Hamlet’s Shakespeare

There is no more fundamental way of freeing Hamlet from the constraints of text than by removing words altogether, as ballet of necessity does.

Michelle Assay (2022). “The late- and post-Soviet trials of Hamlet in song, ballet, and opera.” Cahiers Élisabéthains: A Journal of English Renaissance Studies, 108(1) 35–52 (accessed on line at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/01847678221092791)

The artist as the created; Mona Lisa’s Leonardo, Beatrice’s Dante. Curious concept.

Guy Davenport in a letter to Hugh Kenner, 1963 (Questioning Minds: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner. Edited by Edward M. Burns, 2 volumes (Counterpoint, Berkeley, CA; 2018).

If anything, the notion of “Hamlet‘s Shakespeare” looks to be a way of textualizing Shakespeare. Not just his becoming the playwright through writing Hamlet, but also writing his own narrative self by thinking through Hamlet. As if in referring to Satan’s Milton, I am positing how John Milton might have worked out his own personal theology by having to dictate (verbalize) that Satan into Paradise Lost.

If so, then freeing both Hamlet and Shakespeare from the textual is to imagine something altogether different, like those ballets called Hamlet.

Here the upshot is that there are multiple versions, not just necessarily unique performances, of the single play, e.g., Robert Helpmann’s 1942 version for the Sadler’s Wells Ballet, Kenneth MacMillan’s 1988 Sea of Troubles, Stephen Mills’ 2000 Hamlet, and the 2015 Hamlet of Radu Poklitaru and Declan Donnellan’s for the Bolshoi Ballet (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0184767820913797).

For policy and management to have multiple versions, rather than many unique implementations, is also to imagine policy and management through different genres than those of the textual.

One great example is that of the refusal. There have been those whose rejection to involvement in policy and management, let alone in politics, has been uncompromising: “At a certain moment, when faced with public events, we know that we must refuse. Refusal is absolute, categorical. It does not discuss or voice its reasons. This is how it remains silent and solitary, even when it affirms itself, as it should, in broad daylight.” This silence and isolation includes refusing to “to formulate a political demand, a different path, a different solution”(quotes from https://illwill.com/the-movement-of-refusal)

The rejection goes further than refusing to take sides; it refuses to offer even a position. Now, of course, you can say this is through and through political, as in “silence is consent.” But the functions of silence depend on the medium of expression. Silence as consent is no more political than swimming under water is. Or better yet: In what ways do you want voiceless ballet or swimming to be political?