Playing for Time in Hamlet
Adrian Poole, Lecture on Playing for Time in Hamlet, 27 March 2021
Guest blog by Lisa Hutchins
Hamlet hasn't received much sympathy in recent years. His treatment of Ophelia and his mother have gained him few fans, as has his endless capacity for thinking rather than acting. However, Professor Adrian Poole, in his session for Literature Cambridge, offered a more dynamic view of this famously troubled young prince.
His starting point was the phrase 'playing for time' which, although coined much later than the 17th century, is one he felt Shakespeare would have liked. His session examined how different meanings of the words 'play' and 'time' provide a framework for thinking about the drama.
Hamlet is surprisingly hard to pin down. Adrian said any theatre performance has the capacity to surprise, but no play is as surprising as this one. Its textual history is extremely complex, with editors consulting three versions of the text with very significant differences. With directors' performance decisions also in play, audiences can never be quite sure what they will see. The running time can vary by around two hours and several characters (most significantly Fortinbras) may never appear.
Adrian drew a distinction between the text and the play in performance and pointed to a key sequence of events (the plot) which must happen in order for an audience to feel they have seen Hamlet. These are essentially the sequence of seven deaths, characterised by Adrian as a matter of compulsion or necessity that exists outside time or the constraints of any particular production. In the story, Hamlet is caught up in events he cannot ignore: he cannot unhear what the ghost tells him and he cannot undo his mother's marriage. But whether and how he reacts is down to his free choice. Similarly, every production or reading involves decisions about textual edition, what lines to include in the performance, and how the role is acted. Every production and performance is therefore unique and unrepeatable.
This, Adrian argued, is an example of one of the two kinds of time at work in the play, which are held in tension throughout. They are 'high time', where characters have defined and predictable roles, where plot, ceremony or ritual take precedence; and 'down time' which is spontaneous, lyrical, reflective, informal, playful or clownish. He characterised 'high time' as a plot, narratively, but also in the sense of land, on which battles may be fought and lives lost:
Hamlet: …to my shame I see
The imminent death of twenty thousand men,
That for a fantasy and trick of fame
Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot
Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause
Which is not tomb enough and continent
To hide the slain.
(Act 4 Scene 4 – Folio text)
The play in production fluctuates between scenes that move the plot forward and those that suspend it, often providing the viewer with relief from its harsher elements. None is more famous than this one:
First Clown: Here's a skull now; this skull has lain in the earth three and twenty years.
Hamlet: Whose was it?
First Clown: A whoreson mad fellow's it was: whose do you think it was?
Hamlet: Nay, I know not.
First Clown: A pestilence on him for a mad rogue! A' poured a flagon of Rhenish on my head once. This same skull, sir, was Yorick's skull, the king's jester.
Hamlet: This?
First Clown: E'en that.
Hamlet: Let me see. Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he has borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! My gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now, to mock your own grinning? Quite chap-fallen. Now get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come; make her laugh at that. Prithee, Horatio, tell me one thing.
Horatio: What's that, my lord?
Hamlet: Dost thou think Alexander looked o' this fashion i'the earth?
Horatio: E'en so.
Hamlet: And smelt so? Pah!
Horatio: E'en so, my lord.
(Act 5, Scene 1, 163-91)
This scene embodies a great theme of the play: how we remember the dead who live on for us in memory and imagination. It reminds us how the language of drama extends far beyond words through the powerful visual metaphor of Hamlet addressing the skull. The language is also interesting: the skull is variously addressed as 'him', 'it' and 'you'.
An even more dramatic embodiment of death comes with Ophelia, and music makes up a large part of the dramatic impact of her story. Her madness is expressed through dances and broken snatches of ballads, and she may actually play a lute. The rhythm of her verse breaks and we hear from Hamlet of the ‘maimed rites’ marking her funeral. Another sense of playing comes right at the drama's climax in the fatal fencing match. This seemingly playful activity foregrounds the tension between two kinds of time and two kinds of playing, of a civilised recreation but also of playing for the highest possible stakes. Adrian concluded by reflecting that time is on our side when we 'play for' it but that it also works against us: back to that key theme of mortality and remembrance.
He said that time is both our collaborator and our adversary and, as we contemplate the bright young people of Elsinore who died long before their time, we all feel the chill of lost potential and of opportunities missed.
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Adrian Poole is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity College. He will return to discuss Shakespeare's Richard III on Saturday November 27 at 6pm.
Literature Cambridge will be running four different sessions on The Waves between Saturday April 3 and Saturday April 24. And on Saturday April 10 at 6pm, Alison Hennegan will speak on Flush: A Biography. Full details and booking information here.
