‘Hid indeed within the centre’: The Hall/Finney Hamlet

Summary

When Peter Hall assumed the directorship of Stratford’s Memorial Theatre and founded The Royal Shakespeare Company in 1960 he established a bold new direction in the modern staging of Shakespeare. Hall came to Stratford committed to building a permanent ensemble of actors who, through intense training and discipline, could discover a contemporary approach to Shakespeare’s rhetoric. As he explained in his 1964 essay, ‘Shakespeare and the Modern Director’, the core problem centred on Shakespeare’s language and modern assumptions about meaning:

Shakespeare’s language and his form are, of course, foreign to us. Modern actors naturally distrust words. They know them as grey soiled things and, as any politician will tell you, rhetoric is now suspect. Actors also (in a time when the artist’s freedom of self-expression is canonised) resent the disciplines of blank verse or alliterative prose. Techniques have, therefore, to be learnt and developed until Shakespeare’s form is a discipline which supports rather than denies self-expression.