Reading The Unseen (Offstage) Hamlet by Stephen Ratcliffe
A couple of months ago I was sitting out at the Groin between sets when Professor Steve paddled out.
“Loren, my book came out yesterday.”
“Good news. Now I have to order it. How does it look?”
“Great!” Steve and I have chatted about his book on and off for the past few months. Steve has a PhD in literature from UC Berkeley and is a tenured professor at Mills College specializing in Shakespeare and poetry. He is also an avid surfer who tries to get into the water and the waves everyday. Last year he surfed 355 days and is heading for even more this year. He also writes a short poem everyday and posts it on his blog Temporality. The last two lines give his glimpse of ocean conditions. He told me he was writing a book on Hamlet, a treatise on all the offstage action. For a couple of weeks he was stressed about finishing the manuscript to meet the publisher’s deadline. He obviously made it.
Steve had chosen to go with Counterpath Press instead of a large publishing company. He felt Counterpath was more writer centric and would publish his book in paperback at a reasonable price. The big publisher wanted to produce a hardbound tome for college students.
“Are you going to do any readings?”
“I already have. Yesterday to my class at Mills.”
“How did it go?”
“Good. I had film clips from the Olivier and Branagh films. The movies can show offstage action whereas live performances cannot. Both of those movies do a great job with the ghost of Hamlet’s father with flashbacks to depict the poisoning of Hamlet’s father in the garden.” Steve is referring to the two best movie versions of the play: Laurence Olivier’s 1948 version is considered the epitome performance of Hamlet himself and the 1996 Kenneth Branagh’s production includes every line of the play and is thus four hours long.
“Loren use that link I gave you for the publisher, Counterpath. You can order it through Amazon but they keep a large percentage of the price. The publisher makes more money if you order it directly from them.”
I followed his advice. That evening I ordered Steve’s book from the publisher and in one week it arrived. I went for total Hamlet immersion. The only time I read the play was in college, but I have seen it performed on stage and in movie versions, namely the Mel Gibson and Kenneth Branagh versions. To refresh my memory of the story I rented the Branagh movie from Netflix, watched all four hours of it and then read Steve’s book.
Reading the Unseen is a tribute to words, Shakespeare’s words. The book focuses on action not seen by the audience, events that occur offstage but are described on stage through dialogue. All we have are words, but the genius of Shakespeare is his ability to vividly and movingly depict these events using only words. The play Hamlet has plenty of on stage action: poisonings, sword fights, a play within a play and appearances of ghosts. Shakespeare has to include several offstage events because they are significant to the plot of the story. Steve goes into depth on these speeches. They happen quickly, fifteen to thirty seconds of dialogue, the audience barely notices their importance, but Steve delves into the words, their meanings, sounds and symbols to prove how in such a short space Shakespeare brings these distant events to life. As Steve puts it,
How the words, words, words in these speeches work to make physically absent things imaginatively present; how they show us action we don’t actually see; how what is concealed from us is essential both to the play and to our lives in this world – beyond which lies the ultimate unknown, that ‘undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.’ (Preface pg xii).
Hamlet’s letter to his friend Horatio is our first hint of Hamlet’s transformation from his oscillation between self-doubt and outrage to total resolve for revenge. He was sent to England with his two childhood friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. In the play, Horatio reads Hamlet’s letter, but in the movie versions and in some play productions Hamlet’s voice is used. Via the words of the letter, Hamlet announces that he is returning, describes discovering his uncle’s real intent and has more to say about his companions Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
When he returns Hamlet explains in detail to Horatio and to the audience just what happened on the voyage. Steve points out that within a few lines Shakespeare can compress action that would be time consuming and impossible in act on the stage. In the middle of the night Hamlet crawls into Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s quarters, finds the letter from his uncle that his companions are carrying to the King of England, sneaks back to his cabin and reads it. Hamlet’s uncle requests that the King of England execute Hamlet. Hamlet cleverly replaces the original letter with his own version. From that point on, Hamlet expresses to Horatio that he is determined to destroy his uncle.
The murder of Hamlet’s father as told by his father’s ghost delivers a detailed description of how the murder occurred. From this brief but powerful speech, Steve notes the effectiveness of the rhythm and the repetition of certain sounds and phrases. The speech cleverly shifts from a string of three first person possessive pronouns to second person:
Brief let me be. Sleeping within my orchard,
My custom always of the afternoon,
Upon my secure hour thy uncle stole
With juice of the cursed hebona in a vial,
From simple description “my” to “thy uncle” implies that Hamlet by this blood relationship is involved in this murder and must avenge it.
Steve points out that through words the ghost describes what cannot be acted on stage: the impact of the poison on the internal body. This “leperous distilment” quick as mercury spread through all the natural gates and alleys of the body where it immediately coagulated like milk curds causing a loathsome crust. Shakespeare uses the word “bark,” at first I thought the passage meant to bark like a dog. No, the term is used to describe the power of the poison. Here bark is a verb meaning to form the bark of a tree (i.e. “to bark”). What nasty stuff. This poison causes one’s insides to coagulate like the bark of a tree.
Gertrude’s description of Ophelia’s death does not confirm whether Ophelia committed suicide or accidentally fell into the river and drowned. Ophelia, daughter of the king’s consul, Polonius, sister of Laertes and object of Hamlet’s love, was driven to despair and insanity. Gertrude, the queen and Hamlet’s mother, announces the death of Ophelia, an offstage event. Fourteen lines delivered in fifteen seconds, Steve dissects this passage carefully, point by point, to prove that Shakespeare intentionally obscures whether the death was an accident or a suicide. In her insanity, Ophelia had taken up the making of garlands. She was trying to hang one on a limb of a willow tree that grew at an angle over a stream. The branch broke; Ophelia fell, at first her shirt held her afloat until soaked with water it pulled her down. Gertrude is ambivalent, what happened to Ophelia is doubtful, did she jump or did she fall? Gertrude gives details that only an eyewitness would know unless the tale was fabricated. Did Gertrude see Ophelia fall? Did someone else see it and report it to Gertrude? And if someone witnessed the event why did they not attempt to rescue Ophelia? The play does not answer these questions. As Steve points out this is another incident of the doubt and ambiguity that runs through out the play.
The last chapter is about Shakespeare himself. Like the offstage action of Hamlet where all we have are words, little is known about the Shakespeare, his life, his friends, his loves and his personal events; all we have are the words that he wrote. But from the beauty of his works, he was a true genius.
I hope I have whetted your appetite. May I suggest an immersion in Hamlet? Rent the Branagh movie, watch it, yes all four hours of it, then read Steve’s book noting all the important offstage events and then watch the Branagh movie a second time. I can guarantee that your attention will perk up and you will focus and clearly hear all the passages that Steve describes and you will enjoy their significance to the story.
Steve, thanks for the book, I enjoyed it. Four STARS out of five on the Lorenzo Scale of Excellence.
To order Steve’s book:
Reading the Unseen: (Offstage) Hamlet by Stephen Ratcliffe, (Denver: Counterpath Press, 2010).
Counterpath Press
Check out Steve’s daily poems blog
Temporality
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