That the Clown has been a grave-digger for 30 years is no surprise. What is a surprise is that he claims his first day at work coincided with these two historic events. It is nonsense to believe that anyone, let alone a grave-digger clown, can recall historic events that happened on a particular day in their childhood.
Given the Clown's exaggerations, how much more likely is it that, over the years, he has attached his first day at work to these famous events? It makes a good story and probably gets him an occasional free beer from his cronies.
Despite the obvious fabrication, vast numbers who hear the play accept, without question, the Clown's childhood memories, yet sane people, if asked, are unable to recall dates or to link events in their remote pasts. Isn't it reasonable to doubt the Clown's accuracy and veracity?
He is so precise in his colourful recollections that he seems too good to be true. When the baby was born in the palace perhaps the news seeped down to the populace that very day but would a mere boy place special significance on the event? News of the defeat of Fortinbras would not have arrived in Elsinore until many days or weeks after the actual battle. Are we to believe the boy grave-digger counted back to that date and found it coincided with the day he started work?
There is nothing to corroborate his statements so why swallow them hook, line and sinker? Something is rotting in the state of Denmark! While the Clown is digging the grave he throws up a skull. A little later he throws up another skull. While he is talking to Hamlet he picks up a third skull. He says that this particular one is Yorick's skull:. Clown: Here's a skull now; this skull has lain in the earth three and twenty years. This same skull, sir, this same skull, sir, was Yorick's skull, the king's jester.
Presumably he would need to know all three skulls individually to be able to declare so precisely who owned this one. How does he do that? But is this one really Yorick's skull? It seems most unlikely:. Hamlet: How long will a man lie i' th' earth ere he rot?
A tanner will last you nine year. It is a revenge tragedy that revolves around the agonised interior mind of a young Danish prince. In the first Act, the ghost of Hamlet's father appears to him, revealing that he has been murdered by Hamlet's uncle, Claudius. Claudius has subsequently married Hamlet's mother and claimed the throne.
The suspense is built upon a central question: when will Hamlet take revenge for his father's murder? But the prince, throughout the play, seems emotionally paralysed and, in turn, tortured by his inability to take action. The fact that Hamlet continually delays taking revenge for his father's murder is the key that opens up Hamlet's inner thoughts to the audience.
Derek Jacobi in the BBC video version was 42! Mel Gibson was 34 but the beard added 10 years. I like the age range of 21, maybe a little older, quite possibly younger. I think the drama and the tragedy is heightened when an audience sees this KID going through all this. The bright young lad who would be king.
Naturally with age comes maturity, experience, wisdom, and more skill to an actor. Hamlet was brought startlingly up-to-date in H. Ayliff's production at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in The play held its mirror up to nature, as Hamlet requires that it should, and, in place of doublet and hose, there were plus fours, flapper dresses and bobbed hair: the Danish court were as fashionably dressed as their Midlands audience.
Influenced by the theatrical work of William Poel and Harley Granville-Barker, the director's aim was to return to the immediacy of effect and the swift style of its original production.
Polonius was no longer played as an old fool but as a domineering father and shrewd councillor. Ophelia's sexually explosive mad scenes were the direct result of the persistent suppression of her natural desires and wishes by the men around her — the audience was offered no refuge in a picturesque and sentimental portrayal of a disordered mind.
This was one of the many psychologically astute interpretations that would influence future productions of the play. John Gielgud is the actor of the twentieth century most closely associated with Hamlet.
He played the role five times between and , and also directed Richard Burton as the Prince in New York in Aged 25 when he first took on the role, Gielgud brought out the character's youthful changeability and mercurial speed of thought. As always, Geilgud's superb vocal technique and expressive tone won praise but, as he returned to the role over the years, he was far more than a sweet and noble Prince, consistently bringing a sharp intelligence to bear on the complexities of the part.
This production was remarkable for its interpretation of Hamlet's delay based on Freud's analysis of the Oedipal complex, in which the son unconsciously desires to kill the father and possess the mother. In this reading, Hamlet cannot bring himself to punish Claudius since his uncle has actually fulfilled what Hamlet obscurely knows to be his own illicit desires.
Director and actor opened up the play's psychosexual meanings. From this point on, the marital bed has rarely been absent from Act 3 Scene 4, with its electric encounter between mother and son. Hansgunther Heyme's production in Cologne in was fearlessly committed to an exploration of the boundaries between illusion and reality. His actors videoed each other with hand-held cameras which then multiplied every action via a wall of television monitors. Hamlet himself was represented by two actors, one of whom spoke the lines of Schlegel's classic translation from the auditorium while his alter ego remained onstage, a prisoner of his coarse sexual fantasies.
Instead its terrifying speeches were wrenched out of Jonathan Pryce's Hamlet as he writhed in the grip of a psychic possession.
0コメント