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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