Hamlet

A couple of nights ago, I watched a BBC production of "Hamlet," featuring David Tennant as Hamlet, and Patrick Stewart as Claudius and old Hamlet's ghost. This production is set in the 20th century, allowing the players to wear modern clothes, and giving the production a kind of immediacy. I liked it very much. Tennant is nearly overwhelming in the title role, and Patrick Stewart is an urbane, almost sympathetic villain.

I wondered as I watched, what had happened at Elsinore before the play began. Hamlet obviously holds his dead father in high regard and is extremely distressed that his mother Gertrude has married the old king's brother only a few months after old Hamlet's sudden death. But Hamlet's opinion of his father might not square with what other people thought. In fact, as I remember, old Hamlet drops a very broad hint that he's now in hell.

Perhaps he was a very bad man and a very bad king. Maybe he and Gertrude were unhappy together. We might guess that Gertrude and Claudius were attracted to each other while old Hamlet still lived. Later in the play, when Claudius confesses to the audience that he did indeed kill the old king, he says his motives were ambition and lust. So he wanted his sister-in-law, even if she didn't yet return his love.

Now about the opening scenes, when the ghost appears to Marcellus, Bernardo, and Horatio. As a schoolboy, I always pooh-poohed the ghosts and witches in Shakespeare as figments for a credulous crowd, fantastic and foolish to modern readers. Now, grown-up and a little more understanding of both playcraft and psychology, I get that the supernatural characters are figments, but occurring within the characters' own minds. Hamlet imagines his father's ghost, meaning he has been moping about the old man's death and it suddenly crosses his  mind that his father was murdered and his uncle did the deed. In fact the whole opening of the play might be considered to have happened as Hamlet's musings.

I'd be willing to bet I'm not the first person to have thought of this. Readers might well be thinking, "Well, he finally figured it out," as they read this blog. If that's the case, please just chalk this post up as the belated insight of someone who enjoys Shakespeare, but is only  just now putting things together.

And, get hold of that BBC production. It's really very good.