The rest is silence: Hamlet, cutting, and contemporaneity

Abstract

This essay considers the long history of abbreviating Hamlet for stage performance, from the early quartos and Folio text through to post-modern productions such as those by Bocsardi Laszlo, by Kelly Hunter, and by Daniel Tyler (all 2015). It wonders what people thought they were cutting when they cut Hamlet;when theatregoers started to desire an uncut Hamlet, and whether they imagined that whole play as the distillation, the average or the aggregate of all its many iterations. It points out that many printed editions down to 1800, which record the cuts and minor verbal modernizations made by stage producers, saw no separation between the play as read and the play as seen, and shows how their cuts are congruent with the play’s own depictions of interruption and abridgement. A perceived gap between the play as seen and the play as studied, the essay argues, emerged only in the nineteenth century, and was then addressed at the turn of the twentieth by ‘purist’ niche productions which either revived strictly the Q1 text or favoured ostentatiously and impractically long conflations of Q2 and F, newly-advertised as ‘uncut’. In our own times, Hamlet has variously been regarded as so well-known as to be cut-proof (as in Laszlo’s production, in which, with even the unspoken lines internalized by the cast, Stanislavskyan characters could be seen to be refusing to speak certain well-known phrases) and thus susceptible of abbreviations which privilege interiority over plot (such as Hunter’s), or as the locus of a cluttered, burdensome heritage -- as in Tyler’s The Hamlet Archive, a site-specific show staged in a library, in which multiple versions of key scenes from the play were performed among an allusive litter of leftover props, styles, film clips and motifs from the play’s multiple reception history. Such productions all suggest that we have arrived at a very late stage in the play’s performance and literary history alike.