PROJECT-HAMLET.INFO: The Pawns

[NOTE: If you haven't already read the disclaimer on this section's introductory page with regard to any and all actor names mentioned in this section of the website, please do so before proceeding here.]

Thoth Tarot (Aleister Crowley and Frieda Harris):
The Five of Cups – Disappointment
(image used by permission of the Ordo Templis Orientis, Secretary General/ International Headquarters,
Berlin, Germany)

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern

They were "sent for." This much we know, but to really drive home the point, Hamlet still says it no less than four times in just over a minute in his first encounter with his two "schoolfellows" in the second act's second scene; until Guildenstern himself (after a brief, secretive consultation with Rosencrantz, which Hamlet, however, catches regardless) reluctantly confirms: "My lord, we were sent for."

But do we know anything else, or perhaps more to the point, do they themselves know anything else about their purpose in the play? Writer-director Tom Stoppard and actors Gary Oldman (Rosencrantz) and Tim Roth (Guildenstern) in the hilarious, absurdist spin-off "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" suggest that no, they don't; in fact, they stumble around absolutely cluelessly, trying to make sense of a fate that caught them by their necks before they ever woke up to what was really going on. And you know what, folks? I think that analysis is dead-on.

For Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are the ultimate pawns: those little chess pieces without much of an identity or any great powers of their own which are routinely the first to be sacrificed in any offensive move, just because they are so utterly expendable. In that, they are, of course, also foils to Horatio, Hamlet's other (strong and true) friend; indeed, I very much suspect that Claudius and Gertrude may have "sent for" these two only after first having unsuccessfully tried to sound Horatio about the Prince's cause of distemper. And I think there is a certain significance in the fact that we see Horatio together with them only in one scene: namely, after the play designed to "catch the conscience of the King" (in other words, at a moment when we know that Hamlet has fully taken him into his confidence), when the Prince – who until then has treated Rosencrantz and Guildenstern cordially, albeit never entirely without suspicion – openly confronts them about their attempts to "sound [him] from [his] lowest note to the top of [his] compass." Although Horatio doesn't have a single line to speak in that entire scene, to me it offers incredible potential to juxtapose the two pairs of friends: on the one hand Hamlet and Horatio, the genuine article (and is it really a coincidence that their names alliterate?); on the other hand Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who even at that very moment demonstrate their utter cluelessness, not only by showing themselves as Claudius's (and Gertrude's) willing mouthpieces, but also in Rosencrantz's answer to Hamlet's acidic remark (in turn a response to the former's plea not to "deny [his] griefs to his friend") that he (Hamlet) "lack[s] advancement," which is of course a comment on the way Claudius has sidelined his nephew in his accession to the throne. Because how does Rosencrantz respond to that? "How can that be, when you have the voice of the King himself for your succession in Denmark?" I can very well picture Hamlet and Horatio exchanging a pointed glance and rolling their eyes upon hearing this, before Hamlet turns his attention back to Rosencrantz and quips, "Ay, sir, but 'while the grass grows' – the proverb is something musty" ... and then instantly seizes on the opportunity afforded him by the players, who are bringing out a few recorders, to corner Guildenstern about his and Rosencrantz's attempts to "play upon [him (Hamlet)]," while he can't even play a real musical instrument. (And even more directly, when Claudius sends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to seek out Hamlet after the murder of Polonius, the Prince accuses Rosencrantz of being "a sponge ... that soaks up the king's countenance, his rewards, his authorities," and is therefore kept "in a corner of [the king's] jaw; first mouth'd, to be last swallowed. When he needs what you have glean'd, it is but squeezing you and, sponge, you shall be dry again.")

Now, the two fellows' fate wouldn't be half as tragically pointless (and pointlessly tragic) if they didn't have the best of intentions – which however they do, not only towards Hamlet (indeed, "Heavens make our presence and our practices pleasant and helpful to him," Guildenstern comments towards the end of their first audience with Claudius and Gertrude), but also – simultaneously, and herein of course lies the crux – towards the royal couple, to whom they promise to "give up [them]selves, in the full bent, to lay [their] service freely at [the King and Queen's] feet, to be commanded." And thus, in short order they find themselves not merely commanded but (ab)used as the pawns that they are in Claudius's dealings with his nephew; and while he successfully manipulates everybody else by turning their weaknesses to his advantage, in the case of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern he doesn't even have to go that far, because they themselves have begged for the mistreatment they are receiving at his hands. By the time he sends them off to England to unwittingly marshal Hamlet to his "present death," they have fully bought into the notion that what they are doing is not only in their friend's, the Prince's interest but in the interest of the entire kingdom, because Hamlet has gone mad and turned into a danger to everyone around him, including even the King himself. "Most holy and religious fear it is to keep those many many bodies safe that live and feed upon your Majesty," Guildenstern comments in the private audience during which they receive their marching orders, and Rosencrantz verbosely echoes that sentiment, pointing out inter alia that "the cesse of majesty dies not alone, but like a gulf doth draw what's near it with it," and "never alone did the King sigh, but with a general groan" – thus not only verbalising the conceptual foundations of the royal "we" but also mirroring in rather guileless irony Claudius's own reference to that "whole kingdom" still "contracted in one brow woe" over his own brother's death during his announcement of his and Gertrude's wedding. (And of course by killing Polonius, however mistakenly, even Hamlet himself has at this point played into Claudius's hands.)

"But aren't you a bit too forgiving here?" I can hear someone ask. "Doesn't their very closeness to Claudius make them morally ambiguous? Besides, what about their names: Aren't these supposed to suggest that they are Jewish? And wasn't Shakespeare, like many people of his era, profoundly anti-semitic?"

So yes, a less favourable interpretation of their role is certainly feasible. But on the other hand, Hamlet ultimately abuses Rosencrantz and Guildenstern much worse than Claudius ever does, by having them take his place on that English gallows – just because they have let Claudius use them too creedently before. Thus, he shows himself capable of absolutely the same level of cunning and ruthlessness as his uncle, for once with even more dire consequences. And Hamlet fully realises what he has done: when he tells Horatio how he averted the King's designs on his own life, his friend comments (with an audible note of sorrow, I imagine, and not merely sorrow about the two pointless deaths in themselves and about the events that have brought them about but also sorrow about the fact that none other than Hamlet ultimately sent his two "schoolfellows" to that kind of end), "So Guildenstern and Rosencrantz go to't" – to which Hamlet responds rather defiantly that they are not "near [his] conscience," because "they did make love to this employment! ... their defeat does by their own insinuation grow" – and for all the Prince's protestations, what he ultimately demonstrates here is that they were nothing more than pawns to him as well.

That all being the case, of course in any abridged adaptation of the play the question arises whether to accord any space to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern at all. Sir Laurence Olivier did the gutsy thing and cut their roles entirely; and given the utter futility of their existence, he certainly had a point. Leaving aside that my version wouldn't be much of an abbreviation to begin with, however, I personally would give them some space (and even more than Zeffirelli and Kosintzev did, although I would cut into their scenes more than into those of most other characters): first of all in order to highlight Horatio's role as Hamlet's true friend by contrasting him with the two "schoolfellows", as explained above (and since Sir Laurence Olivier uses that very scene mentioned above, after the "play within the play," to particularly highlight the friendship between Hamlet and Horatio, I can't help but regret that he deprived himself of the chance of going all the way there, if nowhere else); and in addition, because I think that Hamlet's dealings with them underscore his considerable capacity for callousness – not a trait we want to see in our hero at all and yet, one only too present in the Prince, here as much as in his treatment of Ophelia. On the other hand, while I generally like the way Messrs. Zeffirelli and Kosintzev handle the issue, I don't think it is absolutely necessary to show their deaths (as Franco Zeffirelli does): the thing that truly counts in my view is how Hamlet instrumentalises them in the first place (and how Horatio, who can't possibly feel much sympathy for them, either, ultimately reacts to his account), so although the two true and trusted friends' conversation after the Prince's final return to Elsinore contains a fair bit of "telling" instead of "showing" – which is fine in a theatrical context but these days tends to raise eyebrows in a movie – I'd still prefer to stick with Shakespeare's original approach there.

As far as casting goes, the two gentlemen's characters seem to have become sort of a stepping stone to bigger things; as such, Michael Maloney, the Rosencrantz of Franco Zeffirelli's movie, later appeared not only as Laertes in Sir Kenneth Branagh's "Hamlet" but also as Joe Harper (Hamlet) in Branagh's own spin-off on the Prince of Denmark's tragedy ("In the Bleak Midwinter" a/k/a "A Midwinter's Tale"), released the year prior to Branagh's "Hamlet" and, incidentally, one of the best "Hamlet"-related things out there (but then, you'd expect nothing less of Sir Ken, would you?). And yet, since Hamlet's "schoolfellows" show so darned few individualised traits – newcomers to the play routinely lose track who is who somewhere halfway through their first appearance, and frankly, that's exactly what I suspect the Bard intended – my approach would be to actually play up that element even further, and even to a greater extent than Kosintzev, who pointedly endowed them with extremely similar clothes and hairdos: I'd go so far as to cast them with identical twins, or at least, with brothers who have a great physical resemblance to each other; and not with actors whose faces are too widely known, either. If these two are in essence replicable, expendable pawns, then why not let the world take note and be completely honest about it?

Thoth Tarot (Aleister Crowley and Frieda Harris):
The Four of Cups – Luxury
(image used by permission of the Ordo Templis Orientis, Secretary General/ International Headquarters,
Berlin, Germany)

Osric

"Osric – a pawn?" a slightly overdressed and oversized gentleman dead centre first row inquires with furrowed brows and a note of protest in his voice. "But he's rich ... and he's a nobleman. Besides, he is the duel's arbiter – that's a position of responsibility. How can he be a pawn?"

Although Osric is a courtier, and yes, even a rich one, too, does that really mean he must necessarily be a person of great responsibility or noteworthiness? Granted, he seems to have somewhat more individualised traits than Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; and if one considers presence in a number larger than one a key definitive element of pawns, the mere fact that we don't see two Osrics in itself seems to mandate against such a classification. But for one thing, if you've lost all but one of your pawns in a game of chess, that circumstance alone doesn't suddenly elevate the one remaining pawn to some sort of higher status ... a pawn is a pawn is a pawn; period. And secondly, given the kind of court we're talking about, can we really assume that Osric is one of a kind? Isn't it much more likely that he is just a typical example of the kind of courtier we would find in the environment created by Claudius, the kind of environment where only the shallow, foppish, brainless, servile, and the incorrigibly naïve survive, because everyone with even so much as half a brain and a capacity for independent judgement has by this time either sought salvation in flight or forcibly been weeded out?

And with that in mind, now let's remember a pawn's key purpose, and look at Osric's function in the play.

A pawn is, first and foremost, a figure you use and abuse – not someone who makes decisions of his own. A pawn is generally not even fully informed about all the pertinent details of a given matter (who would care to keep a pawn in the know anyway?); indeed, his very uninformedness makes him so eminently (ab)usable. And a pawn is someone you ideally use according to his desert, or more precisely, the way he is best suited. – Now, Osric is unquestionably best suited to flatter; we can safely assume that this is the very reason why he has survived at Claudius's court (apparently without so much as a sliver of doubt about his King) – and from Claudius's point of view, a flatterer is just what the doctor ordered so to praise Laertes's gifts as a swordsman to Hamlet that the Prince can't fail to be enticed to agree to the fateful duel. Of course, hating flattery as he does, and having already classified Osric as a "waterfly" in his own mind earlier, Hamlet is in fact anything but impressed with the young courtier's lavish commendations – not to mention that, if my theory that Hamlet and Laertes were boyhood friends is worth the parchment it's writ on, Hamlet probably knows the qualifications of Ophelia's brother full well and doesn't need Osric, of all people, to remind him of them; particularly considering that the "waterfly" doesn't even understand half the words he is uttering. But how does our Prince react to Osric's lavish praise (particularly in the 1604 Second Quarto version)? Conceivably he could easily cut him short, sort of "more matter, with less art" style – he does it often enough to other people, and there actually does come a point later in the scene where Hamlet begins to treat the young courtier more curtly than he does initially. But at the beginning ... well, have you ever watched a cat at play? I have; I own several. And I can't begin to tell you how much our valiant hero – yes, him, that much-burdened defender of civilisation, would-be avenger of his father's murder and setter-right of this time so seriously out of joint – how much he reminds me of my cats at the beginning of the Osric scene. Because to him, Osric is no more than a toy. Something you toss in the air and gleefully watch sail back down, only to catch it again mid-air – claws out, but not so much as to instantly kill it and thus shorten your own pleasure – then toss it again, chase after it if it flies a little ahead of you, catch it again, roll on the ground with it, let it go again, chase after it, toss it in the air again, and so on and so forth; until you are tired, at which time you simply kill it with a quick bite to the neck. And this is exactly the way Hamlet treats Osric, whose only salvation lies in the fact that he isn't even aware how severely he is being abused, although I do believe at least occasionally there is a glimmer of recognition in his reactions.

And perhaps as importantly, this is also the one scene where (again, in the 1604 Second Quarto more extensively so than in the 1623 "First Folio") we even see Horatio join in the fun. Not ever overtly and by directly addressing Osric in the way that Hamlet does, I'm pretty certain even without a stage direction to that effect: Osric's mental powers may not be able to hold a candle stump to Horatio's, but these aren't our liberated modern times where brains count more than class (or do they?); we're somewhere in the late 15th or early 16th century, and Horatio is way too prudent to let his enjoyment of the scene so much get the better of him that he forgets class distinctions vis-à-vis a nobleman whom he doesn't know but has every reason to suspect to be in Claudius's favour, even if by all appearances the guy doesn't seem to catch on to somewhere in the vicinity of 95-99% of Hamlet's insinuations and double-entendres. But his intermittent exchanges with the Prince demonstrate his enjoyment clearly enough, and I also think it's significant that the one comment most succinctly summing up Osric's flattery – "golden words" – comes from Horatio, not from Hamlet. Now, by the time this scene takes place (and indeed looking at the very core of Osric's mission), we do, of course, have more than a mere premonition that things are going to turn sinister pretty soon; and so, too, does Horatio. So also does Hamlet, for that matter, but I think he might just be taking advantage of an opportunity for a last little bit of escapism – and quite crucially, Horatio lets him. This, in turn, also tells us that in his eyes Osric really is, for all the serious import of his mission, no more than a harmless fool; because I am sure that if Horatio were to accord any greater significance to the young courtier, he would step in right there and not wait until afterwards to warn Hamlet.

"So if Osric is such a ridiculous figure, then why don't you categorise him as a clown?" someone asks.

Because no clown in a Shakesperean play is ever just ridiculous – not even Bottom in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and Dogberry in "Much Ado About Nothing," although they certainly stretch the limits, particularly if they are portrayed with as much gusto as Dogberry is by Michael Keaton in Sir Kenneth Branagh's movie adaptation of "Much Ado," or Bottom by the Royal Shakespeare Company's Malcolm Storry in the 2005 season. But much like medieval court jesters, Shakespeare's clowns – no matter how much they also represent society's simpletons, common people and baser elements – tell a fair share of meaningful truths amid their quips, jibes and fast retorts. This is addressed in greater detail in its own place on this site, but whereas the Gravedigger for example does, indeed, gain Hamlet's respect precisely on the basis of his witty remarks alone, Osric never stands a chance with our Prince just because he is so utterly clueless; and while I generally find a certain amount of scepticism warranted before we adopt our Prince's views on other people, I think here we can safely trust his instincts (particularly as these are Horatio's instinct's, too).

"Well, then what about the duel?" the gentleman in the middle of the first row insists with ever so slight indignation. "How does Osric get to oversee that – shouldn't that improve your opinion of him?"

Ay, marry, the duel. Well, sir, put yourself into Claudius's place for a moment: If you intended to have your own nephew killed – the one remaining person posing a serious danger to your power after you have turned the intentions of the other challenger to your crown to your favour – if you had hatched a plot involving the use of an unblunted and poisoned blade during a duel, not to mention topping it off with a poisoned drink, whom would you rather have as the arbiter of that little production: a man of independent judgement and intelligence or someone like Osric? Leaving aside that Claudius would probably have had the pick of his Osrics, while a person of even moderate intelligence might have been decidedly more difficult to come by at this stage, it strikes me as fairly obvious that the last person you want as your arbiter at a lethal scam show like the one Claudius has in store for Hamlet is someone who might actually catch on to what is going on and warn the Prince. (This, in addition to Horatio's low birth, which would probably not have made him eligible for active participation in a game of chivalry in the first place, incidentally makes me strongly disagree with Sir Laurence Olivier's interpretation, which not only sees Horatio as an openly vocal party to the Prince's exchange with Osric but even as the second arbiter of the duel.)

That all said, my opinion of Osric isn't actually as low as it may have sounded up to now, because I do see – and in this he is typical of a pawn, too, of course – an earnest desire to fulfil his mission; and for all the potential symbolism embodied in his bonnet (which he waves about and won't for the life of him wear when initially prodded by Hamlet, but does put back on as soon as he is outside the Prince's presence), I can't help feeling a certain sympathy for the kid, particularly given his youth. For I also do think there is a certain significance in the fact that Shakespeare, otherwise so sparing in stage directions, expressly tells us that Osric is a young courtier: it's as if he were saying, look, the guy isn't the brightest light in this particular court's chandeliers, but give him a break; in part that's also because he's just a bit youthfully naïve, and he may yet have a chance and learn a few things in life after all. I think the great danger in the Osric scene is to ham it too much – there is so much plain silliness in the character himself that, emphasized even further, it can easily go over the top; and much as I otherwise admire the comedic talents of Peter Cushing and Robin Williams, I think both of them do precisely that in the movies by Sir Laurence Olivier and Sir Kenneth Branagh. On the other hand, the Zeffirelli movie wastes an opportunity for a lighter moment (which it then replaces, most inappropriately, in the duel's second round, which to me is all "Lethal Weapon" and no Shakespeare), an all the more surprising turn given the famously flamboyant performance of this very actor (John McEnery) as Mercutio in Zeffirelli's "Romeo and Juliet." – This, then, leaves the production starring Sir Derek Jacobi; and there, indeed, I find the scene done almost to pitch perfection (with the one slight caveat that there, as in Sir Laurence Olivier's movie, on a number of occasions we see Horatio directly interacting with Osric, which for the reasons explained above seems unlikely to me. But that aside,) Peter Gale is far and away the best Osric I have seen to date, and in my view he hits exactly the right note with every single one of his words and gestures.

So who would I then cast as Osric? Another unknown actor, because after all we're talking randomly exchangable pawn? Err – no. First of all, however much he may in many ways represent the typical courtier of Claudius's court, Osric is just a bit too flamboyant not to be instantly recognisable. And secondly ... well, it so happens that I have a pet choice here as well, if you'll excuse the fall-back into that kind of imagery: The more I think about it, the more I find myself coming back to Billy Boyd, the Pippin from "Lord of the Rings." He was my favourite hobbit; I liked the absolutely golden-hearted sincerity shining through from under even his most foolish or naughty actions, which is, I think, exactly what we need to see in our young courtier, too. And Mr. Boyd – who once said in an interview that he likes roles where he gets to steal scenes from the production's big stars – certainly has both the deadpan comedic talent and the sensitivity needed to simultaneously get across Osric's abject silliness on the one hand and his youthful naïveté on the other. So go ahead, Billy, show 'em what you can do! I can't wait to see you stealing this one from under Edward Norton's and Colin Firth's backsides ...