O'Brien, Richard
(2018)
“I will never play the Dane”: Shakespeare and the
performer's failure.
Literature Compass, 15 (8).
ISSN 1741-4113
Abstract
The cultural prestige accorded to Shakespeare's great roles
has made them high watermarks for ‘great acting’ in general.
They are therefore also uniquely capable of channelling a
performer's sense of his own failure. The 1987 film Withnail
& I famously ends with its title character, an out‐of‐work
actor and self‐destructive alcoholic, delivering Hamlet's
“What a piece of work is a man” to an audience of unresponsive wolves. And in 2014's The Trip to Italy, Steve
Coogan plays a fictionalised version of himself: a comedian
who fears he will never be remembered as a serious artist.
On a visit to Pompeii, Coogan's delivery of Hamlet's speech
to Yorick's skull similarly becomes a way of channelling the
series's wider reflections on fame, mortality, and the value
of the actor's art. Drawing on Marvin Carlson's argument
that the role of Hamlet is unusually densely ghosted by its
previous occupants, this article will explore how these two
contemporary depictions of struggling performers evoke
the received idea of the great Shakespearean role as the
pinnacle of the actor's art to respond to the dilemma of
how to cope with creative failure.
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