ABSTRACT a Director's Approach to William Shakespeare's Hamlet
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ABSTRACT A Director’s Approach to William Shakespeare’s Hamlet Nathan D. Records, M.F.A. Thesis Chairperson: DeAnna M. Toten Beard, Ph.D. This thesis provides an in-depth analysis of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, as directed by Nathan Records at Baylor University Theatre from September 26 through October 1, 2006. Chapter one provides the historical context for the play and offers discussions of various sources for Shakespeare’s tragedy along with a review of literature and a brief examination of production history. Chapter two offers a detailed analysis of the play and comments on the project cutting the text of Hamlet to create a production script. Chapter three discusses the collaborative process between director and designers, detailing the production decisions made for scenery, costumes, lighting, and sound. Chapter four focuses on auditions, actor rehearsals, and technical implementation of the elements of the play in production. Chapter five concludes with the director’s critical self-evaluation of the production process. A Director’s Approach to William Shakespeare’s Hamlet by Nathan D. Records, B.S. A Thesis Approved by the Department of Theater Arts ___________________________________ Stan C. Denman, Ph.D., Chairperson Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Baylor University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Fine Arts Approved by the Thesis Committee ___________________________________ DeAnna M. Toten Beard, Ph.D., Chairperson ___________________________________ Marion D. Castleberry, Ph.D. ___________________________________ Maurice A. Hunt, Ph.D. ___________________________________ Thomas Ward, M.F.A. Accepted by the Graduate School May 2007 ___________________________________ J. Larry Lyon, Ph.D., Dean Page bearing signatures is kept on file in the Graduate School. Copyright © 2007 by Nathan D. Records All rights reserved TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments v Chapter One: William Shakespeare and Hamlet 1 William Shakespeare 2 Sources of Hamlet 5 Review of Literature 16 Great Hamlets and Great Hamlets 22 Conclusion 33 Chapter Two: An Analysis of Hamlet 34 Synopsis of Hamlet 34 The World of Hamlet 39 Dramatic Action 42 Character Analysis 46 Problems in Hamlet 62 Cutting the Script 66 Conclusion 71 Chapter Three: The Production Style 72 Stage Space 74 Pre-Production Design Development 75 Costumes 82 Set 90 Properties 92 Lights 93 Hair and Make-up 94 Music 94 Sound 95 Conclusion 97 Chapter Four: The Rehearsal Process 98 Auditions 98 Casting 100 Actor Preparation 102 Rehearsals 103 Technical Rehearsals 111 Dress Rehearsals 113 Conclusion 114 iii Chapter Five: Self-Evaluation 115 Design 116 Acting 122 Directing 124 Conclusion 127 Appendices 129 A—Photos of the Baylor University Production of Hamlet 130 B—Permission forms for Appendix A 144 C—The Cutting of Hamlet 147 Bibliography 225 iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS There are a number of people without whom I would have been unable to see this process to the end. I would like to thank the entire Department of Theater Arts for taking a chance on someone who had no idea what it meant to be a director or a graduate student when he first arrived on campus and especially for the support I received on Hamlet. There have been three professors who specifically challenged my growth as a person, as a Christian, and as a theatre artist. Dr. Carolyn Roark helped me, as much as anyone can help me, make sense of theory and begin to understand that it is our friend, not our enemy. Dr. Marion Castleberry is a friend and mentor who, whether over a plate of ribs or falling into a river, has constantly challenged, pushed and beat me into something of a director. Without Dr. DeAnna Toten Beard, I would be lost in the sea of Shakespeare and Hamlet material. This specific project has taken eighteen months and I could not have completed all of this without her. I am thankful to my wife Maren, who put up with me during this process while showing me endless support and finishing her own degree at the same time. I would also like to thank my dog, Baylor, for being ready to forgive this long process as long as there are some long walks, delicious treats and trips to the park in return for her patience and boredom. She always seemed to know when I needed a break for some playtime . usually around two or three a.m. Finally, to our unborn child, whose mother announced she was pregnant by presenting me with a bib that read, “I love daddy.” I carried the bib with me everywhere during the final months as motivation to continue when I was ready to give up. I look forward to a lifetime of knowing you. v CHAPTER ONE William Shakespeare and Hamlet Ann Thompson’s introduction in the 2006 Arden Shakespeare edition of Hamlet begins with a story about Horace Howard Furness addressing fellow Shakespearean scholars at Harvard University in 1908. In the speech, Furness humorously implored his colleagues to avoid writing on Hamlet, saying: “I am convinced that were I told that my closest friend was lying at the point of death, and that his life could be saved by permitting him to divulge his theory of Hamlet, I would instantly say, ‘Let him die! Let him die! Let him die!’” (Thompson 1). The experience of directing the most often- analyzed play by the most often-studied English writer has certainly provided me ample reason to agree with Furness’s assessment of the state of Hamlet scholarship. As I began to delve into the thesis writing process, I made a habit of setting up shop in the library among the stacks, closest to the Shakespeare books. Each day as I passed through “Shakespeare Row” the sheer volume of texts—yards and yards of shelf space—seemed to grow more and more overwhelming. This is no surprise considering the staggering facts Thompson shares: “by the 1990s the average number of publications every year on Hamlet, as recorded in the Shakespeare Quarterly Annual Bibliography, was running at well over 400” (Thompson 1-2). The challenge then is to fight the urge to digest and discuss absolutely everything that has been written about the play, something my thesis advisors gently remind me is neither possible nor advisable. In preparing this written defense of my thesis production of Hamlet, I have nonetheless spent more time 1 2 exploring some subjects than I should have and I have probably neglected some avenues of investigation. Along the way, I discovered many ideas which I would like to one day explore further. Indeed, even as I complete the final stages of this thesis project, I cannot help but imagine what I will do the next time I get the opportunity to direct Hamlet. The work on this thesis has demonstrated to me that Shakespeare has been analyzed and discussed from every imaginable angle. There is no way for one project to survey every topic related to Shakespeare or even to the single play Hamlet. This chapter will therefore not seek to be exhaustive. Instead, the chapter will offer a thorough look at a few key areas of research necessary to pre-production planning for staging Hamlet: the biographical details of the playwright, source material for the play, a survey of selected literature, and finally a brief discussion of important theatrical interpretations of the play throughout history. William Shakespeare Writing about Shakespeare, in a way, is like writing about a ghost story. So much has been passed on as facts by well-meaning high school literature teachers as facts, when indeed we know little about the figure considered to be the greatest English playwright of all time. Shakespeare’s birth is celebrated the same day as his death, though no documentation exists to make this a proven fact. His christening is registered as April 26, 1564 in Stratford-on-Avon in England, and his death is registered on April 23, 1616, at fifty-two years of age. Besides this scant data, little physical evidence of Shakespeare’s life remains. As Stephen Greenblatt notes in his preface to Will in the World: 3 Apart from the poems and plays themselves, the surviving traces of Shakespeare’s life are abundant but thin. Dogged archival labor over many generations has turned up contemporary allusions to him, along with a reasonable number of the playwright’s property transactions, a marriage license bond, christening records, cast lists in which he is named a performer, tax bills, petty legal affidavits, payments for services, and an interesting last will and testament, but no immediately obvious clues to unravel the great mystery of such immense creative power. (12) Certainly, as with all other subjects Shakespeare, there is no lack of biographical and pseudo-biographical material written about the man. Take for example the work of Peter Alexander in Shakespeare’s Life and Art and Samuel Schoenbaum’s Shakespeare’s Lives (1970). More recent forays into the speculative business of Shakespearean biography include Park Honan’s Shakespeare: A Life (1998) and Gary Taylor’s Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present (1989). Other writers question whether a man named William Shakespeare actually wrote these plays or even actually existed, such as Mark Anderson’s Shakespeare by Another Name: A Biography of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, the Man Who Wrote Shakespeare (1989), and John F. Michell’s Who Wrote Shakespeare? (1999). But much of the material in all of these works is based on the material as quoted above from Greenblatt with added speculation. Because of the allusiveness of his biography, this thesis study chooses to focus not on the life of William Shakespeare but on the life of Hamlet. Shakespeare authored thirty-eight plays, though some argue for an addition, such as Edward III.