Radiolab - 14: The Four Groans

Episode Date: August 13, 2009

Another meditation on what happens after the moment of death, this time as Shakespeare envisions it. 

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C. See? Yes. And NPR. Number 14, the four groans. There is a moment in Shakespeare. It is a very, very famous moment when Shakespeare allows his actors to step. right up to the edge of death, almost into death itself.

It's from Hamlet. Yeah, that sounds good. Okay, so we'll start. So what's going on in the play at the very end? Well, at the very end, there's a pile of bodies. This is Ron Rosenbaum. He's the author of a book called The Shakespeare Wars. Hamlet and Laertes have fought a duel.

and the queen has drunk a draft of poison. A drink. Oh, my dear. People are dying all over the place. And Hamlet, too, he's been cut and fatally poisoned. He falls into the arms of his very best friend, Horatio. Oh, I die, Horatio. This is Sir Lawrence Olivier.

The potent poison quite all crows, my spirit. And then finally he says, The rest. So that's the end of Hamlet. The rest is silence. Those are his last words. Which may be Shakespeare's way of just saying, so that when you die, that's what happens next.

It's just nothing. It's just silence. However, seven years after Shakespeare's death, his collaborators reprinted collected works of Shakespeare. This is called, the folio version. In that version, says Ron, after the rest is silence, Hamlet is not silent.

What is printed beneath the rest of silence is literally capital O, comma, O comma, O comma, O. Four O's. Yes, we have an appointment with Mark, Ryland. We are from National Public Radio. We wondered what are these O's. They just tacked. like big dangling donuts onto one of the most lyrical deaths in the English language, so what are they doing there?

Well, most of the actors who perform Hamlet pay no attention to the phone. They don't do the O's, they do the rest of silence, they die, and it's done. But we met a guy who does do the groans. You are he? I'm Mark. I'm Robert Colerich.

Hi, this is gentlemen, right? Hi. His name is Mark Rylance. So we go up to my best room? Yeah, yeah, yeah. We met him backstage at the long. Longacre Theater in New York City. He was starring in a non-Shakespeare Broadway show, but he took us up to... Wow, right at the Broadway dressing room. It teemed the dressing room,

and it was there that he began to talk about the groans. So the O-O-O-O, oh, oh, it was added by very careful editors to the folio in 1623. Mark said he didn't think that Shakespeare actually wrote those O's, they think it's probably an actor did it. So when you and your director sat down and you looking at these four O's on the page, why didn't you think to yourself, shut up? Because I guess, I guess I'd done it 300 times shutting up, so I was into the change, into the difference.

Particularly when he began to just consider the character of Hamlet himself. Of all the characters who die in plays, I think we're most intrigued about what Hamlet will make of it. Because Rowland says, remember, not only is Hamlet, you know, unusually obsessed by death, He went to a school that champion reason over mystery.

He's a student at Wittenberg University. He's part of that whole Protestant movement to the accurate study of nature. He's moving away from superstition and... What? He encounters a ghost. I am thy father's spirit. A ghost that not only appears as his father, but sounds like his father. If thou didst ever thy dear father love.

Oh, God. This is, for the scientists, I imagine, listening to your program, you have to put yourself in that position. It's one of you. It's not a new age wanderer or some regular visitor to a psychic who has this experience. So his gaze has been, for the whole play, his gaze has been on what is on the other side of our consciousness. And when, in the end, Hamlet finally steps to the edge of the answer, and he utters, the rest is silence. Here's the choice that actors and directors, when they do, Hamlet must make. Hamlet's next step is either into silence where there is nothing, where there's a nothingness forever and ever,

or is there a something waiting on the other side, and does he see that something in a vision? Maybe four visions. Oh, oh, oh, oh. They could represent a kind of dying area. Oh. A long sigh. I see it coming. Oh. Oh, my God, it's here.

Oh. It's about to happen. Oh. That's it. This is an idea you had to inhabit night after night. I did, yeah. So what did you think you were doing? I felt that I felt I was encountering.

I felt I was encountering another reality than was immediately a to those around me. And so I felt with Hamlet that he'd moved and was seeing things, was encountering things, but his ability to put words to what he's witnessing dies before his ability to witness. The ability to say what he saw, that died, even though he still had mind enough to see.

So some nights, Mark would deliver the O's silently. Just looking for it. four times, in four different places maybe. Or he might change tempo. Oh, oh, oh. And some nights he died better deaths. The best deaths would just be when the audience and I were together, and we were all kind of together wanting, I suppose,

Hamid to say, say something, what's happening to him? Something is happening, but we don't know what it is. There he's gone. He's gone. And the rest is silence. Radio Lab is funded in part by the Sloan Foundation, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the National Science Foundation.