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Why Is Hamlet Tall and/Or Thin?

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The job of casting director is to me a fascinating one because casting directors need to be aware of audience preconceptions about the correlation between looks and personality. Yet, I’ve never found any kind of text spelling out the tacit awareness of casting directors, even though they would be the world’s leading experts on stereotypes about the interplay of body shape and behavior.

Consider the most famous role in the world: Hamlet. While verbal dexterity is crucial for the role, most of the famous Hamlet’s have also been some combination of tall and/or thin: ectomorphic. For example, Edwin Booth, Henry Irving, John Gielgud, Lawrence Olivier, Kevin Kline, Ethan Hawke, Jude Law, and so forth. In Shakespeare in Love, the original Hamlet, Richard Burbage, is played by Ben Affleck. My son, who is about 6’2″, played Hamlet in high school (not in Hamlet, but in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead).

In contrast, we’re probably not going to see the Jonah Hill Hamlet anytime soon.

And yet, in the duel with Laertes before it turns deadly, Hamlet’s mother Gertrude comments, “He’s fat, and scant of breath.” Hamlet himself refers to his “too too solid flesh,” although that may be meant metaphorically. The leading Shakespearean actor of the 18th Century, David Garrick, was only 5’4″.

Perhaps the exception to the rule in recent years is Kenneth Branagh, who directed himself in a well-regarded film version of Hamlet in the 1990s. He eventually put on a fair amount of weight, which may have something to do with how out of fashion he became in the 2000s. Today, Branagh is better respected for his multiple talents than he was a dozen years ago, but perhaps the public temporarily turning on him had something to do with a sense of betrayal over Hamlet packing on the pounds.

 

20 Comments to "Why Is Hamlet Tall and/Or Thin?"

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  1. Olaf the Dane needed some beef to swing his ax. RADA grads senior enough to play Shakespeare today are liable to be a little dried up. It’s a pity three hundred years of theatrical tradition requires Lady Macbeth to be a tough old meaty wacko part for a tough old meaty wacko broad- as written, it’s an ingenue role. Some young bride so inexperienced she hasn’t figured out that when you kill guests, people talk.

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  2. You’re forgetting Derek Jacobi, one of my favorite Hamlets (his version is on PBS). Jacobi was definitely not long and lean http://www.flickfilosopher.com/2008/09/to-be-or-not-to-be-derek-jacobi-as-hamlet.html

    And no, Branagh was still lean for Hamlet in 1996.
    http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Qi_l_pmRm0g/TGU59718_3I/AAAAAAAABX8/IluH1hHpjyY/s1600/00316506.JPG and http://www.classicfilmfreak.com/wp-content/uploads2/2010/08/00316524.jpg

    Branagh’s Hamlet–the movie, at least–is by far the best.

    Incidentally, back when I studied Hamlet in high school and college, we discussed that very point. I argued that perhaps his mother was teasing him, and won a fair amount of converts.

  3. Here’s another oddity. Why is Hamlet so frequently depicted as a blond (cf Olivier and Branagh’s Hamlets). We don’t get a direct account of Hamlet’s coloring in the play, but we are told that his father’s beard is a “sable silver’d,” which could be taken as evidence that Hamlet is a probably a brunet.

    Perhaps blondness is connected in the imagination with a predilection for introversion?

  4. says:
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    Perhaps blondness is connected in the imagination with a predilection for introversion?

    It’s also connected with a predilection for Daneness.

  5. It’s the association of personality types with body types–ectomorphs are intellectual and nervous, mesomorphs are energetic and powerful, and endomorphs are fun and lazy. Compare Alvin and the Chipmunks–it’s all over the place, from high to low. It even shows up in the three doshas of Ayurvedic medicine in India, so it may be a bit of a human universal.

    There probably is some basis for it in that athletic types will build muscle, if you’re a laid-back guy in a society with enough food you’ll tend to pack on the pounds, and intellectuals forget to eat.

  6. It’s probably spill-over from Julius C:

    Let me have men about me that are fat,
    Sleek-headed men and such as sleep a-nights.
    Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look,
    He thinks too much; such men are dangerous.

  7. Syon:Perhaps blondness is connected in the imagination with a predilection for introversion?

    Anon:”It’s also connected with a predilection for Daneness.”

    Sure, but one could the same thing about Norwegians, and Rufus Sewell didn’t wear a blond wig when he played Fortinbras in Branagh’s HAMLET .

  8. Hamlet was a comedy, written to curry favor with the court by ridiculing the revenge tragedy as the state assumed sole authority for the resolution of disputes. The revenge tragedy was structured with the crime in act I, the investigation in act II and the resolution in act III, whereas in Hamlet, the crime has already been committed when the play commences, and the villain is disclosed in act I. Then Hamlet farts around for two and a half acts, and ends up bumbling his revenge. Not only that, but he undoes his father’s signature achievement and lets Fortinbras take over Denmark. Was anyone else available? Like, say, Horatio? Hamlet’s boon companion, fellow student at university (and thus almost certainly from the high nobility), perhaps?

    There’s a theory that Hamlet was no callow youth, but a man in middle age (I don’t have the references to hand just now, but I found them years ago). If so, the ravings about Gertrude’s beauty could be another comedic element, as she’d be at least thirteen or fourteen years older than the middle aged Hamlet. (Well, she’s beautiful because she’s the queen, I guess.)

    Anyhow, that’s my theory, and I’m sticking to it.

  9. Mel Gibson as Hamlet was good and different from the norm. Dark, bearded, lean and muscular, not thin.

  10. Casting directors are, to a disproportionate measure, gay white men balancing between a flimsy understanding of (or, willingness to understand) ethnographic realism on one hand, and the minimal realist demands of their profession on the other.

    Gay white men, by the way, are frequently comfortable in their racism. Being the current favorite protected minority, they exercise a license to indulge in crassness without threat to their position.

  11. Power Child:”Casting directors are, to a disproportionate measure, gay white men ”

    Are they? From what I’ve seen, quite a few are women:

    Marion Dougherty, Mary Jo Slater, Mary Selway, Lynn Stalmaster, April Webster, Tammara Billik, Marci Liroff, Avy Kaufman, Mindy Marin, etc

  12. says:
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    In Hamlet’s “lost all my mirth” speech he says he has “foregone all customs of exercise”.

  13. I have always found Hamlet a uniquely unsympathetic character. Claudius, on the other hand strikes me as an excellent anti-hero. I would like to see a production of Hamlet where Hamlet is played by some fat pimply 30 year old and it is implied that this pathetic weasel wasn’t fit to rule thus compelling Claudius to act for the good of Denmark. That’s how I choose to read Hamlet. Claudius as Nixon. The necessary man.

  14. syon: That’s not how disproportionateness works.

    1.7% of the American population identify as gay or lesbian, and whites and men are less likely to identify as LGBT than minorities and women.

    For the sex divide, my guess is that there are more female bisexuals and fewer female homosexuals — so let’s round the numbers and say 1% of the American population is gay and 0.7% of the American population is lesbian.

    64% of the population is non-Hispanic white, 16% Hispanic, 12% non-Hispanic black, and 5% Asian. 3.2% of non-Hispanic whites identify as LGBT, 4.0% of Asians, 4.6% of blacks, and 4.3% of Asians. There’s probably some mathematical way to estimate the percentage of the population that’s a gay white man from this, but 0.6% looks about right.

    Now, if 6% of casting directors are gay white men, gay white men are overrepresented among casting directors by an order of magnitude — that is, casting directors are, to a disproportionate measure, gay white men if only 6% of casting directors are gay white men.

    That’s not what Power Child means, of course — he’s saying gay white men are overrepresented enough to shape general trends in casting. How overrepresented would they have to be for that? Well, first of all, general trends are historical: if it’s convention to cast Hamlet as tall and thin, then Hamlet has been cast as tall and thin for a while, so what matters is not what proportion of casting directors are gay white men now, but who cast the Hamlets that made the convention start. I would guess that the percentage of gay white casting directors has gone down over time — but also, conventions can be set by only one person. If Michael Jackson can make everyone wear white socks, one influential production could make everyone cast Hamlet as tall and thin.

    But the personality type/body type correlation seems more likely to me.

  15. FWIW and almost entirely off-topic: Branagh and Jacobi are Oxfordians.

  16. I’ve seen or performed in probably 30 different versions of Hamlet, over the years. I saw it first when I was 12, performed it first when 17. I’ve never seen a good skinny Hamlet. Something about the role works best when the Prince is fat and spoiled, and looks slightly hungover. Hamlet as a beautiful youthful androgynous philosophical poet (like Percy Shelley) is a serious misstep. The play is not about metaphysics but impotence. I always thought Philip Seymour Hoffman would have done a fine Hamlet 10 years ago.

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  17. Speaking of Philip Seymour Hoffman as Hamlet, an interesting production of Hamlet that never happened was the stage production in Los Angeles about 12 or 15 years ago in which Mel Gibson was going to direct his friend Robert Downey Jr. But, it never happened due to Downey’s drug problems.

  18. There is a well-known story that Hamlet is said to be fat because the first actor to play him, Thomas Burbage was short and stocky. I don’t know how old the explanation is.

  19. Wesley Morganston:” syon: That’s not how disproportionateness works.”

    WEsley, I do know how things like over-representation work. Indeed, I would wager that anyone who reads Steve on a regular basis knows how over-representation works. My comment was addressed to the fact that Powerchild said that male homosexuals are over-represented in the ranks of casting directors. This assertion was made without reference to data of any kind. Hence, my posting (which made reference to some very well known female casting female directors) was meant to trigger a response that would provide some solid demographic data: what is the gender ratio among casting directors? Are men or women disproportionately represented? Of the men, how many are homosexuals? etc., etc.

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