Theater: Prince of Thought

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Hamlet. Richard Burton plays Hamlet as Hamlet would like to have been. He may be self-critical, but he is never self-doubting. He is whole of soul, single of mind, undivided of purpose. If the text will not permit him to sweep to his revenge, there is never any question that he is speeding towards it with unblunted zeal. Burton's Hamlet is master of the stage, master of Elsinore, and master of himself. And there's the rub. A masterful Hamlet is more heroic than tragic, and can scarcely evoke the torment of a man who is to be overmastered by fortune and by fate.

If life is a tragedy to those who feel and a comedy to those who think, it may be startling but not exaggerated to say that Burton's Hamlet is imbued more with the spirit of comedy than with the spirit of tragedy. This is no Melancholy Dane. His ever-ready wit is neither a cloak for nor a release from melancholy. Burton never plays a line for a laugh, but he is cat-and-mouse playful, and his nerve ends seem to tingle with suppressed laughter rather than secret tears.

Burton and Director John Gielgud have made intelligence the touchstone of the play. This is a thinking man's Hamlet, the kind G. B. Shaw might have written, and it is cool, clever, lucid, fresh, contemporary and vivid, but seldom emotionally affecting. What Burton does best is to turn sensibility into sense, modulate a phrase so that it rings with present meaning rather than bygone eloquence. He has put his passion into Hamlet's language rather than his character. He banishes the staling curse of familiarity from the soliloquies. "To be or not to be" can be the desperate verbal dirge of a man who is in mourning for his life and a bare bodkin's distance from committing suicide. Burton gives it freshness with a limpid speculative reading, contemplating the idea of suicide the way a man might hold a glass of red Burgundy up to the light to savor its color.

The problems of this Hamlet are solved like mathematical equations. For Burton, Hamlet's madness is a tactic and he goes to great lengths to show that this Hamlet is play-acting madness rather than edging neurasthenically close to it. Spying out the King and Polonius eavesdropping on his meeting with Ophelia, he tongue-lashes her, not with the cruelty of a distraught lover but with the put-on harshness of a strategist of palace politics who sees her as the pawn of his enemies. He upbraids his mother for failing her better self and not for failing his Oedipal needs. This Hamlet takes every test as it comes and proves more than equal to it. As for killing the king, that is merely unfinished business to Burton's Hamlet and not a moral dilemma or a psychological block.

The gain in clarity and credibility is paid for by making most of Hamlet's conflicts external. He becomes a man with a job to do, rather than a mind and heart to keep from breaking. If Shakespeare's tragic prince duels with himself and the universe, Burton's Hamlet duels mainly with Laertes.