Youth and Authenticity in Hamlet: Burbage in His Thirties and a Sexagenarian Hamlet in Seoul

This chapter reconsiders the startling revelation in Act 5 of Hamlet that scholars and readers have struggled over the centuries to make sense of: that Hamlet, despite being a university student and being routinely called a “youth,” is thirty years old. I examine this seeming anomaly in the context of early modern anxieties about extended adolescence, especially its association with rebellion and madness. Onto this background I map what I argue is a historical development—exemplified in Reformation theologians and the character Hamlet—in which authenticity emerges in contradistinction to sincerity (thus developing Lionel Trilling’s ideas about authenticity). In this context, I consider (or speculate on) the stage presence of Richard Burbage playing Hamlet in his early 30s when he is too old to be behaving like a youth but embodies a new form of authenticity. From here I examine at length a 2016 Korean performance of Hamlet with a sexagenarian Hamlet in a cast in which the average age was 66. Considering in this connection the production’s metadramatic frame that makes the performance a shamanistic ritual of what Koreans call nori (or play), I argue ultimately that the production celebrates Hamlet’s theatricality as the expression of a form of authenticity that theatre embodies.