This is Hamlet We're Talking About Here, Hamlet!

I love Hamlet. I know it's cliche, but I really, really love Hamlet.

As previously mentioned, I tend to look at Shakespeare through an actor's lens. With that in mind, I'm going to share a theory that a friend of mine put forward as her PhD thesis in theatre acting:

Hamlet should never be performed. Hamlet should be bound up and venerated and kept forever, but it should never be performed. The idea is that Hamlet has so much inner turmoil that no actor would be able to adequately perform it without losing his mind. I don't completely agree, but I can certainly see her point. I never got to read her thesis, but I can come up with several arguments that support it.

It was brought up in class today where the character separates from the actor. In my mind, There isn't much of a distinction. The characters we play are parts of us, or we would not be able to play them. The best actors do one of two things: they use who they are to play the character, or they turn the character into who they are.

In the first case, there is almost no one who has enough negative life experience to adequately play Hamlet in the Meisner technique. Most people simply do not have enough to draw on to manufacture the emotions that Hamlet experiences. I mean, let's examine this for a second: His father has been murdered, probably by his uncle. His mother is in an incestuous relationship with said uncle. He is having spectres appear to him, leading him to wonder if he's being led down the right path, whether he's being deceived by a devil, or whether he's losing his mind altogether. His love life is completely messed up, and he makes it worse by accidentally killing his girlfriend's dad. That girlfriend then goes on to kill herself as a direct result of his actions. Also, he's inheriting a country that is at risk of war. He's not sure whether to kill himself, kill his uncle, or whether to kill anyone at all.

And these are only the issues explicitly brought up in the text. Never mind subtext, the actor's life-blood. I mean, what if Hamlet was also in love with his mother? Or Laertes? What if Hamlet knew that his mother's affair with his uncle started before his father was dead? What if Hamlet secretly hated his dad, adding even more confusion to his father's post-mortem cry for vengeance? There is not a person alive who has had a wall of crap like that fall upon him. I'd be pretty surprised if there was anyone who even came close.

Then, of course, there's the issue of whether Hamlet is actually saying what he means. Shakespeare uses verbal irony pretty extensively - there are any number of places where Hamlet could be sarcastic. Here's a passage from act I. What if Hamlet hated his father?

O all you host of heaven! O earth! What else?
And shall I couple hell? Hold, hold, my heart!
And you, my sinews, grow not instant old,
But bear me stiffly up. Remember thee?
Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat
In this distracted globe. Remember thee?
Yea, from the table of my memory
I'll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past
That youth and observation copied there,
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,
Unmix'd with baser matter. Yes, by Heaven!

If Hamlet is saying this sarcastically, it takes on a completely different meaning. Rather than telling his father how he plans to take on the task of vengeance out of love and respect, he is telling his father how much he hates him. He might seek revenge strictly out of sonly obligation (although hating your father and hating your uncle aren't mutually exclusive). I think we all know how much it sucks to do something for a parent that we don't want to do. I think most people are familiar with being guilt-tripped into something. If we look at this passage as sarcastic, the entire play takes on a completely different tone.

Is it really possible that one person is carrying around enough emotional baggage to really do Hamlet justice? If not, acting by experience is probably out.

If the actor were to embody Hamlet, he could end up dead or psychologically broken. One of the best examples of the danger of deep method acting is Heath Ledger as the Joker in The Dark Knight. Heath Ledger was, by all accounts, a nice normal guy. He had a kid and friends and a life. In order to play the Joker successfully, he became the unhinged, sadistic, amoral character. He played the character beautifully, but I wonder if anyone thinks it was worth the consequences. In order to become the character, method actors bring upon themselves the traumas of their character's lives. They wear their character's clothes and sleep in their character's beds and speak in the character's voices. Rather than becoming the character, the character becomes them. By all accounts, that takes an enormous psychological toll.

I'm not saying that I agree that Hamlet should never be performed. I think most of us can relate to having a messed-up family or a messed-up love life. I don't think that the character needs to be taken as far as it's written. I can, however, see the potential danger in performing the role of Hamlet.

You could probably make the case that Hamlet is the most conflicted character in literary history. Usually, Shakespeare spreads the issues out among everybody, but it seems like all of the other characters in Hamlet have pretty clear motives and ambitions. They're surprisingly one-dimensional, if we adhere strictly to the text. Polonius is a nosy old man who wants to be actively involved in his children's lives. Ophelia does what she's told until she loses her mind. Gertrude is a slave to her desires. Claudius is a competent king, but an evil and ambitious man. It seems like Shakespeare reserved all the complexity in the play for Hamlet himself, and he may have gone somewhat overboard. It's certainly his magnum opus, but it makes for an extremely difficult performance.