I read a couple interviews with Sir Patrick Stewart recently. These were old interviews, but they were new to me. What surprised me was that Stewart seemed to view Hamlet's uncle, King Claudius, in a very similar vein to what I used in creating my own version of the character in 2015. Not an evil man at all, but one who simply committed one horrible act in an otherwise, if not exemplary, then by no means bad life.
I put a lot of my own musings into my one-act play, To Kill a King, which suggested that old Hamlet was far from the saint his son seemed to think him to be, and that his blissful marriage was mostly a triumph of public relations over reality. In my play, King Hamlet is first of all a soldier; Claudius is a diplomat. My play also suggests that Claudius, not his brother, is Hamlet's actual father. This is hardly a new suggestion, by the way. I merely suggest that Claudius and Gertrude got drunk one night and Hamlet was the result of a one-time slip. Others have suggested that the Ghost was right when he used the word "adulterous," and that his wife had been carrying on with his brother for a very long time. If that were the case, then it would be entirely possible that Claudius killed his own brother, but it was Hamlet who killed Hamlet's father.
Claudius, after all, would no doubt still feel remorse and guilt over his brother's death even if he had a perfectly valid reason for killing him. I give him one, with a soliloquy that provides a counterpart to his "confession" in Hamlet. It allows him to speculate on his future, portraying his decision to murder his brother as something he finds morally repugnant, but preferable to allowing his brother to kill Gertrude, as he's already tried to do once. In effect, he chooses to damn himself rather than allow any harm to come to a woman he's loved for years.
One place where my own portrayal resembled Stewart's was at the end, with Claudius seemingly drinking the poisoned wine of his own accord, rather than having it forced on him, as it usually is. I chose to do it this way for two reasons. First, I had reached an age where this was absolutely preferable to anything more strenuous, such as being bent backwards over a table. Second, hearkening back to Claudius' statement to Laertes of how important his wife was to him, it seemed entirely reasonable that, with Gertrude dead, Claudius would decide he had no reason to live anyway and drinking the poison could be seen as a way of defying Hamlet by taking away his revenge.
Now, I've seriously thought of trying to produce a senior citizen version of Hamlet, which would allow me to play the title role. Claudius and Gertrude would likely be in their eighties, Ophelia a lovely young thing in her early sixties, Polonius another octogenarian (as he's often played now, though considering his children's age he probably shouldn't be much over forty), and so forth. Possibly this would be a "concert" version, an unstaged, or minimally staged reading, rather than a fully produced play, if only because most of the actors might well be too old to do a staged version.
Shakespeare wasn't always kind to his characters. His treatment of Macbeth, for example, didn't merely "verge" on the libelous, it actually was. The real Macbeth didn't murder Duncan, didn't murder Banquo (who may never have existed), and was generally regarded as a good king during his seventeen-year reign. Richard III wasn't a hunchback and, if the young princes were actually illegitimate, wasn't even a usurper (Henry Tudor actually had stronger motives for getting rid of them, but Shakespeare could hardly blame the queen's grandfather, could he?). He was also a young man when he died, despite often being played by actors ten to twenty years older than the real king.
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