Speak the Speech

Benedict Cumberbatch’s Hamlet, which played this season at London’s Barbican, was the fastest-selling event in British theater history. In October it was broadcast in movie theaters across the United States. Cumberbatch, Oscar-nominated for playing Alan Turing in The Imitation Game, and supporting Johnny Depp in the new Whitey Bulger biopic Black Mass, is a sex symbol. To his fans, the self-proclaimed “Cumberbitches,” his sexiness symbolizes the hope that a man can be handsome, witty, and muscular, like a young Mel Gibson, but nice too. For Cumberbatch is a proper English gent, not like that naughty Hugh Grant. A young lady could take Cumberbatch home for tea in full confidence that, before she led him upstairs to show him her First Folio, he would conduct himself impeccably before her parents.

Even when Cumberbatch plays a sexually obsessed, suicidal murderer, his essential pleasantness pokes out. During rehearsals, residents in the Barbican’s apartment towers complained about the howling fans camped at the stage door. Cumberbatch himself manifested amongst them and politely asked them to desist. When the run began, the players were bombarded with camera and smartphone flashes. After a few nights, Cumberbatch slipped out of Hamlet’s character, expressed the mildest of frustration—more on behalf of his fellow actors, of course—and asked everyone to be reasonable. Which, after repeated prompting from the staff of the Barbican, a couple of whom lurked by the wings of the stage like nightclub bouncers, was the case at the show I saw.

At that moment, Hamlet was the hottest ticket in town, and not all the heat came from the lights. A pheromonal mist wafted over the stalls as packs of ravening Cumberbitches eyed the stage with the “lean and hungry look” of Bacchantes preparing to dismember an offering to Dionysus. Not surprisingly, their object of desire hit the stage running. Cumberbatch’s Hamlet, like his Sherlock Holmes, is all “antic disposition.” His mind burns, and he speaks “trippingly on the tongue.” He suits “the action to the word,” too: His body jerks and jumps with all the “shocks that flesh is heir to.” For his first soliloquy—“O, that this too, too solid flesh would melt”—he bounds onto the table at his mother and father-uncle’s wedding feast, like Errol Flynn at the court of King John.

The next soliloquy is the big one. Cumberbatch started the run by opening the show with “To be or not to be.” After complaints from critics, the speech was restored to Act Two. Cumberbatch approached his dilemma with Holmes’s scalpel, slicing each clause and examining it forensically. The raw question was anatomized: to live or die?

Freud called Hamlet a procrastinator, but there was little sense here of delay. The frantic rhythm was slowed for the soliloquies, not stopped, and the tempo accelerated after each caesura. Hamlet hurtled through a series of ever-deepening recognitions—his father’s murder, his uncle’s guilt, his mother’s complicity—until his responses were subsumed by irresistible fate. To act rightly, by avenging his father’s murder, is to act wrongly, by killing his uncle and widowing his mother for a second time. To act wrongly, by insulting his mother and Ophelia, is to act rightly by refusing to accept the criminal farce of his uncle’s court. Freud and the rest of us have the luxury of accepting “ordinary unhappiness,” but royal families are not ordinary.

Nor is Hamlet’s capacity for reflection. He is, he realizes, “the king of infinite space,” an intellectual and physical acrobat, tumbling towards disaster. Cumberbatch’s soliloquies articulated each step of this terrible dance in slow motion; “O what a rogue and peasant slave am I” seethed with the anger of self-harm. Only “I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth” fell flat, dwarfed by Richard E. Grant’s harrowed delivery in Withnail and I (1987). But Cumberbatch rallied with the ambiguous “No, nor women neither” conclusion, which drew sighs from members of the audience, willing to test just how much libido Hamlet had lost. To his credit, Cumberbatch was prepared to act unpleasant: always the test of a star’s integrity. His Oedipal aggression was plausibly obnoxious. He derided Sian Brooke’s mumbling Ophelia pitilessly, and delivered the “country matters” joke with a contemptuous yet crowd-pleasing thrust of the hips.

When Hamlet coaches his players for the dumb show that will “catch the conscience of a king,” he praises them as “the abstract and brief chronicles of the time.” Our taste in Shakespeare is a chronicle of our times. In the classically minded late 1600s, Shakespeare fell from fashion: too disorderly, too passionate. The Romantics revived Shakespeare as the wild man of blank verse, tumbling through the infinite space of the natural world—and we, being very late Romantics, see Hamlet that way, too. Stephen Greenblatt interprets both Shakespeare and the tragedies by way of Schopenhauer and Wagner.

Es Devlin’s sets had something of the modern Götterdämmerung too. The first half took place in a Ruritanian country house with an interwar, post-Habsburg atmosphere: Hamlet pined by a portable gramophone, and Ophelia used an old camera. The deep turquoise interior, with its glinting swords, sweeping staircase, and glittering chandelier, was lit from the side, giving the long and ominous shadows of a winter sunset. The second half was darkness and devastation. The actors clamber over mounds of charred debris, as though the house had been shelled and burnt. Both of these sets will film well, and so will director Lyndsey Turner’s cast.

Shakespeare left few stage instructions, but Hamlet is usually played with a short second half. This cannot always compensate for the fragmented nature of Act I V. Hamlet is absent: sent to England by Claudius and, bizarrely, kidnapped by pirates. But Karl Johnson excelled as the gravedigger, and, as Cumberbatch clutched Yorick’s skull, the audience’s interest returned to life. The final fight scene was superbly physical: Elegant fencing led to scrabbling in the dirt. As Hamlet drove his sword towards Laertes, the duelists and the courtiers shifted into balletic slow motion, spiraling around the still point of the turning world, the poisoned tip of the rapier. Cumberbatch had the good manners not to overstay his death: “The rest is silence” is, like Hamlet’s life, short and bitter. The curtain call was taken in a tight, sweaty T-shirt. If Cumberbatch gave an encore, it would be played on the abdominal washboard.

In a recent piece for the Wall Street Journal, John McWhorter praised efforts to “update” Shakespeare into modern English for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Admittedly, some of Shakespeare’s language is lost to us; but why assume that the groundlings of Elizabethan London understood every word? Nor is the difference as great as we think. To take one of McWhorter’s examples, when Polonius advises Laertes to “character” his advice, he means that Laertes should write it down. Today, we tweet in “140 characters or less.” The difference between Shakespeare and us is that between a verb and a noun.

Earlier ages flattered themselves by rewriting Shakespeare to their taste. We rightly derided the ludicrous classical rewrites and the prurient bowdlerized versions as brief and futile chronicles of one time’s vanity. Our times’ taste is for brief, immediate clarity, with as little abstract as possible. Elsewhere, McWhorter has promoted the populist fiction that all languages communicate the same content. This, as anyone who can speak a second language knows, is false: The Latin Mass, the Hebrew liturgy, the works of Shakespeare, and those bookends to Shakespeare’s English, Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer (1549) and the Authorized Bible (1611), all have minds of their own. The limits of my language, Wittgenstein said, are the limits of my world. To experience a different language is to learn something new about being human.

Shakespeare lives as long as we can be bothered to listen—and as long as good actors are prepared to risk their reputations by doing difficult work. Like Hamlet, Benedict Cumberbatch did not take the easy way out. Nor did Cumberbatch allow his world to be limited by his fame. The ticket sales and global transmission of Cumberbatch’s Hamlet prove that Shakespeare still speaks to us. Dr. McWhorter, brush up your Shakespeare and join the global groundlings.

Dominic Green is the author of, among other titles, The Double Life of Dr. Lopez: Spies, Shakespeare and the Plot

to Poison Elizabeth I (2003).