Cuts and shurgs: observations on RSC 2008 Hamlet

 I finally saw the Royal Shakespeare Company's (RSC) 2008 stage of Hamlet, which is available in full online free (completely legal) here.  Nearly all productions of Hamlet make extensive cuts because the full play would run around 4 hours. That's what Kenneth Branagh aimed for with his film version. The run time for this one is just over 3, and like many adaptations it cuts the appearance of  Fortinbras at the end. 

This is meant as a video version of a stage productions, so it is generally limited to what you would see on a stage without film enhancements. The notable exception to that is the use of camera views that I believe was used to replace the effect the live production had achieved in placing a large mirror in front of the audience. That generally works well, particularly as reference to ubiquitous CCTV cameras that would be familiar to people around London (making their way in NYC now, as well). 

Some reviewers didn't care for another camera effect: that of actors addressing it directly when speaking some of the lines, particularly Hamlet for some of his soliloquies. I remember having the same reaction many years ago when watching a BBC performance of The Merchant of Venice in a Shakespeare class in college. Then I found it distracting, though not so much here. I believe that the reason why we find it jarring on a screen is that the close-up makes it seem rather like breaking the frame of the actors within a play when they come face-to-face (as if on a video call) with us. When you would see it on the stage, it would be far less intrusive because of the physical distance between the performer and the audience. 

David Tennant is engaging with some of the same mannerisms he brings to the the Doctor's character, though without the sideburns. I found some of the mad antics a bit much. (Admission of personal bias: I'm give to understatement rather than overstatement and do read Hamlet as an introverted intellectual.)  They must have been the  director's idea, as Ophelia did the same kind of thing. 

I didn't really care much for Ophelia who didn't get to convey any emotion other than hysteria and madness. When calm, she was rather wooden. As for stripping down  to her underwear for her madness, some pointed out that it was inconsistent with the description of her drowning, which is attributed to the weight of her water-logged clothes. That's a good point.  

I can think of two possible defenses for the direction here, though I wouldn't have gone that route myself. One is that Ophelia's mad entrance is described as entering with her down. For Shakespeare's audience, that would have been seen as a state of undress, as a properly put together young lady would have her hair contained. To achieve that in modern terms, the hair alone wouldn't cut it. Two: in King Lear, when Edgar assumes madness, he strips off his clothes, so that typical mad behavior in Shakespeare.

 I didn't like the way the Mousetrap scene was done -- overly crude and in-your-face kind of obvious. I suppose they thought otherwise the Shakespearian double entendres would just fly over the audience's head.  There is also the bit of anachronism of male actors for female roles when the play is set in modern times, though I suppose that may be meant to contrast the more realistic contemporary look of the production we are watching with the artifice of the players' performance.

One thing that I liked in  that scene was the transference for the cameras. Hamlet rebels against being caught by the cameras and then uses one himself in recording the play and catching Claudius' reaction. 

The king's reaction is much calmer in this production than the way it comes across in other. He carries a lantern over to Hamlet and shows him with a shake of the head that he knows that Hamlet knows, and he's letting him know that he knows. That may be going just a bit far, given that Claudius resumes the pose of liking Hamlet for the fencing match, and why would Hamlet go along knowing that he knows that he knows?

What I liked in the last scene was a kind of closing the circle visual. The cut Hamlet put into his own hand after speaking with the ghost, remains a reminder for a while with a bandage. At the end he transfers the same cut -- also on the left hand -- to Claudius. That makes the actor's controversial shrug a bit more understandable, as he is already poisoned. 

As we don't have the textual ending of Fortinbras, the play ends with Horatio's emotional farewell to his friend, who has died in his arms. That makes it a rather more intimate death than one that would get the royal honors that Fortinbras said he would bestow on the prince of Denmark. 

Overall: I wouldn't go so far as some who claim this is the definitive Hamlet for the 21st century, but it's one that most people would probably enjoy watching.  I suppose that each generation has to endure assumptions about how Hamlet is to be made accessible to them. At least this one doesn't open with a summation like Laurence Olivier's opening to his film version: "This is the story of a man who could not make up his mind." 

Speaking of how the generations reinterpret Shakespeare's play, you can watch a sort of companion to the production video, Tennant's exploration of the play's enduring popularity also available online  (note the video is just a tad out of sync).

The most striking thing for me in that video was seeing the rare first editions of Shakespeare housed in the British Library handled  so casually -- no gloves. When I had to use books in the New York Public Library's Arents Tobacco Collection, I had to be more careful with an Oscar Wilde typescript.  But I was a mere student at the time, and one of my Grad Center professors was a disciple of  Stephen Greenblatt.

Back then New Historicism was still, well, new. Greenblatt's appearance in this video indicates that his approach is not quite mainstream.  Shakespeare is subjected to biographical details inserted into understanding his plays with the Hamnet/ Hamlet connection. The name of Shakespeare's son who died in childhood was Hamnet, which does sound an awful lot like Hamlet, but is not quite the same. It's hard to hear the difference  in the video which accepts the connection as a given. It's Greenblatt's argument in "The Death of Hamnet and the Making of Hamlet." Some of the argument is rather forced, but I won't get into all of that here.

What are little girls made of?

 The full title of Lise Eliot’s book really explains her intent: Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow Into TroublesomeGaps -- And What We Can Do About It. The way it is structured, she goes through the differences that are “hard-wired” or innate and how the difference set by nature tend to get exaggerated by the nurture effect. Each descriptive section is followed by a prescriptive list of things to do to counteract some of those stereotyped paths that can prove detrimental to both boys and girls.

In her introduction, Eliot asserts that the two sexes do not originate on different planets but on neighboring states: “’Men are from North Dakota, women are from South Dakota.’” The fact is that while “the mean male and female” ranks are not all that far apart, though “it’s only the extremes that make headlines.” Perhaps in the romantic spirit of vive la difference, most of what gets published about men and women highlights points of divergence beginning in childhood or even in the womb.

This book also ends up highlighting differences, though it does point out that some of them are completely due to parental and other response to a baby’s sex. Dress a baby in a pink outfit, and people will comment on how dainty, delicate, and pretty she is. Dress the child in blue, and you will hear altogether different types of comments. Experiments show people respond to the clothes cues rather than the child itself, for they do the same when the clothes are deliberately switched. Parents, of course, have the greatest influence on gender expectations, and already from the time a baby crawls, the boy is expected to be capable of greater challenges in slope than the girl (see pp. 66-67).


However, due to the fact that girls do mature somewhat faster, some parents feel their boys could be at a disadvantage in school with girls who have greater verbal development. Consequently, boys are more often selected by parents to start school later in the practice called redshirting.

In fact, school principals and teachers often promote redshirting for girls, as well, either by advising parents of children near the cut off dates to hold the child back for the sake of better competitive advantage or by forcing the effect on everyone by arbitrarily moving up the cut off date, say from December to mid-October or even September. Despite their claims of expertise, they could be setting people on the wrong track:

Whatever the motives, most research finds the practice of redshirting misguided. Although the older children in a class may have a modest advantage in kindergarten and the first few grades, their academic boost typically fades by later elementary school. There is also some evidence that children who were held back are more vulnerable to risk taking and other emotional and behavioral problems when they reach adolescence of their classmates.

Aside from that, it is possible that their on par performance that is due to being older than their classmates could conceal the fact that they have “true development delays or learning disabilities” that are better addressed earlier than later (144-145).


Eliot does take veer off a bit at times , as she seems to have it in for Leonard Sax.  Sax advocates educating boys and girls in separate schools, a concept that she devotes quite a number of pages to in arguing against it. Though she admits that boys do prove more aggressive and more competitive than girls and that they avoid playing together through most of the elementary school years, she maintains that they should work together in school in the same classrooms. The way she dismisses the records of success for women who have gone to all female schools is by saying that they were atypical – the best and the brightest in their day. Of course, once you start analyzing results in that way, you can dismiss the findings of many studies, including many of the ones Eliot refers to in her own arguments.



My particular greater concern here would be that the book’s premise can be turned on its head by those who would characterize themselves as conservative or “traditional.” Wouldn’t they be able to say that what her prescriptions demand is for people to work against the pink princesses and dolls for girls and superhero and construction toys for boys that they would naturally go for? That is exactly the type of thinking that gave rise to the Lego line “for girl,” which I discussed in a blog post elsewhere.  While I was reading Eliot’s descriptions of how girls play, it sounded to me like a corroboration of (should I say justification?) for Lego’s assessment that girls would not care to build unless they have dolls and accessories and feminine colors to work with.


That brings me to an even more fundamental question is something that Eliot merely touched on but didn’t really explore: the fact that the genders seem to have grown more polarized over the past few decades – just when you would think progress would have narrowed the gap. That is why people are so disappointed in seeing Lego tacitly characterize the standard sets as for boys. The pink bricks and “Friends” sets are supposed to be a godsend for girls who are assumed to otherwise never build once they outgrow the Duplo sets. Even things that were considered gender neutral now have to be labeled as either blue or pink. Based on the advertising and habits of children in the 1980s, people actually did not box boys and girls into such rigid categories as much then as they do now. I would really like to see when and why the road of girlhood started to curve back toward the 1950s .