Hefty Hamlet

I’m sure Santino Fontana will be great as Hamlet. But you’re wrong to suggest that casting him is somehow authentic, rescuing the part from inappropriately “fat, bearded, balding guys.” “The Prince of Denmark is twenty or so years old” says Straight Talk [March]. No, Hamlet is thirty. The gravedigger in Act Five, when asked how long he’s been in the job, replies that he started “the very day that young Hamlet was born.” He goes on to explain that he has been at it “man and boy, thirty years.” When Hamlet is deriding himself for cowardice, he calls to the audience, “Who calls me villain? breaks my pate across?/ Plucks off my beard, and blows it in my face?” And when he’s fighting his duel with Laertes, his mother worries that he’s “fat and scant of breath.” OK, this has been interpreted as meaning “sweaty” or “relatively out of shape.” But elsewhere in Shakespeare, “fat” when used to describe a person generally means … well … “fat.” So Hamlet’s thirty, bearded, and on the pudgy side. The skinny young man of our imaginations is a Victorian invention. Not that it matters in production. What’s needed is an imaginative and versatile actor. But the telling-it-how-it-is tone of Straight Talk grates a bit when the initial premise of the article is wrong.

Bridget Escolme
London, UK