“You would pluck out the heart of my mystery”: The Audience in Hamlet

Summary

When we think about Shakespeare's plays, we tend to think of them as closed worlds, each one a system of actions and interactions among characters involved in plots that begin, develop, and work their way to their conclusions. So our discussions about what happens in these plays are framed in terms that place the issues of the play and the sources of information needed to resolve those issues within the play itself, or in its originating culture—as phenomena “over there” in the world of the play, very much apart from us, who are “over here,” in our own worlds. This style of consideration is of course exacerbated in conversations among literary scholars because for us Shakespeare's plays are texts that appear to us as black marks on the white pages of scholarly editions.

Recent trends in theatrical performance, however, raise questions about whether this separation between the play—“over there” in its own world—and us—the play's readers or observers, in the case of actual performances—might be an artificial one. I’m thinking of the increasing interest among theater professionals in recovering original styles of performance practices for productions of early modern plays. At London's Globe Theater reconstruction, for example, or at the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, Virginia, the “house style” of performance deliberately seeks to recreate— and to incorporate into their productions—the conditions of performance in early modern theatres. For productions at the Blackfriars Theatre in Staunton, for example, they “Do It With the Lights On,” while at the Wanamaker Theatre in London performances take place not just in uniform illumination but in a space litonly by candlelight. Less frequent, but in the same spirit of incorporating original theatrical and cultural practices, is the occasional practice of performing early modern drama in “Original Pronunciation,” using the hypothetical reconstruction of early modern London pronunciation devised by the linguist David Crystal.

One characteristic of productions done in the spirit of adopting “original practices” in contemporary performance has been to incorporate into stage productions an aggressive effort to efface the fourth wall that separates the world of the play in performance and the audience assembled to watch it.