A Black Hamlet Amid the Detritus of Empires

[Paapa Essiedu as Hamlet in 2016 RSC production, screen capture]

Some may think that countless high school students believe Shakespeare's Hamlet is a play about a girl whose dad won't let her date a certain boy, and the boy is later very, very mean to her, and he later kills her dad accidentally, and she later commits suicide, and later many other people die too, including the boy, his mom, and his uncle.

Oh, and his mom's the queen of the country, and it turns out that she had wished her son would marry the girl (yes, the same girl whose dad prohibited her from seeing him). Ironic! What's with that?


[Image via me.me]

Many scholars still believe Hamlet is mostly a play about a prince with mommy issues (ignoring the political contexts and frame).

So what might average white people make of a mostly-black-cast, African-themed, 2016 RSC production of Hamlet, with Claudius in western military garb?


What shall we make of the ghost of the king, the brother that Claudius killed, a ghost dressed in what seems to be traditional African tribal garments?

[Paapa Essiedu as Hamlet and Ewart James Walters as Ghost in Hamlet; image via RSC, cropped]
What are we to make of the sentinels, dressed in modern western-influenced military uniforms and berets, with machine guns?

[Kevin N Golding as Bernardo, Patrick Elue as Fortinbras and James Cooney as Horatio in Hamlet, image via RSC]


Is all of this merely meant to show that girls and boys in African nations have romantic problems too? Or is there more to it?

We all come to the theater with our own individual thoughts, assumptions, and priorities, and Hamlet as a story about star-crossed lovers has its appeal to some.

But it's also about a dead king who, earlier in life, had killed a neighboring king in single combat, resulting in that king's surviving son hoping to avenge the death of his father.

And we later learn that it's about an older Denmark that required payments of "tribute" from England. Yes, from England, which is the country where Shakespeare's acting company performs the play. What's with that?

And what do these things have to do with Shakespeare, writing (or revising an earlier play) in London, for English audiences? Why is an English play set in a fictional recreation of an older, historic Denmark?

And what might it have to do with Africa?

LAYERS AND LENSES
Every time we view a play, we bring to it our own unique personal lens through which we view it. This lens is influenced by our personal and family history, and also by our cultural and political history. (Even if we have been taught lies, propaganda about our cultural and political history, even if we've been deceived, we bring these internalized falsehoods with us to our reading or experience of a play.) If the play is from a much older time, or from a distant land, the contrast between the play and our lens may seem even more pronounced.

If the play refers to stories or events from other lands, cultures, ages, at worst this may at times seem confusing, but at best it may add to the richness of our experience: A modern audience, with its own lenses, is in dialogue not only with the play in general, but also with those other stories and events alluded to by the play. In my blog posts here, I often deal with this in regard to Biblical allusions and the additional layers of meaning or opportunities for reflection that the allusions offer.

Before we consider the 2016 RSC production and casting... Regarding an English play set in an older Denmark that required tribute of England (that exploited England with the threat of violence and military invasion, in other words), what might we find in the most basic sense if we wrestle a bit with these details of the play?

DANISH RAIDS, A DANISH QUEEN OF ENGLAND, & TRIBUTE
My research about the names of the sentinels, Francisco and Bernardo, included (as frequent visitors to this blog know) research not only about saints Francis of Assisi and Bernard of Clairvaux, but also about the locations and history of Franciscan and Cistercian convents and monasteries in England that were dissolved, and their lands taken, during the reign of England's King Henry VIII. It turns out that among the ruins of convents and monasteries in England, records show that there were some that had been sacked during raids launched from Denmark (including Westbury Priory; Exeter Monastery; Holy Hill Monastery, Breedon; and Tynemouth Priory).

Think about that: Danish raiders attacked convents and monasteries, and these raids may likely have included stealing gold chalices and food, raping the nuns, warrior-raiders pillaging, and capturing people to take them back home as slaves. Steal, rape, pillage, enslave, kill. If you live in a time and culture where your life is often threatened by raping, pillaging, and enslavement, you may think you need to defend yourself in part by doing a bit of raping and pillaging yourself. (Ah, the good old days. Simpler times. But were they really better and more honorable times?) If the bullies are bullying you, some think, the best defense is a strong offense. This is the impulse to revenge, which is in part at the heart of the play.

The idea of a vanquished country paying tribute to a conquering one is sort of like people paying "insurance" money to organized crime: A thug comes along and says he won't rob or burn down your business, as long as you make regular payments to him and his organization. He may call this an insurance policy (as a running joke, to make the illegitimate offer seem more legitimate).

In the historical context of old Denmark and England, this was what it would have been like for England to pay tribute to Denmark in the fiction of the play. (Did England ever really pay tribute to Denmark, or did pirate-types in Denmark simply launch raids on England whenever they pleased? The play doesn't say, but that could be another topic of historical research.)

It also so happened that James, the new king of England who came to the throne after Elizabeth's recent death, had a Danish bride. So the new queen of England was Anne, a princess of Denmark. Shakespeare may have had an interest in reviving some version of this story for English audiences in part because of the new queen.

But note: In the original versions of the tale handed down from Saxo Grammaticus and later translated and revised by Belleforest, Hamlet travels to England and takes an English wife before returning to Denmark to avenge his father's death (among other adventures there in England). Yet in Shakespeare's England, James, a Scottish king (now also an English king, the son of a vanquished, executed Scottish queen) had taken a Danish bride. In the patriarchy of the time, Denmark is no longer in the dominant position, but England. So Shakespeare's Hamlet is not a play written in a country that still pays tribute to Denmark, but one written by a dominant power among many others. The tables have turned a bit.

Furthermore, by setting some of his plays in distant lands, this allowed Shakespeare indirect ways to address topics of concern to his audiences in London. So The Merchant of Venice may, on its surface, be about a Jew in Venice, and Hamlet a tale about old Denmark, and Julius Caesar about an emperor in Rome, but indirectly, these stories had relevance and appeal because of how people of England saw themselves and their own cultural stories in the mirror of the plays by analogy. This is still the case today, which is in part why it works to set Hamlet in what seems to be an African context, as the 2016 RSC production does, or for other productions to explore many other possible settings. They work by analogy with our own times and in many cultural contexts.

COLONIALISM, EUROPEAN EXPLOITATION OF AFRICA, & ITS AFTEREFFECTS
If Denmark raiding England, and then requiring tribute, gives us an image in the play of international strong-armed exploitation by a pirate-warrior empire, the 2016 RSC production invites us to hold in our minds the memory and awareness of how Europe colonized and exploited African and other nations, and how modern corporate-military alliances continue to do so.

What Denmark did to England in the 800s may have a parallel in what Europe did (and in the minds of some, is still doing) to Africa. All of the major powers of Europe had colonies in Africa. All of them were used to exploit labor and natural resources.

Since the 1998 publication of Adam Hochschild's best-selling book, King Leopold's Ghost, a great deal of attention has been given to Belgian atrocities in the Congo, and rightly so. For its ivory and rubber, Belgium's King Leopold II, and others under his direction, brutally exploited the colony they named The Congo Free State. By some estimates, 10 million were killed (perhaps half of the population) and many more maimed in the practice of cutting off hands. Even after the Belgian slave trade had been abolished, Leopold and his underlings continued the practice in the heart of Africa where, at least for a while, it was relatively out of European sight and out of European minds, with profits making Leopold richer.

[Image: John Hobbis Harris: "Mutilated Congolese children, image from King Leopold's Soliloquy, Mark Twain’s political satire," photos by Harris. Wikipedia.]

But Belgium also had a colony in the Gold Cost, and other European nations had African colonies as well: England had 15; France eight; Germany six; Portugal five; Italy and Spain had four each.

The general movement globally was from legal slavery to abolition (too many people would not tolerate the sight of slavery), with slavery replaced by colonization and often virtual enslavement abroad (easier to tolerate because it was out of sight and out of mind). This was the case with so-called Banana Republics, whose governments were usually hand-picked and supported by some stronger and distant government and its military, or by puppet-kings and rulers who would do their bidding.

My own country, the United States, has a sordid history in this way. Some of the higher profile cases took place not only in Central and South America (among those railed against by General Smedley Butler in his classic book, War is a Racket), but also coups in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), The Congo (1961), and Chile (1973). The list of nations in which the US meddled to discredit, remove, or assassinate democratically elected leaders, and to support or install leaders of foreign governments more favorable to US interests, is in fact much, much longer.

Today, the US and China each have a significant presence in Africa, each nation competing to secure African resources; China has a military base in Djibouti, Africa (East, Horn of Africa) that cost nearly $600 million to build; the US has one of its eleven combatant commands, Africom, devoted entirely to military operations in Africa.

A recent film/documentary called The Spider's Web: Britain's Second Empire also does a good job showing how Great Britain went from being a global colonial power ("the sun never sets on the British empire") to being a financial empire; they no longer have to worry about ruling unruly colonies, but they still control the purse strings of many around the globe. If a financial system can accomplish this, it doesn't need to launch a raid to steal, rape and enslave other peoples. It just exploits them financially.

Because of colonialism and western meddling in the affairs of African nations, it's (sadly) not surprising to see some leaders of affected nations dressed more like Claudius in the 2016 production, in western military garb, and not like the same production's ghost of Hamlet's father, in traditional tribal robes.

VIEWING SHAKESPEARE'S HAMLET THROUGH THE LENS OF COLONIAL AND POST-COLONIAL AFRICA
In the text of Shakespeare's Hamlet, we learn not only about the romantic tensions between Hamlet, Ophelia, and her father, but also about a history of tense international relations: Hamlet's father killed Fortinbras of Norway, whose son wants his father's land back. Denmark collects tribute from England, under threat of invasion. Young Fortinbras is either convinced by his uncle not to invade Denmark, and to invade Poland instead, or is cunning enough to use the invasion of Poland as an excuse, to request permission to cross Danish land on the way, and perhaps to invade Denmark. Nations and their leaders are deceived and deceiving, and it's in this context that the play offers us its tale of a king who secretly killed his brother by poison to gain the throne, and who lied about it to cover his misdeeds.

The history of European colonization of Africa is similarly fraught with violence and with lies to cover misdeeds (as readers of Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost know).

In the text, the Ghost speaks of sleeping in his orchard, when he was stung by a serpent - who was his brother. This evokes a sense of the Biblical tale of Adam in and Eve in the book of Genesis. Some scholars view the dead king as having lived more honorably and honestly, defeating an opponent in single combat, which may have spared the lives of many soldiers in each respective army, while Claudius is a poisoner and liar, representing a more dishonest and Machiavellian style.

Yet even the references in the dialogue of the play to the dead king are ambiguous: He is in purgatory instead of heaven because of some unforgiven sin or sins. The poison makes his skin "lazar-like," a reference to the Biblical tale of the Rich Man and Lazarus, the neglected beggar whose skin was covered in sores licked by dogs. Hamlet idolizes his dead father, but he expresses more fond memories and affection for Yorick, the king's fool, a man of "infinite jest" who let the prince ride on his back.

The danger with idealizing the past is that the good old days were never quite as good or ideal as we sometimes remember them to be. A time of knights and warrior kings and chivalry, associated with the dead king, may not have been all it was cracked up to be. Perhaps one weakness in the 2016 RSC production of Hamlet is that, in contrast with the text, the ghost of the dead king may be too idealized, never appearing to the audience in warrior-armor (only appearing as light apprehended by the sentinels and Horatio, though they speak of his armor). And the gravedigger, a wit and fool-type who has a kindred-spirit relation with Yorick, is played by the same actor who plays the ghost of Hamlet's father, at least in one recorded production. Rather than a contrast between a cold, warrior-father and a warm, affectionate, surrogate-father, as hinted by the text, these lines are blurred by the casting.

But this is a small point: What was lost (in the rich fabrics of ancient African cultures) comes to much more than what followed after colonialism and the meddling of empires that extracted labor, lives, and resources. The 2016 RSC production gives us one interpretation, and there are many other possibilities.

Shakespeare's Hamlet shows us a world described at least by some of its characters as dangerous, rotten, and out-of-joint. In this 2016 production, through casting, dialect, costuming, sets, and staging, we are reminded of some of the corrupting influences of European colonialism upon Africa. The prince is a counter-cultural rebel and graffiti artist, seemingly powerless but struggling still in an oppressive system.


[Clarence Smith as Claudius, Paapa Essiedu as Hamlet. Image source: RSC, cropped]

[Late addition to this blog post:
On a FaceBook Early Modern forum, Jonathan Burton writes,
"A deeply researched and very thoughtful review of this production by Sujata Iyengar and Lesley Feracho appears in the April 2019 edition of Cahiers Elisabethains and is also accessible to all via MLA Commons. Iyengar and Feracho argue that 'the production mixed these multiple referents of blackness (Eastern African, West African, Caribbean, South African, 1970s African American) in order deliberately to create an imaginary post-colonial domain where these different kinds of diasporic blackness engaged with each other through the figure of Hamlet and his art.'"
Jonathan Burton provides this link, which works:
https://mla.hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:25441/
On another FaceBook forum, one of the authors, Sujata Iyengar, also mentions the article.
Thanks to both Sujata Iyengar and to Jonathan Burton for mentioning this.]


BLACK LIVES STILL MATTER
Black Lives Matter protests are still taking place in many parts of the world as I write this (and this is very relevant to my reflections here). Just yesterday, in Aurora, Colorado, there was a peaceful protest in memory of Elijah McClain, who was killed by police last year. Elijah liked playing violin, so some of the leaders of the protest organized violin-playing for those gathered. Police came in, in riot gear, and seem to have assaulted the peaceful protesters with pepper-spray. The police chief later claimed that this was justified because they suspected the presence of (that amorphous group) Antifa (meaning, anti-fascist) among the protesters.

[Meme source: Facebook]

Even my mother would probably describe herself as Anti-fascist, tho' she would not resort to violent means. Antifa is not one group, not all violent, but many groups and individuals who are against things like police brutality and Trump.

This was the Aurora, CO police chief's justification for riot gear and pepper spray on peaceful protesters?

For the police to blame their brutality on an alleged presence of Antifa is a lie, not so far from Claudius claiming his brother was bitten by a snake, when in fact Claudius is the guilty one who poisoned his brother. The police are often more guilty of violence than the protesters, who are sometimes infiltrated by white provocateurs who wish to discredit the BLM movement.

In Esquire magazine yesterday, Jack Holmes had a good OpEd arguing that police who confront peaceful protesters with violence only prove some of the protester's main points: that something is very wrong with policing in the US, and police departments should be defunded, rethought, funds invested in more helpful ways, and the the recruitment and training of public servants who enforce laws and keep the peace should be done in radically new ways. What we have now obviously is not working.

Some things are still rotten and out of joint. Who will work to set them right?

Peaceful protesters are rising to the challenge.

Given the present and historical context, the 2016 RSC production of Hamlet is an important one for our times. If you have not seen it, I highly recommend it, and supporting theaters like the RSC and Shakespeare's Globe, as well as your local theaters and arts organizations.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I would love for readers of this blog to view the 2016 RSC production of Hamlet; in the past, I have encouraged blog readers to view and donate to Shakespeare's Globe to help save that theater in this time of pandemic and the new financial pressures placed on arts organizations. The RSC is also under great pressure (one story and interview with Gregory Doran on "RSC in fight to survive" can be found here). Please support the RSC and other arts organizations if you are able.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Disclaimer: If and when I quote or paraphrase bible passages in many of my blog posts, I do not intend to promote any religion over any other, nor am I attempting to promote religious belief in general; only to point out how the Bible may have influenced Shakespeare, his plays, and his age.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Thanks for reading!
My current project is a book tentatively titled Hamlet’s Bible, about biblical allusions and plot echoes in Hamlet.

Below is a link to a list of some of my top posts (“greatest hits”), including a description of my book project (last item on the list):

https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2019/12/top-20-hamlet-bible-posts.html

I post every week, so please visit as often as you like and consider subscribing.