On Hamelet (Part 2)

These are more quotes from the book, 'The Friendly Shakespeare'.  Part one is here. 

• Hamlet is loathsome and repugnant. The fact that he is eloquent has nothing to do with him being obnoxious. He's an aging playboy. The only time he gets animated is when he bosses around the players, telling them how to do their own business. Imagine telling actors to insert some extra lines! - Charles Marowitz
• An Anglo-Saxon bore that talked too much. - Henry Miller
• A rich kid from Denmark. - Diane Sawyer
• A half dozen characters rolled into one. - George Bernard Shaw
• What Hamlet is before he is anything . . . is an authentic tragic hero who is himself a man of genius. And once Shakespeare had written him he never wrote [about] a man of any genius at all again . . . Once he'd written [Hamlet] and discovered that there was no actor who could play him . . . he turned to something else. - Orson Welles

I've never played Hamlet and now I'm too old to do so.  That's one of the strange things about the character, it's a young role but it's doubtful that anyone young enough to play it has enough life experience to really pull it off.  This issue is usually ducked by finding young looking guys in their thirties and forties. 
The last quote from Orson Welles makes me think.  There must have been a first actor to tackle the role.  He would have made choices on how to portray the tortured soul.  (Or, more probably, since William Shakespeare was present, he would have been directed in a certain way.)  That means that the first audiences to see 'Hamlet' would have been given a more direct answer to all of the lingering questions.  I wonder what they thought of it. 
Ok, one more quote and then I'll close the book on 'Hamlet'  This is on the 'to be or not to be' monolouge.

• By now that speech has been translated into every major language on earth and some minor ones, and it's remarkable how the first line always seems to come out the same. "Sein, oder nicht sein?" runs the German version, "das ist die Frage." Which perhaps lacks the fresh charm of the English subtitle in a recent Hindi film version: "Shall I live, or do myself in? I do not know." - Clive James