Marowitz Hamlet

Among the classics, Hamlet is a very special case. It is the most often performed, the most widely read, the most thoroughly studied of Shakespeare’s plays. It has – quite literally – been done to death. It has become a myth, compounded of misunderstandings, distortions, and contradictions. It is a man in black sprawled on a gravestone with a skull in his hands. It is a man looking fixedly at empty air. It is everyone who cannot make up his mind; who talks one way and behaves another. It is the

wilful son of a vain mother, and the misunderstood stepson of an unsympathetic stepfather. It is the angry young man flouting conventions, and the cool hipster tuned into Zen contemplation and eschewing violence. It is the LSD tripper floating free on his ‘expanded consciousness’. It is the man caught between psychological uncertainties and moral necessities; the man who is provoked by Vietnam and paralysed by Vietnam, terrified by the Bomb and committed to the Bomb; the man weighted with the knowledge that in a corrupt world, whether one acts honourably or not at all, harm is done and corruption grows.

All of these pertinences are in the play, but not demonstrable because the play is imprisoned in its narrative. The play is the story, and to present ‘the play’ is to retell the story. No matter what the interpretation, it must be expressed through the narrative-line, through the progressive fiction of the play’s given situations. And it is this relentless narrativeness, this impregnable closed circuit of storylines, which constricts the power and suggestiveness of what the play has become. Once the narrative sequence is broken, one has direct access to the play’s ambiences. One rips open the golden lid of the treasure chest to find other riches within. After a rapid inventory there is nothing to prevent one from closing the lid once more.

Hamlet takes place in Hamlet. For a man locked in a fantasy, real and unreal are meaningless terms. Everything that enters Hamlet’s perceptions is real for him. In this collage of Hamlet, the dead King is mixed with the living King and then again with the Player-King; the dead father with the stepfather; the faithless mother with the seeming-faithless mistress; the past with the present; the actual with the illusory. We see sights because they are reflected through Hamlet’s sensibility. Elsinore is a figment of Hamlet’s imagination; so are Gertrude, Claudius, and the Ghost. So is poetry; so is comedy; so is pleasure and pain. Hamlet’s cerebrum is our cyclorama, his forehead our proscenium arch.