The original: Richard Burbage
Born, like his friend Shakespeare, in Stratford-upon-Avon, Burbage was a famous actor by the time he was 20 and in 1601 became the first Prince of Denmark. He made such an impact that when he died in 1619, one version of his funeral elegy claimed there would be “no more young Hamlet” — a prediction proved staggeringly wrong by the multitude of actors who succeeded him in the part.
No description of his performance survives, but it was clearly memorable. Another poet suggested: “Oft I have seen him leap into a grave/Suiting the person, which he seemed to have, /Of a sad lover, with so true an eye/ That there (I would have sworn) he meant to die.”
The scholar: Henry Irving
By the time Irving played Hamlet at the Lyceum Theatre in 1874, the essayist William Hazlitt had suggested that the character should no longer be acted in order to preserve the beauty of Shakespeare’s picture. “It is WE who are Hamlet,” he claimed.
Irving bucked the trend. With his white face and dark, disordered hair, he made an indelible impression on the young WB Yeats who described him as a “lean image of hungry speculation”. According to the critic Clement Scott: “This Hamlet is thinking aloud . . . he is as much of the gentleman and scholar as possible and as little of the actor.” The performance was “a noble contribution to the dramatic art”. Irving later played Hamlet opposite his lover, Ellen Terry.
The woman: Sarah Bernhardt
Clement Scott included Sarah Bernhardt’s performance as Hamlet at the Adelphi Theatre in 1899 in his book Some Notable Hamlets on the ground that “the whole thing was imaginative, electrical and poetical . . . As a rule the play exhausts one. There was no exhaustion with Sarah Bernhardt — only exhilaration.”
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Others were less impressed, arguing that Bernhardt was – oddly – too boyish, and that the act of impersonating a man obliterated all other meaning. She set an important precedent; there have been a large and successful number of female Hamlets from Frances de La Tour to Angela Winkler and, most recently, Maxine Peake.
The noble prince: John Gielgud
When he first played Hamlet at the Old Vic in 1929, Gielgud was only 25. He returned to the part in more than 500 performances, and six different productions, the last in 1946. Perhaps the most memorable was in 1934, when the critic WA Darlington said: “In every syllable that he speaks, there is evidence of an understanding mind at work so that the lines come fresh to the minds of the audience as if the part had never been acted before.” You can still hear this in the recording made after he had stopped playing the part: it is exceptionally clear and surprisingly conversational.
The blond bombshell: Laurence Olivier
“This is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind” announced the preamble to Laurence Olivier’s 1948 film version of Hamlet. The problem with Olivier’s performance was that he all too clearly could. He had first played the prince in 1937 at the Old Vic, bringing to the part an athletic vigour and fashionable Oedipal lust for his mother. Not all the critics loved it. James Agate remarked “he does not speak poetry badly. He does not speak it at all.” Michael Redgrave, who was playing Laertes, thought he was “too assertive and too resolute”. But the film, which he also directed, was hugely influential even if it cut the play in half, missing out Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
The middle-aged man: Michael Redgrave
Redgrave was 50 when he played Hamlet at the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1958, directed by Glen Byam Shaw. That made him the oldest Hamlet in England since 1938, and nine years older than his mother, Gertrude, played by 41-year-old Googie Withers. He was, said Kenneth Tynan with characteristic incision, “less a youth approaching murder for the first time than a seasoned commando colonel suffering from battle fatigue”. Nevertheless, the waspish critic acknowledged the performance was “a packed, compendious affair, much richer in detail” than Redgrave’s first Hamlet, eight years earlier.
A man possessed: Jonathan Pryce
When Richard Eyre directed Hamlet at the Royal Court in 1980, he came up with the idea of having the hero possessed by his father’s ghost, to make the manifestation of the spirit believable for a sceptical contemporary audience. In Pryce’s astonishing performance, the echoing voice spewed from his mouth as he clutched his body, eyes wide and staring. The grief conjured was real: Pryce gave this febrile, haunted interpretation just after his own father had died. For another Hamlet, Daniel Day-Lewis this sense of confronting his real father’s ghost became too much: he walked out of a National Theatre performance in 1989 and has never returned to the stage.
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The madman: Mark Rylance
“You were really mad — take it from me, I should know, I’m a loony.” That was how a patient at Broadmoor complimented Mark Rylance, when the RSC mounted a one-off performance of Ron Daniels’s production at the high-security hospital in 1989. Rylance played the prince as utterly undone by grief, prowling the stage in excrement-stained pyjamas, mooning at courtiers, spitting in Ophelia’s face. Yet the greatness of the portrayal was how, under the madness, he suggested a gentle, noble mind in the grip of a terrible breakdown
The moral man: Simon Russell Beale
By the time he played the Dane in John Caird’s National Theatre production in 2000, Simon Russell Beale was 40, and it felt as if he had been waiting half his life to interpret the part. He brought to it a soulful intelligence that made perfect sense in a religiously tinged, domestically based production that cut Fortinbras to concentrate on the fact that this is a play about faith, as well as doubt. Russell Beale’s tearful, emotional performance emphasised that Hamlet is a “sweet prince”, loved and loving, full of warmth and gentle humour. His was a Hamlet who, at the last, conveyed both spiritual illumination and a calm acceptance of his fate.
The troubled teenager: Ben Whishaw
Snot-stained and painfully thin, Ben Whishaw gave a heart-rending central performance in Trevor Nunn’s 2004 production at the Old Vic. Only 23 and a year out of Rada, he delivered “to be or not to be” holding a jar of sleeping tablets and that painful impulse to suicide, the sense of an adolescent in the grip of clinical depression, made his performance raw and convincing. Historically, it sat in the tradition initiated by the 24-year-old David Warner at the RSC in 1965; for the first time here was Hamlet not as a royal prince but an awkward teenager, scruffy, discontented — and utterly real.
The wit: David Tennant
Just as Benedict Cumberbatch’s popularity as Sherlock unleashed a furore of anticipation, particularly among young fans, so David Tennant’s celebrity as Doctor Who triggered months of speculation before he appeared as the prince in Gregory Doran’s modern-dress RSC production in 2008. He didn’t disappoint. Both fans and critics were spellbound by a quicksilver performance so light, fleet and funny that his revelation of utter despair and disgust in his clearly delivered soliloquies was all the more shocking. This Hamlet was both the life and soul of every party and a melancholy loner, unable to trust anyone. After his sea voyage he returned to confront the skull of Yorick in the graveyard with a new sense of acceptance of the inevitability of his own death.
The victim of circumstance: Rory Kinnear
Hamlet is such a fascinating prospect because not only the hero but also the play itself is capable of adapting its nature to the times. In Nicholas Hytner’s 2010 production at the National Theatre, Elsinore became a police state, where everyone’s every move was subject to constant surveillance and even Ophelia’s Bible was bugged. In this setting, Rory Kinnear — in his first major Shakespearean role — was a studentish Everyman, a rational bloke in an impossible situation with which he cannot cope.