I once read a review describing Andrew's performance in Hamlet as "volcanic". I get it now - he's nothing short of explosive, and yet there's this tender vulnerability to his Hamlet. What an experience it must've been to witness this live.
I've lost sleep over Andrew's Hamlet (and Andrew in general) and now quote Shakespeare on a daily basis. Andrew, baby, please let me go, I have a life to live.
It's an amazing interpretation of the Act 4 Scene 2 soliloquy, probably the most original I've ever seen. At the same time though, the way Scott's voice keeps popping to the top of his upper register becomes distracting, even annoying, after a while. It would be effective if he dialed it back a notch or two, but instead he takes it bit too far -- it makes me think of some adolescent whose voice has only begun to change performing in a high school production.
I couldn’t help but feel something was off when I was watching. my attention was brought to the way he projected his voice, raising some anxiety. amazing interpretation, indeed, but I also agree that scott’s voice became distracting.
That's a fair point. However, I agree with those scholars who say that our sense of Hamlet's age is all wrong. He's not thirty; he's sixteen. Evidence: 1) He's away at college at Wittenburg. Thirty year-olds weren't in college in Shakespeare's time. Sixteen year-olds were. Also, his youth would help explain why the Danish court was willing to go along with Claudius taking the throne, and why Claudius makes a public declaration that Hamlet will still be his successor ("most immediate to our throne"). 2) In this speech, Hamlet calls Fortinbras a "delicate and tender prince." That phrase suggests a young man, one who can't even grow a beard well, not a seasoned military commander. Because King Fortinbras was slain by King Hamlet the day Hamlet was born, the youngest Fortinbras can be is 9 months younger than Hamlet. 3) Hamlet's relationship to Ophelia makes much more sense if they are both teenagers than if he is 30 and she is 15. And why would Laertes call Hamlet "young" and Polonius refer to his "youth" is he were 30? Thirty-year-olds were not young in Shakespeare's day. 4) Hamlet's attitude toward his mother's sexuality only makes sense if he is 16. Why otherwise in the closet scene would be bring up how young people can't be expected to be chaste if older people can't? That apparently irrelevant point makes sense if he's thinking his relationship to Ophelia. (Textual evidence is also that Ophelia is pregnant, but that's a different point.) 5) The evidence that Hamlet is 30 comes from the gravedigger scene, in which the gravedigger (who says he started his job the day Hamlet was born) answers the question of his age by saying, "I have been sexton here, man and boy thirty years." That's in most modern editions. However, the First Folio text says, "I haue bin sixeteene heere, man and Boy thirty yeares." How did "sixeteene" become "sexton"? That happened in the 19th century, when someone decided "sixteen" and "thirty" were contradictory. But the word "sexton" is never spelled "sixeteene" in any other place in Shakespeare. If it is sixteen, then what the gravedigger means is "I've been at this job 16 years, and I'm 30 years old" - which makes sense because most trades began at 14. But there is one objection to this: the gravedigger says Yorick has been dead for 23 years in both the Second Quarto and the First Folio. (He does not in the First or "Bad" Quarto, though the scene is fairly complete.) So why the contradiction? One possibility is that at some point in the staging Shakespeare decided Richard Burbage was too old to convincingly play a 16 year-old. But that's just a guess. Still, holding up that one objection against all the others, I think the play makes much more sense if Hamlet is young.
@@richardnanian6075 I take your point about what Hamlet's actual age would have been in the play and agree with you. I don't feel as if it's an adequate explanation for Scott's delivery here, however, as in other scenes his delivery is more consistent with a man who is well past puberty.
@@danielallenbutler1782 Well, yes, I didn't mean to imply Scott was attempting to indicate his voice was breaking because of puberty (though I can see how my comment could be read to imply that). My thought was (and is) that Scott's delivery suggests someone who is younger and more insecure than the role is usually played. That said, I think he goes to that particular well a little too often. I have never found any single performance (let alone production) of the role entirely satisfying. On the other hand, I almost always find something in any performance to like. As the great Shakespearean actor Robert Stephens said, you can't really play Hamlet; you can only give your own take on the role. And while that is true of every great role to some extent, Hamlet is surely the apotheosis of the principle. I do love Scott's performance overall. He gives some original readings to certain lines - "original" meaning I have never heard them before. Few things please me more than an original reading that makes sense of a particularly knotty passage. I love how Kevin Kline, for example, says the line "Nay, then, I have an eye of you" in Act 2, Scene 2, directly to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, meaning "I'm looking right at you, stop talking to each other," rather than as an aside, as it it usually performed. More than anyone else I've seen, what Scott does beautifully in the soliloquies is make the words seem to be coming to Hamlet in the moment. The soliloquies are so well-known that making them seem spontaneous is almost impossible. They come across as speeches or set-pieces. Branagh's performance suffers from that: he's terrific whenever he is with other actors, but each of his soliloquies has a "Look, I'm going to recite this speech now" effect. But the essential nature of Hamlet's character is that he is a thinker, constantly attempting to use language to make sense of and impose some kind of order on his situation. The wonder of the play is watching him do that, not watching him reflect on something he has already done. Scott gets that across marvelously, in my view. Cheers.
could be talkin about modern politics. the Qanon Trumpers; adament in their follyful movement vs. the despair and lacking of everyone else. And the anger in all of us as we're left to vote on 1 of 2 terrible people, unable to believe in any other path forward
To me it’s acting Acting and I am unmoved intellectually and, especially, emotionally. It’s game-playing rather than living and being the part. And I sincerely doubt the real Hamlet did all this stuff with his arms and fingers in an attempt to make up for the shortfall. Perhaps only Hamlet can play Hamlet…
The poetry is lost amongst his naturalism - he appeals to people who can’t recognise art and instead watch naturalistic TV shows. It’s a profound way of performing Shakespeare but, in my opinion, forgoes art for the pursuit of ease-of-understanding.
