SOURCE: Scolnicov, Hanna. “Chekhov's Reading of Hamlet.” In Reading Plays: Interpretation and Reception, edited by Hanna Scolnicov and Peter Holland, pp. 192-205. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

[In the following essay, Scolnicov delineates the influences that Hamlet had on Chekhov and the relationship between Hamlet and The Seagull.]

That The Seagull is indebted to Hamlet in many ways has long been recognized and partially demonstrated.¹ Yet the Shakespearean play cannot be seen as a ‘source’ play in the ordinary sense, since it presents other characters involved in another action set within a different society. Chekhov also borrowed widely from Maupassant, Turgenev, Maeterlinck and others.² Stretching from verbatim citation through structural and thematic analogues all the way to parody, Chekhov's debt covers the whole gamut of possible literary links, the whole range of intertextual relations. The question of the degree of borrowing, its function and meaning, is thus raised by the play.

Chekhov's use of the Hamlet material can be seen as his reading of Shakespeare's play, a playwright's imaginative, dramatic, reinterpretation of the human relations and theatrical issues worked out in the earlier tragedy. Chekhov's reading is not that of a historian of drama and theatre but of a modern artist gazing at a classical model and attempting to render in his own modern idiom what he sees as its essence. His reading, one playwright's reading of another, is a truly creative reading.

In comparing Hamlet and The Seagull I wish to show how, through his dramatic recasting of Hamlet, Chekhov changes our reading of that play. His own play is so much concerned with the nature of dramatic art and the growth of an artist, that the focus of Hamlet is also necessarily shifted from the personal and political to the artistic. The young prince's dilemma about the nature of the Ghost, the ethics of revenge or his uncle's guilt, becomes redefined as the actor's dilemma about how to express emotion on the stage, how to bridge the gap between inner feeling and its communication. Chekhov's overriding interest in the theoretical questions of drama and theatre both highlights and is derived from the metatheatrical concerns in Hamlet.

The Seagull's borrowings from Hamlet are too numerous to be systematically covered. But it is the significant structural parallels which I will be concerned with here. The direct quotation from the closet scene in the conversation between Arkadina and her son Konstantin is no doubt a self-conscious attempt to draw our attention to the deliberate use of Hamletian parallels in the play. The problematic relationship between widowed mother and son, the triangle formed when they are joined by Arkadina's lover, Trigorin, who is also set up as Konstantin Treplev's professional rival, and the young man's uneasy relationship with Nina, his beloved, are carefully modelled on Hamlet's relations with Gertrude, Claudius and Ophelia.

Wherever Chekhov has introduced a deviation or a variation, this serves to accentuate the parallels, and vice versa. The question of suicide over which Hamlet agonizes, from his wish ‘that the Everlasting had not fixed / His canon 'gainst self-slaughter’ (1.2.131-2) to his longing for self-annihilation, ‘To die, to sleep … and by a sleep to say we end / The heartache’ (3.1.61-3), is echoed by Treplev's threat ‘Soon I shall kill myself’ (Act 2, p. 25), then by his attempted suicide, and finally by his committing suicide. While Hamlet only argues with himself over the advisability of suicide, Ophelia's ‘death was doubtful’ (5.1.217). Nina, on the other hand, though no less manipulated by the men surrounding her, survives her own ordeal, discovering that what matters ‘is not fame, not glory … but knowing how to be patient’ (Act 4, p. 57). Her reference to patience is reminiscent of Shakespeare's own phrasing of that Renaissance stoic virtue.

My discussion of the relationship between the two plays will focus on the handling of the plays within the plays. Although in terms of plot structure, there can be little to associate The Murder of Gonzago with the inner play in The Seagull, if we look beyond the content of the respective inlays to their dramatic and theatrical settings, the parallels become apparent. The reflexive quality of Chekhov's play accentuates the Shakespearean parallel, and the play within the play becomes the central aesthetic artifact, an example of a dramatic idiom different from that used by the playwright himself.

In both cases, the playlets are offered as exclusive entertainments by the grown-up son of the family. These festive occasions are fraught with tremendous family tension, which gives vent to critical comments and sniping remarks. Both performances are broken off abruptly, creating a family scandal. The vehemence of the reactions to these ‘entertainments’ seems in excess of their intrinsic artistic merits, dependent rather on the relations between the artist and his audience. The extraordinary richness of these scenes is due to their multiple-exposure technique, duplicating the theatrical event on stage, making their protagonists double as viewers. Beyond this intricate web of correspondences, both amateur productions serve as a testing ground for their young producer's artistic theories.

The respective performances are heralded by a charged atmosphere. First there are the nervous last-minute preparations. Then there is tense expectation in the air, as the uneasy spectators try to relax in their seats. Arkadina tries to extricate herself from the awkwardness of the moment by assuming the role of Gertrude, thus further implicating herself. Treplev picks up the conversation from the closet scene, identifying himself with Hamlet's role.³ It is quite natural for this theatrical Russian family to be able to quote snatches of Shakespeare at each other. Without in any way overstepping the boundaries of naturalism, Chekhov can thus underline the structural and thematic parallelism with Hamlet.

In this urbane interchange, mother and son air their own conflict without even alluding to it. To a certain extent, this is a parasitical scene, for without a true knowledge of its source, the son's accusation of sexual sin, too embarrassing for a naturalistic play, would be missing. But although there is no moral stigma attached, both mother and son recognize a psychological problem in the changed relationship between them because she has a lover. Even without the exceptional circumstances of death and remarriage in Hamlet, the psychological and practical repercussions on the young man of his mother's pursual of her own sexual life and artistic career are immense.

The bandaging scene in The Seagull, in which mother and son squabble over Arkadina's relationship with Trigorin, recalls the closet scene in Hamlet. At the height of the argument, Arkadina hurls at her son ‘You are nothing but a Kiev shopman!’ thus implicitly invoking his dead father, her former husband. Clearly, the triangular relationship between mother, lover and son has lost nothing of its poignancy despite the absence of the blood feud.

Chekhov's modernism has no use for royal protagonists or for a gothic plot of murder and revenge. Shakespeare himself merely manipulates these staples of his contemporary theatre so as to create the situations around which he can develop the inner character of his protagonist. But if for Shakespeare the King is still the exemplum of humanity, Chekhov is dealing with his peers, and the sensitive consciousness at the heart of the play is an artistic one, like his own. Chekhov represents a society of aspiring artists, competitive city people trying to relax in the country, at an old family estate in the provinces. Hamlet shares with Kostya the grudge at being forced to reside in a provincial place, away from the bubbling intellectual life of the city.

The high drama of murdering a brother and committing incest with his wife, the infringement of primeval taboos, the ritual pollution that calls for purgation by the shedding of more blood, all these are put aside by Chekhov in favour of those themes and human relationships in the play that are relevant to modern sensibility. Chekhov has no need of such outstanding events as murder and incest to justify Kostya's nervous state or Masha's mourning. The trivial and the humdrum are quite enough to trigger off the sharp response of a sufficiently delicate psyche.

With the change in sexual mores, gone is also the suggestion of carnal sin. Arkadina's affair with Trigorin seems perfectly acceptable in her milieu until the unbearable tension breaks out in Treplev's challenging of Trigorin to a duel. The tension between the two men has multiple sources: there are both sexual and professional rivalries between them. Kostya is jealous of Trigorin because, not only has he taken his mother from him and overshadowed him as a writer, but he has also won Nina's love and admiration. This is of course only the barest outline of Kostya's painful involvement with his mother's lover.

Trigorin is not prepared to answer Treplev's challenge, which he regards as immature (Act 2, p. 32). It is as though the great Hamletian duel has undergone a process of attrition. The possibility of ritualizing conflict in the form of fencing has been lost. In Hamlet, as Nigel Alexander has shown, ‘the idea of duel is one of the great images which dominate the action of the play’, beginning with the account of the duel between Norway and Hamlet senior.⁴ Chekhov's ironic treatment of the duel highlights Shakespeare's own sophisticated employment of this theatrical convention. Hamlet's adherence to the antiquated code of honour practised by his father, which forces him to accept the challenge despite his ‘gain-giving’ (5.2.162), is contrasted with Claudius's Realpolitik, which does not scruple at using the ‘play’ of duel as a means of murder.

Ostensibly offered as family recreations, both inset plays are designed to be provocative. Arkadina is quick to sense this when she interprets the whole play as a direct affront to herself as an artist: ‘He wanted to show us how to write and what to act. This is getting tiresome! These continual sallies at my expense—these continual pin-pricks would put anyone out of patience’ (Act 1, p. 13). By contrast, Claudius's suspicion is aroused relatively late, when he enquires ‘Is there no offence in't?’ (3.2.219). He has sat through the motions of the dumb-show, apparently unperturbed, and makes his enquiry only when Hamlet converses with his mother during a scene change. Despite their different messages, both inset plays contain direct attacks, which, however, are only clear to their addresses.

Arkadina is engaged in light social conversation when her thoughts suddenly return to her son's amateurish theatrical production: ‘But my conscience is beginning to trouble me. Why did I hurt my poor boy's feelings? I feel worried’ (Act 1, p. 14). This momentary awakening of motherly instinct is one of those supreme naturalistic touches which Chekhov manages to charge with drama. It is a startling psychological disclosure of the inner discomposure and unease of Arkadina beneath the assumed appearance of perfect composure and ease.

Arkadina's conscience has been stirred by what has just happened at the performance; she feels guilty about the way she has treated her son Konstantin and is worried about what his hurt reaction might be. But beyond the naturalistic twist of thought allowing us a fleeting glimpse into the complex psychological make-up of the actress, society woman and mother, there is the symbolic weighting of the moment through its literary association with Hamlet's plan to ‘catch the conscience of the King’.

The parallel is only partial, for while Treplev catches his mother's conscience, Hamlet catches his uncle's. Chekhov has picked out elements from Hamlet, rearranging them into new patterns. In this case, he may have felt intuitively what Richard Proudfoot and others have shown, that Hamlet may be suspicious of his mother being an accomplice to the murder and wishes, perhaps subliminally, to catch her conscience as well.⁵

While imitating the circumstances of the Mousetrap performance, Chekhov places his own inner play at the beginning of The Seagull, rather than in its middle. Its performance sets the whole plot in motion. Treplev's playlet lacks a name, but presumably it too should be called The Seagull. The figure of Nina sitting on a big stone, all dressed in white, representing the lonely world-soul, evokes that image, and in the framing play, as Nina becomes increasingly disturbed, she accepts her identification with the seagull, first suggested by Trigorin, and internalizes it. The inset and frame plays are associated with each other through their common central symbol, without however establishing any material relation, or any parallel structure, as in Hamlet.

Treplev attacks the conventionality of modern theatre where ‘When the curtain goes up, and by artificial light, in a room with three walls, these great geniuses, the devotees of holy art, represent how people eat, drink, love, move about, and wear their jackets’ (Act 1, p. 6). He strikes an avant-garde pose, calling for ‘new forms of expression’. Chekhov challenges us to view his own play in relation to Treplev's production and views on theatre. But Treplev is merely a character in Chekhov's play, a dramatic means of introducing the debate on the aesthetics of theatre. From the wealth of uses to which Shakespeare has put his play within the play, Chekhov has chosen to focus on the metatheatrical implications. By making the inset a futuristic piece compared with its more conventional frame, he has inverted the old versus new relationship between inset and frame established in Hamlet.

The Seagull as a whole may be seen as an impressionistic reworking of Hamlet. It was Tolstoy who reputedly first suggested that ‘Chekhov has his own manner, like the Impressionists.’⁶ This observation captures, according to Ernest Simmons, Chekhov's unique contribution to traditional Russian realism, and also surely differentiates between him and traditional realists like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Tolstoy himself was not apparently sure whether he liked or disliked this innovation, and on one occasion told Chekhov, ‘But I still can't stand your plays. Shakespeare's are terrible, but yours are even worse!’⁷

The impressionist style is apparent not only in the seemingly random flow of conversation but also in the general tone and colour of the play. The French Impressionist painters often went back to famous paintings, both old and contemporary, in order to show what was new in their own approach and technique. Chekhov put Hamlet to a similar use, changing the chiaroscuro of the older play into an iridescent picture with softer contours. The gloomy medieval Danish castle he transformed into a Russian country house. The political problems, the questions of state, the threatening wars, all these darker shades at the back give place to a much brighter setting.

Hamlet's ‘nighted colour’ also undergoes in The Seagull an interesting displacement. Not having recently lost a father, Treplev has no cause for wearing black; this affectation is transferred instead to another character, to Masha. But Chekhov insists on the Hamlet allusion by evoking it in the opening line of the play. To Medvedenko's question: ‘Why do you always wear black?’ Masha replies: ‘I am mourning for my life. I am unhappy.’ Unlike the older master, the modern one no longer feels the need to supply a motive for mourning. Masha is not in mourning for a dead father but for herself, for her own unfulfilled life. This example demonstrates Chekhov's impressionist approach to his source play in two ways: (1) He chooses to keep the black spot on stage, but transfers it from his protagonist to another character, and (2) he refuses to provide a precise motivation for the character's behaviour. Chekhov does not even need to keep melancholy as a distinctive feature of his protagonist; it is enough that his canvas contains this daub of colour. It surely shows a measure of insensitivity to dress all the characters save Nina in black, as was done in Alexander Tairov's 1944 production.⁸

By lifting the black-clothes motif out of its original context, Chekhov directs our attention to it as an issue of intrinsic interest, not just as subservient to the plot. The question is brought to the fore of the colour scheme, the design and the costumes as non-verbal communicative systems in both the theatre and real life. The wearing of black is, in western civilization, a prime example of a conventional sign. From among Hamlet's various external signs of melancholy, Chekhov singles out the one that is most prominent, and places it before us as an object for contemplation by choosing to open his play with it. But he presents it from an ironic angle, with Masha's mock-romantic mourning over herself, assuming the classical ‘Hamletian’ pose.

If Masha's clothes reflect her state of mind and her feelings, so do Hamlet's. Shakespeare makes the most of Hamlet's sombre appearance in the midst of the colourful court by insisting on its inadequacy as a means of expressing his psychological condition. The body language of sighing, crying, wearing a ‘dejected havior of the visage’ and black clothes, all these are ‘actions that a man might play’, but they do not ‘denote me truly’. In this, his very first long speech in the play (1.2.77-87), Hamlet is already transcending the immediate dramatic situation to direct our attention to the question which will later engross him in relation to the play within the play: how to suit the action to the word and the word to the action. The search for an artistic vehicle which will be capable of conveying the emotion or ‘passion’ becomes an end in itself, beyond the immediate exigencies of the plot. Anticipating Hamlet's interest in co-ordinating word and action, Shakespeare is searching here for a way of superseding conventional behaviour both in everyday life and in its theatrical representation. He employs the Elizabethan stage convention of the melancholic young man, but makes Hamlet defy that stereotype. Shakespeare is attempting to go beyond the visible appearance, the ‘trappings and the suits of woe’ to an expression of the inner self, ‘that within that passes show’.

But theatre must show. The situation is paradoxical: in order to be communicative, body language, as all language, must be conventionalized, but as it is conventional it cannot convey particular ideas and emotions. From the vantage point of Chekhov's own time, the way to escape this paradox is by a whole-hearted commitment to introspective naturalistic acting of the kind developed by Stanislavsky. While Hamlet can have nothing like this in mind, he does seem to advocate in his advice to the players a greater degree of naturalism in acting.

However, the question of naturalism is forever a relative one. The ability to convey meaning through movement and expression is dependent on the search for naturalism, rather than on its attainment.⁹ Hamlet's demand for a freer style of acting is grounded on his understanding of the mimetic nature of the theatre. The players should not ‘o'erstep … the modesty of nature’, because the ‘end’ of playing is ‘to hold as 'twere the mirror up to nature’ (3.2.16-19). Hamlet endorses the familiar Renaissance emblem of art as a mirror, but then qualifies the mirrored ‘nature’ as having a distinctly ethical bias: ‘to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure’ (3.2.19-20).

In Hamlet the purely aesthetic and theoretical considerations are subordinated to the plot and to the moral issues and intertwined with them. But the play within the play provides an opportunity for reflecting on the nature of theatre as an art. On stage is reproduced the theatrical performance with all its paraphernalia: the preparations, the producer's intentions, the social occasion, the audience reaction. The very act of performance itself, as distinguished from the contents of the play performed, becomes an object of mimetic representation.

How to perform and what to perform are the issues picked up by Chekhov from his model as the questions to be explored in Treplev's experimental play. Because Chekhov is much less encumbered with a plot, his delineation of the purely aesthetic, forever dangerously close to the decadent, is much more pronounced.

‘Decadent’ is indeed Arkadina's immediate judgement of her son's theatrical experiment, and ‘decadent’ was also, strangely enough, the reaction of many of the first reviewers of The Seagull.¹⁰ Our own response to Treplev's play is complicated by the wide range of critical opinions provided by Chekhov, from Arkadina's condemnation to Dorn's admiration. Is Chekhov trying to baffle us? To warn us against a simplistic response? Whose opinion are we to adopt? Are we meant to regard Treplev's play as a parody or as an artistic experiment? Does Chekhov support the avant-garde, or the older, more conservative, generation? Does he endorse Treplev's search for new forms or Trigorin's well-oiled naturalistic technique? The evaluation of the inset Seagull is crucial, for at stake is our understanding of Chekhov's own artistic aims and achievements.

Though Treplev's spoken text is highly rhetorical and slightly ridiculous, his theatrical invention is none the less inspired. When the curtain rises on the makeshift stage-on-stage, ‘the view of the lake is revealed; the moon is above the horizon, its reflection in the water’ (Act 1, p. 11). Konstantin has previously calculated the effect: ‘Here is our theatre. The curtain, then the first wing, then the second, and beyond that—open space. No scenery of any sort. There is an open view of the lake and the horizon. We shall raise the curtain at exactly half-past eight, when the moon rises … If Nina is late it will spoil the whole effect’ (Act 1, p. 5). Surely we must agree with Sorin that this is ‘magnificent’. Konstantin has hit on the brilliant idea of using not a naturalistic setting but framing nature itself for his most unnaturalistic play. The view of the lake is itself so breathtaking that it creates the strongest possible theatrical effect. This is a play created for a particular performance, hence the hour of performance can be set so as to show the moon rising behind the lake, thus enhancing the spellbinding beauty and at the same time providing theatrical lighting.

But the purity of this artistic conception is undermined when we realize that this ‘natural’ effect is in its turn created artificially on Chekhov's stage. The moon and lake are in fact not real but part of the scenography. Ultimately what we get is yet another naturalistic effect, not a window opening out on nature.

Chekhov may be taking here a side-glance at another Shakespearean locus classicus of theatrical technique. The question of how best to represent the moon in the theatre was already taken up by the artisans in A Midsummer Night's Dream. After consulting the almanac, Bottom suggests leaving ‘a casement of the great chamber window, where we play, open, and the moon may shine in at the casement’ (3.1.43-5). Perhaps a naive solution to the problem of bringing moonlight into the chamber for Pyramus and Thisbe to meet by moonlight, but certainly a very effective one, and not too far from Treplev's symbolist usage of the rising moon. The alternative solution, proposed by Quince, to have an actor representing Moonshine come in with a bush of thorns and lantern, is no less naive, but its artificiality and stylization contrast with Bottom's ‘natural’ setting.¹¹

Chekhov's sophisticated superimposing of Treplev's ‘natural’ scenery onto his own naturalistic scenery forces us to consider the central problem of theatrical aesthetics: How can reality be represented on the stage? What is the nature of the mimetic relationship? Treplev himself abandons the mimetic concept of theatre, repudiating Hamlet's notion of holding the mirror up to nature, and prefers to use nature as a backdrop, investing it with symbolist overtones. His experimentalism purports to represent lofty futuristic ideas rather than life as we know it. His art is abstract, beyond life and experience. He is a true harbinger of post-realistic art.

Chekhov's practice and theory direct our attention to Shakespeare's grappling with similar problems, though in a less rigorous and more scattered manner. The Seagull draws together the theoretical references in the two plays most concerned with theatrical presentation, Hamlet and A Midsummer Night's Dream. From Chekhov's point of view, Hamlet's Ciceronian definition of the basic mimetic nature and ethical function of the theatre is supplemented by the yokels' more pressing staging problems.

That Chekhov rejects this radical path there can be little doubt, for his own play has living people in it and romance, so that even Nina, who decries the lack of these in Konstantin's play, could enjoy it. But although the inset is a gentle parody, the young man's experiment is portrayed with much sympathy and his ideas deserve serious consideration. Treplev is shown as a young man with an artistic vocation, and there is a measure of admiration for his serious-mindedness. At the same time, his excessive seriousness is portrayed with gentle humour, as an aspect of his emotional immaturity.

The Seagull can be seen as devoted to discovering why Treplev's potential talent has not found its right outlet, why society cannot accept his work as legitimate art, and why he has failed in his bid for love. Like other distinctive Chekhovian features, the theme of the blighted life of a young man is already present in Shakespeare, even if it is overshadowed by the direct dramatic appeal of the plot.

The Seagull uses Hamlet as its ‘classical’ frame of reference. Shakespeare's play lends its shape to Chekhov's naturalistic material, and provides it with a sense of direction and purpose. For Chekhov, as for many writers, Hamlet had assumed the same importance that classical antiquity had had for Shakespeare. ‘I am more an antique Roman than a Dane’ (5.2.294) is how Horatio sees himself. In asking to hear the speech about Priam's murder from Aeneas' tale to Dido, Hamlet implicitly compares himself to Pyrrhus avenging his father Achilles' death. Looking back to the heroic literature of the Homeric age, he sees himself as miscast in the avenger's role. He is not the only one who cannot measure up to his classical precursor: the late King ‘was to this / Hyperion to a satyr’ (1.2.140), and Gertrude's grief falls far short of Hecuba's or Niobe's.

Hamlet may see himself as a mere ‘rogue and peasant slave’ (2.2.538) compared to the epic figure of Greek mythology, but, from the perspective of The Seagull, he in his turn becomes a figure of heroic stature. Placed beside Chekhov's anti-hero, Hamlet assumes a ‘classical’ dignity. To our own latter-day anti-heroism Treplev himself might seem a larger-than-life romantic hero in his attitude to both art and love and in his courage to commit suicide in the face of failure. The dramatic image we have of ourselves is probably closer to that of the Beckettian protagonist, so impotent that he cannot even take his own life.

With one well-aimed shot at the seagull, Treplev topples Hamlet's belief in the special Providence in the fall of a sparrow (5.2.166-7). Shakespeare's universe still retains, though tenuously, this metaphysical dimension of man's life. Treplev shoots first the seagull and then himself, because for him there is nothing beyond his own needs and his own life. The theatrical clashing of swords in which Hamlet both kills and is killed gives way to Treplev's offstage, very minor-key suicide. Chekhov's subdued ending makes us question the ‘heroic’ ending of Hamlet, the military funeral procession accompanied by ‘a peal of ordnance’ (5.2.356 stage direction), and return to Hamlet's own words of exit: ‘The rest is silence’ (5.2.311).

Finally, Chekhov used Hamlet as his classical model, imaginatively transposing both its form and artistic concerns into a modern idiom, moving towards a greater degree of naturalism, a more immediate and direct expression of thought and feeling. But if, to a certain extent, he thereby solved the riddle of suiting word and action to each other, he also indicated ironically, through Kostya's bumbling experimentation, that his own solution was only temporary and that the artistic equilibrium achieved was unstable.¹²

Notes

1. Eleanor Rowe, Hamlet: A Window on Russia (New York: New York University Press, 1976). David Magarschak, Chekhov, p. 146; quoted in Rowe, p. 110. Thomas G. Winner, ‘Chekhov's Seagull and Shakespeare's Hamlet: A Study of a Dramatic Device’, American Slavic and East European Review 15:1 (1956), pp. 103-11. T. A. Stroud, ‘Hamlet and The Seagull’, Shakespeare Quarterly 9:3 (1958), pp. 367-72. Robert Porter, ‘Hamlet and The Seagull’, Journal of Russian Studies 41 (1981), pp. 23-32.

2. On The Seagull's indebtedness to Maupassant's Sur l'eau, which is read by Arkadina in Act 2, see Richard Peirce, Chekhov: A Study of Four Major Plays (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), pp. 23-8, and Jerome H. Katsell, ‘Chekhov's The Seagull and Maupassant's Sur l'eau’, Chekhov's Great Plays: A Critical Anthology, ed. Jean-Pierre Barricelli, pp. 18-33. For Turgenev's influence on Chekhov, see Eleanor Rowe, p. 109, and Marc Slonim, From Chekhov to the Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 72. On Chekhov's interest in Maeterlinck and especially on the close connection between Trofimov's play and Maeterlinck's drama see Laurence Senelick, ‘Chekhov's Drama, Maeterlinck, and the Russian Symbolists’, in Barricelli, pp. 161-80, and J. L. Styan, Chekhov in Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), p. 17.

3. For a discussion of which translation of these lines Chekhov was using, see Winner, pp. 106-7, n.

4. Nigel Alexander, Poison, Play, and Duel: a study in Hamlet (London: Routledge, 1971), p. 25.

5. Richard Proudfoot, ‘“The Play's the Thing”: Hamlet and the Conscience of the Queen’, ‘Fanned and Winnowed Opinions’: Shakespearean essays presented to Harold Jenkins, ed. J. W. Mahom and T. A. Pendleton (London: Methuen, 1987), pp. 160-5.

6. Ilya Ehrenburg, Chekhov, Stendhal, etc., ed. Harrison E. Salisbury (New York: Knopf, 1963), p. 58; quoted in Ernest J. Simmons, Introduction to Russian Realism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965). Cf. also Slonim, From Chekhov to the Revolution, p. 74.

7. Harvey Pitcher, The Chekhov Play (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), p. 1.

8. Vera Gottlieb, Chekhov in Performance in Russia and Soviet Russia (Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey, 1984), p. 50.

9. On Shakespeare's criticism of the older, more rhetorical style of Alleyn's acting, see Peter Holland, ‘Hamlet and the Art of Acting’ in Drama and the Actor, ed. James Redmond, Themes in Drama, vol. XI (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 39-61. The difficult question of Shakespeare's views on acting is taken up by Ekbert Faas, Shakespeare's Poetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 39-42. He thinks Shakespeare has made his hero ‘the mouthpiece of a theory of drama … out of tune with his actual practice’, a neo-classical, didactic and elitist theory akin to Ben Jonson's.

10. Gottlieb, Chekhov in Performance, no. 1.

11. Cf. Styan, Chekhov in Performance, p. 26: ‘The scene is to be lit by the real moon, a plan which only Bully Bottom could otherwise have conceived, and the backdrop is to be the mysterious lake itself, the ultimate scenic realism. He goes over the plans with a breathless fervour, as if to justify his concept of theatre.’

12. An earlier version of this paper was read at the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1989.

The texts used are as follows: Hamlet, ed. G. R. Hibbard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); A Midsummer Night's Dream, ed. R. A. Foakes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); The Plays of Anton Tchekov, tr. Constance Garnett (New York: Modern Library, 1929).