The Catholic University Hamlet

Abstract

HE Catholic University's Speech and Drama Department, which has within the past decade produced King Lear, Othello, and Macbeth, achieved this season (January 27 to February I4) a notable success with Hamlet. The function of a college drama department is to teach and to experiment. The danger is that in producing plays so familiar to the judicious spectator as Shakespeare's great tragedies, the attempt to do something new and striking will obscure rather than illuminate. In this Hamlet, James D. Waring, its director, and the whole company deserve high marks for staying clear of this danger and producing a restrained and conventional play. Not striving for any specially antiquarian or novel effects in stage, costume, or business, they bring off a Hamlet at once satisfying for the contemporary audience and, one feels, containing nothing which would have bewildered an Elizabethan audience. Philip Bosco as Hamlet was, in the big things, right-not too melancholy, nor too mad, nor too much confused; intellectual, keen, dignified. In short, like the whole production, he was conservative. This was the totaleffect. He was not without faults, but the most conspicuous of these must be charged rather to the direction than to the actor. In I. v, at If thou didst ever thy dear father love- Hamlet collapsed and afterward lay prostrate and sobbing audibly till the patient ghost bade him adieu-with, one could but fear, doubts not only as to whether young Hamlet was made of the stuff required for the task ahead, but even as to whether he had heard the charge. The stricken prince rose just before my sinews . . . bear me stiffly up, as if to give meaning to these words; but this is wrong, for they do not mean that he was already down-only that he felt his senses reeling and his knees shaky. Hamlet's deplorable weakness did not show itself again and was soon forgotten. On one or two occasions, on the contrary, he was a little too violent-especially in the closet scene, where he gave Gertrude good cause to fear for her life. In these whirlwinds of passion, when he displayed some tendency to shout too much, his voice, ordinarily excellent and excellently controlled, became unpleasant and his words difficult to follow. The supporting cast was with few exceptions more than adequate. The king, a wily politician, exhibited subtly a growing awareness of his danger. He and Gertrude showed the purely carnal basis of their union without (which is difficult) much overdoing it-except for a regretably protracted kiss after they took their places for the mousetrap. Polonius was conceived with restraint and avoided a common pitfall of amateur productions, the exaggeration of the comical. For a too weak Laertes, one of the stage managers afterward offered the explanation,