BURTON'S LOST "HAMLET"
January 22, 2004

by Joe Sobran

     I once saw the legendary actor Richard Burton in 
person, a few years before his untimely death. I was 
leaving a Manhattan restaurant after lunch and saw him 
sitting with a small group. I strained to hear his famous 
speaking voice, but he said nothing.

     Burton's 1964 Broadway performance as Hamlet has 
finally been released on video. It was a sensation at the 
time; his celebrity had peaked during his scandalous 
affair with Elizabeth Taylor, which got roughly the 
combined publicity of the Kennedy assassinations and 
9/11. "Liz and Dick," as the press called them, had met 
during the filming of the mega-epic CLEOPATRA, now nearly 
forgotten.

     I followed the story, but I was more interested in 
Dick than in Liz. In fact I wished he'd dump her and go 
back to Shakespeare and, if necessary, his wife. So I was 
enthralled when he played Hamlet on Broadway.

     As a high-school boy in Michigan, I didn't expect to 
see it; but it was shown for one night only at movie 
theaters across the United States on closed-circuit 
television, so I saw it in Ann Arbor. This, the public 
was told, would be our only chance to see it, forever; 
the tape would be destroyed. Home video was still 
undreamed of. But lo, here it is at last, available to 
everyone.

     It was a curious production. The actors wore street 
clothes instead of period costumes. The conceit was that 
HAMLET can never receive a definitive performance, but 
can only be eternally rehearsed, so it was performed as a 
rehearsal. I supposed it saved the producers a lot of 
money.

     My impression at the time was one of disappointment. 
The conceit didn't work. Shakespeare demands pageantry.

     Having seen the video, I feel even more 
disappointed. Yet the Burton HAMLET remains an 
interesting period piece. If nothing else, it tells you 
what kind of cultural fraud could be perpetrated in 1964.

     The cast was all wrong. Apart from Hume Cronyn's 
Polonius, none of the other characters had any 
distinction. Most were played by Americans with no 
feeling for Shakespeare's verse.

     This forced Burton to carry the play all by himself. 
He was acting as if in a vacuum. You can still sense his 
riveting stage presence on the video, but he seems to 
overwhelm the other actors rather than interact with 
them.

     As a result he appears less Hamlet than just hammy. 
He was already too old for the young prince, too 
commandingly virile to reflect the role's perplexities. 
This Hamlet never hesitates. He is a man of action, not 
meditation.

     Even Burton's great voice becomes a liability. It 
snaps off the familiar lines with what one writer called 
its "tympanic resonance," undeniably thrilling, but there 
is no real drama, only the sense of brilliant recitation. 
Hamlet is played as a celebrity, witty but hardly tragic. 
His death brings no tears.

     Sir John Gielgud directed, and the spare production 
uses a tape recording of his voice to represent the ghost 
of Hamlet's father. Here is another bit of incongruity. 
In his day Gielgud was considered the greatest speaker of 
Shakespeare in the world, but to hear his quavery tenor 
urging the rugged basso Burton to violent revenge is 
almost comical.

     Burton never played another serious Shakespeare 
role. Near the end of his life he spoke of alternating 
with Robert Preston as Othello and Iago, but it never 
came off. In his youth he had made an awesome reputation 
on the English stage as Hamlet, Iago, Prince Hal, 
Coriolanus, and the Bastard in KING JOHN -- a reputation 
you'll fully understand if you can lay hands on his 
electrifying recordings of CORIOLANUS and THE RAPE OF 
LUCRECE.

     Alas, his 1964 turn as Hamlet -- weary and dreary -- 
already shows a great talent gone to seed. We didn't know 
it then, but he was nearly finished before he was forty. 
After that he made lots of movies, many with Taylor, in 
which he looked as bored as he was boring.

     Too bad. He could be a generously eloquent man, as 
when he said of his great contemporary and rival Paul 
Scofield, "Of the ten greatest moments in the theater, 
eight are Scofield's." The pity is that a few of them 
might have been Burton's.

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