It was hard to look at the wall and not try to deduce what had happened in front of it. Prague is the ultimate Mitteleuropean crossroads of history where since Roman times and before, east and west and north and south have met and fucked or fought. Where chiefs and kings and emperors and despots have played ‘I’m the king of the castle’. Prague has a pastel prettiness which surrounds the playing of that game with a gilded frame. It heightens the sense of man enacting history while having a knowing sense of its actual fiction. The towering castle-capped hills serve as a backdrop before which people stage their odd show. Sometimes history feels real, plugging away at life in an industrial town in a valley; sometimes it feels unreal, storming up or fleeing down the hills of Prague.
Beside me sat the Czech Republic’s leading Shakespearean, a scholar who had translated every one of Shakespeare’s plays into Czech and whose versions were still respected and used. We had met at a reception earlier, and his enthusiasm for our arrival was humbling. A gentle courteous soul, he bore the scars of his country’s complicated history with a light grace. It was impossible not to warm to him and not to feel embarrassed by his excitement at our being there. Warmth radiated from him as if Shakespeare had entered the room. It feels churlish in the circumstances to say that the Globe in London is only a little more real than any of the others in the world, and that our actors are not ordained with any special Shakespearean-ness; they are just hard-working pros who have done a lot.
He sat beside me, and I briefly apostrophised the wall in front of us. Thankfully he didn’t treat me as mad, or laugh at me as a recreation of Brick Tamland in Anchorman – ‘Wall! I love wall!’ – but gently sketched in a little history.
‘Much history has happened in front of this wall. . . much cruelty. . . before this piece [pointing to some air in front of one section] for 200 years people were executed, hung and er. . . quartered and drawn as you say. . . the crowds would gather where we are now sitting. . . in front of this section [waving at some more pregnant emptiness] there was a prison where for many years anyone who defied the king was imprisoned. . . there they would rot their way to a lonely death. . . up and down these stairs [following with his hand the ghost of a long disappeared stone staircase] several royals escaped the castle when it was under attack. . .’
Spectral figures hung from ropes and twisted in the air, cowered in the corners of dank rooms, or scurried along passageways, stuffing the crown jewels into the linings of their garments. Those were real ghosts, however daft that may sound, and here we were with our flesh-and-blood Ghost, as embodied by John Dougall, in his dusted-down royal coat, masquerading as an old Danish ghost, as written by an Englishman 400 years dead. And here was his tortured report of purgatory coming alive in front of 700 Czechs in 2016. Ghosts old and new, real and fake, imagined and re-imagined.
In front of that wall, the show took on a vivid reality new to itself. Tales of kings displaced, princes robbed of their inheritance, court intrigue and threatened revolutions can take on a phoniness in modern theatres. Here in this enclave of trapped history, their phoniness was evocative. Beyond the narrative resonance, the words started to fly. The stone walls of the courtyard clattered the words around, and rebounded them into a palpable concreteness. The actors thrilled to the acoustic and, while acting the story fiercely, gave the best spoken account of the play I had witnessed thus far. The audience leant into it, eager for the language. A breath-bated silence came over the courtyard as people relished the pleasure of each new thought.
The clouds which had threatened throughout the day, and which had tumbled ever closer like a rumbling Napoleonic army on the march, shrouded the castle in their ominous darkness at the end of the first half. Just as Claudius looked up to the heavens and prayed for forgiveness, his first admission of the crime he has committed, the skies opened with a loud rumble and tipped sheets of rain down. Everyone scrambled for cover – the company to a medieval dressing room. Our worried promoter flitted in and out telling us that Czech audiences never stay to watch in the rain and that we may lose our whole crowd. Then miraculously, after twenty minutes of rain like stair rods, the downpour stopped as abruptly as it had begun, and the army of clouds moved on to terrorise another part of central Europe. The audience all retook their dampened seats. The pre-storm electric tension of the first half – a tension that always feels more clammily real in central Europe than anywhere else – gave way to a starlit calm, and a lucidity. The words were as important as before, but no longer freighted with the same cargo of pain; they floated light and clear beneath the stars and the steeples. As Hamlet’s spirit lightened, and as he found his own way through to acceptance at the play’s end, the atmospheric pressure seemed to concur. Outdoor playing often provides these tonal shifts, without thought or design. They throw new patterns across the play, and sometimes reveal more clearly what was always there.
At the end, I turned to the scholar on my right. His eyes were rich with withheld tears. ‘Thank you for bringing these words here. Thank you for the words.’
* * *
The words of Hamlet can seem like an intimidating smooth surface, a forbidding carapace of polished perfection, full of headache-inducing philosophic thought and studied aphorism. Modern editions, until recently, have often claimed a spurious authority, scaring the reader or student with their assertion that this is the one true text – as authorised by this degree of scholarship, or by that imprint. This is baloney. There is no right text.
There is no one text of Hamlet. We have inherited three, the first commonly known as the Bad Quarto, published hurriedly in 1603 without the knowledge or permission of its author. The second, known uncomplicatedly as the Second Quarto, was published in 1604. It is twice as long as the first and is closer to the intentions of its author. It is still rife with oddities of translation from rehearsal room to page, and stuffed with errors from the magnificent laziness of printers. Quartos are single editions of plays, small enough to hold in the hand or slip into the pocket. The third text is one of the thirty-seven plays collected together by two of Shakespeare’s fellow actors, Heminges and Condell, in the First Folio. The Folio is much too big for a pocket. The Folio version of Hamlet is marginally shorter than the Second Quarto and full of differences of detail – speeches cut, some rearranged, and a whole host of different words and punctuation.
The single most surprising fact about Shakespeare is that he never supervised the printing of his own plays. Other authors did; some, like his friend Ben Jonson, quite assiduously. His sonnets and his longer poems are carefully laid down and prefaced by dedications from the publisher. These seemed to matter to him; their relationship with posterity was precious. But Hamlet? King Lear? Twelfth Night? They were left to push their way into print through the brambles of early printing, and emerge with their clothing torn and their shins scratched. It’s hard to say why, but knowing that Shakespeare himself was an actor and had to watch day after day as his plays were mangled, shredded and retold by actors, it must have been hard for him to think of a play as a fixed thing. Having heard his Ophelia stammer and riff freeform in her madness, having cringed at the clowns going gleefully off-piste, and having despaired at bombastic actors merrily importing speeches from other plays when they lost their way, he may have found the whole idea of locking these plays down for posterity laughable.
This liberating contingency of attitude has not been enough for many of history’s editors, who have felt the need