aving started working on Hamlet, we were immediately confronted with the question that Ian Kott had formulated as : What is the Hamlet that is at the same time the most Shakespearean and the most contemporary one? We first removed the age-old layers of sediments of stereotypes and prejudices that have been covering Hamlet for four centuries. That done, the radiant play about characters and events that touch the very heart of the heart opened up before us, an ecstatic theatrical endeavour full of action; a spiritual adventure; an intellectual challenge; a temptation for both our knowledge and our imagination; a play that sets our human responsibility and our artistic dignity at the highest possible level.

To approach this most intimate of Shakespeare's plays means to start living with the spirit of one of the most exciting personalities mankind has ever borne. Shakespeare’s is a story that resists explanation, as Stephen Greenblatt put it. For Shakespeare, literature and theatre were the mental landscape within which he moved boldly and knowingly, confronting the questions that Greenblatt rightly asks: What should I do with my life? What to believe in? Who to love? From today's viewpoint that is shaped by our panicky concern for authorship and intellectual property, it is particularly impressive to see Shakespeare’s total absence of urge to remain recorded in history – from his thirty-six plays, eighteen (among them, masterpieces like Julius Cesar, Macbeth, Anthony and Cleopatra and The Tempest) were not printed during his lifetime and, were it not for his friends, they would have been lost in oblivion. Likewise, Shakespeare used to borrow from other sources, aware that they were all part of the knowledge that belongs to the entire human race.

 

It is in this context / this environment that we sought Shakespeare’s directions, approaching him humbly, free from the urge to impose our own concept on him, and yet without stifling our own uniqueness / potential for originality. We were preposterous in our approach, yet not too tame either. Let your own discretion be your tutor, as Hamlet says to his players.

We have discovered the tremendously exciting theatrical emotion and immense knowledge that Shakespeare wrote into this play, a play that has become one of the key experiences of mankind. The structures of political power, revolt, conspiracy, treason are written into it, together with the pain of despised love, the force of friendship, the dynamics of the mind, the joy of playing. We have also discovered in Hamlet the principles of theoretical physics that Shakespeare had so accurately grasped four hundred years before the scientific thought of the 20th century, and their meaning for the life of the individual. Particularly exciting was the realisation that Hamlet, who understands so deeply the principle of uncertainty, takes theatre for the measure of truthfulness – theatre, whose essence lies in the transience/eternity paradox.

 

To us, Hamlet is modern because the prince and other characters in the play are so similar to ourselves. We face the same issues and share the same ambivalences. When it comes to intimacy, or to the philosophical, political and ethical aspects of life, Hamlet, Ophelia, Horatio, Claudius, Gertrude, Polonius, Laertes, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are all faced with choices, decisions and with the consequences of their choices in a world that we so profoundly experience as our own, so that they touch our souls and our deepest needs, quests and fears. We have examined by our minds, our hearts and the stage action the ventures of these people as well as the complex relations between them.

We have contemplated the modernity of our time and the modernity of Hamlet seeking to find out what "very body and age of time" and what "form and pressure" acting needs to show... Aware that we have been living for almost two decades in a completely new world that is - in its form - so crucially different from everything known in human history, we tried to understand both our time and Hamlet in it.

Sometimes we diverted from Hamlet, either getting lost or deliberately giving in to the streams that lead to small backwaters, but we have always returned to the main course, re-reading Shakespeare’s words of so sweet breath composed, written into the book of his mind and watching his images composed with care so subtle that it is capable of unveiling the shades of the colour of night when dawn approaches, at the hour when the glow-worm… begins to pale his uneffectual fire. It is in this delicate quality that Shakespeare’s words meet those of Jallaluddin Rumi, Omar Khayam, Faraduddin Atar, with the music of Dede Effendi, with calligraphy, and with endless arabesques embroidered on silk, or painted on Ottoman pottery.

 

The dramatic similarity of events at the Ottoman court with the story of Hamlet and the concurrence of Shakespeare’s and Oriental esoteric thought have encouraged me to set Hamlet at the Ottoman court. My initial assumption was that Hamlet belongs to mankind, to every culture and civilisation. The story did happen, or could happen in the Elizabethan, Danish, Ottoman, Russian, Chinese or Japanese courts. I have opted for the Ottoman court. What happens when Hamlet is set in a Muslim context? What does such a transposition tell us about our world? We have changed nothing in the story; we have not changed the names, but only the titles and the cultural context.

This change of perspective has confirmed the universality of Hamlet; it has brought about new, complementary meanings and introduced new passions, and perhaps made one more step towards the answer to the question: What’s Hamlet to us, or we to Hamlet, that we should weep for him?

Haris Pasovic