Don't Send in the Clowns

OK, class, it’s time for a quiz.

What does this picture have to do with Shakespeare’s Hamlet?

You in the back playing with your cell phone—what do you have to say?

Oh, er, that looks like a clown—a woman clown. I don’t think that that has anything to do with Hamlet. I mean, he was a prince, right? And a guy. Not a clown, and not a woman, right?

Well now, take a look at this second picture. I ask the same question: What does this picture have to do with Shakespeare’s Hamlet?

You there, spooning yogurt into your mouth—what do you have to say?

Well [gulp], what he said. That’s a lady clown, not a prince of Denmark.

You two are half right; the first picture is from a magazine advertisement advertising magazine advertisements. It’s from 1970. The second picture is from the front cover of a DVD recording of a 2018 production of Hamlet at Shakespeare’s Globe in London. 

But maybe, on second thought, both your answers are correct. While the recording is allegedly of Shakespeare’s tragedy, one must wonder what in hell it has to do with the play Shakespeare wrote. [I leave aside for now the issue of whether a woman should play the Prince.] Why is Hamlet made up and dressed as a clown? What in the text signals that? Then again, even if there was clear reason for the Prince to be a clown, why is he dressed in white? Hamlet himself (in Act I, Scene 2) refers to his “inky cloak” and “customary suits of solemn black.” Which is a sign of his continuing mourning for his father. Is the wearing of white meant to be a vitiating or elimination of Hamlet’s deep-seated feeling? 

I have no intention of ever watching the Globe’s production to record other abominations.   

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Classic theater and opera are unfortunately hostages to directors who harbor IDEAS. These ideas are put to work overriding the intentions of the original creator—playwright or composer/librettist.  

Simon Brett in his 1997 satirical mystery novel Sicken and So Die has landed his fourth-rate actor-hero, Charles Paris, a part in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Unfortunately, the original director succumbs to food poisoning and is replaced by an avant-garde Romanian director, who has an IDEA: the cast will play the comedy nude. Except for the fact that there’s a murder, the book is wonderfully funny and absurd.

Perhaps the most famous 20th century example of a director imposing his IDEA on a Shakespearean play is the case of Peter Brooks’ production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which appeared in New York in 1971. Brendan Gill, in his New Yorker review, notes that 

And Clive Barnes, who raved about the production in the New York Times [“the greatest production of Shakespeare I have ever seen in my life”], wrote of “an Oberon on a trapeze, a Puck who juggles with plates or dashes across the scene on Tarzan rope or runs on stilts.” [Here is a video of some plate spinning.]  

  

All that was mind-boggling stupidity enough, but perhaps worst of all was having characters on their knees speaking Shakespeare’s great verse affectlessly.

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Gill was “miserable” during the evening and wondered what Brooks’ intention was.

Mr. Gill, staying the course, had a stronger stomach than me; I walked out very early in the evening and went home to a welcome cup of tea. I figured if I wanted a circus, I would buy popcorn and wait for the elephants.