The Dark Prince

First level came with the Hamlet production letter—marinating in the big soliloquy’s over and over again until a lucid enough vision of the play emerged into mind. To justify my production, I had been looking for lines that really outlined the suffering of life that would go along with my production’s setting—a miserable colony, Roanoke to be specific, in the, so to speak, “undiscover’d country from whose bourn / no traveler returns” (1.3.80-81).  I brought up a lot of lines from the soliloquy that originated the abovementioned phrase in my paper, and, as horrifically sentimental as it sounds, the language kept on rolling around my skull with their emotional weight as I threw the words onto paper: “thus conscience does make cowards of us all,” “for who would bear the whips and scorns of time,” and especially “for in that sleep of death what dreams may come / when we have shuffled off this mortal coil.”

            But then came memorizing those very same lines for the performance—the second level, as it were. Not only stringing the words together in proper order: my mind would subconsciously substitute in synonyms for certain words or remove words entirely for the sake of what felt right to me instead of sticking to the text, and fixing those errors made me wholly aware of the powerful quality to certain word choice in the “to be or not to be” soliloquy. Why one should say “outrageous fortune” instead of “outrageous misfortune,” or “the thousand natural shocks” instead of just “the thousand shocks;” this discipline forced me to come to terms with the true injustices and emotions dealt with in the soliloquy.

            Madness and personality came after memorization. What movements felt natural: should Hamlet be calmly sipping a glass of scotch as he laments the scorns of time, or should he be absolutely freaking out? To be candid, I found myself constantly being drawn back to that awesome interrogation scene from the “The Dark Knight:” a wholly dynamic scene that heavily relies on emotional volatility, a characteristic that I think works especially well with the hyper intelligent and possibly hyper mad character of Hamlet—thus the sweeps from calmness to craziness that I hopefully conveyed in my performance yesterday. Essentially, in trying to evolve from a prosaic delivery of the text into the emotions and enterprises of great pitch and moment that define a character, I grew into a third-derivative appreciation for Shakespeare—the final link to realizing how these characters were written for viewers, not necessarily readers, in the diverse emotions they lend themselves too. Truly all molds of emotive humanity—I tested out a lot of different performance styles for this scene before settling on “calm-angry-crazy,” everything from the aforementioned “wistfully-drunk-reflective” to “charitably-whimsical-casual.” And though I had to make a choice in the end, so many different styles (and hundreds of styles more, I am sure) felt right in their delivery—in other words, I came to the daunting realization that the themes of these plays, or at least the theme of pointless mortality in Hamlet, fit right into the folds of all styles of humanity, even mine. And that will keep me coming back for more.