Hamlet & Me (Part I)

"Heaven and earth, must I remember?"
Spring 1989

Junior year at Ohio University, I was preparing a soliloquy from Hamlet, the one that begins “O, that that this too, too solid flesh …” The day I presented it in workshop for our voice and movement teachers, I was asked why I had chosen this particular piece.

I could have been honest and said, “I don’t know.” I could have said it was the first monologue in the first script I picked up yesterday. I can’t remember what I actually said, but I am sure I tried to bullshit my way through. I was worried I might be asked to choose a different piece, and I’d already worked on this one for over an hour and I did not want to start again.

But they wanted to know, what interested me about the character? Why Hamlet? And the more they asked, the more embarrassed and defensive I became because the fact was, I knew nothing about Hamlet.

I was fortunate enough, attending Bay High School in the early 1980s, that I could still benefit from the expansive liberal arts education that had been afforded to the teeming mass of my Baby Boomer antecedents. We weren’t merely offered the same English curriculum provided to every grade level (English I, English II, etc.) but quarter classes in a variety of genres and disciplines.

I took classes in Journalism, radio drama, Death in Literature, and courses in both Shakespeare Comedy and Shakespeare Tragedy. It was like a college curriculum. We even had a quarter course in Vonnegut, if you can even imagine that.

Richard Burton & Alfred Drake
Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, 1964

For Shakespeare’s Tragedies we read Hamlet, King Lear, and Romeo & Juliet (we had all read Macbeth in eighth grade.) We watched the BBC adaptation of King Lear starring Laurence Olivier and John Hurt (1983) and Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet (1968). But we listened to the 1964 Broadway Cast Recording of Hamlet, starring Richard Burton and directed by John Gielgud.

I cannot speak for my classmates, but I absolutely loved these studio recordings. What I remember most was how Burton brought out Hamlet’s great, cynical humor, which I had missed on the page. Wry, sarcastic, incisive, bitter. The guy was an asshole, and so was I.

And so, several years later, it made sense to choose a piece from this play to rehearse for class, but as was normally the case during my undergrad years, I hadn’t bothered to return to the text. I knew nothing about Hamlet.

To be continued.