[In the following essay, Berry suggests that through Hamlet's soliloquies, the audience becomes, in effect, his psychological counselor, sympathetically accepting his perspectives on himself and other characters. In Berry's judgment, the lack of soliloquies in Act V reflects Hamlet's recognition that it is now time for him to behave like a man and replace complaints with action.]

The extended ingratiation by which Hamlet develops his special relationship with the audience rests on two factors: the persona of the actor and the sequence of major soliloquies. The persona is, I think, more important than technique. Hamlet is not, oddly, a part that demands great acting. But it does demand the essential star quality of magnetism. An actor, perfectly competent in a general professional way, who essays Hamlet without charm can be merely embarrassing. The part is written for a star actor, who may be a third-rate star, but not for a good actor. From his base of personal magnetism, the actor woos the audience in seven soliloquies. In general, the soliloquy is a device for bonding actor and audience. Those characters to whom it is granted are on a different plane from those lacking one. It's a rule that soliloquies never alienate audiences. The device is too intimate, fascinating, absorbing. And in Hamlet, the soliloquy sets up a particular kind of relationship.¹ The audience becomes a counselor, perhaps even a psychiatrist, as Hamlet brings to it his problems. “Am I a coward?” Enmeshed in the self-analyses of this fascinating young man, the audience—like a good counselor—may not interrupt but listens, intent, to every word. For seven sessions, Hamlet pours out his fears, doubts, and resolutions, and to all of them the counselor-audience gives sympathetic ear. It is of course on Hamlet's side; it assents to his perception of affairs. And this remains broadly true throughout the first four acts.

The shift in this equation of forces occurs at what is surely planned as the interval. Traditionally, and with good reason, stage directors take an interval after act 4, scene 4, which ends on Hamlet's last soliloquy: “O, from this time forth, / My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!” Mark the theatrical implications. If the interval is at all prolonged and the playing of the next few scenes somewhat stately, it will be close on an hour before Hamlet reenters during the gravedigger scene. The actor will have spent the time resting in his dressingroom. He may quite possibly have taken a nap. (Albert Finney did regularly during his National Theatre Hamlet of 1976.) The actor, naturally, needs a rest from the audience. All his energies will be required for the fencing match. Less obviously, the audience needs a rest from him. Hamlet has, after all, been somewhat overexposed during those four acts. And it is a catalogue of failure that he has to tell. The sympathies of the counselor-audience have been very fully exploited; they might be wearing thin. So the audience, in the interval and following scenes, takes a break from the tribulations of Hamlet.

Ophelia takes up the running. Effectively, she is a support actor. Ophelia is there to divert the audience during the extended interval, while the star is resting. What is the reality of her appearances? Ophelia delivers an aria: two arias, strictly. That is how the actress approaches her task and how the audience sees it. And however her scenes are played—fey, pathetic, sexual, disturbing—there will be general agreement that enough is enough. There's an odd suggestion in her role of a difficult child staying up late, solemnly performing before a stage audience of adults. Such a performance never “fails”; that is not possible, in its circumstances. But there may well be a general feeling at “good night, sweet ladies” that, as Mr. Bennet put it to his daughter, “You have delighted us long enough.”

In my experience, Ophelias are seldom genuinely moving. More often, they are slightly embarrassing, even boring. This is not a reflection on the competence of unnamed actresses. It is rather, as I see it, the essence of the part. Hamlets rarely fail; Ophelias rarely succeed. No deep bonds have been established between Ophelia and audience. She has no soliloquy or aside, for example. No one goes to the theatre to see The Tragedy of Ophelia. Ophelia is not, I think, loved. It is not that she is unlovable, but not enough of her is exposed before the audience for it (and Hamlet) to love. In any case, the appeal of madness to the general audience cannot be large. One would as soon not be present; the stage offers a court, not an asylum, and an air of painful indecorum prevails. Hence the audience is glad enough, at her exit, to put Ophelia out of mind.

Is this too brutal a formulation? Not, I think, if we reinforce it with the principle that Hamlet generally imposes his viewpoint upon the audience. He sees Ophelia as an adjunct to his own psychodrama. At all their meetings (shown or reported), Hamlet is absorbed in his own feelings, not hers. His moods with Ophelia range among engagement, detachment, and hostility. Their encounter (following “To be or not to be”) reads like the end of an affair, rather than an episode in its development. It is clear that Hamlet sees Ophelia as absorbed into the maneuvers of the oppositions. During the play scene, he treats her badly; but his behavior is I think excused if not condoned by the audience, for the focus is on Hamlet's manic excitement rather than Ophelia's distress. By the time Hamlet sees her corpse he has, fairly obviously, forgotten her. The funeral brings her back to mind; he says, “I loved Ophelia”; but his emotions toward her are essentially unexplored. (She figures in no soliloquy.) On the whole, our feelings for Ophelia appear to parallel those of Hamlet for her: charming girl, sad fate. The audience-counselor accepts Hamlet's perception of his relations with Ophelia. There are no solid grounds for gainsaying him. It's his play, after all. No Ophelia is going to steal it from him. When the Queen's lyric lament ends, decorously, the life of Ophelia, the audience is being emotionally cued for the return of the star. Subliminally, the audience responds to the play's promptings and sends out its own impulses: bring back Hamlet.

He comes back, to the infinite pleasure of the audience. As everyone remarks, he seems older. He is. Hamlet turns out to be between twenty-eight and thirty, his age being fixed by the reminiscences of the First Gravedigger. This is surely the great turning point in the audience's relations with Hamlet. The stealthy drip of information about Hamlet yields a fairly straight answer to that fundamental question, one that people habitually pose, answer, and reflect on all their lives: how old is he?

The essential answer is marked. Hamlet is older than we thought. All our responses in the early scenes are based on the assumption that “young Hamlet” is indeed young, say in his early twenties. The appeal is to our sympathies. Poor young man! What cruel dilemmas he must face! And the crafty vagueness of the early information sketches a kind of alibi (in the correct sense) for Hamlet. Claudius's “For your intent / In going back to school in Wittenberg” leaves in the air the suggestion that Hamlet was abroad, in Wittenberg, when his father died. That, as Bradley showed, would supply a sound excuse for his not being chosen king of Denmark. But Claudius's line is perfectly compatible with Hamlet's being in Denmark when the new king took over. And not until the later stages of the play do we grasp fully that Denmark is an elective, not a hereditary, monarchy. Buried in the play's hinterland, therefore, are the two supreme questions: where was Hamlet at his father's death, and why was he passed over, or outmaneuvered, for the succession? My point in registering these Bradleyan questions is not to pursue them, but to stress that they can be allayed or neutralized on the assumption of Hamlet's youth. There are good objective reasons for the Danes' preferring the experienced Claudius, as ruler, to a twenty-year-old Hamlet. Those reasons look far weaker, and the consequent queries much sharper, if Hamlet is approaching thirty. What was the prince and heir presumptive doing abroad at that age? Isn't he rather old for graduate study? Why, if at home, did he allow Claudius to pop in “between th'election and my hopes”?

The discovery of Hamlet's age, in 5.1, must adjust the audience's perception of Hamlet and thus its relationship with him. It is not a matter of the audience-counselor reflecting consciously: you didn't tell us that in our first session. But the vestigial memory of the first soliloquy is part of its response. Is a twenty-nine-year-old permitted quite the totality of grief and prostration that a twenty-year-old is? If the audience knew the facts in 1.2, would it not feel that Claudius had a case when he urged Hamlet, in effect, to pull himself together and grow up? The play makes excuses for Hamlet, and so does he, by that subtlest of devices: advancing all manner of criticisms that could be leveled against him, save the right ones. By 5.1 it is time to put the excuses aside.

The successive layers of consciousness and repression of which the play is composed are the mind of Hamlet. In act 5 dawns the realization that he is approaching thirty and that time is running out. That consciousness is forced upon him, and upon us. It is the Gravedigger who blows the gaff. Thereafter the reminder of age, and of mortality, takes Hamlet nearer to the fact of death and the imperatives of his diminishing space. The gravedigger scene is, as it were, a soliloquy for three instruments. It is a meditation on mortality. After the violence of Ophelia's funeral, it leads to the final scene, on which the basic observation is that Hamlet has become fully adult. In a word, he acts his age.

The reality of this in stage practice is worth pursuing. We know Hamlet's age. What of the actor's? It's a reasonable bet that for the Elizabethan audience the actor could scarcely have looked younger than his age as stated. Acting has generally been a rough trade; and Burbage himself was thirty-three in 1600-1601, the date to which Hamlet is usually assigned. From Betterton on, there has been a long line of over-age Hamlets, ending I think with Michael Redgrave's, who was fifty in 1958. For today's actors, the upper limit is around forty (Olivier in his film, Finney in 1976). They are allowed to exceed Hamlet's stated age by a decade. The modern convention is certainly healthier than the older one, in that it avoids manifestly elderly Hamlets. Yet the underlying problems have still to be faced.

I take as exemplary Joseph Papp's reported remark to Kevin Kline, the latest Hamlet of substance (New York Shakespeare Festival Public Theater, 1986): “You're not getting any younger, Kevin—what about Hamlet?” The germ of the part is all there, in that question. The actor is not getting any younger. If he has the opportunity—like Hamlet—he cannot delay much longer. “An actor,” said Michael Goldman, “is a man who wants to play Hamlet.”² Kline, as it happened, accepted the challenge at the age of thirty-eight, a good age. What does it mean?

The effective reality of the actor's age has changed. For Burbage, that reality was limed sack, substandard food, rough conditions, health care in which one's best chance lay in avoiding the physician: a man as robust as he must have borne his age successfully, not dismissed it. For today's actors, an extension of half a dozen years to their “young Hamlet” period is easily possible. They take good care of themselves: the Kean-Barrymore self-destructive syndrome is not the mode. They observe proper diet, exercise intelligently, and take the best medical advice. When they break out over a weekend, they might take a second glass of white wine. That is the way the best and most ambitious actors play it. At all except the very closest quarters, a contemporary actor is well placed to keep his age at bay, a secret from the audience. I hazard that today Hamlet might ideally be cast at around thirty-five, or a little over. The Elizabethan/Jacobean Hamlet could well be cast precisely at the age as stated, twenty-eight to thirty. The reality is always the same: Hamlet's age comes partly as a revelation, partly as a recognition of something we really knew already. It is anagnorisis.

The final scene is therefore Hamlet's coming of age. It is his rite of manhood; and that is as true of the actor as it is of the Prince. There are no more soliloquies, no more complaints and appeals to the audience. He just has to do it. In part one, Hamlet confided in us, the audience; now he confides only in his friend. The special relationship with his counselor is over. Only his executor now matters. As a man should, Hamlet makes his posthumous arrangements: Horatio takes possession of the document that damns Claudius and is given as much of the story as Hamlet thinks fit together with the bill of indictment against Claudius. Hamlet makes public amends to Laertes, in his graceful apotheosis as Renaissance Prince, before going on to assert his superiority in the noble art of fencing. At the climax, Hamlet accomplishes his revenge and does what he can to bring about a smooth transference of power to Fortinbras. These are the actions of an adult, and they are social. The alienated individual of the first four acts is transformed into the public figure of the finale. What the audience has lost in intimacy it gains in respect. It is the triumph of a public figure that we applaud.

Notes

1. Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins, New Arden edition (London: Methuen, 1982). All references are to this edition.

2. Michael Goldman, Shakespeare and the Energies of Drama (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 74.