Hamlet: Phillip Burton

Hamlet by Phillip Burton Just as every actor is supposed to want to play Hamlet, it would seem that every author wants to write about him. He has received more performances in the theatre and more explication on the printed page than any other character of Shakespeare. Theatergoers collect Hamlets as philatelists do stamps, and in both cases, it would seem, the rarer and stranger the specimen the more it is cherished.
Since every actor is unique, no two performances of any role will be exactly alike, not even when an understudy strives, or is made to strive, hard to copy his principal, but it is particularly true that all Hamlets are different. More than once in the history of the play, four separate productions have been offered to the public in one city in one year. Hamlet is such an all encompassing human phenomenon that it will absorb and be illuminated by actors of quite contrary qualities. It is a particularly naked part, and no actor will succeed in it who tries to hide himself, and no actor will completely fail who is content to let Hamlet take hold of him rather than he of Hamlet.
Just as every actor’s Hamlet is himself, so is every writer’s. He sees in the character what his personality, predilections prejudices, beliefs lead him to see. And so do I. In what follows I am prompted by two considerations: to contradict Goethe’s conception of Hamlet and the many subsequent versions of it, and to provide for an actor a blueprint of the character as I see it, always remembering that a blueprint is not the building.

To begin with, a brief quotation from Carlyle’s translation of William Meister’s Apprenticeship, which gives the essence of Goethe’s conception of Hamlet: "A lovely, pure, noble, and most moral nature, without the strength of nerve which forms a hero, sinks beneath a burden it cannot bear and must not cast away. All duties are holy for him; the present is too hard. Impossibilities have been required of him; not in themselves