THE TEXT.

Hamlet's reputation as a problem play stems from the absence of a single authoritative source. Actors and directors must select a performance text from dozens of variations of hundreds of lines, the best known being whether to say 'this too too solid flesh' or 'too too sullied flesh'. The selection of which wording to use is probably the most important part of the interpretation of the play.

Hamlet is substantially longer than most of Shakespeare's other plays which raises the suspicion that modern editions may be corrupt. Performances at The Globe Theatre had to be completed during the hours of daylight, both because of the lack of artificial light and also to enable audiences to return north over the Thames in safety. Shakespeare was a practical man of the theatre and was unlikely to write a play which could not be performed. It is now almost unknown for the play to be performed uncut.

Hamlet has three sources, a short first Quarto, the second Quarto and the Folio. The Arden Shakespeare is the most authoritative modern edition, drawing mainly on the second Quarto and the Folio. In most instances A One Man Hamlet is based on Arden. The most significant difference is in the order of  'To be or not to be' and the Players' scenes.

Arden, in common with most modern editions, follows the Folio and places 'To be or not to be' in Act III after the Players' scene. In the First Quarto it is in Act II and becomes Hamlet's first entrance after the scene on the battlements with the Ghost.

Literary criticism may prefer the Folio but Hamlet's psychology is more consistent in the Quarto which presents Hamlet after the encounter with the Ghost of his father wracked with doubt, guilt and fear, then stirred into action by the Players and committed to a new course of action, i.e. the play within the play. It is the sequence of events preferred by Ron Daniel in his production at the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1989, by Declan Donellan for Cheek By Jowl in 1990 and it is the one followed in A One Man Hamlet.

THE CHARACTER OF HAMLET.

The text contains a certain amount of information about Hamlet: the gravedigger tells us he is thirty years old; we can infer he speaks German from the fact that he is studying at Wittenburg and that he speaks Italian from his comments on The Mousetrap ('The story is extant and written in very choice Italian'). He is an athlete and he is good at fencing ('I have been in continual practice; I shall win at the odds').

According to Ophelia he is also a fashionable and good looking man ('The glass of fashion and the mould of form, The observed of all observers'). Yet in the course of the play we see little of this; as Claudius says: 'nor th'exterior nor the inward man resembles that it was'. Hamlet is negligent of his appearance, distracted and embittered. His behaviour in the play is not his natural condition, it is a reaction to the death of his father and to the appearance of the Ghost.

There is little consistency in the way the character is presented on stage. Mark Rylance portrayed him at the RSC as a grief-stricken neurotic dressed in pyjamas. Mel Gibson in the Zefirelli film plays a dynamic man of action guided more by instinct that intellect. Olivier's Hamlet was quick witted and satirical; Giulgud's was a melancholy philosopher. Sarah Bernhardt and Frances de la Tour have both played female Hamlets. When the disabled actor, Nabil Shaban, played Hamlet he found the suspicion and distrust of the court of Elsinor towards the prince corresponded with his experience of attitudes to his own disability.  

One aspect of the character which should not be overlooked is the fact that he is a prince. Shakespeare does use ordinary people in his plays but more commonly for comic effect. The high status of the great tragic figures provides greater scope to illustrate the extent of their fall.

Laurence Olivier said: 'Hamlet is a play about a man who cannot make up his mind' which suggests the character is indecisive. But he is not, there is simply no course of action open to him. If he kills Claudius he will be a murderer and a regicide, therefore no better than Claudius. As he says: 'The spirit that I have seen may be a devil [who] perhaps out of my weakness and my melancholy, abuses me to damn me'. But if the ghost is real and he ignores it his father may remain in purgatory for ever. The third option, suicide, is also a mortal sin and will damn him as surely as the murder of his uncle.

Does Hamlet go mad? If madness is a loss of reason and self-awareness, then Hamlet is very sane. At no stage in the play does he lose his awareness of himself or the ability to reflect upon his situation. It might be more accurate to describe his condition as a form of nervous breakdown brought on by grief for the loss of his father, the sense of betrayal by his mother and his conflicting responses to the appearance of the Ghost. This results in violent and uncontrollable changes in mood and erratic behaviour.

With most tragedies the tragic hero is guilty of one fatal misjudgement which, if averted, would have saved him: Lear should not have divided up his kingdom, Richard II should not have banished Bolingbroke. Hamlet's tragedy is not of his own making and from the moment the Ghost appears it is difficult to see how tragedy can be averted. This gives rise to the view that the Ghost is indeed a devil since it is indirectly responsible for the violent deaths of every member of Hamlet's and Polonius' families.

THEMES IN THE PLAY.

English translations of the works of Sigmund Freud became available around the 1940s. Ever since then British productions of Hamlet have been dominated by Freudian Oedipal interpretations, heavily underlined by the obligatory lingering kiss between Hamlet and Gertrude. But the text is overwhelmingly preoccupied with the love between fathers and sons, not sons and mothers. There are three parallel father/son plots in the play: Fortinbras is out to avenge the murder of his father by old Hamlet, young Hamlet wants to avenge the murder of his father by Claudius and Laertes seeks revenge against Hamlet for the murder of Polonius. Mothers are scarce; indeed with the exception of Gertrude and Ophelia there are no women in the play at all (the player queen is often played by a man so hardly counts).

Through the character of Hamlet the play explores ideas of good and evil and our freedom to choose between them. Hamlet sees all good qualities in his father ('Where every god did seem to set his seal to give the world assurance of a man') and all evil in his uncle ('like a mildewed ear blasting his wholesome brother'). Hamlet is related to them both and has the potential for both good and evil ('What should such fellows as I do crawling between heaven and earth?'). Mankind is tainted with original sin ('virtue cannot so inoculate our old stock but we shall relish of it.') but we can choose to fulfil our potential for good. This is Hamlet's real choice.

The theme of moral choice holds good for Hamlet, Claudius and Gertrude but it is less applicable to the other characters. Ophelia and Polonius face no moral dilemma and commit no sin but both die violent and unnatural deaths. They illustrate a fatalistic tendency in the play. It is possible to interpret the play as wholly pre-determined from the first apparition of the Ghost. Hamlet himself questions whether he really possesses the degree of self-determination he believes he has ('There is a divinity shapes our ends, rough hew them how we will'). Shakespeare offers two contrasting world views, fatalistic and self-determinist, in the same play and allows the audience to draw its own conclusions.

The religious view of the play is broadly Catholic. Hamlet believes in Purgatory where his father's spirit is, and in a state of grace achieved through prayer. Hamlet is in no doubt that the Ghost is real but fears it may be a devil. He queries the message the Ghost gives him rather than its existence. The idea that his father can be freed from Purgatory by an act of vengeance on earth owes more to the dramatic form of revenge tragedies which was emerging at the time than to Catholicism.

Shakespeare was brought up in post-Reformation England when many former monasteries were converted into schools so the general outlook is likely to have still been Catholic but Catholicism with an enquiring mind. It is unlikely that Shakespeare could have acquired his extraordinary command of the language if the Reformation had not taken place and such schools opened. It is also interesting to note that Hamlet studies at Wittenburg, which had strong associations with Luther and the Reformed church. His studies would have challenged any orthodox Catholic views with which he arrived.

Interpretations of the play's social dimension reflect the political climate of the day. Peter Hall's 1965 production at the RSC with David Warner as Hamlet caught the mood of a country under the shadow of the Bomb, in the throes of the Cold War and with recent memories of The Bay Of Pigs crisis when World War III seemed inevitable. For him the play is profoundly pessimistic. It shows a loss of innocence; the end of a golden age under the old Hamlet. Hall described the play as 'a clinical dissection of life. At the end you are left with Fortinbras, the perfect military ruler. And I don't know about you, but I would not particularly like to live in Denmark under Fortinbras.' 

Frances de la Tour's Hamlet came in the 1970s at a time when women in Britain were challenging preconceptions of what a woman could or could not do. A Czech production performed in London in the summer of 1990 presented an Elsinore tyrannised by Claudius in which Hamlet is alienated by a powerful political machine. For a modern Czech audience Fortinbras represents youth and hope for the future; a benign influence who casts out the old regime.

A ONE MAN HAMLET.

A One Man Hamlet uses only Shakespeare's text to present the play as seen through Hamlet's eyes to create as immediate an experience of the play as possible. Many of the speeches are addressed directly to the audience as if they were additional characters in the action. Hamlet is uniquely suited to the format of a one-man show as the play's dramatic tension stems from Hamlet's internal thought processes rather than a conflict between two characters. His sense of isolation and alienation are emphasised by removing other actors from the stage.

This works best when Hamlet is telling the audience what he is thinking but presents a problem when new information has to be introduced, for example, the fact that his uncle is a murderer. Fortunately there is a precedent in Jonathan Pryce's performance at the RSC in the early 1980s in which he spoke the words of the Ghost himself as if possessed by the spirit of his father.

Apart from a brief performance of The Mousetrap the audience remains in the company of Hamlet throughout the whole play. This changes the usual perspective. Offstage events which are normally reported by other characters, such as the voyage to England (read by Horatio) or Hamlet's writing love letters to Ophelia (read by Polonius) are observed first hand. Onstage scenes from which Hamlet is absent, such as Ophelia's madness and Claudius' plotting with Laertes, are omitted. Consequently the audience discovers Ophelia's death only when Hamlet does. No-one in the play ever reveals to Hamlet how or why she died, so the audience isn't told either.

Removing the scenes from which Hamlet is absent reveals some surprises. In the closet scene with Gertrude, for example, how does Hamlet know he is to be sent to England? Claudius has just issued his instructions to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern so no-one else can possibly be aware of his plan. Hamlet's prescience defies logical explanation; a slip which can go unnoticed in a conventional production.

The set, costume and props are as unobtrusive as possible to focus the audience's attention on the narrative but are meant to have some significance in their own right. All the objects Hamlet acquires are associated with the other characters in the play: the dagger is his father's and is the means by which he kills Claudius, the book of poems is dedicated to Ophelia and the locket is snatched from the neck of his mother.