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What We Hear; What we see: Theatre for a New Audience's 2009 Hamlet
- Edited by Peter Holland, University of Notre Dame, Indiana
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- Book:
- Shakespeare Survey
- Published online:
- 28 November 2011
- Print publication:
- 06 October 2011, pp 290-299
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Summary
In any production of a Shakespeare play what we hear and see is largely determined by the text, but individual productions can and do make surprising and sometimes enlightening choices that bring the text to life in unexpected ways. Theatre for a New Audience (TFANA) added visual images (through video and staging techniques) and sound effects to a text that, with almost all the unfamiliar words and images cut, rarely could trouble even a novice audience. By cutting the text in decisive ways, director David Esbjornson shaped a clear interpretation of a play that has seemed to contain too many possible interpretations. Esbjornson's was not, however, a heavy-handed imposition of a director's perspective on the play but a subtle enactment of the play's potential within a modern context. The production avoided the problematic Hamlet proposed by much critical literature from the eighteenth century through to the present and the potentially less than admirable Hamlet exposed in passages that undercut the character's nobility. It was a production that could please those who praise Hamlet as one of the most admirable characters in literature; it required no excuses for his inaction. Nevertheless, this Hamlet was as complex and deeply layered as the actor Christian Camargo could make him. Greeted by most reviewers as one of the best Hamlets seen in many years, the production had at its heart superb acting and an innovative group of designers.
Entering the theatre, the Duke on 42nd Street, in New York City, audiences were immediately struck by the intimacy of the venue (180 seats for Hamlet). Arranged on three sides of a black, tiled platform stage, the audience was close to the action but shielded from each other most of the time by extreme darkness. The choice of a mixture of modern-dress costumes fitted the neutral setting. Penetrated by spotlights, the darkness focused attention where it was needed. The script eliminated lines that invite actors to speak directly to the audience, keeping Elsinore hermetically sealed within that black space. For example, Polonius does not urge the audience to share his perception of Hamlet's madness with lines often interpreted as asides, such as ‘How say you by that’ (2.2.189) and ‘I’ll speak to him again’ (2.2.193). The darkness of the production precluded any such intimacy between the actors and the audience and made the production insular and pressurized.
Print and Electronic Editions Inspired by the New Variorum Hamlet Project
- Edited by Peter Holland, University of Notre Dame, Indiana
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- Book:
- Shakespeare Survey
- Published online:
- 28 March 2007
- Print publication:
- 12 October 2006, pp 157-167
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Summary
THE THREE-TEXT HAMLET: PARALLEL TEXTS OF THE FIRST AND SECOND QUARTOS AND FIRST FOLIO
At the beginning, there was the Modern Language Association’s New Variorum Hamlet project. The original team, which began working before 1990, included Paul Bertram as text editor. Almost immediately, he and I realized that having the three early texts of Hamlet in front of us in a compact and legible form would be useful for textual collations as well as commentary notes based on textual variants – the material we were collecting for the variorum edition. Encouraged by the many vital works that AMS Press had made available through its reprints, we approached Gabriel Hornstein, President of AMS, with a plan for publishing a Three-Text Hamlet, which he readily accepted. Though the idea of electronic versions of our new variorum work was very much a part of my original planning, Paul Bertram and I also felt that we needed a book to place by our computers for easy consulting. The flow between paper and electrons is a hallmark of our efforts in all our texts.
The first edition of The Three-Text Hamlet appeared in 1991 and was useful beyond our expectations not only to us but to the many scholars, students, and theatre practitioners who wrote to tell us how much they valued it. Though many of the users had facsimiles of the First Quarto (q1), the Second Quarto (q2) and the First Folio (f1), our book simplified comparing the three texts through the parallel columns in which we arranged them. If we had chosen to model our work on the example of Michael Warren’s excellent Lear books, we might have xeroxed the facsimiles and cut them up to produce the parallel texts, but given the technology available at that time we would not have been able to generate electronic texts from facsimiles.