Monday, April 25, 2016

" that's villanous, and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it "

Oh dear, I've sinned against and violated that cherished myth of Broadway legend, THE Hamlet, THE Richard Burton Hamlet, THE DEFINITIVE plain clothed, bare stage RICHARD BURTON Hamlet.

Well, that pirated video of it is the best document of what it was and Burton was a hammy Hamlet, a stagey Hamlet, a histrionic Hamlet, one who was way too full of himself as he "sawed the air", one who was a lot more like William Shatner at his most worst,  when Burton wasn't more like someone doing a comic imitation of William Shatner doing Hamlet.   It sucked and I'm not pretending otherwise.  I wouldn't be surprised if it documented a Hamlet who out drank Claudius.

One of the hazards and opportunities of doing Hamlet is that the role, itself, has the author's directions of how the role is to be played contained right in the text.  Right there, at the head of Act III,  scene 2. 
 
HAMLET

Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to
you, trippingly on the tongue: but if you mouth it,
as many of your players do, I had as lief the
town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air
too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently;
for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say,
the whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget
a temperance that may give it smoothness. O, it
offends me to the soul to hear a robustious
periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to
very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who
for the most part are capable of nothing but
inexplicable dumbshows and noise: I would have such
a fellow whipped for o'erdoing Termagant; it
out-herods Herod: pray you, avoid it.

First Player

I warrant your honour.

HAMLET

Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion
be your tutor: suit the action to the word, the
word to the action; with this special o'erstep not
the modesty of nature: for any thing so overdone is
from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the
first and now, was and is, to hold, as 'twere, the
mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature,
scorn her own image, and the very age and body of
the time his form and pressure. Now this overdone,
or come tardy off, though it make the unskilful
laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve; the
censure of the which one must in your allowance
o'erweigh a whole theatre of others. O, there be
players that I have seen play, and heard others
praise, and that highly, not to speak it profanely,
that, neither having the accent of Christians nor
the gait of Christian, pagan, nor man, have so
strutted and bellowed that I have thought some of
nature's journeymen had made men and not made them
well, they imitated humanity so abominably.

First Player

I hope we have reformed that indifferently with us,
sir.

HAMLET O, reform it altogether. And let those that play
your clowns speak no more than is set down for them;
for there be of them that will themselves laugh, to
set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh
too; though, in the mean time, some necessary
question of the play be then to be considered:
that's villanous, and shows a most pitiful ambition
in the fool that uses it. Go, make you ready.
Exeunt Player


And to emphasize that, the author has Enter POLONIUS, ROSENCRANTZ, and GUILDENSTERN, the blowhards and liars come in to joust with Hamlet.

Anyone who plays Hamlet invites a comparison between his performance and those instructions that come right out of his mouth as he is acting the part.

As I recall, part of the myth is that the director was absentee for most of the run of the play, thus using a recording of his voice to be the Ghost.     If there's something that Richard Burton needed that night it was a director telling him to cut the ham. 

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