men behaving madly

Men Behaving MadlyPerforming Hamlet’s Seven Soliloquies

What is a soliloquy?soliloquy, n.

Pronunciation: /səˈlɪləkwɪ/

Etymology: < Latin sōliloquium (introduced by St. Augustine), < sōli-, sōlus alone + loqui to speak.

1a. An instance of talking to or conversing with oneself, or of uttering one’s thoughts aloud without addressing any person.

(Oxford English Dictionary)

Soliloquy in Doctor Faustus

FAUSTUS. Settle thy studies, Faustus, and beginTo sound the depth of that thou wilt profess.[...] Is to dispute well logic’s chiefest end?Affords this art no greater miracle?Then read no more; thou hast attained the end.A greater subject fitteth Faustus’ wit.[...] These metaphysics of magiciansAnd necromantic books are heavenly,Lines, circles, signs, letters, and characters – Ay, these are those that Faustus most desires.O, what a world of profit and delight,Of power, of honour, of omnipotenceIs promised to the studious artisan!All things that move between the quiet polesShall be at my command. (A-text, 1.1.1-59)

Psychomachia in Doctor Faustus

Enter the Good Angel and the Evil AngelGOOD ANGEL. O Faustus, lay that damned book aside

And gaze not on it, lest it tempt thy soulAnd heap God’s heavy wrath upon thy head!Read, read the Scriptures. That is blasphemy.

EVIL ANGEL. Go forward, Faustus, in that famous artWherein all nature’s treasury is contained.Be thou on earth as Jove is in the sky,Lord and commander of these elements.Exeunt [Angels]

FAUSTUS. How am I glutted with conceit of this! (A-text, 1.1.72-80)

Direct address in Hamlet

A disclaimer: the text is not a coded set of instructions so much as the basis for creative response. There’s no single “right” way to perform it.

Peter Brook:‘The Deadly Theatre approaches the classics from the viewpoint that somewhere, someone has found out and defined how the play should be done.’ (1968: 14)

Some critics, however, express a clear preference one way or the other…


Bert O. States:‘In fact, the only characters in tragedy who “work” with the audience seem to be clowns and villains. […] It would be unthinkable for a character like Lear or Macbeth – or even Hamlet, who is brother to the clown – to peer familiarly into the pit because there is something in the abridgement of aesthetic distance that gives the lie to tragic character and pathos. A character who addresses the audience immediately takes on some of the audience’s objectivity and superiority to the play’s world.’ (1983: 366)

Andrew Gurr:‘…the explanatory soliloquy or aside to the audience was a relic of the less sophisticated days which developed into a useful and more naturalistic convention of thinking aloud, but never entirely ceased to be a convention.’ (1992: 103)


Bridget Escolme, on the other hand, critiques Gurr’s ‘post-nineteenth century assumption about theatrical progress’ (2005: 7), and points out that States’ description of an actor ‘peering’ into the pit assumes modern rather than Elizabethan theatrical conditions: ‘audience in darkness, actor with bright lights shining into his/her eyes’ (2005: 70).

When David Warner played Hamlet for the RSC in 1965, one critic noted:

‘This is a Hamlet desperately in need of counsel, help, experience, and he actually seeks it from the audience in his soliloquies. That is probably the greatest triumph of the production: using the Elizabethan convention with total literalness. Hamlet communes not with himself but with you. For the first time in my experience, the rhetoric spoken as it was intended to be, comes brilliantly to life.’ (Ronald Bryden, New Statesman, 27 August 1965)


David Warner as Hamlet, RSC, 1965


Mary Z. Maher concludes:‘Generally speaking, direct-address soliloquies temper or even negate madness in a Hamlet. Direct-address soliloquies are perceived as more persuasive and objective, cooler and more rational than internalized soliloquies – Hamlet stepping outside the play and commenting upon it. … The converse is also generally true: an actor can move toward communicating full-blown insanity if he keeps his soliloquies inward.’ (1992: xxvi)

Hamlet’s first lines

Hamlet’s first line is often played as an aside, but is not necessarily.

Hamlet has no speeches marked ‘aside’, in fact. Alan C. Dessen points out that ‘Shakespeare apparently did not use the term as part of his working vocabulary’ (1995: 52). First Folio, 1623

Hamlet’s first

soliloquyActor and director Michael Pennington argues that in the first soliloquy, Hamlet speaks ‘with a shocking candour new to the play’ (1996: 40).

David Warner ‘did not use the soliloquy to bond with the audience […]; he rather assumed their collusion and let off steam. The character established was a rebellious prince who did not respect authority’ (Maher 1992: 54).

First Folio, 1623

Hamlet’s second soliloquy

‘…it was not unusual for Hamlets who chose the direct-address mode to find that one of the soliloquies was best addressed inwardly even though he performed the other six outward. There was a tendency for most of the Hamlets I interviewed to internalize the second soliloquy, “O all you host of heaven.”’ (Maher 1992: xv)

First Folio, 1623

Hamlet’s third soliloquy

The last of these questions, suggests

Pennington, ‘hangs in the air’

(1996: 75).

Pennington argues that Hamlet ‘must surely have got an answer’ to some of these

questions at the Globe, and ‘even in these restrained days, the responses sit at the front of

our mouths’ (1996: 75).

First Folio, 1623

Hamlet’s third soliloquy

Mark Rylance as Hamlet, Shakespeare’s Globe,

2000

Lars Eidinger as Hamlet, Schaubühne

Berlin, 2008

Hamlet’s fourth

soliloquy‘The Christian inhibition against self-slaughter which Hamlet recognised in his first soliloquy has gone now, replaced by fear, and his typical strengths have deserted him. […] There is no personal pronoun at all in its thirty-five lines, so it is in a sense drained of Hamlet himself: although the cap fits, it also stands free of him as pure human analysis.’ (Pennington 1996: 81)

‘Although the content of this speech was very contemplative and personal, Warner never questioned that it should be given to the audience. Indeed, he felt that this soliloquy was the most direct of all of them. He saw it as sharing his dilemma with them (“after all, he’d shared everything else!”) and “debating gently” the very serious options.’ (Maher 1992: 56)

Second Quarto, 1604

Hamlet’s fourth soliloquy

Mark Rylance as Hamlet, Shakespeare’s Globe,

2000

Mark Rylance:

‘I found if I came out speaking “to be or not to be” as if it had not been cooked before, but I was cooking it at that very moment, ingredient by ingredient … it provoked a different response from the audience. Shakespeare comes to life when we speak and move with the audience in the present, particularly with famous speeches like that one. … if you actually take it step by step, you know, “to be or not to be, that is the question”; then imagine the audience saying, “What do you mean, that is the question?” And go on, “Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”, there is a sense of dialogue with the audience who are playing the role of Hamlet’s conscience at that moment.’ (Rylance 2008: 106-7)

Hamlet’s fourth

soliloquyThe writer of the ‘bad’ quarto misplaced this soliloquy, putting both it, and the subsequent scene with Ophelia, before the arrival of the players and Hamlet’s decision to use them to ‘catch the conscience of the King’.

Modern productions (including recent ones by the RSC and the Young Vic) have copied this placing of the speech.

First (‘Bad’) Quarto, 1603

Hamlet’s fourth soliloquy

The speech is evidently detachable:

Laurence Olivier’s film (1948) puts it after the nunnery scene (itself repositioned into the Q1 spot);Peter Brook’s production (2001) placed it after Hamlet’s murder of Polonius and subsequent banishment to England, making it Hamlet’s last soliloquy (sliding in ‘From this time forth / My thoughts be bloody or be nothing worth’ at the end); Sarah Frankcom’s (2014) did something similar;Dreamthinkspeak’s The Rest is Silence (2012) allowed every single character to deliver the speech!

Charles Lamb, ‘On the Tragedies of William Shakespeare’, 1811:

‘I confess myself utterly unable to appreciate that celebrated soliloquy in Hamlet, beginning “To be or not to be”, or to tell whether it be good, bad, or indifferent, it has been so handled and pawed about by declamatory boys and men, and torn so inhumanly from its living place and principle of continuity in the play, till it is become to me a perfect dead member.’

Hamlet’s fifth soliloquyJohn Gielgud described the fifth soliloquy (which his production cut) as ‘difficult to deliver and unrewarding to play’ (Maher 1992: 12).

Pennington notes a tendency for Hamlets ‘to move into this new purposeful phase by making some identification with the Players – wearing a multi-coloured Player’s cloak (me), the Player King’s crown (Dillane), a Player’s mask (Ralph Fiennes). […] face to face finally with ‘proof and therefore the need for action, Hamlet retreats, making himself an actor whose deeds are only gestures’ (1996: 92).

First Folio, 1623

Hamlet’s sixth soliloquy

First Folio, 1623Second Quarto, 1604

Hamlet’s sixth soliloquyAs Lars Eidinger’s Hamlet debated killing Claudius, pre-filmed footage of an audience applauding played behind him. When I saw the production at London’s Barbican theatre in 2011, Hamlet’s speech descended into a torrent of action-movie clichés (‘You killed my father, you’re fucking my mother, and that’s why you’re going to die!’), before Eidinger broke off and asked the audience, ‘Is this what you want to see?’.

Lars Eidinger as Hamlet, Schaubühne

Berlin, 2008

Hamlet’s seventh soliloquy

This soliloquy appears only in the 1604 Second Quarto.

It gives Hamlet a very different ‘arc’…

CAPTAIN. Truly to speak, and with no addition,We go to gain a little patch of groundThat hath in it no profit but the name.

(4.4.8-10)

Second Quarto, 1604


‘Gielgud viewed “How all occasions” as a “very important soliloquy” that showed Hamlet’s state of mind as “clear, noble, and resolved” before he went to England, with a “clear understanding of his destiny and desire.” Here was an assertion of the Victorian notion of the noble prince who valued honour above “the death of twenty thousand men.” After World War II and Vietnam, it would become less and less popular to find inspiration in Fortinbras, and, in fact, his portrayal on the stage would become more and more brutal and dictatorial.’ (Maher 1992: 14)


Escolme describes the change in the character/spectator relationship following Hamlet’s last soliloquy:

‘As a clown’s skull is replaced in its grave, as Ophelia is newly laid in hers, it seems we must also say goodbye to the complex theatrical subjectivity of Hamlet, as he slips back into a simpler moral frame where there can be no questioning of man’s inevitable fate.’

In Mark Rylance’s performance at the Globe, this shift was, suggests Escolme, nothing less than a ‘bereavement of the spectator’ (2005: 73).


Bertolt Brecht described Hamlet’s final soliloquy as ‘the turning point’ at which ‘he succumbs to Fortinbras’ drums of war’ (1948: 101).

‘After at first being reluctant to answer one bloody deed by another, and even preparing to go into exile, he meets young Fortinbras at the coast as he is marching with his troops to Poland. Overcome by this warrior-like example, he turns back and in a piece of barbaric butchery slaughters his uncle, his mother and himself, leaving Denmark to the Norwegian. These events show the young man… making the most ineffective use of the new approach to Reason which he has picked up at the University of Wittenberg.’ (1948: 100-1)


Arnold Kettle puts the same idea more subtly:‘Hamlet is not merely a Renaissance prince. Along with Marlowe’s Faustus he is the first modern intellectual in our literature and he is, of course, far more modern as well as much more intelligent than Faustus. And his dilemma is essentially the dilemma of the modern European intellectual: his ideas and values are in a deep way at odds with his actions. […] Hamlet, the prince who has tried to become a man, becomes a prince again and does what a sixteenth-century prince ought to do – killing the murderer of his father, forgiving the stupid, clean-limbed Laertes, expressing (for the first time) direct concern about his own claims to the throne but giving his dying voice to young Fortinbras… The end then, is, in one sense, almost total defeat for everything Hamlet has stood for. But it is an acceptance of the need to act in the real world, and that is a great human triumph.’ (245-6)

ReferencesBrecht, B. (1948) ‘A Short Organum for the Theatre’ in Cole, T. [ed.] (2001) Playwrights on Playwriting: from Ibsen to Ionesco, New York: Cooper Square Press, 72-105.

Brook, P. (1968) The Empty Space, London: Penguin.

Dessen, A. C. (1995) Recovering Shakespeare’s Theatrical Vocabulary, Cambridge: C. U. P.

Escolme, B. (2005) Talking to the Audience: Shakespeare, Performance, Self, London & New York: Routledge.

Gurr, A. (1992) The Shakespearean Stage, 1574-1642: Third Edition, Cambridge: C. U. P.

ReferencesKettle, A. (1964) ‘Hamlet in a Changing World’, in Hoy, C. [ed.] (1992) Hamlet: A Norton Critical Edition, 2nd ed., New York: W. W. Norton, 237-46.

Maher, M. Z. (1992) Modern Hamlets and their Soliloquies, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.

Pennington, M. (1996) Hamlet: A User’s Guide, London: Nick Hern.

Rylance, M. ‘Research, Materials, Craft: Principles of Performance at Shakespeare’s Globe’, Carson, C. & Karim-Cooper, F. [eds] (2008) Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment, Cambridge: C.U.P., 103-14

States, B. O. (1983) ‘The Actor’s Presence: Three Phenomenal Modes’, Theatre Journal 35: 3, 359-375.

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