stage Because most theater-goers will not be immediately familiar with the discrepancies between the three printed versions of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet—the first quarto (1603), second quarto (1604) and folio (1623)—Ralph Alan Cohen, executive director of Staunton’s American Shakespeare Center, runs the risk of alienating his audience by staging the arcane and rarely produced first quarto of Shakespeare’s famous play.
 So, Ofelia: “To perform, or not to perform?” That is the question tackled by the American Shakespeare Company’s decision to stage the “bad quarto” at Blackfriars Playhouse. |
Notoriously known among scholars as the “bad” quarto, the first quarto weighs in at roughly 1,400 words lighter than its counterparts, is rife with linguistic missteps, clumsy meter and a variety of infelicities. In another director’s hands, a production of the “bad” quarto might trip ass-over-teakettle into the front row, sparing only a few scholars who might appreciate the historical value of the compromised script. Yet the Actors’ Renaissance Season production manages not only to appeal to a wide audience, it also dares—in a nod toward high postmodernism—to comment playfully on its own construction.
The “play within the play,” for example (in which performers stage a re-enactment of the hideous murder of Hamlet’s father by Hamlet’s uncle) is ingeniously enlivened in this production. Benjamin Curns (in his excellent, if sometimes over the top, turn as “Hamlet”) plays this scene with a manic bounciness that welcomes the audience into the joke and reveals the construction not only of this play, but of plays in general. As Hamlet and the lead player struggle to reconstruct Aeneas’ speech to Dido, one cannot help but read the scene as a self-conscious reflection on the construction of the “bad” quarto itself. The result: a play within a play within a play—and, if you like, within a play.
This scene also underscores the compelling contrast between Prince Hamlet’s crafted wickedness and his rotten uncle Claudius’ casual and unrehearsed evil (portrayed with brilliant ease by James Keegan)—a contrast not always highlighted in traditional productions.
Overall, this rare first quarto production achieves a freshness that ought to be enjoyed by those intimate with the play and those entirely new to it. If the first quarto production sacrifices some of the profundity and existential weight of the more fully realized second quarto and folio, then it certainly makes up for those shortcomings in its playfully sophisticated commentary on the processes of the theater.
