The 800 Hamlets

“There has never been a time when there aren’t 800 Hamlets … You are aware consciously that there is a History about it. You see this list of Hamlets and you think, ‘Oh, my God, no. And there’s Adrian opening in five minutes. 

There’s Olivier. There’s Gielgud … But there’s an extraordinary shutoff point when the rehearsal room door closes. 

Gielgud died the morning we started rehearsals for our Hamlet, and you thought, ‘This is really weird.’ 

But you have to – as Adrian says – start from scratch.”

— Simon Russell-Beale 

(Hamlet)

Gielgud himself made a similar point when asked if he had modelled his performance on any of his predecessors: 

“No, I didn’t. I thought I had. 

I thought I would copy all the actors I’d ever seen, in turn, and by then I’d seen about a dozen or fifteen Hamlets [including H.B. Irving (Sir Henry’s son), Ernest Milton, Henry Baynton, Arthur Phillips, Colin Keith-Johnston and John Barrymore]. 

Of course, [the elder, Sir Henry] Irving was my god, although I’d never seen him … I didn’t try to copy, I only took note of all the things he’d done and looked at the pictures of him and so on. 

But when it came to the [London Old] Vic, the play moved so fast and there was so much of it that I suddenly felt, ‘Well, I’ve just got to be myself’, and I really played it absolutely straight as far as I could. 

— Sir John Gielgood

(Hamlet)

quoted in Burton, 140 

Previous generations were equally affected : a cartoon from 1804 (see Fig. 1) shows John Philip Kemble (who performed the role from 1783 to 1817) with William Betty on his back, illustrating the sensational competition between the adult performer (Kemble was forty-seven in 1804) and the child actor who astonished London by undertaking the role at the age of thirteen and becoming known as ‘the infant Roscius’ (see 2.2.327 and n.). Kemble is exclaiming (in a parody of Ophelia’s lines at 3.1.159–60), ‘Alas! is it come to this / Ah! woe is me / Seeing what I have seen / Seeing what I see!! Oh Roscious –’. 

There were well-known rivalries between contemporaries like William Charles Macready (who performed the role from 1823 to 1851) and Edwin Forrest (1829–72), and John Gielgud (1930–44) and Laurence Olivier (1937–48) (on the former, see Phelps, 20–21, and Hapgood, 75; on the latter, see Maher, 26, and Olivier, 50). 

One of the most famous American Hamlets, Edwin Booth (who performed the role from 1853 to 1891), was apparently haunted by the ghost of his father, Junius Brutus Booth, who had himself played Hamlet from 1829 to 1849: a cartoon of 1875 shows the ‘Spirit of the Elder B——h’ appearing to ‘B——h the Younger’ (see Fig. 2). 

Edwin claimed to have heard his father’s voice speaking through the Ghost, and he used a miniature of his father in the closet scene. 

Junius Brutus had died before Edwin’s first Hamlet and he saw the performance as a ‘sacred pledge’; his biographer records that the role became ‘almost an autopsychography’ for him (see Shattuck, 3–6).2 

Daniel Day Lewis withdrew from the part in mid-run in 1989 after he allegedly began seeing his father (the recently deceased poet Cecil Day-Lewis) on stage at the National Theatre in London (see Davison). 

The Ghost is indeed often played by an actor who has himself played Hamlet in the past : Gielgud as director used his own voice for the Ghost when he directed Richard Burton in 1964 (the Ghost did not actually appear in this production), and Paul Scofield played the Ghost to Mel Gibson’s Hamlet in Franco Zeffirelli’s 1990 film.