In Germany Shakespeare’s Hamlet became a socio-cultural catalyst that decisively contributed to shaping the nation’s identity. From the eighteenth to the twentieth century, “Hamletology” relied on idealising constructs that progressively alienated the “spirit” (Geist) of Hamlet, that is its textual authority, from the “body” (Leib) of performance. In the 1960s and 1970s the productions by Adolf Dresen and Benno Besson in East Germany and by Peter Zadek and George Tabori in West Germany challenged the long-standing German tradition of sacralising the Shakespearean text. Taking Robert Weimann’s distinction between locus and platea and his notion of the “dual authority” of text and performance as a point of departure, this essay shows how these stagings restored the centrality of the performer’s physical presence and histrionic skills. Working with new stage-oriented translations, Dresen and Besson foreground the tensions between thought and action, idealism and material reality, language and gesture as acts of resistance against official ideology and the generational authority of the fathers. By contrast, Zadek and Tabori develop postmodern and psychoanalytic interpretations centred on an eroticised, wounded or diseased actorial body to expose, through theatrical artifices, cross-dressing, improvisation and the disruption of scenic illusion, the brutality of political power and post-war society’s persistent inability to confront its past. The statement “The play’s the thing” thus emerges not as an abstract maxim but as a definition of theatrical materiality, implying the dependence of the spectral Shakespearean text on the actor’s body in order to renew itself in the interplay between actor and spectator.
