Avant-Garde Hamlet: Text, Stage, Screen by R.S. White (review)

At first glance, the title of R.S. White’s study of Hamlet and the avant-garde, and of Hamlet as avant-garde, may seem paradoxical and perhaps even oxymoronic, given the play’s reputation as “a high-water mark of canonical art” (1) and the ambivalent attitude Hamlet expresses toward many of the newer theatrical trends of Shakespeare’s own time (e.g. Ham. II.ii. 38–45, 337–40; V.ii. 184–91; see White 69–71). However, the canonical status of Shakespeare in general, and of Hamlet in particular as “the most performed and most famous play in the history of the world” (2), can easily lead present-day readers to forget that in many ways Hamlet is a revolutionary play, in both form and content. Within its own fictional world, its protagonist questions the workings of his society and of his own mind in equal measure; and in the world(s) of authors and readers, it challenges the conventions of Elizabethan revenge tragedy, and the worldviews that informed that genre, even as it uses those very conventions and worldviews. Though the editors of the First Folio classified Hamlet specifically as a tragedy, it incorporates, and has incorporated, elements of many other genres, bringing to mind Polonius’s listing of “tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited” (Ham. II.ii. 392–98), and it has been adapted into numerous forms including stage productions, films, novels, illustrations, musical compositions, and interactive games, to name but a few.

White reads Hamlet as an avant-garde play, or as a play about the avant-garde, because of its “experimental form and adversarial stance, unlike other plays of its period” (2), characteristics that would go on to inspire many of the twentieth-century artists, writers, and directors to whom the term avant-garde is most commonly applied. For him, the enduring appeal of Hamlet is not only as an iconic piece of literature/drama in itself, but as a work that inspires and invites change both in-world and in reality: “it exhibits elements of disjunctive absurdism, numinous symbolism, surrealism, dark humour, and theatre of cruelty” (4); and its title character is an archetype of “those who […] seek to challenge authority and the trappings of power” (5), yet also one who resists action even, and as much, as he resists authority. It has provided avant-garde creators such as Bertolt Brecht and Heiner Müller with some of their ideas for their radical approaches to drama and to politically-charged storytelling, which then reciprocally inform productions and studies of Hamlet itself, simultaneously reinforcing its canonical status and making this familiar work—or set of works—and the world(s) in which it is appreciated into something new.

The first chapter, “Aspects of Avant-Garde,” discusses the difficulties in defining such a slippery term as avant-garde, particularly the appropriateness of using it to describe a play that was written long before the concept as we know it was codified—as much as avant-garde can claim to be codified at all. Although the term as a reference to artistic movements meant to challenge the social, political, and aesthetic traditions of their parent cultures was first used in the early twentieth century, many of these movements did draw upon the dramatic and literary conventions of Shakespeare’s time, using the artistic and sociohistorical past as pathways to possible futures. White here describes as avant-garde those works and creators that are driven not so much by specific aesthetic concerns as by seeking to subvert or overturn existing conventions and norms, especially ones that these creators see as oppressive, stifling, or false. White also differentiates avant-garde from the related categories of modern, contemporary, and postmodern in that modern and contemporary are relative terms dependent on time and place rather than on artistic...