In Our Time - Hamlet

Episode Date: December 28, 2017

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Shakespeare's best known, most quoted and longest play, written c1599 - 1602 and rewritten throughout his lifetime. It is the story of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, encouraged by his father's ghost to take revenge on his uncle who murdered him, and is set at the court of Elsinore. In soliloquies, the Prince reveals his inner self to the audience while concealing his thoughts from all at the Danish court, who presume him insane. Shakespeare gives him lines such as 'to be or not to be,' 'alas, poor Yorick,' and 'frailty thy name is woman', which are known even to those who have never seen or read the play. And Hamlet has become the defining role for actors, men and women, who want to show their mastery of Shakespeare's work. The image above is from the 1964 film adaptation, directed by Grigori Kozintsev, with Innokenty Smoktunovsky as Hamlet.WithSir Jonathan Bate Provost of Worcester College, University of OxfordCarol Rutter Professor of Shakespeare and Performance Studies at the University of WarwickAndSonia Massai Professor of Shakespeare Studies at King's College LondonProducer: Simon Tillotson.

This is the BBC. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programmes if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoy the programmes. Hello, William Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, his longest play, around 1599. It was an immediate success and has since become his best-known work around the world and the most quoted. Shakespeare has Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, reveal his inner self to the audience,

as he revenges of the death of his father, while concealing his thoughts from all at the Danish court who are sometimes presuming insane. He gives him lines such as to be or not to be, alas, poor Yorick and frailty thy name is woman, which are known even to those who have never seen or read the play. And Hamlet has become the defining role for actors, men and women, who want to show their mastery of Shakespeare's work.

With me to discuss Shakespeare's Hamlet are, Sir Jonathan Bate, provost of Worcester College University of Oxford, Carol Rutter, Professor of Shakespeare and Performance Studies at the University of Warwick, and Sonia Massai, Professor of Shakespeare's studies at King's College London. Jonathan Bates, where does Hamlet fit into the order of Shakespeare's plays? Okay, it's really at the centre of his career. So Shakespeare starts writing plays in the early 1590s. There's an early revenge tragedy called Titus Andronicus, his first tragedy.

Then for most of the time, through the 1590s, he's writing comedies and his great English history plays. Then at the end of the 1590s, he goes back to tragedy, he writes Julius Caesar in 1599, and then Hamlet 1599 or 1600. So it really is at the midpoint of his career where he's fully developed his art, and it comes before the subsequent great tragedies

such as Macbeth, King Lear and Othello. Do you think he knew it was at the midpoint of his career? Did you think he knew he was writing in a more mature way, or is that what you've gleaned since? That's always, of course, very hard to know how an artist thinks about their own development. But there's no doubt that what you find in Hamlet is Shakespeare gathering together

a range of styles and themes that he's explored in earlier plays. Hamlet's his longest play, and it does seem to be a moment where he's taking stock, pulling together a lot of his ideas and techniques, and then really digging deep into human beings. and psychology.

What were the origins of the Hamlet play? Now that's quite a complicated question. Well, let's make it as simple as we can. Okay. Without giving an inch in academic credibility. Right. The reason it's complicated is because there is firm evidence there was an older play called Hamlet in the repertoire

that had a ghost calling for revenge. What's your repertoire? The repertoire of the theatre in the 1590s. The Shakespeare's acting company, actually acted at a theatre called The Theatre. And there's a reference by a man called Thomas Lodge to a play called Hamlet with a ghost well before Shakespeare wrote Hamlet in 1599 or 1600. And indeed, there are a couple of earlier references going back to the late 1580s.

So what it seems to be the case is that Shakespeare is rewriting an old play. And he did that very often. I mean, King Lear, there's an old anonymous King Lear play. But the trouble is that the old Hamlet play is lost. So we had to go back a further step, and we find there was a French collection of stories by a man called Bell Forest, which contained a translation of an older story written way back in medieval times by someone called Saxo Grammaticus, telling the story of Amleth, not Hamlet, but Amleth, who was a Danish prince and there's a murder, and the outlines of the plot are all there.

But our problem is that Shakespeare got it from this old lost play. Now, he borrowed things, or stole things, but borrowed. I mean, if you're an artist, you're borrowed, don't you? He borrowed things all over the place. I mean, his political plays are sort of just versifications of lines and lines of Holland Shed. So is this typical of his work? Is it in a different category to what he'd done before, this kind of appropriation?

No, I think it is typical because although, as you say, in the case of the history plays, he's got the chronical histories of Holland's head sort of open on his desk as he writes. But it was also the case. There were older history plays in the repertoire. There was a play called The Famous Victories of Henry V, and the sources of Henry IV and fifth are to be found there. I mean, I think one thing that modern scholarship has been very good at showing is that Shakespeare was supremely a writer for his company,

a man of the theatre and a man whose plays existed in this wider repertoire where rival acting companies were sort of putting on the same stories in different versions. What do you think, what do you think attracted him

to the subject of Hamlet? Well, I think revenge is such a great theme dramatically, because the point about it's revenge, it's action and reaction and that gives you a structure for your play.

He was fascinated by family, dramas and this is a play about a man whose father has been killed and then whose mother has married his uncle. So the family dynamic Shakespeare's tremendously interested in that. He's also fascinated by

the relationship between individual and familial dynamics on the one hand and politics and statecraft on the other. So Hamlet had all those elements but the thing that seems to be so innovative about the play is that whereas

earlier revenge dramas, of which there were many in the repertoire, focus on the action of the revenger. Hamlet stops and thinks. And so this play has more soliloquies, moments of inner reflection than any play that had gone before. Sonia, can we develop the idea of the influence of the revenge tragedy on Shakespeare's? As Jonathan's pointed out, it's stuck. And the play is given direction by the ghost appearing and saying,

I have been murdered revenge me, so that drives the play. Now, the revenge tragedies were in the area, as Johnson indicated, could you develop that? Yes. The ghost, in fact, is the most significant addition to the literary sources, the Saxo-Gramaticus and Bell Forest. And it comes straight out to the Seneca tradition. Seneca had become popular on the English stage when 10 of his tragedies have been translated into English and then published both individually and in a collected volume between 1599 and 1559 and 1581.

Can you just contextualised Seneca but sorry to interrupt. Latin dramatist who wrote gory tragedies that I think can best summed up as kind of murder, madness and revenge. And what also becomes conventional when English playwrights rewrites Seneca is what we call the play within the play. So they were reading, Seneca. They knew about Seneca. Yeah, they were reading Seneca first. They had good classical education

of, including Seneca, who was one of the greatest Romans of them all as far as educated persons were concerned. The well educated in Lassin first and then the translations in the 60s and the early 1580s allowed English writers to also imitate Seneca. And Thomas Nash has a complaint about this HACC writers who read the English Seneca by candlelight and produce whole hamlets and fill these hamlets with tragical speeches. So the well-educated will condescendingly refer to the English playwrights who would use the English translation of Seneca to write their own plays. So Senators doing revenger's tragedies, gory tragedies.

Shakespeare himself has written his gory tragedy, Titus Andronicus. Exactly. But there are others around him who are hammering away at revenger's tragedies at that time. Could you tell us little about those people? Yes. The model was already being mocked by Jonathan, is just referred to Thomas Lodge referring to what we now call the Ur-Hamlet as antiquated and absurd and possibly ridiculous because the ghost in the Hurr hamlet is said to be crying Hamlet revenge like an oyster wife. So the ghosts, I think, were starting to sound maybe petulant rather than

portentous. So Shakespeare had a huge challenge in his hands because having already written a successful revenge tragedy, Titus and Ronicos, he had to come up with something new. exciting. And I believe we did so, as Jonathan was intimating just now, by shifting from the mere mechanics of revenge to the problematic nature of remembrance and the burden of the past. Also, I guess by showing off, one of the symptoms, I think, of an artist who feels at the height of his artistic powers is that Hamlet is very much a play about playing. It's a play about the theatre. is an homage to the Globe Theatre that is mentioned several times in the play.

So Hamlet looking at the heavens and describing the heavens as majestic roof, fretted with golden fires, is describing the canopy overhanging the stage at the globe. What do you have to say about the several early printed versions of Hamlet? Is there something you can sum up about those? The single most important event in that history

that has kept scholars, like myself, I'm a textual scholar, fighting ever since its discovery, it's its late discovery. Because unlike all the other early printed texts, including the longer versions of Hamlet, the second quarter of Q2 and the folio F, the first quarter of Q1 was only discovered in 1823, a whole 200 years after Shakespeare's plays were printed as a collected edition in 1623, and it caused a literary sensation because it was so different from the... In what way? Well, it's half the length of Kitu and F.

And also it's very different in terms of dialogue. Can we just dwell on the context more, just picking it out for the listeners. Is there anything else at the time feeding in to what he's doing? Jonathan said it's coming from all over the place, the influences. Can you just thicken it up a little? One of the things that we need to remember is that when Shakespeare started in the business, he didn't start as a playwright, he started as an actor. and when he arrived in London, he was probably working with Lord Stranger's men,

and he was playing revenge plays. So the two big blockbuster revenge plays that he would have had as a player on his plate, were played by Marlowe, the Jew of Malta, and Thomas Kidd, the Spanish tragedy, playing these day after day after day. These were the plays that he had in his muscle memory. So it is no wonder to me that these plays come out in his own revenge play Titus Andronicus and then later in Hamlet. He's remembering these plays and redoing these plays because he knows these plays

and the language of these plays. It's amazing how many playwrights have been actors first, isn't it? Good training, really. But then he brought in this man, this Hamlet person, who is not only somebody seeking revenge, he is something else. Where do you think he got Hamlet for? Well, partly he got Hamlet directly from Thomas Kidd's Spanish tragedy, which is a play that invents the idea of the revenge play inside the revenge play inside the revenge play. And Hamlet is, after all, two revenge plays. It's the revenge of Hamlet for his father.

But then subsequently, it's the revenge of Laertes for his father. And what he does, what Kid does in the Spanish tragedy, we have revenge upon revenge. We have soliloquies where Hieronimo pauses and things. about what he's going to do. We have a mother who goes mad and raves across the stage. A lot of elements in Hamlet are there. We'll come to Silucus a little later,

but that's a fascinating clue there for us. For anyone who's not read Hamlet, I think we've more or less covered the main plot points, is there anything we've left out? There's the ghost, there's a desire for revenge, there's the what is the so-called will come back. Yes, I think always inside the revenge play, there is a love interest.

There's the girl. and that there is a problem that is circulating around the female body in all of the English revenge plays. Jonathan, can you, is it possible? Here we go, to describe the character of Hamlet. Many great writers and thinkers have spent a very long time failing to do that. I mean, one of the fascinating things about Hamlet, you said at the beginning, Melvin, how, you know, it's the best known Shakespeare play

sort of the most influential. One of the fascinating things about it is it's a play that writers and thinkers have constantly wrestled with. So if you think in the late 18th century, Gertrter, the great German writer, he writes a sort of autobiographical novel called Wilhelmmeister's Apprenticeship, all about growing up and the central character plays the part of Hamlet. And for Gerta, that becomes a way of thinking about Hamlet. Samuel Taylor Coleridge said, I have a smack of Hamlet myself, if I may say so. Sigmund Freud was obsessed with Hamlet and the family dynamics. So I don't think I'm going to be able to answer a question that Gertor, Coleridge and Freud failed to answer.

Well, let's go for broad lines. I mean, because it's useful to help. I mean, I think one of the things that distinguishes him is a man of deep contemplation and when occasion demands it, a man of swift action. Is that a usual or an unusual competition? No, I think the key thing about Hamlet is this sort of opposition between thinking and acting. Acting, of course, has two senses.

I mean, Carol has already been talking about the importance of the play within the play. Hamlet's very interested in acting a part, but he's also interested in action. But the moment you start thinking about playing and acting, then you find yourself reflecting, doubting, hesitating, digging into yourself. And that's what Hamlet is always doing. And I think one of the keys to this is, is a big change has taken place in the course of the 16th century, which we call Renaissance humanism.

What that kind of goes back to is educators saying, what's the best way of educating a prince? In the medieval times, the way of educating a prince was to sort of teach them how to ride horses and fight with swords. The humanist educators say the prince needs to study human nature, to read the classics. The prince needs to be an intellectual. And I think Hamlet is really the great example

at the end of the 16th century of the intellectual prince. He's in this court setting, but he's also, he's a student, a thinker, a reader, and it's the thinking versus action that is one of the keys. It comes back from Wittenberg, as we know. Sonia, you were talking earlier about the earlier text,

and that was, I think there's a bit more to be said. Would you say the character developed from the earlier text? From what we see in the early text to what we've got now, the two-hour version we have now? The Q1 Hamlet is... Sorry, the four-hour version we've got now. The Q-1 Hamlet is more action-driven than the Hamlet in the longer versions of the text.

I think a prime example which listeners might be amused to hear is that even the most famous line from the play, To Be or Not to Be, that's the question. In Q-1 reads, to be or not to be, that's the point. It's an amazing experience to listen to the play performed because it's almost like you listen to a familiar play, but maybe the actors are misremembering their lines,

so it's got some of the language, but it's very different. Excuse me, this is fascinating. When did it, I quite like point myself, but question, it keeps the monosyllables going, and I'm very fond of his monosyllable, but never mind. When did you, do we know any change from point to question? Well, we think that the play was revised at different stages in its life. The first moment of composition we like to date from late 1599 but also through 1600.

Then later on, around the middle of the first decade of the 17th century, because of an allusion to the boys' companies that gets added to Act 2, when the Prince is discussing with Rosicry. at the Gildesden, the arrival of the players at Elsinore and he's wondering why the players have left the city. And the reason why the players have left the city is because they're getting tough competition from the boys' actors. And that was definitely happening for the other companies

that Shakespeare was working for around that time. So we can't quite place exactly the time of the revision. But first time of composition, I'd say turn of the century and then certainly around the middle of the first decade. Is it worth questioning, whether he made the revision or the revision was made by somebody else as they put it together, which they did much later, as you know. Yes, well, certainly for the...

We're still on point in question. Yes, yes. They may very well both be Shakespeare's. What is less clear to me is whether the differences between the second quarter and the folio, which are more similar in length, are also all Shakespeare. The folio, if it's quite a bit shorter, so it's leaner. Some scholars have argued maybe more suitable to be performed. In a two-hour slot that they had?

Still too long. More recently, a fellow scholar, Richard Aten, has argued that the longer plays might not be written for readers, as another colleague, Lucas Ahern has argued, but for core performances, which I think the jury is still out. but whether F was adapted by the actors or by Shakespeare, we don't know. Carol, Carol, Roger, the skull of Yorick has achieved great importance and you attached great importance to it. It's the most famous skull.

I know the most famous skull in all drama. Why do you think that is? If you just contextualize it? Yorick makes a late entrance in the play. This is a play that will not leave Shakespeare alone. It's twice as long as any normal. early modern play. And Shakespeare keeps adding characters,

introducing characters. York enters Act 5, being chucked out of a grave that's being prepared to bury Ophelia. And when he's chucked out of the grave, there's banter over the skull with the grave diggers and Hamlet, who has just appeared beside the grave, and the grave diggers hand the skull to York.

And that moment has become iconic of Hamlet. holding the skull, talking to the skull, with the skull, of the skull, and then ventriloquizing the skull. So Yorick, in conversation with the prince, has kind of become the poster boy. Why? I think because it is a moment that distills so many of the themes of youth and death and conversation and trying to get to the ends of conversations,

this is a play who starts out asking who's there and winds up at the end of the play, still asking the same question. But Yorick, I think, is actually more important than that, because also, as when he appears, appears a backstory to the play. We understand in this backstory that Yorick was the kind of surrogate father to Prince Hamlet, and that he was the one who was around when Daddy Hamlet was out bashing the Norwegians and the Poles and so on. And as Hamlet looks at this skull, he says, I knew him, Horatia. then goes on to say, I wrote on his back, I kissed these lips a thousand times. And we learned that Yorick died when Hamlet was only seven years old, that moment in early morning culture when a boy became, as it were, a little man, he was breached.

And so we see this whole understanding of a Yorick as a substitute father. But now we have, in this wonderful moment, another father, like the ghost, coming out of the grave, to speak to the son. And when that father came out of the grave, he said, revenge. And this father coming out of the grave says, go to my lady's chamber, tell her, let her paint an inch thick. She will come to this. And the answer to the ghost revenge is to say, hey, you don't have to do anything.

We are all on our way to becoming corpses. We don't need to commit revenge. Just be patient. Let be. Well, that's a lot for a skull to say. It is indeed. Indeed. We'll watch our skulls in future.

But it was very enjoyed it. Jonathan. To what extent can you say to play about statecraft? Yeah, I think this is a very important dimension of it. And in many ways, some of the famous interpretations of the play that have focused so much on Hamlet, the individual, the internal life of Hamlet, have neglected the fact that this is a play about a court

with a lot of intrigue. We haven't yet really talked to. about Claudius, the brother who kills Old Hamlet, and indeed Polonius. Let's start with Claudius. Claudius, the first time we see him, he is conducting a whole lot of court business, of

statecraft. There are ambassadors coming from Norway trying to sort out a peace treaty. There's a counsellor called Polonius and his son Laertes and Laertes is requesting permission to go off to Paris. And we see Claudius conducting the court

business with great efficiency. And we almost think, gosh, maybe Claudius is a better king than Old Hamlet, who seemed to spend his afternoons asleep in the orchard. Polonius becomes a particularly interesting figure, because although he's sometimes represented on stage as a bit of an old bumbling fool, and there's no doubt Shakespeare mocks his very elaborate verbal rhetoric. But despite that, Polonius is clearly a very cunning politician. He's managed to negotiate the change from the regime of Old Hamlet to the regime.

of Claudius, and he becomes a crucial player in a world of surveillance and overhearing of court intrigue. This is rather impertinent to me, but I've never seen Polonius played well in terms of the way I've read Polonius. He's always thought of as a bit of a fool. What have you played him wittily? What if that speech about as a play historical? What if he was being witted, would you?

And playing around with the idea, instead of being sonorous and boring about it. He would get away with that. That would work. He's the spy on behalf of the king He's quite clever in trying to manoeuvre his way To work out what this air to the throne is doing How did he come to be treated as a buffoon? Because Hamlet says so

But why do we believe Hamlet at that moment? Well, that's a fascinating thing about the play in general. It seems to me there's a constant disjunction Between Hamlet's reading Both of his own self and of the wider situation And what we actually see in terms of the overall action Yeah, because when he stabs him thinking at his father, he says, what a fool. But actually, he's talking about himself.

He, Hamlet, is the fool for not checking he killed the right man. Yeah. Is that right? I think that is right. Sonia, you want to come in. About Polonio, something interesting is that the early printed text suggests that he may have been taken seriously indeed, almost seriously than we do today. Really?

Because there are quotation marks placed next to some of his most famous sentences to tie on through Byself. to their own self be true. So it was probably his lines were highlighted for readers, who it was common at the time for readers to copy out of texts, things that they wanted to remember and memorize and put in their own commonplace books. Can you talk about Gertrude, the wife of Old Hamlet who was murdered by Claudius,

who then married her, and that's the second engine of the play. Can you talk about her? Yes, she gets bad press. She really does. The problem of Hamlet has become so central to the kind of Western dramatic canon, to the

kind of world dramatic canon, and is one of the most fiercely misogynistic plays, and Gertrude is the target of the hatred. But what do you think about? There's Gertrude's mother, and what do you make of her? She's ambiguous, as many critics who agree with Hamlet, have pointed out.

T.S. Eliot went as far as claiming that she's a flawed character, which makes the play flawed because she cannot quite represent the level of disgust, the level of the emotions there she triggers in Hamlet. He calls her the Mona Lisa

of literature because of her ambiguity. But actually, if one looks closer, she has a lot of compassion for Ophelia. She has some of the most beautiful lines in the play when she reports the drowning, Ophelia's drowning. She says

there is a willow, grows a scant, the brook, that shows his hoary leaves in the glasses stream. Those are lines that resonate. But more importantly, the marriage at the time, marrying your deceased husband's brother would have been seen, yeah, the speed, unseemly, but the marriage to a deceased husband's brother,

not so uncommon, especially in the context of your families, but also the Bible ambiguous about whether that degree of affinity was incestuous or not. So you have... Leviticus wasn't? Leviticus forbids it, but Deuteronomy urges it. But crucially, if there is no child.

So Pache Freud, who believes, like Elliot, that Hamlet cannot quite come to terms with his unconscious desire for his mother. What might be the problem with Hamlet? It's been dispossessed. That is, as he puts it, the king has popped between him

and his right to the throne. Yes. this desire for his mother and I don't I don't either I think it's Freud galloping away I'm getting less interested in interpretation but that's me Can we you delete that? No no we can't

Carol then there's Ophelia Can you talk about Ophelia? Yes I mean I was just going to pick up what Sonia was saying as some of the bad press that she gets is also offered to us through the ghost because the ghost suggests to us that she has been stimulated by lust and it's very ambiguous in the ghost's representation

of what has happened between Claudius and Gertr But he does... You mean they might have had an affair before? It suggested that somehow that he seduced her. And was it before, was it after, whatever. But right in the middle of every of these plays is always the story of a wrecked love affair. And Ophelia is the one who's clinging to the wreckage.

She is bullied, betrayed by every person in this play. So her mother... Yes, but also perhaps Gertrude. Really? Her brother gives her toxic misinformation to say fear the prince's love. Her father sets her up as bait to try to figure out and entrap the prince. Gertrude perhaps betrays her on the grave. Gertrude says, I hoped thou should have been to my son's Hamlet's wife.

New news, why didn't we know that in Act 1? It would have changed the story. But she is also, I think, one in the play who has little, to say. And Hamlet Bullitt, you forgot. Oh, absolutely. Hamlet savages her, dumps all of this misogynist discourse upon her. In public. In public.

When she can do nothing to defend herself, because what he's accusing her of is misadvertising their relationship, misdirecting their relationship. But she's one of those

characters who has very, very little to say in the play, but a lot to perform. And what she performs, I think, is the psychic journey of Prince Hamlet and the big themes of the play. So Hamlet is thinking about madness. Aphelia plays it for real. She comes on mad. Hamlet toys with suicide to be or not to be that death is remade in the fifth act, not as an accidental death, but as Ophelia committing suicide. This is a play that from the opening has driven towards male death and the male grave, and yet when we get to the grave,

the person who's going to be put in that grave is the body and the body of a woman, and that body is problematized through, and it's brilliant that we've got quarto one to tell us what happens at that moment. Quarto 1, in a stage direction that probably represents stage action. Has Laertes leaping into the grave and holding his sister's body, but then the prince also leaping into the grave. And we now have these two people claiming the body, grappling over the body, saying, I loved her, I loved her. Well, boys, it's too late. Right. Can you be quick? Yes. I think the fundamental problem with Ophelia and Gertrude is that

they speak each 4% of the lines in the play. So they are mostly represented and it takes very strong writers from the 20th century to give them other voices. And some of my favorite examples are Margaret Atwood, Gertrude talks back. She is quite happy in the closet scene to turn around and say to her son, it was me darling, it wasn't Claudius. Acknowledging the guilt,

disambiguating the character and making her happily and confidently vicious. Jonathan, you mentioned humanism earlier on. Can we bring back into the equation? Yeah, I mean, it's very striking that Hamlet is a student and some of his closest friends are as well. Horatio, his best friend, his confident. They've studied together.

And so, as I was saying earlier, and there's a very strong sense of the life of the mind as being something different from the life of the battlefield and of politics. Now, one of the great sort of debates within humanism is about the nature of human being. And Hamlet really alludes to this very powerfully. A wonderful speech he has where he's talking to Rosencranton,

Gildenstern, these two fellow students who have been sort of more or less put on him as spires. and he then starts talking about the power of the human mind, the infinity of human faculties, our powers of speech. And yet, he says, to me, we are just the quintessence of dust. And it's that sense that on the one hand, we are like animals. We all come to death, as Carol was saying. We have bodily instincts like animals.

But on the other hand, we have these twin powers of reasoning and of speech that set us apart from the animals and that give us free will. It's these kind of ideas that Hamlet wrestles with, this dual identity of mankind. Sonia, does that chime in, as it were, can we make it chime in with his time at Wittenberg, which has a different connotation, of course,

the Reformation, and this has passed the great thesis, nailed to the door in 1517, the 95 Thesis. Does he come back a Protestant? Well, people interested in establishing Hamlet's religious beliefs and why not Shakespeare's as well, as if we could, are very keen on looking at Hamlet, which seems to be written reflecting on the cultural clash created by the end of the old faith, the Roman Catholic faith,

and the brave new world of the Reform Church of England. And the play is ambiguous, and nowhere more so then in the character of the ghost. Is the ghost a Catholic ghost who comes back from purgatory or is it a Seneca ghost coming from the classical tradition? And it would certainly, the ghost sounds very much like he's coming for purgatory when he says, I am thy father's spirit, doomed for a certain term to walk the night,

and for the day confined to fast in fires, till the foul crimes done in my days of nature are burdened, purged away. It's classic purgatory. Roman Catholic purgatory. In a now Protestant country. In a now Protestant country. And Shakespeare comes close to getting into troubles with authorities, but never does, because it's a revenge tragedy. So although it sounds like a ghost from purgatory and the Reformation had abolished with the 39 articles of the Church of England by 1563, had abolished purgatory. So to be

Treating purgatory seriously amounted to be enplasmus. But it gets away with it because it's a revenge tragedy and you can still see the ghosts coming from the classical tradition. I think this is really important because there is that moment when Hamlet has the opportunity to kill Claudius while he's praying and he stops and he doesn't do it because he says, well, he's praying, he'll go straight to heaven. Now, in a Catholic world, it would be the case that because of what Claudius has done, he'd have actually had to do a lot of time in purgatory. So it is clear in that regard that Hamlet has... the Protestant belief that if you truly repent, whatever terrible things you've done, if you die, you'll go straight to heaven. Carol, you mentioned earlier soliloquies, the earlier soliloquies. Now, they're a great feature of Hamlet.

So they were, it was something that Shakespeare picked up as well as all the other things we'd be talking about. Yes, indeed. Yes, indeed. What is distinct, what did the siloquis say to you? Can you just talk about one of your, you think is most significant and unravel it for us? Yes. These soliloquies are thinking machines,

and they actually allow us to hear the mind thinking itself into action in front of us. There are five of them in the play. Each of them is absolutely distinct. So in the first one, it takes him 30 lines to say one sentence. Two months ago, my mother married my uncle. And across those 30 lines, we're swinging between, evasions, between disgust, between exclamations, between things he can't say, to get to that point of his reaction to what his mother has done.

But for me, the great soliloquy is the second one, the one that emerges out of his encounter with the players. So he's watched, he's asked the players to play a bit of a play, and then he watches the player tell the story of the end of the fall of Troy when Hecuba watches the slaughter of her husband. The players go off and Hamlet is left there to reflect, and he reflects upon what he has just seen in a fiction, this extraordinary outpouring of passion and grief

for something that hasn't happened that has only been enacted. And Jonathan was talking earlier about these twin ideas of acting and acting, and whether the fiction teaches us how to act in the real world or the reverse, Hamlet then reflects upon the acting of the player as against his own inaction and makes a comparison, a rhetorical comparison between those two things. But then he drives forward

to ask us the audience a question that emerges out of what's Hecuba to He or Hehkeba that he should weep for her? Why can't I do the thing that needs to bring to the end the revenge of my father? But ask us the question,

am I a coward? And solicits from us our response to the play. Now, that positions us as a different way in acting this play with Hamlet. But out of that, then question about cowardice, he then tries on the idea of Revenger. It puts it on. He rehearses. Bloody, body, revenge.

And then he says, oh, God, what an ass am I. Now, let's think. Let's think. And out of the thinking comes, I've heard the guilty person sitting at a play, da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. I know what I'll do. We'll put on a play. So reverting back to the idea of the acting, inacting, acting forward, the plays the thing in which I'll catch the conscience of the king,

and that sends him into, from paralysis into action. Excellent. Jonathan, I'm delayed asking this until now, but why do people talk so much about Hamlet's delay in doing what he sets out to do in the first scene or second scene? Because Hamlet talks so much about his delay, as in that soliloquy and his later soliloquies, he's constantly saying, I have the greatest cause for action and I'm not doing it. But actually, this to me is an example of this disjunction between what Hamlet says and what actually happens. Because if you think about it, one thing he's got to do

is check that the ghost really is his father and not a devil sent in the shape of his father to tempt him to commit a crime himself. The way he checks that is by watching Claudius' reaction to the play. The moment that happens, he goes off to kill Claudius, but he doesn't do it because Claudius is praying and that would send him to heaven. He then goes into Gertrude's chamber.

There's a rustling behind the arras, and he stabs him. He thinks he's done the deed. Actually, it turns out that's polonious. And at that point, Hamlet is under suspicion. He's under guard. He's under watch. He's dispatched to England. He manages to escape, thanks to some helpful pirates.

He comes back. I love the pirates. And as soon as he's back... Completely undervalued. And as soon as he's back, he sets up the plot for the revenge. So, hey, where's the delay? Yes. agree with that. Did you both agree with that?

Well, and I also find it incomprehensible that anybody would want our prince to move from the ghost straight into killing Claudius without checking whether the ghost has authority. Because ethically, of course, one of the things that Shakespeare is developing in the revenge tragedy

is the thinking about the cycle of revenge and whether we can ever stop the cycle of revenge, which is what he's exploring in Titus Andronicus. And whether if conscience does make cowards of a soul, what are we going against our consciousness and so on. Right, there you are. You want to say something. Yeah, I think as well

as an ethical question is also again stagecraft. If we look, again, the early texts, Shakespeare changed his mind as to whether he should pose and think, and even the position of the to be or not to be soliloquy, it's earlier in the first quarter and it makes sense is in act too, because by the time

he gets to decide that the place, the king is the thing wherein you catch the conscience of the king, then we get the to be or not to be in the longer texts. And so that comes across as a digression as a delay, which in terms of theatre, you might think actually Q1 has a much stronger structure. But then it may well have wanted that soliloquy to come across as a regression. And so Shakespeare seems to be working very actively to increase the delay as he revises the play. Can I ask all of you to come to conclusion of this?

Why do you think it has had such power? increasing power, why it's so attractive to audiences, to actors, to read this. Why? Carol, you first. Because I think it gives actors, and not just the Hamlet actor, but the Gertrude actor. One of the brilliant performances of Gertrude is Penny Downey's, which people can see on film, because it's in the David Tennant, Greg Doran, RSC production, gives actors so much scope to develop not just the speechcraft of the play, but also the performance craft of the play. and explores it, it exercises all of their actually muscles. Sonia.

I'm quite struck by the fact that the most iconic moment in the play, the Yorick moment, Carol was talking about earlier, is already a hit, a very palpable hit. Two or three years after Hamlet premieres on the Globe stage because there's a play called The Revengeous Tragedy by Thomas Middleton that opens with Vindichy, the Revenger, holding the skull, dressed in the skull of his former fiancé, Gloriana. So it's, I think, from the beginning, it's quite clear that the play is about playing and it's about the theatre.

And that's what makes it work so well for actors and for audiences. Jonathan. The play opens with a question, who's there? The answer, nay, answer me. I think I've got answers about most of Shakespeare's plays, having sort of taught them all my life. I've still not got the answer with Hamlet. It's still a question. It is the great play of questions.

We don't get an answer. and that's why we keep going back to it. Well, thank you very much to Carol Rutter, Sonia Massi and Jonathan Bates. We return on the 11th of January with the Great Siege of Malta in 1565. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now

with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. Well, we missed out most of the play that isn't Hamlet, in fact, and all of this kind of extraneous material and wondering, I guess, why it was that Shakespeare just couldn't let go of this play. Early modern plays, the playwrights were paid standard rate six pounds a play. The play then belongs to the playing company.

It doesn't belong to the playwright anymore. He has no right in the play. So it belongs to the players. Shakespeare had rights in his plays as a player because he was a member of the Lord Chamberlain's men, but he didn't have any rights to his plays as a player. So if we imagine Shakespeare being paid six pounds for a play, it's The Comedy of Errors or Macbeth or Hamlet,

why did he keep writing? You know, this is twice. It was multitasking. He had the theatre, he was manager, he was a good businessman. No, no, no, but I'm saying is, but I'm saying it could not have been for money. It had to be, it had to be

that this place simply would not let him go. You write for the love of it, don't you? Most people I know, most people I know do, they do. They really do. Almost everybody I know who writes writes because they want to write. But the love of the writing then must be impelled by something that that love is projecting into the writing. You write and continue to write because you want to say something, surely.

Yeah, but not about money. Well, I'm just... It's part of the mix. It's part of the mix. He's a very busy man. You know, he's a very busy man as an actor needing to be at the playhouse playing. I think actually money does come into it. James Marino has written a great book called Owning Shakespeare.

And although playwrights were paid a one-off fee for writing plays, because Shakespeare was in the envio position of being also a shareholder of his own company, I think he was encouraged by the very economy of the Arne Modern Theatre to keep revising. Audiences would go and watch the play again and probably notice the differences. So a play was less immediately by, Shakespeare, but it was the play that was the crowd-pleaser. And so from the Ur-Hamlet to the version maybe we got in the first quarter to the first version we have in the second quarter, then the folio.

And these are probably just snapshots of what the play was and continue to be in a kind of continuous evolution. Because it might have been from an audience demand for something novel to listen out for when they went to see the play or to hear the play. I mean, I think we perhaps should have talked more about those players who arrive at Elsinor. They're so central to it. And it's not just the play within the play, the murder of Gonzago, which reveals Claudius's guilt. But this amazing speech that the actor gives when Hamlet arrives.

You know, they arrive at Elsinor and Hamlet says, oh, come on here. Give us a taste of your art. And, okay, he said, what speech do you want? Hamlet says, I tell you, my favorite speech, Aeneas's tale to die, Dave, a tale of what happened after the fall of Troy, where Pyrrhus, the son of Achilles, goes to find Pryam, the father of his killer, and he absolutely slashes him and murders him. And there's this great speech in a very classical style. But it was an amazing moment in that speech when Pyrrhus is about to smite his sword down onto Priam. And he just stops, the sword holds there, and he says, and he did

nothing. And it's an exact sort of mirror of the scene we later have when Hamlet has that opportunity to bring the dagger of sword down on broadies and does nothing. So again, you know, Carol was talking about like Laertes as a parallel avenger. We didn't even mention Fortinbras, another one who's carrying out a revenge for his uncle having been defeated. There's Pyrrhus as well. I mean, it's just kind of mirrors within mirrors and the players are the key to that. Yeah, surely, that has to do with this business about the length of the play. Because the question is, why does he keep writing?

It's the effect of what he keeps writing. And the effect of what he keeps writing is that he keeps amplifying the stories that being enclosed in this story of Hamlet. So not just this story, the story of Pyrrhus, that suddenly is in its center stage with us as the player is speaking it. But it's also Hamlet's history of hearing this play once, he says, and then begins to enact it, but also his relationship to the players, these tragedians of the city.

So there are all of these multiple backstories that are being released into this play that keeps remaking itself. Or indeed, from my point of view, Jonathan mentioned statecraft and the ambassadors that are being sent from the court of Denmark into Norway, where old Norway is asleep and doesn't know what his nephew is up to,

this Fortinbras, who seems prepared to march in any direction across Europe and lay devastation at any direction that he seems inclined to attack in the latest moment. moment. But when Fortinbras comes in and the entire household of Denmark is dead in front of him, and he lays claim to the kingdom, he says, I have some rights of memory in this kingdom, and he simply takes over while Horatio is still notionally holding the body, the only cooling body of the dead prince,

but beside Fortinbross coming these two hapless little ambassadors from England, who have arrived in Elsinore to tell them that Claudius's instructions that of course have been manipulated by Hamlet have been fulfilled and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead. And then that ends the whole story of these two stooges. And it's tragedies inside tragedies inside tragedies inside farces inside tragedies. I think the relationship to England is also very... interesting because of course the play is set in Elsinor, but England plays a role. And scholars

interested in establishing the historical setting for the play. They set the moment of the play in the 50 years before the Norman conquest, which is also known as the rule of the Danes. And Magrera Grazia is someone who writes beautifully about this side of the story, the English side of the story. And she comes up with a wonderful explanation as to why, again, going back to the early texts, the quarters described the play

as a tragical history, whereas by the time we get to the collected edition in the folio, it becomes a tragedy. Now, the sense of Hamlet's as a tragedy, it's much closer to how we understand the play, but we lose sight of the history and of England's role

within that history. And as to why it may have become a tragedy in the folio. So the Grazza argues that pre-1066 history was a history of conquest and devastation for England. And so plays or histories before 1066 are kind of grouped together in the folio as tragedies. Whereas the post-1066 history, the English history, which is a history that seems to be French English history. French English history or English history, if you look at the the kind of progression of the crown in the table of contents in the folio seems orderly and nearly providential. And so it's again quite interesting, the ambiguity in the play in relation to the wider world around the court.

And it's not just Norway and Fortimbras, but also England and how one recovers a sense of English history from the play. I'm sorry, I interrupted you. That's okay. Because, of course, the Vikings came over and then the Norman Viking is the same lot for the salad. further south came over. That's right. You were talking about about a couple hundred years there, aren't we, fighting? That's right.

I hadn't put those two together. How stupid of me? Thank you. I know that. Carol saying Rosencrest and Guildenson are dead sort of reminds us that there's a whole other in our time to be made about the rewritings of Hamlet, you know, from Gertr through to Tom Stoppard. One of the things we learn about these programmes is that when you finish, you all say there's another seven programs you can do. I mean, we are a soliloquy at 43 minutes, so than we do.

I think you've covered a lot of ground. And sometimes I get, no, sometimes I think, oh God, because afterwards, when I say, what did we miss out? That's just to get you going. But then you tell me what we missed out, and I think, oh, God, I should be doing something else because we've got tons of stuff we didn't talk about. Yes? But of course, Jonathan raising the issue of the players then takes us forward to think about the sheer theatricality of what Shakespeare is doing, the inventiveness of Shakespeare. Of course, we're very used to scenes because we've seen them so often. But when Ophelia comes on the stage in the stage direction of the first quarter with her hair down and playing upon a lute, mad, distributing those memory flowers that remake the whole idea of remember, sweet remember, rosemary for you, we're seeing a scene that is absolutely extraordinary on the English stage.

and we I think sometimes need to re-remember the innovativeness of Shakespeare stagecraft making theatre. Well, thank you all very much. Did you enjoy that? Yeah, we do. immensely. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. Hello, I'm Michelle Hussain. And if you're looking for an excuse to lie in in in the morning, well, you've found it. The best of today podcast is how you can get the highlights of our programme, anytime, anywhere, at home, on your commute while you're out and about.

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