Page 126 - Shakespeare in the Movie From the Silent Era to Shakespeare in Love

I Know Not Seems I 115

bare stage suggesting that Elsinore exists altogether out of time—a
state of mind rather than some concrete castle in Denmark.
Paradoxically, though, Hamlet is the most modem of Shakespeare's
tragedies, sharing as much with Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman
as Oedipus the King, by Sophocles. He is, in a word, existential. From
the rightfully famous "To be or not to be ..." speech to the wise-guy,
stand-up-comic attitude this protagonist assumes to the central issue
raised by the play (is life, in Hemingway's words, nothing more than
a dirty biological trick?), Shakespeare raised questions that, four cen-
turies later, would be debated by artist-philosphers, including Camus
and Sartre. Is, as Nietzsche insisted, God really dead? Are we all, in
Kurt Weill's words, lost in the stars? Or is it possible to continue
believing there is "providence in the fall of a sparrow," God's hand
evident in the smallest act?
We live in an age of doubt, but Hamlet was created when the idea
of the great chain of being still offered reassurance that the world
was a perfectly ordered, smooth-running machine. Hamlet stepped
from out of the shadows as a precursor to the twentieth-century
existentialist as antihero. A Scandinavian intellectual, Hamlet would
seem more likely to have been created by Ingmar Bergman (who did
indeed mount a stage Hamlet) than Shakespeare. Bergman is the
modern dramatist who most profoundly analyzes the search for
meaning in what appears a God-abandoned universe, while Shake-
speare was an Elizabethan of provincial origin and conservative lean-
ings. At a time when literary figures were still defined by some
humour (a single, overriding personality trait), due to one of four
bodily fluids. Hamlet presaged the psychologically complex charac-
ters of post-Freudian drama.
Ironically, Shakespeare conveyed such revolutionary ideas through
what was, on the surface, a humble genre piece. Hamlet belonged to
a popular type of lurid tale considered no more likely to result in
profundity than the typical western or gangster film of today. The
"revenge tragedy," which had flourished in the late 1580s, was stag-
ing a comeback. The public devoured plays—good, bad, or indiffer-
ent—dealing with some central character who sets out for
vengeance. Crude, bloodthirsty, playing to a lowest-common-denom-
inator audience and contemptuously dismissed by serious-minded
theatergoers, the Elizabethan era's revenge tragedies (including a
roughhewn Hamlet, probably written by Thomas Kyd) peaked, then
waned in popularity.