When David Warner was performing Hamlet at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre one evening, a member of the audience actually entered into the play. It was near the end of the second act, just after Hamlet dismisses Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. With a sigh of relief, Warner breathed, “Now I am alone.” He raked the stalls with his eyes, scooping in the balcony with a wide look, and then began the soliloquy: “O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I …” The audience followed him closely. He gave the natural builds in the speech, moving through “What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, / That he should weep for her?” At the series of short questions, beginning with “Am I a coward?” Warner paused, just to think about what he'd said. Surprisingly, one of the spectators shouted, “Yes!” Warner responded, “Who calls me villain, breaks my pate across, / Plucks off my beard and blows it in my face, / Tweaks me by the nose, gives me the lie i' th' throat / As deep as to the lungs? Who does me this?” And now a name was shouted out from the audience! Warner was excited and responded with some vehemence, “Hah, 'swounds, I should take it; for it cannot be / But I am pigeon-liver'd …” Warner remembered this as one of the most exhilarating nights of his acting career. He was stunned with the rightness of feeling and the naturalness of speaking these soliloquy lines directly to the theatre audience. The text supported him absolutely. No adjustments in timing, motivation, or thought needed to be made. He was still making discoveries inside the act of performance, and it filled him with a sense of awe about Shakespeare's dramaturgy.¹

This Hamlet was director Peter Hall's contribution to the social revolution of the sixties. Scruffy, antiheroic, powerless in the sweep of the military-industrial complex of Denmark, Hamlet was recycled and reconstituted to adapt to the needs of the emergent theatre audience for the new Royal Shakespeare Company. Ralph Berry details the way in which the character interpretation in this 1965-66 production broke the mould: First of all, Warner was not shown as attractive. He did not fit the matinee-idol image of the Leslie Howards or the John Nevilles of the past, with their flowing hair, romantic profiles, and gently rhythmic verse. In fact, he was downright unprincely. The production did not offer a delicately costumed and obviously wronged heir to the throne of Denmark.² Newspaper headlines announced a clear departure from tradition: “An Existentialist Prince,”³ “The Unfinished Hero,”⁴ “Middle-Class Hamlet,”⁵ “Prince Of Denmark Street.”⁶

Warner said that the critics took Ophelia's soliloquy too literally: they demanded, “Where is ‘the glass of fashion and the mould of form’ that she speaks about, where is the courtier, where is the soldier, where is the scholar, where is the prince?” Furthermore, Warner's Hamlet was not middle-aged. Up to this juncture in the twentieth century, it was not unusual to see an actor of fifty playing the part. Only Gielgud and Guinness had dared to be so young, both attempting the most difficult of classical roles for the first time in their early twenties. Warner was barely twenty-four. Berry sums up the audience appeal: “The éclat of David Warner's Hamlet sprang from the fact that he looked like, and was, a contemporary of a heavy proportion of the audience.”⁷ Critics emphasized the youthful flavor of the character conception: “He shelters in childishness, seeking to appear not merely too insane to be responsible for his actions, but too young. His disguise is … the willful untidiness of an undergraduate, the half-baked impertinence of the adolescent who would test his parents' love to the limit of tolerance.”⁸ “He imprints an image of a pale, defiant boy, immensely tall and thin, trying to live with some sort of honest sense of dimension.”⁹

Hall's pre-production ideas were spelled out in a presentation to Royal Shakespeare Company actors at the start of rehearsals for the production in the summer of 1965.¹⁰ He began with a discussion of Hamlet's “trembling on the point of full maturity.”¹¹ Hall emphasized his isolation in a court where Claudius was a “master of appearances”¹² and Polonius “the kind of shrewd, tough establishment figure you can still meet in St. James's.”¹³ What Hall saw as a contemporary political dilemma guided his notions about the tragedy:

For our decade I think the play will be about the disillusionment which produces an apathy of the will so deep that commitment to politics, to religion or to life is impossible. For a man said to do nothing, Hamlet does a great deal. For a man said to refuse experience, he experiences a great deal. He is always on the brink of action, but something inside him, this disease of disillusionment, stops the final, committed action.¹⁴

Hall was alarmed by the apathy he saw in the youth of the sixties, and his production explored the reasons for their political inaction. These young people and the sympathetic liberal elite of Britain were Hall's target audience in two important ways: indeed, he wanted them to become regular theatregoers, but he also wanted them to judge, rather than merely be entertained, once they got to the theatre: “[Hamlet sees that] politicians … have to lie and cheat. And Hamlet refuses this. The young must feel this about their rulers even when there is no crime in question. They must believe that the millennium could come tomorrow if power were in the right hands.”¹⁵

Tony Church, who played Polonius in the production, recalled Hall's ideas:

Peter's lecture was about a Hamlet fighting an establishment so well oiled that it was actually impenetrable … it would eat people and just go on. It was very much based on the British establishment. We'd only just escaped thirteen years of very strong conservative rule, and there was a feeling that it was still very much about.

… I based Polonius on Harold Macmillan, who was a sort of Lord Burleigh of his time. The whole thing about the English establishment was that it was extraordinarily good-humored and bland; you couldn't get past it. It would be very difficult for a young man to rebel because you couldn't actually find the points to hit at. As Harold Hobson once said in an article, “What the English establishment does well is buy people in.”¹⁶

It was the impenetrability of the bureaucracy that was suggested within the production, rather than any benign qualities. As Church stated, “Our world was designed to work without David Warner.” Contemporary events as influences in Hall's production may have been based on Jan Kott's notions about re-creating Shakespeare's plays so that they appealed to the modern consciousness.¹⁷ Church added that another influence was Martin Holmes' The Guns of Elsinore, which described Hamlet within the context of war articulated in Horatio's I.i speech about battle preparations. These notions had already filtered into Hall's previous work on the Royal Shakespeare Company's Wars of the Roses production, where a predominant militarism overshadowed the events of the Henry VI plays.

The first sight that confronted an audience as this Hamlet began was a cannon pointed straight at them. The stage set itself, as Stanley Wells described it, “was permanent in some respects, but it could be rapidly rearranged. Beyond a black false-proscenium arch … two great black walls slanted inwards, their further ends separated by two massive doors.”¹⁸ The rear panels could be changed to represent designs, bookshelves, frescoes, gravestones, in order to effect changes of scene. Critic Ronald Bryden called the design “a superb inferno of bitumen ramparts and lakes of black marble.”¹⁹ Designer John Bury used unusual textures, which he made particularly heavy and overpowering to reflect “the enclosed world and stifling politics of Elsinore.”²⁰ Photographs of the set show the upstage area filled with panels which angled inward and severely weakened most of that area for acting. This was indeed a claustrophobic kingdom which sought to enmesh Hamlet. It is no wonder that he escaped so frequently to the forestage to be free of the confinement of the set.

Tony Church as Polonius and the other bureaucrats wore “compact costumes, the square, powerful Holbein line but Victorian materials, grays and silvers and maroons and lots and lots of black pin-stripe to suggest court and officialdom.” The design concept reflected the director's idea of an efficient political machine, founded on financial stability and reeking of power and old money. Even the accents used projected an overbearing sense of upperclassness (“Hamlet” became “Hemlet”). Church concluded that Hamlet was the grit that finally stopped the workings of this vast combine.

Other stage icons that critics noted were Hamlet hemmed in by officials at the council table in I.ii, an image that reinforced the confined quality of the court, and also the huge contraption that represented the Ghost, Hamlet's father. The twelve-foot puppetlike machine was operated by other actors and, at one point, cradled Warner like a baby in its arms and punctuated Hamlet's youth within the surrounds of an oppressive and impersonal court. Tony Church felt that the closing moments of the play were the most shocking and foreboding, since they suggested that an even more malign force might replace Claudius:

In the end when Fortinbras arrived, the wicket gate was punched in, a man came in and took the huge grate bars off the door, and an army appeared—total occupation. The beautiful ice-cold figure of Fortinbras was absolutely the sense of realpolitik. … At the end everybody on the stage regards Hamlet's killing of the king as treason. There is no indication that anyone [onstage] ever supports Hamlet. Hamlet was a troublesome madman, a deranged student who spoke totally unacceptable things at the wrong time … and had to go.

Ideally, the actor-director relationship produces ideas which complement the production. Hall appeared to have been Warner's mentor; he was, after all, ten years older than Warner and had been director of the Royal Shakespeare Company for five years. Nevertheless, the collaboration between the two men was close and fruitful. Church felt that Hall's casting of Warner was especially propitious:

Warner was, in a sense, plastic material in [Hall's] hands. Warner didn't know the play, had never seen anyone play it before. [He had seen the Kozintsev film and the Olivier film.] You couldn't find an actor that naive now. … This was the brilliant thing Peter had done in that he was able to take someone who had no preconceptions at all and point him in the right direction. He knew what [Warner] could do, what the boy represented, and what his charisma meant—and he knew Warner didn't have any hang-ups. … Warner was picking his way through this extraordinary territory for the first time. I don't think it will ever happen again.

David Warner was trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art when he was eighteen and nineteen. He vividly remembers the day that, at age twenty-one, he was asked to go to Stratford:

I was working at a small theatre run by the Royal Shakespeare Company called the Arts Theatre in London that did experimental plays. I had seven lines in a play. … Peter Hall saw that and came round to the dressing room to talk to the other actors and he said congratulations to me and that he hoped one day I might like to join the company. Lo and behold, a year later I was invited to audition for this Henry VI, and I went back and back and back for six years.

As he began working on Hamlet, he was taken through the play by Robin Phillips, then Peter Hall's associate director: “I was asking for extra time and … he helped me learn the lines.” Warner felt he could ask Phillips to help him with meaning in the dialogue. But it was inside the rehearsal process that Warner and Hall forged their working relationship and mutually agreed on actual technique:

It was either Peter suggested to me or I suggested to him, or it may have been a mutual moment … I wouldn't claim credit, and certainly I was given enough of a stick on the way to do things. He would always assemble the whole cast and have models of the sets and have this whole concept of the piece. He didn't say to you, “You will play it in this way. You will do this and you will do that,” but he laid it out in a pretty pertinent way which way he wanted to go.

Warner describes the working environment:

Also, Peter Hall's speech to the company would be one thing, but, you know, I sort of stayed within the house [the theatre] with him and we'd talk away from the other people, so what was the rehearsal process and what was friendship we developed while we talked things over? It wasn't a question of a student and a teacher, I honestly believe, because when I left, I did three movies with him. He would never turn to me in my wildest imagination and ask me for advice about how to direct it nor would I ask him for advice about how to act it. But I think that we would have a fair amount of instinct going. He'd say, “This time, David, would you mind—” and I'd say okay because I could just tell by the inflection of his voice what he was going to ask me to do on the next little run-through. So, I think it would be fair to say that I put in. For me to say it was Peter Hall's idea to do the soliloquies [a certain way], I don't think it worked that way. I may have turned around and just said it, or maybe one day because I was always trying something new, I just did it.

Despite the original and very coherent concept behind this production, the critical reception to Warner's Hamlet was decidedly mixed—as Berry says, “This was a much-loved and much-attacked Hamlet.”²¹ Some reviewers took pains to announce their biases: “Ideally speaking, the critic should walk into a theatre with his mind a virgin surface, a wax tablet from which all previous markings have been smoothed away. … I was far from any such state when I entered the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. … the tablet was full of scratches made by preconceptions and speculations.”²² Robert Speaight in Shakespeare Quarterly warned that “most of the critics and many of the spectators came to Mr. Peter Hall's production of Hamlet with their memories of Sir John Gielgud concealed like a hand grenade in their pockets” and then declared that “this is undoubtedly the most important theatrical statement on the play which has been made for a long time.”²³

Ronald Bryden wrote a thoughtful piece which eventually declared, “In other words, against all expectation and professional habit, I have to say that the new Stratford Hamlet seems to be a great and historic production.”²⁴ Most of the reviews were cautious and balanced: “This is a powerful and disquieting production, and one that promises to grow in stature and authority with its hero … a good Hamlet but not yet a great one.”²⁵ However, the critic for The Spectator was clearly offended: “It won't do. Hamlet as an existential tract will not do. … he is anti-heroic, anti-romantic and very suitably the subject of the shrill pre-pubescent ecstasy in the gallery.”²⁶ John Trewin was regretful but direct: “I could imagine Horatio looking down on the dead Hamlet and saying, ‘Goodnight, sweet Prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest from the problems of commitment in life and politics.’”²⁷ John Gardner summed up the wariness of the press: “As soon as young prince Hamlet stops being predictably beautiful, like Bach, and starts sounding like Bartok, there is trouble.”²⁸ And the chairman of the Royal Shakespeare Company's Board of Governors, Sir Fordham Flower, concluded that the “criticisms you have read are just about calculated to fill the house for years.”²⁹

Articles began to appear in the local papers asserting that Hall and Warner were unabashed by the critical reception. On its return to Stratford, the RSC program printed, at Warner's insistence, a page of press clippings titled “For” and “Against,” with the added comment that “this production of Hamlet, an immense success, provoked strong feelings amongst the critics.”

Warner said that his verse-speaking was also the subject of critical turmoil. He had eschewed formal training in verse-speaking at drama school and did not attend Cicely Berry's verse classes at the Royal Shakespeare Company because he found the production itself to be very exhausting. When asked about verse structure and image patterns, he declared that the meaning is the most important thing: “The critics who liked the production never mentioned the verse. The ones who didn't went for the jugular and said I was like a schoolmaster lecturing the audience.” In actual fact, there was a wide variety of responses. Although generally positive, Hugh Leonard professed ambivalence: “Mr. Warner has a habit of pausing irrelevantly in the middle of lines; and more importantly, his soliloquies were disposed of almost shamefacedly in the manner of an atheist reading the Song of Solomon. A grievous fault, but here let me seem to contradict myself and say that this was the most exciting Hamlet I have seen.”³⁰

In the midst of an overwhelmingly favorable review, one critic added, “I had the impression, through much of the evening, either that Mr. Warner was ignoring the beat, or that the conductor was giving him the wrong one. I also thought that he shouted far too much, and sometimes in odd places.”³¹ And in the act of razoring most of the production, another critic eulogized: “It is refreshing to hear verse taken at such a clip (as he takes ‘To be or not to be,’ for instance) and receive its overall shape instead of being seduced by passing phrases en route.”³² Warner himself accepted most of the remarks philosophically by forgiving critics who condemned him and held him personally responsible for the sins of an entire evening. He also felt that it was much easier to play nightly against mixed reviews because people's expectations were more normalized. If the reviews are too positive, the actor has to top himself each night to hold the audience, and if the reviews are too negative, one has the opportunity to improve the production and turn audience opinion around. This is especially true of the repertory situation in Stratford, when the play is scheduled to run for a set period of time no matter what.

Though the critics fluttered and fanned, the response of the youth of Great Britain was unilateral. Word got around that this was the “young” Hamlet, and teachers in the area brought busloads of school students to the production. The production also drew in college students. Tony Church describes them as “not rebels but they would have liked to have been.” They brought sleeping bags and slept in long queues which extended around the back of the theatre and across the street, just in order to hold a place in the ticket line. From the beginning of the run, they had found their Hamlet: “The response, especially among the younger members of the first night audience, was sustained cheering,”³³ giving Warner eight curtain calls.³⁴ That the youth of the nation had been shaken from apathy seemed to be evidenced in this letter from a student who took a critic to task in the local papers:

As for Mr. Warner's performance—“small” Mr. Trewin called it. My comment is that Mr. Warner's was one of the “largest” Hamlets I have seen—and I have seen many despite my tender years. … He was a true Shakespearian tragic-hero. … [Trewin's] criticism seems to be based upon the fact that Mr. Warner was given a long ovation but that this response was not an accurate comment on his performance because it was predominantly youthful applause. For some unaccountable reason this exuberance seems to count for little in Mr. Trewin's estimation—indeed his opinion of young people generally seems to be pretty low.³⁵

Overstated, perhaps, but it showed no lack of courage. There was a tendency among critics to compare Warner to a rock star: “It is painstakingly intelligent in conception, as contemporary as the Rolling Stones. And, finally, just about as attractive.”³⁶ Church stated that there has been nothing like this interest in a play before or since that time. Actors in Britain now in their mid-forties claim that this was the most important Hamlet of all time. The nostalgia for it has not diminished today.

Warner himself completed the circle of identification. He had a special relationship to and a deep compassion for young people coming to see this play for the first time. Church described it as a mutual act of discovering, with Warner “picking his way through the mine field of this extraordinary text” and the young out front helping him to do it.

Warner had more than his own youthfulness to account for his interest in “kids.” He'd had a troubled childhood and didn't do well in the usual subjects like math or sports. However, one person greatly influenced his life and offered a rescue:

My saving grace was that I lived about twenty miles from Stratford-upon-Avon. A wonderful English literature teacher in my last of eight schools saw that I was in difficulty academically because of domestic problems—I couldn't concentrate on my lessons while I was in school—I couldn't get it together at all. It was she that got me interested in theatre at school because I played Lady Macbeth and Shylock in a tiny little production. It gave me an identity where I managed to get to the last class, the top class. She tried to encourage me to go to Stratford to see theatre with a school party and I went, but I couldn't understand it, I couldn't understand what anyone was talking about … because my brain wouldn't do it. Although I did have the kind of feeling that maybe someday it would be lovely to be a sort of actor.

Warner felt that part of his not comprehending what was happening onstage could be attributed to an artificial mode of playing: “I couldn't understand the Bard not only because of my lack of academic training but also because there was a lot of declaiming onstage, a lot of ‘the voice’ and a kind of posturing that got in the way of understanding.” These early experiences were a seed that lay dormant for a long time. Even at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where Warner had taken a medal for his performances in class, there was a feeling that Shakespeare was somehow not relevant:

In drama school, we used to go to Shakespeare classes, and we'd say, “What are we doing This for? When are We gonna do Shakespeare—run off and join the Royal Shakespeare Company? What for—to do Starveling!!” I mean, there were Shakespeare buffs in the class, yes, but by and large we never thought we were gonna Do this Shakespeare stuff. What Use was it to us … like algebra or geometry or trigonometry!

Once Warner was at Stratford as an actor, Shakespeare's text unfolded to him: “When I was asked to play it, I could actually understand it. When I read it, I understood it for the first time!” His excitement and elation were passed on to the audience, and it became his mission to bring them the classics:

Having been a member of a schools audience at Stratford and thinking about how even many of my contemporaries found it difficult and uninteresting to watch, it was my job as a twenty-three-year-old up on that stage, playing one of my best parts—to make it understood. Bearing in mind that a vast proportion of that audience were required to go, I wanted to make it as interesting as possible. I had to approach it by trying to understand the play as much as possible and then to communicate it so that they understood it, which gave Hamlet a kind of humanity instead of its being the famous soliloquies and the famous scenes just presented. As if Hamlet was saying all this for the first time and sharing it with them. … One thing I Don't want to do is bore the pants off these kids—I mean, this is just something I'd want Not to do.

Warner was so careful of the young people that he persuaded Hall to take the act interval right after the second entrance of the Ghost (forty-five minutes into the play) rather than after “How all occasions” (two and one-half hours into the play):

Peter Hall said that every ten years a play like Hamlet will mean something different to a generation—this particular one meant a lot to the kids. And nothing was changed—we didn't do a kind of glitzy production or anything. So that was very gratifying—to be told that young people might like this. Both Peter and I felt that the kids there needed to be involved in order to sit in that theatre. Now the best way to involve them is to be with them.

Warner's sense of being with them showed most strongly in the soliloquies. Here was an instinctual actor who did not even know what the stage convention of the soliloquy was, that in the twentieth century it was primarily played in front of an audience but not necessarily to them. There was a rush of critical commentary regarding the performance mode that he chose:

This is a Hamlet desperately in need of counsel, help, experience, and he actually seeks it from the audience in his soliloquies. That is probably the greatest triumph of the production: using the Elizabethan convention with total literalness. Hamlet communes not with himself but with you. For the first time in my experience, the rhetoric spoken as it was intended to be, comes brilliantly to life.³⁷

In the soliloquies, he had a special gift for involving the audience.³⁸

In this way, he builds carefully, using the soliloquies not so much for thinking aloud as for taking the audience into his confidence and seeking silent support.³⁹

He delivers the soliloquies as though he were dictating to the literary pirates, jotting down the First Quarto version of the play.⁴⁰

To gauge how close this production gets to contemporary truth one has but to watch the way in which David Warner slams out the soliloquies directly to the audience—as though pleading for their aid—and finding only himself reflected in the rows of upturned faces.⁴¹

His agonies of mind are most strongly communicated naturally enough in the soliloquies, which have the tone of desperate appeals.⁴²

… a telling quietness of delivery that invests the soliloquies in particular with an extraordinary air of spontaneity.⁴³

How fresh and meaningful he makes the familiar lines of the soliloquies sound.⁴⁴

When Mr. Warner speaks the great soliloquies, he comes to the front of the stage and rakes the first few rows of the stalls with ravaged eyes, searching distractedly for a comfort that is not there or anywhere.⁴⁵

To have them [soliloquies] spoken directly to the audience as at a public meeting ensures that we listen closely and attentively to the argument. They are appeals for our support and understanding and establish a rapport which is rarely obtained by more fluent and sonorous Hamlets. It creates an atmosphere like a teach-in.⁴⁶

He speaks the great soliloquies direct to the audience, downstage, as if demanding immediate answers.⁴⁷

He subtly displaces the rhythm of the verse so that the soliloquies become direct while remaining poetic. Only Olivier has steered so true a middle course between reciting and turning Shakespeare into Noel Coward. … [Warner] makes you feel, not like a spectator at a spectacle, but like yourself sitting late at night in a coffee bar while your best friend explains his problems.⁴⁸

But what will annoy many Shakespeare lovers is the way Warner speaks the soliloquies.⁴⁹

The comments indicate how thoroughly established was the convention of the inner-directed soliloquy in Hamlet. People were so accustomed to the notion of the actor's executing this stage convention as if he were totally unaware of the audience that some actually objected to his performing them in a way Elizabethans may have found “natural.”⁵⁰ An examination of each of the speeches will show how Warner integrated his character conception with the requisites of the production concept.

In the council scene of act I, scene ii, the king, the queen, Polonius, and Hamlet (Hamlet hemmed in by the others) were trucked in on a platform to center stage, looked down upon by a tapestry bearing two giant horses caparisoned for battle.⁵¹ Despite the closeness of sitting side by side throughout the proceedings, Warner showed unconcealed rancor toward the king and queen by literally shouting what is usually played as an aside, “A little more than kin, and less than kind” (I.ii.65), at them. On “I shall in all my best obey you, madam” (I.ii.120), the audience hummed in response, indicating their awareness of his impertinence.⁵² The scene was overpopulated with trumpeters, drummers, halberdiers, counselors, and secretaries, all of whom ministered to Claudius and, of course, none to Hamlet.⁵³

Warner said that this soliloquy “was the most difficult to get into,” not only because it was the first one but because Hamlet had to break free of the vast, efficient organization which had just left the stage. He needed to find supporters, and he virtually located them out of the play, within the theatre audience. From an acting point of view, the performance energies now had to be channeled off the stage, and eye contact had to be spread across the audience, requiring a great push of force in a new direction. The way Warner decided to do this soliloquy set the precedent for the way that he did most of the rest.

The first soliloquy (“O that this too too solid flesh,” I.ii.129-59)⁵⁴ began with Warner sitting upstage center, having been released from his imprisonment at the council tables by the exit of the group. Projecting his reticence, he did not rise and move toward the audience until “Fie on't” (six lines into the speech). On “Possess it merely” he crossed to downstage center to establish further contact. The pace of the soliloquy was gunshot. Very fast, furiously angry, he slammed it out as if pounding on things and gnashing his teeth. There was little attention to rhythm or verse, with few pauses, some in odd places. There was a slowing down on “galled eyes” and his voice dropped to a whisper on “post with such dexterity to incestuous sheets.” He concluded the soliloquy on “it cannot come to good” and crossed downstage right to sit on a chair. Robert Speaight found the sitting posture a reflection of “an unsettled mind in a seemingly settled society.”⁵⁵ Warner's intention here was to finally express the bottled anger that had accumulated throughout the council scene. He did not use the soliloquy to bond with the audience, slowing down and wooing them with eye contact; he rather assumed their collusion and let off steam. The character established was a rebellious prince who did not respect authority.

Before the second soliloquy, the stage picture revealed the powerful image of a young child cradled in the giant metal arms of the elder Hamlet,⁵⁶ giving a feeling, as Warner says, of “total love and belief in the father.” Warner reacted quite violently to the Ghost's request for revenge, even to shouting “What!” (not in text) and then sobbing throughout the Ghost's long speech. The Ghost exited upstage center, and Hamlet (positioned in stage center) fell onto his back, facing upward. Warner explained his reactions in the soliloquy as “the soul coming out of him” and “the nearest he was to any kind of concentrated nervous breakdown.” He felt that there wasn't much logic to the speech that an actor could follow. Warner took a particularly long pause after “O most pernicious woman!” and then overemphasized “damned villain” in the next line. He rose later and again fell to his knees, using a prop on the last six lines: “In ‘meet it is I set it down,’ I had a kind of little notebook. I had a cape on and a kind of coat and it was in one of the pockets. [I] took notes. … I think the production where people do the motions with their hands is the best way to do it actually.” Perhaps most interesting of all, this soliloquy was not direct address: “I didn't do that to the audience, because it simply wasn't a discussion with them—it was coming out of a swoon.” The passage was too personal and too emotional to be shared.

Warner began the third soliloquy (“O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!” II.ii.550-605) after Rosencrantz and Guildenstern had left by crossing to upstage center and sitting on a table. In this speech, he began his most direct and most intimate communication with the audience. He rose and crossed to downstage center, the very edge of the forestage, to pose the question “What would he do / Had he the motive and the cue for passion / That I have?” “Who calls me villain …” had a sustained pause following it. The whole series of ensuing questions were then asked point-blank of the audience.

When asked if he “set the lines up” each night for that one bold challenger to answer him, Warner replied, “You mean warming them up? No, no, that would have unbalanced the thing. All I could think was that I was prepared for it to happen every night.” He reiterated how astonished he was to find that speech perfectly orchestrated for audience participation: “It all fitted in so perfectly with this person who ostensibly was trying to heckle me,” and it gave a huge boost to the line “'swounds, I should take it,” which played with an absolute logic after the dialogue with the audience member.

On “Bloody, bawdy villain!” he broke contact with them and suddenly darted upstage to hurl the lines to the king's empty chair. After the climactic “Oh Vengeance!” he sat down on the table again. He began a fresh burst of hostility on “And fall a-cursing like a very drab, / A scullion” where he grabbed a chair and kicked it over with an angry bang. On “Fie upon't, foh!” Warner crossed to upstage center, facing toward the rear of the set, as if to collect himself and regain his temper. With the relationship that he had established, it would have been inappropriate to intimate displeasure with the audience. When he began his plan about the play within the play, he returned to downstage center to resume his duologue with them. The closing couplet was delivered after a laconic laugh, very directly to the audience as he exited at stage left near the proscenium. The actor handled huge twists of emotion, guilt, self-anger, and wrath, but still retained the connection he had made with the audience. He didn't nurture an attachment—he merely assumed it and they followed his bidding. He was, however, specific and careful about which emotions were directed where. He had to be because much of the speech was loud and energized, not pleading or persuading.

Warner recalled that there was an agreement to play the nunnery scene as if Ophelia were up to something and Hamlet had a feeling that people were hiding behind the arras. But first came the fourth soliloquy (“To be, or not to be,” III.i.55-89), performed in its usual location, shortly after the third soliloquy. Ophelia had gone off the stage. Hamlet entered upstage center through the left door. He crossed to down center, stopped, and then turned downstage to face the audience, contacting them immediately with a searching look which created a very theatrical pause before the opening phrase. On “Devoutly to be wish'd” he went to the very edge of the forestage and stayed there for most of the speech, until “lose the name of action,” when Ophelia reentered.

Although the content of this speech was very contemplative and personal, Warner never questioned that it should be given to the audience. Indeed, he felt that this soliloquy was the most direct of all of them. He saw it as sharing his dilemma with them (“after all, he'd shared everything else!”) and “debating gently” the very serious options. Hamlet was in a terrible situation and was having great difficulty resolving it. He turned over solutions in his mind, wishing that one answer would stand out as the most logical. One critic commented that by emphasizing the “insolence of office” he “seems to be speaking for a whole debunking generation.”⁵⁷ Warner said, “I don't think they should come up on the stage and shake Hamlet and say, ‘Pull yourself together!’” However, “there's absolutely no reason why one shouldn't use the audience as the one you're speaking to instead of yourself.” It is notable that he was considerably quieter and more low-key in speaking, a distinct change of delivery from the soliloquy before: “First of all, absolutely everybody knows this speech, especially the first two lines of it. That's the killer. It wasn't a question of saying it beautifully, it was just a question of trying to make it clear.”

At the end Warner spoke the transition lines, “Soft you now / The fair Ophelia” in a highly conspiratory whisper, which indicated how closely he and the audience had bonded. However, he shouted alarmingly, “Nymph, in thy orisons / Be all my sins rememb'red,” suddenly changing the mood and whirling away from her. There was no attempt in this production to show a close relationship with Ophelia;⁵⁸ in fact, at one point Hamlet slapped her. This action reduced even more the possibility of onstage confidants for Hamlet.

The fifth soliloquy (“'Tis now the very witching time of night,” III.ii.388-99) was notable for its speed. However, Warner did take great care to emphasize that he intended no harm to his mother by unbuckling his sword belt along with the pledge “I will speak daggers to her, but use none.”⁵⁹ Everything that happened after the play scene was angry and fast, as if Hamlet were filled with renewed determination.

The prayer scene at III.iii contains the double soliloquies—the first from Claudius and then Hamlet's. Critics complained that it was difficult for them to believe in Claudius' remorse, given the decisive and resolute character that had been built. However, Robert Speaight disagreed and felt that Brewster Mason gave the soliloquy a “calm argument of his desperate case.”⁶⁰ Claudius' soliloquy was positioned within an enclosed area, a private chamber with a council table and seats and a prie-dieu located slightly down left. He spoke to himself.

In contrast to this, Warner sought to enlist the audience as his ally, his objective being collusion through intimacy, not belief through cool rationality. He began the sixth soliloquy (“Now might I do it pat,” III.iii.73-96) by entering from upstage right, crossed through the chamber unseen by Claudius, and made his way free from the chamber. He soon crossed to down center, level with the proscenium, and after “And so am I reveng'd?” (the third line), he went downstage right, to the very edge of the forestage and worked that section of the audience. On “know thou a mor horrid hent” (about two-thirds of the way through), he broke upstage and took his exit at left upstage center.

His purpose was highly persuasive: he wanted all the support for himself; none should go to Claudius. The soliloquy was deliverd with three major pauses. The first was after “And so am I reveng'd,” which was a natural place for Hamlet to make a major realization. The second was after “this same villain send / To heaven” as he continued his train of thought. The third was after “No,” where there is only one word on an entire line; here the actor made the ultimate decision not to murder the king and to resheathe his sword. His physical movements toward the onlookers roughly coincided with these textual beats.

The final soliloquy (“How all occasions do inform against me,” IV.iv.32-66) was prepared for with a great show of militarism as act IV, scene iv opened with a powerful parade of weaponry and soldiers which marked the entrance of Fortinbras. In contrast, Hamlet was brought in by one guard. Warner intended that the speech be mostly a commentary on soldiers who fight unnecessary wars. He neither saw any particular inspiration in Fortinbras nor thought him admirable. The seventh soliloquy was Warner's favorite because it had a great deal of personal meaning for him as well. It represented the end of a beat where “all these things are ending, there is some kind of future there, he's come to terms with some kind of peace with that phase of his life.” Although it was his last soliloquy to the audience (the second and final interval followed) and nowhere did he have the opportunity to talk to the audience again, it felt good to him to speak some of the sentiments expressed. Warner explained,

There was a lot going on then in the sixties, Vietnam and everything, and although this production was not commenting on that, David [Warner, the actor, as opposed to Hamlet, the character], I think, was feeling something there about that particular situation, “The imminent death of twenty thousand men … Go to their graves. …” I grew to like this speech, and it began to mean more things as one just played with it. Perhaps some of this was purely personal.

Tony Church said that the closing line, “My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!” although very direct to the audience and very calmly reasoned, threw a gauntlet down to Claudius. Hamlet was now determined and ready to act.

In summing up the performance, a number of points emerge. First of all, the production was engineered to have Hamlet remain almost friendless and without allies. Seventy-five of Horatio's lines were cut, thus weakening his role. Ophelia's and Hamlet's relationship was not presented as an intimate one. The supernumeraries in the cast were often increased to emphasize “officialdom”; the larger the cast, the lonelier and more isolated was the character of Hamlet. Warner found his closest companions to be the theatre audience, and to reinforce this decision, none of the soliloquy lines were cut. Second, the blocking pattern on this particular stage set almost always put Warner far downstage or actually on the forestage to deliver the soliloquies.⁶¹ It is to be emphasized that he took the initiative in establishing contact with his audience, feeling obliged to do so from the viewpoint of the persona. Third, Warner says that the production grew; the difference between the way he did the soliloquies at the beginning of the run and at the end was that he gained more confidence in technique and increased his affinity with the audience. He felt that the soliloquies got most intimate at the Aldwych Theatre; there was no change in the basic blocking or the production concept, however. Fourth, Warner truly relished audience contact, a mode some actors are distinctly uncomfortable with in performance:

Given the fact that Shakespeare wrote lines when nobody else was onstage, it's quite logical that it gets said to the audience because the audience is There. I'm not saying that the way I did it was right, but it was certainly right for me to do it that way at that time. The point was to involve them. You cannot depend on how good-looking you are or your sexuality or a gimmick as such—you've got these words and a sense of contact. … it was a wonderful feeling to be able to bring them into me.

If Warner had elected to do the soliloquies inwardly, it would have been a serious violation of his character conception as well as of the aesthetic coherence of the production design.

About delivery of the soliloquies, Warner said:

It wasn't a question of moving the whole head in an arc or moving the head up and down. It was looking up into the audience and acknowledging them and then down below, but it was not a great big circular movement of the head to the stalls and back or anything. Occasionally, the eyes would flicker. You just do it so that they Know that you mean to include them. This is something to do with technique.

The sound recording of this production provides additional insights about the performance. It was taken halfway through the Aldwych season, during a matinee on March 9, 1966, at a time when the play was “set” and in a good, working groove. The most obvious feature was the lively rapport between the audience and the chief performer. There were bursts of reaction and small murmurs of engagement throughout. The recording microphone was located near two younger students, and from time to time one could hear them discussing what had happened onstage in enthralled voices. The power and energy of David Warner was manifest. He played very strong anger and considerably more comedy than was revealed in reading the reviews of the production. He was cynical and very much the wisecracker. The joking was often at the expense of authority figures, like Polonius, who did not play his own lines for laughs. The spectators responded very favorably to Warner and spurred him onward. There was an exchange of energy which they gave and he fed upon. The audience was very lively and picked up on nuances of text—small puns, emphasized words, pauses. One can almost feel the heat of the group as one listens to it.

Conclusively, the form and pressure of the age had conspired to create a rogue-and-peasant-slave Hamlet. In exploring why these soliloquies were performed direct-address, a convergence of answers emerges. First and foremost, director Peter Hall was a driving force in devising a production concept in which no other way of performing the speeches seemed appropriate. He began with his reaction to a particular political climate, as Church described it, “the corrupted end of a long conservative administration … sex scandals [Profumo] and all that going on,” the oppressiveness of which produced a profound disaffection in the youth of Great Britain. On the surface, then, Hall wanted to make a production that was “relevant” and spoke to the audience of the sixties, a unique and eventful decade. However, no matter how political Shakespeare can get (as Alan Sinfield has pointed out), “in the work of the Royal Shakespeare Company we may perceive a strain of opportunism, or at least a wish to sustain the company itself.”⁶² Critics reacted with a huge flap of attention, and the play sold tickets with amazing constancy. It became such an important play in the Royal Shakespeare Company's repertory that after it was performed for the first season in Stratford (August 19-December 11, 1965, 46 performances), it was transferred to the Aldwych Theatre in London for a season (December 22-February 12, 1966, 29 performances) and then returned to Stratford for a third season (April 28-November 12, 68 performances), totaling 143 performances.⁶³ This was a procedure rarely accorded any other production—at best, most plays phase out after the London run. Obviously the critical controversy had done no harm at the box office. The revenues from Hamlet were sorely needed by a company unsure of its next subsidy from the Arts Council.⁶⁴

The production reinforced the new image Hall sought for the company that he had taken over in 1960, that of a “popular theatre” that appealed to a dissident and leftist intelligentsia and drew in politically well-tuned audiences. Hall had a strong sense of the readiness being all. He had found the right actor, he had accurately felt the pulse of this tumultuous era, and he had an obligation to sell this dramatist. Shakespeare's dramaturgy permitted both a direct confrontation and a direct dialogue with the audience because the mode of delivery of the soliloquy is optional. What had once been an inward and internalized psychomachia Hall turned outward, to a more political and more engaging stance. Even the set design, non-Elizabethan and heavy in its execution, facilitated audience contact. The old rhetoric, Renaissance in origin, had suddenly become the new: forget the tropes and schemes of the early seventeenth century and concentrate on the arguments and strategies used to persuade. Shakespeare in performance had suddenly abandoned the beautiful man speaking well and introduced a Hamlet bent upon swaying an audience. Warner's role was that of a lone dissenter who elicited its overwhelming sympathies.

Lastly, the production initiated a brief resurgence of soliloquies addressed to the audience. Nicol Williamson's 1969 Hamlet at the Roundhouse, directed by Tony Richardson, saw him talking to the audience on all four sides in a theatre-in-the-round situation. Hall also directed Albert Finney in a 1970 Hamlet, where Finney reached out to the offstage audience in the vast auditorium of the Olivier Theatre.

David Warner felt that it was all completely natural:

If we were accused of talking to the audience and nobody had done that before, then I guess … we broke a bit of ground. During the Restoration, actors were talking At the audience. As far as I was concerned, I was talking With the audience. … And sometimes one might be a bit curt with them. Maybe one was looking for a parent figure or a father figure or trying to talk to a young brother or a sister he didn't have. But that would be up to some analyst trying to analyze what was going on. As far as I was concerned, it was the most personal thing in the world. Sharing Hamlet's words with strangers—we weren't strangers by the end of the evening! After that, they may know something about the play and something about you. A lot of actors say there are moments, maybe just once in a split second in your career, you get next to God. There is this Oneness—one moment where every single member of the audience is There, together with yourself, where you feel everybody is in tune, one split second. I don't mean chatting together, I mean being quiet together. I don't mean being lifted off the ground or anything—just a moment of total understanding. It's a spirit or something …

Notes

1. Recounted by David Warner in an interview taken by Mary Maher on January 30, 1987, in Tucson, Arizona. Unless otherwise noted, subsequent Warner quotations come from this interview.

2. Ralph Berry, Changing Styles in Shakespeare (London: Allen, 1981), 84-87.

3. Review of Hamlet, The Times, August 20, 1965.

4. Ronald Bryden, review of Hamlet, New Statesman (August 27, 1965): 295.

5. Don Chapman, review of Hamlet, Oxford Mail, August 20, 1965.

6. David Benedictus, review of Hamlet, Spectator, August 27, 1965.

7. Berry, 84-87.

8. Bryden, 295.

9. Penelope Gilliat, “Ophelia, Prince of Stratford,” review of Hamlet, Observer, August 22, 1965.

10. “Hamlet,” condensed from a talk by Peter Hall to the company, in Theatre at Work: Playwrights and Productions in the Modern British Theatre, ed. Charles Marowitz and Simon Trussler (Great Britain: Cox, 1967), 160-63. The original and complete text of the speech appears to be lost.

11. Marowitz and Trussler, 160.

12. Marowitz and Trussler, 161.

13. Marowitz and Trussler, 162.

14. Marowitz and Trussler, 162.

15. Marowitz and Trussler, 162.

16. Recounted by Tony Church in an interview taken by Mary Maher on June 6, 1988, in London. Unless otherwise noted, subsequent Church quotations come from this interview.

17. Norman Cockin, “Post-war Productions of Hamlet at Stratford-upon-Avon, 1948-1970” (M.A. thesis, University of Birmingham, 1980), 111-12.

18. Stanley Wells, Royal Shakespeare: Four Major Productions at Stratford-upon-Avon (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977), 27.

19. Bryden, 295.

20. Cockin, 116.

21. Berry, 96.

22. W. A. Darlington, “Hamlet of Vigour but Lacking in Poetry,” review of Hamlet, Daily Telegraph, August 20, 1965.

23. Robert Speaight, “Shakespeare in Britain,” Shakespeare Quarterly 26 (1965): 319-20.

24. Bryden.

25. Geoffrey Lane, “David Equal to the Test,” review of Hamlet, Wolverhampton Express and Star, August 20, 1965.

26. Benedictus.

27. J. C. Trewin, “Hamlet,” review of Hamlet, Birmingham Post, August 20, 1965.

28. John Gardner, “Hamlet, Child of Our Times,” review of Hamlet, Stratford-upon-Avon Herald, August 27, 1965.

29. “—And an Actor Says They're Pathetic, Harmless Creatures,” Stratford-upon-Avon Herald, August 27, 1965.

30. Hugh Leonard, “Fireworks,” review of Hamlet, Plays and Players 13, no. 1 (October 1965): 32-33.

31. Speaight, 321.

32. Charles Marowitz, “Hall's Hamlet,” Plays and Players 13, no. 5 (February 1966): 14.

33. “Youthful Hamlet Commands Part,” review of Hamlet, Nottingham Evening Post, August 20, 1965.

34. Fred Norris, “The Loneliness of a Long Distance Hamlet,” review of Hamlet, Birmingham Mail, August 20, 1965.

35. S. M. Friar, “Youthful Hamlet,” letter, Birmingham Post, August 24, 1965.

36. Herbert Kretzmer, “Was This Squatting Really Necessary?” review of Hamlet, Daily Express, August 20, 1965.

37. Bryden, 295. The emphasis is mine.

38. Nottingham Evening Post, August 20, 1965.

39. David Nathan, “This Hamlet Hardly Needs a Ghost,” review of Hamlet, Sun, August 20, 1965.

40. Julian Holland, “Nothing Princely about This Hamlet,” review of Hamlet, Daily Mail, August 20, 1965.

41. Gardner, Stratford-upon-Avon Herald.

42. Lane, Wolverhampton Express.

43. Anthony Merryn, “Immature But Full of Promise,” review of Hamlet, Liverpool Post, August 20, 1965.

44. W. H. W., “Unconditional Surrender to a Memorable Prince,” review of Hamlet, Birmingham Mail, August 20, 1965.

45. Harold Hobson, “The Offbeat Hamlet,” review of Hamlet, Sunday Times, August 22, 1965.

46. Alan Brien, “The Boy's Own Prince,” review of Hamlet, Sunday Telegraph, August 22, 1965.

47. R. B. Marriott, “The Peter Hall and David Warner Hamlet is Fresh and Free,” review of Hamlet, Stage and Television Today 4402 (August 26, 1965): 13.

48. Mervyn Jones, “Without the Prince,” review of Hamlet, Tribune, August 27, 1965.

49. Jack Bentley, “Curtain Up,” review of Hamlet, Sunday Mirror, August 22, 1965.

50. What Elizabethan actors actually did with the soliloquy in performance remains very much a point of speculation.

51. Cockin, 124-25.

52. I am interpreting here from responses heard on a sound recording taken at the Aldwych on March 9, 1966, during a live performance. The recording is housed at the National Sound Archives in London, David Warner's Hamlet, no. LP29930.

53. Movements about the stage and exits and entrances are from the most thorough and best kept of the promptbooks, the 1965 version, housed at the Nuffield Library, Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Stratford-upon-Avon.

54. Warner changed the line reading from “sallied” (Riverside) to “solid,” which is preferred in the Signet Classic Shakespeare used for the production.

55. Speaight, 320.

56. From the Tony Church interview: “The actual contraption was a mind-boggling thing to live with because we had to have more than one of them to be able to do the lines “'tis here” and “'tis here.” The person controlling the thing stood on this ramp about halfway up the machine and held a walkie-talkie because he couldn't see except through tiny hollows in the armor. It was originally supposed to come out of a trap door. I remember that rehearsal—this monstrous thing couldn't get in and out!”

57. Gilliat, Observer.

58. There were three Ophelias. The first and harshest was Glenda Jackson. Janet Suzman replaced her, and Estelle Kohler finished the run. Warner says that each sparked a different performance from him in their scenes together, but that Jackson received the roughest treatment.

59. Fredson Bowers argues just this point in “Hamlet's Fifth Soliloquy,” in Essays on Shakespeare and Elizabethan Drama, ed. Richard Hosley (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1962), 213-22. He feels that Shakespeare includes this soliloquy to make sure that the audience knows that Gertrude has been chosen for later redemption and Hamlet intends no harm whatever to her in the upcoming closet scene.

60. Robert Speaight, “Shakespeare in Britain,” Shakespeare Quarterly 27 (1966): 396.

61. See Sally Beauman, The Royal Shakespeare Company: A History of Ten Decades (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 239. In Peter Hall's initial years at Stratford (by 1960), the stage was redesigned with a rake, a new false proscenium arch, and an apron stage that jutted fourteen feet into the auditorium. The Aldwych was redesigned to match the Stratford stage. It could not be described as three-quarters thrust, but the alterations made the actors and the play more accessible to the audience.

62. See Alan Sinfield, “Royal Shakespeare: Theatre and the Making of Ideology,” in Political Shakespeare, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), 178.

63. Cockin, 118-19.

64. Beauman, 283 ff.