[RADIOLAB INTRO]

ROBERT KRULWICH: Number 14. The Four Groans. There is a moment in Shakespeare, it is a very, very famous moment when Shakespeare allows his actors to step right up to the edge of death, almost into death itself. It's from Hamlet.

RON ROSENBAUM: Yeah, it sounds good.

ROBERT: Okay, so we'll—we'll start. So what's going on in the play at the very end?

RON ROSENBAUM: Well, at the very end, there's a pile of bodies.

ROBERT: This is Ron Rosenbaum. He's the author of a book called The Shakespeare Wars.

RON ROSENBAUM: Hamlet and Laertes have fought a duel, and the queen has drunk a draft of poison.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gertrude: The drink! Oh my dear Hamlet.]

RON ROSENBAUM: People are dying all over the place.

ROBERT: And Hamlet, too. He's been cut and fatally poisoned. He falls into the arms of his—of his very best friend.

RON ROSENBAUM: Of his very best friend.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Laurence Olivier: Oh, I die, Horatio.]

ROBERT: This is Sir Laurence Olivier.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Laurence Olivier: The potent poison quite o'ercrows my spirit.]

RON ROSENBAUM: And then finally he says ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Laurence Olivier: The rest is silence.]

ROBERT: And then Hamlet dies.

RON ROSENBAUM: So that's the end of Hamlet. "The rest is silence." Those are his last words.

ROBERT: Which may be Shakespeare's way of just saying so that, you know, when you die, that's what happens next. It's just nothing. It's just silence.

RON ROSENBAUM: However, seven years after Shakespeare's death, his collaborators reprinted collected works of Shakespeare. This is called The Folio Version.

ROBERT: In that version, says Ron ...

RON ROSENBAUM: After "The rest is silence" Hamlet is not silent. What is printed beneath "The rest is silence” is literally O, O, O, O.

ROBERT: Four Os.

RON ROSENBAUM: Four Os.

ROBERT: Yes. We have an appointment with Mark Rylance. We are from National Public Radio and ...

ROBERT: We wondered: what are these Os? They're just tacked like big dangling donuts onto one of the most lyrical deaths in the English language, so what are they doing there? Well, most of the actors who perform Hamlet pay no attention to the folio. They don't do the Os, and they do "The rest is silence," they die and it's done.

STAGEHAND: The green room is down to the left there.

ROBERT: But we met a guy who does do the groans.

ROBERT: You are he?

MARK RYLANCE: I'm Mark, hi.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich. Hi. This is Jad Abumrad.

JAD ABUMRAD: Hi.

ROBERT: His name is Mark Rylance.

MARK RYLANCE: Yeah. Should we go up to my—my dressing room?

ROBERT: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

ROBERT: We met him backstage at the Longacre Theater in New York City. He was starring in a—in a non-Shakespeare Broadway show, but he took us up to ...

JAD: Wow, we're in a Broadway dressing room. This is pretty cool.

ROBERT: ... a teeny dressing room. And it was there that he began to talk about the groans.

MARK RYLANCE: So the "O, O, O, O," was added by very careful editors to the folio in 1623.

ROBERT: Mark said he didn't think that Shakespeare actually wrote those Os. He thinks probably an actor did it.

ROBERT: So—so when you and your director sat down and you're looking at these four Os on the page, why didn't you think to yourself, "Shut up?"

MARK RYLANCE: Because I guess—I guess I'd done it 300 times shutting up, so I was into—into the change, into the difference.

ROBERT: Particularly when he began to just consider the character of Hamlet himself.

MARK RYLANCE: Of all the characters who die in plays, I think we're most intrigued about what Hamlet will make of it.

ROBERT: Because, Rylance says, remember, not only is Hamlet, you know, unusually obsessed by death, he went to a school that championed reason over mystery.

MARK RYLANCE: He's a student at Wittenberg University. He's part of that whole Protestant movement to the accurate study of nature. He—he's moving away from superstition and then he encounters a ghost.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Hamlet: What?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Hamlet's Father: I am thy father's spirit.]

MARK RYLANCE: A ghost that not only appears as his father, but sounds like his father.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Hamlet's Father: If thou didst ever thy dear father love ... ]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Hamlet: Oh, God.]

MARK RYLANCE: This is—this is for—for the scientists I imagine listening to your program, you have to put yourself in that position. It's one of you. It's not a new age wanderer or some regular visitor to a psychic who has this experience. So his—his gaze has been—for the whole play, his gaze has been on what—what is on the other side of our consciousness.

ROBERT: And when, in the end, Hamlet finally steps to the edge of the answer, and he utters ...

MARK RYLANCE: The rest is silence.

ROBERT: ... here's the choice that actors and directors, when they do Hamlet, must make: Hamlet's next step is either into silence where there is nothing, where there's a nothingness forever and ever, or is there a something waiting on the other side? And does he see that something in a vision—maybe four visions?

MARK RYLANCE: "O, O, O, O."

RON ROSENBAUM: They could represent a kind of dying aria.

MARK RYLANCE: O.

RON ROSENBAUM: A long sigh. "I see it coming."

MARK RYLANCE: O.

RON ROSENBAUM: "Oh, my God. It's here."

MARK RYLANCE: O.

RON ROSENBAUM: "It's about to happen."

MARK RYLANCE: O.

RON ROSENBAUM: "That's it."

ROBERT: So this is—this is an idea you had to inhabit night after night.

MARK RYLANCE: I did, yeah.

ROBERT: So what did you think you were doing?

MARK RYLANCE: I felt that—I felt I was encountering—I felt I was en—encountering another reality than was immediately apparent to those around me. And so I felt with Hamlet that—that he'd moved and was seeing things, was encountering things, but his ability to put words to what he's witnessing dies before his ability to witness.

ROBERT: The ability to say what he saw? That died, even though he still had mind enough to see. So some nights Mark would deliver the oaths silently.

MARK RYLANCE: Just looking, four times in four different places, maybe.

ROBERT: Or he might change tempo.

MARK RYLANCE: O, O, O, O.

ROBERT: And some nights he died better deaths.

MARK RYLANCE: The best deaths would just be when the audience and I were together, and we were all—we were all kind of together wanting, I suppose, Hamlet to say—say something, what can you say? What's happening to him? Something is happening, but we don't know what it is. Then he's gone. He's gone.

ROBERT: And the rest is silence.

ROBERT: Radiolab is funded in part by the Sloan Foundation, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Science Foundation.

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