OVERVIEW

Thank you for inviting me to talk about our radical, new, and experimental production of Hamlet. It is titled Hamlet’s Apocalypse and opens this Sunday 7 November,  for only three nights, and there will be a student discount ticket, of $12 if you show an ID. As you know, what we are putting on stage is the evidence that shows that Hamlet is a comic parody of the Book of Revelation. In this talk I will begin by looking at the background context. Then I will look at some structural comparisons between these two literary works –from the perspective of literary criticism. Then thirdly I will address the issue of theatrical performance and what it means to try and perform the underlying allegorical meaning. And in conclusion I will turn to the broader implications, if it turns out that Hamlet is actually a black parody of some of the most sacred Christian beliefs.

1. CONTEXT

The Book of Revelation is the last book of the Christian Bible. It was created in part as a fictionalization of the Roman-Jewish war, which is why the armies assemble at Har-Megiddo (Rev 16;16,) sometimes translated Armageddon, where Titus and Vespasian assembled their troops before destroying Jerusalem. Jerusalem is shown as the whore of Babylon who has given herself over to the Romans—who are represented by a seven headed beast whose heads can be identified with the seven hills of Rome and the Caesars. The beast can also be identified primarily with Vespasian Caesar. There is a second beast who makes people worship the first beast and make images of it—and this is probably Titus implementing the worship of his father the divine Vespasian. Onto all this is grafted a story about the Woman Crowned with the Sun (a version of Mary), the Lamb Jesus, the king who escapes from the Pit, and the Divine Ruler who rules with a rod of iron. The most notable feature of the Book of Revelation is its catalogues of sevens: seven angels, seven trumpets, seven letters, seven vials, seven plagues etc.

This narrative was used by the church around the year 1600—as it is used by the Religious Right today—as an instrument of power, creating fear that Doomsday was about to come and bring about the End of the World. So this narrative was prevalent in Shakespearean times as a sacred narrative which upheld the church and the State.  Around a dozen of the plays concern apocalyptic themes. But this could not be expressed directly, because it was illegal to bring issues of religion onto the stage. It had to be done covertly. This brings us to the issue of literary style.

In Elizabethan literary theory it was normative that to write about anything risky you had to use allegory—in which you said one thing explicitly but it was a semblance of false seeming that stood for something else.  You created a deceptive surface for everyone to consume but those who were wise would “digest the allegory” (Harrington) underneath, as the expression went.  Pastorals, in particular, were especially known as a pleasant surface that concealed much darker material underneath. So well known works of literature like Spenser’s Fairie Queen used allegory. But so did the theater. The best known writer to use it was John Lyly. But there were at least half a dozen others.  Old fashioned plays actually told people they were using an allegory. Thus in Dekker’s Old Fortunatus (1598) Fortune enters followed by nymphs carrying her symbol of a globe and a wheel. In Wilson’s The Three Lords and Ladies of London (1588) Pride appears with a shield on which there is an impressa of a peacock.

But  there was another trend to conceal allegories—as writers did in Court pageants and as Ben Jonson did. Attempts to find the allegory or moral of plays were so common that Jonson complained (in the introduction to Volpone) about those who kept bothering him by announcing they had had found the meaning of his writing and “claim to have a key for the deciphering”. Mostly the true meaning was, as Jonson scathingly put it “steps beyond their little, or (let me not wrong them) no braine at all”.

So there is no reason why there should not be allegories in Shakespeare, including Hamlet. The only problem is that the last time it was fashionable to look for them, in the 1930s, scholars could not make sense of the 3,000 religious terms in the plays, because they didn’t form any allegory that was consistent with Christian doctrine. And they still don’t. Because they are not Christian. They are a parody of Christian doctrine and Hamlet is one of the simplest examples.

2. PLAY ANALYSIS

So turning now to the literary research and the comparative study of the play, research by various scholars, most notably Linda K. Hoff, which I have expanded on, suggests that both the structure of Hamlet and its main characters mirror those in Revelation.

(a) Structure of Hamlet

Perhaps the most startling thing about Hamlet is that it features a similar catalogue of sevens to the Book of Revelation. Revelation has seven trumpet blasts, so does Hamlet. Revelation has seven letters, so does Hamlet. Revelation has seven angels. Similarly Hamlet has seven mentions of angels. Then Hamlet goes on and creates its own catalogue of seven songs and seven soliloquies , even maybe the 7 vials corresponding again to Revelation

• 7 trumpets The trumpet blasts are 1,2,1, 1,2,128; 1,4,7; 2,2,364; 3,2,89; 3,2,133; 5,1,220.
• 7 Angels appear in Hamlet “So lust, though to a radiant angel linked”,“like an angel, in apprehension how like a god”,“Of habits devil, is angel yet in this”,“A ministering angel shall my sister“,“Art more engaged! Help, angels! Make assay”,“And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!”,“angels and ministers of grace defend us!”
• 7 Letters Claudius’ letter to England, Norway’s letter to Claudius delivered by Voltemand, and Hamlet’s five letters to Ophelia, Horatio (4.6.8-28),Gertrude (4,7.36), Claudius (4.6.20 and 4.7.36-46) and to the King of England (5.2.31-35).

(b) Characters in Hamlet

But it is not only aspects of the structure of the play that follow Revelation. The characters do as well. To give you a simple example, instead of the Ruler with a rod of iron from the Book of Revelation we get the fop Osric, whose name in old English means the Rule of God, but who is a complete dandy, a parody.

The main characters are divided into two different families, one good and the other evil. Lets look, first, at the forces of Christianity who form the first Triad. This is the family of Polonius. The Holy Family.

• Ophelia, is both an allegory for the Virgin Mary and also for Mary’s equivalent in the Book of Revelation, the Woman crowned with the sun. This is why Hamlet addresses her in his letter as a ‘celestial’ heavenly idol while the name Ophelia is the Greek for Mary’s property of ‘succour’.

• Laertes, is the resurrected Christ who leaps out of the grave. The reason why this young man bears the otherwise inappropriate name of an elder is presumably that he is rejuvenated, just as the old Laertes was in Homer by Athena. He is acclaimed by the rabble as their “lord”, and declares that he will stretch out his arms like the “kind life-rendering pelican” feeding people with his blood– a well-known Christ symbol.

• Polonius, is the “father of good news” (2,2,42), the term “good news” being the literal meaning of the word “gospel”. As the allegorical father of the Virgin Mary and of Christ, he is presumably God the Father. He dies by being stabbed through a curtain, in an odd parallel to the account in the Talmud of how Titus Caesar stabbed the curtain in the Jerusalem Temple, and thought he had killed the god of the Jews.

The second Triad, the Unholy Family, is the Danish family who represent the forces of evil, the forces of Anti-Christ. Cherrell Guilfoyle has suggested that the setting of the play in Denmark indicated that this second Triad represent the forces of Anti-Christ.[i] The Danish for Denmark is ‘Danmark’, and the Danes were accordingly sometimes believed to be the offspring of the tribe of Dan, described in the Bible as a serpent, and whose tribe church theologians expected to give birth to the Anti-Christ. This second Triad family includes:

• Old Hamlet, is in Hell at the beginning of the play because he is specifically identified with Hyperion. Hyperion was the Greek god of light who was similar to Apollo—the god of the sun, fire and plagues—who was imprisoned in the pit Tartarus. His equivalent in the Book of Revelation is Apollyon, the destroyer—who was the king of Hell—and who escapes from the pit. The play clearly associates him with the devil.

• Gertrude, who at the end holds the poisoned chalice containing a pearl, represents the Whore of Babylon, adorned with gold and pearls, who holds a chalice filled with abominations and will be made to drink a “double draught” of it (Rev. 18:6). Dressed in scarlet and purple, the Whore was sometimes regarded as an allegory for the church.

• Claudius, is the “serpent” who stung Old Hamlet, and the Hyrcanian beast (the tiger), who is called an “adulterate beast”. He represents the Beast from the Apocalypse which has the body of a leopard, heads like a serpent, and on whom the Whore rides. The heads are associated with the seven Caesars and sometimes with the seven hills of Rome—- and Claudius is of course the name of the Julio-Claudian dynasty of Caesars.

Finally what about Prince Hamlet? Hamlet’s identity as Lucifer son of the Devil, is further supported when he imagines wearing Provincial roses on his shoes, which were used by stage actors to indicate a cloven foot, a well-known signifier of the devil. He also uses expressions used by the Vice or  junior comic devil on the English stage.

He also represents the Anti-Christ. He comes back from the sea like Beast from the Sea who was thought to be the Anti-Christ. This is confirmed when he is associated with events in the life of the Emperor Nero who was another early Anti-Christ figure (who also killed Claudius). Finally he wears black and comes from Wittenberg, and one of the dates in the play is the day before Martin Luther nailed up the 95 theses to start the Reformation, all of which suggests that Hamlet has characteristics of Luther, who Catholics regarded as the Anti-Christ.

(c ) Parodic plot

So what about the plot? There is actually an underlying allegorical plot if you put it all together.  In Revelation the woman crowned with the sun, and the Christ figure win, and the whore and the beasts are defeated. But here everyone is killed. Here Hamlet as the Anti-Christ kills Laertes who is the Christ figure. In this play the forces opposed to Christianity win, and everyone dies—including Ophelia whose life is based partly on the life of the Virgin Mary except when she ascends to heaven to become the woman crowned with the sun, she falls into the water and dies. So what does it mean to show this allegory in production? I am going to take a couple of detailed examples.

3. HOW CAN THIS BE SHOWN IN PRODUCTION?

Obviously to show any of this in production means using experimental and meta-theatrical techniques—-and non traditional approaches. To show this in production we face several huge problems. Firstly, the Decline in literacy and in religious knowledge in the population. For example the Pew Religious Knowledge survey showed that under half the US population know that Martin Luther started the Reformation. That is a problem if you want to show that Hamlet is in part an allegory for Luther.

The second problem is Realism—which was unknown on the Elizabethan stage, which was highly meta-theatrical. Women were played by boys, you could see across the stage to the audience the other side, people spoke in verse, the actors told you they were actors and used direct address to breach the fourth wall showing that this was not a slice of life.  Yet many people today expect that a production of Shakespeare should be realistic, but that is based on anachronistic modern conventions—which actually get in the way of understanding the play, since these characters were created as literary figures and are not real people.

(And yes I know that is contrary to what people get taught in acting school. But what you get taught in acting school just doesn’t help you to play Hamlet and to reveal his three different identities as different kinds of Anti-Christ as well as an identity as Helios the sun god, whose title was the Mousekiller.)

The third problem is our Entertainment culture and its superficiality. Most audiences today expect to go to a play to be entertained and just to see the surface of the play. We have to attract an audience that wants to see our productions because they are interesting, because they will learn to think differently. Unlike in Elizabethan London, today it is a disadvantage to do productions that are intellectually challenging.

And the fourth problem is people’s Expectations about Shakespeare. Many people have in their heads the model of the New Criticism, that the text is a sort of blueprint for performance that should be precisely reproduced on-stage. This is an oppressive, dominant and patriarchal assumption about how the text is privileged and how it deserves to be treated. As you can gather that is an assumption I do not share. Firstly this assumption assumes that all that matters is the surface of the verse, and not what lies underneath it. That is not correct. Secondly there is in any case no such thing as a definitive text. The 1603 and 1605 Quartos are different, and the Folio is different again. Each of the hundreds of surviving Folios is even different from each other. Every modern edition is different, and involves editors constructing what they think the text should be, and what other materials it should be related to inter-textually, what extracts from the sources, what photos etc. Worst of all are the people who support ‘original practices’ and think that by having the actors’ trousers woven on 17^th century looms or making them wear Elizabethan underwear it makes the performance authentic. It doesn’t. They are wrong. It makes a performance a museum piece. It does not convey the meaning of the play.

What makes a performance authentic in its outcomes is if what happens on stage—regardless of what that stage action is—helps an audience to deconstruct something of the same meanings that the author intended in writing it. And in this case that means enabling an audience to understand the inter-textual relationship to the Book of Revelation. So in my approach to Shakespearean dramaturgy, meaning and substance is more important than form. So if we have to cut and rearrange the play and insert all sorts of metatheatrical devices to make that meaning visible….then that is fine.

So the first thing we did was cut the play to highlight all the pieces where the allegorical action was most obvious. Then we created a prelude in which Hamlet is approached by a troop of actors who want to perform the play Hamlet. Each actor has their own ideas which all illustrate different correspondences to Revelation. Then all of them are hung up on the wall and ticked off as they are covered. Then the play proper starts with the dumbshows and play-within-the-play. This is how some of the characters—who appear typologically in each of these as well as the main play—get different attributes of their identity. From then on we run straight through the main elements of the play. However as people put on costumes, various wardrobe signs indicate what character that belongs to. We also bring 18 books on-stage so whenever someone makes an important allusion it can be visibly read out of the inter-text that is being referred to.

So let me just give two examples about how we try and bring out the allegories, one about the religious allegory and one about the parallel astronomical allegory.

We bring in Hamlet’s letter on stage in the form of a large Fedex envelope so it is very clear that Ophelia is addressed as the Virgin Mary—as a celestial idol– and we even have Gertrude comment on it. Work by Chris Hassel has shown that the way that Ophelia is interrupted while sewing and reading is a parody of the annunciation to the Virgin Mary.[ii] The references to pregnancy and maggots in a dead dog are allusions to medieval theology about how Mary conceived and remained a virgin. Ophelia’s death singing lauds and with a coronet is a parody of the ‘Assumption of Mary’ into heaven to be crowned. So when Ophelia is interrupted by Hamlet his clothing all disordered, she is like the Virgin Mary who was interrupted by the Archangel Gabriel, and a ray of sunlight shining on her stomach allowed her to conceive the Christ. But here Ophelia is interrupted by Hamlet who is both the Archangel Lucifer, the Anti-Christ and also Helios the sun god, who bends the light of his eyes upon her. So she conceives the son of a devil. Which is why later in her scene with all the herbs—recognized in scholarship to be used for abortion recipes—she is aborting the baby. So  in our production we are going to show this, Ophelia will get pregnant when Hamlet shines the light of his eyes on her, and we will bring on the various Herbals showing that the herbs are abortive herbs.

My second example is the astronomical allegory that also exists in Hamlet which has been identified by Peter Usher. The characters are not only from the Book of Revelation, they are also astronomical. As Helios, Hamlet is the sun, Ophelia (whose name suggests she is opposite to Helios) is the moon “the moist star”. Claudius is the Earth, the world, who is named after Claudius Ptolemy and is surrounded by ten thousand stars that revolve around him. The struggle goes on between Claudius’ geo-centric model of the solar system, which Hamlet wants to replace by a helio-centric model. So, for instance, at the point when Gertrude says that Hamlet is being retrograde in wanting to go back to Wittenberg, this is a particular astronomical term referring to the backwards movement of the sun. So we will illustrate this with movement  and a struggle between Claudius and Hamlet in which Hamlet actually starts walking backwards. And Ophelia’s astronomical identity as the moon will be illustrated simply by her wearing a cardboard crescent moon. For the last few weeks we have been using our Facebook page to familiarize some of our potential audience with these ideas—for instance by showing a video snippet extract from rehearsal of the struggle between Hamlet and Claudius, and putting up Durer’s illustration of the Virgin Mary seated on the crescent Moon, and so on.

4. IMPLICATIONS

What the Dark Lady Players are trying to do is create an allegorical theater, in which what happens on stage highlights the underlying meanings in the text.  We are doing it on a tiny budget with no production values and someone else’s lighting, but we are doing it as a proof of concept of a new understanding of the play.

The full text of Hamlet, without any breaks would take four and a half hours to read and could only have been performed at a university (where it was possible to have performances between four and five hours.[iii] The London stage would have had a short version like the 1603 Quarto that only took a couple of hours. Our version is about 90 minutes because that is what most Off Off Broadway audiences want. Of course what we are doing could never have been shown on the Renaissance stage—everyone would have been killed by the Secret Service. Nonetheless, these are the meanings that an intelligent man like Gabriel Harvey probably meant when he wrote cryptically that Hamlet contained much of interest to the “wiser sort”.

This religious parody also raises very significant questions of why a Catholic actor like William Shakespeare would create such a literary play—which had limited performance and revenue opportunities since it could only be performed at Oxford and Cambridge —and which challenged everything that any Christian would believe. What is  achieved by depicting  this covert version of Apocalypse in which there is no immortality and only death and destruction? Who would take the appalling risks to write such a thing that could not even be performed on the London stage? The answers to these questions will change everything you thought you knew about Shakespeare. So come, join us this Sunday, Monday or Tuesday  for Hamlet’s Apocalypse.

[ii] Chris Hassel, ‘Painted Women: Annunciation Motifs in Hamlet.’ Comparative Drama, 32, (1998): 47-84.

Contact: John Hudson

Tel: (212) 769 9537, (347) 334 0826

Email: JohnHudson41@gmail.com

11/7/2010 THE WORLD’S FIRST ALLEGORICAL PRODUCTION OF HAMLET

The Dark Lady Players, the world’s only allegorical Shakespeare company, presents Hamlet’s Apocalypse, a black comedy showing that Hamlet is a comic Jewish parody of the Book of Revelation (the last book of the Christian Bible which predicts the coming of Doomsday). Direction is by Jenny Greeman, whose production of Screenplay won the ‘Outstanding Production Award’ at the 2010 Midtown International Theater Festival. This production opens on 7 November for three nights at 8pm at Manhattan Theatre Source, 177 MacDougal Street, New York NY 10011. Tickets $18, reservations 866-811-4111.

This allegorical meta-theatrical production by the Dark Lady Players takes place on Doomsday. Against the background of the seven great trumpet blasts in the script, which echo the seven trumpets of the Book of Revelation, all the characters appear as religious parodies. The Anti-Christ (Hamlet) and son of the Devil (King Hamlet) kills Christ (Laertes) and God the Father (Polonius). The Virgin Mary (Ophelia) tries to help by rising into heaven as the Woman Crowned with the Sun, but falls into the water and drowns. Hamlet then kills his own family—from the tribe of Dan(mark), the tribe of the Anti-Christ–namely the Whore of Babylon (Gertrude) and the Seven Headed Beast of the Apocalypse (Claudius) before dying himself. Artistic Director John Hudson is speaking about the production at CUNY/City College, at 3.30 on November 4^th at Simon H. Rifkind Center, CUNY, City College of New York, 138 Convent Avenue, New York 10031.

Founded in 2006, The Dark Lady Players perform the underlying allegories in the Shakespearean plays, showing that they are comic religious satires. This raises a profound question about how such parodies could have got into the plays, which leads to the latest authorship theory, that a major author of the plays was the Dark Lady, the Jewish experimental poet Amelia Bassano Lanier.  In response to this finding, the Shakespearean Authorship Trust in the UK in 2007 listed Lanier as one of the leading authorship candidates. In 2009 The Oxfordian, the leading journal on authorship studies, published ‘Amelia Bassano Lanier; A New Paradigm’ by John Hudson, making her one of the top four likely authorship candidates.

Dramaturgy is by John Hudson, the Artistic Director and Founder of the Dark Lady Players. He has an M.A. in Shakespeare and Theatre from the Shakespeare Institute of the University of Birmingham, the world’s leading center for Shakespearean scholarship.  His articles on the Dark Lady Players’ productions of Midsummer Night’s Dream and of Shakespeare’s parodies of the Virgin Mary are published in the Birmingham Journal of Language and Literature.  For this production Hudson has expanded upon original scholarship by Chris Hassel in his article on Ophelia being interrupted by Hamlet as a parody of the Annunciation to Mary, and the book by Linda K. Hoff titled Hamlet’s Choice; A Reformation Allegory, which was described in the South Atlantic Review as showing that “standard readings of Hamlet may have missed the mark…its central meaning has….been hidden to intelligent readers for centuries”.

Cast members Alexandra-Cohen Spiegler (Hamlet), Mimi Hooper (Ophelia) and Lindsay Tanner (Old Hamlet/Laertes) graduated in Shakespearean acting from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA). Cast members Bella Poynton (Horatio) and Megan McGrath (Polonius) graduated in  Shakespearean acting from the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA). Associate Director Stephen Wisker has an MFA in Directing Shakespeare from the University of Essex, trained at the Royal National Theatre’s Studio Directors Course, and formerly taught Shakespeare at the Atlantic Acting School/ NYU Tisch School.

The women-only company, the Dark Lady Players, is the only allegorical Shakespeare company anywhere in the world. Their work has been featured in news articles in Italy, Israel, India, Vietnam, Canada, and the UK.  In summer 2010 Reform Judaism magazine, the world’s largest Jewish magazine (circulation 500,000) devoted a six page cover story to their work, titled ‘Unmasking Shakespeare’ by Michael Posner, the arts journalist for the Globe and Mail.

This production is funded by the Halbreich Foundation, dedicated to supporting social transformation and interfaith understanding. This is their first grant to an arts group and has been made to promote inter-religious dialogue. More detail about the production is available on the Dark Lady Players’ website : http://www.darkladyplayers.com/hamlet_apocalypse.htm

and daily updates on the production are available on Facebook page visit: http://www.facebook.com/darkladyplayers For tickets to the show visit: https://www.ovationtix.com/trs/pr/776395