Free Hamlet by William Shakespeare

sense of the play’s special capacity to catch the contemporary Zeitgeist, cutting and rearranging of the text, and the international dimension and appeal of the play. The legendary centrality of the prince—with nearly forty percent of the lines—has led to the focus on the performance of the leading actor in the main part, particularly in historical productions in which the cutting of the text increased the relative size of the role. Such a focus is problematic but inevitable and does have some value, as the modern critic Anthony Dawson recognizes:
    I am aware of perpetuating the discredited tradition of equating performance history with detailed accounts of how one or another famous actor played a single role. But one explanation is that the available source materials make such an emphasis almost unavoidable; moreover, leading actors express in heightened ways features of cultural style, and when they take on Hamlet they help to reveal an era’s understanding of subjectivity. 1
    Thanks to an anonymous elegist writing on the death of Richard Burbage, the leading actor in Shakespeare’s company, we know that Burbage played the part in the early seventeenth century:
    He’s gone and with him what a world are dead!
    Which he reviv’d, to be revived so,
    No more young Hamlet, old Hieronymo
    Kind Lear, the grieved Moor, and more beside,
    That lived in him; have now forever died,
    Oft have I seen him, leap into the grave
    Smiting the person which he seem’d to have
    Of a sad lover with so true an eye
    That there I would have sworn, he meant to die;
    Oft have I seen him, play this part in jest,
    So lively, that spectators, and the rest
    Of his sad crew, whilst he but seem’d to bleed,
    Amazed, thought even then he died indeed. 2
    Assuming that the lines describe the graveyard scene in Act 5 Scene 1 of
Hamlet
, we are also given some idea of how he played the part. In general Burbage is praised for the realism of his performances. It is striking that all the great actors who followed in his footsteps are similarly praised despite very different conceptions of the part and performance styles. There is also a tendency for actors themselves to trace a lineal descent for their performance, as though perhaps this might validate or authenticate their interpretation. This was certainly the case after the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 when the part was played for Sir William Davenant’s company by Thomas Betterton. John Downes, company bookkeeper and prompter, reports that
    Hamlet
being Perform’d by Mr
Betterton
, Sir
William
(having seen Mr
Taylor
of the
Black-Fryars
Company Act it, who being Instructed by the Author Mr
Shaksepeur
) taught Mr
Betterton
in every Particle of it; which by his exact Performance of it, gain’d him Esteem and Reputation, Superlative to all other Plays … No more succeeding Tragedy for several Years got more reputation, or Money to the Company than this. 3
    In fact Joseph Taylor, who inherited Burbage’s roles, joined the King’s Men at the Blackfriars three years after Shakespeare’s death so could not have been personally instructed by the author, but he probably performed them in a similar way. Betterton played Hamlet to great acclaim until he was seventy:
    had you been to-night at the play-house, you had seen the force of action in perfection: your admired Mr Betterton behaved himself so well, that though now about seventy, he acted youth; and by the prevalent power of proper manner, gesture, and voice, appeared through the whole drama a young man of great expectation, vivacity, and enterprise. Thesoliloquy where he began the celebrated sentence of “To be or not to be?,” the expostulation, where he explains with his mother in the closet, the noble ardour, after seeing his father’s ghost; and his generous distress for the death of Ophelia, are each of them circumstances which dwell strongly upon the minds of his audience, and would certainly affect their behaviour on any