Shakespeare in Performance

Castings and Metamorphoses

Ralph Berry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317646426
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Arti performative

These studies take stage history as a means of knowing the play. Half of the studies deal with casting - doubling, chorus and the crowd, the star of Hamlet and Measure for Measure. Then the transformations of dramatis personae are analyzed and The Tempest is viewed through the changing relationships of Prospero, Ariel and Caliban. Some of Shakespeare's most original strategies for audience control are studied, such as Cordelia's asides in King Lear, Richard II 's subversive laughter and the scenic alternation of pleasure and duty in Henry IV. Performance is the realization of identity. The book draws on major productions up to 1992, just before the book was originally published.

1 Hamlet's Doubles

DOI: 10.4324/9781315761855-1

In the RSC Hamlet of 1980, Michael Pennington’s Hamlet, listening intently to the Player’s account of Pyrrhus,

So as a painted tyrant Pyrrhus stood,

And, like a neutral to his will and matter …

anticipated the Player to complete the sentence himself:

Did nothing.

(2.2.476–78)

A bold touch, and perfectly in keeping with the play’s echoic, self-referential quality. Everything that happens in Hamlet relates to the consciousness at the drama’s centre; and Hamlet, with his supreme self-awareness, constantly sees in others images of himself. Laertes and Fortinbras are only the most obvious examples. The Player, in the passage cited, reminds Hamlet of what he knows, and would as soon forget.

Now this quality of Hamlet animates the doubling possibilities that are coded into the text. Given a company of 15–16, the assumed strength of the Chamberlain’s Men, extensive doubling was inevitable. Full casting – a different actor for each part – was an indulgence of the Victorian/Edwardian stage, a demonstration of lavish acting values. Most stages, and the provinces everywhere, have had to accommodate more austere castings. Hamlet is designed for productions in which actors appear and reappear in different guises, hauntingly reminding the audience of what was said and expressed earlier in similar voices, other habits.

What, in the most general sense, is the effect? A. C. Sprague distinguishes between deficiency doubling (together with emergency doubling) and virtuoso doubling. ¹ The first variety is aimed simply at making good the numerical deficiencies of the company. Doubling has often been concealed (by such devices as ‘Walter Plinge,’ together with his American associate ‘George Spelvin’), the management being ashamed to admit the company’s limitations. It follows from this perception that the actor’s triumph was to submerge himself, unrecognizably, in his several roles. The second variety, on the contrary, glories in a display of character acting. As Sprague and Trewin note, ‘Polonius and one of the Gravediggers (most likely the First)… was once the most popular of all Shakespearian doubles.’ ² This double goes back to 1730, and Sprague, in the appendix to his monograph, lists many instances. Neither variety of doubling, I think, exists in the same form today. Deficiency doubling there must always be, but nobody is ashamed of it; the actors tackle their assignments openly. The concept of virtuoso doubling is scarcely mainstream, and the actor playing Polonius is unlikely to relish the implication that this is the first leg of a comic double. Poloniuses are usually praised for not overdoing the comic touches. Broadly, then: doubling is not a uniform mode, implying a single variety of audience response. It will depend on the circumstances and attitudes of the stage in its era. And a history of Hamlet doubling is well beyond my scope here. I want to examine, first, some aspects of the doubling problems which the text of Hamlet discloses; second, some solutions which theatrical practice, in London and Stratford-upon-Avon, has proposed in the past century. And finally, I will use these solutions to return to the nature of the text itself.

Shakespeare’s two-part structures are fundamental to his dramaturgy. From Richard III to The Winter’s Tale, there are numerous before-and-after compositions, some of them, like Timon of Athens, exceptionally clear-cut. The schema calls for a number of lower/middle-order parts, which will appear and disappear before the midpoint, whose actors can be re-deployed in the later stages of the play. It is a principle of organization, not a fixed plan of allocation. Shakespeare must be aware that the actor playing Strato will come from the pool containing Flavius, Marullus and Casca; the disposition of company forces can be made, without preconception, in the light of the available talents. The doubling charts that have been drawn up for Richard II and Julius Caesar show us how the thing was done. ³ The two-part structure accommodated the doubling that was basic to performances in Shakespeare’s day, a practice, says G. E. Bentley, of which audiences were fully aware. ⁴

Hamlet is not self-evidently a two-part structure, and commentators who assume such a structure have disputed whether the midpoint lies in the Play Scene or the Closet Scene. Nevertheless, the ‘centred symmetry,’ the careful structural balancing which Keith Brown adduces between the outer Acts cannot be gainsaid, and I find his ‘centric view’ of the larger Act 3 cogent. On Brown’s showing, Hamlet is indeed symmetrical, but its midpoint is itself a ‘central act’ covering several scenes, with the play dividing into Acts 1–2; 3–4.3; and 4.4–5. ⁵ Suppose we apply this tripartite division to the doubling problem; it corresponds reasonably well to the challenges of organizing roles other than the major ones, The early stages of Hamlet require decent middle-order casting for Marcellus, Bernardo, Francisco, Voltemand, Cornelius, and Reynaldo. These parts disappear before the middle stages, which call upon Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, First Player (presumably, Player King), Player Queen, Prologue, Lucianus, Norwegian Captain, and Fortinbras. Fortinbras will be needed for the later stages, which also require two Gravediggers, Sailor, Priest, Osric, and English Ambassador. Without taking note of attendants, or such immediate possibilities as a conflation of Lucianus and Prologue, one sees at once that half-a-dozen decently capable actors are called for in the early stages, again in the middle, and again in the later stages of the play. They can accomplish their tasks in various permutations of tripling, which grow progressively less onerous as the cast numbers available move up between 6–7 and 20.

All this assumes a full text, or something like it. Hamlet, the quarry-text par excellence, invites cuts aimed at re-shaping the material (and not merely reducing the bulk). The major possibilities are too well known to need elaboration. Theatregoers today collect Reynaldos in the way their ancestors collected English Ambassadors and Fortinbrases. An assiduous but unscholarly Victorian/Edwardian play-goer might have imagined that Hamlet ends at ‘And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.’ And in Olivier’s film even Rosencrantz and Guildenstern found no place. Serious cutting, of the surgical order, finds it easy to eliminate parts as well as lines from Hamlet. This obvious but unpursuable faċt I record and abandon. The discussion of doubling here takes for granted an approximation to a full text, whether of Folio or Second Quarto.

The complexity of this situation disposes of any idea that there can be a natural track whereby certain dispositions taken early on lead to ‘convenient options’ after the interval. Instead, the actors are conducted through the ‘junction’ of the mid-section – which, for our purposes, is the Play Scene – after which they are to be re-deployed in new and unpredictable ways. Let us take the opening scene as the simplest illustration of the problems. Three soldiers are required, in addition to Horatio and the Ghost. Of these, Francisco is the least substantial; he exits early, does not re-appear, and is available for recasting at all later points. Bernardo must remain throughout scene 1, and is with the group that announces the news of the Ghost to Hamlet in 1.2. Marcellus, the most important of the three, is additionally present in the battlement scenes of 1.4 and 1.5. Thereafter he, like his colleagues on watch, must return to the acting pool. From there he will emerge later in ways that defy prescription. The director may take the view (a) that Marcellus, having already had a reasonably substantial part, must now submit to something less distinguished, or (b) that Marcellus, an actor of some ability in a lean company, must be given something at least as good later on. Of the three on guard duty, the actor with the most soldierly bearing might be retained for Fortinbras; the second such, Norwegian Captain. How are parts re-assigned via the ‘junction’? What is the previous existence of the Priest? Is a tripling feasible, or does the director save a part by combining Lucianus/Prologue, thus yielding a spare actor who could take over Francisco, always provided that Captain could return as Sailor, granted that English Ambassador is taken care of …? The combinations spin and re-form. Always the director is in the business of playing to strength and masking weakness, of trying to match numbers with burly sailors, soldierly soldiers, lizard-like courtiers and reverend priests, not to mention bloat kings and Gertrudes who are not too obviously younger than Hamlets. He must avoid being end-played with reverend soldiers or lizard-like sailors, unless, despairing, he resolves to defy stereotype. To arrive at pre-formed answers to these puzzles would seem beyond the wit of man.

Thus the text, as it discloses itself to initial reflection. Scene 1 is not in itself especially important as a casting problem. The director is likely to start elsewhere, from the perception that such a one is an ideal Osric and another is one of Nature’s Guildensterns, and to build up his castings from that point. It is simply that scene 1 comes first, even if closed out late in the casting process. From it one can trace the network of options criss-crossing into a mathematical blur, as the tracks lead away from the apparent simplicities of Francisco, Bernardo, and Marcellus. They, too, have an identity problem. Who are they going to play next?

Hamlet will always be a Rubik’s cube of the director’s art. What can theatrical practice tell us about the solutions? Of the infinite mass of material available in theory, I select two major samplings as convenient and apt. J. P. Wearing’s calendar of the London stage now extends from 1890 to 1929. ⁶ Michael Mullin’s catalogue-index covers a century of productions in Stratford-upon-Avon (and latterly, London). ⁷ The cast lists, save for the remoter years in Stratford-upon-Avon, are reasonably full. Together, these catalogues cover a hundred productions of Hamlet. It is enough to stimulate generalization.

The main conclusion is marked. There is nothing approaching a central, continuing tradition of Hamlet doubling. Historic situations change, for one thing. The London stage, as I have mentioned, adopted a standard of lavish, full casting. In the entire Edwardian era, there were only a handful of doublings (most of them in Wearing, 09.14). One is startled to come across a doubling of Bernardo and the Ghost, but one’s sense of hallucination fades with the knowledge that William Poel arranged the text (Wearing, 14.12). During the 1914–18 war years, certain exigencies were obviously forced upon managements. Even so, Martin Harvey at His Majesty’s (Wearing, 16.93) kept alive Beerbohm Tree’s practice of full casting. (Tree, in keeping with the opulent standards of his day, used to add a Court Jester to his cast.) After the war, Lilian Baylis’s frugal reign at the Old Vic involved regular and frequent doubling. At Stratford-upon-Avon, Benson, of course, had to cut corners; and Bridges-Adams, operating under the fiscally conservative Sir Archibald Flower, had to deploy his forces with great care. Since 1945 the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, later the Royal Shakespeare Company, has generally been able to cast as it pleased. There was however a remarkable production in 1975 by the late Buzz Goodbody at The Other Place (Mullin, 0280) in which triple castings were normal. Charles Dance, for example, was well reviewed for the unlikely combination of Reynaldo, Third Player, and Fortinbras. Of recent years, doubling at Stratford-upon-Avon has reflected not exigencies but the director’s wish to make a point. To that I shall return.

Conditions, though changing, do not I think generate historic trends in patterns of doubling. What one finds are odd pockets of practices, which turn out to reflect the taste of a director able to return over the years to Hamlet. Benson, for example, liked to cast Marcellus and First Player, irrespective of the actors available. Bridges-Adams favored the doubling of Ghost and Fortinbras, doing so on four occasions from 1920 to 1929. Robert Atkins, who directed five Hamlets in London during the early 1920s, four at the Old Vic, also experimented with Ghost/Fortinbras (twice). Tripling was common at the Old Vic during that era, and no one combination dominated. One finds Frances L. Sullivan combining Francisco/Priest/English Ambassador (Wearing, 22.117). To approach the matter from another angle, suppose we sample the doubles with which Bernardo was associated: the first four decades of this century at Stratford-upon-Avon yield us Guildenstern (twice); Second Player (four times); Priest; Rosencrantz (twice); Fortinbras; Second Gravedigger. London, from 1900–29, gives us Rosencrantz (three times); First Player (twice); Osric (twice); Second Gravedigger (twice); Priest; and Captain. It is tedious to demonstrate the obvious. Doubling practice in Hamlet is, and must always have been, overwhelmingly opportunistic.

A negative curiosity is worth mentioning. If we can be tolerably sure of any specific doubling in Shakespeare’s own company, it is that of Marcellus and Voltemand. The First Quarto evidence seems to confirm an authentic practice of the Chamberlain’s Men, that a single actor was responsible for Marcellus and Voltemand together with Prologue and Lucianus. ⁸ One might expect Marcellus/Voltemand to be at least a cult double, a purist’s double. I can find no evidence of its popularity, now or in any era. Voltemand is an early candidate for elimination, as the director eyes his options together with the playing-text; Voltemand’s lot may well be to join the woebegone Cornelius in the limbo reserved for non-players. But that does not account for the continuing irrelevance of a doubling practice from Shakespeare’s own company.

Theatre practice, then, reveals no consistent pattern of doublings. Polonius/Gravedigger had two centuries of esteem before fading. Even Ghost/Laertes was practised for a hundred years, an oddity which Sprague has preserved for us. ⁹ Individual directors have favoured or experimented with certain combinations. But there is no master key. The search for through lines yields only a crazy pattern of interconnected lines. One has then to accept that the play is like that: it is an infinitely complex set of possibilities, not a logical grid with well-defined paths.

A third variety of doublings I shall term ‘conceptual.’ This is a modern phenomenon. In conceptual doublings, the director looks beyond numbers, and beyond the physical characteristics of the acting corps, to couplings which have an underground linkage. Recognizing that the play’s unity comprehends all its parts, the director wishes to italicize into a formal relationship two of them. Conceptual doubling brings a hidden relationship to light. Suppose we think of the play as a metro subway system, the characters as stations: to double parts with conceptual intent is to colour-code the stations on the subway map. The play’s meaning as realized in performance is then held to depend, not minimally, on a relationship whose intensity the director proposes. This tactic affords the director of Hamlet an especially inviting range of possibilities in those pairings which include the Ghost.

The Ghost is the animating spirit of Hamlet. Everything that happens in the play, from the initial ‘Who’s there?’ is an index of or reaction to this appearances. The play’s subtitle is an adjustment: ‘Not the King of Denmark.’ Admonishing and dominating his son, the Ghost, like Julius Caesar, is ‘mighty yet’; and young Hamlet, going through a series of admissions and submissions that leads to the use of the royal seal and the taking-up of arms, acknowledges his kingly mentor. And yet the all-pervasiveness of the Ghost’s influence does not march with the actor’s duties. Two silent appearances in the opening scene, a major cadenza in 1.4–5, a brief intervention in 3.4: it is not much for the play’s arbiter. Where else can the old mole re-emerge?

Peter Hall’s Hamlet at the National Theatre (1975) offered a clearcut illustration of a possible answer. The National, operating to neo-Edwardian standards of luxury casting, has not tended to economize on actors. One reviewer indeed compared disparagingly the large cast at the National to the 14-strong RSC corps, then playing the Goodbody Hamlet at the Round House. ¹⁰ In the National’s production (which contained two English Ambassadors) there was a single major dou...