Planet Word

by J. P. Davidson

  Laurence Olivier as Hamlet, 1948

  ‘Absolutely terrifying’ is how Simon describes performing the ‘To be, or not to be’ soliloquy for the first time on stage. ‘Apart from it being so famous, it was scary because it’s such a simple question.’ He says it took him until well through the run before he got to grips with the power of the soliloquy – its calmness and self-control.

  ‘I get the sense that it was a radical exploration of a single human soul in a way that hadn’t been done before.’

  Stephen Fry and Simon Russell Beale in the Globe Theatre

  For the Elizabethan audience, Hamlet must have seemed incredibly modern and cutting-edge. Macbeth, for instance, was set 400 years before, but Hamlet is completely different; he has a whole different set of morals and a whole new outlook on the world. The controversial American scholar Harold Bloom wrote a book called Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human in which he claimed that before Shakespeare there were no real, rounded, ambiguous, complex characters.

  Some people argue the culture we live in, with the competing attractions of television and books and computer games, makes Shakespeare too boring for an awful lot of people, simply not important. Is there any argument Simon can propose that would persuade someone to feel that Shakespeare is worth trying, that he’s not an unpleasant medicine that you have to take for the good of your soul?

  Simon admits first off that Shakespeare does take work – there’s no way round it. He was lucky at school because he had teachers who managed to inspire him. He admits that there are boring bits in Shakespeare – bad bits occasionally – but it’s worth the effort:‘It really does yield extraordinary riches.’

  The passion which Shakespeare inspires was evident when Simon was touring with Hamlet in Eastern Europe. One day he arrived in Belgrade, where the play’s poster with his face on it had been stuck up everywhere. He went into a shoe shop, and the woman serving shouted, ‘Hamlet! Hamlet!’ when she saw him and just kept saying, ‘To be or not to be,’ over and over again. The idea of that simple little phrase being repeated everywhere they went – even in China – is rather moving.

  ‘Utterly terrifying, poleaxing with fear because of all the baggage that it brings with you and because of the expectation that people have.’ That’s how David Tennant remembers feeling before his opening night as Hamlet at the National Theatre in 2008. He’d wanted the part since he was an eighteen-year-old drama student and he’d seen Mark Rylance play Hamlet when the RSC came to Glasgow.

  ‘I saw him at that very formative age and … it sort of sang. And you suddenly realize that these plays are deeper and wider and longer and better. Utterly contemporary, which is sort of a magic trick because it remains four hundred years old, and yet it seems to keep being reborn and rediscovered.’

  Accepting the role of Hamlet – ‘like keeping goal for Scotland’ – was a brave thing to do. David was at the height of his TV career playing Dr Who and was put under intense media scrutiny in the run-up to opening night. David describes the newspaper articles with critics drawing up their top ten Hamlets of all time and wondering where David would fit in the list.

  ‘And you think, please Lord, let me just remember the lines. And then on the first night the News 24 truck draws up outside your dressing-room window, and you think, oh so now I’m going to fail on a global scale. Terrifying but also so thrilling to have those words at your command and to have that part in your palm for even a brief time. And you think, how do I begin? And of course you just begin by not worrying about it, which sounds terribly simple and isn’t, but there’s sort of no way round it other than just going, “Well, this character happens to say these lines here and they’re the first time they’ve ever been said.” ’

  David Tennant holding Yorick’s skull, donated by André Tchaikovsky

  Richard Burton said it helped him to remember that there’s always someone in the audience who will never have heard a single line of Hamlet before, so this is absolutely the first time for them. For other audience members, this is not the case. One night during a performance at the Old Vic Burton heard a dull rumble coming from the stalls; it was Winston Churchill sitting in the front row, reciting the words along with him.

  Another of David’s favourite scenes is Act 2, Scene 2, when Hamlet says to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, ‘I can be bounded in a nutshell and count myself the king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams’.

  ‘You just get the sense that he hasn’t slept for days,’ says David. ‘He wants to sleep but can’t. And if you’ve ever had those long nights of the soul … it’s just that sense which is so vivid in that speech of “all I want to do is close my eyes but I can’t because it’s terrifying when I do, because my brain is so full of demons, and I hate myself so much”.’

  Shakespeare talked a lot about sleep. He probably didn’t get enough of it or maybe he simply loved to sleep. The language he used – in Julius Caesar he calls it the ‘honey-heavy dew of slumber’; in Macbeth it’s ‘sore labour’s bath … balm of hurt minds’ – isn’t that fabulous?

  The most identifiably visual moment of the play is the gravediggers’ scene, when Hamlet holds up the skull of the court jester and says, ‘Alas poor Yorick, I knew him’. It’s a memento of death, just like the ‘to be’ soliloquy. ‘I think the Yorick moment is much more specific,’ says David ‘because he’s looking at the material of a human being and he’s imagining that lips hung here and he’s trying to get his head round the actuality of death.’

  The skull used in David’s performance was in fact a real one, donated by a concert pianist called André Tchaikovsky, who donated his head to the RSC in his will, to be used as a Yorick.

  ‘The first few performances holding a real human head was terribly potent because that is exactly what it’s about – we will become inanimate matter.’

  As a young boy Mark Rylance spoke too fast to be understood by anyone. He had elocution lessons to slow him down, chanting tongue twisters and reciting poems and prose out loud. Mark found that learning bits of Shakespeare by heart and speaking the lines in front of people was the first time that he was able to express a whole range of emotions and ideas. He performed his first Hamlet as a sixteen-year-old school boy, then played him again aged twenty-eight and finally at forty. He reckons that’s about 400 performances in all.

  When Mark was offered the part of Hamlet at the Royal Shakespeare Company it was a huge thing for him. He told the director, Peter Gill, that he planned to go up to Stratford immediately and read the old prompt scripts of all the luminaries who’d played the part, ‘like it was some big oak tree and I hoped I might add a little twig to the tree by being aware of all the choices they’d made’. Peter Gill told him not to be a fool – they’re all dead and gone or at least not playing the part any more. ‘ “It’s you who are alive now. Make sure it’s not set in outer space, but apart from that it’s you.” I said, “Yeah, but David Warner, he has such a …” “He was only wonderful because he was of his time,” said Gill, “and you’re of our time.” And that comment comes right down to the last ten seconds before you’re about to enter to say “To be, or not to be”.’

  Just like Richard Burton, Mark had encounters with members of the audience who knew the play a bit too well. He had to be careful not to make his dramatic pauses too long. ‘In Pittsburgh there was a little old lady sitting next to her husband, and I came out right next to her in my pyjamas, all tearful and crying, and I said, “To be, or not to be”. And then I thought for a moment. And she turns to her husband and says, “That is the question”. And everybody heard it and laughed a bit. But I was able to say, “That is the question!” ’

  Those sort of close-hand experiences with the audience stood Mark in good stead when he was appointed the first artistic director of the newly recreated Globe Theatre in 1995. He developed strong ideas about the relationship between actors and the audience, so that by the end of his ten years there he says he thought of the audience as more like fe
llow players. They were bringing the most important energy of the whole evening, a desire to hear a play. Mark likens it to a moment when he was playing Hamlet and delivering the line ‘Sit still, my soul: foul deeds will rise, though all the earth o’erwhelm them, to men’s eyes’.

  Mark Rylance as Hamlet

  ‘I remember performing the play out at Broadmoor special hospital and turning to a man and I wasn’t aware whether he was a nurse or a patient but I could see his imagination was completely with me. And in that moment between us I felt: who’s to say you’re the audience and I’m the actor? We’re in this together.’

  Hamlet’s soliloquy

  To be, or not to be, that is the question:

  Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer

  The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

  Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

  And by opposing end them? To die, to sleep,

  No more; and by a sleep to say we end

  The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks

  That flesh is heir to: ’tis a consummation

  Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep;

  To sleep, perchance to dream – ay, there’s the rub:

  For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,

  When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

  Must give us pause – there’s the respect

  That makes calamity of so long life.

  For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,

  The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,

  The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,

  The insolence of office, and the spurns

  That patient merit of the unworthy takes,

  When he himself might his quietus make

  With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,

  To grunt and sweat under a weary life,

  But that the dread of something after death,

  The undiscovered country from whose bourn

  No traveller returns, puzzles the will,

  And makes us rather bear those ills we have

  Than fly to others that we know not of?

  Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,

  And thus the native hue of resolution

  Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,

  And enterprises of great pitch and moment,

  With this regard their currents turn awry,

  And lose the name of action.

  The Professor and Bob Dylan

  Sir Christopher Ricks is one of the greatest literary critics of our day. He’s written seminal works on Milton, Keats, Tennyson, Beckett, T. S. Eliot, edited the Oxford Book of Verse, has been Warren Professor at Boston University since 1986 and until 2009 was Professor of Poetry at Oxford University. He’s been described as holding all of English poetry in his head. He was also my very exacting professor at Bristol in the 1970s.

  Photos of Ricks’ academic subjects adorn the walls of his elegantly spacious office at Boston’s Editorial Institute, which he now runs – the haggard, intense face of Samuel Beckett, T. S. Eliot besuited and respectable, and Bob Dylan, whom he has favoured with a compelling 500-page critical work entitled Dylan’s Visions of Sin. Sir Christopher is the critics’ critic. Scholarly, yes, with an extraordinary forensic ability for close textual analysis down to the use of the comma or apostrophe, but also very funny and in his seventy-seventh year as bright and acute as ever in not letting any lazy thinking get in the way of good criticism.

  Stephen Fry almost had Ricks as his supervisor when they were both at Cambridge University in the 1980s. Now, thirty years later, he finally gets the chance of a one-to-one tutorial with the Professor. The ostensible subject is Beckett and Dylan and why poetry matters, but in typical Ricksian fashion they end up dancing all over the place. Here’s a flavour of the Ricks Masterclass, kicking off with the difference between poetry and prose.

  Bob Dylan, a poet songwriter

  CR: I think poetry is to be distinguished always from prose. They have different systems of punctuation.

  SF: That’s a really good point because it’s a game people play to try and devise the best, most compact, most necessary and sufficient definition of poetry as opposed to prose. And you said different punctuation which sounds trivial but it strikes at the heart of it in a way, doesn’t it?

  CR: Well, I think that it does. The line endings are significant in poetry or verse. They carry significance.

  SF: So it’s the shape on the page. T.S. Eliot said that poetry is not about expressing emotion or personality, it’s almost the opposite. And people might say, but surely poetry is the excess, the demonstration of personality and emotion?

  CR: You’re right, especially in a world in which too much is being made of the idea that poetry is self-expression. Though Eliot is always resourceful enough to know that you need a multiplicity of ways of talking about things. That is, a poem is in some ways like a person. In another way it’s like a plant. In another way it’s like a beautiful building. We need all these figures of speech. The key term from him, I think, is when talking about intelligence either in criticism or in poetry – he thinks of it as judging. It’s the discernment of exactly what and how much you feel in any given situation. So it doesn’t make poetry or literature the realm of feeling as against prose as the realm of fact or proof or argumentation. I think it’s a very, very beautiful formula in what it does with both thinking and feeling.

  SF: And it requires a huge amount of honesty. Direct confrontation.

  CR: Great honesty, including doubts about the rhetoric of honesty. So as one says, ‘I’ll be completely honest with you,’ as though in the ordinary way I was doing no such thing.

  SF: Yes quite. We’ve started with Eliot, which is for some people the start of modernism and the time when a lot of the public turned off poetry. But while we’re on the subject of him there’s a precision, an almost miraculous ability to create lines which stick in the head like music. Anybody who’s read Eliot will probably say he’s one of the easiest poets to memorize a phrase from. And I wonder where that comes from. Why, for example, ‘the young man carbuncular’ and not ‘the carbuncular young man’ in a modern poem?

  CR: Well it would partly be that – the striking turn of phrase, and that is indeed a turn, isn’t it? What it’s doing is imitating languages, ancient or modern, in which an adjective comes after a noun. The human form divine becomes the young man carbuncular and so on. So there’s something about moving. You’ve got to allow a shape to it. So I think he’s always interested in resisting either the tyranny of the eye or the tyranny of the ear. Each is inclined to take over. The eye will say every time you use the word ‘image’ it’s clear that imagination is seeing things. But every time you turn to a figure of speech that comes from hearing, you seem to be deaf to this.

  SF: That’s a very good example of the close attention to language that people might find astonishing in your work. You go almost to the molecular and atomic level of a sentence and into the syllables and the actual structure of words and you find in them an energy and they are often the thing that causes the whole work to show itself.

  And I suppose as much as anything, the problem that poets have to confront is that they’re making their art out of something that is common to all humanity. Unlike a painter who can go to a shop and get turpentine and acrylics and canvas and brushes or a musician who has a special language of augmented sevenths and special machines made of brass and wood. There’s another Eliot phrase – ‘to purify the dialect of the tribe’. So a poet has to take the same thing I use when I order a pizza over the phone and turn that into art. And does that mean poetry has two choices? One is to embrace the everyday and the other to try and get rid of it and to find a noble and elevated language.

  CR: I think it’s always having to do both. I think poetry is very like ordinary life. It’s continually wanting some arrangement of things that are new and surprising to it. It’s continually int
erested in the fulfilment of expectations and in the arrival of surprise.

  SF: Yes. You want to be surprised but you also want the comfort of reassurance that you know them.

  CR: The poet Donald Davy talks about how the words of a poem should succeed one another like the events of a well-told story. They should be at once surprising and just. That is, it’s easy to be surprised if you don’t care whether the effect is a just one. It’s easy to be just if you don’t care whether it’s surprising. Bob Dylan loves rhyming ‘new’ and ‘true’ because every artist is in the business of finding something new to say that is also true. It’s easy to find something new to say. It’s easy to find something true to say but these people come up with very extraordinary things that are at once new and true.

  SF: Again it suggests the Eliot line in the ‘Four Quartets’ about arriving at a place and seeing it for the first time. There is this sense in poetry and even in just great writing of being in a familiar place and being assured by the authority of a writer that you trust them and yet also being surprised by them because they make you look with new eyes and things. And is that something that you think is innate in that there is a certain class of person who can do this and they do it with words when someone else might do it with music?