Hamlet in adaptation Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Maxine Peake as Hamlet, Hamletmachine, and the Wooster Group’s Hamlet Hamlet as Memento Mori David Tennant as Hamlet 2008 with the skull of André Tchaikowsky, a Polish composer, who left his skull to the RSC in 1982 for the express purpose of playing Yorick in Hamlet Death and Hauntology…the great unknown • Rosencrantz: Do you ever think of yourself as actually dead, lying in a box with the lid on it? Nor do I really. Silly to be depressed by it. I mean, one thinks of it like being alive in a box. One keeps forgetting to take into account that one is dead. Which should make all the difference. Shouldn’t it? I mean, you’d never know you were in a box would you? It would be just like you were asleep in a box. Not that I’d like to sleep in a box, mind you. Not without any air. You’d wake up dead for a start and then where would you be? In a box. That’s the bit I don’t like, frankly. That’s why I don’t think of it. Because you’d be helpless wouldn’t you? Stuffed in a box like that. I mean, you’d be in there forever. Even taking into account the fact that you’re dead. It isn’t a pleasant thought. Especially if you’re dead, really. Ask yourself: if I asked you straight off I’m going to stuff you in this box now – would you rather to be alive or dead? Naturally you’d prefer to be alive. Life in a box is better than no life at all. I expect. You’d have a chance at least. You could lie there thinking, well, at least I’m not dead. In a minute, somebody’s going to bang on the lid and tell me to come out. (knocks) “Hey you! What’s your name? Come out of there!” • Watch Benedict Cumberbatch as Rosencrantz: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDZ0ynoouQQ&ab_channel=CoraDon Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead • Written in 1964, published in 1967 • Played on Broadway in 1968 • Won the Tony for best play • Influenced by Waiting for Godot , which changed theatre by undermining many of its traditional values: plot, characterization, and dialogue that move the action of the play forward Tom Stoppard Czech-born British playwright and screenwriter whose work is marked by verbal brilliance, ingenious action, and dramaturgical ingenuity. • Stoppard’s father was working in Singapore in the late 1930s. After the Japanese invasion, his father stayed on and was killed, but Stoppard’s mother and her two sons escaped to India, where in 1946 she married a British officer, Kenneth Stoppard. Soon afterward the family went to live in England. Tom Stoppard—he had assumed his stepfather’s surname—quit school and started his career as a journalist in Bristol in 1954. • He began to write plays in 1960 after moving to London. His first play, A Walk on the Water (1960), was televised in 1963; the stage version, with some additions and the new title Enter a Free Man, reached London in 1968. Tom Stoppard Playwright Sir Tom Stoppard was born Tomas Straussler on 3 July 1937 in Zlin, Czechoslovakia. He grew up in Singapore and India during the Second World War and moved to England in 1946 with his mother and stepfather, his own father having been killed in Singapore. He is a Czech-born British playwright and screenwriter. He has written for television, radio, film, and stage, finding prominence with plays such as Arcadia, The Coast of Utopia, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, Professiona Foul, The Real Thing, Travesties, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (194-5) was performance at the Ediburgh Festival in 1966. It was produced by the National Theatre in 1967 and rapidly became internationally renowned. He co-wrote the screenplays for Brazil, The Russia House, and Shakespeare in Love, and has received an Academy Award and four Tony Awards. His work covers the themes of human rights, censorship and political freedom, often delving into the deeper philosophical understanding of society. SHAKESPEARE’S SOURCES FOR HAMLET UR-HAMLET • The immediate source of Hamlet is an earlier play dramatising the same story of Hamlet, the Danish prince who must avenge his father. No printed text of this play survives and it may well have been seen only in performance and never in print. • References from the late 1580s through to the mid 1590s testify to its popularity and to the presence of a ghost crying out for revenge. There is general scholarly agreement that the author of this early version of Hamlet was Thomas Kyd, famous as the writer of the revenge drama, The Spanish Tragedy. This play did survive in print and was a huge theatrical hit in the late 1580s and 90s, delighting the contemporary taste for intrigue, bloodshed and ghostly presences. ANCIENT SCANDINAVIAN SAGAS • Kyd and Shakespeare were the latest spinners of an age-old yarn originating in the ancient sagas of Scandinavia. It was written down in manuscript form in the twelfth century by the Danish scholar, Saxo Grammaticus, in his Historia Danica and it finally found its way into print in 1514. The old Danish folk-tale of Amleth by Saxo Grammaticus has many of the features of Shakespeare’s play: a villain kills his brother, takes over the throne and then marries his brother’s wife. The King’s son Amleth pretends to be mad to shield himself from his uncle. But the tale has no ghost demanding vengeance, no gravediggers or play within a play, and no Laertes character. Amleth lacks Hamlet’s melancholy disposition and long soliloquies, and he survives after becoming king Themes • Moral corruption and the consequent dysfunction of family and state. • Revenge and the complexity of taking revengeful action in relation to honor and religion (the opposition of societal expectations) • Appearance and reality and the difficulty of discovering and exposing the truth in a corrupt society. • Mortality and the mystery of death. • Action and Inaction – which is worse? • Women in patriarchy their power/powerlessness • Madness – What defines it? How do we know when it exists? When does pretending become reality? Is it possible to simulate madness or will this make one mad? Motifs • Disease, rotting, decay as the manifestation and consequence of moral corruption. • Actors and the theatre as highlighting the deception, illusion and role-playing of major characters in the play; also as holding a mirror up to nature, exposing the corruption of the court. • Ears and hearing as needed to discover the truth in such a corrupt and dangerous world; also as vehicles for murder and for distortion of the truth • Poison – literal, moral, and societal (and thus, political) Freytag’s Pyramid for Hamlet Adaptations as a cultural barometer “The history of Shakespeare re-visions provides a cultural barometer for the practice and politics of adaptation and appropriation” --Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation (2006: 51) In Notes from the Front Line, Angela Carter states that “most intellectual development depends upon new readings of old texts. I am all for putting new wine in old bottles, especially if the pressure of the new wine makes the old bottles explode” (Angela, 69) Aneta Mancewicz Hamlet After Deconstruction • While it is no longer common in adaptation studies to claim that new versions are inherently imitative and inferior to their sources, there is now an opposite tendency to see adaptations as some sort of expansion or enrichment of the source. • In the Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies, Timothy Corrigan observes how ‘different nuances, revisions, revaluations, and rewritings could suggest adaptation as an improvement of its source in a variety of ways’ (2017: 27). • The idea resonates with an understanding of adaptation in biology and ecology. Drawing on Charles Darwin’s observations about birds at the Galapagos islands and on other instances of genetic modification to fit a specific environment, Sanders shows how adaptation ‘proves in these examples to be a far from neutral, indeed highly active, mode of being, far removed from the unimaginative act of imitation, copying, or repetition that it is sometimes presented as being by literature and film critics obsessed with claims to “originality”’ (2006: 24). • Mancewicz Introduction, p. 9 Revenge Tragedy • Shakespeare’s most famous tragedy “Hamlet” belongs to the genre of Revenge Tragedy, which comes from the Roman playwright Seneca. • Hamlet, at the start of the play, is in great despair because of his father’s death. Hamlet’s father was murdered by his brother Claudius. More than that Hamlet is also shocked and depressed when he learns that his mother has married his father’s murderer (Claudius). Hamlet says: Horatio My lord, I came to see your father's funeral. Hamlet I pray thee, do not mock me, fellow student. I think it was to see my mother's wedding. Horatio Indeed, my lord, it followed hard upon. Hamlet Thrift, thrift, Horatio! The funeral baked meats Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables. Would I had met my dearest foe in heaven Ere I had ever seen that day, Horatio. (Act 1, Scene 2 175-80). To Lose the Name of Action… • The motif of revenge is outstretched beyond the protagonist. Apart from Hamlet, Fortinbras, and Laertes are also interested in taking revenge. Fortinbras wishes to take revenge on Denmark for the troubles endured by Laertes’ father in a fight with Hamlet’s father. Laertes also wants to take revenge against Hamlet, because Hamlet kills Laertes’ father. Thus, the motif of revenge runs throughout the play. • Mancewicz, Hamlet After Deconstruction, p. 32 • In Hamlet as a revenge tragedy, the obligation to act is at the core of the play. However, when Hamlet postpones the execution of the filial duty to avenge the murder of the father, the word takes precedence over action and when something finally happens, it seems almost accidental. Action and Inaction In English, the noun ‘action’ and its verbal variant ‘to act’ correspond to a number of meanings. Stoppard focuses on two of them that are particularly relevant for drama—one related to doing things in real life and the other to impersonating dramatic characters on stage. Both are present in the following passage: • Guil. But we don’t know what’s going on, or what to do with ourselves. We don’t know how to act. • Player. Act natural. (1967: 51) The exchange wittily exploits the ambiguity of the verb ‘to act.’ According to Sammells, it conflates the ‘action with acting, and the agent with the actor’ (2001: 110). While Ros and Guil reflect on their real deeds, searching for a logical explanation of their situation, the Player frustrates them further, responding with a remark that refers more to theatre than to life. –Mancewicz, Hamlet After Deconstruction p. 50 Memory Loss/ Amnesia • Stoppard ‘borrows this concept from Shakespeare, yet he fully exploits its comic potential—as well as its tragic implications. In Hamlet, Claudius and Gertrude seem slightly unsure as to how they should address the two courtiers (Shakespeare 2007: 2.2.33–34). In R&GAD, the uncertainty is more evident, because of specific instructions in the stage directions, and because later the protagonists themselves admit that the King cannot distinguish between them (1967: 81). Stoppard further extends the comic device in his adaptation, making Ros and Guil forget their own names, which gives rise to comic scenes in the play.’ Memory Loss/ Amnesia cont. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Guil. (Seriously.) What’s your name? Ros. What’s yours? Guil. I asked you first. Ros. Statement. One – love. Guil. What’s your name when you’re at home? Ros. What’s yours? Guil. When I’m at home? Ros. Is it different at home? Guil. What home? Ros. Haven’t you got one? Guil. Why do you ask? Ros. What are you driving at? Guil. (With emphasis.) What’s your name? Ros. Repetition! Two – love. Match point to me. Guil. (Seizing him violently.) WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE? Ros. Rhetoric! Game and match! (1967: 33–34) Ghost of Hamlet’s Father As Horatio asks in the opening lines of Hamlet: “What, has this thing appeared again tonight?” (I,i,20). Where is King Hamlet? • ‘There is a famous problem with all of these heavy hints that the Ghost is in or has come from Purgatory: by 1563, almost forty years before Shakespeare’s Hamlet was written, the Church of England had explicitly rejected the Roman Catholic conception of Purgatory and the practices that had been developed around it. The twenty-second of the Thirty-Nine Articles declares that “[t]he Romish doctrine concerning Purgatory, Pardons, Worshipping, and Adoration, as well of Images as of Reliques, and also invocation of Saints, is a fond thing, vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture, but rather repugnant to the word of God.” This fact alone would not necessarily have invalidated allusions to Purgatory: there were many people who clung to the old beliefs, despite the official position, and Elizabethan audiences were in any case perfectly capable of imaginatively entering into alien belief systems… But it would have been highly risky to represent in a favorable light any specifically Roman Catholic doctrines or practices, just as it would have been virtually impossible to praise the pope.’ • Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory, pp. 235-6 The Ghost in Hamlet Act I, Scene 5 I am thy father's spirit, Doom'd for a certain term to walk the night, And for the day confined to fast in fires, Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature Are burnt and purged away. But that I am forbid To tell the secrets of my prison-house, I could a tale unfold whose lightest word Would harrow up thy soul.... The entrance of the ghost (inciting incident) • Enter Ghost. MARCELLUS Peace, break thee off! Look where it comes again. BARNARDO In the same figure like the King that’s dead. MARCELLUS, ⌜to Horatio⌝ Thou art a scholar. Speak to it, Horatio. BARNARDO Looks he not like the King? Mark it, Horatio. HORATIO Most like. It ⟨harrows⟩ me with fear and wonder. BARNARDO It would be spoke to. MARCELLUS Speak to it, Horatio. HORATIO What art thou that usurp’st this time of night, 55 Together with that fair and warlike form In which the majesty of buried Denmark Did sometimes march? By heaven, I charge thee, speak. MARCELLUS It is offended. BARNARDO See, it stalks away. HORATIO Stay! speak! speak! I charge thee, speak! Ghost exits. MARCELLUS ’Tis gone and will not answer. King Hamlet reveals his murder Act 1, Scene 5 Sleeping within my orchard, My custom always of the afternoon, Upon my secure hour thy uncle stole With juice of cursèd hebona in a vial And in the porches of my ears did pour The leprous distilment, whose effect Holds such an enmity with blood of man That swift as quicksilver it courses through The natural gates and alleys of the body, And with a sudden vigor it doth ⟨posset⟩ And curd, like eager droppings into milk, The thin and wholesome blood. So did it mine, And a most instant tetter barked about, Most lazar-like, with vile and loathsome crust All my smooth body. King Hamlet’s murder • Thus was I, sleeping, by a brother’s hand Of life, of crown, of queen at once dispatched, Cut off, even in the blossoms of my sin, Unhouseled, disappointed, unaneled, No reck’ning made, but sent to my account With all my imperfections on my head. O horrible, O horrible, most horrible! If thou hast nature in thee, bear it not. Let not the royal bed of Denmark be A couch for luxury and damnèd incest. But, howsomever thou pursues this act, Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive Against thy mother aught. Leave her to heaven And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge To prick and sting her. Fare thee well at once. The glowworm shows the matin to be near And ’gins to pale his uneffectual fire. Adieu, adieu, adieu. Remember me. Ghosts in Renaissance Tragedy: • In Shakespeare’s Plays: Richard III, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Macbeth, Cymbeline • And others: Thomas Hughes, The Misfortunes of Arthur Thomas Kyd, Spanish Tragedy Thomas Middleton, The Second Maiden’s Tragedy John Webster, The White Devil Staging the Ghost Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g05x9X7mpcY&ab_channel=Jack Adrian Lester in Peter Brook’s Hamlet (2002) begin at 6:04 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84bAaCjSlLA&ab_channel=Shakespe areNetwork Maxine Peake’s Hamlet What do you think of the doubling of the Ghost and Claudius? What about the staging of the Ghost in 1.1? Blau in Take Up the Bodies: In theatre “things” do return night after night. It was the haunting of the paternal ghost in Hamlet doomed for a certain term to walk the night, that inspired Herbert Blau to first turn the phrase “calling up the ghost” in relation to the theatre in his book Take Up the Bodies: “The ghosting is not only a theatrical process but a self-questioning of the structure within the structure of which the theater is a part….all of which cause us to think that theater is the world when it’s more like the thought of history” (Blau, Take Up the Bodies 199). The Haunted Stage by Marvin Carlson All plays in general might be called Ghosts, since, as Herbert Blau has provocatively observed, one of the universals of performance, both East and West, is its ghostliness, its sense of return, the uncanny but inescapable impression imposed upon its spectators that we are seeing what we saw before. Blau is perhaps the most philosophical, but he is certainly not the only, recent theorist who has remarked upon this strange quality of experiencing something as a repetition in the theatre. (Carlson, page 1). Key Terms for Carlson • Memory • Recycling • Ghosting • ‘all forms of narrative are spectral to some extent’, and ‘the spectral is at the heart of any narrative of the modern’; moreover, ‘to tell a story is always to invoke ghosts, to open a space through which something other returns’, so that ‘all stories are, more or less, ghost stories’ (Victorian Hauntings, pp. 1–3). The weight of history • Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradiiton of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service.... • Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) HAUNTOLOGY • Portmanteau of ONTOLOGY & HAUNTING • Joke: hauntology is the new ontology; • Orange is not the new black… • Hauntology supplants its near-homonym ontology, replacing the priority of being and presence with the figure of the ghost as that which is neither present nor absent, neither dead nor alive. • Colin Davis Hauntology, spectres and phantoms French Studies, Volume 59, Issue 3, 1 July 2005, Pages 373–379 TIME • The time is out of joint (I.v. 100) • Anachronism (against, ana; time, chronos) • a thing belonging or appropriate to a period other than that in which it exists, especially a thing that is conspicuously old-fashioned. • "the town is a throwback to medieval times, an anachronism that has survived the passing years" • the action of attributing something to a period to which it does not belong. • "it is anachronism to suppose that the official morality of the age was mere window dressing“ • Back to the Future is a good example from film Is Hamlet mad or feigning madness? • 1). He meets the ghost and swears revenge, so he has a goal to carry out that revenge, • 2). After the ghost’s revelation, he made up a plan to find out if the ghost told him the truth or how to expose his father’s murder through the play within a play (the mousetrap). Also, his instructions to the players are direct and accurate. • 3). He couldn’t comport himself as before at the court of Claudius, and so he had to convince not only the court but his astute uncle about his insanity. • 4). In his monologues, he is never incoherent • 5). He confides with Horatio about his plans. Hamlet is aware of his own melancholy. • 6). His perfect performance as a madman is only in the presence of those he mistrusts; he is sane when dealing with his friends • 7). He acted in sudden anger when he slew Polonius and at Ophelia’s grave because of the Laertes’ behaviour. Hamlet’s advice to the players: Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance – that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature. For anything so o’erdone is from the purpose of playing whose end, both at the first and now, was and is to hold as ‘twere the mirror up to Nature to show Virtue her feature, Scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure. (Q2 3.2.19-24). Heiner Müller • Heiner Müller was born in eastern Germany in1929. In 1945 he was drafted into the German army and after the end of the Second World War returned home to the part of Germany occupied by the USSR. • He took up writing in the 1950s and began a checkered relationship with communist officials in the German Democratic Republic: heworked for the League of German Writers in1954–1955; he wrote for Berlin’s VolksbühneTheatre in 1957; he was expelled for political reasons from the writers’ league in 1961, so that his plays could not be performed until 1967 • He was invited to join the prestigious Berliner Ensemble (founded by Brecht) in 1969; in the1970s and 1980s he was given unprecedented freedom to travel to and return from Western Europe and North America, although many of his plays remained banned in East Germany. By this time he had become a world-renowned playwright,‘a sort of socialist William Shakespeare’ (Hofacker:335). • After the fall of the East Bloc, Müller wasforced to rethink his position in the world and the political role of his theatre (see Croyden, Höfele). He died on 30 December 1995. • --Fischlin and Fortier Adaptations of Shakespeare ( Heiner Müller • Often his point in these adaptations is to show the long history and legacy of barbarism and the limitations of this history faced by people in the present: revolution has never been, is not going to be, easy. Müller describes his project in these terms: • What I try to do in my writings is to strengthen the sense of conflicts, to strengthen confrontations and contradictions. There is no other way. I’m not interested in answers and solutions. I don’t have any to offer. I’m interested in problems and conflicts.(1982: 50)H Ophelia in Hamletmachine • One of the most striking aspects of Hamletmachine is the prominence given to Ophelia– Rogoff writes that the play might better be called Opheliamachine(57). • By having Marx, Lenin, and Mao appear as three naked women, Müller asserts that it is not ‘man’ who has suffered the most egregious enslavement and abasement. The play does not shy away from the litany of horrific victimization to which Ophelia and other womenhave been subjected. • Indeed, at the end (in a hyperbolic echo of Shakespeare’s mad and drowned heroine) Ophelia sits bound to a wheelchair at the bottom of the sea. However, she is also fiercely enduring through ongoing millenniums of oppression. • She remains dedicated to the struggle against enslavement. Working in a dialectic of harsh opposition rather than easy reconciliation, the play ends with a quotation from Susan Atkins of the Manson Family: ‘When she walks through your bedrooms carrying butcher knives knives you’ll know the truth.’ Müller’s Ophelia is a victim with a desire for vengeance. She is clear-sighted and highly unsentimental. Maxine Peake’s Hamlet, directed by Sarah Frankcom • In 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 clearheaded 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 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. • Catherine Belsey “New Directions: Hamlet and Gender,” in Hamlet: a Critical Reader, edited by Ann Thompson, and Neil Taylor, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2016.
