Does Hamlet Hate Women?

As anyone unfortunate enough to follow me on Twitter knows, I watched the BBC2 broadcast of Andrew Scott’s Hamlet last night, directed by Robert Icke. While it was met with basically universal critical raves, I was more or less irrevocably turned off by the production around 40 minutes in. Icke compresses the first four or five scenes of the play so that they take place on a single, chaotic night– a feeling he uses to good effect later, in the aftermath of Hamlet’s play, but doesn’t add much here. Except, that is, for the opportunity for Hamlet to leave his ghost sighting and immediately surprise Ophelia as she is taking a bath, and attack her. The camera cuts to the scene, which takes place far upstage behind glass, after Scott has entered, so it’s hard to tell how the sequence begins, but he seems to have surprised her, and Jessica Brown Findlay, who plays Ophelia, is rubbing her head as if he’s startled her into banging her head against the side of the tub, or maybe has even pulled her hair. She turns to Hamlet, he bends to her, and they kiss. But then he grabs her by the arm and wrenches her hand violently towards him. She pulls away, and he reaches out and grabs her by the throat.

This is, it becomes clear in the next scene, the encounter Ophelia describes to her father, when Hamlet approached her with “his doubled all unbrac’d.” In her own description, Hamlet does indeed take her by the wrist and hold her hard. She says nothing about being grabbed by the throat– nor, of course, about being naked and vulnerable in a bathtub.

I can’t stop thinking about this sequence– how offended I am by it, how no one mentioned it to me despite months of raves (possibly, as a friend noted, because it was difficult to see clearly in the live performance, which only raises the question why bother doing it, then), and just generally what a bad, bad choice it is– particularly in a show that then goes on to seize every opportunity to have Hamlet enact violence on Gertrude and Ophelia.

But the key word in that sentence is, of course, opportunity— which is to say, the text does offer these opportunities. There is a long tradition of Hamlets manhandling Ophelias and Gertrudes– after all, he has to be acting so wild and violent that both Gertrude and Polonius sincerely think Hamlet might kill her (Scott’s Hamlet goes on assaulting Juliet Stevenson’s Gertrude long after this, at one point wrestling her to the floor). While I do feel that the sexual tone of this Hamlet’s attitude towards Ophelia was particularly marked– during the ‘nunnery’ scene, he kept forcing her to kiss him, as she struggled to try and break away– Hamlet is hardly less sexually crude and cruel verbally during the play scene, with his public taunting about country matters, with Ophelia offering terse responses that are hard to read as anything but embarrassment and discomfort. That is to say: did Icke’s addition of this assault (and unnecessary nudity) simply prime me to more readily notice what has always been there? Did the fact that I generally like the character Hamlet make me too willing to ignore his misogyny and violence?

Yes, I think. Sort of. To a certain extent. Hamlet is a misogynist. He treats Ophelia and especially Gertrude very, very badly. He constantly speaks slightingly of women, and his great love for Ophelia does not extend to actually speaking to her about anything or trying to let her in on his plan. Maybe, possibly, if you really think Gertrude helped kill her first husband, you can explain why Hamlet treats her the way he does, but otherwise it’s a stretch. Maybe, in a funny way, it’s good to lay his treatment of them bare– turn it into a midnight assault while she’s naked in a bathtub if that’s what it takes to make us see it.

But there are real differences between the way Ophelia describes her encounter with Hamlet and what Icke decides to show him doing. Though Ophelia describes Hamlet’s behavior as wild, and he grabs her by the arm, the bulk of her impression is of stillness and sadness: he stands staring at her, and she fixates on his sigh, “so piteous and profound, it did seem to shatter all his bulk and end his being.” She seems scared for him. Findlay’s Ophelia, on the other hand, should probably be scared of him. His attacking her in the bath turns their exchange in the nunnery scene more frightening: Hamlet, who previously realized that Polonius was bugged while speaking to him, tries to flirt and kiss her, and playfully gropes around the collar of her dress searching for a microphone. As it becomes clearer and clearer that Findlay is not joking or just putting on a show for her dad, Scott’s Hamlet gets angrier and angrier, culminating in the sequence described above, where he repeatedly forces her to kiss him. In light of his initial assault, I couldn’t read it as anything but an abuser growing violent when faced with repercussions– Ophelia breaking up with him– for his actions.

The ‘nunnery’ scene can certainly be frightening and violent, but the text leaves space for various explanations of what is happening. Is Hamlet trying to communicate to Ophelia that she should get the hell out of Denmark, and she doesn’t get it? Does she make it too obvious that she’s spying on him, and he loses his temper at the betrayal? None of these make Hamlet look great, but some make him seem less actively abusive.

But maybe I’m just trying to talk around the idea of Hamlet the abuser because I don’t want it to be true. Or, more accurately, I don’t know what to do with it. How do you perform that play? You can make it explicit, as Icke does, but that’s a risky choice, to say the least, and one the text doesn’t leave much space for dealing with. We have two and a half more hours to spend with this guy, what do we do with that time if we already hate the abusive protagonist? Can you even do Hamlet anymore if that’s who it’s about? It’s a case where you’d like to come up with a version that lays that bare, that centralizes the stories of Ophelia and Gertrude and maybe even Horatio and Laertes in response, but Shakespeare’s text simply does not allow for that.

That’s also clearly not the problem Icke was attempting to grapple with. I don’t know what he thought having Hamlet attack Ophelia in a bathtub would add, but it was certainly not meant to lessen our love for Scott’s Hamlet. He’s the star in every possible way, and we are so obviously meant to continue to find him intelligent and charming, and to feel bad for his pain. While Findlay’s journey through her scenes with Hamlet made perfect sense when read as a woman whose partner has suddenly attacked her, and for that reason she’s willing to go along with her father’s instructions to leave him, Icke’s not actually interested in Ophelia’s voice– a fact he makes abundantly clear by cutting almost all the text of her madness. The production overall cuts almost nothing– adds things, even including a very nice Q1 scene between Horatio and Gertrude– but Ophelia’s lines are gone. She has one or two of them, but it’s mostly singing. Where Shakespeare’s Ophelia repeatedly forces her way into the room, Icke’s is wheeled in in a wheelchair, not even allowed to move under her own power, her strange and troubling language of grief replaced with her beating her own chest and face. I have a lot of difficulty with Ophelia’s mad scene, and am always open to experimenting with it, but in this context, to replace language with silence and self-inflected violence felt frustrating and almost offensive in a context where almost no other lines had been cut, and this was an Ophelia who had explicitly been a victim of violence at the hands of the hero. It seemed to say that Icke values Ophelia more as an object upon which violence can be enacted than as a character who takes up space and has things to say.

So Hamlet may well be more problematic than I’ve fully allowed myself to realize before now. But I also think Icke made a textual problem much, much worse with wholly unnecessary nudity and sexualized violence towards the play’s female characters– and worst of all, didn’t really seem to realize he was doing it.