A Review of David Tennant's Hamlet

He That Increaseth Knowledge Increaseth Sorrow : How Hamlet Demonstrates That Conscience does Make Cowards of Us All 

It is among the most pleasurable, and the most maddening, enterprises in life to read The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark by William Shakespeare. Pleasurable because of its inexhaustible depth, its perfect turns of phrase, and its expansion of the art form that is the English language. Maddening because of the impenetrable layers of madness throughout the text, and within its many characters. At the end of the play, one is left feeling that something profound has been said, but that one is powerless to reiterate what it was. In Stephen Greenblatt’s seminal treatment of Hamlet he identified eleven essential unanswered questions in the play, among which are, “Why does Hamlet delay avenging the murder of his father by Claudius, his father’s brother? How much guilt does Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude . . . bear in this crime? How trustworthy is the ghost of Hamlet’s father . . . ? Is vengeance morally justified in this play, or is it to be condemned? Is Hamlet’s madness feigned or true, a strategy masquerading as a reality or a reality masquerading as a strategy?” (103). This ambiguity, which is really Shakespeare’s negative capability, is part of the beauty of Hamlet. It forces one to see the mess of consequences facing individuals. It emphasizes that men and women with great power infect these consequences into innocent persons.

This important dissonance is masterfully portrayed in Gregory Doran’s recent adaptation of Hamlet for the Royal Shakespeare Company (Doran). David Tennant’s performance as Hamlet in this film is essential to the confusion, and frustration, that Shakespeare originally intended for audiences. Reviews of this production are mostly positive, but many have complained about a lack of consistent interpretation. They want Doran to provide answers to Greenblatt’s questions as has been attempted by most cinematic versions. He refuses to do so.

Andrew Billen, for example, in The NewStatesman, gave rave reviews of Tennant’s performance, but complained when he was done that, “I still do not understand his Hamlet – or Doran’s” (Billen). He cites, for example, Doran’s choice to make The Ghost tangible, “Seen by everyone. An undeniable fact from which Hamlet dare not flinch” (Billen). That, coupled with Tennant’s, “playful, spiteful . . . but never deranged” performance leads Billen to conclude that this Hamlet only feigns madness, but never succumbs to it (Billen). A choice that, for Billen, is inconsistent with the scene between Hamlet and Gertrude in her closet. In this scene The Ghost is only visible to Hamlet, and can walk through walls. In the opening scene, The Ghost cannot pass through Horatio, but must walk around him (Doran). “Why would Shakespeare have written that scene,” Billen asks Doran, “if not to show that Hamlet . . . had temporarily lost it?” (Billen). Yet Tennant plays the scene with, “perfect limpidity, a son and mum levelling with each other,” consistent with Tennant’s choice to assert Hamlet’s constant sanity (Billen).
Billen’s complaints do not seem warranted. Tennant’s performance is not so much an inconsistent interpretive choice, as a choice to remain true to Shakespeare’s text. The inconsistency between the tenability of The Ghost in the opening scene and the esoteric visibility of The Ghost in Gertrude’s closet is a real, textual, inconsistency. Yes, one means of interpretation is to use the scene to create doubt about Hamlet’s sanity. It also can create doubt about The Ghost’s reliability or nature. It can call Gertrude’s integrity or even sanity into question. 

Tennant simply portrays an inconsistency that is true to Shakespeare and leaves the viewer with the pleasurable and maddening task of finding answers. Billen is right in calling into question an interpretation of Hamlet that does not entertain the idea of his having actually gone mad. The inconsistencies are very much there. Why did Gertrude not see The Ghost when Hamlet did? That seems like madness. Yet a counter-question might be put to Billen: If Shakespeare inserted that scene to assert that Hamlet had temporarily lost it, why did he immediately precede it with Hamlet’s very lucid soliloquy about when it would be most effective to kill Claudius? “A villain kills my father, and for that, I, his sole son, do this same villain send to heaven . . . Up, sword, and know thou a more horrid hent. When he is . . . in th’ incestuous pleasures of his bed . . . that his soul may be damned” (Shakespeare III:III:76-94). This is good, logical, sense. From a Catholic perspective, Hamlet is sanely working out his plan. The “perfect limpidity,” then, of Tennant’s performance can also be attributed to the limpidity with which Shakespeare wrote the scene (Billen). When Gertrude asks Hamlet if he has forgotten her, he responds, “Not so. You are the queen, your husband’s brother’s wife, and would it were not so, you are my mother” (Shakespeare III:IV:15-17). The riposte is playful and spiteful, but not deranged. This is not to say that Billen is wrong in pointing out the inconsistency of Hamlet’s sanity, with the strange manifestation of The Ghost in Gertrude’s closet. It is to say that Tennant is making no comment at all about how we should interpret Shakespeare’s Hamlet. He is attempting to creatively portray what Shakespeare put down for him.

An example of an interpretation that dogmatically asserts Hamlet’s consistent sanity is Isaac Asimov’s Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare. Such an overtly dogmatic, but well defended, reading can be used to demonstrate the more nuanced vision of Doran’s verisimilitude. Asimov opens the argument by asserting, “There is no reason to speculate as to whether Hamlet was really mad or only pretending. Of course he was pretending. He says so” (105). Asimov places Hamlet into the eleventh century context that Shakespeare intended. In a Denmark so recently converted from paganism, Asimov argues, “a madman was thought to be touched with the divine and was respected and even feared a little . . . Claudius would find it difficult to take any action against a mad Hamlet under any circumstances, for the gods would then be displeased” (Asimov 106). Asimov proceeds to argue that Hamlet was a slick operator, a purposeful con who knew precisely what was to be done and how to do it. For Asimov, Hamlet’s madness was, “a strategy masquerading as a reality” (Greenblatt 103). But how did he reconcile Hamlet’s pretended madness with the difficulties raised by the scene in Gertrude’s closet? By ignoring them. He treats the scene by saying, “at this point, the Ghost enters for one last time. Hamlet, in his anger, has forgotten reality, and the Ghost has come to bring him back to that” (Asimov). That kind of glossing over is what one does when willing a tale to yield a specific answer. That is not what Tennant or Doran have done. If they truly wanted to provide a reading that makes a specific statement about Hamlet’s sanity, they could have easily doctored the closet scene, or the opening scene, to defend that thesis. They did not do so. They asserted the undeniable reality of The Ghost in the opening scene and the doubtfulness of The Ghost in the closet scene to be true to the text.
Shakespeare is quite clear on the issue. When Hamlet first sees The Ghost he is accompanied by Horatio and Marcellus. Shakespeare plainly tells us that Horatio sees The Ghost first, saying, “Look, my lord, it comes” (I:IV:38). Marcellus obviously sees it also since he says, “Look with what courteous action it waves you to a more removed ground” (I:IV:69-70). The Ghost is visible to all present. In Gertrude’s closet, however, this is not the case. When The Ghost tells Hamlet to speak to his mother, Hamlet says, “How is it with you, lady?” to which Gertrude responds, “Alas, how is’t with you, that you do bend your eye on vacancy . . . Whereon do you look?” (III:IV:118-128). Such an inconsistency can hardly be argued to be Doran or Tennant’s creation. If they have a bias toward an always lucid Hamlet, this interchange may have been cut. Or, if not cut, the portrayal could have been done differently. In scene four of act one, The Ghost is physical enough to embrace Hamlet, and walk around instead of through Horatio. In scene four of act three, The Ghost materializes out of the mirror Hamlet has just shot Palonius through, and disappears through the same mirror (Doran). This is more than simply putting into the film all of the words of the authorized text of Hamlet. It is an active choice to convey the same confusion that Shakespeare intended. This is why it can be said of both David Tennant and William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, “You never understand his Hamlet, but you can't take your eyes off him either” (Billen).

Our collective eyes are on him still. The universal esteem of Hamlet is attributable to the very elusiveness that Billen finds frustrating. Easily packaged and reproduced works of art do not yield the respect that Mona Lisa, Don Quixote, Heart of Darkness, and Hamlet have commanded. This is the masterwork of the master in the English canon. The task of an actor or director is not to manipulate such a work to mean what they desire in a given moment. It is to be true to the layers, facets, and tangles that made the piece into a masterpiece. Shakespeare’s artistic climax is the question, “To be, or not to be?” (III:I:56). The magic of those words is not that Shakespeare gave us a final answer, but that he dwelt gloriously and unforgivingly on the question.

Works Cited
Asimov, Isaac. Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare. New York: Doubleday, 1970. Print. 9 April 2013.
Billen, Andrew. "Fit for a Prince." NewStatesman (2008). Web. 9 April 2013.
Greenblatt, Stephen. "Hamlet." The Norton Shakespeare Based on the Oxford Edition. Ed. Stanley Wells, et al. Second. Vol. II. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2008. II vols. 103-110. Print. 9 April 2013.
Hamlet. Dir. Gregory Doran. Perf. David Tennant and Patrick Stewart. BBC Wales. 2009. Film. 9 April 2013.
Shakespeare, William. "The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark." The Norton Introduction to Literature. Ed. Alison Booth and Kelly J Mays. Shorter Tenth. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc, 2010. 1305-1398. Print. 9 April 2013.
The Holy Bible. Authorized King James Version. Salt Lake City, Utah: Intellectual Reserve, 1979