Book review: Hamlet Globe to Globe: Two Years,190,000 Miles,197 Countries,One Play

Outdistancing Jack Kerouac’s On the Road peregrinator Sal Paradise by 196 countries and more than 30,000 miles, Globe Theatre Artistic Director Emeritus Dominic Dromgoole here recounts the adventures, both harrowing and heartening, of an intrepid company of itinerant tragedians performing Hamlet in places ordinarily presumed inhospitable to High Culture. While acknowledging a debt to ‘stimulation’ from prominent academics like James Shapiro, Jonathan Bate and Stephen Greenblatt (378), Dromgoole is stridently defensive against naysayers of every stripe but especially legislators from ‘the congress of Shakespeare scholars’ (193), BBC talking heads, turf-defending British Council mandarins, cultural imperialists as well as their anti-imperial adversaries.

In part, Dromgoole’s own personal sweet swan song, this two-year commemoration of Shakespeare’s death, begun 23 April 2014, was conceived to extend the Global Shakespeare Project’s Globe to Globe festival by performing Hamlet to nearly every country in the world. Through a combination of doggedness and insouciance, he assembled an ethnically diverse cast whose ‘joy, innocence and enthusiasm’ (193) for bringing Shakespeare to far-flung regions enabled them to overcome punishing physical conditions, threatening political circumstances and daunting practical logistics – and often all three at once.

Epigraphs from the play that introduce each chapter directly correspond to situations the company encountered, particularly ‘the spurns / That patient merit of the unworthy takes…’ (3.1.73–4) as they were ‘surrounded by the full array of British mechanisms to hinder and slow [their] endeavor – the media, the academics, the apparatchiks, the governance – all lancing any bubble of adventure of connection which crossed their path’ (197). Despite such discouragements from officialdom, not to mention sandstorms in Jordan, monsoons in Cambodia, and Montezuma’s notorious revenge in Mexico, these successors to the Lord Chamberlain’s Men resolutely persevered from Albania, Angola, Armenia and Azerbaijan to Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, Vietnam, Zambia and Zimbabwe – as well as 186 other countries.

Dromgoole continually invokes Hamlet’s performance history, rather than academic scholarship, as the ultimate authority for his interpretations of the play:

Many have seen and argued a deliberate replanning done by Shakespeare, James Shapiro in 1599 most persuasively. But it is always hard to juxtapose Shakespeare and planning…. We have little idea what played in front of his audience, probably a beautiful muddle of author’s intentions, actor’s enhancement, actors’ destruction, and the text floating uneasily between them all. (79)

His readings of Hamlet thus more closely resemble those of fellow theatrical practitioners like Harley Granville-Barker than those of the Second Great Cham, Harold Bloom.

Rejecting the idea of a singular ‘right text’ (73), Dromgoole privileges any aspect of the play’s three extant versions that helps convey characters’ moral and psychological complexity. In due course, his understanding of textual variations, along with practical dramaturgy, accounts for directorial choices such as how Hamlet’s first soliloquy should be delivered:

The headlong rush of this soliloquy is an artful way to dump us, the audience, in at the deep end. Before we have had a chance to get to know this young man, he is pouring out the lava of his soul without mediation or filtering. The directness forces us into, if not agreement, immediate sharing, before we have any chance to consider what is being said. We are plugged directly into this young man’s scrambled soul. (174)

A self-proclaimed ‘verse agnostic’ (45), Dromgoole rejects both ‘iambic fundamentalists who believe passionately that every foot should be stressed the same way’ and those who ‘don’t give a toss, and who mutter, shout and maul the verse in any way they like’ (44). He advocates instead for ‘the direct address, the clear engagement and the simple talking’ (47) – as when, also in Hamlet’s first soliloquy, ‘the iambic beat maintains a forward tread, but the incline is downhill and the ground is gravelly’, so that ‘the only way for the actor, the character and we the audience not to fall is to give in to the cadence’ (174). Allowing that the hue of such prose is decidedly heliotropic, his readings themselves nevertheless carry weight because they directly confront central interpretive issues.

Likewise, he does not shy away from addressing sensitive political and cultural obstacles his migrating players repeatedly encountered. Accused of cultural imperialism on the one hand and of validating North Korean criminality on the other, Dromgoole exhibits an impressive grasp of global issues ranging from Middle Eastern warfare to Sub-Saharan genocide. What no doubt sustained the company – beyond a naive belief that ‘touring Hamlet would have some sort of benevolent effect…on a world filled with hatred’ (276) – was simultaneously not taking themselves too seriously by acknowledging the ‘madness of the endeavor’ (289). Interspersed with grandiose claims about promoting world peace were ‘the pleasures that life in the theatre naturally affords’ – ‘the best time that you can have without drugs’ (60).

Self-righteousness often intermingles with self-irony, as when declaring the project’s central conditions included ‘that we played to people’ rather than ‘the posh’ (190) and comparing their achievement to that of the space programme while acknowledging such a comparison is ‘nutty aggrandizement’ (366). This remarkable test of endurance for both the actors and the play itself – three countries a week ‘over the course of two years and through almost 200 countries, and doing 280-odd performances [without ever missing] a single show’ (290) – in the end remains a mystery not just for Dromgoole, but also for readers of this heartfelt testimonial to humanity’s quest to achieve the impossible.