Murder Most Foul: “Hamlet” Through the Ages by David Bevington

This everything-you-wanted-to-know about Hamlet is intended by noted scholar-editor David Bevington for “general readers and theatre enthusiasts and anyone fascinated by Hamlet” (viii). His worthy intention is less likely to include scholars, however, as the book’s detailed survey of the familiar would likely outweigh the good number of lively additional materials. Organized historically “through the ages,” it modestly concedes that it has no new “critical method” for its stance that the play’s meaning has been variously enriched—sometimes controversially—over time. The book’s thesis, lightly driven, is that the play’s history is a “kind of paradigm for the cultural history of the English-speaking world” (viii) and that Hamlet strikes every generation with a new relevance transcending history.

While its overall trajectory is historical, the book shuttles between accounts of staging, criticism, and editing of the play, usually surveying them efficiently and specifically. Although Bevington proposes that these areas have proceeded “hand in hand,” their conjunction is not itself argued in a sustained way, which in any case would be difficult with such widely disparate materials. The book begins logically with the “prehistory” of the story, recounting details from Saxo’s Latin History of the Danes in the thirteenth century and concluding with much speculation about the lost Ur-Hamlet from its presumed connection to an eighteenth-century German version of the story. Bevington follows his “prehistory” with a chapter on the play as staged around 1600, helpfully including a short course on Elizabethan theater companies and staging. He also treats the play’s famous “cruxes” of interpretation, such as why Claudius does not react to the “dumb show” of the murder when it is performed before the “Mousetrap” play, and conjectures that this particular question is explicable because the audience was to see the scene as a “riddle.”

Following an explanation of the textual problems raised by the play and its current division into three Hamlets (two quarto versions and the folio’s), the next chapter surveys several topics: major staging issues, Elizabethan politics, and conventional themes such as revenge, which Bevington construes as “ideological.” Bevington’s take on ideology tends not to seek out the radical or the dissident but rather the traditional, inferring the dominant audience’s responses when actual reception evidence is understandably sparse. Extensive citations from the play thus demonstrate how Hamlet follows a well-understood “revenge code,” but with Shakespeare also instructing his audience to “perceive the problems it poses for ethical and religious thought” (59). Here Bevington uses the current scholarly attention to Reformation controversy, in particular the suggestion that the Catholic doctrine of purgatory informs the play’s ambivalent treatment of the ghost. Bevington nevertheless avoids overemphasizing the controversy and the Reformation schism by noting where common Christian beliefs, such as the idea of innate human depravity, might override sectarian difference. Bevington’s ultimate determination secures this approach, as he holds that the Elizabethan audience would “conclude . . . that Hamlet’s story ends justly and providentially” (75). Much of the chapter, however, closely illustrates not ideological “context” but rather major staging “challenges” inherent in the play, such as how discovery space is used for Polonius’s murder, or the stage trap for the graveyard scene.

With much of the introductory material out of the way, the next chapters focus especially on the various modes of reception of the play—editing, performance, and criticism—through the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Here we learn more about transformations of the theaters after the Puritan interim of their closings and of the subsequent innovations and transformations: female actors, perspective scenery and elaborate scenic effects, different acting styles, and the limitation of performance to two acting companies. Critical appraisal of Shakespeare became characteristically mixed, often echoing Ben Jonson’s criticism that he sometimes “lacked art” and that his natural genius was mixed with unpolished or overly exuberant style. The explosion of what we would think of as adaptations and spin-offs rose to absurd heights, with multiple musical renditions of “to be or not to be” and of Hamlet’s letter to Ophelia. While the overall historical journey here may be familiar to many, Bevington’s illustrating examples can liven up the tour.

Textual criticism provides its own adventure, particularly for an editor such as Bevington, beginning with early eighteenth-century editions of the play and a new willingness to provide “improvements” of the text. There were attempts at unifying the action of the play more strongly, concentrating on major characters at the expense of minor characters, incorporating more scenic effects, and, for the proper reception of Hamlet, usually emphasizing “poetic justice” above all. The first scholarly, and for Bevington “culturally momentous,” enterprise was Nicholas Rowe’s edition in 1709, based on the 1685 Fourth Folio and newly introducing lists of dramatis personae. With the actor-entrepreneur David Garrick promoting Bardolatry and dominating the scene at midcentury, Hamlet was elevated even further, partly by calls for the removal of the “low” comic parts such as the gravediggers. This theatrical “Age of Garrick” was accompanied in literary criticism by the Age of Johnson, who saw Shakespeare as a great moralist whose works transcend history through a “just representation of nature,” an understanding that excused the violation of neoclassical prescriptions and rules that sometimes informed scholarship and editing.

Moving on to the nineteenth century, Bevington surveys the interpretations by famous actors such as Edmund Kean and the shift to the romantic introspective. Here we notably uncover the beginning of the interpretive issue of Hamlet’s supposed delay, nowhere apparent in the play’s earliest reception. As the gap between stage and literary study grew, a theatrically rich era emerged, with stars such as the galvanizing Kean, John Kemble and his sister Sarah Siddons, and William McCready, who campaigned for the period’s lavish costume and scenery. New stars and companies with distinctive approaches followed, with actor-manager Henry Irving leading the way late in the century by playing Hamlet as deeply in love with Ophelia, a favorite character for Victorian writers, critics, actor-managers, and even visual artists. Victorian excesses were understandably accompanied by new parodies and spin-offs, such as W. S. Snow’s Hamlet the Hysterical and Gilbert and Sullivan’s far better Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

Some simpler styles of performance began to appear in the early twentieth century, as Bevington records in a chapter covering 1900 to 1980. Harley Granville-Barker made early efforts to employ Elizabethan staging; on the other hand, the first modern-dress Hamlet took place in 1925, establishing a tradition now almost a century old. With some gestures toward Asian and global productions, Bevington surveys a great number of Western performances, including Hamlets by stars such as John Gielgud and even Sarah Bernhardt. For this period, modernist productions were increasingly politicized, with performances after World War II and especially in the sixties and seventies often finding an atmosphere of political repression and paranoia in the play. Performances were also sometimes psychologized, as in Olivier’s famous 1948 film, with psychoanalysis used explicitly to understand Hamlet’s “delay.” Beginning with the character studies of A. C. Bradley in 1904, literary criticism takes on the multiple, diverging forms, beyond character and psychology: more historical approaches, New Critical approaches emphasizing internal literary coherence from T. S. Eliot on, and attentions to language and close-reading. Rapidly changing commentary, theatrical experimentalism, and social critique flourished.

The final chapter on “Postmodern Hamlet” attempts the more difficult generalization about an era that the reader, of course, actually inhabits, and often the criticism and the stage performances surveyed do not fall neatly under the category summarized as “post-structuralism or deconstruction” (171). Bevington deploys the generalization under the chapter’s Hamlet citation that “there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so,” which does establish a kind of relativism, argued as the influence of postmodern interpretive “indeterminacy.” But Bevington never forces the category, beginning instead with Stephen Greenblatt’s innovation of New Historicism and a very brief mention of leftist “culturalism” before emphasizing the textual revolution in which the idea of Shakespeare’s “original texts” was replaced by multiplicities, influenced as well by performance, repertory company, and chance. Feminist, psychoanalytic, and specifically deconstructive approaches are all briefly summarized and cited. Bevington devotes more favorable time to one project similar to his book’s, namely Margreta de Grazia’s account of stripping away earlier, especially romantic accounts, to redefine Hamlet as modern in a “multiple context” (177). Considering major theatrical productions and films (from Olivier and Zeferelli to Almereyda), along with spoofs, spin-offs, and some literary adaptations, Bevington ultimately ends the tour with short concluding commonplaces, namely that Hamlet provides us an “ever-changing cultural image of ourselves,” and that we “reinvent it to this day” (199).