh Laurie - Shakespeare and Hamlet (1989)

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Richard Burton 1964

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Hamlet "To be or not to be" - Richard Burton (1964)

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Andrew Scott

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To Be Or Not To Be - Hamlet (Andrew Scott Full Soliloquy)