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As one biographer claims of Henry Irving, "His career not only spanned the whole history of the Victorian theatre, but it was the Victorian theatre." Born John Henry Brodbibb in 188, Irving was the son of devoutly Methodist parents in fact, after he became an actor, which was not considered a respectable profession, his mother neither spoke to him nor saw him again. At age 1, his father, a traveling salesman, took him to a performance of Hamlet and from that moment on, Henry Irving was determined to become an actor. Irving performed in almost every popular play. As Jeffrey Richards writes, "He made no distinction between high and low brow, alternating happily between Shakespeare and popular melodramas, showing all of them equal respect." He not only performed to audiences in the Lyceum the theatre he was ultimately to manage--but also toured extensively, and is credited with, by Oscar Wilde among others, establishing a truly national theatrical taste. He is associated with Ellen Terry, his leading lady as well as business and most likely private partner She was the most famous actress of the period, who, at one point, played Ophelia to Irving's Hamlet. (Gordon Craig's mother).
Before Irving (same era), Charles Fechter (in London) and Edwin Booth (of the famous Booth family, which included John Wilkes) (in London and America) were the most famous of the actors playing Hamlet. Irving was taking a risk in playing Hamlet; he was famous but not yet considered distinguished enough to be a true Shakespearian actor. In addition, there was a saying in the theatre world, "Shakespeare spells ruin." This association of Shakespeare with ruin came partly because a few theatres had attempted to produce Shakespeare with extremely costly spectacular effects common to the Victorian melodrama, without achieving the same popular success. Hamlet, however, firmly established Irving as the generation's most successful actor, just as it established the Lyceum. Hamlet opened on October 1, 1874 and ran for an unprecedented 00 consecutive performances. Irving later revived Hamlet with Ellen Terry as Ophelia in 1878 and the play remained in his repertoire until 1885. Following Irving's production of the play, Hamlet became a cult; it was unfashionable not to have seen Irving as Hamlet.
At this point, Hamlet performances had become completely predictable and ritualistic; audiences knew the "points" the moments in which the actor made some sort of sensational revelation or strike. Edmund Kean was such a master of "points" that Coleridge described watching him act like reading Shakespeare "by flashes of lightning." The first changes Irving made were to the set. Irving chose a more naturalistic set; he eliminated the spectacular effects which characterized the Victorian theatre and which had come to dominate productions of Shakespeare. This abandonment of spectacle is appropriate for Irving's interpretation of Hamlet; it is also a result of his paltry 100 pound budget for the production. Irving's costume itself was simpler than the conventional Victorian Hamlet; as Clement Scott drama critic for the Daily Telegraph wrote, Irving presented "a tall, imposing figure, so well-dressed that nothing distracts the eye from the wonderful face."
Eschewing the heroics and histrionics of conventional productions, Irving sought to portray the Hamlet that William Hazlitt had called for in his essay on the character of Hamlet, a sensitive, complex Hamlet "thinking aloud." He therefore abandoned many of the usual dramatic "points," gestures, and even tones some audience members complained of not being able to hear Irving at certain moments because he was not using conventional methods of voice projection. This Hamlet was, "as much of the gentleman and scholar as possible, and 'as little of the actor.' In his contemporary essay "Irving as Hamlet," Edward Russell identified "two remarkably contrasted qualities" in Irving's Hamlet, "a sort of domestic sensibility of the calamities and perplexities by which Hamlet is inundated, and a wild poetry of aspect and speech."Order custom research paper on Henry Irving's Hamlet
Irving's Hamlet was a more complex creature than the conventional 1th century Hamlet. Other Victorian dramatic companies had cut those scenes which complicated the nineteenth century favored view of Hamlet as a good, kind, and possibly mad prince. Irving allowed for a more complicated interpretation, which showed the protagonist as depressed and frenzied, loving and vengeful. This interpretation allowed for an interiority which the "point by point" method of acting did not. Russell summed up Irving's interpretation of the prince as "He is what Hamlet was." Audiences had never viewed a human Hamlet. Irving's interest in playing Hamlet as naturally as possible extended to even minor details. For example, adding to the "domesticity" which Russell noted, Irving left one scene with a torch, and then entered the next scene (the closet scene) with a bedroom lamp. Irving had therefore taken into consideration the fact that in a real castle in real life, Hamlet would have carried the torch through the corridor, lit the bedroom lamp with it, and put out the torch. Russell, who was a frequent critic of Irving as an actor, closed his essay in writing, "To Irving belongs the merit of snatching with a hand feverish, perhaps, but sure graces which were not, and can hardly become, in a stage sense, traditional. He has made Hamlet much more, and something more ethereal, than a type of feeble doubt, of tragic struggle, or even of fine philosophy. The immortality of his Hamlet is immortal youth, immortal enthusiasm, immortal tenderness, immortal nature."
In fact, as Scott wrote, "So subtle is the actor's art, so intense is his application, and so daring his disregard of conventionality, that the first act ends with disappointment." The spectators were silent for the first two acts which greatly worried Irving until they gradually began to revise their own form of spectatorship by accepting Irving's subtler and more complex portrayal. Hamlet's first scene with Ophelia marked the turning-point in audience reception; Austin Brereton records that the effect of this scene was "electric."
One of the most successful scenes, according to Scott, was the "play" scene. Here, with his signature electric, almost hysterical energy, Irving, as Hamlet the actor, used the conventional techniques he had abandoned in his portrayal of Hamlet the scholar. At the end of this play within a play, Irving flung himself onto the king's throne his rightful place a moment which critics were to refer to as an act of genius on Irving's part.
While Irving cut some major scenes from his production, the play still ran over the typical length of the Victorian popular play. As a sign of his success, however, the audience of the first showing which took place on a Sunday night missed the last orders at the pub. Scott wrote, "It may be that the intellectual manager will yet have to see how far 'Hamlet' can be curtailed to suit this luxurious and selfish age. There are not many audiences which will relinquish their beer for the sake of art. This was a very special occasion." What came to be called "Hamlet fever" lasted until the two-hundreth showing of the play.
Irving not only performed Hamlet the character differently, but he also made some interpretative choices that proved controversial. In fact, he later published essays on how his textual interpretation played out in his performance and even published his own edition of Shakespeare's plays. One of the great debates of the day which seems strange now was whether Hamlet was feigning madness or was actually mad. In fact, this question of Hamlet's madness was the only interpretative issue given space forty-one small print pages, in fact-- in the Variorium edition of 1877. Irving interpreted Hamlet as a sane man who is overly sensitive and susceptible to hysteria.
Irving also emphasized the Ophelia-Hamlet relationship more than many had before and have since. In fact, he was accused by one hostile critic of turning Hamlet into a "love poem," and the staging sketches do suggest that actors used poses similar to conventional staging of Romeo and Juliet. Irving always linked his famous moments of hysterical excitement with Hamlet's love for Ophelia.
Irving did cut out the first four scenes of Act IV, thus basically eliminating the England subplot. This cut was probably motivated by a need to keep the play short enough for Victorian audiences.
Irving made a few radical changes in the final scene of the play. The play ended mid-way through Hamlet's final textual speech, with Irving declaring "O, I die Horatio!/ The potent poison quite o'ercrows my spirit./ The rest is silence." In the background, an oboe softly played the Ghost music, reminding the audience that Hamlet had fulfilled the Ghost's command, and suggesting that the Ghost had acted as a sort of instrument of Providence. In addition, the only onstage witnesses to Hamlet's death were Horatio and Osric. The court ladies were gathered around Gertrude's body, while the men of the court had gathered around Claudius, their backs facing Hamlet and the audience. This unusual staging imagines Hamlet as isolated even in death and depicts his tragedy as a private one even though it takes place in the public space of the court. Horatio and Hamlet's platonic love serves as the final image, demonstrating Irving's emphasis on love throughout the play mostly in the Horatio-Hamlet, and Hamlet-Ophelia relationships.
Two changes in Irving's production generated a particular amount of public notice. Irving chose these two changes to write about in his "An Actor's Notes on Shakespeare." First, he did not use miniatures of the king and Hamlet's father in the closet scene with Gertrude. As Irving wrote in his "Notes on Shakespeare," using actual pictures in this scene had been a stage convention since the Restoration. At first, Hamlet would take out two medallion size miniatures; later production companies used tapestries or full-length portraits. Irving interpreted Hamlet's comparison between his father and Claudius as mental rather than literal, but, Irving wrote, audiences could also imagine that portraits hung on the invisible "fourth wall" the front of the stage.
More importantly, Irving restored Hamlet's debate with himself on whether or not to kill Claudius as the king is Hamlet believes praying. This scene demonstrates a cruelty, or at least the ability to commit violence, which other nineteenth century productions had avoided.
This production was radical for its time; nonetheless it was not actually what we would call pure naturalistic or realistic drama. It is, ultimately, still a "nicer" version of Hamlet with a Victorian audience in mind. Irving believed that "to merely reproduce things vile and squalid and mean is a debasement of Art." Ellen Terry romanticized Ophelia's madness; Ophelia's bawdy songs were cut, along with other risque jokes throughout the play. Jeffrey Richards writes, "In many ways Irving was a revolutionary figure, but his innovations became so rapidly institutionalized that this has often been forgotten."
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