When I saw the film Look Back in Anger, I did not know who was steamier – Richard Burton or Mary Ure (who is for some the hottest woman ever to appear on the screen).  The film had a great line about the hero marrying above his station: ‘Alison’s mummy and I took one look at each other and from then on the age of chivalry was dead.’  (God could not have improved on that line for Richard Burton to spit out.)

The reaction to Jimmy Dean in Rebel Without a Cause was very different, because of circumstances about the actor’s life and death.  (The movie is now nearly 70 years old, and the word ‘understated’ does not come readily to mind; Natalie Wood has an eery and disturbing innocence; she and the lead would become star-crossed lovers in death.)

These movies defined a generation, much as The Graduate would do for a future generation.  And the difference between generations is common to both films, as old as the bible.  In the American film, there is a conscious personal failure and betrayal in the parents, but in both it is the double standards that makes the young men so angry.  It is the hypocrisy.

The most popular play Shakespeare produced features two very angry young men.  And, Boy, are Hamlet and Laertes both angry at the hypocrisy of their parents!

Hamlet is outraged – to the point of contemplating suicide – that within a month of his father’s death, his mother has married the brother.  That is too close for many, and too fast for most. 

Marrying the widow of your brother was tricky back then.  The play was first performed in the year Queen Elizabeth I died.  Her father split the nation and all of Christendom after a dispute about his marriage to the widow of his brother.  The queen had had to assent to the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, whose husband was murdered in a very loud Scottish fashion, after which Mary promptly married the suspected murderer. 

This kind of closeness of kin – a word in the first line that Hamlet utters – was therefore a hot topic for Elizabethan audiences.  It is not surprising that a form of the word ‘incest’ appears five times within the play – each time laced with arsenic.  It almost drives Hamlet truly mad – he refers to the incestuous sheets ‘and the rank sweat of an enseamèd bed’ – and other lines that would have made Freud’s eyes light up.  At one point, the young man says Claudius has ‘whored’ his mother.  Well, that may be short of what Orestes did to his mum, but not much else.

When Hamlet feigns madness, his mother, Gertrude, puts it down to her ‘o’erhasty marriage.’

Hamlet is the heir to the throne – at least he is now.  Laertes is the son of a prominent courtier, Polonius.  Polonius holds a position in the Danish court that is the equivalent of prime minister or head of the Privy Council.  But he is old, mediocre, and a caricature of the wordy and useless counsellor.  He is humbug made flesh.  And since he functions to let the audience let off steam at his verbose pomposity, he is expendable – and he is expended. 

After Hamlet kills him in the hot blood that he had been craving, he calls the dead man ‘a foolish prating knave’ – and then ‘lugs the guts’ into a neighbour’s room.

Both young men have been out of the country.  Hamlet is studying in Germany.  It is not clear what Laertes is doing in France, although he is impressing the locals with the rapier, and his father thinks he will favour the then red-light area in Paris. 

But their home life is not such as to keep them in Denmark.  Each goes through a crisis in a young man’s rite of passage – and psychologists tell us that young men tend not to mature until their late twenties.

So, there is a lot going on in the mind of this young university student – well before his father’s ghost tells him that he was murdered by his brother, and then asks Hamlet to avenge him.

But there is another case of shrieking hypocrisy from both Polonius and Laertes.  Hamlet is fond of Ophelia, the daughter of Polonius.  She says he has professed his love, and Hamlet says at least twice that he did love her, in circumstances where there is no reason to doubt his word. 

And there is a puritanical streak in the young man that suggests that the courting has not got beyond just that.  (My recollection is that Branagh had a different view, that would have put the Edwardians like Bradley into a spin.)

But Laertes takes it upon himself to warn his sister off her suitor.  In a speech that suggests he has been infected by his dad’s warbling, he warns her against opening her ‘chaste treasure’ to his ‘unmastered importunity.’  That leads her to respond that Laertes is not one ‘like a puffed and reckless libertine, Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads.’  Deuce.

But Polonius puts his paternal foot down, because he can, and orders his daughter to break off with her troubled boyfriend.  And then two scenes later, Polonius commissions a stooge to spy on Laertes and see what brothels he goes to, if he ‘shows a savageness in unreclaimed blood.’  (The scene in the Branagh film between Richard Briers and Gerard Depardieu is worth the price of admission – Gallic incredulity at this preposterous old Dane: and the great scene stealer is upstaged by the Frenchman in the shortest role in the play.) 

Then Ophelia comes to tell her father that Hamlet is even worse, and has now fouled his stockings.  And that silly old hypocrite can’t wait to tell his king that this is ‘the very ecstasy of love.’

It is of the essence of the lightweight to crave being near the centre of the action – even while remaining at best useless.

Hamlet feigned madness.  After being rejected by Hamlet, who then kills her father, Ophelia goes truly mad – and does kill herself.  The author correctly believes that he has done enough by now to be allowed to show us his bawdy side again, as Ophelia in madness gets down to tin tacks.

Young men will do’t, if they come to’t;
By cock, they are to blame.
Quoth she, before you tumbled me,
You promised me to wed.
So would I ha’ done, by yonder sun,
An thou hadst not come to my bed.

These young men are justly angry at their forebears.  The reference to The Graduate  suggests that if you wanted a really sultry Gertrude, you could have done a lot worse than Anne Bancroft.  But the performance by David Tenant and Penny Downie is in my view at least as wrenching as that of Kenneth Branagh and Julie Christie in the Branagh film. 

If act two of Tosca is for many the most electrifying scene in opera, then for my taste it is overtaken on the stage by the scene between the hero and his mother in Hamlet.  It takes your breath away in a manner beyond even James Dean and Richard Burton.  It is I think the most performed play of all, and there are reasons for that.  Greg Doran thought it was a thriller, and his RSC production was just that.

And this being theatre, we can leave it to the gods of theatre to tell us how Laertes and Claudius expected to get away with their plot to murder Hamlet in public – a fit young man dies after a band-aid nick at the hands of an incensed young swordsman, who has the lives of two members of his family to avenge – in a play about just that.

The first angry young men?

When I saw the film Look Back in Anger, I did not know who was steamier – Richard Burton or Mary Ure (who is for some the hottest woman ever to appear on the screen).  The film had a great line about the hero marrying above his station: ‘Alison’s mummy and I took one look at each other and from then on the age of chivalry was dead.’  (God could not have improved on that line for Richard Burton to spit out.)

The reaction to Jimmy Dean in Rebel Without a Cause was very different, because of circumstances about the actor’s life and death.  (The movie is now nearly 70 years old, and the word ‘understated’ does not come readily to mind; Natalie Wood has an eery and disturbing innocence; she and the lead would become star-crossed lovers in death.)

These movies defined a generation, much as The Graduate would do for a future generation.  And the difference between generations is common to both films, as old as the bible.  In the American film, there is a conscious personal failure and betrayal in the parents, but in both it is the double standards that makes the young men so angry.  It is the hypocrisy.

The most popular play Shakespeare produced features two very angry young men.  And, Boy, are Hamlet and Laertes both angry at the hypocrisy of their parents!

Hamlet is outraged – to the point of contemplating suicide – that within a month of his father’s death, his mother has married the brother.  That is too close for many, and too fast for most. 

Marrying the widow of your brother was tricky back then.  The play was first performed in the year Queen Elizabeth I died.  Her father split the nation and all of Christendom after a dispute about his marriage to the widow of his brother.  The queen had had to assent to the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, whose husband was murdered in a very loud Scottish fashion, after which Mary promptly married the suspected murderer. 

This kind of closeness of kin – a word in the first line that Hamlet utters – was therefore a hot topic for Elizabethan audiences.  It is not surprising that a form of the word ‘incest’ appears five times within the play – each time laced with arsenic.  It almost drives Hamlet truly mad – he refers to the incestuous sheets ‘and the rank sweat of an enseamèd bed’ – and other lines that would have made Freud’s eyes light up.  At one point, the young man says Claudius has ‘whored’ his mother.  Well, that may be short of what Orestes did to his mum, but not much else.

When Hamlet feigns madness, his mother, Gertrude, puts it down to her ‘o’erhasty marriage.’

Hamlet is the heir to the throne – at least he is now.  Laertes is the son of a prominent courtier, Polonius.  Polonius holds a position in the Danish court that is the equivalent of prime minister or head of the Privy Council.  But he is old, mediocre, and a caricature of the wordy and useless counsellor.  He is humbug made flesh.  And since he functions to let the audience let off steam at his verbose pomposity, he is expendable – and he is expended. 

After Hamlet kills him in the hot blood that he had been craving, he calls the dead man ‘a foolish prating knave’ – and then ‘lugs the guts’ into a neighbour’s room.

Both young men have been out of the country.  Hamlet is studying in Germany.  It is not clear what Laertes is doing in France, although he is impressing the locals with the rapier, and his father thinks he will favour the then red-light area in Paris. 

But their home life is not such as to keep them in Denmark.  Each goes through a crisis in a young man’s rite of passage – and psychologists tell us that young men tend not to mature until their late twenties.

So, there is a lot going on in the mind of this young university student – well before his father’s ghost tells him that he was murdered by his brother, and then asks Hamlet to avenge him.

But there is another case of shrieking hypocrisy from both Polonius and Laertes.  Hamlet is fond of Ophelia, the daughter of Polonius.  She says he has professed his love, and Hamlet says at least twice that he did love her, in circumstances where there is no reason to doubt his word. 

And there is a puritanical streak in the young man that suggests that the courting has not got beyond just that.  (My recollection is that Branagh had a different view, that would have put the Edwardians like Bradley into a spin.)

But Laertes takes it upon himself to warn his sister off her suitor.  In a speech that suggests he has been infected by his dad’s warbling, he warns her against opening her ‘chaste treasure’ to his ‘unmastered importunity.’  That leads her to respond that Laertes is not one ‘like a puffed and reckless libertine, Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads.’  Deuce.

But Polonius puts his paternal foot down, because he can, and orders his daughter to break off with her troubled boyfriend.  And then two scenes later, Polonius commissions a stooge to spy on Laertes and see what brothels he goes to, if he ‘shows a savageness in unreclaimed blood.’  (The scene in the Branagh film between Richard Briers and Gerard Depardieu is worth the price of admission – Gallic incredulity at this preposterous old Dane: and the great scene stealer is upstaged by the Frenchman in the shortest role in the play.) 

Then Ophelia comes to tell her father that Hamlet is even worse, and has now fouled his stockings.  And that silly old hypocrite can’t wait to tell his king that this is ‘the very ecstasy of love.’

It is of the essence of the lightweight to crave being near the centre of the action – even while remaining at best useless.

Hamlet feigned madness.  After being rejected by Hamlet, who then kills her father, Ophelia goes truly mad – and does kill herself.  The author correctly believes that he has done enough by now to be allowed to show us his bawdy side again, as Ophelia in madness gets down to tin tacks.

Young men will do’t, if they come to’t;
By cock, they are to blame.
Quoth she, before you tumbled me,
You promised me to wed.
So would I ha’ done, by yonder sun,
An thou hadst not come to my bed.

These young men are justly angry at their forebears.  The reference to The Graduate  suggests that if you wanted a really sultry Gertrude, you could have done a lot worse than Anne Bancroft.  But the performance by David Tenant and Penny Downie is in my view at least as wrenching as that of Kenneth Branagh and Julie Christie in the Branagh film. 

If act two of Tosca is for many the most electrifying scene in opera, then for my taste it is overtaken on the stage by the scene between the hero and his mother in Hamlet.  It takes your breath away in a manner beyond even James Dean and Richard Burton.  It is I think the most performed play of all, and there are reasons for that.  Greg Doran thought it was a thriller, and his RSC production was just that.

And this being theatre, we can leave it to the gods of theatre to tell us how Laertes and Claudius expected to get away with their plot to murder Hamlet in public – a fit young man dies after a band-aid nick at the hands of an incensed young swordsman, who has the lives of two members of his family to avenge – in a play about just that.