Hamlet

Hamlet by William Shakespeare
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The last time I read Hamlet I came away thinking it was a play haunted by depression and suicide rather than revenge. This time around, what struck me was how the Ghost sets up a theological mystery that Hamlet needs to investigate. It is only with the staging of the play within the play that Hamlet can see the Ghost is honest and the King is a regicide. But that reveals his hand, and gets him packed off to England. Revenge is deferred because of Hamlet’s probing at the workings of heaven. It is after seeing Fortinbras marching with his army to fight over “an eggshell” that he lets go and surrenders to what may be. The sea voyage turns him into a creature of impulse – “the readiness is all”. In the final scene the deaths feel random. Providence takes over and resolves the feud where Hamlet’s intellectualising could not. His antic disposition enters a new lighter mode in Act 5. The angst is replaced by a sense of comic absurdism, where weighty matters of death are treated as skulls to be thrown about. But in his last moments he suddenly starts caring about his reputation, contradicting his earlier claim that not knowing what might happen after death means he is ready for it. Fundamentally this character fascinates more than any other not just because of the poetry he is capable but because of the several transformations he undergoes.

The Arden 3rd edition’s textual notes are excellent. A lot of the introduction and appendixes focus on the decision to present the different versions of the play separately, rather than conflating them. That is new and interesting, but it leaves less room to explore the historical context and staging history of the play.

View all my reviews

The Spanish Tragedy

The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The first big hit of Elizabethan drama, and still absolutely captivating. The scene constructions and rhetorical flourishes may strike some readers as offputtingly artificial. I thought they were impressively thought out, and rich in interpretative possibilities. Kyd gives us a play within a play within a play. The personification of Revenge orchestrates the action, coming to embody the protagonist Hieronimo who in turn stages a play that enacts his revenge. The pivotal scene in which he discovers the letter revealing the murderers of his son, which can feel quite arbitrary, can be staged in such a way that has Revenge come in to press his thumb on the scale and kickstart the revenge plot. The guiding hand of providence makes good in the end, delivering a sense of poetic and dramatic justice. It must have felt powerfully cathartic to an audience who were used to burying their children to have a figure embody and enact extra-worldly justice on the stage, although the disaster that ensues might complicate the response of a modern audience. Anyone interested in Shakespeare or the theatre of his day needs to read this play.

View all my reviews

The White Devil

The White Devil by John Webster
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Extremely plot-heavy to its detriment. Webster doesn’t have his characters explain themselves to the audience in soliloquy so it’s often hard to determine why they are doing what they are doing. The general sense conveyed is of courtiers and lovers driven to hysteria and madness as a result of serving the whims of their powerful patrons. Poison pervades the court and few escape it. The sham trial in the middle of the play is its finest moment. The ending is very confused.

View all my reviews