Early in Bruce Robinson's 1987 comedy classic Withnail and I, the two heroes, a pair of distinctly out-of-work actors, meet Uncle Monty, an ageing, wealthy but distinctly out of work actor himself. Staring wistfully at a photograph of a younger, more optimistic self, he says: "It is the most shattering experience of a young man's life when one morning he awakes and quite reasonably says to himself: I will never play The Dane. When that moment comes, one's ambition ceases."
Playing Hamlet, Monty's great "Dane", is arguably the ultimate challenge for any young male actor treading the boards. The part is a rite of passage, dividing promise from the fulfilment of talent. It is not simply that every serious leading man from Richard Burbage, Shakespeare's own actor, to Jude Law, David Garrick to Kenneth Branagh, Laurence Olivier to Daniel Day-Lewis, has tried their hand at the role. Rather, they had to perform their Hamlet in order to be considered a serious leading man.
Enter Benedict Cumberbatch, who has been making headlines across the world for his own take on the "sweet prince" at London's Barbican Theatre in a production directed by Lyndsey Turner. Arguably the 21st century's thespiest thesp, Cumberbatch captured the urgency of assaying the role three years ago: "I don't know if there is such a thing as a right age to play the part, but 36 or 37 seems appropriate to me, so I need to do it before long," he told Britain's The Daily Telegraph.
Cumberbatch's Hamlet has proved a thoroughly modern, global spectacle. Newspapers have been filled with images of (if the photographs are to be believed) almost exclusively young fans queuing overnight to buy day seats for a production that had sold out a year in advance. The Barbican has been lambasted for refusing to allow cast autographs. While Cumberbatch has since relented, the actor's first appearance at the stage door was to make an impassioned plea for audience members not to record his performance on their iPhones. With typical 21st century irony, this plea was made to a bank of iPhones for broadcast around the globe.
Such self-reflexivity feels entirely appropriate for what is arguably the masterpiece of self-reflexivity. Hamlet not only pivots on a play within a play ("to catch the conscience of the king"), it contains some of Shakespeare's most famous soliloquies, including the mother of all internal meditations, "To be or not to be, that is the question."
The question for one critic, Kate Maltby of The Times, who broke theatre tradition and published a scathing review on preview night, was why Turner's production began with these famous words. Most printed editions using the preferred Second Quarto position the speech in Act 3, Scene 1.
One way to read Maltby's outrage is to connect this to her broader dissatisfaction with an interpretation aimed at "kids raised on Moulin Rouge". The decision to open with Hamlet's big moment (which apparently has since been reversed by The Barbican) was not an act of character analysis but one of populist pandering to an auditorium stuffed with Sherlock-fuelled Cumbermaniacs. Think The Beatles forgetting The White Album and kicking off with Twist and Shout.
What is Maltby’s problem? It is certainly hard to tell who she is patronising more: the audience or the production. “To be or not to be” may well be Shakespeare’s greatest hit but an extended rumination on suicide, inaction and the meaning of existence is hardly easy listening.
Right or wrong, Maltby’s savaging of Turner’s populism is nothing new in the world of Bardolatory, and is a reminder that the challenge of Shakespeare to modern audiences is easy to take for granted. There are the obscure and rapidly fading historical contexts that include everything from the War of the Roses to late 16th century Verona. There is the intimidating and often incomprehensible mass of scholarship that frets over editorial minutiae and the dearth of biographical information. And at the heart of everything there is Shakespeare’s language, which is a trial for native-born English-speakers much less international theatre-goers: “Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth into dust; the dust is earth; of earth we make loam; and why of that loam, whereto he was converted, might they not stop a beer-barrel?”
Admired Shakespearean critic and biographer Jonathan Bate argues: “We now think of Shakespeare as a unique genius – the embodiment, indeed, of the very idea of artistic genius.” But that “we” takes an awful lot on faith. Who exactly is doing this thinking? White, educated, English-speaking Oxford dons like Bate himself? Greater thinkers than he have thoroughly disliked the Bard of Avon. George Bernard Shaw “despised” him “entirely”. Charles Darwin found his plays “so intolerably dull that it nauseated me”. Voltaire cut to the chase and called his works an “enormous dunghill”.
Landing between these extremes, Shakespeare editor and scholar Gary Taylor has argued in The Incredible Shrinking Bard that his reputation has been in decline since the Victorian age. One way to reverse the trend is to cast big names like Cumberbatch to attract audiences who wouldn't normally touch Shakespeare with a Bard-pole. To be fair to Cumberbatch, he has extensive stage credits, certainly more than other star Hamlets including Keanu Reeves, Mel Gibson and, to lesser extents, Jude Law and Ethan Hawke.
We can guess what these A-listers were getting out of the deal – the veneer of Art and Acting, with capital As. But do celebrities actually work? Maltby's slighting allusion to Moulin Rouge remembers Baz Luhrmann's commercially successful Romeo + Juliet in 1996, whose young, sexy and inescapably modern pairing of Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes did for doomed romance what DiCaprio would do for doomed ocean liners in Titanic a year later.
Gary Taylor notes that Romeo + Juliet's box office triumph is a comparative rarity, succeeding where any number of more stately but staid adaptations failed, including Kenneth Branagh's film versions of Much Ado About Nothing in 1993 and Hamlet in 1996. Taylor asks: Were all those teenagers going to see Shakespeare, or going to see Danes and DiCaprio?
Fair enough, but you need the right superstars. Casting Denzel Washington and Keanu Reeves in Much Ado About Nothing or legends like Billy Crystal, Jack Lemmon and Robin Williams in Hamlet did not lead Branagh to box office gold.
As Taylor notes, the relatively lowly return of these high profile adaptions (one could add Ralph Fiennes's Coriolanus or Ian McKellan's Richard III) interrogates assumptions of Shakespeare's current popularity. Nowhere is the debate hotter than in schools where most of us first encounter the Bard. In the days before the American TV show House made him a superstar, Hugh Laurie depicted the agonies of an overly enthusiastic Shakespeare teacher fighting a heartbreaking battle with student boredom. "Who has had the chance to look at Romeo and Juliet since last week?' he asks brightly to absolute silence. "No? Well, I know you have all been busy. Difficult to make time."
The classroom stages two opposing presumptions. In the Bardolatory corner are teachers (mainly) who assume Shakespeare's genius and promote him as a force for good. In the other are (mainly) students who find him obscure, difficult and boring. Such divides might be crude (there are teachers who hate Shakespeare and students who adore him), but that doesn't make the general proposition untrue. As one blog on the UK's The Guardian newspaper put it: "Old uncle Bill has become the relative that we invite to family gatherings out of habit, not because we actually want to."
How do you make Shakespeare appealing? Some of his greatest interpreters from Laurence Olivier to Kenneth Branagh have initiated revolutions in Shakespearean speech. According to the playwright Charles Bennett, Olivier spoke Shakespeare’s lines as naturally as if he were “actually thinking them”. This same urge inspired Olivier to found the National Theatre in London, which both commemorated Shakespeare and promoted him to new audiences. For early National Theatre directors Peter Hall and Trevor Nunn, a key concept was relevance. According to Nunn, Hall insisted “that whenever the company did a play by Shakespeare, they should do it because the play was relevant, because the play made some demand upon our current attention”.
For Hall, this meant including nods towards then current affairs like the Kennedy assassination and Cuban missile crisis. For Luhrmann's hormonal Romeo + Juliet, relevancy pounded to a soundtrack of then-cool rock bands like Garbage, The Cardigans and Radiohead. Looser homages like 10 Things I Hate About You set The Taming of the Shrew in an American high school, complete with a raw Heath Ledger. Sons of Anarchy, the smart, ultra-violent Hells Angels revenge drama, has been called "Hamlet on Wheels" for its plot in which a tortured young soul seeks the truth about his father's death and his mother's re-marriage.
But where does relevancy end and condescension begin? In 2013, a British youth worker Lindsay Johns decried efforts to make Shakespeare "cool": "Hamlet doesn't need a hip-hop sound track for young people to enjoy it. It's been doing just fine for the last 400 years." He even insinuated accusations of racism at those who believed the only way "black and brown kids will get Shakespeare is if it's ... presented in three-minute, MTV-Base-style chunks".
These circular debates present 21st century Shakespeare not as Bate’s embodiment of artistic genius but as the poster boy for disputes about cultural elitism and populism. Kenneth Tynan, the flamboyant theatre critic who was also instrumental in setting up the National Theatre, had no problem denouncing “vogue-words” like relevance. “What depths of egocentricity and parochialism the use of the word betrays! To demand that a work of art should be ‘relevant’ to southern English late-capitalist society in 1973 is to reveal an appallingly blinkered sensibility – and a dismaying lack of curiosity. The function of a work of art is to enable us to see through the eyes of others – and it is vulgar narcissism to insist that those eyes should be directed at ourselves.”
Instead of worrying how to make Shakespeare relevant to us, Tynan asks us to consider how we might be relevant to Shakespeare. One could argue that the present fuss about Cumberbatch's Hamlet is actually proof of Shakespeare's continued currency. Arguments about whether he is Cumberbatch's introspective depressive or Mel Gibson's warrior prince are anticipated by Ophelia's exclamation that the Dane can be all things to all people: "O, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown!/The courtier's, soldier's, scholar's, eye, tongue, sword."
Equally, productions of the play across the Middle East propose Arab and Muslim Shakespeares, while a recent performance at New York University Abu Dhabi completely reinvented the play as part art-installation and part garagerock gig.
As Margaret Litvin argues in Hamlet's Arab Journey, the play has been used to express potent political ideas in Egypt from as early as 1901, has been re-written by the Palestinian-Iraqi author Jabra Ibrahim Jabra and has been quoted to comment on everything from September 11 to the Danish cartoon controversy, when something was "rotten in the state of Denmark".
Here, perhaps, is Shakespeare’s true genius that he can be Sherlock and Shylock, a hipster and a scholar, a night out in London and an act of protest in Damascus. Or as the great English poet and Shakespeare fanatic John Keats put it: “I am very near agreeing with Hazlitt that Shakespeare is enough for us.”
James Kidd is a freelance reviewer based in London.
