Shakespeare Magazine 14

shakespeare 

At last! A magazine with all the Will in the world 

FREE 

Issue 14 

Who the 

Hell is 

Hamlet?

“...the readiness is all.” — Hamlet V.2 

Learn more at shakespeare300.com

Welcome 

Welcome 

Photo: David Hammonds 

to Issue 14 of Shakespeare Magazine 

When I decided to devote an entire issue of Shakespeare Magazine 

to Hamlet, I assumed it would be a relatively straightforward process. 

After all, lots of people have lots of interesting things to say about this 

play and this character – all I had to do was fling it on the page. 

What I didn’t bargain for, but which in retrospect seems all too 

obviously predictable – is that in the process I would become Hamlet. 

I hesitated, I prevaricated, I dithered. I underthought things that 

required a good deal of thinking, and I overthought things that 

didn’t require any thinking at all. I prepared reams of interview 

questions, and them scrapped them. I wrote thousands of words and 

then chucked them in the bin. I remembered things – like the time 

I wrote and acted in a Hamlet spoof at school, over 30 years ago, in 

part inspired by an edgy production of the play that wowed me at 

Southport Arts Centre. And then I realised that some of my memories 

were no longer trustworthy. 

I think perhaps my main point here is that we all think we know 

Hamlet like we know ourselves. But when we return to the text(s) there 

are always shocks, surprises and rude awakenings in store. 

And just like Hamlet, my dithering at last ended, I suddenly knew 

what had to be done, and the issue finally rocketed to its conclusion. 

It’s been an education, and the bodies that litter this particular stage 

are, thankfully, all metaphorical. Anyway, here it is. 

Thanks as ever, for your patience and support. 

Enjoy your magazine. 

Pat Reid, Founder & Editor 

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Issue 14 

Contents 

Who the 

Hell is 

Hamlet? 

Shakespeare Magazine 

Issue Fourteen 

July 2018 

Publisher 

JoAnn Markon 

Founder & Editor 

Pat Reid 

Art Editor 

Paul McIntyre 

Contributing Writers 

Samira Ahmed, Alice Barclay, 

Maddy Fry, Michael Goodman, 

Rhodri Lewis, Stewart Kenneth 

Moore, Clare Petre, Jen Richardson 

Photography 

Tim Gutt, Manuel Harlan, 

Jonathan Keenan, Francis Loney, 

Johan Persson, Bronwen Sharp, 

Julie Vrabelová 

Web Design 

David Hammonds 

Contact Us 

shakespearemag@outlook.com 

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facebook.com/ShakespeareMagazine 

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@UKShakespeare 

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www.shakespearemagazine.com 

Newsletter 

http://tinyletter.com/shakespearemag 

Donate 

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ShakespeareMagazine 

How Old is Hamlet? 6 

Hamlet is 30 years old – it says so in the text, right? Rhodri Lewis, author 

of Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness, explains why this is NOT the case. 

The Avenger 

Disassembled 14 

Maddy Fry savours the “intimacy 

and intensity” of Tom Hiddleston’s 

Hamlet at RADA. 

 

Soul-searching 

with Scott 20 

Clare Petre recounts the 

shatteringly cathartic experience 

of Andrew Scott’s Hamlet. 

 

4 SHAKESPEARE magazine

Contents 

Time Travelling 

with Ophelia 26 

 

 

Daisy Ridley’s Hamlet spin-off. 

 

Why do Women 

Love Hamlet? 32 

Samira Ahmed argues that there 

are “Three Ages of Hamlet” for the 

women fascinated by the Prince. 

 

Victorian Hamlet 

Illustration 38 

Michael Goodman picks his Hamlet 

favourites from the Victorian 

Illustrated Shakespeare Archive. 

 

How’s your 

Father? 48 

Jen Richardson meets Gyles 

 

family production of Hamlet. 

 

I Capture 

the Castle 56 

Pat Reid takes a trip to Denmark 

to visit Hamlet’s historic home, the 

mighty Kronborg Castle. 

 

Hamlet in the heat 

of the Night 60 

Alice Barclay makes Hamlet the 

people’s play on a sweltering 

summer’s evening in Bristol. 

 

SHAKESPEARE magazine 5

How Old is Hamlet? 

Artwork for 

the National 

Theatre’s 2015 

Hamlet (starring 

Benedict 

Cumberbatch) 

featuring the 

play’s characters 

as children. 

How Old is 

Hamlet? 

It’s a question every reader of Hamlet has found 

themselves asking. And one that Professor 

Rhodri Lewis has addressed in his recent major 

work Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness. 

6 shakespeare magazine

How Old is Hamlet? 

“In addition to its role in signifying mourning, 

black is also the academic colour” 

In writing Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness, 

one of the central planks of my argument 

is that Prince Hamlet is youthful and a 

university student. Approaching Hamlet 

– and Hamlet – from this perspective 

helped me to make a series of claims about 

what I take to be Shakespeare’s attitudes 

to the humanistic doctrines of his era 

(Hamlet never stops grappling with, and 

can never quite escape from, the “saws 

and observations” of his Wittenberg education), 

and about how Shakespeare uses his dramatic art 

both to critique them and to move beyond them. 

Hamlet’s youth also offers a plausible explanation 

for the decision of the Danish court to elect 

Claudius its monarch in succession to Old Hamlet: 

Hamlet is on the way to full manhood, but is not 

there yet. Claudius kills Old Hamlet shortly after 

Hamlet has left Denmark for the new academic 

year in Wittenberg, juxtaposing his presence (in 

all senses of the term) with his nephew’s absence. 

“Young Hamlet” is still learning about himself and 

the world around him; his time will come. 

A peculiarity of writing books for university 

presses is the process of peer review. Your 

manuscript is handed by the press to two or 

perhaps three anonymous experts, who then 

write reports in which they submit your work to 

thoroughgoing scrutiny. Even when agreeing in 

their recommendations (from “publish as it stands” 

to “over my dead body”), these reports frequently 

differ so much from one another that you can begin 

to doubt whether their writers were reading the 

same things; as an author, the best you can hope 

for is that what you’ve written will be approached 

intelligently and with an open mind. 

One of the few topics on which the anonymous 

reviewers of my manuscript agreed with each other 

was that as I had made a lot of Hamlet’s youth 

and student status, I couldn’t sidestep the fact 

that, in the Graveyard scene, we are told pretty 

unambiguously that he is thirty. So it was that I 

decided to write an appendix tackling the question 

of exactly how old Hamlet is supposed to be. 

Writing it turned out to be more difficult, more 

interesting, and much more enjoyable than I had 

anticipated: the action of the play not only enables 

us to say some concrete things about Hamlet’s 

age, but also allows us to witness Shakespeare’s 

engagement with what, in the years around 1600, 

was the new language of numbers. Familiar though 

Hamlet is to all of us, and voluminous though the 

literature on it has become, writing my book led 

me to the conclusion that we have only begun to 

scratch the surface. 

Hamlet is described on several occasions as 

“young”; he is roughly the same age as Fortinbras, 

Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern; he seems to be 

a little younger than Horatio and Laertes; he is a 

student at Wittenberg; he thinks and speaks like 

one in the midst of a humanistic education. And yet 

his exchange with the Gravedigger at the beginning 

of Act 5 appears, anomalously but unambiguously, 

to suggest that he is thirty years old. However, the 

age given in the graveyard scene does not stand 

up to scrutiny: it emerges from a textual crux, is 

at variance with the manifest signs of Hamlet’s 

age given elsewhere in the play, and relies on an 

authority – the Gravedigger – whose arithmetical 

skills are very much open to question. I also suggest 

that thinking about Hamlet’s age in terms of the 

number of years he might have been on the earth is 

misconceived. 

After satisfying himself that the Ghost is not 

purely a figment of Marcellus and Barnardo’s 

imaginations, Horatio decrees that they should 

impart what they “have seen tonight / Unto 

young Hamlet” (1.1.174-75). “Young” here 

differentiates the son from his father: deutero- 

Hamlet, Hamlet Junior, Hamlet the Younger. But 

it is also the adjective with which Shakespeare 

chooses to introduce his disaffected prince, and 

reveals something not only about his royal status 

but about his quality of being. Versions of it 

reappear frequently throughout the play. Claudius 

counsels Hamlet that his enduring display of grief 



“Hamlet’s desire to return to his studies at 

Wittenberg tells us that he is a teenager” 

Benedict 

Cumberbatch 

played the role 

of Hamlet at 

the age of 39, 

having just 

become a 

father for the 

 

for his father is “unmanly” (1.2.84), a term that is 

normative rather descriptive, but whose persuasive 

force depends on Hamlet aspiring to, rather than 

already having attained, the condition of manliness; 

Laertes thinks of Hamlet as “A violet in the youth of 

primy nature” (1.3.7); the Ghost tells Hamlet that 

if it were to describe the afterlife in detail, the effect 

would be to “freeze thy young blood” (1.5.16), and 

addresses him as a “noble youth” (1.5.38); Claudius 

turns to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern because 

they are “of so young days brought up with him, / 

And with so neighbour’d to his youth and haviour” 

(2.2.11-12); the fencing match between Hamlet 

and “young Laertes” (4.5.101; cf. 5.1.217) is framed 

with some care as a contest of “youth” (4.7.72-80). 

One might go on, but the point is incontestable: 

although it might be possible to dispute what 

“young” is intended to signify in the dramatic 

context of Hamlet, it definitively connotes more 

than Hamlet’s status as the son of a father with the 

same name. Before he has taken on the part of the 

forensic huntsman, tracking and seeking to expose 

his uncle’s guilt, Hamlet himself acknowledges his 

resemblance to a “rascal”, or juvenile deer (2.2.562). 

On the basis that Hamlet and Fortinbras are 

so obviously set in counterpoint to one another, 

to say nothing of the fact Fortinbras’s father was 

killed on the day Hamlet was born (5.1.139-40), we 

can surmise that Hamlet is about the same age as 

Fortinbras; either a little older than him, or a little 

younger. If the former, then no more than nine 

months so. As the frustrated son of an overthrown 

monarch, Hamlet sees his own character 

illuminated by the bold example of his Norwegian 

peer. So much so that his final soliloquy projects 

his own likeness onto this would-be conqueror 

of Denmark, envisaging him as “a delicate and 

tender prince” (4.4.48); Fortinbras will return the 

compliment by imagining the dead Hamlet as a 

soldier. In fact, their tender years are all they have 

in common. 

Hamlet’s status as a student further asserts his 



youthfulness. Lawrence Stone’s statistical labours 

give a clear picture of when it was that early modern 

Englishmen went to university. For instance, the 

median age of matriculation at Oxford for the 

years 1600-02 was 17.1. Among the aristocracy 

and gentry it was substantially lower, at 15.9 years. 

Further, it was common for the well-educated 

sons of socially elevated families to enter university 

as young as eleven or twelve. A good example is 

Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton and 

the dedicatee of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis 

and Lucrece. Wriothesley went up to St. John’s 

College, Cambridge in 1585 at the age of twelve; 

he graduated before he turned sixteen in 1589, at 

which point he had already been admitted to Gray’s 

Inn. In a word, Hamlet’s desire to return to his 

studies at Wittenberg tells us that he is a teenager. 

To an audience of theatregoers or readers in late 

Elizabethan or early Jacobean London, it would 

have been starkly irregular for an aristocrat, let 

alone a member of the royalty, to have remained at 

university beyond the age of about twenty. 

Hamlet’s ambitious but frequently confused and 

incoherent mode of discourse sounds like that of 

an early modern university student. But as Barbara 

Everett has proposed, it might well be that he also 

looks like a student, or at least that he did so to 

Shakespeare’s earliest audiences: in addition to its 

role in signifying mourning, black is the academic 

colour. 

We come now to the encounter between Hamlet 

and the Gravedigger. Hamlet asks the Gravedigger 

when he began digging graves, and the following 

exchange ensues: 

Gravedigger: Of all the days i’th’ year I cam to’t that 

day that our Last King Hamlet o’ercame Fortinbras. 

Hamlet: How long is that since? 

Gravedigger: Cannot you tell that? Every fool can 

tell that. It was that very day that young Hamlet 

was born – he that is mad and sent into England. 

(5.1.139-44) 

From which we deduce that although the 

Gravedigger thinks that “every fool” knows when 

Old Hamlet defeated Old Fortinbras and Hamlet 

was born, Hamlet himself is less sure. After several 

lines in which the Gravedigger works hard to evade 

the questions he has been asked by and about 

“young Hamlet”, he steers the conversation back to 

the ground beneath their feet: 

Gravedigger: I have been sexton here, man and boy, 

thirty years. 

Hamlet: How long will a man lie i’th’ earth ere he 

rot? 

Gravedigger: Faith, if a be not rotten before a die 

... a will last you some eight year or nine year. 

(5.1.156-62). 

On the face of it, this is open and shut. The 

gravedigger has been at his trade (i.e., a sexton) for 

thirty years. Hamlet is therefore thirty years old, 

however out of keeping that might seem with the 

rest of the play. There are, however, both textual and 

interpretative grounds to doubt this reading, and to 

stick with our inference that Hamlet the student is a 

teenager. 

The textual crux first. As many readers of 

Shakespeare Magazine will be aware, there are 

two authoritative versions of the play. One is the 

1604/05 Second Quarto (Q2), the other is the 

1623 First Folio. Only Q2 supports the reading of 

the text given above. On the question of how long 

the Gravedigger had been at his work in Denmark, 

the Folio (TLN 3351-52) has him say “I have 

been sixeteene heere, man and Boy thirty yeares”. 

The reading is grammatically challenging, but 

offers a very different picture of Hamlet’s age. The 

Gravedigger has been “heere” (qua Denmark and/ 

or his graveyard – he is being willfully ambiguous) 

for sixteen years, and has been “man and Boy thirty 

yeares”. On this account, it is the Gravedigger who 

is thirty years old, while Hamlet is only sixteen. 

Q2 has traditionally been preferred, on account 

both of its grammatical simplicity and of what the 

Gravedigger reveals about a disarticulated skull that 

has caught his attention: “Here’s a skull now hath 

lien you i’th’ earth three and twenty years” (5.1.166- 

68). On being pressed, the Gravedigger discloses 

that “This same skull, sir, was Yorick’s skull, the 

King’s jester” (5.1.175-77). As Hamlet goes on to 

recall the joyful times he had spent with Yorick as a 

child and as Yorick died twenty-three years ago, the 

textual logic runs smoothly: Hamlet must be thirty 

years old, and the Folio reading a corruption of Q2, 

which spells sexton “sexten”. The more so because 

the thirty years of Hamlet’s life echo the thirty years 



Left: Naeem Hayat, one of the young 

actors who portrayed Hamlet in the 

epic Globe to Globe production. 

Right: Maxine Peake’s Hamlet was 

full of adolescent energy – although 

she was aged 40 at the time. 

that the Player King and Queen have been married 

(3.2.150-55). Even “unedited” texts of Hamlet 

based on the Folio emend it. 

If one sticks with the mortal remains of Yorick, 

things quickly become more complicated. Putting 

to one side the question of why the Gravedigger has 

unearthed his skull (has it been dug up accidentally 

or on purpose? Where is the rest of him? And how, 

with human remains apparently littered around 

him, can he be sure that the skull in question 

belonged to Yorick?), a twenty-three-year-old corpse 

should on the Gravedigger’s own account long ago 

have become a skeleton: it has been in the ground 

for fourteen or fifteen years more than the eight 

or nine he specifies for complete decomposition. 

And yet, Yorick’s skull has the rankly sweet odour 

of human decay. “My gorge rises at it” (5.1.181-82) 

might just about be understood as an expression of 

metaphysical nausea at handling the skull beneath 

the skin of a loved one, but the gross physicality of 

the matter is soon beyond doubt: 

Hamlet: Prithee, Horatio, tell me one thing. 

Horatio: What’s that, my lord? 

Hamlet: Dost thou think Alexander looked o’ this 

fashion i’th’ earth? 

Horatio: E’en so. 

Hamlet: And smelt so? Pah! 

Horatio: E’en so, my lord. (5.1.189-95) 

This is a graveyard, not a charnel house in which 

the stink of a newly decomposing corpse might 

taint even the most desiccated bones. Yorick’s soft 

tissue has not yet fully putrefied. His body has been 

in the ground for nothing like as long as twentythree 

years. 

Before going any further, I want briefly to glance 

at the 1603 First Quarto (Q1) of the play. By virtue 

of so straightforwardly making both numerical 

and dramatic sense, it hints at something integral 

about the puzzles of Hamlet’s age and Yorick’s 

subterranean years in Q2 and the Folio. In Q1, the 

Gravedigger brandishes a skull: 



“The Earl of Southampton attended Cambridge 

at the age of 12, and graduated at 15” 

Look you, here’s a skull hath been here this dozen 

year – let me see, ay, ever since our last King Hamlet 

slew Fortenbrasse in combat – young Hamlet’s 

father, he that’s mad. 

The Gravedigger subsequently reveals that 

the skull belonged to Yorick; Hamlet laments the 

dead clown and the transitoriness of life, then 

recoils from the skull’s smell. There is no mention 

of Hamlet’s age (the problem of which is thereby 

resolved), and granting that “dozen” need only 

be the reflexively imprecise unit of measurement 

of one brought up in the duodecimal thinking of 

English tradition, there is no difficulty with Yorick’s 

skull still reeking of putrefaction. As these remarks 

imply, I take it that the textual discrepancies of 

Q1 are, as usual, those of simplification. Whoever 

was responsible for Q1 and however he or they 

produced it, the text fails to grasp that numerical 

incoherence is the point of Hamlet’s exchange with 

the Gravedigger. 

This incoherence has its root in Shakespeare’s 

awareness that the cultures of early modern England 

and Europe were not arithmetically advanced. 

Although arithmetic belonged to the quadrivium, 

facility in mental arithmetic (“reckoning”) was 

confined to merchants, sailors, soldiers, and other 

more or less artisanal trades. For the general 

populace, of high and low social status alike, the 

ability to compute more than the most elementary 

sums of addition and subtraction depended on the 

manipulation of physical counters on a board, and 

recording the results in Roman numerals. And yet 

at the same time, the impulse to exact measurement 

and quantification, and with it Arabic numerals, 

had already begun its transformation of western 

intellectual life. The dramatic potential of this state 

of affairs had long since been exploited by Marlowe 

(who frequently has his characters grasp at numbers 

in the ineffectual effort to show themselves in 

control of a situation), and Shakespeare was not 

slow to turn it to his own ends. As Edward Wilson- 

Lee has shown, he did so sustainedly in Troilus and 

Cressida. But perhaps the most obvious place to 

look in establishing this claim is The Winter’s Tale – 

where much is made of the discrepancy between the 

apparent precision of numeration and the vagueness 

with which numbers are, in reality, employed. A 

Clown enters, destined to be swindled by Autolycus. 

The Clown is attempting to figure out the value of 

the wool he has shorn from his 1500 sheep, but has 

to give up: “I cannot do’t without counters”. Like 

any good cony-catcher, Autolycus is as astute as 

he is opportunistic. He does not share the Clown’s 

difficulties, and sets to work on his mark. 

The exchange between Hamlet and the 

Gravedigger is animated by exactly the same 

cultural dynamics. Both characters enjoy feeling like 

the cleverest person in any conversation; both will 

say anything to ensure that they get to feel like this; 

in the culminating skirmish of their wits, neither 

shows more than the most rudimentary notion of 

how to compute numbers in general, or of how to 

use numbers to compute time in particular. 

Shakespeare quickly establishes that the 

Gravedigger, like Dogberry, is prone to detach 

verba from res for self-aggrandising rhetorical 

effect. In describing the prospect of Ophelia having 

drowned herself in self-defence, he asserts to his less 

loquacious partner that “It must be se offendendo” 

(5.1.9). He means the opposite (i.e., se defendendo), 

but the chance to accrue some Latinate cultural 

capital is too good to miss. A little later, he theorises 

that if a man goes to the water, “but the water come 

to him and drown him, he drowns not himself. 

Argal, he that is not guilty of his own death shortens 

not his own life” (5.2.18-20). For “argal”, he means 

to say ergo; he again seeks to repeat a Latin word 

that he has heard others use to impressive effect, but 

that he does not himself understand. 

Once Hamlet and Horatio arrive in the 

graveyard, Hamlet begins to speculate about the 

various disreputable parts that the people whose 

skulls are before them might formerly have played 

(“here’s fine revolution”). He and the Gravedigger 

then engage in some mutual chicanery about lying, 

lying down, and the business of digging graves. The 


“Adolescence is an age of apprenticeship in the 

world, of preparation for the challenges ahead” 

Gravedigger considers answering direct questions 

to be dull or otherwise beneath him. Hamlet sees 

his answers as a sort of “equivocation”, and informs 

Horatio that “these three years I have took note 

of it, the age is grown so picked [i.e. pernickety, 

nit-picking] that the toe of the peasant comes so 

near the heel of the courtier that he galls his kibe” 

(5.1.135-38); the sophistry of the lower orders is 

snapping at the heels of the nobility. Quite aside 

from the fact that Hamlet has spent most of the 

last year or two (or three) away from Elsinore 

as a student at Wittenberg, the most important 

aspect of this declaration is that his “three years” is 

meaningless as anything other than a placeholder 

for “of late” or “in recent history”. It operates on the 

same level as the “he walks for four hours together” 

(i.e., for long periods of time) that Polonius observes 

of Hamlet at 2.2.160, or Hamlet’s own assertion 

that not even “Two thousand souls and twenty 

thousand ducats” (i.e., a vast accumulation of 

manpower and money) would be enough to “debate 

the question of this straw” between Fortinbras and 

“the Polack” (4.4.25-26). “Three years” nevertheless 

has the feel of considered observation, and leads 

Hamlet to ask the Gravedigger how long he has 

been about his business. The Gravedigger seems 

no keener to answer this question than those that 

preceded it, but his response is historically specific: 

since the day on which Old Hamlet defeated Old 

Fortinbras and the younger Hamlet was born. 

Remarkably, even for one who has trouble 

reckoning with numbers, Hamlet shows no sign 

of being able to quantify when his father’s famous 

victory took place. Furthermore, the Gravedigger 

asserts that “every fool” knows this event to have 

been synchronous with Hamlet’s birth, and it 

beggars belief to suppose that Hamlet has never 

heard of this synchroneity for himself – especially as 

it makes his royal birth, like his royal patronymic, 

seem distinctly auspicious. The conclusion? Hamlet 

does not know how old he is. He immediately 

changes the subject when the Gravedigger’s 

comments threaten to lay this reality bare. The 

Gravedigger may or may not suspect that his highborn 

interlocutor is, in fact, the “young Hamlet” 

of whom he is now being pushed to speak, but 

must sense that the drift of their conversation 

towards matters of state puts him in danger. He 

needs to tread carefully, and once he guesses that his 

questioner has a limited facility with numbers, sees 

a gratifying way out. His gambit succeeds: unable to 

fathom what the Gravedigger says about his age and 

the duration of career, Hamlet counter-bluffs with 

a question about rates of bodily decay. From there, 

the Gravedigger – aided by the skull of Yorick (if, 

indeed, it is the skull of Yorick) – has no difficulty 

in redirecting their discussion to safer territory; in 

this case, to the conditions of mortality. In dwelling 

on Yorick and then discovering the death of 

Ophelia, Hamlet lets numbers go, but soon returns 

to them in belittling the “dozy arithmetic” of Osric’s 

memory. (As he does in claiming to understand 

the “odds” on his fencing match with Laertes.) 

The rub is that the Gravedigger is no better at the 

numerical computation of time than he is at Latin. 

His historical measurements of sixteen, thirty, and 

twenty-three years are empty signifiers – no more 

than words. They are self-contradictory, but he 

doesn’t care: he gets to put one over on someone 

of a far higher social and educational status than 

himself, and who has presumed to question his 

work. 

So, the numbers in the graveyard scene as 

recorded in Q2 and the Folio designedly do not 

compute. They represent the inability of Hamlet 

and of the Gravedigger to reckon with historical 

numbers in their heads, and the desire of both 

characters to look as if they can. Both “sexten/ 

sexton” (Q2) and “sixeteene” (the Folio) lend 

themselves to the incongruity of what follows (the 

more so as “sexten heere” and “sixteene yeare” are 

likely to have been all but homophonic in early 

modern English), but “sixeteene” seems to me the 

better reading. In clashing so directly with the 

twenty-three years that Yorick is supposed to have 

been in the ground, it allows the exchange to make 

even less sense, thereby capturing more of the 

Gravedigger’s pretentions and self-regard, and of 


In his midtwenties, 

Paapa Essiedu 

(pictured 

here in the 

Gravedigger 

scene) was a 

boyish-looking 

Hamlet for the 

RSC (2016-18). 

Hamlet’s inability to expose them. Folio “sixteene” 

as a corruption of Q2 “sexten” cannot be ruled 

out, but nor can the possibility that just as Q2 

stumbles over the nonsensical se offendendo, so it 

sees that sixteen (howsoever spelled) is contradicted 

by the reported death of Yorick, and emends it to 

“sexten”. On one level, a far from unreasonable 

procedure. Unfortunately, to convey the impression 

of nonsense is precisely Shakespeare’s point: Hamlet 

and the Gravedigger only feign to know what they 

are talking about. Their attempts to speak the new 

language of numbers offer a comically macabre 

miniature of the pretence, and frequent bravado, 

that drives life in Elsinore as a whole. Ever the 

radical egalitarian, Shakespeare reminds us that 

the willingness to mislead does not belong to the 

socially elevated orders alone; Denmark’s afflictions 

cannot be explained by looking in isolation at the 

vices, or even the crimes, of those who rule it. 

What does all of this tell us about Hamlet’s age? 

As his student status suggests, he is an adolescent. 

That is, an inhabitant of the intermediate category 

between boyhood and the assumption of adult 

masculinity; on the seven-stage model of human life 

familiar to Shakespeare, the period between one’s 

fourteenth and twenty-first birthdays. To venture 

anything more precise is guesswork or special 

pleading, and to maintain that he is thirty – perhaps 

with reference to the age of Richard Burbage when 

he played him for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men – 

is unsustainable. In As You Like It, Jaques portrays 

adolescence as the age of “the lover, / Sighing 

like a furnace, with a woeful ballad / Made to his 

mistress’ eyebrow”, and his depiction maps well 

onto Hamlet’s relationship with Ophelia – before 

and after she jilts him. But in most iterations, 

adolescence has a different aspect. It is an age of 

apprenticeship in the world, of preparation for the 

challenges ahead, and of fitting one’s understanding 

to one’s burgeoning physical and sexual potency; 

it is also marked by heat, impetuousness, and 

impatience. Ecce homo. 

 

Hamlet and the 

Vision of Darkness 

is published 

by Princeton 

University Press 

Buy it here 


Tom Hiddleston 

“Revenge is a fool’s errand,it gets you nothing. 

And Hamlet is really about that.The interesting 

thing about playing Hamlet is that as an actor 

one is so aware of the size of the play and the 

significance of the role… And then when you 

approach playing it, you have to meet the play 

head on and confront it.” 

Tom Hiddleston, speaking to Jenelle Riley for Variety 

14 shakespeare magazine

Tom Hiddleston 

Left: Hamlet (Tom Hiddleston). 

Below: Guildastern (Eleanor de Rohan), Horatia 

(Caroline Martin), Hamlet (Tom Hiddleston) 

Rosencrantz (Ayesha Antoine). 

The Avenger 

Disassembled 

If you were one of those lucky enough to get a 

ticket, director Kenneth Branagh’s massively 

over-subscribed RADA Hamlet starring Tom 

Hiddleston was all about the “intimacy and 

 

Words by Maddy Fry 

Photos by Johan Persson 



Left: Tom Hiddleston as Hamlet and 

Caroline Martin as Horatia. 

Above: Hamlet and King Claudius 

(Nicholas Farrell). 

Right: Hamlet battles Laertes (Irfan 

Shamji). 

Often I’ve found it comforting that 

most of Tom Hiddleston’s alter-egos 

seem incapable of making good 

choices. Whether it’s the PTSDinspired 

alcoholism of Freddie 

Page in The Deep Blue Sea or the Shakespearean 

sibling angst of the Marvel villain Loki, most of his 

characters are dogged by despair and failure. Even 

the nefarious Prince Hal of The Hollow Crown and 

the enigmatic Jonathan Pine at the centre of The 

Night Manager go through considerable travails 

before fulfilling their true purpose. It seemed apt 

that director Kenneth Branagh described the Prince 

of Denmark, that great monument to unfulfilled 

ambition, as “the role he was born to play.” 

For any devotee of Hiddleston, the chance to 

see him as Hamlet in a tiny central London theatre, 

nestled within the walls of his old drama school, 

felt akin to seeing The Beatles at the Cavern Club 

– the sense of a colossal talent scaled down while 

losing none of its potency. The result was little 

short of magical. 

Up close and personal in RADA’s 160-seat 

auditorium, the play opened with Hamlet sitting 

in near-darkness at the piano, crooning out a low 

wolf-howl of defeat. 

“And will he not come again?” our hero 

moaned, lamenting the absence of his father via the 

heart-wrenching cadence of “No, no he is dead. Go 

to thy deathbed...” 

Hamlet’s alienation and sense of betrayal over 

his mother’s hasty remarriage was, particularly for 


Tom Hiddleston 

those in the front row, frighteningly visceral, made 

manifest through kicking and screaming, spit, 

sweat and tears. In turn, Hiddleston masterfully 

depicted Hamlet’s inability to be what those 

around him needed – supportive, vengeful, loving, 

or even just consistent. 

Much has been made of how HiddleHamlet’s 

madness was undoubtedly feigned, yet the 

production’s great strength was the ease with 

which he switched to an all-too-real malice and 

vindictiveness. His brushing aside of Ophelia 

(Kathryn Wilder), triggering her fatal sense of 

abandonment, combined with his shrugging off the 

deaths of his informant friends, were shocking in 

their callousness. 

Yet one couldn’t shake the feeling that the 

derangement and loss of control in Hamlet’s eyes 

after murdering Polonius (Sean Foley) was genuine. 

The final duel resulting in the Prince’s death, barely 

two feet from my seat, was no less agonising for its 

portrayal of one man imprisoned by grief, with its 

destructive effects spiralling outwards. 

“More than anything, this Hamlet was about 

bereavement and family breakdown” 



“Hamlet’s alienation and sense of betrayal over his 

mother’s remarriage was frighteningly visceral” 

Above: The Ghost of Hamlet’s father, King 

Hamlet (Ansu Kabia). 

Right: Hamlet’s mother, Queen Gertrude 

(Lolita Chakrabarti). 

The threat of military conquest by Norway always 

hung in the foreground, but more than anything 

this Hamlet was about bereavement and family 

breakdown – the torment caused by our relatives 

moving on, even if we can’t, and robbing us of 

any space to heal. Proof, as though it were needed, 

that Shakespeare speaks to us for the moment we 

find ourselves in. Few plays have left me waking 

up sobbing the next day, but the rage, remorse and 

anguish on display still resonated, to the refrain 

throughout of “Go to thy deathbed...” 

Yet on the night, for those in attendance it was 

three hours of uncomplicated happiness. Watching 

Hiddleston seamlessly recite ‘To be, or not to be’ 

right in front of me was enough to make me feel 

thankful for my pulse. As much as I loved Benedict 

Cumberbatch’s 2015 turn at the Barbican, it 

couldn’t rival RADA’s Hamlet for intimacy and 

intensity of craftsmanship. 

 

This performance of Hamlet took place 

on 20 September 2017 at the Jerwood 

Vanbrugh Theatre, London 


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Andrew Scott 

“With Hamlet… we mourn 

our own tragedies as they are 

reflected on the stage” 

SOUL-SEARCHING 


Andrew Scott 

Behind the sofa: 

Andrew Scott’s Hamlet 

had a watchful quality, 

in a production where 

surveillance technology 

was given a notable 

supporting role. 

WITH SCOTT 

Irish actor Andrew Scott delivered an 

“exquisite, fragile” performance in Robert 

Icke’s “electrifying, heart-wrenching 

production” of Shakespeare’s Hamlet at 

London’s Harold Pinter Theatre. 

Words: Clare Petre Photos: Manuel Harlan 


Andrew Scott 

“Laertes became a man torn between his loyalty 

to the court and his desire to forgive Hamlet” 

Gertrude (Juliet 

Stevenson) 

attempts 

to restrain 

Laertes (Luke 

Thompson). 

irector Robert Icke’s exceptional 

contemporary interpretation of Shakespeare’s 

most famous play has had plenty of time to 

sit. Indeed, London has seen two further Hamlets 

(Tom Hiddleston’s and Benet Brandreth’s) since 

this formidable piece of theatre closed, but Andrew 

Scott’s is the one that seems to haunt the capital. 

With its soundtrack of some of Bob Dylan’s most 

touching songs, this electrifying, heart-wrenching 

production has plunged a poisoned foil into the 

hearts of thousands. 

Andrew Scott’s exquisite, fragile Hamlet was 

offset beautifully by Jessica Brown-Findlay’s 

graceful yet physically strong Ophelia (her dance 

background was evident throughout), whose 

weakness, ironically, lay in her attempting to 

convince herself and the court of her strength. 

I have seen criticism of the “monotony” of 

Angus Wright’s Claudius, as if his performance left 

something to be desired. I disagree – Wright is an 

accomplished actor and his Claudius was cunningly 

crafted. He left us in no doubt as to how Derbhle 

Crotty’s elegant and likeable Gertrude, in the midst 

of her confusion and grief, was attracted to his 

lupine, prowling figure but saw the error of her 

ways so quickly in the closet scene. 

Peter Wight’s Polonius was apparently 

succumbing to the insidious effects of dementia, 


Andrew Scott 

but his performance lost none of the character’s 

levity. 

Aided by a cast of such strength, the play felt 

so fresh that some of its most famous and often 

most laboured words became unfamiliar. Icke’s 

daring direction served to emphasise this by giving 

several of the play’s best-known moments entirely 

new readings. Laertes’ plea to use another foil, as 

the one he has chosen is “too heavy”, for example, 

became a sudden second thought – a desperate and 

urgent cry to avoid the inevitable, and perhaps use 

a foil untainted with poison. He became a man 

torn between his loyalty to the court, and his desire 

to forgive Hamlet and begin to define a better 

future. For the duel scene itself, Shakespeare’s 

words were all but abandoned, the fight performed 

as a dumb-show to Bob Dylan’s ‘Not Dark Yet’. 

Emotionally manipulative? Perhaps. Facile? 

Possibly. Heart-breaking? Undeniably. 

This production’s outstanding competence lay 

in giving its audience the opportunity to share 

grief and express its own, usually muted, sorrows. 

Shared emotion equates to shared humanity. As a 

fully paid-up member of Generation X, I cannot 

remember a more (over)dramatic outpouring of 

love and grief than that which we witnessed after 

Hamlet’s brooding isolation is neatly updated and encapsulated in this scene. 


Andrew Scott 

“Angus Wright is an accomplished actor, his 

lupine, prowling Claudius is cunningly crafted” 

Barry Aird as the 

play’s infamously 

irreverent 

Gravedigger. 

Awkwardly 

positioned between 

Claudius and 

Gertrude, Hamlet 

is forced to smile 

for the cameras. 

the death of Princess Diana, which has been much 

discussed of late, it being the 20th anniversary 

of the Paris crash. There was, at the time, an 

extraordinary and tribal response to her carefully 

orchestrated funeral. 

With Diana, we were not mourning the 

death of a princess so much as celebrating the 

opportunity to experience human communality. 

So with Hamlet, while we feel acutely his pain, 

Ophelia’s, Gertrude’s, we mourn our own tragedies 

as they are reflected upon the stage. When we 

weep for Hamlet and his fellow characters, we are 

weeping for our own grief and for the sense of loss 

which might permeate our own lives, but using 

Shakespeare’s writing as a conduit. To paraphrase 

Gertrude, this Elsinore turned our eyes into our 

very souls. 

I fell in love with Hamlet 30 years ago, and 

in that time many interpretations have come and 

gone. But it is Andrew Scott’s that has remained 

with me above all others, and which will do until 

usurped. I suspect I am in for a long wait. 

 

This performance of Hamlet took place on Monday 

24 July 2017 at the Harold Pinter Theatre, London, 

with Derbhle Crotty in the role of Gertrude. 


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British actress Daisy 

Ridley, who plays the 

title role in Ophelia. 


Time 

Travelling 

with Ophelia 

Painter, illustrator and occasional actor 

Stewart Kenneth Moore shares his 

 

 

 


(Left to right) Daisy Ridley as Ophelia, 

and as Rey in Star Wars: The Last Jedi. 

ot so much 

“Who’s There?” 

as “Who and where 

am I?” While they moved 

the time machine I took 

in my surroundings. I had 

become an old priest, moored, 

anchored, for a few days, 

somewhere deep in the past. The 

location could not have been more 

beautiful. Seated at the edge of all the 

machines I looked out at a stunning 

summer view, a small pond, a steep field of green 

grass running away from me to meet a hillside and 

escape into a tree line in the sunset. 

Actors are time travellers and cameras are time 

machines. They capture light and change its speed, 

they frame the moment forever. Films take you back 

to the past and they wait as time capsules for future 

generations. 

If you ever find yourself in costume, on a film 

set, somewhere deep in the countryside, you will 

know how easy it is to imagine you are actually in 

some past century. Easy, that is, until you get hungry 

and wander back to Catering and leave the hazy 

world of fireflies for that of the crackle of walkietalkies 

and gaffer tape. 

I had been cast in Ophelia, the new film directed 

by Claire McCarthy starring Daisy Ridley in the 

titular role. Based on the novel by Lisa Klein, this 

is the story of Hamlet and Ophelia retold from 

the point-of-view of Ophelia. In this way the 

story shares similarities to the Tom Stoppard play 

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Both take a 

parallax view of the classic narrative. 

The pond was not in shot but it made me think 

of the painting of Ophelia by John Everett Millais. 

The time-machine (the camera) was behind me 

at a small yard that seemed like an old abandoned 

graveyard with one small section of chapel wall 

remaining. A scene both humble and epic that could 

have been painted by John William Waterhouse. 

Czech set builders are so very good at their work 

that I’ve given up trying to discern reality from 

set design. This little yard sat at the edge of a tiny 

village, not even a village – a hamlet. No pun 

intended. The residents were out silently watching 

the strange goings on. Hollywood had appeared 

out of nowhere with its time machine and its many 

trucks and time travellers (crew). The locals stood 

and watched as we changed the weather, conjuring a 

cold downpour on a warm summer evening, I think 


“Ophelia has an excellent cast, including 

Daisy Ridley, Naomi Watts and Clive Owen” 

we may even have brought the moon with us. This 

is a fairly vast illuminated ball, a moon in essence, 

that is lassoed and suspended nearby for lighting 

purposes. 

It takes a long time to film a few scenes because 

we go back and forth filming various close-ups and 

reaction shots, and from this the editor will later put 

together an aggregate of all our actions and reactions. 

It’s always a surprise to see the final outcome. You 

might shoot a scene ten different ways, so you’d 

think you’d have a good memory of what happened, 

yet it’s always a surprise to see the final version. 

The theme of Hamlet and Ophelia has been 

popping up in my work for years now. I’ve sketched 

my fellow actors at work, mostly on stage. The series 

that has slowly emerged, such as it is, has no real 

title and I’m not planning on showing it any time 

soon, but it’s basically a study of ‘stagecraft’. I’ve 

drawn scenes from Hamlet and Macbeth (on stage 

and rehearsals) and even created a Macbeth graphic 

novel based on the work of the Prague Shakespeare 

Company. I’ve also studied the players of Blood, 

Love and Rhetoric at work on Rosencrantz and 

Guildenstern Are Dead. So my studio has quite a few 

images based on some form of Hamlet. Add to this 

the redoubling weirdness of a chat between scenes 

with an actor who, I suddenly realise, is the son of 

that particular parallax playwright. 

All of this made working on this film very 

familiar and more than a bit coincidental. After all, 

I had only just portrayed Czech theologian Jan Hus 

(1369-1415) for Nat Geo, so I’d been walking the 

walk, or, the dogma, only a few weeks prior. And in 

the weeks before auditioning I had begun asking why 

it was I only ever seem to meet male directors, where 

are the female directors? This question seemed like an 

epiphany (I am a man, it would). But, I wondered, 

where is the female perspective in cinema? And is 

the lack of that perspective one reason for the rot? 

Probably not, but female direction shouldn’t be a 

parallax view, it should be just another norm. To this 

day I’ve never met a female director of photography. 

I’ve met and worked with a few female student 

directors, perhaps an indication of the changing 

balance, but never on a big budget film, or any film 

for that matter. The only exception being Susan Tully 

directing us on an episode of Britannia (the time 

machine forcing me back a few thousand years this 

time, and into the sandals of a Roman revolutionary) 

for Sky television. And then, suddenly, there was 

Claire, like Susan, another excellent director and, for 

that, no different than so many. 

Ophelia (Daisy 

Ridley) with 

Queen Gertrude 

(Naomi Watts). 


Two of Stewart’s 

paintings inspired 

by Tom Stoppard’s 

Hamlet-referencing 

play Rosencrantz 

and Guildenstern are 

Dead. 

By now you may be wondering why I am not 

writing about the stars, the roles, other nitty-gritty. 

Well, I can’t, time-travellers take a vow of omertà 

when they sign on the dotted line. I cannot tell you 

what I saw, what happened. I can say that it was 

a good-natured place, it was a good set. I might 

be able to tell you about a prank I pulled – an 

absolute blinder, to be honest – but unfortunately 

it is connected with a key moment in the story 

and would be a spoiler. I’m no spoiler. I might be 

able to tell you about the dead body, a life-cast, an 

avatar identical in the smallest detail to an actual 

dead man, that lay on the grass and why that was so 

hilarious... but I can’t. I can say the villagers noted 

it but were apparently unfazed and that too was 

amusing. 

Ophelia has an excellent cast. As I’ve said, Daisy 

Ridley as Ophelia but also starring Naomi Watts 

(Gertrude), Clive Owen (Claudius) and Tom 

Felton (Laertes). Two you may not know – George 

MacKay as Hamlet and Devon Terrell in the role of 

Horatio – are both superb actors. I didn’t realise I’d 

seen George in one of my favourite TV shows of the 

previous year. He was in the miniseries 11.22.63, 

about a time traveller, played by James Franco, 

attempting to prevent the assassination of John F 

Kennedy. I wished I could have told him how much 

I enjoyed the series. 

Stranger still, when I got home my son suggested 

we watch a film after dinner, one he’d been waiting 

to see. He’s very interested in politics and told us 

about a film about the young Obama, he chose it 

out of the blue. I was stunned and found myself 

saying “You’re not going to believe this, but I was 

just in the car with that guy... today!” 

It is interesting to see how actors shape a scene 

and, in some sense, are guardians of logic in the 

story. The time machine sometimes remains on 

standby while an actor questions the logic of an 

action. It may all become clear to the actor and we 

move forward in time as planned. Or the director 

may be alerted by the actor to the lack of logic in 

the scene, make some adjustment, and the timeline 

shifts slightly and the scene becomes more logical, 

it can go either way. This is the alchemy of motion 

picture storytelling at its heart, and actors don’t get 

much credit for those key moments. 

Before you know it, it’s a wrap and the set and all 

its players evaporate. Before you know it, the whole 

crazy event is over and “Tis in my memory lock’d...” 

 

Stewart Kenneth Moore (aka Booda) is a painter, 

graphic novelist and actor. He has recently completed 

acting work on Lore for Amazon, and is currently 

developing a new comic strip with writer Pat Mills. 

You can buy his graphic novel of Macbeth 

Here 


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Samira Ahmed 

“The third 

age of Hamlet 

for women is 

post-40. I am 

completely 

Team 

Gertrude” 


Samira Ahmed 

Brodcaster and cultural critic Samira Ahmed 

grapples with one of the the thorniest questions 

in literary and theatrical history… 

“Why do 

women love 

Hamlet?” 


Samira Ahmed 

Samira 

interviewed 


in March 2017. 

here are three ages of 

Hamlet. Like a lot of women, I first 

encountered Hamlet as a teenager, and 

of course I fell in love. He’s misunderstood 

by the adults, he’s disgusted by their phoneyness. 

So far all so very Holden Caulfield. 

The first soliloquy “Oh that this too too 

sullied flesh...” is when you fall in love with 

Hamlet. 

However as you get older, by your late twenties, 

the way Hamlet treats Ophelia is impossible to 

reconcile. It’s like Molly Ringwald rewatching the 

old John Hughes movies, shocked at the sexual 

harassment all the way through – seeing Judd 

Nelson looking up her skirt. All the crude sexual 

references. What way is that to speak to the woman 

you love? And in the age of Me Too, I think it’s 

interesting how we try to find get-out clauses for 

Hamlet. There’s something of the tormented dark 

soul in romantic fiction that you can trace back to 

Hamlet that appeals to young women who think 

they can rescue him. Even Kylo Ren in Star Wars. 

Misunderstood, cruel because he’s tormented 

and, guess what, it’s all tied up with his dodgy 

relationship with his father, grandfather and his 

hated Uncle Luke. There are revisionist Hamlets 

where women have rightly tried to give Ophelia 

more agency for female readers. The YA novel 

Dating Hamlet by Lisa Fiedler was written with 

that in mind. In the intro it says “She felt female 

characters like Ophelia always got a raw deal... 

so she gave them the guts to change their own 

destinies”. 

The third age of Hamlet for women is post- 

40. I am completely Team Gertrude. I realised 

she might well have been only 15 when she had 

an arranged marriage, possibly to a much older 

man. What was really made clear in the wonderful 


Samira Ahmed 

“By your late 

twenties, the way 

Hamlet treats 

Ophelia is impossible 

to reconcile” 

Clockwise from top: 

Star Wars baddie Kylo Ren has some 

of Hamlet’s darkly destructive angst. 

Laurence Olivier’s hugely 

Hamlet. 

Maxine Peake played Hamlet at the 

 

Juliet Stevenson as Hamlet’s mother 

Gertrude, 2017. 


Samira Ahmed 

Andrew Scott/Juliet Stevenson Almeida/West End 

production last year was how she was finally in a 

happy marriage and having wonderful sex for the 

first time with a considerate lover. I did discuss this 

with Juliet Stevenson, so I know I’m right. And 

here’s Hamlet, totally self-absorbed and unable 

to cope with the idea that she has basically finally 

found happiness with another man. Actress Nicola 

Walker told me Sarah Phelps has written a version 

of Hamlet from Gertrude’s point of view. Perhaps 

we need more of that, in the way that Jean Rhys’ 

Wide Sargasso Sea was able to give Bertha’s story 

and challenge Jane Eyre. 

I don’t have a problem with women playing 

Hamlet. We need to take ownership of the right to 

be the angst-ridden hero/ine who matters, and it 

emphasises the feminine aspects of the character – 

but I think it changes everything. Under patriarchy 

a female Hamlet is such a different being. I find 

it interesting that Janet Suzman – a very famous 

Ophelia opposite David Warner – wrote a book, 

Not Hamlet, frustrated by the lack of such a part 

for women, but is insistently against women 

playing those male roles. 

The thing I can’t fathom is Hamlet being 30. 

That makes no sense, for him as a young romantic 

hero. That seems practically middle-aged for 

Shakespeare’s age, though more palatable today in 

the age of eternal middle youth. 

But I would say Hamlet can still grip your 

heart the way he did when I was a young girl. The 

Paapa Essiedu RSC Hamlet moved me more than 

any for years, for the tears in his eyes as he faces his 

death at the end, suddenly realising how, despite 

all his clever plotting, he was a naive young man, 

who could not conceive of the depth of the adult 

wickedness of his Uncle and his courtiers. For all 

his faults, he is a noble soul. 

 

 


You know him as an actor, playwright, 

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“A hundred 

ducats apiece 

for his picture 

in little...” 

The Victorian Illustrated Shakespeare Archive is a 

wondrous free resource compiled and curated by 

Dr Michael Goodman of Cardiff University. So we 

asked him to select some of his favourite examples 

of Hamlet-related artwork from the archive. 

1. Kenny Meadows, 

Hamlet Dramatis Personae 

This is a clever example of the illustrator Kenny 

Meadows commenting upon the theatricality of 

the page and, indeed, the illustrated edition itself. 

By alluding to the device traditionally used in the 

theatre to signify the start of a play – the lifting of 

the curtain – Meadows draws (quite literally) our 

attention to the differences between stage and page 

and wittily challenges us to reconcile the two. But 

there is something more going on here. Hamlet is 

a play which is all about looking – things seen and 

unseen, the observer becoming the observed, and 

the dangers that lie with misunderstanding what 

our eyes are telling us. By opening his illustrated 

imagining of the play in this way, Meadows is also 

implicating us, the readers, within the play’s narrative. 

The illustration is an effective instance of word and 

image combining to create a larger and more richer 

meaning than they could in and by themselves. 


Victorian Hamlet 

1. 



“Knight’s editions focus more on the geography 

and objects in the plays than on the characters” 

2. 3. 

4. 

2. G.F. Sargent, 

Platform at 

Elsinore. 


Church and 

Churchyard at 

Elsinore. 


View of Elsinore. 



5. 


Hamlet’s Grave 

One of the most overlooked 

editions in VISA (going by the 

stats) is the one published by 

Charles Knight. Knight, who was 

a publisher and not an illustrator, 

included in his edition the work 

of many different artists in many 

different styles, and I suspect the 

reason this edition is the least 

used is because it focuses more 

on the geography and objects of 

the plays than on the characters. 

In effect, the edition singularly 

treats each play like a history 

play – as if they depict actual 

historical events. Nevertheless, it 

is a fascinating document which 

reveals what Knight thought 

 

audience to know about the plays 

of William ‘Shakspere’ (Knight was 

preoccupied by ideas of historical 

authenticity and concluded, along 

with others, that ‘Shakspere’ was 

the likely spelling of ‘Shakespeare’ 

in the early modern period). 

When I have been teaching 

students, a valuable way of 

approaching the illustrations 

in Knight’s edition has been to 

think of them, to use a term 

from cinema, as setting up an 

‘establishing shot’ and depicting 

the scene where the play’s 

action will take place. These four 

examples, all by the artist G.F. 

 

this. We see Elsinore Castle from 

a distance (2) and then we can 

‘zoom in’ closer in the illustration 

in ‘Platform at Elsinore’. We can 

use the same strategy again with 

the illustrations ‘Church and 

Churchyard at Elsinore’ before 

transitioning to ‘Hamlet’s Grave’. 

But let’s, for the time being, 

imagine that we could zoom in 

even further onto the ‘Platform at 

Elsinore’. What would we see? 



6. 

6. H.C. Selous, The Ghost. 

We would probably witness 

Horatio encountering Hamlet’s 

Ghost, as depicted here by Henry 

Courtney Selous. This is not just 

one of my favourite illustrations 

from Hamlet, but one of my 

favourites in the whole archive. 

Whilst the other illustrators 

depict the ghost shrouded in 

darkness or unsatisfactorily, 

Selous uses his characteristic 

light style to create an image that 

is bold, distinct and satisfyingly 

composed. There is a real sense 

of physicality to both Horatio 

and Marcellus, which makes the 

disparity between them and the 

otherworldliness of the ghost 

even more pronounced. 

Indeed, what this illustration 

 

wood engraver – the craftsman 

who would realise the artist’s 

illustrations by engraving them 

onto a block of wood. If you look 

closely at many Victorian wood 

engraved Illustrations you will 

often see two signatures. In this 

case, at the bottom left of the 

image you can just about make 

out the initials H.C.S (Henry 

Courtney Selous, the illustrator), 

whilst on the right we see the 

signature of F. Wentworth (the 

engraver). The signatures remind 

us that the world of Victorian 

image making, much like the 

theatre, was a collaborative 

process and often, in the case 

of these illustrated editions, an 

elaborate production as well. 

7. H.C. Selous, Hamlet Full Page 

Introductory Illustration. 



7. 



8. 


Hamlet Introductory Remarks 

Just as there are innumerable 

ways to stage one of 

Shakespeare’s plays, there are 

also a vast amount of ways to 

illustrate them. One of the most 

interesting aspects of VISA is 

that it allows us to easily explore 

how the different illustrators 

interpreted the same scene. These 

two illustrations by Selous and 

Meadows are a case in point with 

both demonstrating the different 

artistic styles of the two artists. In 

 

could be very much be mistaken 

in thinking that Hamlet is a sort of 

pastoral drama – a kind of more 

serious counterpart to As You 

Like It. With Meadows’ illustration, 

 

realm of the macabre and the 

gothic. 

While Selous’ illustration 

represents wickedness occurring 

in an idyllic landscape (the snake 

on the ground makes us think 

that we could be in the Garden 

of Eden here), in Meadow’s 

interpretation of the scene 

even the trees look dark and 

malevolent. Something is indeed 

rotten in the state of Denmark. 

As ever with Meadows there is 

also some fourth wall breaking 

going on as well, with Claudius 

(or is it?) clutching at the wall 

with ‘Introductory Remarks’ 

written upon it. The effect is 

unsettling for the reader and it 

is possibly a visual reference to 

Claudius’ line in Act III when he 

talks about his ‘cursed hand’. The 

fact that both these illustrations 

appear near to the start of their 

respective editions (before the 

play has actually begun) means 

 

purpose a trailer does for a 

 

 

moments of drama and we wish 

to learn more. 



“John Gilbert presents Ophelia here with great 

skill – alone, still, and garlanded with flowers” 

9. 

9. John Gilbert, Ophelia 

John Gilbert’s portrait of Ophelia 

is perhaps the best and most 

interesting imagining of the 

character in the archive. That said, 

none of the illustrators’ depictions 

of Ophelia are particularly good 

(Meadows’ Ophelia is awful) and 

indeed, more broadly, there is 

a certain reluctance to fully 

engage with Shakespeare’s 

female characters to 

 

Whether this comes 

from the cultural and 

political context in 

which the illustrators 

were working or, as I 

suspect, they found it 

easier to depict men, 

is for a future research 

project. Nevertheless, 

Gilbert presents Ophelia 

here with great skill. 

Alone, still, and garlanded 

 

her ‘muddy death’, the 

 

moment is visually 

 

illustration taking up 

three quarters of 

the page. Of course, 

the problem for 

any artist wishing 

to depict Ophelia 

in the second half 

of the nineteenth 

century is that it will be 

immediately compared 

with the famous John 

Everett Millais painting from 

1851-2. Gilbert sensibly chooses 

to portray Ophelia just before 

the scene Millais depicts and it is 

no less poignant because of that. 



10. 


Hamlet, Full 

Page Introductory 

Illustration. 

11. H. C. Selous, 

Hamlet and Claudius. 

12. John Gilbert, 

Poor Yorick. 

11. 12. 



13. 

13. H. C. Selous, 

Mr Henry Irving 

as Hamlet 

 

Hamlet, the Prince 

of Denmark himself. 

Because, as everyone 

knows, you cannot 

have Hamlet without 

Hamlet! 

Explore the 

Victorian Illustrated 

Shakespeare Archive 

Here 


Gyles Brandreth 

“What makes this special? What makes 

it justifiable? It’s that we are a 

family fascinated by Hamlet” 

Shakespeare’s Hamlet becomes the 

ultimate domestic drama in the hands 

of Gyles Brandreth and family. 


Gyles Brandreth 

HOW’S YOUR 

FATHER? 

In the summer of 2017, veteran British author 

 

long-held ambition to appear in a production of 

Hamlet. Acting alongside him were his own son 

and daughter-in-law. He tells us all about it. 

Interview by Jen Richardson 

Photography by Francis Loney 

Tell me about your 90-minute, strippeddown 

version of Hamlet, and how you 

came to take multiple roles in the play. 

“Yes. How did this come about? I suppose it came 

about because I’m an almost lifelong Hamlet 

obsessive – who isn’t? And I thought to myself, 

‘I’d like to play Hamlet’. Then my wife said to me 

‘Please, don’t be absurd, you can’t play Hamlet, 

you’re knocking 70. I said, ‘Sir Frank Benson was 

still a very credible Hamlet aged 72. The older 

Hamlet often works very well. Michael Redgrave 

played Hamlet at Stratford when he was 50 years of 

age. There have been plenty of ‘old’ Hamlets’. ‘Be 

sensible,’ she said. 

“So I thought ‘OK, I can’t play Hamlet, but 

there are two characters called Hamlet in the play, 

Hamlet Senior and Hamlet Junior. I shall play 

Hamlet the ghost’. Then I thought, ‘Who’s going 

to play Hamlet?’, and it occurred to me that my 

son could play Hamlet. “My son is, by day, a 

barrister, but by night he’s a performer and he is an 

author. He has written, for example, recently two 

novels – the first one was called The Spy of Venice. 

They’re novels based on Shakespeare’s lost years. 

In fact, you should be interviewing him in due 

course, and am sure will be! He knows all about 

Shakespeare, but more to the point, he’s rhetoric 

coach at the Royal Shakespeare Company and, as 

readers of Shakespeare Magazine don’t need to be 

told, rhetoric was a core subject in Elizabethan 

schools, and at grammar school Shakespeare would 

have learned rhetoric. 

“Rhetoric imbues all of Shakespeare, and my 

son is a brilliant rhetoric coach. I thought this 

would be a brilliant opportunity for him to put 

what he preaches to the test. As a result of this, we 

came up with this idea of doing a family Hamlet, 

because why do Hamlet? Well, you do Hamlet 

because you want to. And once you’ve done it, 

you realise that you want to keep on doing it, but 



“Benet plays Hamlet. Kosha plays Ophelia and 

Gertrude, but also Rosencrantz and Horatio” 

Husband 

and wife 

Hamleteers 

Benet 

Brandreth and 

Kosha Engler. 

I’ll come back to that later on. But we thought, 

what makes this special? What makes it justifiable? 

It’s that we are a family fascinated by Hamlet. I’m 

going to play the older characters, my son is just 

going to play Hamlet, and by chance he is married 

to a very fine American actress called Kosha Engler 

who was born in Maryland, and before she came to 

live in the UK performed at the Folger Shakespeare 

Theatre in Washington DC. 

“So we thought ‘she can do the female parts, I 

can do the older parts, and Benet can do Hamlet’. 

We were encouraged to do this by Steven Berkoff. 

He wrote a wonderful book years ago called I am 

Hamlet. In it he reminds us that everyone, every 

actor, will want to play Hamlet and every actor 

should and could play Hamlet because what there 

is in Hamlet is everything, which is what we began 

to discover as we rehearsed and as we played it. 

Every kind of human experience is there. Then we 

thought, ‘how are we going to do this with three 

people?’ Well, my wife and I are patrons of the 

Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond, and we had 

seen there a number of outstanding Shakespeare 

for young people productions, all of them brought 

down to size for either four actors or six actors by 

a director called Imogen Bond. We’d seen these 

productions of hers, she is a Shakespeare scholar, 

and we asked her if she would be interested in 

creating for us a 90-minute version. 

“We got on board Simon Evans, a brilliant 

young director, and he brought with him a 

colleague as a co-director called David Aula. It 

was fascinating working with two directors and 

we gained from that. One of the things that we 



Gyles as 

the Player 

King, giving 

his speech 

at Hamlet’s 

request. 

discovered that we hadn’t really expected was that 

the doubling would be revelatory. Benet plays 

Hamlet, Kosha plays Ophelia and Gertrude, but 

she also plays Rosencrantz and she plays Horatio, 

and we’ll come on to Laertes later! Basically, what 

we discovered was all these characters were all 

aspects of – well, you see – your friends and family 

in terms of yourself. Here is Hamlet looking at the 

people closest to him through the personification of 

one woman, which becomes suddenly intriguing. 

“David and Simon took Imogen’s script and 

played with it a bit. In the play, Simon wanted us 

to throw in odd lines and speeches from other plays 

because audiences think they know Hamlet and 

we’re doing something different here. They were 

determined to be bold. We wanted to do an intense 

version, and because we are a family – the reason 

for doing it – to do a family Shakespeare and 

concentrate on the family. Out go the politics, out 

goes Fortinbras. This is about a family.” 

With that in mind, we are interested 

to know which themes, as a family, you 

found particularly difficult to confront 

through your characters. 

“I think it added something, both for us and, 

curiously, for the audience. The audience didn’t 

need to know that we were related, but we’re quite 

similar in different ways. Could you tell we were 

father and son? Yes. So I think, for example, people 

did find the Hamlet the ghost and Hamlet scenes 

quite touching. When the ghost wanted to go 

away because dawn was breaking, Hamlet wants to 

hold onto him, so the ghost had to struggle to get 



“A wonderful and 

terrifying experience” 

Benet Brandreth 

“I was instantly excited” 

Kosha Engler 

“As one of the most performed Shakespeare plays, 

Hamlet has been done a lot. I have personally 

seen it done a lot – usually with excellent actors as 

Hamlet, but often directed in a fairly traditional 

and predictable way. When Gyles suggested 

a three-person, family version with a young 

innovative director I was instantly excited. I loved 

the idea of breaking open the play in a new way, 

paring it down to its essence and discovering what 

that would reveal. Playing so many characters 

was daunting, thrilling and exhausting. Of all the 

bold choices we made my favourite, and most 

controversial, was about Ophelia. 

“We decided she wasn’t suffering from general 

‘madness’ but specifically multiple personality 

disorder – she’s a textbook case. Instead of actually 

dying, the trauma of Hamlet rejecting her then 

murdering her father triggers Ophelia to ‘kill’ her 

more fragile, submissive personality and replace it 

with a stronger, aggressive alter ego – her absent 

brother Laertes. It was a practical as well as a 

creative decision and some audiences found it 

challenging, but I just loved giving Ophelia the 

chance to fight Hamlet at the end and ultimately 

forgive him on her own terms without another 

man doing it for her.” 

“For my own part, the production was both a 

wonderful and a terrifying experience. Wonderful 

because we got to play with Shakespeare and 

explore one of his greatest plays. It is important 

to me that his plays shouldn’t be viewed as 

museum pieces but as texts that still speak to us, 

that are alive and reflective of our times. I feel 

our production had that vitality to it. It was an 

experiment, more successful in some parts than in 

others but always, I feel, illuminating the characters 

and the themes of the play. It was wonderful to 

feel that we had really explored the text and made 

something of it. At the same time it was terrifying 

because the part and the play is so well known. 

I felt the weight of the history and the expectation 

on me.” 



Gyles crying as 

the Ghost with 

Hamlet just 

before he departs: 

“Remember me”. 

away. He wanted to hold onto him not because he 

wanted to hear more, but because it was his Dad. 

Obviously, from Kosha and Benet’s point of view, 

they are husband and wife, so the struggle between 

Ophelia and Hamlet, and being rejected by your 

husband, was very real. 

“Because of what we did with Laertes – he has 

already gone to France, so as Polonius I couldn’t 

deliver the famous speech to him – so, in fact, we 

had Ophelia asking Polonius what he had said 

to Laertes when he saw him off. It became quite 

touching, actually. Also that it was genuinely my 

daughter-in-law that I was giving this advice to. So, 

I think the emotional impact was greater.” 

You once quoted Steven Berkoff, who 

you mentioned earlier, as saying that 

‘you cannot be miscast as Hamlet’, and 

that ‘there is something of Hamlet in 

everybody… the wit will play for laughs, 

the lunatic for madness’ and so on. What 

did you see come to the fore in your son’s 

performance? 

“We saw the thinker, the intellectual, the student, 

the clever person. The directors made him wear his 

glasses. Benet made a decision before that he would 

do whatever he was told to do and go with the 

flow, and he wore his glasses. One performance he 

didn’t because he had forgotten them, and he was 

quite thrown. He wore them so he was a studious 

Hamlet. In years gone by that would have been 

terribly controversial, but it enabled him to do 

something with ‘To be, or not to be’ that Sir Derek 

Jacobi was kind enough to say. He said ‘you are an 



“Steven Berkoff reminds us that everyone, 

every actor, should and could play Hamlet” 

Ophelia’s 

mad scene 

with Claudius 

featured a 

variation of the 

knife game that 

was repeated 

throughout 

the play. 

intellectual, you’re holding a book all the time. 

You are reading ‘To be, or not to be’ – it’s a 

philosopher and you’re reading it’. So, he was an 

intellectual Hamlet.” 

What would you say Hamlet, as a play, has 

to offer audiences in 2018? Why does it 

endure as one of the most popular works? 

“It has everything. That is the reason it works, 

that all human life is there. There are so many 

facets to it, you find so many aspects of yourself. 

Anyone – men can play it, women can play it, tall 

people, short people. You can bring anger to it, you 

can bring gaiety, because it’s all in there. I think 

that’s really the reason. Jonathan Slinger, who was 

a brilliant Hamlet at the RSC, he said to us ‘You 

will find that you will go on, you can’t stop digging 

with Hamlet. Dig, dig, dig, and there’s still more’. 

He told us an interesting story that he’d been told 

by Sir Kenneth Branagh. Kenneth Branagh did 

Richard III at Chichester and was asked, inevitably, 

would he like to bring it to London and he said 

‘No, I’ve done it at Chichester and I’ve discovered 

everything there is in this play. I’ve dug deep, and 

I’ve got it all’. And Jonathan said ‘I’ve also played 

Richard III, and it’s true. Richard III is a great 

character to play, but it is what it is’ – Hamlet, you 

could carry on playing forever.” 

 

Find out more about Gyles Brandreth via 

his website https://www.gylesbrandreth.net 


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Elsinore 

I capture 

the castle 

Shakespeare Magazine’s Editor takes a trip to 

the real-life Elsinore for a spot of ghost-hunting 

at Hamlet’s ancestral home – Kronborg Castle. 

Words: Pat Reid 


Helsingør 

Left: Historic 

print of 

Kronborg 

Castle – it looks 

quite different 

today. 

Right: Statues 

of Hamlet 

and Ophelia 

at Helsingør 

railway Station. 

hen asked to think of a 

Shakespeare character, you might 

immediately picture an English 

monarch, like Henry V or Richard III. 

You could possibly envisage one of the 

noble Romans that Shakespeare remixed, such 

as Julius Caesar or Mark Antony (or their Egyptian 

partner in greatness, Cleopatra). Your mind’s 

eye might even flash upon one of Shakespeare’s 

numerous Italian characters – Romeo and Juliet, for 

example – or an exotic outsider in that world such as 

Othello (aka The Moor of Venice). 

However, the character who most epitomises 

Shakespeare’s works is not English, Roman, 

Egyptian, Italian or anything else. He is in fact a 

man who, in the second half of the play that bears 

his name, introduces himself with the words: “It is I, 

Hamlet the Dane!” 

That’s right. The world’s favourite Shakespeare 

character is from Denmark. And what’s more, you 

can even pay a visit to his home. 

Mind you, taking a trip to Kronborg Castle at 

HelsingØr (Elsinore) can have a strange effect on 

the way one imagines Hamlet. For a start, it makes 

the events of the play feel more real, somehow, 

as though they were historical fact rather than a 

decidedly wild creative journey. And once you’ve 

got it into your head that this is where Hamlet 

took place, you may start rearranging the scenes, 

characters and events in the play to fit the layout 

that Kronborg now reveals to you. 

As an ardent Shakespearean, I’m especially 

susceptible to this syndrome. It’s not so much that 

Kronborg gives flesh and bone to Shakespeare’s 

tragic imaginings, but it certainly adds monolithic 

slabs of history-infused masonry – not to mention 

the ominous beauty of the Danish coast. 

I’d somehow convinced myself that Hamlet’s 

Elsinore was situated slap bang in the middle of 

Denmark’s modern-day capital, Copenhagen, where 

we’re staying. But in actual fact, Helsingør is about 

50 km to the north of the city. The good news is 

the train journey is covered by the prepaid cards 

we’ve bought that give you free public transport 

and entry to various attractions. The scenery is 

fairly unremarkable, but the train does go through 


Elsinore 

“Kronborg certainly adds monolithic slabs of 

masonry to Shakespeare’s tragic imaginings” 

Kronborg 

Castle, 

photographed 

on our visit in 

October 2015. 

a station near the famous Louisiana Museum of 

Modern Art, and so we plan to stop there on our 

return journey. 

Maybe it’s just my excited anticipation but I’m 

captivated by HelsingØr from the moment I walk 

out of the station and see the statues of Hamlet and 

Ophelia mounted there. They aren’t pretty, but their 

metal features seem to be wrought from tormented 

passion, dark eroticism and subsumed violence. If 

I was hoping to find one of the cradles of Europe’s 

gothic imagination, it seems I’m on the right track. 

HelsingØr is basically a small maritime town, 

with sailing boats moored at the harbour and a 

big ferry waiting to cross the Øresund Strait to 

Helsingborg in neighbouring Sweden. It’s maybe a 

20-minute walk to the castle, but first we stroll by 

the Maritime Museum and have a look at a fairly 

new-looking ‘Culture Yard’. There’s cool artworks 

everywhere and and equally cool-looking Danes 

of all ages enjoying generous servings of food and 

drink. Despite its connection with Shakespeare’s 

greatest tragedy, Denmark has a reputation as the 

world’s happiest country to uphold. But I like to 

imagine there’s a dark undercurrent. I can picture 

Saga Noren, the autistic detective from Scandinavian 

noir series The Bridge, tracking down a suspect to 

this award-winning restaurant, leading to a climactic 

shoot-out among the oven-fired pizzas (with locallysourced 

ingredients) and bottles of organic lager. 

Onwards to Kronborg! Well, the castle is 

certainly an imposing sight, but sadly it simply 

doesn’t look like a product of the Shakespearean 

age or earlier. There’s a reason for this. Much of the 

castle was destroyed by fire in 1629, so it had to 

be rebuilt. The Royals haven’t lived here since the 

1780s, but the Danish army did take up residence 

for about 300 years. There’s a blunt, hard aspect 

to the edifice that stands today – it’s like a French 

château that’s been lifting weights. 

During Shakespeare’s lifetime however, the castle 

was very different. In the 1570s, Denmark’s King 

Frederick II set about remodelling it to the finest 

standards of the day. One of the architects, Hans 

Hendrik van Paesschen of Antwerp, also worked on 

some London landmarks Shakespeare would have 

known, such as the Royal Exchange. Although the 

name Kronborg is not mentioned in Hamlet – a 

shame, since it literally means ‘King Castle’ – it’s 

likely that Shakespeare would have been aware 

of it. King Frederick himself was a dynamic and 

ambitious ruler who came to the Danish throne at 

the age of 24. He was also King of Norway, and was 

active in the politics and warfare of the wider region. 

Indeed, it’s tempting to imagine that Frederick 

may have inspired some facets of the characters 

in Hamlet. He died in 1588, the year the Spanish 


Helsingør 

Armada sailed against England, and also the year 

that Shakespeare turned 24. 

So it’s very much Frederick’s Kronborg in 

my head now, as I enter the castle, noting that it 

would be fairly difficult for sneaky Fortinbras and 

his army to gain entry unless invited. The next 

couple of hours are a blissful blur of courtyards and 

battlements, banqueting halls and bedchambers, 

nooks and crannies. There’s a plaque which 

graciously celebrates Shakespeare and, rather 

brilliantly, there’s an actor in period costume playing 

Hamlet’s faithful sidekick Horatio, who tells us the 

events of the play from that character’s perspective. I 

even stumble across a pile of dirt left behind by some 

builders, inspiring me to hammily intone “What is 

this quintessence of dust?” 

I’m disappointed to have missed the annual 

HamletScenen festival which stages Shakespeare 

productions in the castle, but there’s a terrific 

photographic exhibition of the festival’s greatest hits, 

dating back to the 1930s. Here are British theatrical 

legends aplenty – Gielgud, Olivier, Leigh, the rock 

star swagger of Richard Burton, Canadian luminary 

Christopher Plummer (with Michael Caine as 

Horatio). There’s also a plethora of European 

actors with every bit as much charisma, and even a 

smattering of new, young talents including rising star 

(and occasional Shakespeare Magazine contributor) 

Jade Anouka. 

I’ve been so fascinated by the exhibition that I 

forget I’ve abandoned my partner and child in the 

castle’s frankly amazing gift shop. It’s a treasure trove 

of Shakespearean swag, and I would happily spend 

all my kroner here, but I’ve just realised that there’s 

no sign of my family and I’m alone. 

I search the castle, the courtyard and the 

battlements. I retrace my steps and peek into the 

quaint tea rooms we stopped at earlier. I return to 

the Culture Yard. I’m leaving voicemails and sending 

texts with increasing anxiety, but there’s no response. 

I suddenly recall that terrifying 1980s film The 

Vanishing. Eventually, with rising panic, I return to 

the station, and there they are. It transpires that they 

had decided to visit the castle’s dungeon, assuming 

I was right behind them. The dungeon sounds like 

a suitably spooky experience, lit only by the glow 

of visitors’ phone screens – but I’ll have to save that 

for another time, as our train is about to depart. 

It’s been a brilliant visit to Elsinore. And, unlike 

Hamlet, we made it out alive. 

 

Visit Kronborg Castle 

Above: Horatio tells his side of Hamlet’s story. 

Above right: Shakespeare swag in the gift shop. 

More information on HamletScenen 


Alice Barclay 

Hamlet 

in the heat 

of the night 

The culmination of a Shakespeare acting course 

for adults run by the Bristol Old Vic, a remarkable 

abridged version of Hamlet was performed in the 

room above a community arts venue in Bristol. 

Words by Alice Barclay 


Alice Barclay 

“One of us was stranded in London, waiting for 

a Megabus instead of playing Ophelia” 

Participants 

were ordinary 

people in 

everyday 

clothes. But in 

performance 

they became 

their characters. 

A 

group of actors preparing for a 

performance is a wonderful thing. 

The cocktail of nerves, adrenalin and 

concentration is like pure potential 

energy, and it’s impossible to replicate. When you 

share with an audience your telling of a Shakespeare 

play for the first time, things happen that you can’t 

ever predict. A date has been set, lines have been 

learnt, people have come to “hear a play”, and there’s 

an alchemy between the performers, the audience and 

the words that can take you to another place. That’s 

why it’s thrilling and empowering and brilliant. 

Thursday nights at the Southbank Club 

were busy. On this hot June evening, the Hamlet 

company waited downstairs for the African 

drummers to end their rehearsal in the room above 

that would soon become a theatre. Meanwhile the 

South Bristol Running Club arrived back in sweaty 

dribs and drabs to stretch and rehydrate. Perhaps 

the only time and place in history where running, 

drumming and Shakespeare have met in this way? 

We didn’t know quite what was going to 

happen that night in the low ceilinged room 

with the broken fan upstairs. We’d had very little 

time to practically prepare our Hamlet, we had 

no set blocking or carefully rehearsed action. The 

audience would be seated around us in a rectangle, 

but beyond that it was all up for grabs. We did 

know that we’d been on an incredible journey to 

get to that day. I’d led the course and we’d spent 

ten weeks getting to know, feel and discover as 

much about Shakespeare as we could, making sure 

we were match fit for an audience. 

We’d lost one or two of our number through 

immovable work commitments and more 

significant life events. And that night, one of the 

company was stranded in London after a day at 

Wimbledon, with all trains to Bristol suspended 


Alice Barclay 

“The alchemy between the performers, audience 

and words can take you to another place” 

Polonius awaits 

his fate at 

Elsinore. 

indefinitely. He was waiting for a Megabus instead 

of playing Ophelia, so instead of buying a gin 

and tonic, as I had planned, it meant that I began 

to look at Act II, Scene 1 with some sense of 

urgency! My true belief in the need for spontaneity 

and playfulness, my insistence that good acting 

is responding truthfully to an impulse (without 

necessarily needing to know what was going to 

happen) was to be tested. I would be playing 

Ophelia without any rehearsal at all. 

One of the things that the group had hooked 

onto was the use of cue scripts, which they found 

to be a quick way into this sense of spontaneous 

playfulness. Listening is a given when you’ve got 

a script with only your own lines and the three or 

four words someone else says before you have to 

speak. There’s no zoning out, safe in the knowledge 

that your line isn’t coming up for a while. When we 

first used these scripts (the kind that Shakespeare’s 

actors used for purely practical reasons), the 

reaction to the experience had been so profound 

that all scripts since then had been cue scripts. 

I had often heard the response from actors that cue 

scripts alter your quality of listening entirely, and 

I was used to seeing something intangible occur 

in an actor’s physicality when that was happening. 

I was less used to the reflection from one of the 

actors that the sense of everyone listening intently 

to him (because they had to, because he might be 

speaking their cue) was something he’d never felt 

before, on stage or off. 

Our Hamlet ran at about 50 minutes, so of 

course it was missing much of the narrative. The 

scenes were selected to tell the arc of the story and 

give everyone something challenging to do, but 

the sense of it was there, and so were all the best 


Alice Barclay 

Alice directs 

the company. 

bits. Liberated from the need to perform anything 

approaching the entire play, we could concentrate 

on the individual moments the characters found 

themselves in. 

We had none of the usual casting limitations of 

gender and age, but I had tried to give the actors 

parts that I thought suited their natural energy. 

Without that literal characterisation, the words 

seemed to resonate on a different level, and I heard 

things that night that I’d heard hundreds of times 

before sound different and new. 

Over the weeks leading up to the performance 

we’d been playing around with different ways 

into soliloquies, and the results were so powerful 

we decided to maintain them for the audience to 

see. “O that this too too sullied flesh” became a 

vibrant conversation between two actors positioned 

at opposite corners of the space. It was like one 

of those heightened discussions with someone 

who believes in the same politics as you, when 

everything you say serves to validate and fuel each 

others’ position. “O what a rogue and peasant slave 

am I” was shared between three actors, all widely 

different ages. This time they were speaking directly 

to the audience, but without deciding beforehand 

who would say which lines. Some thoughts came 

out spoken by three voices chorally, some with two 

voices emphasising different things, and some as a 

single voice, at once incredibly vulnerable. 

We decided to make “To be, or not to be” the 

most intimate, so every actor in the company, 

staggering their start, spoke it very quietly but 

directly to the person next to them. These multiple 

Hamlets needed to be heard and understood by the 

one person they had chosen to reveal their thoughts 

to. As we couldn’t predict where people would 


Alice Barclay 

“There’s something about the struggle that makes 

performing Shakespeare so unique and exciting” 

Above: Bathed in post-performance 

euphoric glow outside the venue. 

Left: One of the evening’s many 

Hamlets, cue script in hand. 

be sitting by then, it meant some actors crossed 

the space and knelt at the audience’s feet. With 

around 17 voices talking, there was a combination 

of one-to-one intimacy and a wave of words that 

you could make occasional sense of. Most of 

all, there was the sense of Hamlet having a very 

important and desperately personal conversation 

directly with a member of the audience, which was 

extraordinary. When the ensemble came to an end 

after 14 lines and a single Hamlet continued the 

soliloquy alone, and then went on into the next 

scene with Ophelia, it was breathtaking. 

Afterwards, I was able to drink that gin and 

tonic, and join with the rest of the company in 

celebrating the performance, feeling rather lucky 

that I’d been able to be part of it too. Perhaps it 

was the runners who made me think of it, but 

there’s something about the struggle that makes 

performing Shakespeare so unique and exciting. 

Not that it should feel effortful in the end, but 

it’s tricky to truly get inside all those complex 

thoughts. When you perform Shakespeare, 

you speak words that you would never utter in 

everyday life, and tell stories that are beyond your 

own experience, which is an extraordinary thing. 

And the drummers reminded me that we were 

all performing it with a collective heartbeat, an 

elemental sense of rhythm in the words that drives 

you forwards. And we were doing it together. 

Performing Shakespeare is like nothing else. 

Perhaps everyone should experience it at least once 

in their life. 

 


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We hope you’ve enjoyed Issue Fourteen of Shakespeare Magazine. 

Here’s a taste of what we have coming up next time… 

Shakespeare Films 

 

Are low-budget indie Shakespeare movies the future? 

Every Inch a King 

Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson in King Lear. 

 

Fans And Fiction 

 

Julius Caesar And Me 

Paterson Joseph’s Shakespeare memoir. 

The contemporary authors reimagining Shakespeare.

Shakespeare Magazine 14

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