Midnight at Elsinore
Jan. 11th, 2012 11:02 amMarvin Rosenberg gives us a good mood for the opening scene of "Hamlet" with the guards on watch on the battlements of Elsinore.
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Midnight on a high platform, a castle battlement. A deep bell tolling out the uneasy hour. A lonely sentinel, distraught. Something is wrong with this night.
The aura of foreboding darkness, in the daylight performances of Shakespeare’s Globe, would grow from the repeated mention of night and the show of flickering torches or lanterns, hung on walls or carried by the frightened armed men on guard. These fearful sentinels, peering into the imagined, haunted blackness, conspire with the marvellously conditioned imaginations of Shakespeare’s audiences to sustain a mood of ominous midnight danger - mortal danger, and more than mortal, from the aura of an uncanny presence against which the sternest weapons are helpless. In the public night performances, the actual darkness would intensify the climate of threatening mystery by fighting against the torchlight, or the swinging windblown lanterns, with shifting, sinister shadow.
[...] The theaters of the world have moved back toward letting night scenes become what Hamlet’s text makes them: places of mystery, at the boundary of the human world, with only darkness beyond.
[...]
In this cold winter night, the wind is often likely to be bitter, in bite and bark; it whines and sighs - in modern times electronically, sometimes interweaving with a human wail, or a siren. [...]
Mist clogged the air in Tom Taylor’s 1873 staging; wreaths of smoke and fog have often since cloaked the battlement, to enhance mystery and make seeing more difficult for the sentinels - who have also been vexed by lightning, thunder and other signals of tempests
-- Marvin Rosenberg, “The Masks of Hamlet”
_ _ _
Midnight on a high platform, a castle battlement. A deep bell tolling out the uneasy hour. A lonely sentinel, distraught. Something is wrong with this night.
The aura of foreboding darkness, in the daylight performances of Shakespeare’s Globe, would grow from the repeated mention of night and the show of flickering torches or lanterns, hung on walls or carried by the frightened armed men on guard. These fearful sentinels, peering into the imagined, haunted blackness, conspire with the marvellously conditioned imaginations of Shakespeare’s audiences to sustain a mood of ominous midnight danger - mortal danger, and more than mortal, from the aura of an uncanny presence against which the sternest weapons are helpless. In the public night performances, the actual darkness would intensify the climate of threatening mystery by fighting against the torchlight, or the swinging windblown lanterns, with shifting, sinister shadow.
[...] The theaters of the world have moved back toward letting night scenes become what Hamlet’s text makes them: places of mystery, at the boundary of the human world, with only darkness beyond.
[...]
In this cold winter night, the wind is often likely to be bitter, in bite and bark; it whines and sighs - in modern times electronically, sometimes interweaving with a human wail, or a siren. [...]
Mist clogged the air in Tom Taylor’s 1873 staging; wreaths of smoke and fog have often since cloaked the battlement, to enhance mystery and make seeing more difficult for the sentinels - who have also been vexed by lightning, thunder and other signals of tempests
-- Marvin Rosenberg, “The Masks of Hamlet”