HAMLET: as a manifestation of
'THE HOMUNCULUS PROBLEM' [1]

by JULIA BARDSLEY


article commissioned for PUCK no.11 by Institute International de la Marionette

The play of HAMLET poses questions of a most fundamental nature. Shakespeare uses theatre as both the form and the metaphor by which to explore these questions. What better means could there have been to aid me in my own investigation of the world of the play, than that universal symbol of horror vacui - THE PUPPET.
  The Puppet, in various manifestations, has been a significant feature in my theatre work. I use the term puppet in its widest sense: as human replica on various scales, as mask, as prosthetic extension to the body, as doll, as inanimate object made animate. Never has it been implemented in my work as pure novelty. For me, the inherent meanings of The Puppet have always transcended mere function. HAMLET provided me with the perfect context for the multifaceted reverberations of The Puppet to exist. Throughout this piece, I investigate the themes of The Puppet with reference to my production of HAMLET at the Young Vic Theatre in London. I staged my adaptation with eight performers (including myself and the Designer) and six puppets; one life-size and five miniature doubles of the actor/characters. In this reflection on my production, I find myself drawn into territory that both articulates the themes of the play of HAMLET and the lexicon of The Puppet: the Double, Control and Destiny, Silence, Scale and the interplay of Reality and Illusion. It is only in retrospect that I can marvel even more at the richness of both their terrain's.

'Of all the prostheses that punctuate the history of the body, the double is doubtless the most ancient ... The double, however, is not properly speaking a prostheses at all. Rather it is an imaginary figure, like the soul, the shadow or the mirror image, which haunts the subject as his 'other', causing him to be himself while at the same time never seeming like himself.'

Baudrillard [2]

One of the attractions of HAMLET is the endless play of ideas around the theme of identity and the self, duality and the echo, the mirror and self-reflection. The use of the Puppet Double in my production was inextricably linked with Hamlet's soul-searching. Utilising the idea of the soul as a mannequin has ancient precedents. In James Frazers study of Magic and Religion, he sites the Huron tribe who thought that "... if a man lives and moves, it is only because he has a little man who moves him ... the man inside the man is the soul.. a complete little model of the man himself." [3] Hamlet's dilemma is one of a split of the two selves within him. A conflict with the one that could live in this world and the one that cannot. The Puppet Double, in the case of the character of Hamlet, was used in my production as a graphic externalisation of this split, his confusion of identity, coupled with the problem of having to play a role. Hamlet is swept into a real life revenge tragedy but does not want to play the part of the avenging hero. His nature is unsuited to this particular role. A classic case of mis-casting. In my version of events, The Players, (the actors who arrive at Elsinore to perform for the Court) are all puppets. One of the puppet players is a replica of Hamlet. Hamlet asks this Player to speak a speech. The Puppet, the miniature image of the performer playing Hamlet, performs Hamlets "To be or not to be ..." speech for him. Not only is Hamlet, the character, confronted with an image of himself, but the actor playing Hamlet (in this case, Rory Edwards) comes face to face with a puppet in his image, playing the role of an actor, performing Hamlet's most famous speech, whose contents deal with questions of the self. This articulates the first moment that Hamlet is confronted with his own nature and he seizes it as an opportunity to scrutinise his conscience.

"... Haven't you noticed that when one looks someone in the eye, he sees his own face in the center of the other eye, as if in a mirror? This is why we call the center of the eye the 'pupil' (puppet): because it reflects a sort of miniature image of the person looking into it ... So when one eye looks at another and gazes into that inmost part by virtue of which that eye sees, then it sees itself ... and if the soul want to know itself, must it not look at a soul..?" [4]

But part of Hamlets problem is his obsession with self-analysis. By gazing into the mirror of his conscience he is seduced into a state of indecision and self delusion. The mirror/double has a way of distorting the truth. The double, as Baudrillard warns, needs to be other, almost the same, but with subtle and necessary differences. The main difference between Hamlet, the man (character or actor) and Hamlet, the puppet is essentially a matter of awareness, consciousness of the self.

Hans Bellmer, famous for creating his own articulated Doll, was fascinated by Heinrich von Kleist's essay 'On the Marionette Theatre.' According to Peter Webb, "... what interested Bellmer in Kleist's essay was the comparison between the physical phenomena of movement in marionettes and certain mental phenomena in mankind, in particular his description of the ontological rupture or sense of alienation which has become inseparable from the human condition. 'The puppets are superior in grace to human dancers', argued Kleist, 'because they portray no affectation. This is because the puppet has no self-consciousness ... The price of our freedom as self-conscious beings is that we have become creatures of two worlds, somewhere between the marionette and that of God. No matter how much we 'reflect' on our state, our intellectual faculties are unable to restore unity and wholeness to our souls." [5] This consciousness of the self is the nub of Hamlet's and our own existential crisis; the acute awareness of our own mortality and our attempts to deny this knowledge, to deny the pain of the real. We project crisis onto an artificial, externalisation of ourselves. The double becomes both a decoy and scapegoat, a convenient receptacle for all our fears. Theatre is itself a double, a vessel in which we place images of ourselves to enact that which we cannot bear to confront in real life.

"... I always saw myself as a surrogate who, in the absence of anyone else, would stand in for him.
... so I always had the feeling, not so much of inhabiting an imaginative or fictional world of my own, but of being a theatrical 'stand-in'."

Ron Vawter from the Wooster Group [6]

When dealing with the subject of The Puppet, the inescapable theme of control arises. Who is manipulating who? In my version of HAMLET, Aldona Cunningham (the Designer) and I created characters for ourselves within the fiction. The Director and the Designer became a Magician and his assistant, mute manipulators of the space that was a cross between circus and cabaret, of fairground and the faded spectre of a theatre long gone. This was a deliberate comment on the role of the Director and Designer as controlling and manipulating forces. By doing this, were we saying that ultimately actors are a kind of puppet? Or that we would prefer actors to be replaced by puppets for ultimate control? I tend to side with Kantor on this issue, "... I do not believe a MANNEQUIN (or a WAX FIGURE) might be a substitute for a LIVING ACTOR (as Kleist and Craig demanded.) ... In my theatre, a MANNEQUIN should become a MODEL embodying and transmitting a powerful feeling of DEATH and of the condition of the dead - the Model for a Living ACTOR." [7] In Kantor's Theatre of the Dead, the living actors exist along side the dead (the wax mannequins) in a necessary co-habitation, where one can have no meaning without the other.

The German director, Hans Syberbergs use of puppets in his film, Hitler: a film from Germany, was a seminal influence on my interpretation of HAMLET. "This allegory-littered wasteland is designed to hold multitudes, in their contemporary, that is posthumous form ... Since all the characters of the Nazi catastrophe-melodrama are dead, what we see are their ghosts - as puppets, as spirits, as caricatures of themselves ... Like photographic images and the props, the actors are also stand-ins for the real ... the presence of the inanimate makes its ironic comment on the supposedly alive." [8] The multiplication of the Self blurs the boundary between self and not self, human and not human, the living and the dead. Actors become another form of duplication, a kind of echo - repeating, night after night, performance after performance, the words of others. This is their theatrical destiny. In my production, these ideas were heightened further, with the actors 'doubling', that is, playing more than one character. The actors dexterity in the Art of Transformation is celebrated and shared with the audience. On the revolving stage, before their very eyes, Laertes turns into Polonius. The actress playing Gertrude also plays Ophelia and is in a continuous loop, merging from one character to the other. Through Hamlets distorted vision, Mother and Lover's identity becomes blurred, all women become one and the same.

With Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, we presented the double in yet another configuration, one real actor and one life-size replica of that actor. The joke in the play is that these characters are indistinguishable from each other, an interchangeable identity, a single nonentity split into two. They become Claudius's puppets, tip toeing round the court on their two-faced missions, changing their mask depending on the situation.

"the double was originally an insurance against destruction to the ego ...
as a preservation against extinction."

Otto Rank [9]


"... the dread is that this double image should detach itself from its dependence on it's origin, taking on a life of its own, and even turning against its source."

Freud [10]

The more sinister aspects of The Puppet come into the fore when it becomes unclear as to who is manipulating who. Within the play of HAMLET, Claudius is a supreme Puppet Master, manipulating all within his private Theatre of the Court. If he opened his cloak, perhaps we would see rows of tiny figures, the souls of those he has captured and controlled. But Claudius does not escape from his own demons. In the vocabulary that we created, the theatrical solution for the Ghost of Hamlets father was by the use of a ventriloquist puppet, clad in a lead suit. The scene where Hamlet is told by the Ghost of the events leading to his death is done through his murderer, Claudius. Claudius, in an hypnotic state induced by the Magician, sleepwalks onto the stage and performs a perverse ventriloquist act. He confesses the murder of his bother through the puppet and in the process, torments himself with the nightmare of his own guilt. My model for this was the film, MAGIC [11], with Anthony Hopkins as the ventriloquist who loses grip on reality as the puppet starts to take over his personality, allowing his violent nature to have a voice. But we must remember that the puppet is only given life by the Self. It is the Self that uses the puppet as a means of confessing, of revealing fears and violence. The Puppet becomes a means of transferring responsibility and blame to an 'other'. Yet still we persist in our fear of The Puppets power to turn against us, fuelled by our suspicion that it is capable of a life independent of us; that it can become free of origin.

"The speculations of man are amusing and noisy.
The doll is above all this, infuriatingly divine in its silence."

Idris Parry [12]

For me, part of the power that the puppet has over us lies in its innate silence; a silence which confers upon it a gravity, a quality of waiting, preparation, anticipation. A weight which it acquires by its uncanny similarity to something real, coupled with its stubborn muteness. This also provokes frustration. We assume it knows the answers to something profound, but in its superior state of not speaking, is keeping this knowledge from us. We have elevated The puppet to the status of potential Oracle, a conduit to a greater level of consciousness. We have projected our imaginations and invested our desires so heavily on this figure, that we are exasperated when it refuses to respond to our call, even though we know it will never respond. In a sense we create The Puppet, The Theatre and Art to keep hope alive in an existence which we sense to be devoid of hope; as a strategy to keep asking the questions in order to keep possibility alive. In the end, we know that answers are really beside the point.

'..it must be understood that values become condensed and enriched in miniature ... one must go beyond logic in order to experience what is large in what is small.'

Bachelard [13]

Coupled with silence is the question of Scale. There is a potency in that which is condensed. The miniaturisation of the human form focuses our concentration and appeals to our imaginations. In the theatre domain, which is itself a microcosm, the scaled down replica of the actor directs us to unnoticed detail and magnifies it's value and meanings. Our life-size puppet of Rosencrantz/Guildenstern seemed to be a foolish and clumsy trick in comparison to the subtle sophistication of the three foot high replicas of Claudius, Gertrude, Hamlet and the Ghost. The further away in scale from the real, the more real and compelling the puppets became. It's interesting to note that in the recent SENSATION exhibition at the RA [14], amongst all the real animal carcasses and artists frozen blood, was ex-puppet maker, Ron Mueck's exact replica of his deceased father as a three foot long effigy. This uncannily perfect diminutive had a captivated audience, scrutinising its chest. There was a tangible oscillation between the extremes of hoping it would breathe, disappointment that it didn't and sheer relief, that this impossible anatomy could never breathe.

'There is no difference between ILLUSION and REALITY. There is only a mystical oneness. Maybe illusion is an image of reality in a different universe that exists and can be sensed through art.'

Kantor [15]

The ambiguity of what is real and what is artificial is an enigma central to The Puppets meaning. It is ground that is endlessly exploited in the theatre and is certainly used to fruitful effect within the world of HAMLET. The play is concerned with crossing the boundaries which normally separate real life and dramatic representation. Hamlet is constantly being made aware of the threshold between life and art and how they invade each others territories. In one instance, he is appalled that an actor playing a character can weep real tears for a fictional sorrow, when he, Hamlet, has greater and more real sorrow, but still cannot prompt himself into action. In another episode, the play within the play, Hamlet seeks to use Fiction to reveal Fact and entrap Claudius. In my staging of the scene, The puppets, as the players, perform The Mousetrap, as directed by Hamlet. The puppets he pulls onto the stage are replicas of Gertrude and Claudius. The real Gertrude and Claudius watch the puppet replicas of themselves enacting their lives on the mirrored stage. Claudius sees himself poison his brother. Eventually Gertrude and Claudius are pulled into the action, manipulating their own puppets. The live performers take over the stage in a grotesque simulated sex scene, while their puppets sit and watch the act from the stalls. The mirror of truth is held up to Claudius. He is confronted with his own reflection, his own guilt and forced to watch the action replay of his murderous act. Fiction reveals fact within a fiction.

"... trompe l'oeil does not seek to confuse itself with the real ... the real is relinquished by the very excess of its appearance. The objects resemble themselves too much ... they point to the irony of too much reality.'

Baudrillard [16]

Difficulties occur when the Puppet is taken out of the arena of illusion and is forced into the realm of the Real. History, in both fact and fiction, is littered with attempts to create the perfect human being and copy reality. In 1918 the painter Oskar Kokoschka commissioned the construction of a life-size doll, giving detailed instructions on ways to make the doll as realistic as possible. When it was finished, he took his artificial companion to dinner and on theatre trips. In the end he destroyed the doll saying that it didn't live up to his expectations. Most attempts at artificial creation of human form are characterised by an obsession with making something as close to reality as possible. This is spurred on, certainly in Kokoschka's case, by a deep rooted inability to actually deal with the real. What is forgotten in this zealous endeavour, is that perfection is boring; reality is not perfect. There is a need for error, imperfection, asymmetry, difficulty. In a way, a Puppet with its strings and wire and padding, has true honesty; it is what it is and is not pretending to be anything other than what it is. It is devoid of affectation, which ironically, makes it more of a reality than an illusion.
Then the dancer came.
Not him. Enough! However lightly he moves,
he's costumed, made up - an ordinary man
who hurries home and walks in through the kitchen.
I won't endure these half-filled human masks;
better, the puppet. It at least is full.
I'll put up with the stuffed skin, the wire, the face
that is nothing but appearance. Here. I'm waiting.

Rilke [17]

Finally, a major reason for staging HAMLET with the use of puppets, was to deliberately make the audience aware of the artificiality of theatre, whilst simultaneously highlighting our own persistence with the deception of certainty. Who can articulate or even experience what is real and what is not. And why would we want to? For this uncertainty is the pleasure and the pain of both Art and Life. The Puppet finds its true home in the confines of the theatre, where they share the same language of complexity, contradiction and doubt.


© Julia Bardsley 1998
1

 Jacques Lacan - For Lacan, the model of an autonomous little man inside our heads in charge of the ego created The Homunculus Problem. What would be inside the head of the little man inside our head? The little man would have to have a complete mind of his own, which would have to work with its own little man ... ad infinitum.
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  2

 from: The Transparency of Evil - by Jean Baudrillard (Verso 1993) Part II: The Hell of the Same
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  3

 from: The Golden Bough: by James Frazer (1922) Chapter XVIII: The Soul as Mannequin
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  4

 quoted by Bill Viola in Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House (Thames and Hudson 1995) taken from the Alcibiades of Plato where Socrates describes the process of acquiring self-knowledge from the contemplation of the self in the pupil of anothers eye, or in the reflection of one's own.
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  5

 from: Hans Bellmer by Peter Webb (Quartet Books 1985)
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  6

 from: Breaking the Rules: by David Savran (Theatre Communications Group 1988) the actor Ron Vawter on performing with the Wooster Group
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  7

 from: Cricot 2 - The Theatre of Death by Tadeusz Kantor. Theatre Papers 2nd Series, no. 2 (Dartington 1978)
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  8

 from an essay by Susan Sontag - Syberberg's Hitler in Syberberg: a film maker from Germany (BFI 1992)
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  9

 from: The Double by Otto Rank, quoted in: The Mirror and the Lamp (The Fruitmarket Gallery 1986)
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  10

 Freud as quoted in: The Mirror and the Lamp (The Fruitmarket Gallery 1986)
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  11

 Magic: Directed by Richard Attenborough. Screenplay by William Goldman
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  12

 preface to: Essays on Dolls by Idris Parry (Syrens 1994)
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  13

 from: The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard (Beacon Press 1969)
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  14

 Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection at the Royal Academy of Arts, London 1997
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  15

 from: A Journey Through Other Spaces: a critical study of theatre of Kantor by Michal Kobialka (UCP 1993)
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  16

 from: Seduction by Jean Baudrillard (Macmillan 1990)
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  17

 from: the Duino Elegies (1923) - the Fourth Elegy by Rainer Maria Rilke
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