THEATRICAL COLLOQUIA DOI number 10.2478/tco-2020-0019 Hamlet’s Theatre Lesson Antonella CORNICI Abstract: Hamlet is the play that has ignited the most numerous polemics, and about the Prince of Denmark and his madness, may it be considered real or acted out, thousands of pages have been written. “Hamlet is the absolute character. No other author has ever managed to create something with such a spectacular status. He is an enigma, the only one that has never given anyone the chance to fully decipher it, not one from all the people that had ever come close to it.”1 Hamlet- the actor and the director, this is the perspective from which one will seek answers by following the text and certain unique directorial approaches. One analyzed the monologue from the second scene of the third act. In this “theatre lesson”, one can find guidelines on acting, but also on directing, pieces of advice that are valid today. Hamlet is one of the characters with the most monologues, pages and pages of words that cover the same dilemma – To be or not to be. One proposes to follow the acting lesson, but also the play-within-the-play scene, as they are connected from the actors’ and directors’ perspectives. The monologue presents strict guidelines for actors/directors, exemplifying them, and in the scene of the performance one can notice whether the “lesson” was truly efficient or not. One will follow this specific path in certain productions, considered as being unique. Key words: Shakespeare, theatre, monologue, Hamlet Lecturer PhD. at “George Enescu” National Arts University, Iași, Theatre Faculty, Directing School 1 Octavian Saiu, Hamlet și nebunia lumii [Hamlet and the Madness of the World], Editura Paideia, București, 2014, p. 9. 36 THEATRICAL COLLOQUIA Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue: but if you mouth it, as many of our players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus; but use all gently: for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness. O, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious, periwig- pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who, for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb-shows and noise: I would have such a fellow whipped for o’erdoing Termagant; it out-herods Herod: pray you, avoid it. Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion be your tutor: suit the action to the word, the word to the action; with this special observance, that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature: for anything so o’erdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure. Now, this overdone, or come tardy off, though it makes the unskillful laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve; the censure of the which one must, in your allowance, o’erweigh a whole theater of others. O, there be players that I have seen play,- and heard others praise, and that highly,- not to speak it profanely, that, neither having the accent of Christians, nor the gait of Christian, pagan, nor man, have so strutted and bellow’d, that I have thought some of nature’s journeymen had made them, and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably. O, reform it altogether. And let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them: for there be of them that will themselves laugh, to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh too; though, in the meantime, some necessary question of the play be then to be consider’d; that’s villainous and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it. Go make you ready.2 2 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Wordsworth Editions Limited, Hertfordshire, 1996, pp.689-690. 37 THEATRICAL COLLOQUIA When one thinks of Hamlet, one sees, at once, “a thousand plays in one text. Limning Hamlet means limning the world. It is simply impossible. To interpret Hamlet – this is possible, as interpretation is, after all, a question of choice. Each verse is, in Hamlet, simple and clear. Almost every line from Hamlet allows hundreds of meanings and triggers an avalanche of consequences. The rest is silence.”3 Thanks to these hundreds of meanings that have “triggered” an avalanche of consequences, there have been at least as many stage versions as there have been productions. The years after 2000 are very rich when it comes to this, and the majority of the shows have the tendency of giving up the Shakespearean verse, of turning it into prose, and of rewriting it. The young director Radu Alexandru Nica, the creator of a controversial Hamlet („Radu Stanca” National Theatre, Sibiu, 2008), proposed a „massive and coherent project that contained Shakespeare’s complete works in Romanian. The majority of the published translations are fifty years old and it is obvious that they are no longer contemporary. Drainage of this kind is more than justified, as it is known that, in half a century, a language developes enough to impetuously require the retranslation of a European cultural dogma’s center.”4 One finds the director’s option to be reasonable, but the stage version he proposed in 2008 was a mixture of old translations (Ion Vinea), new ones (Rareș Moldovan), and anonymous texts. It is true that the director took responsibility for the artifices within the text. The poster of the production warns one that Hamlet is a staging based on Shakespeare. One does not find an entire retranslation (as one expected). On the contrary. The adaptation is a collage of texts that do not find harmony with the modernity of the show, with 3 Andrzej Żurowski, Citindu-l pe Shakespeare [Reading Shakespeare], translated in Romanian by Cristina Godun, Editura Cheiron, București, 2010, p.297. 4 Ciprian Marinescu, Shakespeare@yahoogroup, Scena.ro, nr.3/iunie/iulie/august 2009, Internet source: http://www.revistascena.ro/performing-arts/dezbatere/shakespeareyahoogroup, data download: 11 iulie 2015. 38 THEATRICAL COLLOQUIA the acting. The director explained – “The translation is partially new. There had been two working phases. At first, we tried an entirely new translation and a complete update of the text. We started rehearsing with this version and the rehearsals did not fulfill my expectations. Through retranslation, the text had lost most of its polysemy. I opted, thus, for a partial return to the classic version, even though it might have had an obsolete perfume, so that the acting could work contrapuntal, the acting technique being contemporary.”5 One does not see the counterpoint mentioned by the director, but a dissension, a continuous conflict between the acting and the text. The process of updating a translation is the basis of today’s stage versions. One agrees with the director and translator Cristi Juncu, who was sanctioning this method: „Adapting old translations seems to me the most… Romanian option- betwixt and between. I either like how that man formulated it fifty years ago (ok, I might change a word or two, but I mostly will go with him), either do not feel satisfied, therefore start again from zero! If the text is important in a production (and, let’s be honest, from Shakespeare this is all we got: a text), then these I think should be the options.”6 Thus, the real cause of the avalanche of stage versions is, as one believes, most importantly, the directorial concept. As long as one finds entire fragments from the old translations, alongside texts from other authors, it is clear that not the almost archaic language of the already existent translations bothers the most. The director’s proposal must be entirely justified, and the Shakespearean text does not necessary include the newly found meanings. But there is also the permanent adjustment to the political and social reality that implies modifying the text. Perhaps it is that not all of Shakespeare’s works can appropriate the present times and, naturally, artifices become necessary within the play. This is the case when one notices an adaptation of 5 Veronica Niculescu, A fi sau a nu fi, cu pistolul la tâmplă [To be or not to be held at gunpoint]. Interview with the director Radu Alexandru Nica, „Suplimentul de cultură”, nr.171, 22.03.2008, Internet source: http://www.suplimentuldecultura.ro/index.php/continutArticolNrIdent/Interviu/3131,data download:2 iunie 2019. 6 Ciprian Marinescu, cited location. 39 THEATRICAL COLLOQUIA the story and even a “narrowing” of the text. The best method seems to be that the director teams up with a translator. This way, his idea would be better motivated by the text and vice versa. The director Alexander Hausvater stated, on the Shakespearean verse: “Translating Shakespeare includes certain levels that one must comply with. Firstly, I do not think you can stage Shakespeare if you are unable to read the original texts. One must understand the system of the iambic pentameter, what it means to leave a verse free, and for the movement to come from within the story, from within the text, and not from its appearance. Secondly, one must take into account the fact that the history of Shakespearean productions has constantly changed the language.