’36 in 6’ project enters final year with ‘Hamlet’
The UNC Charlotte Shakespeare in Action initiative has entered the final year of a six-year project to address all of Shakespeare’s plays before the 400th anniversary of the bard’s death in April 2016. Tackling six plays a year in formats ranging from lectures to full-blown theatrical productions, the “36 in 6” project has left for this final season the play that many consider to be Shakespeare’s best “The Tragical History of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.” The Department of Theatre will present “Hamlet” Wednesday, Nov. 4, through Sunday, Nov. 15, in the Black Box Theater in the Robinson Hall for the Performing Arts.
While “Hamlet” is one of the most-often performed of all Shakespeare’s plays, the UNC Charlotte production is using a text that is rarely presented on stage or screen or in high school English classrooms. The First Quarto – or Q1 – text, printed in 1603, is the first published version of “Hamlet.” Followed quickly by what is known as the Q2 (1604) and later the First Folio (1623), the Q1 text disappeared and was totally forgotten for two centuries until it was discovered in 1823 in an English manor house. (There are now two known copies of the 1603 printing.) Substantially different from the “Hamlet” texts that had become popular over the preceding 200 years, the Q1 used to be criticized as a “bad” quarto – a pirated, fallible work less purely “Shakespearean” than the later texts. Questions of its origin and authenticity continue to inspire debates, articles and books, but its content has influenced both literary criticism and dramatic presentations of the play.
“We wanted to save one of Shakespeare’s most iconic works for our final year of the ‘36 in 6’ project and find a way in which we could do something that was both theatrically innovative and pedagogically exciting,” said Andrew Hartley, Robinson Distinguished Professor of Shakespeare in the Department of Theatre. “The First Quarto of ‘Hamlet’ gave us both of those opportunities.”
Much shorter than the “Hamlet” commonly known, the Q1 version is dramatically and structurally tighter. Some text and characters’ names are different. Polonius, for example, is called Corambis, and the famous “to be” soliloquy appears in a different scene and has different words from those often memorized by acting students.
Performed by UNC Charlotte students, “Hamlet” is directed by James Vesce. The production sets the action in a contemporary dystopian world in which Hamlet and his friends are wealthy college students.
Performances are at 7:30 p.m., Nov. 4-7 and Nov. 11-14; 2 p.m. matinees will be Nov. 8 and 15. The Department of Theatre will host talk-backs after the performances on Nov. 5 and 12 and a pre-show discussion at 6 p.m., Nov. 13, with Shakespeare scholar Paul Menzer.
Tickets are $18 for the public, $12 for UNC Charlotte faculty and staff, $10 for seniors and $8 for all students and can be purchased at the Robinson Hall Box Office, via telephone (704-687-1849) or online.