Welcome back to part two of my quarantine quarto from the Shakespeare Institute. I'm
Simon Smith, last time I was talking about wider cultures of sight in the early
modern Playhouse and about visual stagecraft today I want to turn specifically
to Hamlet to think about how that wider culture
of visual attention, critically engaged visual attention, might manifest in
this specific case of Shakespeare's Hamlet. So there are a few long-recognised
moments of spectacle in Hamlet that have dominated discussions of the play’s interest in sight
– principally the dumb show to The Murder of Gonzago and the physical appearance of
the Ghost. Whilst such discussions can be somewhat circumscribed, the mid-twentieth
century saw several studies looking more widely across the play for visual stagecraft. Such
work, the best examples of which include studies by Lee Sheridan Cox and Alan Dessen, typically
attends to structure or symbolic patterning. The most recent work in this area has foregrounded
active, interpretive models of looking, in relation both to the play’s dramatic world
and its performance reception. Jennifer Rae McDermott finds in Hamlet’s play-world a
hierarchy in which ‘attent seeing is never as powerful as attent hearing’, but above
all ‘the best perceivers are those that use both senses as one interpenetrative instrument
of full attention’. Elsewhere, Evelyn Tribble places comparable emphasis on the active and
constructed nature of sight, focusing on the staging of the ghost in order to reframe looking
not as a passive and transparent process but an act of cognitive construction.
Building on such work, and in particular taking up the active understanding of vision articulated
by Woods and others, I wish to place a slightly different emphasis on the play’s explicit
foregrounding of its own visual stagecraft, and the paradoxical uncertainty about visual
interpretation this creates. Central to my reading is the claim that Hamlet does not
merely hope playgoers will engage with its sight, but rather utilises particular techniques
to direct playgoers’ active visual attention: (1) through explicit directions to look; (2)
through the modelling of visual scrutiny and interpretation within the dramatic world;
and – (3) especially in Q2 – through the direct and deliberate interruption of verbal
digression with a visually compelling entrance. Hamlet contains innumerable directions to
look, from the opening scene onwards: characters – and by extension, playgoers – are told
to ‘look where’ the ghost ‘comes again’, give Claudius ‘heedful note’, ‘look
here’ at the mad Ophelia, ‘couch … awhile and mark’ Ophelia’s funeral procession,
and ‘bear a wary eye’ toward Hamlet and Laertes’s duel, to take a few representative
examples (1.1.39; 3.2.80; 4.5.37; 5.1.211; 5.2.256). Such moments seem fairly obviously
designed to draw playgoers’ attention to particular sights, both through the imperative
phrases themselves and the onstage performances of visual scrutiny that characters duly offer.
The sights in question are relatively varied, some with fairly obvious potential for spectacle,
such as Hamlet and Laertes’s duel (5.2.257-89), alongside rather more subtle aspects of behaviour,
countenance and physical appearance that might escape sustained visual scrutiny without specific
prompts to look, such as Hamlet’s entrance ‘reading’ that Gertrude notes (2.2.165),
and Claudius’s demeanour throughout 3.2, to which Hamlet explicitly directs Horatio’s
attention – and with it that of the playhouse audience – as the play-within-a-play is
about to begin (3.2.81-3). Hamlet is nothing if not clear that looking is important, both
at Elsinore and at the Globe. Significantly, the looking cued quite instrumentally
throughout the play is not the unthinking ‘gaze’ sometimes associated with theatrical
spectacle, but rather an engaged, active and interpretive spectatorship, consistent with
Woods’ account of dumb show theatricality. This is actually modelled within the dramatic
world itself, for many of the play’s prompts and directions to look are followed by characters
explicitly and sustainedly attempting to comprehend and interpret the sight before them. These
dramatizations indicate the mode of judicious, active spectatorship that Hamlet’s dramaturgy
seeks from playhouse attendees, and may even have helped to shape wider cultural expectations,
encouraging habitual playgoers to respond accordingly in future encounters with visual
stagecraft. Unsurprisingly, the Ghost is subjected to
extended ocular scrutiny and censure onstage, beginning with Barnardo’s compulsive, repeated
response to its very first entrance that it is ‘like the King’ in ‘figure’ and
appearance, a refrain echoed by Marcellus upon its subsequent exit (1.1.40-55). Details
of clothing, facial expression, gait and hue are discussed by Horatio, Marcellus, Barnardo
and, later, Hamlet, as they attempt to ‘read’ the sight of the Ghost (1.1.57-65; 1.2.224-40).
Even in Hamlet’s attempts to control and limit knowledge of the Ghost by making his
co-spectators swear an oath of secrecy, he places noticeable emphasis on visual interpretation,
demanding that the watch ‘never make known’ what they have ‘seen tonight’ (1.5.143;
my emphasis), for fear of affording others the opportunity to offer their own ocular
glosses. Horatio, Marcellus and Barnardo – and the
playhouse audience who are likewise witnesses to the Ghost – are thus invited into a collective
pact of secret seeing, the judicious looking taking place on and off stage a privileged,
private activity. Like the onstage soldiers in Antony and Cleopatra who seek to interpret
disembodied musical sound on the eve of the battle of Alexandria (4.3.1-29), so Marcellus
and Barnardo are included here in Hamlet as minor characters for playgoers to align their
perspectives with, sharing in interpretive visual acts from a liminal position that is
both outside of the dramatic world and yet, through shared sensory experience and engagement,
participatory. Certainly, dramatizations of visual interpretation
could have practical benefits, for instance conveying information to playgoers lacking
a clear view, or clarifying stage business and visual symbolism that some may not undersatnd
even if they can see it. Thus, upon spying Ophelia’s funeral procession, Hamlet details
the participants, the nature of the ceremony, and the possible meaning of its visibly ‘maimed
rites’, with impressive verbal economy:
But soft, but soft awhile, here comes the King,
The Queen, the courtiers. Who is this they follow?
And with such maimed rites? This doth betoken The corpse they follow did with desperate
hand Fordo it[s] own life. ’Twas of some estate.
Couch we awhile and mark. (5.1.205-10)
Yet even whilst verbally translating both the sight and its possible import, Hamlet’s
words emphasise the difficulty and uncertainty of what he sees, and the censorious scrutiny
it demands. Hamlet knows he looks upon a funeral procession, but not who is dead, a state of
knowledge actually inverted for any playgoers yet to see the sight, but who learned of Ophelia’s
death at the end of the previous scene. Furthermore, whilst Hamlet’s suggestion that the ‘maimed
rites … betoken’ suicide is a valid interpretation, it is nonetheless interpretation rather than
agreed fact, as becomes apparent when the priest suggests Ophelia’s ‘death was doubtful’
(5.1.216), indicating mere suspicion of suicide that might return an ‘open verdict’ at
an inquest in England and Wales today, rather than anything more categorical.
Hamlet’s precise phrase, that the deceased ‘did with desperate hand | Fordo it[s] own
life’, may even deliberately recall Gertrude’s equally precise words in the previous scene,
in which she contrastingly and studiously avoided describing Ophelia as actively suicidal.
Playgoers must negotiate Gertrude and the Priest’s potentially superior knowledge
of the situation, but also the possible tact in their suggestions (both are speaking either
directly or indirectly to Ophelia’s brother); likewise, Hamlet’s more conclusive interpretation
of the spectacle must be weighed against his manifest ignorance of the wider situation.
Even as Hamlet re-presents visual stagecraft in verbal terms, his censorious looking is
exposed as an interpretive act, capable of error and open to challenge, placing the onus
on playgoers not to rely unquestioningly upon Hamlet’s visual understanding, nor gaze
passively upon this ‘notable shew’, but rather to ‘view it well’, bearing their
own judicious eyes upon an emphatically visual and deliberately obtuse moment of dramatic
craft. Hamlet’s third substantial visual-dramatic
technique involves the deliberate interruption of extended speech with a ‘notable shew’.
All early texts agree that at the opening of the play, Barnardo’s endlessly deferred
attempt to describe the Ghost’s appearance the previous night is broken off without ever
reaching its main verb: Marcellus urges Barnardo to ‘look where it comes again’ as the
sight of the Ghost displaces narration (1.1.34-9). Besides foregrounding the immediacy of sight,
the interruption moves the burden of interpretation from the narrating character to playgoers
themselves, who are invited to engage directly with a version of the sensory experience Barnardo
sought to translate into language. Q2 is alone in making this technique a notable
and presumably deliberate feature of the Ghost’s early entrances, through two passages absent
from the other texts. The first of these occurs in the midst of the attempts at visual scrutiny
that follow the Ghost’s interruption of Barnardo (1.1.40-124). As Horatio takes a
comparative approach to ocular comprehension, detailing various analogous and portentous
sights that apparently preceded Julius Caesar’s murder (‘the sheeted dead’ walking the
street, visible ‘stars with trains and dews of blood’, and a lunar eclipse (1.1.111-24)),
the Ghost enters again. This time the speaker cuts himself off with a command to be ‘soft’,
having laid out an interpretive frame through which playgoers might process the ensuing
sight (1.1.111-26). Later, in 1.4, the Ghost’s appearance interrupts Hamlet’s Q2-only remarks
on national stereotyping (1.4.17-39), the prince breaking off mid-sentence upon its
entrance. As the Arden 3 editors note, much of Hamlet’s speech is ‘obscure’, which
has led some editors and critics to suggest that the passage is an unfinished draft (1.4.23-38n).
Yet as the text stands, it actually fits a dramaturgical pattern of increasingly tangential
language giving way to a recurring spectacular sight: the first visual interruption supplants
Barnardo’s deferred attempt to comment directly on the Ghost; the second disrupts Horatio’s
displaced and analogised attempt to offer ghostly interpretation; the third ceases Hamlet’s
full-blown and linguistically redundant digression from the very purpose of his presence – to
watch for the ghostly figure that duly interrupts him.
Just as the visual stagecraft of these Q2¬-only passages eludes some scholarly approaches,
so the critical impact of other speeches can obscure further dramatic uses of sight in
Hamlet. Act 3, scene 1 and Hamlet’s ‘To be, or not to be’ speech (3.1.56-89), is
a case in point, for whilst it is now standard for editors to note Ophelia’s implicit presence,
pretending to read, critics are yet to acknowledge the full dramatic implications of ‘the most
famous of all soliloquies’ not being, ‘strictly speaking, a soliloquy at all’, to quote
the Arden 3 editors once again. This is particularly significant if we take seriously the proposition
that Hamlet was written for audiences attuned to visual as well as verbal stagecraft.
The scene continues the play’s habit of cueing visual attention to key moments of
stagecraft yet, significantly, it is not Hamlet’s contemplative body but Ophelia’s studied
posture of bookish piety to which attention is explicitly and extendedly drawn, suggesting
that the most interesting or important sight on stage during ‘To be, or not to be’
may not actually be the speaker himself. Before Hamlet enters, Polonius gives a very clear
account both of how Ophelia should present herself to his sight – pretending to read
a book – and of the visual interpretation that he expects Hamlet to arrive at – that
this is an act of private, religious meditation. Shakespeare was dramaturgically fond of visual
performances of piety that the audience knows full well are misleading, this example placing
particular emphasis on the difficulty of visual interpretation and the ubiquity of ocular
misdirection. Thus, Polonius’s instructions to Ophelia do not simply predict (correctly)
how Hamlet is likely to read her appearance; they also make it as difficult as possible
for playgoers to miss the point that Hamlet’s interpretation will be inaccurate: Polonius
emphasises that Ophelia should merely pretend to be absorbed in a devotional act, labouring
the point with an aphoristic remark that ‘[w]e are oft too blame in this’ (3.1.45). His
characteristically digressive words encourage playgoers to direct critical scrutiny towards
Ophelia’s ensuing visual performance, even whilst suggesting that the sight may be rather
more challenging to read and interpret than Hamlet’s glib (and erroneous) allusion to
Ophelia’s ‘orisons’ might suggest (3.1.88). What emerges, then, is not a scene intended
to foreground the obtuse verbal craft of Hamlet’s speech alone, but rather a moment of stagecraft
demanding judicious engagement from playgoers through both ears and eyes. As noted, it is
well established that the scene is not strictly a soliloquy, insofar as Hamlet is not alone
onstage when he speaks. It may be possible to go yet further and say that he is not even
the only one ‘speaking’ during these lines, if the visual language of Ophelia’s studied
appearance is acknowledged as an equally significant voice in the scene. Perhaps, then, ‘To be,
or not to be’ is better understood as a colloquy of verbal and visual language, in
the literal sense of ‘speaking together’ (from the Latin col and loquium – see OED).
To make this argument is not only to acknowledge visual aspects of the scene that are all too
easily elided in page-based engagements with Hamlet, but also to recognise deliberate connections
between Hamlet and Ophelia in the scene’s stagecraft. It is surely no coincidence that
even as Hamlet apparently articulates ‘that within which passes show’ (1.2.85), playgoers
are confronted with Ophelia’s outward appearance that they have been told explicitly is not
only a deliberate misdirection, but performed at the behest of her father, not herself.
The play thus draws attention to what the audience is not told or shown of Ophelia’s
own feelings about the unfolding events, even as Hamlet is given a platform to articulate
‘that within’. In this moment, Shakespeare’s dramaturgy may not merely reflect the gendered
myopia of early modern culture, but actually interrogate it through visual stagecraft.
Such an interrogation only becomes apparent, however, if Shakespearean drama is presumed
to aim at both ears and eyes. Here, as elsewhere, the silent presence of a female character
is all too easily overlooked when encountered on page rather than stage, Ophelia joining
Jessica, Beatrice, Isabella and others whose wordless centrality in key dramatic moments
is only now beginning to be explored fully through more sensate understandings of early
modern dramatic craft and playhouse response.
This talk has investigated the role of sight in early modern theatrical culture, in order
to offer an account of Hamlet as a play that is as precise, sophisticated and challenging
in its visual stagecraft as in its verbal design, anticipating and even requiring playgoers’
eyes to be as engaged and critically reflective as their ears. Indeed, the revised account
of wider playhouse attitudes to sight and hearing that I have offered here has implications
for scholarly approaches to early modern drama more generally: given long-standing critical
assumptions about ears, eyes and dramatic sophistication, Hamlet is surely not the only
early modern play whose visual stagecraft is yet to be fully acknowledged and explored
in light of new understandings of early modern cultures of sight. This investigation may
represent initial steps, then, towards a thoroughgoing and fully sensate reconsideration of exactly
what a play was, and what playhouse reception entailed, in early modern England.