Hamlet, Globe to Globe Read online

  Shortly thereafter came the much-heralded banquet: a chance for people to enjoy food and wine and celebrate the new theatre. They still wanted to show off some of their new technology, so the hydraulic system became a dumb waiter. Traps were pulled away magically, engines whirred into motion, and from below the stage appeared tables laden with tucker. To everyone’s surprise, in the middle of the tables there was a naked lady painted gold. She was posed in what in yogic terms is described, I think, as the downward dog, and was wearing an impressive headdress. This we were told was Nefertiti come to bless the feast. She was surrounded by sandwiches, and sandwiches which had been made several hours before. The sight of a naked Nefertiti surrounded by sarnies, curling slightly at the edges, was too much for some of our company, who started to get a little hysterical.

  The next day, our performance was something of a lost cause. The actors were game as ever, but the theatre felt like a new car, the sightlines were beyond hopeless for many, and the audience was full of people from the UK whom we do our best to avoid in London, let alone Gdańsk. They sat there with a sour incomprehension, wondering when something so simple was going to stop being so simple. Happily sitting on one end of the front row was Andrzei Wajda, the great Polish film director, and a personal hero, now sadly deceased. An impish 88-year-old, he beamed and gasped and chuckled his delight, and was full of a straightforward and acute appreciation afterwards. ‘Shakespeare as it was, Shakespeare as it should be,’ he said. We settled for that.

  27 Iceland, Reykjavík

  Harpa

  23 July 2014

  28 USA, Washington

  Folger Shakespeare Library

  25–26 July

  USA, Chicago

  Chicago Shakespeare Theater

  28–30 July

  USA, New York

  UN Building

  4 August

  29 Canada, Prescott

  St Lawrence Shakespeare Festival

  2 August

  30 Bahamas, Nassau

  Dundas Centre for Performing Arts

  5 August

  31 Cuba, Havana

  Teatro Mella

  7 August

  32 Mexico, Mérida

  Explanada de la Catedral de Yucatán

  9 August

  33 Belize, Belize City

  Bliss Centre for Performing Arts

  12 August

  34 Guatemala, Antigua Guatemala

  Santo Domingo del Cerro Cultural Park

  14 August

  35 Honduras, Copán

  Copán Ruins

  16 August

  36 El Salvador, San Salvador

  Teatro Nacional de El Salvador

  19 August

  37 Nicaragua, Managua

  Teatro Nacional Rubén Darío

  21 August

  4

  WORDS AND WALLS IN MITTELEUROPA

  POLONIUS What do you read, my lord?

  HAMLET Words, words, words.

  Act 2, Scene 2

  PRAGUE, AND THE NIGHT WAS chilling fast, amply threatened by bulging storm clouds rolling towards us across the central European plain. We were in a misshapen courtyard, cobbled together by history, a medieval turret in one corner, a dull communist block of concrete in another, a chic cafe beneath a spreading oak in a third. Seven hundred Czechs and a few British expats were waiting in excitement on plastic garden furniture, wrapped in blankets and polythene sheets. We had found our way there through curving byways, up and down the vertiginous slopes of Prague Castle, shaded by the baroque excess of St Vitus Cathedral. Everyone gazed towards a viciously overlit wall.

  Having sloped and slipped through the fairy-tale windings of Prague, it was a strangely blockish site to be presented with. But there was something arresting about it. Crude arc lights hit the wall hard and heightened its irregularity, its bulges, and its unevenness. Its irregularity threw out questions. Why does this uniform plane of brick give way to these bursts of concrete? An architectural revision crudely achieved? A twentieth-century bomb dropped from the air? An antique cannon blast from the plain below? And why is this tier of piled-up sandstone capped by a higher tier of more perpendicular carved masonry? Had it been a garden wall that had then become a castle rampart? Had new stone suddenly become available, which was thought to be more robust? Beyond the questions, there was the pleasure of the sight itself. A lovely dance of greys, off-whites and fauns, all stitched together by the streaks of dirty brown, the rusty dribs and drabs that centuries of rain effect on stone. It felt possible in imagination to run one’s fingers over its different surfaces. Smooth planed stone here, corrugated brick there, crumbly concrete above, stubbly rock below. A sensual pleasure achieved so completely by accident and history.

  It was hard to look at the wall and not try to deduce what had happened in front of it. Prague is the ultimate Mitteleuropean crossroads of history where since Roman times and before, east and west and north and south have met and fucked or fought. Where chiefs and kings and emperors and despots have played ‘I’m the king of the castle’. Prague has a pastel prettiness which surrounds the playing of that game with a gilded frame. It heightens the sense of man enacting history while having a knowing sense of its actual fiction. The towering castle-capped hills serve as a backdrop before which people stage their odd show. Sometimes history feels real, plugging away at life in an industrial town in a valley; sometimes it feels unreal, storming up or fleeing down the hills of Prague.

  Beside me sat the Czech Republic’s leading Shakespearean, a scholar who had translated every one of Shakespeare’s plays into Czech and whose versions were still respected and used. We had met at a reception earlier, and his enthusiasm for our arrival was humbling. A gentle courteous soul, he bore the scars of his country’s complicated history with a light grace. It was impossible not to warm to him and not to feel embarrassed by his excitement at our being there. Warmth radiated from him as if Shakespeare had entered the room. It feels churlish in the circumstances to say that the Globe in London is only a little more real than any of the others in the world, and that our actors are not ordained with any special Shakespearean-ness; they are just hard-working pros who have done a lot.

  He sat beside me, and I briefly apostrophised the wall in front of us. Thankfully he didn’t treat me as mad, or laugh at me as a recreation of Brick Tamland in Anchorman – ‘Wall! I love wall!’ – but gently sketched in a little history.

  ‘Much history has happened in front of this wall. . . much cruelty. . . before this piece [pointing to some air in front of one section] for 200 years people were executed, hung and er. . . quartered and drawn as you say. . . the crowds would gather where we are now sitting. . . in front of this section [waving at some more pregnant emptiness] there was a prison where for many years anyone who defied the king was imprisoned. . . there they would rot their way to a lonely death. . . up and down these stairs [following with his hand the ghost of a long disappeared stone staircase] several royals escaped the castle when it was under attack. . .’

  Spectral figures hung from ropes and twisted in the air, cowered in the corners of dank rooms, or scurried along passageways, stuffing the crown jewels into the linings of their garments. Those were real ghosts, however daft that may sound, and here we were with our flesh-and-blood Ghost, as embodied by John Dougall, in his dusted-down royal coat, masquerading as an old Danish ghost, as written by an Englishman 400 years dead. And here was his tortured report of purgatory coming alive in front of 700 Czechs in 2016. Ghosts old and new, real and fake, imagined and re-imagined.

  In front of that wall, the show took on a vivid reality new to itself. Tales of kings displaced, princes robbed of their inheritance, court intrigue and threatened revolutions can take on a phoniness in modern theatres. Here in this enclave of trapped history, their phoniness was evocative. Beyond the narrative resonance, the words started to fly. The stone walls of the courtyard clattered the words around, and rebounded them into a palpable concreteness. The actors thrilled to the
acoustic and, while acting the story fiercely, gave the best spoken account of the play I had witnessed thus far. The audience leant into it, eager for the language. A breath-bated silence came over the courtyard as people relished the pleasure of each new thought.

  The clouds which had threatened throughout the day, and which had tumbled ever closer like a rumbling Napoleonic army on the march, shrouded the castle in their ominous darkness at the end of the first half. Just as Claudius looked up to the heavens and prayed for forgiveness, his first admission of the crime he has committed, the skies opened with a loud rumble and tipped sheets of rain down. Everyone scrambled for cover – the company to a medieval dressing room. Our worried promoter flitted in and out telling us that Czech audiences never stay to watch in the rain and that we may lose our whole crowd. Then miraculously, after twenty minutes of rain like stair rods, the downpour stopped as abruptly as it had begun, and the army of clouds moved on to terrorise another part of central Europe. The audience all retook their dampened seats. The pre-storm electric tension of the first half – a tension that always feels more clammily real in central Europe than anywhere else – gave way to a starlit calm, and a lucidity. The words were as important as before, but no longer freighted with the same cargo of pain; they floated light and clear beneath the stars and the steeples. As Hamlet’s spirit lightened, and as he found his own way through to acceptance at the play’s end, the atmospheric pressure seemed to concur. Outdoor playing often provides these tonal shifts, without thought or design. They throw new patterns across the play, and sometimes reveal more clearly what was always there.

  At the end, I turned to the scholar on my right. His eyes were rich with withheld tears. ‘Thank you for bringing these words here. Thank you for the words.’

  * * *

  The words of Hamlet can seem like an intimidating smooth surface, a forbidding carapace of polished perfection, full of headache-inducing philosophic thought and studied aphorism. Modern editions, until recently, have often claimed a spurious authority, scaring the reader or student with their assertion that this is the one true text – as authorised by this degree of scholarship, or by that imprint. This is baloney. There is no right text.

  There is no one text of Hamlet. We have inherited three, the first commonly known as the Bad Quarto, published hurriedly in 1603 without the knowledge or permission of its author. The second, known uncomplicatedly as the Second Quarto, was published in 1604. It is twice as long as the first and is closer to the intentions of its author. It is still rife with oddities of translation from rehearsal room to page, and stuffed with errors from the magnificent laziness of printers. Quartos are single editions of plays, small enough to hold in the hand or slip into the pocket. The third text is one of the thirty-seven plays collected together by two of Shakespeare’s fellow actors, Heminges and Condell, in the First Folio. The Folio is much too big for a pocket. The Folio version of Hamlet is marginally shorter than the Second Quarto and full of differences of detail – speeches cut, some rearranged, and a whole host of different words and punctuation.

  The single most surprising fact about Shakespeare is that he never supervised the printing of his own plays. Other authors did; some, like his friend Ben Jonson, quite assiduously. His sonnets and his longer poems are carefully laid down and prefaced by dedications from the publisher. These seemed to matter to him; their relationship with posterity was precious. But Hamlet? King Lear? Twelfth Night? They were left to push their way into print through the brambles of early printing, and emerge with their clothing torn and their shins scratched. It’s hard to say why, but knowing that Shakespeare himself was an actor and had to watch day after day as his plays were mangled, shredded and retold by actors, it must have been hard for him to think of a play as a fixed thing. Having heard his Ophelia stammer and riff freeform in her madness, having cringed at the clowns going gleefully off-piste, and having despaired at bombastic actors merrily importing speeches from other plays when they lost their way, he may have found the whole idea of locking these plays down for posterity laughable.

  This liberating contingency of attitude has not been enough for many of history’s editors, who have felt the need to smooth rough edges, to make the fierce experience into an argument, and the chaotic expressionism of the original into something tidier and more certain. This impulse to correct is most marked in the punctuation. All three early editions feature punctuation that can best be described as random and sometimes seemingly crazed. Parentheses, semi-colons, commas and a glut of colons stud the work. Frequently their application runs counter to the sense. Yet often it reveals strange new thoughts and fresh punches of emotional energy. The first punctuation has the eruptive energy and dislocated music that you find in contemporary writers such as David Mamet or Caryl Churchill. Yet editors for several centuries have re-punctuated the plays, marking Shakespeare’s work just as they would that of a sloppy student, and bringing him closer to proper English. At the Globe and with Hamlet, for the punctuation we try to go back to the originals, most often the Folio, whose music is probably closest to the original intentions, and start from there as a base.

  The text we were using on tour was informed for its detail by the Folio and for its structure by the First Quarto. There are several theories about how this crudely named Bad Quarto came into being. One is that someone heard the play in performance and recited it to a printer. This is hard to credit. The mnemonic capacity of your average Elizabethan was far in advance of ours, but this seems to be stretching it. The other is that it was recollected by the actor who first played Marcellus, a character of no great import from the First Act. This seems more trustworthy given most of Marcellus’s lines are more soundly remembered against the other two editions than the other characters. Marcellus also becomes bizarrely ubiquitous towards the end of this version, when usually he is absent. It’s hard not to imagine that the same actor might have doubled as Hamlet’s mother. In this version, the elsewhere increasingly marginalised and morally complicated Gertrude starts behaving valiantly towards the end, forming an unlikely alliance with Horatio to help Hamlet. There may be an actor’s moral vanity at work here.

  My feeling about the first quarto was informed by the not so subtle clue presented on its frontispiece. It says unequivocally, ‘As it hath been diverse times acted by his Highness servants in the City of London: as also in the two Universities of Cambridge and Oxford, and else-where.’ This is a touring text. Touring for millennia meant one thing – shorter plays. Actors carry lines like baggage. They are heavy. Offer a group of actors a play of 4,000 lines to take on the road with a small company and their response is liable to be brutal and simple. Negotiations will then ensue – some sanctioned by the author, some private amongst the company – about how to cut and shape a quicker and briefer version.

  As well as the frontispiece, there are other clues within the text. At the end, with Hamlet dead and Fortinbras having entered to take over the kingdom, Horatio is left to recount what has occurred. In versions two and three, he says:

  Give order that these bodies

  High on a stage be placed to the view,

  And let me speak to th’yet unknowing world,

  How these things came about.

  In the First Quarto he says:

  Content your selves, I’ll show to all, the ground,

  The first beginning of this Tragedy:

  Let there a scaffold be reared up in the market place,

  And let the State of the world be there.

  The first references a theatre in a room, the second a stage more improvised and temporary. This act, setting up a stage in the market place, is a description of how touring companies operated – the booth-stage mode – which we had adapted for our small-scale touring.

  According with our knowledge of how touring plays were cut, there is an emphasis on story and on action in the First Quarto. There is a cruder, bolder energy. Claudius is more of a villain, less of a politician. He and others are drawn in primary colou
rs; swathes of philosophical musing are excised; complex plot junctures barged through. There are melodramatic flourishes. At the end of Claudius’s prayer for redemption in versions two and three, he says: ‘My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: / Words without thoughts never to heaven go.’ In the Bad Quarto, he appends the line ‘No king on earth is safe if God’s his foe’, which we added, thus turning a couplet naughtily into a triplet. It’s easy to imagine the last line being intoned with a fierce glare to awe the groundlings in the market place.

  Many are dismissive of this sort of writing. It has to be said that there is some outright rubbish in this text. Where Hamlet’s most famous line runs, in the other texts, ‘To be, or not to be: that is the question’, in the First Quarto it fairly bathetically concludes: ‘To be or not to be: ay, there’s the point’. Some people have tried to justify the directness of even this line, which is taking revisionism too far. It’s just bad, too casual to support its appropriate weight of feeling. But there are glories in the First Quarto which contradict the theory that Shakespeare had nothing to do with it. At the end of the ‘Speak the speech. . .’ instruction to the Players, there is a passage to the comedians that contains some of Shakespeare’s finest writing about comedy and about acting:

  HAMLET Let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them. And then you have some again, that keeps one suit of jests, as a man is known by one suit of apparel, and, gentlemen, quotes his jests down in their tables, before they come to the play, as thus, ‘Cannot you stay till I eat my porridge?’ and, ‘You owe me a quarters wages’, and ‘Your beer is sour’, and blabbering with his lips, and thus – when God knows, the warm Clown cannot make a jest unless by chance, as the blind man catches a hare: Masters, tell him of it. . .

  This is a prescription against catchphrase comedy. The ‘suit of jests’ are comedians’ stock gags, as senseless and as imperishable as those of the old radio comics, done with a set intonation and probably a facial contortion to boot. For centuries, these have tickled the audience within an inch of their lives, regardless of context or character, and driven authors to distraction. It’s not hard to imagine Shakespeare’s teeth-grinding rage when the Chekhovian delicacy of Twelfth Night is interrupted by a cry of ‘Cannot you stay till I eat my porridge?’ Or if the realpolitik tensions of Julius Caesar are broken by the clown camply intoning ‘Your beer is sour’.