Response to Jenna: Hamlet and the Limits of Hodgdon (Whitney)

I, of course, have to respond to Jenna’s post and the photos on Hamlet. First, it gives me the chance for a brief cameo mention of Slings and Arrows (“It’s not that heavy at all!”), which I’ve been waiting for. But, these photos - well, really, just this "image" of Hamlet and the skull is such an interesting choice on its own terms because it really pushes the limits of iconism in regards to the performance still. In fact, the Hamlet skull image might just bring the iconic performance still to an utmost extreme.

I’m using Hodgdon to discuss this photo because, even though she uses a version of this photo in her argument, I’d like to suggest that her own analysis regarding this particular image outpaces her methodology in a way that even she doesn’t account for. She specifically brings up the advertising for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2001 production of Hamlet with Sam West. She focuses on this series of photos, including the skull photo, during her most in-depth discussion of performance stills as commodity. When she outlines her methodology at the start of her article, she argues that the “theatrical still has a double history” because “before and during the run of a performance, it takes life as a commodity, teaser or provocation; only when the performance is no longer “up” does the photograph reach the archive” (89). She then outlines her intent to explore both the commodity and archival elements of performance stills in her essay.

Productions of Hamlet, specifically the RSC’s 2001 production, tend to use performance stills from 5.1 in advertising. As Hodgdon points out, this is because of the “emblematic” quality of this moment in Hamlet. She uses the word emblematic, but then she undercuts the nuance of that term by framing it with “recognizable but not clichéd” (108). The OED has several helpful definitions of “emblem”: “a drawing or picture expressing a moral fable or allegory; a fable or allegory such as might be expressed pictorially” (2a) and “a picture of an object (or the object itself) serving as a symbolical representation of an abstract quality, an action, state of things, class of persons, etc.” (3a). By using the word “emblem” to describe this image, Hodgdon categorizes this photo at a level beyond what her two-part methodology for performance still analysis (commodity and archive) allows for. As the OED suggests, an emblem was a visual symbol representing a narrative. Importantly, in early modern England, emblems were used to communicate messages to a largely illiterate society. By weaving together multiple well-recognized symbols into one “emblem” that presented a very short and pointed story, emblem makers could communicate with people who couldn’t read.

It seems to me that Hodgdon is right – that the image of Hamlet with the skull does have an “emblematic” status. But this status seems to result in more than just a useful, “recognizable” performance still for advertising purposes. The result is that this image is not and cannot be archived in the way Hodgdon suggests performance stills are after a performance closes. So while these stills may be useful for commodification purposes in advertising (although, as Jenna’s post suggests, even arguing that the Hamlet and skull image can be a commodity in the way Hodgdon is suggesting seems impossible – it’s almost reached the status of fetish, but a fetish to be appropriated rather than one to be desired and/or purchased?), they can never fulfill the archival function within Hodgdon’s argument. Other performance stills can rightly serve as “the visible remains of what is no longer visible,” as Hodgdon argues (89). But no one needs to revisit photos of Hamlet with the skull to construct his or her own interpretation of this theatrical moment. This moment in the play, and the countless times it’s been performed, are ingrained in memory in a way that no other performance still has achieved because of the overdetermined iconic status of this moment.  I would suggest that performance stills of Hamlet with the skull, no matter the performance, resist being archived. They represent performance photos that will never be revisited, held, or analyzed for reference because there’s no need for the material photo in a case where the abstract idea has taken on the archival qualities of the material.