As the cycle proceeds and the “definitive” Hamlet begins to seem outmoded, a different center of dramatic vitality will come to be identified, and a new interpretation of the play will supplant the old one in authority. When he first played the part, he explains, he was thought “a very modern Hamlet” yet only eight years later: “people have begun to say that I am a Hamlet in the classical tradition and I am not sure whether to take this as a compliment or not” ( Gilder, 1937, p. John Gielgud felt an early phase in this cycle in his own successive productions of the play. Nothing is more common than for a style of acting that seemed “natural” to one generation to seem artificial to the next, and for a new Hamlet to be praised especially for scuttling the previously successful conventions of the past. In due course a prevailing formulation will lose its currency, ossify, and fade. Since players and playgoers change, however, the center of dramatic vitality in the play is constantly subject to redefinition. When the search succeeds, the play “comes to life” when it is supremely successful, the production may seem “definitive,” crystallizing the intersection of the play and the contingent circumstances of its production in such a way that this Hamlet seems “the” Hamlet of its era, one that not only reflects but contributes to its cultural milieu. Hamlet’s stage history thus records an on-going process of discovery.
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