Hamlet, Scene 2, Act 2. Second soliloquy. “O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!”
David Tennant as Hamlet, 2009 RSC made-for-TV production. Director Gregory Doran.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyB4ktn7AIE
Derek Jacobi as Hamlet, 1980 BBC Shakespeare TV series. Director Rodney Bennett.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOsv66930eI
Performance Analysis
Derek Jacobi’s and David Tennant’s respective performances of Hamlet differ in one essential detail. Tennant focuses almost entirely on Hamlet’s madness and is a much more physically active performer than Jacobi. His pacing and raging and thrashing across the stage gives a physical outlet for the emotional turmoil Tennant wants to portray in Hamlet, and his wild movements and increasingly disheveled appearance provide the audience with visual clues as to the character’s disordered state of mind. That said Jacobi’s much quieter performance places the emphasis on Hamlet’s innate cunning and thought processes rather than solely on his gradual emotional disintegration, which serves to make his interpretation of the mad prince more interesting and evocative than Tennant’s admittedly still admirable work. Jacobi is a much more deliberate and conservative performer in this scene than Tennant, and though Tennant’s Hamlet is fun to watch and a strong portrayal of ever-increasing madness, he lacks the steadfast power of Jacobi’s earlier work. Jacobi’s Hamlet is more controlled and meditative, which allows Jacobi to work with Hamlet’s natural melancholy in a more self-aware way as an actor and as the character he is performing.
Jacobi’s Hamlet is more believable as a character who chooses to enact madness in order to pursue his purposes, while Tennant’s version truly appears to be mad or at least crazed enough by circumstances and legitimate emotional disturbances to be on the brink of real madness. There is little room in Tennant’s performance for subtlety and for deliberation about his actions. Once he has decided on staging the play for Claudius, Tennant’s Hamlet bolts from the room to put his ideas into action without further hesitation. Jacobi’s Hamlet is less certain of his course and maintains his doubts, pondering aloud if he can trust what he has seen or heard or if his emotional instability, of which he is aware, has become such a weakness in his character that he can be fooled by what he wants to see. Tennant’s Hamlet speaks the same lines but dismisses the concept of his possible self-delusion as soon as he speaks them while he jumps into action. In Tennant’s performance, Hamlet’s decision comes quickly and without taking seriously the sort of self-doubt and anxiety Jacobi dwells upon. Tennant’s brand of madness, weather real or feigned, permits his Hamlet to make wild actions and to have uncontrolled outbursts of energy and words, but does not allow Tennant to explore Hamlet’s character far beyond his basic desire for revenge. Jacobi’s steadier and more deliberate portrayal gives Jacobi time to take Hamlet up and down the emotional register and really invest every line with motive and thought. This has the effect of not only making his Hamlet easier to follow as his emotions flare and change and as he formulates his plan to reveal Claudius’ treachery, but helps the performance to make more sense of Hamlet’s decision to take revenge.
The actor’s attitudes toward and interactions with the camera, and by extension the audience, also differs quite noticeably. Jacobi maintains much steadier contact with the camera’s gaze which helps to humanize his performance. His Hamlet never strays far from the stationary camera for long before returning to re-establish contact through a close-up shot of his expression. His physical proximity to the camera encourages the viewing audience to pay close attention through his face and words, through which Jacobi does most of his characterization. This is particularly true of his tremendous vocal range which he uses to emphasize Hamlet’s every emotional fluctuation with both nuance and power. Tennant’s interaction with the camera is very different because rather than interacting with the camera, the camera interacts with Tennant. As Tennant moves back and forth and around the rather large, open set, the camera follows close behind him and continually changes angles and speeds to track his erratic movements. This aids in exhibiting Hamlet’s increasing madness and instability, and also makes those moments when Tennant deliberately chooses to turn and interact with the audience all the more shocking with their intensity. It also has the unfortunate side effect of making it difficult to track Tennant’s movements on the expansive, glossy set. This could be at least partially a metaphor for Hamlet’s own confusion and feelings of being alone and unmoored in his own kingdom, but mostly it serves as a distraction as the audience tries to reconcile the limited view on the screen with what glimpses of the set the viewers have been permitted.
Interestingly, both actors use violence toward the camera to break the forth wall at some point in their performances. In fact, Tennant’s performance of the scene opens with a sudden attack on the viewer’s “eye” when he grabs the security camera, through which the audience first views him, and rips it off the wall to throw it across the room. This fit of violent temper isn’t just an attack on the camera; it is an attack on the audience and their intrusion into his private battle with madness and vengeance. At the moment the audience switches from the grayscale vision of the security camera to the full-color gaze of the normal video camera, Tennant’s Hamlet looks the audience in the face and declares “Now I am alone.” The opening line of Hamlet’s soliloquy is made all the more chilling here because Hamlet is indeed not alone on the empty stage. Instead the audience is alone with Hamlet, who Tennant clearly wants to portray as capable of sudden violence toward those he knows are his viewers. Jacobi’s portrayal also features a moment of sudden violence toward his audience, but due to the rest of his performance and his earlier characterization of Hamlet the withheld sword strike halfway through the soliloquy carries a different note. By withholding the strike at the last moment, Jacobi emphasizes that his Hamlet is a man of calculation and thought in addition to being a man of action. While Tennant’s violent temper is chilling and his attack on the camera carries an implicit threat to the audience for the remainder of his time on stage, Jacobi’s calculated control when he pauses in mid-strike serves to remind the audience that this Hamlet is dangerous not only because he is a madman with a weapon, but because he is a madman with enough control to know when and where to deploy the weapon in order to achieve the vengeance he so desperately wants. The line between this Hamlet’s very real madness and his mad play-acting is so blurred that even Jacobi doesn’t seem to know exactly where it lies. If it’s difficult for Jacobi to parse out his character’s growing insanity, then it’s impossible for the viewer to tell if the Hamlet who threatens the audience with the sword or the Hamlet who throws the sword away across the stage is the real prince of Denmark, and that uncertainty is the source of much of the power of Jacobi’s portrayal.
Tennant’s portrayal of Hamlet is by no means a poor one. His capacity to portray mental instability and the breakdown of an intelligent if angry young man is excellent and his interpretation of Hamlet as a violent and unstable person is more than fair. However, it lacks the overall power and appeal that Jacobi manages with his steadier, lower-key performance. Jacobi’s Hamlet displays more self-awareness of his melancholic tendencies and the potential weaknesses they give him, and yet Jacobi manages to turn the self-doubt into a depth of character that still maintains integrity and appeal for the audience. His Hamlet’s sorrow and uncertainty work to enliven the character more than Tennant’s reckless physicality manages. Jacobi offers the audience no frills of rolling on the floor in an emotional outburst or racing back and forth before the camera as he gives voice to his anger and guilt. What Jacobi gives is a deliberately simple though hardly straight-forward portrayal of a depressive prince making a sincere attempt to plan the downfall of his murderous uncle. His stillness and resoluteness in his decision making are laced with sharp-edged bits of melancholy, madness, and self-induced anxiety, and these hard fragments of emotional turmoil make his performance more powerful and memorable than Tennant’s.
