By Isaac Butler for Slate, 20 September 2015
Picture for a moment Hamlet, the melancholy prince of Denmark. Chances are, you’re imagining a dashing gentleman who looks like one of the many famous actors who’ve played him. Kenneth Branagh, say, or Laurence Olivier, or Jude Law or David Tennant. You might even picture Benedict Cumberbatch, who is drawing crowds to London to see him play the role. As the Guardian’s Michael Billington put it, “Cumberbatch has many of the qualities one looks for in a Hamlet. He has a lean, pensive countenance, a resonant voice, a gift for introspection.”
Billington is right: One does look for a Hamlet that is lean and pensive or, failing that, an action hero like Mel Gibson or Keanu Reeves, who both played the role in the 1990s. Cumberbatch combines aspects of both, having recently played both Sherlock Holmes and a genetically engineered supersoldier in Star Trek Into Darkness.
But what if our mental image of Hamlet is wrong? What if the grieving, vengeful prince is actually fat? Just because you’ve never considered the possibility doesn’t mean that Shakespeare scholars haven’t argued about it, just one front in a centuries-old debate about how you determine meaning in Shakespeare’s plays.
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