Andrew Scott as a Hamlet for Modern Times

There’s something in that moment of showing someone whom you trust and care for something you like. Here’s something I believe so strongly that you would also like and there you go and spit on it like it never even mattered to begin with.

Recently, I was tasked with a presentation on Shakespeare’s Hamlet. I had to memorize 3 monologues a daunting task and then extrapolate the meaning, ok I’m an English major and theater minor that’s not too hard, but then I have to show clips from recorded versions. Kenneth Branagh easy enough straight forward, then Andrew Scott. Here’s why all went wrong.

Scott portrays Hamlet in such a human way in a way that I feel connected to using my hands, fidgeting with my watch, saying the wrong thing and probably the wrong moment. He is so engrossed in the character and it is such a modern take, but it proves true in that adaptation. Would his Hamlet fit the “traditional” setting I don’t think so, but in the context and world of today I think it makes sense how he acts. You can feel his anxieties radiate off him and you know what he is feeling through his hand movements. There is wonder in him and grief and shock and the sense of I am thinking of these things as I am saying them but not in a “this is my next line way,” but in a “I am the character and formulating the thought as it happens to me.” All sense of the man Andrew Scott is stripped away and what is left is pure show of who Hamlet is when he is not played through the traditional lens.

So I watch the entire thing. I show it to my class. What do more than half of them do? Laugh. Physically move their body away because they don’t find emotion in the performance nor do they feel connected. And now I’m sitting here wondering where is the lack of connection for them to Scott because there was such a realness to him, that no “traditional” adaptation could convey.

Dare I say it was the best adaptation? No. But was there the need to blatantly say “I don’t think we need to watch anymore” and “If we watched anymore I was going to be mad at you?” In what world do you say that to someone.

You’ve probably experienced that moment when you show someone something that you like and are watching them for what they’ll say and think about it. And I usually love that moment, however, I wanted to slink into my chair and didn’t want to hear what they had to say because I felt silly for liking it, even though I shouldn’t have.

“Not a whit. We defy augury. There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now; ‘tis not to come. If it be not to come; it will be now. If it be not now; yet it will come. The readiness is all. Since no man of aught he leaves knows, what is ’t to leave betimes? Let be.”