Sweet Bells Jangled

Hamlet is Shakespeare’s greatest fool. He is, of course, only mad north-north-west, “mad in craft”; like Touchstone, he uses his folly as his stalking-horse, but he uses it well enough to confuse even Claudius, the shrewdest man in the play.

Richard Burton, in his New York performance of Hamlet, is a fine jester, but he does not seem to know when to put the antic disposition on, and when to take it off. He is, bewilderingly, mad south-south-east. He does not sing his fool’s snatches merely to deceive others. He cracks jokes even when he is alone. He is probably the only actor who has deliberately got a laugh in the middle of the II.2 soliloquy (“What’s heck-cube-bah to him…”) Precisely when he should be speaking in his deepest character, he resorts to antics. The last appeal he issues to Rosen-crantz and Guildenstern, before closing up in their presence, before masking himself in motley, is delivered by a Burton standing on a cushioned chair, idly bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet as he babbles about “this majestical roof fretted with golden fire.” And Burton’s soliloquies are used as periods of rest, time out for relaxation, things said from the periphery of the character’s awareness, not from its core.

GW

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Garry Wills

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William Shakespeare

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Hamlet is Shakespeare’s greatest fool. He is, of course, only mad north-north-west, “mad in craft”; like Touchstone, he uses his folly as his stalking-horse, but he uses it well enough to confuse even Claudius, the shrewdest man in the play.

Richard Burton, in his New York performance of Hamlet, is a fine jester, but he does not seem to know when to put the antic disposition on, and when to take it off. He is, bewilderingly, mad south-south-east. He does not sing his fool’s snatches merely to deceive others. He cracks jokes even when he is alone. He is probably the only actor who has deliberately got a laugh in the middle of the II.2 soliloquy (“What’s heck-cube-bah to him…”) Precisely when he should be speaking in his deepest character, he resorts to antics. The last appeal he issues to Rosen-crantz and Guildenstern, before closing up in their presence, before masking himself in motley, is delivered by a Burton standing on a cushioned chair, idly bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet as he babbles about “this majestical roof fretted with golden fire.” And Burton’s soliloquies are used as periods of rest, time out for relaxation, things said from the periphery of the character’s awareness, not from its core.