THEATER CHRONICLE
dead young prince's aspect, remarks that he might have made a fine
soldier, too bad he never had the chance. Without this tonic fresh
presence, the dead march at the finale is merely a pageant of woe.
There are other times when the Olivier
Hamlet
is perhaps oversump–
tuous with the decor of feeling, too interpretive, heavy on the pathos
and light on the ethos, as in the bedroom scene, the To be or not to
be
speech, the drowning of Ophelia, and, above all, in those taffeta
glances slid by the camera over the marriage couch. Yet the temptation
to the picturesque, the scenic, is in the text itself. There is no tragedy
of Shakespeare in which so much play is made with hand-props: Enter
Hamlet reading, Hamlet writing in his tables, Hamlet with the mirror,
Hamlet with the recorder, Hamlet with the skull. Hamlet's appearances
in the play are a succession of pictorial attitudes, as though the glass
of fashion were reflecting what was being worn heraldically that year
by the model Renaissance man. Reading the uncut
Hamlet,
one cannot
fail to be struck by the efficiency with which the hero is put through his
paces. Not the least baffling aspect of Hamlet's character is that it often
appears to be a mere congeries of "parts": the soliloquies themselves,
so disturbing to the line of the action, seem half displays of virtuosity,
just as if they had been inserted to show off to best advantage the
powers of the principal actor. And the great anomaly, Hamlet's mad–
ness, is the actor's supreme opportunity.
What might be called the Mannerist style in which the hero is pre–
sented, moreover, is not the only example of a kind of showmanship and
professionalism in this otherwise Orestean tragedy. The play is a veritable
county fair of attractions. There are the two recitations, Hamlet's and
the First Player's, the Dumb Show, the Play, a Danish March, flourish
upon flourish of kettledrums, sound of cannon, Fortinbras' army on the
Plain of Denmark, Ophelia's flower-strewn mad scenes, the Ghost-a
profusion of stage-effects, a mime-show of marvels. In a sense
nothing
happens in
Hamlet
because everything happens on the same level of
interest and thus, so to speak, simultaneously. What is seen is a series
of pictures, vivid, brief, isolated. Hamlet, his mother, Claudius are so many
shivered fragments. "A king of shreds and patches," Hamlet says of
Claudius in a line that has been omitted from the Olivier version. He
might also have been speaking of himself or of the play which he gives
his
name to. Hypocrisy, broken faith, playacting, imposture are the
characterological norm of reeling Elsinore. The fissure between
is
and
seems
cracks the world open.
Hamlet
is enigmatic because it is com–
pletely histrionic---everybody is playing a part.
This peculiar jerkiness, both in Hamlet's character and in the play
as
a whole, may be explained by the assumption, put forward by one
scholar, that the play is a hasty composite of several earlier lost
Hamlets
pieced together
so
haphazardly that the dicordances were never noticed.
The text may have been improvised to serve the needs of an acting
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