Virtuosity and celebrity status

In my opinion, the Danish prince is usually played by actors that are too old. Check out YouTube and enjoy a whole range of famous names, from an over-emphatic Laurence Olivier to a magnificent Richard Burton. Unfortunately the virtuosity of their acting rarely serves to strengthen the play. All too often an actor celebrity is chosen to interpret ‘the celebrity of stage roles’, Hamlet.

One of the consequences is that the sexual reproval of his mother, the queen, sounds implausible and even misplaced. The raging thirst for action and paralysis brought about by the fear of failure - both so typical of young idealists – do not befit a man who could be either 35 or 45. This fact alone makes Kenneth Branagh’s film, for example, so problematic - not to mention his own acting, however brilliantly all the others around him perform.    

My proposition is that Hamlet (and so also Ophelia) is on the threshold of adulthood. Romeo and Juliet were young adolescents, victims of their very first and so unbridled puppy love. They do predict the opposition of their families, and of course they are also aware of the vendetta between those two families, but they have no real understanding of the details, the effects, the history, the politics of power and of the implications behind all this. Their interest is purely romantic; their one objective, to flee into each others’ arms.

Hamlet, however, is old and shrewd enough to see the tribulations and power struggles. He, the brilliant student, has the intelligence to detect Machiavellianism. But he still also has the youthful craving for purity to resist that Machiavellianism from the outset and in principle. He is driven by the high-flown Sturm und Drang of every brand-new generation but, unlike Romeo and Juliet, he is all too well aware of the consequences of his actions. The doubt which tears him apart in the process, degenerates into despair and paralysis, and gradually leads to even greater despair and paralysis. His motivation is not romantically clear, as with Romeo and Juliet, but confusingly multifaceted. Indignation, fear, overconfidence, impotence, self-hatred… All these feelings struggle to gain the upper hand. Hamlet is both melancholic and cynical - prematurely old on two counts. Only his verbal energy continues to sparkle undiminished.

Only someone who has strength of mind but is youthful in appearance, and who is frailer than the adults he blames for having lost their purity, can embody this Hamlet with credibility.

Ersatz patricide

For me there are two other important parallel threads running through the play. In terms of terminology, they derive from modern psychology, but in essence they are universal and so very much present in Shakespeare.

The first thread is Freudian and used in many a production. Roughly it can be summed up as follows. Hamlet can no longer commit his patricide himself. In fact, after the death of his father he has to stand by and watch his mother choose not him, her son, but a ‘new’ father, Claudius, who is moreover his uncle on his father’s side, so a totally Ersatz father. Consequently, what is painfully confusing for Hamlet is that he has to commit his patricide – that is to say, achieve adulthood, become a ‘man’ — by murdering the murderer of his real father.

Through the murder of King Hamlet (Hamlet senior) uncle Claudius twice played a nasty trick on his young nephew. He prevented Hamlet committing that murder himself, symbolically I mean. But he also saddled Hamlet with the obligation to take revenge on a man who now lives and sleeps with his mother, while he is tied by blood to himself and to his real father. So, in the Freudian sense, the mother really betrays her son twice. A son strives for the love of his mother on every level.  That makes Hamlet’s real father Hamlet’s first love rival. That father has now been removed, but to the uncle’s advantage rather than the son’s. For inveterate Freudians this means an additional smouldering family entanglement, riddled with jealousy, rejection and humiliation and intensified by the denial of some of the most secret desires, such as sexually-tinged jealousy of his own begetter. All right, this may be a very simplistic interpretation of Freud, but that’s what it actually boils down to.

All this explains the disgust but also the ferocity with which Hamlet reproaches his mother for her lasciviousness and incest. That misogynous aversion extends to Ophelia, the moment she too ‘betrays’ him, under pressure from none other than her own father, Polonius. (Translator Willy Courteaux gives a credible explanation of that extension of the aversion in his, as always, excellent introduction to Hamlet.)

Organ inferiority  

As well as the Freudian thread, I would also like to exploit a second psychological one, which we owe to Alfred Adler, ‘the third forefather of psychoanalysis’. He developed the concept of the inferiority complex. Wikipedia explains it as follows: “An inferiority complex, a term coined to indicate a lack of covert self-esteem, is a behaviour that is displayed through a lack of self-worth, an increase of doubt and uncertainty, and feeling of not measuring up to society's standards.” Adler also believed that the strongest human motivation is the desire for ‘superiority’.

Furthermore, Adler coined the term ‘organ inferiority’, which claims that adolescents and young adults feel humiliated by the strength and even the sheer physical size of adults, particularly where their private parts are concerned.  Children look with disgust, awe and envy at their plump begetters, endowed as they are with grotesque bellies and breasts, buttocks and balls. 

In my opinion these two psychological threads together, Freud’s and Adler’s, bring to light a component that is an inextricable part of the makeup of every juvenile, and certainly Hamlet: the doubt about his identity and his abilities, and in particular the sexual side of that. Twixt fear and longing the undeveloped mind is above all ambiguous and uncomfortable about its own ambiguity. Self-hatred and overestimation of one’s powers are always lurking and magnifying each other. A perpetuum mobile of frustration with oneself and of contempt for the world. The sense of humiliation is still driven by the anger at not being able to end it. And the sense of a lack of one’s own ‘purity’ only intensifies the cry for purity. 

Hamlet’s tormented monologues therefore contain both a cri de coeur and an exorcism. An indictment of all injustice, certainly – but also an exorcism of his own wretchedness. If they do not accuse him of direct complicity, then at least of guilt by default. An ego that doubts its ego is the first to call all the others to order.  But in the meantime his own deeds consist mainly of words, and not of deeds.

To use all the above to our advantage I see our Hamlet best played by Abke Haring. Her androgyny, her vulnerability, her inner strength - they will only magnify this phantasmagoria of being, of seeing and being, this mirrored hall of passion and paranoia.

Note that Abke Haring will not be playing a princess who is pretending to be a prince. No, she has to play a young man, just as all female roles were played by boys at the time of Shakespeare - not as transvestites, but as actors who embodied women. So, too, Abke must embody a prince. 

Choosing a female actor as Hamlet is nothing new. Indeed there is a long tradition of doing just that. Usually it was a commercial and artistic gimmick. (“Come and see! Sarah Bernhardt is playing Hamlet!” She is said to have brought the house down.)

Sometimes it was straight transvestism, as in the case of Asta Nielsen, international star of the silent film. In her case the production was based on a study that appeared around 1910, which claimed that the historical Hamlet was actually a princess, who for that reason could not reign and consequently went mad, etc. Of course in the film version Asta/Hamlet has a full-blown affair with Horatio, including the languorous looks and love-sick pout for which Nielsen became so famous, even in the poems of Paul van Ostaijen.

What we do has nothing to do with the above options and stars. It is an intrinsic choice. Abke’s androgyny will not only colour her own character, she will also colour and in my opinion intensify the bond with Ophelia and with the queen, Hamlet’s mother - the other two women in the play. “Get thee to a nunnery!” and “What woman, what mother behaves so whorishly as you?” From the mouth of an androgynous prince those women-unfriendly jibes will take on a double meaning. Self-hated shines through the misogyny. I believe casting Abke Haring as Hamlet opens up an unsuspected dramatic and psychological horizon.

Tom Lanoye