Free Hamlet by William Shakespeare Page B

dignified familiarity, the apparent levity of manner, with the deeppurpose that lies beneath.” 13 Edwin Booth, the great American actor, was praised for his portrait of a “reflective, sensitive, gentle, generous nature, tormented, borne down and made miserable by an occasion … to which it is not equal.” 14 Booth softened and refined the role.
    Accounts of Henry Irving’s performance at the Lyceum are contradictory, although he was astonishingly successful; some critics faulted him for “the entire absence of tragic passion” 15 while others talked of his “real frenzy.” 16 He is credited with introducing a “psychological Hamlet.” 17 Eden Phillpotts later analyzed his performance in terms of the psychological connection between his intellectuality, insanity and failure to act. 18 Irving’s chosen successor as Hamlet was Johnston Forbes-Robertson, whose performance likewise drew contradictory notices. George Bernard Shaw praised his verse-speaking for the way he “does not utter half a line; then stop to act; then go on with another half line … he plays as Shakespeare should be played, on the line and to the line, with the utterance and acting simultaneous, inseparable and in fact identical.” 19 While all reviewers agreed on the delicacy of his performance, some found him “affable” and “light-hearted”; Shaw talked of “celestial gaiety” 20 while others mention his “gentle melancholy.” 21 This production reintroduced Fortinbras in the last act after the character had been banished from the stage for over two hundred years, an innovation suggested by Shaw but regarded as anticlimactic by many at the time.
    The matinee idol John Barrymore was praised by James Agate as “nearer to Shakespeare’s whole creation than any other I have seen.” 22 To John Gielgud he suggested “tenderness, remoteness, and neurosis,” 23 and he also impressed the young Laurence Olivier: “Everything about him was exciting. He was athletic, he had charisma, and to my young mind, he played the part to perfection.” 24 Olivier was impressed also by the way in which Barrymore emphasized certain words in a line, although critics were less enthusiastic. Olivier drew a telling theatrical line directly back through Barrymore to Booth, from Booth to Kean and hence ultimately to Burbage. 25
    Evolving twentieth-century production styles were influenced by the attempts of the late-Victorian producer William Poel to re-createan authentically Elizabethan bare stage as opposed to a cluttered historical realism with elaborate scenery. There was also a trend toward ensemble-playing which meant that focus was no longer exclusively on the star. Interpretations, meanwhile, veered between exploration of the politics of the play and interest in sexuality in the light of Freud’s theory of the family romance. Late twentieth and early twenty-first-century productions were often concerned with self-conscious dramatic devices (overhearings, the play-within-the-play) and references to play-acting, a phenomenon that became known as “meta-theatricality” (theater about theater). Performances of
Hamlet
frequently sought to interrogate their own meaning.
    The play’s contemporary significance was signaled in the 1925 Birmingham Repertory production which became known as “Hamlet in plus fours” on account of its modern-day set and dress. Postwar disillusionment infected Colin Keith-Johnston’s “snarling prince.” 26 Not all were convinced, but
The Sunday Times’
reviewer was one of many who responded to its modern treatment: “A certain matter-of-factness of diction, combined with the absence of gesture and pose, do give a certain added humanity and life, even if sometimes at the expense of majesty.” 27 Gielgud’s judgment on the production was “UNspeakable,” 28 but it influenced his own performance at the Old Vic in 1930; as one critic puts it, “Like Barrymore with his veiled demonic streak and Keith-Johnston