Hamlet – Prince of Denmark

Audio Sample

William Shakespeare

Hamlet

Performed by Anton Lesser, Edward de Souza, Susan Engel, Emma Fielding, Peter Jeffrey, Sean Baker, Jamie Glover, Geoffrey Whitehead, Gavin Muir, Peter Yapp, Benjamin Soames, David Timson, Richard Pearce & Paul Panting

unabridged

Hamlet, which dates from 1600-1601, is the first in Shakespeare’s great series of four tragedies, the others being Othello (1603), King Lear (1605) and Macbeth (1606). In writing this extraordinary play Shakespeare effectively reinvented tragedy after an interval of roughly two thousand years – we have to go back to the Greek dramatists of fifth-century Athens to find anything of comparable depth and maturity.

  • 4 CDs

    Running Time: 3 h 55 m

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    ISBN:978-962-634-124-7
    Digital ISBN:978-962-954-686-1
    Cat. no.:NA412412
    Download size:97 MB
    Produced by:Nicolas Soames
    Directed by:Neville Jason
    BISAC:DRA010000
    Released:May 2000
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Cast
Anton Lesser
Hamlet
Edward de Souza
Claudius
Susan Engel
Gertrude
Emma Fielding
Ophelia
Peter Jeffrey
Polonius
Sean Baker
Horatio
Jamie Glover
Laertes
Geoffrey Whitehead
Ghost/Player King
Gavin Muir
Rosencrantz/Ist Gravedigger
Peter Yapp
Guildenstern/2nd Gravedigger
Benjamin Soames
Marcellus/Cornelius/Player Queen
David Timson
Barnardo/Priest/Captain
Richard Pearce
Osric/Francisco/Voltimand
Paul Panting
Fortinbras/Reynaldo
Booklet Notes

Hamlet, which dates from 1600-1601, is the first in Shakespeare’s great series of four tragedies, the others being Othello (1603), King Lear (1605) and Macbeth (1606). In writing this extraordinary play Shakespeare effectively reinvented tragedy after an interval of roughly two thousand years – we have to go back to the Greek dramatists of fifth-century Athens to find anything of comparable depth and maturity.

Certainly Shakespeare had already dealt with tragic themes and situations in plays such as Romeo and Juliet, Richard II and Julius Caesar, but in Hamlet he found himself able to fuse with complete artistic success the conflicting concerns of the private individual and the public state of which he is a member, or for which he may indeed be responsible – Hamlet is, after all, Prince of Denmark. This is a quintessentially Renaissance theme: it is no longer enough to appeal to an accepted moral or religious system, but instead each man must find out for himself a moral path through the ‘unweeded garden’ of life.

The Sources of Hamlet
The first known version of the Hamlet story is found in the twelfth-century Historia Danica by Saxo Grammaticus. Most of the main ingredients of the story are already present, albeit in primitive form, and some of the names, too – ‘Amlethus’ for Hamlet. In 1576 Francois de Belleforest retold the story in his Histoires Tragiques, translated into English in 1608 and hence too late for Shakespeare to have read – but someone, perhaps Thomas Kyd, came across the story in the 1580s and turned it into a play which must have been Shakespeare’s immediate source, however radically different Shakespeare’s version turned out to be. We know, incidentally, that the idea of a ghost seeking revenge comes from this lost play: Thomas Lodge in 1596 writes of the ‘ghost which cried so miserably at The Theater, like an oyster wife, “Hamlet, revenge.”’

Synopsis of the play 

Act 1, Scene 1: Sentinels at the castle of Elsinore have seen the ghost of ‘the king that’s dead’ – Hamlet’s father – walking the ramparts. Horatio, Hamlet’s closest friend, then sees it too, and decides to tell the Prince.

Scene 2: The new king, Claudius – Hamlet’s uncle – addresses the court. Laertes, son of the king’s chief minister Polonius, is given leave to return to France. Hamlet bitterly resents his mother’s recent marriage to Claudius and only reluctantly agrees to stay in Denmark rather than return to his studies in Wittenberg. Horatio tells Hamlet about his father’s ghost and they agree to watch for it at midnight.

Scene 3: Laertes bids farewell to his sister Ophelia and warns her to take no notice of the advances Hamlet has been making to her. Polonius in turn offers some worldly counsel to Laertes, and then reinforces Laertes’ advice to Ophelia.

Scene 4: The ghost beckons Hamlet to follow, which he does.

Scene 5: The ghost tells Hamlet how he was poisoned by Claudius while he slept, and orders his son to avenge the murder.

Act 2, Scene 1: Polonius sets Reynaldo to spy in Paris on Laertes. Ophelia enters in distress to tell her father that Hamlet has come to her in a disturbed state; Polonius decides that Hamlet must be mad and resolves to tell the king.

Scene 2: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, old friends of Hamlet, are welcomed by the king, who wishes them to spy on Hamlet to discover what is upsetting him. News arrives of a peace with Norway. Polonius informs the king that he believes Hamlet to be mad with unrequited love for his daughter Ophelia. Hamlet greets Rosencrantz and Guildenstern but clearly suspects that they are working for the king. They tell him that a company of actors are about to arrive at Elsinore; Hamlet then welcomes the players and conceives the idea of getting them to put on a play at court which will imitate the events of his father’s murder and thus, he hopes, expose Claudius’ guilt.

Act 3, Scene 1: The king and Polonius eavesdrop on a conversation between Ophelia and Hamlet in which the former returns to Hamlet all love tokens. Hamlet reacts with angry contempt. Claudius is not convinced either that Hamlet is mad or that he is suffering from unrequited love; Polonius suggests that the Queen should speak privately with her son to try and ascertain the cause of his grief.

Scene 2: The actors perform the play, as instructed by Hamlet, and Claudius reacts with violent horror to what he sees. Polonius asks Hamlet to see his mother in her chamber.

Scene 3: The king decides to send Hamlet to England. Hamlet, on the way to his mother’s room, sees Claudius at prayer and is only prevented from killing him by the thought that he might have repented and therefore escape the damnation he deserves.

Scene 4: Polonius, with the Queen’s consent, hides behind a curtain to overhear the conversation. Hamlet tells his mother that Claudius is in fact the murderer of her first husband – old Hamlet – and bitterly reproaches her for what he regards as her treacherous and incestuous behaviour in marrying Claudius. Polonius, fearing for the Queen’s safety, exclaims aloud, and is stabbed while hiding behind the curtain by Hamlet, who at first believed him to be the king. The ghost reappears to warn Hamlet to treat his mother leniently, but not to forget the duty of vengeance. The Queen is remorseful and promises to help her son. Act 4, Scene 1: The king confirms Hamlet’s instant exile to England.

Scene 2: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern fail to discover from Hamlet the whereabouts of Polonius’ body.

Scene 3: Hamlet is dismissed to England by Claudius, who then in soliloquy tells us that Hamlet will be put to death by Denmark’s allies.

Scene 4: Hamlet, on his way to exile, sees the Norwegian army on its way to war and envies them their capacity for decisive action.

Scene 5: Ophelia has been driven mad by the death of her father at the hand of her lover. Laertes, returning in rage, blames Claudius.

Scene 6: Horatio receives a letter from Hamlet which tells him that he has escaped and is on his way back to Elsinore.

Scene 7: The king persuades Laertes that Hamlet is his enemy. News arrives of Hamlet’s return, and Claudius outlines a treacherous means by which Laertes may avenge his father’s death and sister’s madness. The Queen then brings more bad news: Ophelia has drowned herself.

Act 5, Scene 1: Hamlet and Horatio come upon two gravediggers at work. They show him the skull of Yorick, the King’s jester. Hamlet realises whose grave is being dug when Ophelia’s funeral procession comes in sight. Hamlet and Laertes quarrel.

Scene 2: Hamlet tells Horatio the story of his escape, and of how he has sent Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their deaths. Osric brings a challenge from Laertes to a fencing bout. Hamlet and Laertes greet each other courteously and the bout begins. Hamlet having scored two hits, Laertes takes the poison-tipped foil and wounds Hamlet, but in the ensuing scuffle the rapiers are exchanged and Laertes, too, is fatally wounded. Meanwhile, the Queen has drunk of the poisoned chalice reserved for Hamlet but names Claudius as the villain before she dies. Hamlet stabs the king and forces him to drink off the rest of the poisoned chalice. Laertes apologises to Hamlet and dies. Hamlet names Fortinbras of Norway, whose arrival is imminent, as his successor, and in turn dies himself.

The above summary of the action conveys little of the searching poetic intensity or profound characterisation of the play, but it does suggest that Hamlet is a play rich in varied and exciting action. True though this is, the central enigma of Hamlet in fact rests on a question about inaction: why is the protagonist so slow to act on the ghost’s clear instruction? To say that Hamlet’s fatal flaw (in Aristotelian terms) is ‘indecisiveness’ solves nothing: why is he so indecisive? The most convincing answer to this question, I believe, is that Hamlet’s capacity for decisive action has been disastrously blunted by the appalling shock to his moral system administered by his mother’s swift remarriage: even before Hamlet discovers that his uncle is a murderer, he is in a state of profound depression, his idealised concept of women utterly destroyed by the blind (and incestuous) passion his mother seems to feel for the unworthy Claudius. For Hamlet, the world is like an ‘unweeded garden’ possessed only by ‘things rank and gross in nature’; sexuality is now repulsive rather than beautiful, so that even the innocent Ophelia is corrupted in his eyes – ‘frailty, thy name is woman!’ Only when Ophelia is dead and when Hamlet has had time to come to terms with mortality – witness the gravediggers’ scene – is he able calmly to take the opportunity which providence puts in his way: ‘the readiness is all.’

What makes Hamlet the memorable play it is, the quintessential tragedy in many people’s eyes? First there is the complex, loveable, infuriating character of Hamlet himself; then there is the extraordinarily powerful sense of family and generational conflict around which the play is built, of suffocating emotion clamouring for a release which is only achieved in the last scene; the play is amazingly rich, too, in variety of tone and language, ranging from the comic (Polonius being made a fool of by Hamlet) to the sinister (Claudius offering silver-tongued friendship to the appalled hero) to the sublime (the great series of soliloquies given to Hamlet). How wonderfully, too, Shakespeare is able to combine the comic with the tragic or profound: the gravediggers jest about death, yet when Hamlet confronts the skull of his old friend Yorick the tone shifts effortlessly into pathos – ‘Alas, poor Yorick!’ – thence to physical disgust – ‘my gorge rises at it’ – and finally into searing cynicism at the treacherous falseness of appearances – ‘Now get you to my lady’s chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come…’ The play’s range, then, is dazzling and immense: our perception of mankind, like Hamlet’s, is compelled to the extremes of admiration and revulsion: ‘What a piece of work is a man… the beauty of the world; and yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust?’

Notes by Perry Keenlyside


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