To Be Or Not to Be

To be or not to be, that is the question. That is one of the most famous lines from Hamlet. Shakespeare was and still is a brilliant man of his work. He has written many well-known plays. Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night, Taming of the Shrew, and Macbeth are my favorites. Reading Shakespeare’s are a real treat. But yet, how do they stand up when being acted out alive? One way to find out is to read Hamlet and then watch it live. Will it stand up to the test? One will have to see.

Finding a play production about Hamlet on YouTube was a nightmare. Most videos were from a movie or a spoof. Just like all of Shakespeare’s plays, Hamlet is just that popular. Anything and everything by Shakespeare has been made into a movie, brought into modern times, and spoofed. Plus, I could not get the whole play on video due to the rules of YouTube. So, I did the best that I could for Hamlet. But after some looking, I found the first scene from act one. The quality is not that good because it is a student made play. But it was the best I could find at the moment. Overall, the actors did the best they could do. The costumes are accurate to the time period of the play. They were not expensive at all. Anyone can find something close to Shakespeare’s time and improvise with it if they tried really hard. It just takes imagination and passion to fuel the play into a gold mine. The setting is just a simple stage and the lighting is pretty dark. Again, the actors just had their imaginations rule the scene and guild the audience along. The script is pretty fast-paced. The actors spoke really fast. I had a hard time keeping up. I kept getting lost many times. But the students had nailed the lines down perfectly to the tee.

The whole style may have been cheap, but they did the best that they could with it. They reminded me of my senior year when my English class and I had acted out scenes from Macbeth. We did not have much, but we managed to get the general idea across. The actors in the first scene used their words with force and power to make up for the lack of scenery around them. Horatio’s tone was strong like thunder. However when it came to the soliloquy, a woman’s voice took over for his lines. The characters were splendid with there lines. Even the actor who played the ghost was pretty good with his part. The actors’ work proved that one does not have one does not need expensive setting and equipment to bring one of Shakespeare’s plays to life. All an actor needs is to have good skills and a strong passion for the performance itself.

No matter how many times Shakespeare’s works have been acted out on film or stage, brought into modern times, or spoofed, Shakespeare himself has proved to be king of the drama world. Hamlet is living proof of that testimony. So, to be or not to be that is the question. The answer is to be!