Fat Hamlet

Apr. 2nd, 2007 09:49 pm
steepholm: (Default)
[personal profile] steepholm
I’m not a regular theatre-goer, but I’ve been to quite a few productions of Hamlet over the years. I don’t recall seeing one where the protagonist was noticeably overweight, though. (Kenneth Branagh has the potential but he never quite realises it.) It’s a shame because, the more I read that play, the more convinced I am that Hamlet’s insecurity about his body-image lies at the heart of it.

In the opening act, for example, he’s recently arrived from Wittenberg. He looks distinctly podgy and out of shape, having spent far too much time sitting at his desk reading - with the inevitable accompaniment of wurst and lager - and none at all marching over worthless tracts of land, like Fortinbras (whose name translates as ‘Well-toned Bicep’). And doesn’t he just hate himself for it? ‘Oh that this too too solid flesh would melt!’

Hamlet is out of condition and he knows it. Of course, he makes some desultory attempts to amend the situation, but surely he protests too much. ‘Since he went into France, I have been in continual practise.’ Yeah, right! We were there, Hamlet – remember? Your only ‘practice’ was turning Polonius into a kebab.

His mother isn’t deceived, either. She knows in the last scene that Hamlet is still ‘fat, and scant of breath,’ and even offers him her napkin to wipe away his all-too-obvious sweat. Mothers, eh? Always showing you up.

Crucially, Hamlet projects his disgust outwards as well as inwards. What a downer he has on Danish drinking habits! ‘A custom more honoured in the breach than the observance,’ he says, all niminy-piminy, before rambling on about how a wonderfully noble character (his own, perhaps?) can be brought low by a single bad habit. That degree of prudery is a sure sign of ill-disguised self-loathing. He abuses Ophelia because he cannot believe that anyone would truly love a butterball like him. Surely she must be laughing behind his back.

But the main focus of this disgust is his uncle, with whom he identifies strongly. No, no, it’s nothing to do with Oedipus - it’s because they share the same body type. Yes, the Rhenish-swilling Claudius is clearly the ‘fat king’ in Hamlet’s little homily on worms. When Hamlet looks at Claudius he sees himself in thirty years’ time, and it’s not a pretty sight. Even when he pictures Claudius in bed with his mother, it’s the body-heat and rolls of fat he focuses on (‘the rank sweat of an enseamed bed’), as much as the idea of incest. No wonder he intends to feed the region kites with Claudius’ offal – there’s a lot of it! He wants to hide the evidence by putting him on the slim-fast Prometheus diet.

By contrast, Old Hamlet (like Fortinbras and Laertes, as I see them) was naturally slim and muscular. Hamlet even carries pictures of the two brothers, like the Before and After pictures in a slimming advert – just to torment himself.

Hmm. I wonder if Burton has anything to say about body image and melancholia? There’s a great story in Timothy Bright’s 1586 book on the subject about a man who was morbidly obsessed with the size of his nose, but that’s not quite the same.

Enough of that. But, so, anyway – why have I never seen a porky Hamlet? Or rather, which is the fattest Prince of Denmark ever to grace the stage? And what’s Bacon got to do with it?

(no subject)

Date: 2007-04-03 03:37 am (UTC)
ext_6322: (Hamlet)
From: [identity profile] kalypso-v.livejournal.com
Well, Simon Russell Beale did it a few years ago, and there were a lot of remarks about him being fatter and scanter of breath than most.

(no subject)

Date: 2007-04-03 07:01 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] steepholm.livejournal.com
So he was. I'd heard of him, but never knowingly seen the guy before your comment sent me googling. An interesting clip on the subject from an article:

Ironically, before critics even got a chance to hear Russell Beale utter his first "To be or not to be" on stage, they fretted that the Englishman didn't look the part. He's 40 and, well, a little on the heavy side. As he quipped to one interviewer, their doubts about him could be summed up in true Shakespearean fashion: "Tubby or not tubby?"

"Physically I'm not the traditional type," Russell Beale admits. "My Hamlet is not tall, slim and dark. I do look a bit odd."


He's a little self-deprecating about it there - but maybe he found it to be an advantage after all?

(no subject)

Date: 2007-04-03 09:45 am (UTC)
ext_6322: (Hamlet)
From: [identity profile] kalypso-v.livejournal.com
The Gravedigger also states that he has been in his job for thirty years, having started the day Hamlet was born, and that Yorick has been dead for twenty-three years, so Hamlet appears to have been one of those types who hangs round university for an awfully long time, never quite finishing their degree.

(no subject)

Date: 2007-04-03 08:35 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] shewhomust.livejournal.com
I remember Nicol Williamson as a moderately solid Hamlet: but it was quite a long time ago, and my memory may be unreliable.

Still, if David Warner can play Falstaff...

(no subject)

Date: 2007-04-03 09:50 am (UTC)
ext_6322: (Hamlet)
From: [identity profile] kalypso-v.livejournal.com
He's a big man, but I didn't remember him as particularly fat; still, Hamlet's penchant for black may have helped.

There was also the recent production of Julius Caesar in which the above-mentioned Simon Russell Beale played Cassius; as I recall, they argued that Cassius having a lean and hungry look referred to the way he looked at things rather than the way he looked to other people.

(no subject)

Date: 2007-04-03 09:58 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] steepholm.livejournal.com
Or he could just have a lean (like the tower in Pisa) and a hungry look to go with it. That might have worked, if he'd stooped menacingly about the stage...

(no subject)

Date: 2007-04-05 06:14 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] lilliburlero.livejournal.com
I think Gertrude means he's greasy-looking, as in sweaty. *looks at OED high up on shelf to verify 17th-century meanings of "fat"; decides to go with instinct* So definitely out of shape, but not necessarily porky. I see him as a slim man who hasn't taken care of himself, so he has one of those slack little bellies and an incipient double chin.

(no subject)

Date: 2007-04-05 06:49 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] steepholm.livejournal.com
I'm not better than you about reaching for high shelves, but luckily have access to the OED online! The meaning you've got in mind certainly exists, but all the OED's examples are applied to inanimate objects (e.g. 1611 KJV Marginalia: "Naphtha, which is a certaine kind of fat and chalkie clay"). Not that that's necessarily conclusive.

I now have a mental picture of your slack-bellied, 1.5-chinned Hamlet. It's a plausible reading, to be sure - but I'd really love to see somebody play him as the Fat Owl of the Remove.

(no subject)

Date: 2007-04-26 04:16 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] hafren.livejournal.com
The Welsh Theatre Company did a production a few years back with Wayne Cater, who was the shortest, tubbiest Hamlet you ever did see, and he was great.

When Shakespeare calls falstaff fat, we all think he means tubby, so why shouldn't he mean the same of Hamlet? Allegedly Burbage was on the porky side, too.

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