Hudson Valley Shakespeare is ready for “Hamlet”

 The Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival kicks off its new season with a preview fundraiser at 4:30 p.m. June 11 at Boscobel House and Gardens in Garrison. In this, its silver anniversary year, the troupe is taking on “The Comedy of Errors,” the Bard’s ode to that staple of Hollywood comedies and melodramas alike – twins – and the decidedly un-Shakespearean “Around the World in Eighty Days.”

The infinite variety of
the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival
– a très modern “The Taming of the Shrew”

But no doubt, the news that will be on everybody’s lips at the benefit is that the company will for the first time be presenting the work that defines every Shakespeare troupe – indeed every theater company and every actor – “Hamlet.”

“A few years ago I might have said we were not ready for ‘Hamlet,’” founding artistic director Terrence O’Brien acknowledges in an interview in the company’s Spring Folio (hvshakespeare.org). “But now I think we really are.”

His cautious nurturing of the troupe and the play speaks to its profound place in the Shakespeare canon. And that in turn speaks to the profundity of Hamlet himself. Literary lion Harold Bloom has called Shakespeare in general and Hamlet – the play and the character in particular – the beginnings of modern consciousness. It’s a theme on which he plays provocative variations in his new “The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life” (Yale University Press), suggesting, for example, that the soliloquizing Hamlet is the forerunner of Milton’s diabolically self-possessed Satan in “Paradise Lost.”

Yet as Bloom has also pointed out in previous works, Hamlet – a man who cannot help but pluck at the heart of his own mystery – is ultimately unknowable, even to himself. In this, he is like the nihilistic Iago in “Othello” and, to a lesser extent, the rakish, Machiavellian Edmund in “King Lear,” Bloom writes. And he shares a bond with the disaffected Brick, hubby to that most desperate of housewives, Maggie, in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” Charles E. May posits in “Tennessee Williams: 13 Essays” (University Press of Mississippi ). Just as Brick’s detachment from his wife and the world can’t be put down entirely to his betrayal of buddy Skipper and a perhaps suppressed homosexuality, Hamlet’s weltschmerz can’t be contained in his grief over his kingly father’s murder at the hands of his usurping uncle, Claudius and his mother’s o’er-hasty remarriage to the assassin. Rather, May suggests, Brick’s self-disgust and Hamlet’s melancholy are part of a greater realization that there is something fundamentally damaged about humanity. They’ve peered into the abyss, and though they are still in this human world, they are not likely to embrace its concerns again.

“Hamlet,” then, is what we might call an existential drama, and given that, it’s no surprise that even the most experienced of scholars and actors would be bewitched, bothered and bewildered by it.
“The longer I read, teach, and meditate upon ‘Hamlet,’ the stranger the play becomes to me,”   Bloom, the Sterling professor of the humanities at Yale, writes in “Anatomy.”

Such strangeness can be oddly liberating. The Spring Folio quotes Derek Jacobi – as close to a definitive Hamlet as I ever saw -- as saying: “The play and the part are capable of endless reinvestigation, and that is what makes it so absorbing and so rewarding to perform."

Indeed, there are as many Hamlets as there are actors – and readers.

In a web post (http://www.slate.com/id/2211257/entry/2213533) and her new book “The Long Goodbye: A Memoir” (Riverhead Books), Slate cultural critic Meghan O’Rourke explores how “Hamlet” has enabled her to grieve for the loss of mother to colon cancer at age 55, in part by demonstrating the chasm between the bereaved, who are bound in a bell jar of sorrow, and a world, that however sympathetic, sails blithely on.
“Hamlet” is very much about grief and death. But it is also about dying, which is altogether different. For much of the play, death is an abstraction for Hamlet -- a disapproving ghost, a philosophical problem he can’t quite solve (“To be or not to be”), a mystery that sets him a challenge to which he feels inadequate. It’s only when he encounters the concrete possibility of his own demise at the hands of Claudius during his aborted exile to England that he begins to understand that life and death are two halves of an unanswerable riddle. What matters is how we face them. (“The readiness is all.”)

For all its preoccupation with death, the demanding “Hamlet,” Terry O’Brien says, “should make us all very happy we’re alive.”

The season runs June 14-Sept. 4. hvshakespeare.org.