Letters from Alvina Krause: Spring 1976

Context
Advice and Exhortation

Letter
David,
Do you know, and do you use, "John Gielgud's Hamlet" by Rosamund Gilder? -- It would be invaluable. It is a detailed description, moment by moment, of Gielgud's production -- and his was a Hamlet of deep grasp. If you don't have a copy, get busy and find one. Some one got away with mine, to my deep regret. Start a search through second hand dealers -- I think it is out of print. I think Deering library lost their copy too. Use it!! Assign it: "Present nunnery scene as 1) John Gielgud did it" 2. As you would do it. Do not be hesitant to use such material openly while you are finding your way. If you have any creative sense it will assert itself; if you haven't then follow a leader, a creator, a Gielgud! To the creative teacher, the whole world is a stimulus -- books, people, music, art, politics -- Use the world! The stimuli are not within you -- The responses, the creative responses are within you. The world, life, art play upon them. Shakespeare is the whole wide world, all time, past present future: Renaissance, medieval, modern -- the far stretches of the mind. The theatre is the universe! Don't get bogged down in a classroom for God's sake! Don't get hemmed in by [She names two colleagues and an administrator -- DD].
The theatre is freedom!

Letters from Alvina Krause: Fall 1974

Context
During fall 1974 and winter 1975 my journal was full of questions.

Journal
Me:
[On Creative Imagination, I end the entry with this question:]
What am I missing? Where is my blind spot?

Krause's Response:
Imagination works through the senses. They must be trained to respond.
See the lake -- actually see the color, the form, the movement: See a gull flying over the lake, muscles perceive the movement, the dip, the soaring, Hear the waves, the beat, the tempo, feel the spray.
Enlarge the responses, the lake becomes the North Sea, the water darkens, the roar is loud, the gulls cry out, the spray slaps your face, the clouds are dark, they rush -- Hamlet watches the 7th wave come in, break "To be or not to be"
[Along the left hand margin she wrote "Reality" to bracket this first part -- DD.]
Imagination becomes creative only if the realistic sensory response to a stimulus is vivid enough to enlarge of its own accord from lake to ocean to Hamlet on a parapet --
"To be" will only be words unless touched off by images rooted in reality

"My dear Judge, how mortally bored I have been" -- What must the actress see, hear, perceive -- what must the actress do -- turn a rehearsal table into a Victorian table with marble top, a miniature in a gold filigree frame, a lamp with a decorated globe shade --

Turn a rehearsal prop into Gaev's bookcase through sense response -- begin with your own reality.

Me:
[About a student in beginning acting]
And what do you do with a student who sits caved in, thinking like crazy, uncomfortable with his physical self, unable to let himself create because he is self-conscious even when I get the entire class involved in an exercise? He'll try and then he gives up, collapses. I'm at a real loss.

Krause:
What is his chief interest? What does he know well? To some degree, in what is he an authority? Whatever it is, get him to show the class how -- If he is a camera buff -- Let him illustrate -- Then go to -- If Hamlet had a camera -- what -- how -- Work from the known -- from confidence to --

****

Me:
[A description of work on the Antigone/Creon scene in Anouilh's Antigone and my attempts to get students to create the characters as forces more than as realistic human beings. When I met resistance from the students, I flailed.]
As ever, any light you can shed will be assimilated.

Krause:
Begin with real people, eliminate gradually all small actions, all small intonations. Try it in French, the language of precision. Listen to French drama.

About Antigone's Nurse
She is stripped of everything except the qualities that make her not see, not realize.

Get to the basic motivating force for each one and let that force dominate
Haemon -- a deep love for Antigone -- he would choose death for it. Youth, eliminate all romanticizing about youth and love. Play only the motivating force.
Ismene -- Youth loving life (normal) more than death.
Soldiers -- just that, no more  -- no individualities, they await orders, receive them, obey -- play poker while waiting --

Me:
I begin to question for myself. What is the difference between realism vs. Greek tragedy? Greek tragedy vs. Anouilh?

Krause:
[Next to my "realism"] Death of a Salesman. Keep Arthur Miller in mind for realism.
[Next to my "Greek tragedy"] tragic realization "Lo, he is fallen"
[Next to my "Anouilh"] Aimed at the head.
[Next to my "Greek tragedy"] Aimed at understanding through -- ?

Me:
[Observations about Greek tragedy, ending with this:]
But isn't that essentially what the French drama does too? There is a difference -- I can sense it, but I cannot articulate it and therefore I'm not certain how to teach it. Will you help clarify?

Krause:
It's in the aim -- the French insist on that intellectual grasp.

From my summer journal
Try being Anouilh -- with a keen mind, with a deep concern for his country, for humanity, looking from a high tower at his Paris, his France, knowing, realizing that with his talents he had the responsibility to strike a blow against Nazism. Play the Antigone he is creating as he looks at Paris.

****

Context
I send her copies of the notes I post on the bulletin board.

Letter
David,
The notes are to the point. Can you expand each point, illustrate, question? Always test your own imagination until you can trust yourself fully to develop any statement. Feel that you know Hedda and all her associates better than you know your own friends. And trust your own mind to explore, discover.
Talk about characters in drama as real people. As you talk about Eilert Lovborg become Eilert for a few moments.
[...A discussion of students and friends...DD]
I'm glad you have moved to Evanston. Should save time--

A.K.

Hamlet: The Middle

Question:

One of my teachers said Hamlet is so badly written or constructed or something that it shouldn’t work as a play. Or something like that. I know he was just trying to get our attention, but I thought I would ask you what do you think about this?

Response:

Hamlet can be a messy play. Even those who have seen lots of productions of it have difficulty remembering exactly what happens and in what order things happen—especially in the middle. We remember separate scenes: the nunnery scene with Hamlet and Ophelia and Claudius and Polonius; the closet scene with Hamlet and Gertrude and Polonius and the Ghost; or Hamlet’s “words words words” encounter with Polonius; maybe his “what a piece of work is man” with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; and oh yeah, the gravediggers—or “digger” if one of them has been cut from the production.

But mostly it’s a jumble. There seems to be no actual necessity for events to happen in a certain sequence. Scene follows scene like beads on a string, one after the other, each a separate even self-contained entity. And much of it is recalled in the same blurred emotional tone, the same talky tempo, the same tepid wittinesses.

All this difficulty is not, however, because Hamlet is a badly written play. I think you’re right about your teacher: he’s just saying that one of the genius aspects of the play is the way it breaks the rules of writing a revenge play so that it can get at something else.

I think the messiness and the sense of faulty construction come because readings and too many productions don’t actually focus on much more than the plot—and for productions, usually in trimmed down versions meant to clarify the plot so much that they lose sight of what it's all about. And it is in the "what it's all about" thrust of the play that you find the connective tissue that takes the play with a sense of mounting inevitability from beginning to end.

In the 2004 Marvin Borowsky Lecture on Screenwriting given at The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, screenwriter Gary Ross (Seabiscuit, Pleasantville, Big), referring to Aristotle’s Poetics, said (the address is not published, so the following are not exact quotes):

There are two kinds of plots: simple and complex. A simple plot is one where the question asked at the outset is answered at the end: Can they steal the gold? Yes they can. 
But a story like that can only ever be about stealing gold.

…. There is a richer kind of story, one that Aristotle called a complex plot, in which the theme of the piece is complex enough to reveal deeper questions in the middle. And those deeper questions will inevitably demand a richer more satisfying answer. And that richer answer becomes a more satisfying resolution. And that inevitability is structure. That is clarity. And it all comes from challenging yourself with the right kind of questions at the outset. 
Then suddenly it’s not a movie about stealing gold; it’s about greed and desperation and illusion and self-deception. …and it turns into The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

If we as writers ask complicated enough questions and we put characters in conflict that express those contradictions, then the plot will organically complicate and a central question will emerge. That question builds and builds until it demands a resolution, and that is a three-act structure. That’s all it is.

…I honestly feel, sometimes, that I have a career just because I think about the middle of a movie.

Although Ross is dealing with how writers work toward a finished screenplay, his ideas can help actors and directors work from a finished stage play to create a production that communicates that play.
Before considering Hamlet in Ross’s filmic three-act structure, let me mention something about film director Robert Altman. In some of his films Altman offers his own takes on conventional genres to get at something not usually associated with those genres. In the same way, Shakespeare with Hamlet offers his take on the Elizabethan Revenge Play to get at something else. The “Will They Find Gold” question in a simple plot British murder mystery is “Who Dunnit”. But Altman’s Gosford Park asks complex plot questions about social class and responsibility and cruelty and blindness to others.

The “Will They Find Gold” question of a Revenge Play is, “Will the Hero Avenge a Relative’s Murder”. If that means “Does Hamlet Kill Claudius”, then the answer for Hamlet is Yes he does.

But the deeper complex plot questions, the questions that are Hamlet’s corollaries of self-deception and illusion and greed in Sierra Madre and of social class in Gosford Park, are questions about Ideals and Youth versus Realpolitik and Age; about Fidelity to Family, to Partner and Lover and Polity; about Ethics, Integrity, Honor and Corruption.

The central consideration of this post is: How do we clarify those questions and go deeper to discover Ross’s “central question” in Hamlet and how do actors and directors work to give the audience the joy of experiencing/discovering that in performance?

In Ross’s three-act structure Hamlet’s traditional Act I and my proposed Ross First Act coincide. They dramatize the main characters and their relationships with one another and the essential situation of the play and they set in motion the driving machinery of the Revenge Plot. Our Ross Second Act, the middle of the play—and what I am primarily concerned with in this post--extends from Act II, sc i through Act IV, sc iv. And the Ross Third Act extends from Ophelia’s Act IV sc v “mad scene” to the end of the play.

Opening the Ross Second Act, Polonius instructs the courtier Reynaldo about how to discover what son Laertes has been up to in Paris. Just as Reynaldo leaves, Ophelia comes running in to tell her father of her encounter with Hamlet; Polonius the Problem Solver has a eureka moment and takes Ophelia off to tell Claudius. In the meantime, Claudius meets with Hamlet’s school friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, enlisting their help in sounding Hamlet. Polonius enters and lets the courtier Voltimand report to Claudius what’s been happening with another father/son (okay, actually uncle/nephew) in this story, Old and Young Fortinbras, after which Polonius delightedly informs Claudius and Gertrude that Hamlet is crazy and that his love for Ophelia is the cause. As evidence he reads aloud a love letter Hamlet has written to Ophelia. With a plan to loose my daughter to him as a way to test this [theory] further, everyone leaves as Hamlet enters so that Polonius may board him.

This sequence serves as a Ross Second Act prelude to Hamlet’s coming back into the story. We haven’t seen him since he told Horatio he might need to assume an antic disposition and we haven’t heard of him since Ophelia described him to Polonius As if he had been loosed out of hell. What’s being dramatized in this prelude is the world that Hamlet must navigate as he undertakes the mission of Avenger in the revenge plot.

It all seems straightforward enough. What happens during performance to blur the edges?

One of the things that happens is actors whose primary concern is with My Character and not with The Play:
What is My Character feeling? What would My Character do? What does My Character really mean when saying this? My Character wouldn’t say that. My Character needs to take a moment here.

Ross helps:

Does plot spring from character or does character service plot? Does story drive character or is it the other way around? …They may take away my WGA card for this, but I don’t think that films are character-based. …I think characters are an instrument of the story-telling process. They service your vision when you write; you don’t service theirs.

The actor’s main responsibility is to communicate the story of the play and what’s being dramatized through the story. Notice that Polonius is active in all but one scene of this beginning section of our Ross Second Act. In a sense, he takes over the play for a while. When My Character actors play Polonius they tend to see every scene he’s in as a chance to demonstrate the comedy of his character (and not incidentally their own cleverness). Their primary goal is to touch off the Pavlovian audience chuckle at all costs.

But:

What is being dramatized in the Polonius scene with Reynaldo? How is this scene dramatizing the world that Hamlet must learn to navigate? 

Here is how fathers deal with sons; here is how the world conducts its business.

Polonius strikes the note: By indirections find directions out.

Every response of Polonius and Reynaldo should be aimed at that point. Even the responses that demonstrate Polonius’s comic over-qualifying of every thought, his driving of every point into the ground, etc. must throw focus not on Polonius’s comic character but on the part it plays in creating the developing tragedy of this situation.

The same consideration applies to Polonius's interaction with Ophelia that follows Reynaldo’s exit. What has the Problem Solver set in motion by instructing his dutiful daughter to refuse Hamlet’s attempts at further communication? What should be a father’s response to Ophelia’s situation? What will happen as he continues to solve problems with blindness about the human beings involved? How does the actor focus on the irony so that the audience remembers it when they witness how he responds to Ophelia immediately after Hamlet leaves from the nunnery scene? And what part does this play in the larger tragedy? What gets sacrificed in the name of fidelity to country and leader?
How does an actor lead us to this experience and not just to moments of “comic characterization”?

Every little pause or stumble or tic from Polonius that is primarily an opportunity for the actor to showcase Polonius’s foolishness must be eliminated. If not, those moments add up to a drag on the play and a blurring of the communication of its themes.

It’s sometimes a subtle, but always a profound, distinction that true actors recognize in their very creative beings.

Next, Claudius and Gertrude greet Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. What traits specifically does the play need from R and G? Create these and no more and use them to further the story, the plot, and most importantly, the theme.

What is being dramatized in this scene? Claudius’s version of by indirections find directions out. Even Hamlet’s outside friends are being sucked into the situation and enlisted on the side of rotten Denmark. The rottenness reaches outward.
Anything that does not contribute directly to communicating this should be eliminated.

Claudius contributes to focusing on the thematic current by trying to figure out, from the moment Hamlet appears in the public court in Act I, what Hamlet knows, what he suspects, what Hamlet’s motives for any action must be. It plays beneath Claudius’s actions throughout this Second Act. All of Claudius's responses must point to this undercurrent.

Now Voltimand gives an account of how Old Fortinbras handles his nephew in a different manner and with different results. What is the dramatic point of this interaction beyond the necessary plot exposition? No indirection between this father/son(ish). Directors and actors must focus the audience not just on the information being given but on the contrast that this information offers with the way we’ve seen Polonius and Claudius deal with their sons and with all political governance issues—family matters are state matters. 
It is Young Fortinbras at the end of the play who will begin to lead Denmark back to health.

Then Polonius the Problem Solver, in announcing Hamlet’s madness and its cause, dramatizes how to overlook the human aspect of a situation as you seek to respond to perceived difficulties in that situation. The question for the actor of Polonius: Why does he express no pity? No horror? Why does he show no care in broaching the subject to the boy’s mother? And how do you focus on this so that the audience adds it up as a significant part of the tragedy? How can we get the irony as well as the obvious comedy of Polonius the Father and Counselor?

What do we experience in this scene when attention goes to the silent (or absent) Ophelia? What happens to the innocent and the uninformed in a world of indirection, behind-the-arras manipulation, intrigue and corruption? This is taking her directly to her confusion in the nunnery scene and to escape through madness. And to the grave.

What should be Gertrude’s response to Polonius’s analysis? It's taking her directly to a violent confrontation with her son.
How do directors and actors tell this story?

Upon the entrance of Hamlet and his encounter with Polonius, the Second Act takes off. Yes, it’s comedy, as Hamlet’s intellect runs rings around Polonius’s lame attempts to sound him out. But why does this scene often come off as tired, obvious, tepid--typical--Shakespearean wordplay? The actors of Hamlet and Polonius mustn’t be satisfied with simply yet another demonstration of Polonius’s foolishness and Hamlet’s quick wit. What else is the play getting at here? If the production has created a world of suspicion, intrigue, indirection, a world in which hiding behind arrases and importing double-agents as fact-finders has become the norm; if the opening scenes of this act have dramatized the major rules of the world Hamlet faces in his revenge scenario; then now we experience Hamlet jumping into the fray with The Mad Hamlet serving as his invisibility cloak and allowing him his own version of by indirections find directions out.

Before Hamlet even gets a chance to recover from Polonius (These tedious fools!), R and G accost him. And Hamlet the School Friend springs to the fore. A little undergraduate sexual banter and even as for a moment Hamlet frees himself from the rank, gross, unweeded garden of his world, he is reading his friends’ behavior beneath their words. What are they doing here? How do they fit into the world of the rotten state of Denmark? 
His disclosure in the second half of the scene is sincere, sad, truthful: the world’s a cesspool, Denmark’s a prison, and I’m pretty much in despair about it. But he perceives their real concerns are elsewhere. Even one’s friends cannot be trusted. 

Hamlet enters our Ross Second Act alone and he becomes progressively more alone right to the end of the play.

Jerking Hamlet out of the quiet moment with R and G is the arrival of the players. And Hamlet the Prince and Host and Connoisseur of Art snaps to.
Each new character who enters activates a new Hamlet persona. What does the audience experience about Hamlet they have not experienced before? What new quality in Hamlet’s behavior? What new tone of voice? as he makes his way in this increasingly precarious and over-populated situation.

The Players’ scene has the same actor trap as the Polonius and R and G scenes: a new character enters and the actor is tempted to showcase his character at the expense of the part the character plays in the forward progress of the play on its several levels. Why is the First Player in the play? Compare the lushness of the poetry of the Priam speech with the poetry of the actual play in the several preceding scenes. Hamlet knows this speech, the play it comes from—he recites lots of it. The audience should be as moved as Hamlet is.

Note: Polonius is surprised that Hamlet is such a good actor.

If at the final He was likely to have proved most royal moment in the play there were a film clip-like montage of previous Hamlet moments, surely his giving over to the poetry of the First Player would be one of them. Here is an image that most clearly reveals…what?

The deep relief of the sustained long vowels and the resonant m and n of Now I am alone give a clue to what must be the overriding tenor of the whole sequence from Hamlet’s entering reading a book up to this moment. The audience must experience the assaulting, intrusive, demanding, exhausting bombardment of people after people in Hamlet’s life and his need to change persona with each new confrontation while still being alert and wary.

This whole sequence must feel swift and even disorienting and it must gather to the climax that is Hamlet’s soliloquy. This is not a question of speed, nor even of pace; rather of focus, of eliminating all responses, however justifiable and authentic they may be, that do not contribute to this deep sustaining driving current of theme and drama.

The next sequence begins with a taut enclave trying to figure out what’s going on with Hamlet: Claudius, Gertrude, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Polonius, and Ophelia, who top the Hamlet the play’s the thing soliloquy that climaxes the last sequence.

Then the nunnery scene (See May 5 post), which is topped by Hamlet as anxious about the success of the Players’ Play as Treplev is at the beginning of The Sea Gull. Hamlet’s concern keeps the pace going, creates anticipation of the promised confrontation with Claudius.
Take note of the lush, forthright poetry of the Player King and Queen. Here’s another opportunity to give the audience the joy of discovering, through experiential contrasts, something elemental in the play.

(By the way, what does The lady doth protest too much, methinks actually mean? What's the irony?)

R and G come to Hamlet, followed immediately by Polonius. A frantic distracted pace; overlapping dialogue; Hamlet playing now you see it now you don’t, now time to slow the pace, now a reversal, etc. And beneath it all the promise of that climactic confrontation.

Claudius prays and Hamlet might kill him. But on to Gertrude’s closet and the fractured reuniting of the family--an unexpected climactic confrontation.

When the promised Claudius/Hamlet confrontation finally does happen, what is its tone? Why?

The by indirections find directions out thematic current climaxes with Gertrude and the death of Polonius and it morphs into something else, something that descends into the dark heart--even viscera--of the play right up to the Captain's revelation about Fortinbras and Hamlet’s soliloquy, which ends our Ross Second Act.

What are the deeper questions being asked in Hamlet? As Beckett’s Clov has it: Something’s taking its course. A production of Hamlet must clarify that something and hold every character and every interaction to dramatizing and communicating it. Hamlet uses the revenge play form to get at something about the tragedy of young people who must try to keep their values, their belief in the greater positive virtues, while confronting a world that is venal, duplicitous, corrupt. Why does Hamlet hesitate to act? I do not know why yet I live to say “This thing’s to do". What’s the play’s response to that frustration?

What must a young person give up in order to move into the so-called adult world? Can any action you take be pure, absolute, right, in a world that has gone rotten to the core? What is the tragedy of good sane youth trying to right wrongs in a world gone madly corrupt? O cursed spite,/ That ever I was born to set it right!

If there were a sound score to this Ross Second Act, what would the music be doing during each sequence? Imagine such music expressing the roller coaster momentum of our entire Ross Second Act.
Classic symphonic music expresses viscerally the experience of a deep suspenseful current carrying a play along; it provides a musical version of a kinesthetic goal to aim for. Listen to recordings that at every moment play the sweep of the music, that put at the forefront the suspense and promise of what’s to come, even as every note is clearly struck along the way. 

How does an orchestra of actors, rather than playing moments of individual instrumental cleverness, learn to play the suspenseful momentum of the thematic current carrying the performance of a play along from the first moment to the last?

Conductor Willhelm Furtwangler’s Wagner recordings create the depth and complexity, the grandeur, of Wagnerian music while never relinquishing the deep, strong, cumulative drive toward the inevitable climax. They can help actors and directors in maintaining the momentum of a whole play and in not getting caught in the possible side-pools and eddies of the plot.

Toscanini’s Beethoven recordings illustrate the idea of playing the music rather than the notes, of building to climaxes, of creating the suspense of one note promising the next; which is to say, of playing the drama rather than the character, rather than the emotional or the comical or the what-have-you moment at the expense of the drama. 

(If to your ears Toscanini is too swift and metronomic, try Von Karajan’s Beethoven.)

It is the responsibility of actors to play the music of the play, to build sequences and to let nothing interfere with the builds to those climaxes. What is the mini-climax of each scene that clicks one more temporal experience into place, to be topped in by the next scene which leads to its own climax, as it creates inevitability and carries all along to the final climactic moment?

Hamlet is an intricate play with lots of events and situations and characters. It’s easy to let a production wander off course. And I'm not convinced that ruthless cutting of the text is the best way to address the issue. 
Actors must be alive to the questions of the deeper currents of the play. “Alive to” not just “intellectually aware of”. Lots of actors can “stay in the moment” and “respond truthfully to given circumstances”. They can get authentically from A to B, from B to C, C to D. But they still can go off in unproductive directions. 
Actors need to know how to get just as authentically and directly from A to Z. It is these actors who truly “serve the play”.

Alvina Krause wrote the following notes to actors in a 1979 production of Chekhov’s The Sea Gull she was directing for The Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble:

Begin on technique.

A good dramatist builds to the end of a sentence, to the end of a speech, to the end of an act, to the end of a play. Get that innate feeling of building in your subconscious, in your very bones. Never throw away a line unless it lands somewhere. Usually, if a line is thrown away, it lands in the audience - right square in their hands. Therefore build every sentence to the last word; if it is not the end of the speech, top that last word and get to the end of the speech. Periods, commas, etc. are for the eye. We do not put them in oral communication. Therefore, no stops within speeches. If you, the speaker, stop even to get a breath, the listener should come in to express what he is thinking. If he does come in, you must top him and get on with what you have to say. Then, unless it is a pause indicated by Chekhov, the listener tops in before the last word is finished and carries on to the end of the sequence. In fact, you should be interrupting each other coming in with a word or phrase before the speaker finishes. In which case the speaker tops you and finishes his speech or you carry on.

…Within speeches of more than one sentence there are reactions from listeners who want to get into the conversation, or by listeners who are bored, or lost in their own thoughts. The speaker must be aware of them and top them to hold his own or shrug and give up. Movement within speeches is not scene stealing if the speaker is aware of it and responds to it by topping that response.

…Realize how every scene foretells the end.

In its techniqueal essentials, this note is as true for Shakespeare as it is for Chekhov.  

How do you embody the implicit expectations/requirements of dramatic poetry without forfeiting the muscular improvisational wrestle that is the heart of drama?  

How do you create complex characters and full relationships and complicated situations, and then trust that it's all there so that in performance (and rehearsal) you can focus the totality of your artistic energies on communicating to your audiences the deeper questions of the play?

Staying in Character

Question:

The first time I heard a story about an actor staying in character in between takes on a film set, I rolled my eyes. But the first time I performed in a short film, I suddenly saw some sense in the procedure. It was incredibly challenging to summon the intensity to deliver a good take. In theater, you know when you're going to have to act –curtain to curtain – but on a film set, there's no telling when they'll need you in front of the camera.

What do you think about the whole "staying in character at all times" business? Is it overkill? Is it simply necessary for some actors? Is it self-important nonsense? Or is it something else entirely?

Response:

The easy response is that I think for some actors it is overkill; for some it is necessary; for some it’s self-important nonsense; and for others, it is something else entirely.

What many (perhaps most) people really mean by “staying in character”—especially when talking about television and film-- is “maintaining an emotional state”.  And most film and television actors tend to maintain the appropriate emotional state between takes, though at a lower intensity than the scene usually asks for.  Depending on what that state is, then, it might mean staying aloof between takes or it might mean staying in off-camera situations compatible with the emotional situation of the take. Of course, if the actor is simply doing his well-honed shtick, then there is no need to stay in any state, because if he’s alive he’s already in character.

But let’s not go for the easy answer. Let’s look at something more interesting.

If by character you mean habitual kinds of behavior not the actor’s own; if you mean ways of responding to environment and situation different from the actor’s; patterns of human action as expressions of deep driving passions determined by biology and circumstance that are not the actor’s, then you’re in the realm of film actors like Daniel Day-Lewis and Helen Mirren and Meryl Streep.

Daniel Day-Lewis 

Surely does the “staying in character” thing—some say obsessively so.

My Left Foot

He was always in a wheel chair and had the crew feed him. 
This makes sense to me: He wanted some muscles and limbs to stay unresponsive and inactive so that he could be free to respond while in scene without concern about them. 

Character.

In the Name of the Father

He spent three days and nights in a small jail cell without food and water preparing for the interrogation scene. I think I remember reading at the time that he had the director subject him to harsh abusive interrogations as well, but I can’t now find specific references to this. 

Whether or not this seems obsessive or whether the ole tale about Olivier’s response to Dustin Hoffman’s running himself to near exhaustion before filming a scene for Marathon Man is apposite, the character of Gerry Conlin is true and complex and detailed. And the interrogation scene is pretty harrowing.

Helen Mirren

The Queen

The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone

I know nothing of Mirren’s creative process, but in these two films alone she creates two utterly different characters and with each, you can’t tell where the actor ends and the character begins. You could easily believe she was type cast in both films. 

Great Characterization.

Meryl Streep 

There is no actor working in film today, it seems to me, who has created more characters more definitively than Meryl Streep. 

I'm not going to parse her individual characterizations nor compare their relative successes. When she’s good she’s very good; when she’s not, it shows. But of what artist can that not be said? I admire her courage and her reach. 

 Julie and Julia

Streep is 5’ 6” ish and curvy. We perceive her Julia Child as over 6 feet and angular—it’s a determining part of her character, her way of looking at life, the kinds of decisions she has made, etc., not just the external physical behavioral quirks of a real person.  And it was not accomplished simply with wardrobe or by standing on boxes.

To create Julia, Streep says she also channeled her own mother’s love of life.

This Julia is not just a crafty imitation of a real person; she’s an embodiment that gives perspective and meaning to the character of the real person.

It’s an artistic creation.

The Devil Wears Prada

I’m fascinated by what the screenplay expected and what Streep created. If you listen to the screenplay carefully, you sense that the writer intended Miranda Priestly to be a shrill, shrieking harridan, loud and overbearing. (Is that true to the novella? I don’t know, I haven’t read it. Perhaps someone can clarify.) 

Streep told David Letterman that all the people in power that she knew never raised their voice because they didn’t have to. Then she added: “Of course, they were all men.”

Miranda Priestly is a character for a purpose.

Doubt

Yes, there’s an accent.  But it’s not simply external surface mimicry. It’s the vocal expression of a parochial mind, of a person of limited experience. 

It’s her character.

Creating a Character That You Can Stay In 

Begin with your self. 

First: What’s important to the character?

Then: What stimuli in your own life can activate the “you behavior” that you share with this deepest driving force of the character?

If you’re an actor wanting to animate the Hamlet “you stuff” in you, you may wish to recreate an experience that animates the you that deeply wants life to be good and honorable and rooted in unassailable principles; then smack it right up against the reality that life is a lot dirtier than you hoped, a lot more corrupt than you were led to believe.

Some Americans are having Hamlet moments with the clash between the purity and clarity of the Obama campaign message and his perceived capitulation to the political realities of Washington life. 

If you were dancing and singing in Chicago’s Grant Park on election night 2008 because the Cheney/Bush nightmare was over and you believed “Yes We Can”, recreate that elated you and then confront that you with the recent realities of a favorite political situation. Progressives who saw the public option disappear from the health care bill have experienced Hamlet sucker punches. And there are people having Hamlet smack downs over the handling of the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell repeal process.

If you are among those who think the Bush White House was salvation from the years of Clinton corruption, then you can go there to animate your own Hamlet self. 
The world has no shortage of corruption to touch off your "you Hamlet stuff".

The Gulf oil spill practically literalizes the metaphor of pollution corrupting the world regardless of how true and admirable their leader’s passions may be. There’s something rotten at the heart of Western Civilization. Oil. The very thing that runs our civilization is the source of its greatest corruption. Pure classic tragedy.

And it’s global. It’s almost too theatrically perfect that the BP CEO is British. That the rig was built by a Korean company. That it was licensed in some little island in the Pacific because its regulatory measures are so lax. 

It is an unweeded garden. Things rank and gross in nature possess it merely.

If you care about your country, you can find your way to creating a Hamlet through your responses to today’s political world. 

I stress this public aspect of Hamlet because it is routinely short-changed by actors who would rather plunge into Hamlet’s family life (and I suspect their own private emotional pools)—which always threatens to make of him something of a whining adolescent stamping his foot in rage at mom and step-dad (granted, step-dad did kill dad) rather than a young man facing the tragedy of the corruption of culture and society.

Where were we? Oh yes, Begin with Yourself.

Streep and Mirren had to begin with themselves in order to create great characterizations of Julia and Elizabeth. I won’t presume knowledge of their private creative processes, but take a look at Streep’s Emmy acceptance speech for Angels in America and you get a glimpse of the Streep who loves acting that can be turned into the Julia who loves cooking.

Actors who don’t know themselves and who haven’t learned how to bring the self to character don’t know how to let themselves respond simply, directly, truly. So they act qualities, ideas about a human being, etc. They try to create emotional and behavioral effects that they think will represent the truth their intellects grasp in general conceptual terms.

And so their teachers work hard to get them to understand their "selfs" from the point of view of acting; i.e., in terms of actual direct sensory response to specific stimuli. 

All good acting teaching/learning must address this basic concern. At its core, the Meisner repetition exercise aims at getting actors to discover the answer to the question: Who am I in terms of actual behavioral response? Who am I in terms of literal authentic response to what I see/hear/sense directly before me? Who is the essential, fundamental me and what’s it like when I let that me respond freely and honestly?

Most television and film work hardly asks that of actors and rarely ever more than that. Perhaps those actors need never learn more than that, and truth be told that’s a lot to learn. 

Perhaps they need not concern themselves with dramatic  characterization.

Teachers facing actors who work only for effect and who don't respond authentically may go so far as to declare that character doesn’t even exist. That seems extreme to me, but the reality is that film and television mostly expect actors to “bring themselves" to the script. If character is suggested, it is rarely with more than the most generalized traits.

In television, when a show has a long run, writers change the character over time by writing to the individual actors’ personalities and performing strengths. 
What "character"?

But you aren’t Hamlet and neither is any of those Grant Park revelers.  

Streep isn’t Julia or Miranda Priestly. 

Mirren isn’t Queen Elizabeth or Mrs. Stone. 

The “you stuff” you and they activate is the life stuff that still must be worked into becoming the character.
(This might be an opportunity to mention the moment in Hamlet performance history when Daniel Day-Lewis walked off the stage because he became convinced that he was talking with the ghost of his own father, the poet Cecil Day-Lewis.)

Life studies can help.

Where is the Hamlet in President Obama? Take a look at the 2005 convention speech. Look at the bright gleam of possibility in Obama’s eyes. Listen to the forward-looking power of his voice. Now take a look at recent photos. What do the eyes reveal? Listen to the recent press conference about the gulf oil spill. What do you hear in his voice?

He believed Hamlet-like that he could change Washington, bring transparency to politics, create a climate of bipartisanship aimed at improving America—all worthy Hamlet-like goals. 

But there’s something rotten in the District of Columbia. 

An actor with true empathy can absorb Obama behavior and it will deepen his understanding/creation of his own Hamlet.

For Queen Elizabeth and Julia Child, Helen Mirren and Meryl Streep had life studies indeed to help turn their own “life stuff” into Julia and Elizabeth. Their major task as artists in this regard was to select only the most revelatory behavior and to incorporate it into their characterizations. 
When it works, life model behavior becomes absorbed by muscles and senses with true comprehension; when it doesn’t work, it is at best mimicry of external behavior without understanding. 
In the examples of Queen Elizabeth and Julia Child, it works indeed.

And I love that Streep added her mother’s joy in living. And for Miranda Priestly, there were those men in power.

Note: Streep perceived, absorbed, stored up experiential images of her mother and the men in power throughout her life--perhaps largely unconsciously. And then when she needed those stored-up experiences to create with, they were there. 

What does the actor create with?

Imagination:

Metaphor can clarify and help you to create with objectivity.

Hamlet:

Become a young eagle who has learned to use the muscles of his expansive wings to mount into the skies. Spot a rabbit and dive with accuracy; grasp it with sharp strong talons. Soar, ride the wind currents high above your domain. Sense freedom and power in your entire body.

Then: You're caught in a net, you're thrown into a darkened room. Try to walk, to fly. Bump into a wall.  Stumble into--what is that? Try to find a way out. Try to lift your wings. To find the light.
What’s an eaglet to do?

Note: You’re still you. The eagle images help you to become you if you were the young eagle Hamlet caught in a mad maze of traps.

Julia: 

There’s something of a fish out of water about Julia Child in the kitchen. Or a bony walrus standing upright and miraculously doing a graceful ballet with pots and pans and knives and spoons. Bon appetit! Why is it anomalous for Julia Child to triumph in the kitchen? What should a walrus be doing? 

Elizabeth: 

You try this one.

Photos and paintings and novels and biographies:

Hamlet is an Elizabethan Prince. He’s a poet; he's a scholar; a fencer. He wears clothes that create behavior different from what clothes have asked of the Western male body for the past hundred years or so. What does any actor today do to incorporate these elements? Besides avoiding them by playing the play in contemporary clothes.

Julia is a woman who emerged from a certain time and place in America. Give specific examples to illustrate. What would Mirren have to do to be able to create that American woman besides work with a dialect coach?

Elizabeth is contemporary British royalty. What would Streep have to do to be able to embody this with true understanding in her human totality?

It's true that good casting does most of the director’s work. Especially in television and film, cast an actor with the essential qualities needed for the role and much of the actor’s creative work is done.

In his last years, Jimmy Stewart said that his first question to a director who wanted to cast him was Why do you want Jimmy Stewart? Why couldn’t you use any other old actor? What makes this a Jimmy Stewart role?  If the part didn’t need Jimmy Stewart, if the director wanted him only because of his name, then Stewart declined.

Jimmy Stewart wasn’t asked to create a character; he was asked to bring the recognizable Jimmy Stewart brand to the role. (Yes, even for Vertigo.)

Most television and film actors aren’t asked to create characters; they are asked to play their recognizable characterization affect in various situations.

We expect certain things from such actors as, for example, George Clooney or Julia Roberts. Character creation is not one of them. 

Test it: You can interchange characterizations among the films. Clooney in this film for Clooney in that one. Roberts in this one for Roberts in that one. What accounts for any difference in “character“ is a difference in the emotional or attitudinal state of the Clooney and Roberts brand. 

But you can’t imagine Miranda Priestly singing on a Greek island with Pierce Brosnan or Queen Elizabeth undressing in an automobile to have sex with a young gigolo.

All of which is not to judge either kind of actor as more or less valid or worthy. Their work situations are just utterly different with utterly different expectations of what the actor’s role should be.

And it does suggest something about how deceptively simple the phrase “staying in character” actually is.

Post Script:

I wanted to write about this--and perhaps way too loosely--because I’m hoping readers will post comments, anecdotes, side bars, etc. This topic can be expanded and altered in many ways. So how about trying it?

Hamlet: The Nunnery Scene

Question:
Hamlet. What’s your take on the nunnery scene?

Response:

Whew.

There are books that detail famous and influential stage productions of Hamlet and there are videos of decades of film and television versions. Read them and watch them, looking for elements common to all as well as for illustrations of how and why they differ from one another. As with all truly great plays, no one interpretation of Hamlet can account for all its implications and resonances.

Here’s my take on the so-called nunnery scene:

First: What’s the play getting at? (See the previous blog post) Note the title: The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.

It is not only Hamlet’s tragedy, but it’s the tragedy of the entire polity of Denmark.

Find lines that rise above plot and point toward theme:

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.  (Washington, DC?  Find the world of the play alive in your own world.)

There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

The rest is silence.

For me Hamlet is about a sane young man of integrity and intellect and compassion thrust into a world mad with corruption and deceit. What must an intelligent, decent, caring young person do to survive in a world where the rules change constantly and from which ethical anchors have disappeared?

What happens to a world that fosters such rottenness?

The play suggests forces exist that ultimately will bring order to the world, but meantime people must suffer.

The elemental conflict of the play, then, is those who live by expedience and corruption versus those who want to right wrongs and to live ethically.

Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark, embodies an idealistic belief in integrity and ethics. Upon his father’s death he rightly expects to become King of Denmark. But the court “freely goes along” with giving the crown to the king’s brother. (In my world, the Supreme Court of the United States of America hands the presidency to the guy who didn’t win the election.)

Claudius, the new King of Denmark, embodies the forces of corruption, deceit, and manipulation of the populace. (In my world former Vice President Cheney.)

In Hamlet’s personal life, his mother abandons mourning the death of his father and immediately marries his father’s brother. (The abhorrence Hamlet feels at this we may find in our response to the sexual abuse of children by Roman Catholic priests. And the Vatican’s method of dealing with abuse is how Hamlet sees Denmark’s response to the marriage.)
Not to mention he discovers his uncle killed his father and his father's ghost commands him to revenge the murder.

There’s something rotten in the state of Denmark.

Who are the Hamlets of today’s social and political worlds?

Ophelia is a young person who lives in ignorance of the corruption around her. She has been brought up with blinders on. She is intelligent and loving, but she knows nothing of the harsh secular realities of her world. She has been taught to seek the counsel of her father whenever she is confronted with big issues.

In the world of Hamlet an innocent unaware of the world’s corruption and deceit can escape the brutalities of that world only by madly floating away into oblivion.

Where do you find Ophelias in contemporary America?

Ophelia relies on Hamlet and her father for her stability. When those two anchors are taken away, she can’t survive. And before she dies, her mind loosens from its moorings. Her ending, I think, suggests where she must needs begin and her initial appearances in the play must point inevitably to her end.

When Hamlet confronts her in her bedroom and does some very weird and frightening stuff, what does she do? She runs immediately to her father for explanation and counsel.

The last words of the first scene she appears in are hers spoken to her father: I shall obey, my lord.

I was in a production of Hamlet in which the actress playing Ophelia created a young woman of fiber and independent spirit who begrudgingly and even resentfully spoke that last line. When it came time for her to appear with lots of flowers in her hands, singing slightly off-key and wandering about the castle in madness, it made no sense. There had been no cumulative experience of the inevitability of this moment, no awareness of what Corruption was snuffing out of the world with Ophelia’s death.

If Ophelia is the embodiment of purity and innocence in a corrupt world, then each of her scenes dramatizes a stage in the spoiling and ultimate wiping out of that purity and innocence. Even in the nunnery scene, it is Ophelia’s relationship to the corruption of the world around her and not her personal romantic relationship with Hamlet that is the focus of what happens to her.

She is told to keep Hamlet here so that her father and the king can observe his behavior. She is given a prayer book to justify her presence in this isolated place. (A nice irony.)

What does she pray for here in this corridor? She hasn’t seen Hamlet since he burst into her closet and her father assured her that he is going crazy. What is she praying for in the moments before he comes in?

The tragedy is Hamlet’s not Ophelia’s and so our focus, and our greatest sympathies, must be with him. His fight to the death is with the corruption of the world—even in this encounter with Ophelia.

The last time we saw him is only one scene earlier, when he bounds out at an energized highpoint: The play’s the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.  

And then, he is sent for.

Surely he comes bounding into this corridor energized for a major confrontation with the King of Corruption. 

And what does he confront?

Crickets.

An empty hall, perhaps a sputtering candle in a wall sconce. Shadows.

What this provokes in him isn’t just a soliloquy of intellectual abstraction. Nor is it just emotional turmoil. It’s a profound still moment of thought leading to a grave, even tragic, realization for so young a life. It comes from deep in his soul, it unfolds in his mind, and through his voice it extends far out into the cosmos. His thoughts must be verbalized because they must reach out far enough to give him the perspective he needs to understand objectively what his thinking is leading to.

We all know the exhilarating relief, especially in our youth, of discovering finally what we can do to overcome a monumental impasse in our lives.

And then the world throws its indifference or its hostility at us and we are slammed back to ask the question: Why do I bother? What’s the point? Who cares anyway? What difference does it make?

‘To beee (sustain it)’ is not simply ‘to exist’.‘To be’ is ‘to live’ and ‘to live’ is to do, to act, to take continued challenging action throughout a productive constructive life.

‘To BE’ is to engage in enterprises of great pith and moment.

Early in my teaching life I found myself walking along the lakefront near campus so that my thoughts might lift out over the lake and reach up into the far night sky. I was struggling with the question: To continue doing this or to walk away from it. To BE (to teach, to teach the way I knew I must) or not to BE (to cease agonizing over it, perhaps even to abandon it). That was the question. To do whatever it takes to push the limits of my teaching and my learning, to struggle against the forces of indifference, even hostility, and by opposing, end them; or to sit back and to settle in, to resign myself to the way things were; and thus to be content until retirement.

To die; to sleep. No more.

At that moment of youthful tumult, it really was a consummation devoutly to be wished.

Hamlet closes in on a tragic conclusion to his thinking, comes near to making a tragic decision about what to do.

And then he sees Ophelia.  ohmygod, how long has it been?

What exactly does he see?

Is she kneeling? walking? Is there a halo of candlelight in her hair? Her head is bowed over her prayer book. Delicate fingers turn a page. It’s a stirring image: the entire world isn’t a corrupt pigsty. There still exist grace and purity and beauty.

It just might save his soul.

Nymph, and she looks up, her huge eyes teary with care, with prayer, in thy orisons be all my sins remembered.

What does he need her to say? to do? What does his tormented soul hope she’ll say and do? Perhaps her hand will reach out and touch his; perhaps her voice, the voice of her heart, will touch his heart with understanding of his torment.

What does he get?

A perfectly trained, convent-educated (fold your hands, walk slowly, lower you eyes), Polonius-taught (a modest young lady answers the Prince with civility not familiarity) little clear tinkling bell of a voice speaking the polite platitudes of civil discourse: Good my lord, how does your honor for this many a day?

She might as well slap his face.

And he would like to shout: I’ll tell you how your honor has been doing for this many a day: he’s hit bottom so hard he was thinking he might just as well kill himself, but, hell, why go into all that!

Instead, he answers even more civilly, more formally, than she: I humbly thank you. Well, well, well and he turns to leave.  (I think the well, well, well is as if your girlfriend, having not seen you for days and days--actually having refused to see you for days--instead of saying, Oh God, what’s been going on? They’re saying you’re crazy, I’ve been worried sick, says, [Your Name], Oh, good afternoon, how have you been?, and you feel such a scalding fury that after a cold Thank you for asking, there’s still enough hot energy in you to spit out, Fine, fine, fine, before you turn on your heel and walk away.)

Panic hits Ophelia. And he's being deliberately curt and cruel. And her task is to keep him here. What to do? Perhaps an unconscious look toward the arras—Father, help!—before, hardly thinking, she reaches for—are they letters? were they in the prayerbook? on her person somewhere? or perhaps it’s a locket she’s wearing?—she hears herself saying, partly to answer his curt jabs, partly in panic to keep him here, My Lord, I have remembrances of yours that I have longed long to redeliver.

The word ‘remembrances’, flooding through his brain, pulls him back to face her. And he answers sharply, Not me, I never gave you a damn thing, and turns again to leave.

Poor Ophelia. She’s not used to thinking on her feet, to making decisions and taking action on her own without checking with her father. Yes, you did! she says. Her heart racing, she can’t believe what Hamlet has said; she wants to run to the arras and cry out for Polonius to help, to stop this, to tell her what to do. Meantime, she is saying things she learned in her Young Maiden’s Handbook with even more formality than before. And finally, she thrusts the tokens at him with There, my lord.

It is at this moment that the scene wrenches from poetry to antic muscular prose. Literally. Something huge has to happen to create this breach. Something cracks irrevocably here. And for me it cannot be triggered simply by her giving back some love tokens to him. This moment must arise from the deepest thematic currents of the play and draw its lifeblood there.

It is at this moment, I think, that Hamlet, who has been dumbfounded by what Ophelia is saying, realizes that Polonius is behind the arras. (It's been in the back of his mind: after all, he was sent for, asked to come here to meet with--who?) It is at this moment that Hamlet is struck with the realization that they have gotten to Ophelia utterly (It starts days ago when she refuses letters from him and won't agree to see him--and he breaks into her room unannounced and stares at her long and hard); it's confirmation that that’s why she’s been acting the way she’s been acting, that there’s dirt on her heart, that her hands are not clean. Great great grief for her wrestles with a nearly uncontrollable rage at them for getting to her, for using her, corrupting her.

What it is that sparks his realization must be something more significant to the play than Polonius’s making a sound and Hamlet hearing it or Polonius moving behind the arras and that catching Hamlet’s eye.

For me, the realization that they aren’t alone and that this is a set-up must come directly from Ophelia.

There, my lord is the last line of iambic poetry in the scene. And then come three iambic beats of silent action to complete the line.

There, my lord as she thrusts the tokens toward him.

Then:

1. She inadvertently, almost imperceptibly, looks toward the arras for help, for assurance, before checking herself.
2. Hamlet sees it, follows her look.
3. He looks back at her as he realizes that he’s been set up and that she’s a pawn.

Ha, ha! gasped in shock, in disbelief, sadness, rage.

And the scene takes off with a frightening potential for violence. All that violent energy is already in him and now it surges through him pushing for release in violent action. He drives relentlessly, directly to Where is your father? albeit through the grief/rage of his realizing that she has agreed to be used by them. She tries to maintain civil protocol in the face of his growing rage.

(I’m not convinced by versions that have him discover Polonius is behind the arras only the instant before he asks her where is her father. It’s just too huge a realization for him to act on it so quickly. And his behavior toward her after his ha, ha! is too extreme to be touched off simply by her returning his letters or trinkets.)

Where is your father?

And helplessly, fearfully, Ophelia lies—for the first time in her life—and Hamlet goes nuts. (And by the way, she has not been instructed to return these things. Days ago Polonius tells her only to refuse further letters and visits. But now she has been told to keep him here and when he makes to leave, I think she panics and does the first thing that comes to mind.)

He can barely stand in one place. He’s pulled in all directions.

He wants to unsheathe his rapier and gut whoever's behind the arras (Why doesn’t he just race over to the arras and yank it aside?) He wants to run out of the corridor and storm into his mother’s room (Something in him is pulling to do just that as he spits out, You jig, you amble, you lisp, you paint your face etc.—to Ophelia!). He might grab Ophelia—or worse--as she is the one human being here in his presence on whom he can focus his rage at the whole world.

His several false exits indicate, I think, that there is so much potential dangerous anger in him that, even as he tries to get out of the room, he is ripped back to unload more of the rages that have built in him since even before the play began. And the more he unloads the more he might do violence and so he pulls himself away.

Very little of this has to do directly with Ophelia. But with her capitulation to her father and the king, some final stopper has been pulled out and she is the one there before him to get the brunt of it all.

And finally, he does do something violent—does he actually strike her? Does he throw her to the floor?—and the horror of realizing that he has crossed a major line is what propels him finally/actually to bolt from the room.

The potential for violence in this encounter must be amped up long before Ophelia says O, help him you sweet heavens! And notice that she never says, Help me, I fear for my safety. Throughout, her concern is for the agony Hamlet is experiencing. His rage is not rage at her, though at any moment it might provoke behavior that could hurt her.

After he bolts, her words are of fear and concern for him, not herself. Though she is of ladies most deject and wretched, it’s because she has seen the magnificence that is Hamlet blasted with ecstasy and quite quite down.

I recognize that it is hard in today’s world to accept that our sympathies must stay with Hamlet even at this moment, but I think that’s what’s happening and that’s how we are meant to experience it. If it is Hamlet’s tragedy, then ours and Ophelia’s greatest concern must be for his torment. Whatever pain anyone else is experiencing, even if it is directly caused by him, we must feel that his pain is tragically more profound, more significant. And I believe that if it is done honestly and within the context of a production that dramatizes the greater concerns of the play, the nunnery scene will further move the action inevitably toward The rest is silence and to Horatio’s tale

Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,

Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters,                             

Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause,

And, in this upshot, purposes mistook

Fall’n on th’inventors’ heads.

Someone should do Hamlet out of concern for our country now rather than just for love of the role.