Hi there! (I love this blog btw, God bless) I'm not an opera expert, hence the anon, but a theatre buff who would very much like to hear your thoughts on Brett Dean's Hamlet if you feel like it ...
Greetings, Anon! Thank you for the compliment on my blog, and thanks for sending me a question! I like to chat and discuss stuff.
I’m not sure if you’ve seen Brett Dean’s Hamlet or not so I am not sure how much context I need to give for my remarks. I will take a stab at this, though.
The first thing I’d observe about Dean’s Hamlet is that it assumes its audience is already very familiar with the play. I think it’s watchable even if you do not know the play well, but sort of like Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, it is aimed at people who have probably read the play in school and seen multiple stage performances and/or movie adaptations of it, and who may be able to quote some of the more famous lines from memory. Hamlet is one of the most performed and most adapted pieces of theater in the world; Brett Dean and the librettist Matthew Jocelyn are well aware of that, and do not respond by trying to make the ultimate, most perfect adaptation, but rather by making something new yet recognizable, with plenty of in-jokes.
As you may know, they sort of put the text(s) through a blender. Many famous lines and familiar characters were completely cut out; other lines were re-ordered and re-assigned. A chorus, nonexistent in the Shakespeare play, was added; as well as making up the court of Elsinore, it functions like a classic Greek chorus, commenting on and amplifying the action, and also like an extension of the orchestra, sometimes adding eerie vocal effects to the overall tapestry of sound in the auditorium. The roles of Horatio and Marcellus are greatly reduced in the Dean/Jocelyn Hamlet while the presence of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is increased in proportion to (what is left of) the rest of the play.
Probably my favorite thing about the Dean/Jocelyn adaptation of Hamlet is the fact that they deliberately selected bits and pieces of language from all three of the textual witnesses, including the so-called “bad quarto.” To back up and explain a little bit (with apologies if you know this stuff already): there is no one text of Hamlet. As with all the rest of Shakespeare’s plays, we have no manuscript in Shakespeare’s hand. What we have are various early printed editions of Shakespeare’s plays that could plausibly, in one way or another, have derived from a manuscript (or multiple manuscripts!) written by Shakespeare. In the case of Hamlet, there’s the 1603 quarto edition (Q1), the 1604 quarto (Q2), and the version included in the 1623 First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays (F1). The texts of Q2 and F1 are largely similar to each other and most modern editions of Hamlet are based on a melding of them, but Q1 is substantially shorter than the other two texts, a couple of the characters have different names, and some of the speeches are chopped up in ways that seem clearly erroneous (Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” speech is notoriously muddled in Q1). Thus Q1 has come to be known as a “bad quarto” and has traditionally been disparaged and discarded by editors trying to piece together an authoritatively Shakespearean version of Hamlet.
There are various theories of how Q1 came to be so “bad.” I did my undergraduate thesis on the so-called “bad quarto” of Romeo and Juliet, so I spent a few months reading as much scholarship on the “bad quartos” as I could get my hands on. Some of the “bad quarto” theories are kind of crackpot. The generally-accepted explanation for how these texts came into existence, though, is piracy by memorial reconstruction: the idea is that a couple of actors in Shakespeare’s company would go to a printer and recite as much of the play as they could from memory. They would report their own parts pretty reliably, and they would have fair-to-good recall of other actors’ lines from the scenes they were in, but their recall would degrade for scenes where they were offstage. Moreover, cuts and other changes to the text might have been made in the theater in the process of bringing the play to the stage; these would be reflected in the “bad quarto” but not in other versions of the text deriving more directly from a manuscript penned by Shakespeare. On the plus side, the actors would sometimes supply stage directions in the “bad quartos” that were never specified in other textual witnesses, giving us some valuable clues about the action Shakespeare’s original audiences might actually have seen on the stage.
In recent years, there’s been some interest in reviving the so-called “bad quartos” as performance texts, with an eye towards accessing more “theatrical” versions of Shakespeare’s plays: my interest in the “bad quartos” was first hooked when I met a scholar of early modern performance studies who was directing a “bad quarto” performance of Romeo and Juliet at Oxford in the late ′90s. After finishing my Romeo and Juliet undergrad thesis, I headed off to a graduate program known for its strengths in textual studies, intending to continue in this academic vein. I actually ended up changing fields for my dissertation but I took enough graduate coursework in bibliography, textual criticism, and scholarly editing to achieve geekgasm when Dean and Jocelyn had characters alternately singing “solid” and “sullied”—a reference to a notorious editorial crux in Hamlet, one of the most famous scholarly editing problems of all time. (Here is just one person’s take on the matter.) I really enjoyed the fact that they not only used bits and pieces of Hamlet Q1 on an equal footing with pieces of Q2 and F1 but also took the spirit of a “theatrical” reading of the bad quartos as justification for their adaptation: in cutting and reordering the Hamlet scripts and reassigning many words to other characters, they were not doing anything that Shakespeare’s own company of actors didn’t do. (They did a lot more of it, though!)
Witty and intriguing little turns in the Dean/Jocelyn adaptation flew by too quickly for me to remember them all, but I remember having the impression that their version of Hamlet did a number of things to foreground the theatrical themes of the play. For instance, the whole episode of Hamlet’s trip to England was cut, but the play-within-a-play received lavish attention. (Amber Treadway composed an excellent tweet on “the most meta players scene ever.”) One tiny detail that I especially liked: Hamlet’s line “Do not saw the air too much with your hand,” from his instructions to the players, was relocated to the final duel, where it became a taunt from Hamlet to Laertes, calling attention to the aesthetic aspect of Laertes’ performance as a fencer.
By reducing the cast of soloists, minimizing some of the secondary roles, and completely cutting out all references to the Norwegian threat to the Danish state, Dean and Jocelyn shaped their version of Hamlet into a drama of two interlinked families. Hamlet, the Ghost, Claudius, and Gertrude make up one of the families; Polonius, Laertes, and Ophelia make up the other; and the two are linked by Hamlet and Ophelia’s broken romance. This adaptation foregrounds Gertrude’s tenderness towards Ophelia and Laertes; up until Hamlet gave them reasons to hate him, after all, Gertrude was planning and assuming that she would soon welcome them as new relatives by marriage. Throughout the Glyndebourne staging directed by Neil Armfield, Gertrude can frequently be seen literally reaching out to other characters, touching and caressing them; she is, in this version, a dedicated peacemaker, striving—up until the moment of her own poisoning, when she realizes that her husband intends to kill her son—to hold the court together.
Another interesting presence in this version was the triply-cast role of the ghost of old Hamlet, the first player, and the gravedigger, played memorably by Sir John Tomlinson for the premiere production. I liked the fact that the opera made use of role doubling, a longstanding theatrical practice that is believed to have been used by Shakespeare’s acting company. Besides being one of the elements that made the opera feel very “theatrical” to me, it also allowed the ghost of Hamlet’s father to sort of implicitly or symbolically stick around as an ally to Hamlet. The roles of the first player and the gravedigger stand outside the two-family structure I outlined above, but they fit into another structure of Dean’s Hamlet: Team Hamlet vs. Team Claudius. As Hamlet’s bonds with his immediate family and his girlfriend are rapidly eroded, he turns to figures like Horatio, Marcellus, the players, and the gravedigger for trustworthy information and companionship. As I already mentioned, the roles of Horatio and Marcellus are minimized in this adaptation, so the roles of the first player and the gravedigger take on proportionally greater importance (even though their lines are also reduced).
Those are my thoughts on Brett Dean’s Hamlet, or at least, as many thoughts as I can write up in an evening. Feel free to send me your thoughts too, or ask follow-up questions!
