Screen Adaptations: Shakespeare's Hamlet: The Relationship between Text and Film 9781472538918, 9781408129555, 9781472539069, 9781472538932

Table of contents :
Cover page
Halftitle page
Series page
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication
Contents
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
PREFACE
CREDITS/FILMOGRAPHY
1 Literary contexts
Hamlet in its time
Shakespeare’s sources
The text
Hamlet and revenge
Hamlet as intellectual hero
Politics and religion
Hamlet in our time
Hamlet and Freud
Hamlet and the Age of Aquarius
Hamlet in contemporary performance
Hamlet and the art of adaptation
Notes
2 Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet: From text to screen
Screenplay
Film score
Landscape and atmosphere
Camera
Stage and film conventions
Hamlet and Gertrude
Flashbacks
Hamlet at mid-century
Notes
3 Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet: From text to screen
Branagh and Olivier
Screenplay
Film score
Landscape and character
Camera
Flashcuts and flashbacks
Landscape and atmosphere
Hamlet and fin de siècle
Notes
4 Critical responses and the afterlife of text and film
Olivier’s Hamlet: Afterlife
Olivier’s Hamlet: Critical response
Olivier’s Hamlet and selected Hamlet films: 1948–1990
Grigori Kozintsev’s Hamlet (1964)
Tony Richardson’s Hamlet (1969)
Franco Zeffirelli’s Hamlet (1990)
Branagh’s Hamlet: A new paradigm
Branagh’s Hamlet and the Shakespeare films of the 1990s
Branagh’s Hamlet: Critical response
Branagh’s Hamlet and selected Hamlet films: 1996–2006
Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet (2000)
Campbell Scott’s Hamlet (2001)
Sherwood Hu’s Prince of the Himalayas (2006)
Notes
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX

Citation preview

Screen Adaptations: Shakespeare’s Hamlet

i

RELATED TITLES Shakespeare’s King Lear, Yvonne Griggs Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Courtney Lehmann Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Lisa Hopkins

ii

Screen Adaptations: Shakespeare’s Hamlet The Relationship between Text and Film Samuel Crowl

iii

Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing PLC © Samuel Crowl, 2014 Samuel Crowl has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4725-3891-8 PB: 978-1-4081-2955-5 ePDF: 978-1-4725-3893-2 ePub: 978-1-4725-3892-5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk

iv

This book is for: Lewis and Susan Greenstein, Charles and Claire Ping, Edward and Carolyn Quattrocchi, Stuart and Anne Scott. Good my Lord, will you see the players well bestowed? Do you hear, let them be well used, for they are the abstract and brief chronicles of the time: after your death you were better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live.

v

vi

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements x Preface xii Credits/filmography xiv

1 Literary contexts

1

Hamlet in its time 1 Shakespeare’s sources 2 The text 5 Hamlet and revenge 6 Hamlet as intellectual hero 7 Politics and religion 9 Hamlet in our time 13 Hamlet and Freud 14 Hamlet and the Age of Aquarius 17 Hamlet in contemporary performance 19 Hamlet and the art of adaptation 23

2 Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet: From text to screen 29 Screenplay 29 Film score 33 Landscape and atmosphere 39 Camera 41 Stage and film conventions 45

vii

viii

CONTENTS

Hamlet and Gertrude 50 Flashbacks 55 Hamlet at mid-century 57

3 Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet: From text to screen 65 Branagh and Olivier 65 Screenplay 68 Film score 70 Landscape and character 73 Camera 76 Flashcuts and flashbacks 85 Landscape and atmosphere 88 Hamlet and fin de siècle 94

4 Critical responses and the afterlife of text and film 99 Olivier’s Hamlet: Afterlife 100 Olivier’s Hamlet: Critical response 102 Olivier’s Hamlet and selected Hamlet films: 1948–1990 107 Grigori Kozintsev’s Hamlet (1964) 109 Tony Richardson’s Hamlet (1969) 112 Franco Zeffirelli’s Hamlet (1990) 114 Branagh’s Hamlet: A new paradigm 117 Branagh’s Hamlet and the Shakespeare films of the 1990s 120 Branagh’s Hamlet: Critical response 122 Branagh’s Hamlet and selected Hamlet films: 1996–2006 126 Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet (2000) 128

CONTENTS

Campbell Scott’s Hamlet (2001) 130 Sherwood Hu’s Prince of the Himalayas (2006) 133 Bibliography 141 Index 151

ix

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I want to thank Janet Moat of the British Film Institute for not only guiding me through the Institute’s holdings on the Olivier and Branagh films of Hamlet but by calling to my attention the recent acquisition of the papers of Helga Cranston, who edited Olivier’s film. This volume is the first to make use of Cranston’s written memories of her experience working with Olivier. I also want to thank the staff of the rare book and manuscript department of the British Library for letting me roam through several boxes of not yet catalogued material in search of items related to Olivier’s film of Hamlet. I also want to thank Professor Mark Thornton Burnett for allowing me, several years ago, to make a similar raid on the Branagh Papers at Queen’s University Belfast. Deborah Cartmell first approached me about contributing to this series over five years ago when I had too many writing obligations piled up to casually say yes to yet another. She was patient and gracious in allowing me time to finish those other projects before turning to this one. I hope she feels the wait was worth it as I have relished spending several years with Hamlet and some of its many screen adaptations. I also owe a special debt of gratitude to my editor at Bloomsbury, Margaret Bartley, for her support and encouragement at a precarious moment in the life of this project. And once again Patty Colwell heroically managed to set down my hastily scribbled tables to make them decipherable to others. Many thanks too to my colleagues at Ohio University – Thomas Carpenter, Michael Drew, Andy Escobedo, Jill Ingram – and in the wider world of Shakespeare Studies – Mark Thornton Burnett, Peter Holland, Russell Jackson, James Lake, Douglas Lanier, Courtney Lehmann, Patricia Lennox, Jane Wells, and Ramona Wray – x

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

xi

for their generous participation in the dynamic conversation about Shakespeare on film we have enjoyed in the past several decades. As always I want to thank the members of the recent film seminars sponsored by the Shakespeare Association of America and the World Shakespeare Congress for continuing the lively and productive exchange about Shakespeare on Film that has been ongoing for the past thirty-five years. I offer a special thanks to Professors Sarah Hatchuel and Natalie Vienne-Guerrin for expanding these conversations through their biennial research seminars on Shakespeare on Screen held at the Universities of Rouen, Le Havre, and Montpellier. The editors of Shakespeare on Screen: Hamlet (‘Hamlet on Film at Mid-Century and Fin de Siècle: Olivier and Branagh’) and Shakespeare Bulletin (reviews of Michael Almereyda and Campbell Scott’s films of Hamlet) generously have given permission to incorporate revised material that first appeared in essays and film reviews intended for their audiences. Finally, I have been privileged to share a long and rewarding life with Susan Crowl, who though a James and Browning scholar, has happily joined me in darkened theatres and cinemas where the heart of Shakespeare’s mysteries can seem a morsel ready to be plucked. Her sensibility has helped to shape my ends, rough-hew them how I will. She is also an accomplished musician, and I am deeply indebted to what she has taught me about the Shakespearean film score, particularly the work of William Walton, Dmitri Shostakovich and Patrick Doyle.

PREFACE

The Screen Adaptations series has a basic format in which a significant literary text is placed in the context of its cultural creation (literary contexts); then is considered in one or more screen adaptations (from text to screen); and finally is investigated in terms of its influence (critical responses and the adaptation’s afterlife). In some cases, a single adaptation is explored, for instance To Kill a Mockingbird; in others multiple film versions are included, as in the volume devoted to The Tempest. This volume seeks a middle course. The world of Hamlet on film is the richest for any of Shakespeare’s plays. Kenneth Rothwell lists twenty major sound versions of the play on screen, which does not include either silent versions or loose adaptations like To Be or Not to Be (1942), The Bad Sleep Well (1960), Ophelia (1962), L.A. Story (1991), The Lion King (1994), and Hamlet 2 (2008). There is just too much inviting material here to include in a single book, particularly one in a series where consistency of organization, focus, and approach is a value. I have decided to concentrate on two major Hamlet films, made by Laurence Olivier (1948) and Kenneth Branagh (1996), because they are separated by fifty years, are the products of radically different historical contexts while emerging from the same country of origin, and provide challengingly different approaches to Shakespeare’s text and screen adaptation. The films carry on a vital conversation with one another even as they influenced the Hamlet films that appeared in their immediate wake. I also discuss in some detail six other filmed Hamlets that are most likely to be encountered by students: those directed by Grigori Kozintsev (1964), Tony Richardson (1969), Franco xii

PREFACE

xiii

Zeffirelli (1990), Michael Almereyda (2000), Campbell Scott (2001) and Sherwood Hu (2006). Rather than treating these films in a separate section I include them in the discussions of the afterlife of the Olivier and Branagh films. Kozintsev, Richardson and Zeffirelli were all directly influenced in their approaches to the play by Olivier’s screen version; as were Almereyda, Scott and Hu by Branagh’s. However, I attempt to treat each film in enough detail so that the achievements of these six directors are seen to transcend the anxiety of influence each may have felt in taking on Olivier or Branagh. This volume, then, concentrates on eight major Hamlet films, including one in Russian and another in Tibetan. In order to maintain a consistency of focus I have avoided discussing Hamlet spin-offs where the play serves as a deeply embedded subtext, such as The Bad Sleep Well or The Lion King, rather than directly assimilating the language or plot narrative of Shakespeare’s play.

CREDITS/ FILMOGRAPHY Credits for key Hamlet films discussed in detail

Hamlet (1948) Director: Writers: Cinematographer: Designers: Editor: Composer:

Laurence Olivier Laurence Olivier and Alan Dent Desmond Dickinson Carmon Dillon and Roger Furse Helga Cranston William Walton

Main cast Hamlet: Ophelia: Claudius: Gertrude: Polonius: Horatio: Laertes: Osric: Gravedigger: First Player:

Laurence Olivier Jean Simmons Basil Sydney Eileen Herlie Felix Aylmer Norman Woodland Terrence Morgan Peter Cushing Stanley Holloway Harcourt Williams

Hamlet (1964) Director: Writer: Cinematographer: Designers: Editor: Composer: xiv

Grigori Kozintsev Boris Pasternak I. Gritsyus E. Ene, G. Kropachev and S. Virsaladze E. Makhankova Dmitri Shostakovich

CREDITS/FILMOGRAPHY

Main cast Hamlet: Ophelia: Claudius: Gertrude: Polonius: Horatio: Laertes: Rosencrantz: Guildenstern: Gravedigger: First Player:

Innokenti Smoktunovski Anastasia Vertinskaya Michail Nazwanov Eliza Radzin-Szolkonis Yuri Tolubeyev V. Erenberg S. Oleksenko I. Dmitriev V. Medvedev V. Kolpakor A. Chekaerskii

Hamlet (1969) Director: Writer: Cinematographer: Designer: Editor: Composer: Main cast Hamlet: Ophelia: Claudius: Gertrude: Polonius: Horatio: Laertes: Rosencrantz: Guildenstern: Osric: Gravedigger and First Player:

Tony Richardson Tony Richardson Gerry Fisher Jocelyn Herbert Charles Rees Patrick Gowers Nicol Williamson Marianne Faithfull Anthony Hopkins Judy Parfitt Mark Dignam Gordon Jackson Michael Pennington Ben Aris Clive Graham Peter Gale Roger Livesey

xv

xvi

CREDITS/FILMOGRAPHY

Hamlet (1990) Director: Writers: Cinematographer: Designer: Composer:

Franco Zeffirelli Christopher De Vore and Franco Zeffirelli David Watkins Dante Ferretti Ennio Morricone

Main cast Hamlet: Ophelia: Claudius: Gertrude: Polonius: Horatio: Laertes: Ghost: Rosencrantz: Guildenstern: Gravedigger: Osric:

Mel Gibson Helena Bonham Carter Alan Bates Glenn Close Ian Holm Stephen Dillane Nathaniel Parker Paul Scofield Michael Maloney Sean Murray Trevor Peacock John McEnery

Hamlet (1996) Director: Writer: Cinematographer: Designer: Composer:

Kenneth Branagh Kenneth Branagh Alex Thompson Tim Harvey Patrick Doyle

Main cast Hamlet: Ophelia: Claudius: Gertrude: Polonius: Horatio: Laertes:

Kenneth Branagh Kate Winslet Derek Jacobi Julie Christie Richard Briers Nicholas Ferrell Michael Maloney

CREDITS/FILMOGRAPHY

Ghost: Guildenstern: Rosencrantz: First Player: Gravedigger: Fortinbras: Osric:

Brian Blessed Reece Dinsdale Timothy Spall Charlton Heston Billy Crystal Rufus Sewell Robin Williams

Hamlet (2000) Director: Writer: Cinematographer: Designer: Composer:

Michael Almereyda Michael Almereyda John de Borman Gideon Ponte Carter Burwell

Main cast Hamlet: Ophelia: Claudius: Gertrude: Polonius: Horatio: Laertes: Ghost: Guidenstern: Rosencrantz: Gravedigger: Osric:

Ethan Hawke Julia Styles Kyle MacLachlan Diane Venora Bill Murray Karl Geary Liev Schreiber Sam Shepard Dechen Thurman Steve Zahn Jeffery Wright Paul Bartel

Hamlet (2001) Directors: Writers: Cinematographer: Designer: Composer:

Campbell Scott and Eric Simonson Campbell Scott and Eric Simonson Dan Gillham Chris Shriver Gary DeMichele

xvii

xviii

Main cast Hamlet: Ophelia: Claudius: Gertrude: Polonius: Horatio: Laertes: Ghost and First Player: Guildenstern: Rosencrantz: Gravedigger: Fortinbras: Osric:

CREDITS/FILMOGRAPHY

Campbell Scott Lisa Gay Hamilton Jamey Sheridan Blair Brown Roscoe Lee Browne John Benjamin Hickey Roger Guenveur Smith Byron Jennings Marcus Giamatti Michael Imperioli Dan Moran Sam Robards Denis O’Hare

Prince of the Himalayas (2006) Director: Writers: Cinematographer: Designer: Composer:

Sherwood Hu Tsering Dorje, Sherwood Hu, Trashidawa Yong Hou Suyalatu Xuntian He

Main cast Hamlet (Prince Lhamoklodan): Ophelia (Odsaluyang): Claudius (Kulo-ngam): Gertrude (Nanm): Polonius (Po-lha-nyisse): Laertes (Lessar): Horatio (Horshu):

Purba Rgyal Sonamdoigar Dobrgyal Zornskyid Lobden Trashi Ciringdongrub

1 Literary contexts

Hamlet in its time Hamlet is the most read, discussed, and performed work in the Western literary canon. The play’s cultural history is as protean and enigmatic as its fascinating but elusive central figure. The play was conceived at a moment of transition in the life of its creator, in the culture he helped to shape and fashion and in the political dynamics of the English monarchy. And it appeared precisely as the sixteenth century, dominated by the energies released by the Reformation and the rise of the nation-state, gave way to individual self-fashioning and scientific scepticism. Hamlet, like the late-Elizabethan age it reflects, is set in the interrogative mood. The play abounds in questions from Bernardo’s opening query, ‘Who’s there?’, to Hamlet’s famous ‘To be or not to be’ formulation to the Gravedigger’s puzzlement: ‘Is she to be buried in Christian burial, when she willfully seeks her own salvation?’ (5.1.1–2). The play’s atmosphere is muddled and mysterious. Is the Ghost an honest representation of Hamlet’s father or a creature created by the devil? Is Claudius his brother’s legitimate successor or his fratricide? Is Gertrude innocent or guilty of adultery? Is she complicit in her first husband’s murder? Does Hamlet love Ophelia or simply use her as a pawn in his 1

2

SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

political gamesmanship with Claudius? Is Hamlet mad or does he merely feign madness to rattle Claudius’s court? Is Polonius a concerned parent, a savvy political counsellor, or a tiresome busybody? Are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern loyal friends or adders fanged? Is the state better managed by a smooth and cunning politician or by a distraught young man? Is Fortinbras a legitimate successor to the Danish throne or a military opportunist? These questions of character and plot leap out and up into questions of theology and metaphysics: is there a special providence in the fall of a sparrow? What is a man? Is he angelic or bestial? Does conscience make cowards of us all?

Shakespeare’s sources The play’s origin, like its dominant atmosphere, is murky. The Hamlet story dates to the twelfth century when Saxo Grammaticus wrote a prose narrative about the famous Danish avenger Amleth. Amleth’s story parallels Hamlet’s in several key details: his uncle kills his father, marries his mother, suspects Amleth (who feigns madness to protect himself) and ships him off to England to be killed. Amleth foils that plot, returns to Denmark, kills his uncle, and is crowned king. We have no sure way of knowing if Shakespeare had access to Saxo’s version of the story but it was re-told and revised by the Frenchman Francois Belleforest in 1570 in his Histoires Tragiques, a work Shakespeare was familiar with, as he used it as a source for several of his other plays. Belleforest added several new touches of his own, particularly by expanding the role of the Queen. In Belleforest her relationship with her husband’s brother is adulterous, since it begins prior to the King’s murder. But she eventually sides with her son, keeps his secret (that his madness is feigned), and aids him in his attempt to gain the crown. Further, Belleforest contributes an aura of melancholy to his conception of the avenging prince. We also know, from remarks and comments that reached print in the 1590s, that there was a version of Hamlet, now

LITERARY CONTEXTS

3

lost, in addition to Belleforest’s. Many scholars assume that this so-called Ur-Hamlet was written by Shakespeare’s contemporary (and master of the Senecan revenge play) Thomas Kyd. We know that this work added the element of the Ghost, making it likely that Shakespeare’s only unique contributions to the basic bones of cast and plot are Reynaldo, Osric, the Gravediggers and Fortinbras. What turned Shakespeare to this material as the sixteenth century came to a close? On a purely professional and commercial level his theatre company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, had just completed the expensive relocation of their theatre from north of the city walls to the Liberties across the River Thames on London’s South Bank, where it was rebuilt and renamed The Globe. The new playhouse needed new work and Shakespeare produced Julius Caesar, As You Like It and Henry V as well as Hamlet in the period from 1598–1601. Shakespeare’s rival company had also mounted a revival of Kyd’s great revenge drama, The Spanish Tragedy, which was packing them in at the Fortune Theatre. Perhaps Richard Burbage, his company’s leading actor, urged Shakespeare to return to the revenge genre (he had begun his career as a tragedian with the hugely popular Titus Andronicus) in response to the Kyd revival. Biography too provides speculative source material for Hamlet, especially in the way life and art interact. Though it is dangerous to try and read from the life to the work where the writer’s imagination has a habit of transforming, if not always trumping, reality, it is intriguing to remember that Shakespeare was working on Hamlet in the period where he experienced the deaths of his son (Hamnet, 1596) and father (John, 1601). Caesar, Henry V, and Hamlet all deal in varying ways with the struggle between fathers and sons and the transmission of masculine identity. Brutus, Cassius and even Mark Antony all seek to break from Caesar’s powerful political and psychological hold on their identities. Hal is caught between two stained fathers: the King, who has risked his legacy by unlawfully usurping a weak but legitimate ruler, and Falstaff, who as the

4

SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

Lord of Misrule who presides over carnival, wants to turn everyday into holiday. Hal makes a shifty but subtle move to equate the two fathers so that he appears to emerge in Henry V as his own man, politically untarnished and morally reformed. Even As You Like It touches on paternal legacies in the conflict between the brothers Oliver and Orlando after their father’s death and in the contrasting paternal examples of another pair of brothers, Duke Senior and Duke Frederick. Rosalind, who adopts masculine attire when she and her cousin Celia run away to the Forest of Arden to escape Celia’s paranoid father, perhaps achieves the single healthiest synthesis of male and female qualities in all of Shakespeare. The myriad issues which link and trouble fathers and sons were certainly alive in Shakespeare’s art and life when he began working on his version of the Hamlet story. If Shakespeare had both personal and material motivations for turning to Hamlet he had professional reasons as well. In the first ten years of his career he had proved to be the master of the genres of the English history play and romantic comedy. Perhaps he felt that he might get trapped by audience demand to continue to produce works similar to the ones which had made his fame. Falstaff, for instance, threatened to take charge of his career so, after promising his return in Henry V, he killed him off instead. This so provoked Queen Elizabeth, according to legend, that she demanded he write a new play showing Falstaff in love. Shakespeare obliged but solved his Falstaff problem by reducing the great subversive comedian to little more than the butt of jokes played upon him by two middleclass housewives. Similarly, Shakespeare tried to break the hold of romantic, festive comedy by writing a series of plays, Measure For Measure, All’s Well That Ends Well, and Troilus and Cressida, that either pushed the limits of what could be successfully released and resolved within the romantic comedy genre or shattered it altogether by cynical satire. Shakespeare was trying to turn his art and his audience to the tragic mode, and Hamlet was his vehicle.

LITERARY CONTEXTS

5

The text Just as Shakespeare’s passage to the play was littered with personal and professional obstacles, so the text’s transmission to us has similar complications. We receive Shakespeare’s plays from two publishing formats: Quarto copies, which were relatively cheap single-volume editions of the plays generally published in Shakespeare’s lifetime (1564–1616), and the First Folio edition of the plays in 1623. The First Folio was an attempt by his fellow actors in Shakespeare’s Company (promoted to being The King’s Men by James I) and shareholders in The Globe, Henry Condell and John Heminges, to collect all of his plays in a single volume. Only eighteen of those thirty-six plays had previously appeared in print in Quarto editions, so had Heminges and Condell not gathered the plays into a single volume we would have lost half of Shakespeare’s dramatic canon.1 In some instances we have multiple Quarto editions of the plays to go along with the text of the play as it appears in the First Folio, and rarely are those versions identical. Such is the case with Hamlet. We have two quarto editions of the play, commonly referred to as Q1 and Q2, as well as the Folio text. There are substantial variations between all three versions of the play, and the text we read (or watch and hear in the theatre) is generally an editor’s compilation of material from Q1, Q2, and the First Folio. This brief history reveals that Shakespeare’s texts are not stable and have existed in multiple versions since their inception. Q1, for instance, is a much shorter version of the play than either Q2 or the First Folio, which are closer in alignment, with the exception of Hamlet’s soliloquy ‘How all occasions do inform against me,’ missing in the Folio text. The truncated Q1 appears to be a version used when Shakespeare’s company toured the provinces or Europe when the plague closed the theatres in London.2 Stephen Greenblatt has noted that ‘Shakespeare’s generous text’ often supplies more material than can be performed in ‘the two hours traffic of our stage’ as

6

SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

the prologue to Romeo and Juliet announces, thus suggesting that he intentionally wrote more material than was likely to get dramatized in any single production.3 The text could be shaped and trimmed (as it now is in almost all contemporary stage and film productions of the plays) by the actors to fit the particular demands of a variety of playing spaces and theatrical circumstances. Hamlet certainly appears to be such a ‘generous’ text: a conflated version containing all the elements unique to Q1, Q2, and the First Folio texts makes it Shakespeare’s longest play.

Hamlet and revenge Hamlet stands at the beginning of the great string of seven tragedies Shakespeare wrote between 1600 and 1608, securing his reputation as the greatest English dramatist. Though not as tightly focused as Macbeth, as intensely powerful as Othello, as searing as King Lear nor as sweeping as Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet remains, for the world, his signature work. If Shakespeare turned to the Hamlet story because of a revived Elizabethan interest in revenge tragedy he did so with a twist. In the traditional revenge play the hero (as often a father as a son) discovers that he (or his family) has been wronged. Believing that he is an upstanding moral member of the community, the aggrieved attempts to find redress through traditional channels of securing justice, but his efforts are blocked by a corrupt state or the political power of his enemy. Eventually the revenger realizes he must take the law into his own hands and plans and executes a final bloodbath of Gothic horror-film dimensions – becoming as morally corrupt as the play’s villain, who has driven him to his violent end. Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, for example, is moved to revenge by the murder of two of his sons and the rape and mutilation of his daughter Lavinia by the sons of Tamara the Queen of the Goths and consort of the Roman ruler Saturninus. Titus captures Tamara’s sons, slits their throats, chops them

LITERARY CONTEXTS

7

up, bakes them in a pie and serves them to their mother before killing her, Saturninus, Lavinia, and himself. Hamlet, even given his responsibility for the deaths of Polonius and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, seems an image of moral rectitude by comparison. In fact Shakespeare is at pains to show that the corrupt Claudius is both initiator of poison in the Danish Court and architect of its final bloodbath. It is Claudius who plans the final catastrophe featuring an unbated foil, an envenomed sword, and a poisoned cup of wine, not the revenge figure, Hamlet. Hamlet always maintains, even insists upon, his moral equilibrium as he seeks his revenge against Claudius. As he says to Horatio late in the play: Does it not, think thee, stand me now upon? He that hath killed my King and whored my mother, Popped in between th’election and my hopes, Thrown out his angle for my proper life And with such cozenage. Is’t not perfect conscience? (5.2.62–6) 4 Hamlet wants to insist that it is ‘perfect conscience’ for him to ‘quit’ Claudius and that Horatio must serve as a witness to his innocence. By the fifth act the typical Renaissance revenger is so deeply embedded in the villain’s ways and means that the two have become largely indistinguishable. Shakespeare’s Hamlet never stoops to Claudius’s lethal methods. Hamlet eventually gets his man but the other deaths (Gertrude’s and Laertes’s) are Claudius’s responsibility, not his.

Hamlet as intellectual hero If Hamlet is an atypical revenger he is also an unusual intellectual hero. No other character in early modern drama thinks as much as Hamlet or gives thought such power: ‘nothing’s either good or bad/But thinking makes it so’ (2.2.255–6). The world has been irresistibly drawn to Hamlet as thinker. The great Polish

8

SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

theatre director and critic Jan Kott once said that any production of Hamlet is guided by the book the Prince is reading when he toys with Polonius in the ‘fishmonger’ scene. Is he reading Plato? Machiavelli? Luther? Montaigne? Jefferson? Marx? Darwin? Freud? Kierkegaard? Sartre? Foucault? Hamlet’s thinking is so trans-historically relevant that over the past four hundred years he has been claimed by almost every major philosophical movement as representative of their thought. His quick mind darts from one idea to another depending upon its provocation. Hamlet dramatizes thought. Shakespeare layers his play in a similar fashion. In almost every key scene it is possible to see how that moment can be read philosophically, politically, socially, and psychologically. For instance, when Hamlet confronts his father’s ghost in 1.5 we are tantalized by religious questions relating to Catholicism, Protestantism, ghosts, and the idea of Purgatory; by political questions of fratricide, and the order of succession to the crown; by regicide and social questions about the fabric of the family and issues of adultery; and by the psychological pressures of a father imposing his will upon his son and a son assuming the burden of repressed Oedipal guilt. The play repeatedly presents its characters acting within this complex matrix with only Hamlet acutely aware of how they impact on one another. He finds himself caught between an idealist version of the past (noble father/king, loving mother/ queen, educated son/prince on the brink of maturity) and a suddenly sour and corrupt present: father dead, mother remarried, an uncle as King and stepfather, and his own identity as his father’s heir blocked and compromised. Even before he learns of his father’s murder from the Ghost, Hamlet’s world has been shattered by his mother’s remarriage (‘O God a beast that wants discourse of reason/Would have mourned longer’ [1.2.150–1]) and his failure to succeed his father as King when Claudius ‘popped in between the election and my hopes’ (5.2.65). All this, of course, is the play as seen through the eyes of its protagonist. From Claudius’s perspective the world is golden

LITERARY CONTEXTS

9

except for his sulking stepson dressed in his ‘nighted color’. Claudius has it all: his brother’s crown, his brother’s wife, and his brother’s son. Shakespeare does not provide us with a perspective on Claudius to challenge or confirm Hamlet’s except from a potentially biased source: the Ghost. From the internal evidence we are given, G. Wilson Knight argues, Claudius appears to be an efficient and effective monarch handling both international diplomacy (Fortinbras’s military adventures) and internal social matters (Laertes’s request to return to Paris, Hamlet’s to Wittenberg) with smooth dispatch. His new wife dotes on him; his chief advisor strives to please him; he gives himself fully to the festive moment of his coronation and marriage. The Danish Court appears to be in capable hands.5

Politics and religion In setting up this complicated clash between Hamlet and Claudius over political power, moral authority, and psychological stability, Shakespeare anchors his drama in many of the pressing issues of the late Elizabethan Age. By the time he came to write Hamlet it was clear that Queen Elizabeth was past child-bearing age and would not produce an heir to the throne. Though she was a powerful experienced monarch the question of succession created political instability and a vacuum that invited young male aristocratic egos to jostle for attention and power. Chief amongst them was the Earl of Essex who, when he came to understand that Elizabeth had no intention of naming him her heir, raised a power that attempted a coup d’état that Elizabeth nipped in the bud.6 But potential political instability remained a concrete rather than abstract threat. Politics was complicated by religion. England had changed official religions four times in approximately fifty years. Originally it was a Catholic country before Henry VIII broke with Rome over his divorce from Catherine of Aragon and marriage to Anne Boleyn and established himself as the head of the Church of England. The country reverted to Catholicism

10

SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

in the brief reign of Mary, Henry’s elder daughter, and then returned to the Protestant Church of England under Elizabeth. Her long reign had created religious stability, but its approaching end once again brought long-repressed religious issues bubbling to the surface. Shakespeare’s play also captures the philosophical doubt of the age. The rise of science began to challenge philosophical and religious orthodoxy. The invention of the telescope allowed Galileo to confirm Copernicus’s view of the heavens. The church had long maintained that the Earth was the centre of the universe. The sun, stars and planets revolved around it, for why would God have created man and not put him at the centre of the world? Galileo proved that we live in a heliocentric rather than geocentric universe – the earth revolves around the sun. Man is on the fringe, not at the centre. This finding, along with others, began to shake the foundation of religious assumptions. John Donne put the new scepticism into verse: ‘And new Philosophy calls all in doubt, // The Element of fire is quite put out’.7 A century earlier, Luther had made a direct challenge to the Pope and Catholic authority and had created the first Protestant schism, which would spread through Europe in the sixteenth century. By the end of the century, doubt (especially as it is expressed in the works of Montaigne) was well on the way to routing faith as the dominant intellectual attitude of the age. Remarkably many of these political, religious and philosophical cross-currents work their way into the fabric of Hamlet. The play is launched by a regicide: a cunningly disguised usurpation. Though based on a hidden crime, Claudius’s new dispensation appears solid, stable, and sincere. His reign is then unsettled and destabilized by Hamlet’s covert civil war against his uncle, sparked by his initial aversion to his mother’s remarriage and then by his discovery of his uncle’s fratricide. The struggle between Hamlet and Claudius is political: Hamlet wants to avenge his father, cleanse the corrupt state, and replace Claudius on the throne. The religious issues in the play are even murkier. Hamlet is a student at Wittenberg: Luther’s university. Denmark is

LITERARY CONTEXTS

11

presumably a Protestant country but the play features a Ghost confined to Purgatory until his unconfessed sins are burned away. Both the Ghost and the idea of Purgatory belong to Catholic rather than Protestant belief. Shakespeare avoids including any voice of institutional religion in the play except the nameless Doctor of Divinity (note he does not call him a Priest) who presides at Ophelia’s burial. Laertes’s plea ‘What ceremony else?’ about Ophelia’s funeral goes unanswered. The play’s view of religion appears to be as unstable as its depiction of politics and the social order. The play takes wing on the philosophical speculations alive in the Elizabethan atmosphere. Hamlet’s racing mind, his natural suspiciousness, his wild and whirling words, his ability to tell a ‘hawk from a handsaw’, his instructive understanding that ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,/ Than are dreamt of in your philosophy’ (1.5.165–6) and his willingness to confront raw emotions with metaphysical ideas are what make him both a representative of his own age and the adopted emblem of subsequent ages. An instructive moment, when Hamlet cleverly uses the abstract to both disguise and reveal the ways in which philosophy and experience confound one another, comes in his first encounter with his Wittenberg schoolmates, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. He seems as genuinely glad to see them as he had been earlier when greeting Horatio, and only their limp and lame responses to his questions about what has brought them from Germany to Denmark bring his new-found suspiciousness once again into play. He quickly gets them to confess that they were sent for by Claudius. Confronted by another example of the world’s dishonesty (friends turned spies for the King) he sets out to explain his melancholy behaviour to them in the Neoplatonic language of the university classroom, which saw man as God’s noblest creation, the crucial element in the great chain of being linking the material and the angelic worlds. Hamlet confesses that he has lost his mirth and forgone all custom of exercise because the world has turned bitter and sour and has become, as he says earlier, ‘an unweeded garden/

12

SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

That grows to seed’ (1.2.135–6). He provides Rosencrantz and Guildenstern with a brilliant lecture on his condition but in an abstract language he knows will only confuse them rather than provide the clarification they seek to report to the King. The speech mounts to this climax: What piece of work is a man – how noble in reason; how infinite in faculties, in form and moving; how express and admirable in action; how like an angel in apprehension; how like a god; the beauty of the world; the paragon of animals. And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me – nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so. (2.2.269–76) His mother’s speedy remarriage, his father’s murder, Ophelia’s rejection of his love, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s betrayal of a friendship have all presented Hamlet with lessons from experience which challenge and radically undermine the romantic idealism expressed in the Neoplatonic view of man Hamlet has just described and then exploded in his dazzling disquisition. The ‘man’ Hamlet has discovered owes nothing to the angels and everything to the lower orders. Here he finds his formulation about the quintessence of man in fending off his former friends. By the time we reach the final act and Hamlet’s encounter with the Gravedigger he has become perfectly reconciled to the knowledge that even the noble dust of a Caesar or Alexander may end up ‘stopping a bung-hole’ (5.1.194). Hamlet’s radical scepticism is relieved only by his eventual acceptance/concession that there’s a ‘special providence in the fall of a sparrow’ and that ‘the readiness is all’ (5.2.197–8; 201). Hamlet is a rich depository of unresolved issues about religion, scepticism, the politics of succession, and the fashioning of an individual identity circulating in the Elizabethan period. On a more personal and private level it hints at a crisis in Shakespeare’s life and art prompted by the deaths of his son and father and the

LITERARY CONTEXTS

13

commercial risk he assumed in becoming a shareholder in The Globe. Precisely because these issues and ideas are not resolved, the play has haunted subsequent generations untouched by the immediate circumstances of its creation.

Hamlet in our time For at least the last two hundred years Hamlet, and to a lesser extent Hamlet, has been shaped by the currents of the age. To the nineteenth-century Romantics (especially Goethe in Germany and Coleridge in England) Hamlet was a brooding, passive figure with the soul of a sensitive melancholy poet. Goethe imagined Hamlet’s sensibility as ‘lovely, pure, noble, and most noble’ but without ‘the strength of nerve which forms a hero’.8 Goethe’s Hamlet ‘winds, and turns, and torments himself; he advances and recoils . . . yet still without recovering his peace of mind’.9 Coleridge envisioned a Hamlet struggling to find ‘an equilibrium between the real and imaginary worlds . . . he vacillates from sensibility, and procrastinates from thought, and loses the power of action in the energy of resolve’.10 We all find something of ourselves in Hamlet and it is not surprising that powerful poets like Goethe and Coleridge projected their own fears and anxieties on the character. The image we inherit of Hamlet as the melancholy passive poet, despite strong alternative conceptions delivered in performance by modern and contemporary actors as diverse as Richard Burton, Nicol Williamson, Kevin Kline, Kenneth Branagh and Jude Law, comes directly from the Romantics. As Marjorie Garber points out, several early-twentieth century writers set out to distance their view of Hamlet from that of the Romantics. George Bernard Shaw thought that sentimental Hamlets were ‘bores’.11 It is no surprise that D. H. Lawrence recoiled from the character: ‘I have always felt a strong aversion from Hamlet: a creeping unclean thing he seems . . . [the] character is repulsive in its conception, based on a self-dislike and spirit of disintegration.’12 James Joyce

14

SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

rescued Hamlet from both the Romantics and Lawrence by making him an alter-ego for Stephen Dedalus; Garber understands that ‘the figure of Shakespeare . . . frames – haunts – all of Ulysses . . . and the focus of Ulysses is clearly on Hamlet – and on the question of the ghost’.13 In America Scott Fitzgerald incorporated elements of Hamlet in his mysterious Gatsby (and had Gatsby’s tale told by the Horatio-like Nick Carraway), and William Faulkner loaded his conception of Quentin Compson (in both The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom!) with the demands of the ghostly past of the Old South which he could neither defeat nor escape but only suffer. Most surprisingly, among the American novelists who most shaped the literary landscape of the first half of the twentieth century Ernest Hemingway, seemingly the most aggressively masculine writer of his generation, created early heroes like Nick Adams and Jake Barnes who carried within them something of Hamlet’s sceptical intelligence and psychological neurosis. Hemingway and Joyce were friends from their early years together in Paris, and just as Joyce transformed the Hamlet and Odysseus quests for father and home, so Hemingway’s lost father, a suicide, was recovered in his fiction. I do not believe we should regard these twentieth-century English and American novels as adaptations, even very loose ones, of Hamlet as they rely upon it more as a literary trace memory or haunting rather than as an essential element of plot and structure. Hamlet is the inescapable Shakespearean work and is so densely situated in the global literary culture that we stretch the notion of adaptation to the breaking point if we include, under its rubric, every literary echo of the play.

Hamlet and Freud As Joyce and Hemingway exploited the father–son relationship as a central feature of the Hamlet story, they participated in a cultural era dominated by Freud and his psychoanalytic

LITERARY CONTEXTS

15

formulation of the Oedipal Complex. Freud’s work, popularized in England by his fellow psychoanalyst and eventual biographer, Ernest Jones, had a lasting impact on literary and dramatic interpretations of Hamlet and Hamlet in the twentieth century. Freud’s view that Hamlet is stymied in his attempt to revenge his father because he unconsciously identifies with Claudius, who has enacted Hamlet’s own repressed Oedipal desire to murder his father and marry his mother, became as influential on the twentieth century’s conception of the character as the Romantics’ vision of him as the melancholy poet. Hamlet quickly became the literary centrepiece for the age of psychoanalysis. Hamlet, the most introspective and mysterious of all Shakespeare’s tragic heroes, was irresistible material for psychoanalytic literary critics. The play increasingly became the prince and its wider social and political reaches were gradually trimmed away to concentrate on the family romance at its centre. As mentioned earlier it was Ernest Jones, one of Freud’s followers, who outlined Hamlet’s condition in his book Hamlet and Oedipus (1949). Jones argued that Hamlet is subconsciously blocked from killing Claudius because Claudius has committed Hamlet’s repressed Oedipal desire to kill his father and marry his mother. Earlier twentieth-century critics like T. S. Eliot and G. Wilson Knight had found the play a failure. Knight found Hamlet so obsessed with death that he, rather than Claudius, becomes the real danger to Denmark’s stability. Eliot famously argued that Shakespeare had failed to create an appropriate ‘objective correlative’ to convey the key emotion at the centre of the drama: Hamlet’s anger and disgust at his mother’s actions, leading Eliot to conclude that ‘so far from being Shakespeare’s masterpiece, the play is most certainly an artistic failure’.14 Freud’s ideas helped rescue Hamlet from such accounts by providing one possible answer to Eliot’s criticism that Gertrude’s role in Hamlet’s crisis was ‘in excess of the facts’.15 The shift from Claudius to Gertrude as the key to understanding Hamlet’s character further underlined the twentieth century’s shift of interest in the play from the public and political sphere

16

SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

to the private and psychological. By the end of the century Freud’s ideas were more at home in the humanities than in the sciences. They remained central to Hamlet studies in two powerful critical books, C. L. Barber and Richard Wheeler’s The Whole Journey: Shakespeare’s Power of Development (1986) and Janet Adelman’s Suffocating Mothers (1992) – which gave Hamlet and Hamlet fresh psychoanalytic treatment. Adelman, in particular, placed Gertrude at the centre of Hamlet’s dilemma and the mother – largely absent from Shakespeare’s history plays and romantic comedies – at the centre of Shakespeare’s turn to tragedy. The culmination of our age’s fascination with the private Hamlet came with publication of Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare: the Invention of the Human (1998) where, using Hamlet as a key model, Bloom made the bold claim that Shakespeare had largely invented our sense of what it means to be human, primarily our sense of selfconsciousness. Hamlet’s soliloquies reveal a mind aware of itself and of constituting a personality in flux. Bloom argued that in the creation of his great tragic heroes and other characters such as Falstaff and Rosalind, Shakespeare was, for the first time in literature, creating models of how our minds work in creating a unique sense of self. Though Bloom’s claims were dismissed – even mocked – by many academic Shakespeareans, his work struck a chord with the general public and his book appeared on the bestseller lists in America and England, a rarity for a work of Shakespearean criticism or theory. Bloom’s work was the culmination of the dominant strain in Hamlet criticism in the second half of the twentieth century. In the 1960s the New Criticism, the leading critical methodology of its day, came under challenge from a variety of new interpretive models such as deconstruction, feminism, materialism, performance, New Historicism, etc. These movements slowly began to shift attention from the prince to the play, from an exclusive focus on Hamlet’s inner anguish to a wider concern with the play’s culture and politics. Stephen Greenblatt, the founder of New Historicism, wrote a

LITERARY CONTEXTS

17

book, Hamlet in Purgatory, exploring complicated material in the politics of religion at work in the play. James Shapiro, another cultural critic, placed Hamlet at the centre of his examination of one year in Shakespeare’s life and career: 1599. Shapiro located Hamlet in the swirl of end-of-the-century debate about English politics focused upon Queen Elizabeth’s refusal to name an heir, thus destabilizing the succession and giving rise to rebellions like the one led by the Earl of Essex. Curiously the Hamlet critics now seek to fashion is less the Hamlet who represents our age but the one who emerges from his own. Perhaps we no longer believe, as Jan Kott declared in the 1960s, that Shakespeare is our contemporary.16 Kott, though an important cultural critic, was essentially a man of the theatre, and actors and directors have always seized upon Shakespeare as a contemporary even, I would argue, when presenting ‘traditional practices’ performances of the plays, which became commonplace during Mark Rylance’s directorship of the new South Bank Globe. In recent years such interest in Shakespeare in performance has expanded from the West (England, America and Europe) to the East (Japan, India and China) to become a global phenomenon.

Hamlet and the Age of Aquarius In 1967 on stages in New York and London two theatrical events came to define the explosive age of the 1960s, and both had Hamlet at their centre. One was the first rock musical: Hair. Hair was an ode to hippie culture: a throbbing percussive hymn to drugs, sex, and rock ’n’ roll; it was a colourful theatrical challenge to the war in Vietnam and to bourgeois culture. The Age of Aquarius had dawned and the world was urged, in the lyrics of one of its hit songs, to ‘let the sunshine in’. The musical had a thin plot line that centred on one of the leading character’s (Claude) conflict between being drafted into the Army and serving in Vietnam or burning his draft card and escaping to exile in Canada. As he struggled with his decision his friends

18

SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

urged him to join them in taking acid (LSD) and dropping out. Claude does so, has a bad trip and, at its disorienting climax, sings a song set to the words of Hamlet’s ‘What a piece of work is a man’ speech. Claude, like Hamlet, is caught, even momentarily paralysed, by competing social and political demands and contradictory ideas about the nature of man. Both Hamlet and Claude ultimately decide that escape or exile to either England or Canada is impossible and both die as a result of that decision. More remarkable is that this wild and whirling musical, so closely linked to its moment of creation and meant to break with many social and theatrical conventions, should end up evoking the most famous and traditional drama in the Western canon at its climactic moment: Hair transforms Hamlet into a conflicted hippie and a tragic emblem for the counter-cultural generation. If America translated somber Hamlet into the bright and bold tie-dye colours of the 1960s, England in 1967 presented us with a more subtle shift in the prince’s identity by moving him from the centre to the margins in Tom Stoppard’s rewriting of Hamlet in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Stoppard, cleverly responding to Shakespeare’s casual dismissal of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, brought them back at the centre of their own play where they still struggled to grasp the larger forces that swirl about them. Stoppard’s play anticipated the postmodern aesthetic where pastiche and parody are championed as worthy challenges to elite canonical literary texts. Stoppard wittily took on Hamlet as well as Hamlet and elbowed them both from the centre to the margins of his own dazzling comedy where two supporting players suddenly find themselves not in the wings but in the spotlight (or in a dramatic universe where the spotlight has shifted from centre stage to the wings). Stoppard’s Hamlet was not a 1960s drop-out but a character suddenly transposed from Shakespeare’s Elsinore to Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Hamlet’s journey to comprehend his place in the social, political, and philosophical universe is

LITERARY CONTEXTS

19

replaced by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s endless flip of a coin; a mindless game where every flip miraculously turns up heads. Stoppard stands Hamlet on its head and discovers, via Beckett’s example, just how little it takes to make a play. All the layers and mysteries of Hamlet are reduced to nothing but two lost souls biding their time in a world in which they are clueless (and cue-less) until called upon to play their parts. But by the magic of his minimalist art Stoppard makes us care about their fates even as Shakespeare’s high-Renaissance tragedy does not. Stoppard’s play, like Hair, signals the beginnings of the postmodern moment in the 1960s and like the American musical the vehicle he uses is the poster child for the modernist literary canon: Hamlet.

Hamlet in contemporary performance In a more traditional manner, the post-Second World War era gave us Hamlet productions, on stage and film, which reflected and reinforced the political, social, and intellectual ideas that dominated the last half of the twentieth century. Laurence Olivier’s pre-Second World War stage Hamlet was a robust and athletic figure challenging John Gielgud’s more romantic and melancholy conception of the character created in the 1930s. Olivier largely abandoned his active Hamlet when he came to film the play. Instead he adopted an equally radical Freudian approach to the character in keeping with Freud’s powerful influence in The Age of Anxiety. Richard Burton’s Hamlet at the Old Vic in the 1950s (and on Broadway in the early 1960s) allied the character’s ironic power with the actor’s remarkable voice, rough-edged but musical in its compound of Welsh irony and melancholy. David Warner’s Hamlet for The Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) in 1965 was also a reflection of its age. Warner was a tall, awkward and largely unknown actor with a long sad face and a voice without any distinctive qualities who nevertheless spoke for the disaffected teenagers of the 1960s. Ophelia

20

SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

(Glenda Jackson) strummed a guitar and turned her mad melodies into protest songs sung directly to the audience. Both Jackson and Warner would have felt right at home in Hair. This RSC production was one of Peter Hall’s defining achievements with the company he founded and students queued all night for returns and standing room tickets. A decade later in 1976 Hall opened the new National Theatre building on the South Bank with a production of the play starring Albert Finney as Hamlet. In this production Hall gave us a more traditional Hamlet with a number of established stars like Angela Lansbury (as Gertrude) but Finney’s performance of Hamlet still had plenty of the 1960s radical rebel at its core. He swung his scarf above his head as a rallying cry as though he was headed to the barricades to oppose Claudius. After his encounter with Ophelia in the ‘nunnery’ scene he tied that scarf around his forehead as an emblem of 1960s counter-culture attire and wore it in that fashion until he was dispatched to England. In 1980 at The Royal Court Theatre Jonathan Pryce presented a Hamlet, in a production directed by Richard Eyre, literally possessed by the Ghost so that his Hamlet spoke the Ghost’s lines as though they emanated from a region deep within his solar plexus, an idea stolen from The Exorcist (1973). Pryce’s performance began a decade of Hamlets that became increasingly angry, dispossessed and infantile, culminating in Mark Rylance’s at the RSC (1989) where he played most of the second half in pyjamas stained with Polonius’s blood; he tucked Yorick’s skull under his arm like an American football and carried it with him to the final duel with Laertes. Timothy Walker, in his Hamlet (1990) for Cheek by Jowl, took Rylance one step further by responding to Claudius’s demand ‘Where’s Polonius’ by lifting his nightgown, squatting, and pretending to defecate as he told the King ‘to seek him in the other place yourself’. Even Stephen Dillane’s more sensitive Hamlet (1994) for Peter Hall in the West End felt compelled to strip away all his clothes to reveal his naked vulnerability at the end of the closet scene with Gertrude.

LITERARY CONTEXTS

21

In the same period Daniel Day Lewis played Hamlet (1989) in yet another production at The National Theatre. The role became so emotionally draining that he walked off stage one August night in the middle of the performance never to return, reminding us that playing Hamlet can be as troubling to the actor as to the audience. All five of these Hamlets (especially Rylance’s) were witty and rude, but none might be imagined as a political alternative to Claudius. Perhaps this bad boy behaviour was a response to Margaret Thatcher (and ‘Thatcherism’) who projected an uncompromising brand of political power quite dismissive of culture and the arts. In 1988 Kenneth Branagh acted a Hamlet for his Renaissance Theatre Company that was much in keeping with this tradition, his wild and whirling performance always on the edge of spinning out of control. When Branagh came to revisit the role for the RSC in 1992/3 in Adrian Noble’s full-text production his Hamlet had substantially matured. He retained the quicksilver mimicry he had earlier brought to the role but now he grounded it in steely opposition to Claudius. Branagh’s Hamlet was clearly a political rival and threat to Claudius’s reign, not just an unhinged stepson clamouring for his uncle’s attention and for easy laughs. This Hamlet anticipated the coming of the cocky, ambitious and morally certain Blair more than it reflected the death throes of Thatcherism in John Major’s government. The new century brought major Hamlets from Sam West (2001) and David Tennant (2008) at the RSC, Simon Russell Beale (2000) at the National Theatre and Ben Whishaw at The Old Vic (2004). Each created an interesting Hamlet but no major patterns emerged from their performances: West’s was set in the corporate world perhaps suggesting the Enron scandal; Whishaw was a sensitive impish wisp of another Hamlet set in contemporary society and featuring a Gertrude from Imogen Stubbs who loved to shop; Simon Russell Beale emphasized Hamlet’s good nature and philosophical, even spiritual, side, suggesting that he might have been more comfortable in the church than the court; and David Tennant – coming to the role

22

SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

from his popularity as the BBC’s most recent Dr. Who – brought a bug-eyed angry intensity to the role that lured the young back to the play. The Hamlets who reach New York are almost always imported. America probably produces as many Hamlets a decade as does England, but the great majority are spread across the country in regional theatres and thus receive scant national attention. In fact many of the major Hamlets seen in New York in the past three decades have visited from London, including those of Ralph Fiennes (1995), Simon Russell Beale (2001), and Jude Law (2010). Even the most home-grown and radical Hamlet of recent years by The Wooster Group (2008) reached back for its animating energy to an Electron-o-vision recording of a live performance of Richard Burton’s 1964 New York Hamlet. The Burton Hamlet was projected on a series of rear screens and television monitors while the stage actors mimed the cast’s movements, including some of the technical flaws in the recording. Sometimes we heard lines spoken by the 1964 cast, sometimes by the 2008 stage actors, and sometimes they spoke in unison. The Wooster Hamlet wasn’t just out of joint but a daring collision of text and performance. It willfully smashed both text and performance into shards to remind us that all performances of canonical works like Hamlet are intimately related to their predecessors on stage and screen. The American actor who most claimed Hamlet as his role in the late twentieth century was Kevin Kline, who performed the part in two contrasting productions at Joseph Papp’s New York Public Theatre, one directed by the Romanian Liviu Ciulei (1985), the other by Kline (1989) himself. While Ciulei’s production had many inventive stage images lacking in Kline’s treatment, the central performance remained consistent. Kline’s Hamlet was serious and sincere. He kept his emotions in check even as he was genuinely overwhelmed with doubt. An interesting feature of Kline’s production was the playing of Ophelia by Diane Venora, a New York stage actress largely unknown even to American audiences, as she has appeared in very few films. Several years before playing Ophelia she had

LITERARY CONTEXTS

23

played Hamlet (1982) at the New York Public Theatre in a production directed by Joseph Papp and a decade later (2000) she would play Gertrude in Michael Almereyda’s film of the play. Venora certainly must be the only actor in history to have played Hamlet, Ophelia, and Gertrude in three major productions. There are, of course, as many interesting Hamlets as there are talented young actors who manage to get cast in the role. Every actor brings his own intelligence and sensibility to the part, but those qualities are bound up with the cultural currents alive in the age in which the performance takes shape. Modern Hamlets have tended to be more biting, caustic, and wildly emotional than the melancholy brooding Prince we associate with Gielgud and the 1930s or the Hamlets paralysed by psychological neurosis popular in mid-century. After a generation of radical Hamlets from the 1960s through the 1980s Kevin Kline, Kenneth Branagh, and Simon Russell Beale found a new maturity and seriousness of purpose in the character. According to Kenneth Rothwell’s account Hamlet has inspired more film versions than any other Shakespearean play.17 Movie Hamlets have a history as rich as their stage counterparts but as all the sound film versions follow and flow from Olivier’s pathbreaking 1948 film or Branagh’s 1996 revisionist complete text version they are better studied in the final chapter devoted, in part, to the ways in which those two films have influenced all subsequent screen versions of the play.

Hamlet and the art of adaptation Adaptation Studies has become a major academic enterprise, as witness this book series. Shakespeare might be called The Great Adaptor as he worked in a new, for the Elizabethans, medium that was ravenous for stories to be told (or re-told) in dramatic form. Shakespeare raided Roman and English history, epic poems, Italian and French tales, English prose romances, and even earlier plays for material to adapt and transform into

24

SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

his contributions to the highly commercialized world of Elizabethan drama. Plays, and Shakespeare’s in particular, provide something of a unique example in the world of adaptation because it can be argued that all productions of dramatic texts are adaptations. The same cannot be said of the novel. Novels are texts written to be read, not performed and watched. Novels can be adapted into plays and films and many have been quite successfully so converted, but it is not a condition of their creation that they be performed to be artistically completed. But a play text exists only as a potential for performance. The text is fulfilled by being enacted before an audience; the actors and the audience complete the drama only suggested by the text. The move from stage to screen, though still complicated by the differences in the two forms of expression, is not as great as that between novel and film. And that step is even smaller in the case of Shakespeare because he seems less tied to the material conditions of his own age than the work of other more modern dramatists like Ibsen, Chekhov, Shaw or Williams, Miller, and Shepard. Shakespeare is repeatedly set against a wide range of historical periods or national landscapes on stage and film. Hamlet, for instance, just in the films covered in this study, finds itself placed in the Elizabethan period, the age of Peter the Great, late-nineteenth-century Europe and America, late-twentieth-century Manhattan, and the Himalayas of ancient Tibet. By a curious paradox the desire by many to see Shakespeare as universal only helps to imagine him as local. Issues of adaptation, as Margaret Jane Kidnie points out, participate in the current critical preference for multiple Shakespeares rather than a single originating Shakespeare: While resisting a relativistic position which assumes, wrongly, that anything can mean anything, [Kidnie argues] that there is no ideal iteration of any Shakespearean play towards which one can or should strive, textually or theatrically. This is not to say that at any given moment it is impossible to identify texts and performances that are

LITERARY CONTEXTS

25

regarded as authentically Shakespearean; however, the production which today seems to fully capture or embody a supposed original – and this is true if one speaks of text or performance – enjoys only a potentially temporary and limited currency.18 Contemporary editors have reminded us that we have multiple rather than single versions of most Shakespearean texts and that the dream of a unified text is illusory. Contemporary critics have employed a staggering variety of theoretical approaches to a study of the plays rather than trying to insist, as in the moment of the ascendency of the New Criticism, that only a single methodology was appropriate. Contemporary directors have achieved equally successful results with stage productions of Shakespeare that reach from the minimalist to the spectacular. Contemporary film-makers across the globe return again and again to Shakespeare as a source for their films and some of them (Franco Zeffirelli, Baz Luhrmann, Kenneth Branagh) have found a way to make Shakespeare commercially successful and to return him to something like the polyglot audiences that flocked to see his plays on London’s South Bank in the age of Elizabeth and James. Shakespeare seemingly is always ripe for adaptation; always ripe to be Shakespeares. Screen adaptations of Shakespeare present particular problems and opportunities. Most of us come to the film version of an adapted work after having read and studied the text and, particularly in the case of a canonical author like Shakespeare, we automatically privilege the originating text over the adapted film. In the field of adaptation studies this is something like committing ‘original sin’. Interestingly the history of film adaptations of literary works has shown that the ‘fidelity model’ doesn’t work. As Robert Stam indicates: ‘A fundamental unfairness plagues “fidelity” discourse, reflected in a differential and even prejudiced application of the very concept, depending on which art is being considered.’19 Stam is writing about novels and film here, but the fidelity model is

26

SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

also commonly invoked by many when confronting screen adaptations of Shakespeare. Because length is an important film convention (most films are between ninety and one-hundred-and-thirty minutes long) almost every Shakespeare play being adapted for the screen has to be cut by fifty per cent or more. Viewers are likely to react by complaining about what has been cut rather than by what has been maintained, and fail to perceive how that necessary trimming shapes the screenwriter and director’s approach to their Shakespearean material. The delicate critical balancing act that needs to be accomplished when confronting a film adaptation of Shakespeare is to understand the conversation going on between the play and the film (one form of intertextuality) without unintentionally committing ‘original sin’ by assuming the superiority of the source text over the screen adaptation. This, as Kidnie and Stam are right to insist, does not preclude us from preferring text to film or one film version over another, but only after we have fully explored and attempted to understand why the film director made the choices he did in fashioning his adaptation. Again Shakespeare presents a particular problem here because of his status as the leading Western canonical author. Only iconoclasts (and film directors) are likely to proclaim their preference for a film version over the text of a Shakespeare play, though I sense that the group of iconoclasts is growing as film has come to rival if not supplant literature as our age’s major creative mode of expression. We need to recognize that there is a wide range of films that can be considered adaptations of Hamlet, extending from Svend Gade and Heinz Schalls 1920 silent German version of the play without a spoken word of Shakespeare to Branagh’s Hamlet (1996) which includes every word of a conflated version of early editions of Shakespeare’s text and all the other Hamlets – including loose adaptations like Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be (1942), Akira Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well (1960), Steve Martin’s L.A. Story (1991), Disney’s The Lion King (1994), and Alexander Fleming’s Hamlet 2 (2008) – that come between and after.

LITERARY CONTEXTS

27

The history of film is littered with Hamlet’s offspring. This study will confine itself to a select group of Hamlet films with special attention given to two contrasting films of Hamlet directed by Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Branagh. In the process I will trace the ways in which a classic literary text is adapted for the screen in two different cultural moments, midcentury and fin de siècle, and by two vastly different artists, and the impact those films had on subsequent treatments of the text on stage and film. The world of Hamlet film adaptations is so expansive that I found I could best organize my reflections and fit them into the basic outline of the Screen Adaptations series by concentrating on the Olivier and Branagh versions and the impact they have had on six subsequent film versions, including one made in Russia and another in China (though set in Tibet). As a result this study ignores loose spin-off films, like L.A. Story and The Lion King, where Hamlet is a resonant subtext but not the primary focus of the film’s script and direction.

Notes 1 Many modern textual scholars believe Shakespeare also wrote substantial sections of The Two Noble Kinsmen, Edward Ironsides, and the lost play Sir Thomas More. 2 A memorial reconstruction is a version of a play recounted from memory by several actors in a theatrical company and presented to a printer as a pirated version. 3 Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean Howard, and Katherine Maus, eds. The Norton Shakespeare (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997), 1st edition, p. 67. 4 All quotations are from Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, eds, Hamlet (London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2006), p. 3. 5 See G. Wilson Knight, ‘The Embassy of Death: An Essay on Hamlet,’ in his Wheel of Fire (London: Methuen, 4th edition, 1949), 17–46 for a full account of Knight’s version of the play.

28

SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

6 To understand the close connection perceived between drama and power in the period, note that Essex’s men paid Shakespeare’s company for a private performance of Richard II, which contains the overthrow of a legitimate monarch, on the eve of their rebellion. 7 From John Donne,The Poems of John Donne, ‘The First Anniversary’ (London: Oxford University Press, 1933), p. 213. 8 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, trans. Thomas Carlyle (London: Oliver & Boyd, 1824), 2:75. 9 Ibid., 2:75. 10 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Notes and Lectures upon Shakespeare and the Old Dramatists (London: George Bell and Sons, 1902), p. 178. 11 George Bernard Shaw, Shaw on Shakespeare, ed. Edwin Wilson (New York: Dutton, 1961), p. 82. 12 D. H. Lawrence, ‘Twilight in Italy,’ D. H. Lawrence and Italy (New York: Viking Press, 1972), p. 68. 13 Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare and Modern Culture (New York: Anchor Books, 2008), p. 216. 14 T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays: New Edition (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1950), p. 123. 15 Ibid., p. 125. 16 Jan Kott, Shakespeare our Contemporary (New York: Anchor Books, 1966), pp. 57–73. 17 Rothwell’s filmography, in A History of Shakespeare on Screen: A Century of Film and Television, 1st edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), lists twenty sound film versions of Hamlet. See pp. 309–40. 18 Margaret Kidnie, Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), p. 9 19 Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo (eds), Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), p. 15.

2 Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet: From text to screen Screenplay The crucial transformative process in adapting a work from another medium into a film begins with the screenplay. Typically the screenplay consists of the film’s dialogue and a description of the basic camera movements the director intends to employ in shooting that dialogue. A film of a Shakespearean text presents special problems for the screenwriter. In almost every instance (Peter Hall’s film of A Midsummer Night’s Dream [1968] and Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet [1996] are the two exceptions) Shakespeare’s text has to be substantially trimmed and often rearranged in the screenplay to meet the conventions of film, particularly those related to length and narrative flow. We know that Shakespeare conceived of his plays as scripts for performance. Those scripts were often trimmed, emended, or even enlarged in the collaborative nature of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatrical practice. Stephen Greenblatt has conjectured that [there] is an imaginative generosity in many of Shakespeare’s scripts, as if he were deliberately offering his fellow actors 29

30

SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

more than they could use on any one occasion and hence giving them abundant materials with which to re-conceive and revivify each play again and again, as they or their audiences liked it.1 Screenplays based on a Shakespearean text are often criticized for their deep cuts but it is important to remember that his plays are almost always trimmed, even in stage performances. The director and screenwriter have to decide what elements in Shakespeare’s text will guide its transformation into a film. The job of the critic is to understand how the text they retain suits their cinematic approach, not to lament what has been excised in the screenplay or left on the cutting-room floor in the editing process. Most screenplays of Shakespeare films provide only forty to sixty per cent of Shakespeare’s text. The way in which the text is trimmed and restructured provides important clues to the film director’s approach to his Shakespearean material. Olivier’s screenplay for his Hamlet (co-written with Alan Dent) eliminates Fortinbras, Voltemand, Cornelius, Reynaldo, the English Ambassador, the second gravedigger and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. These cuts indicate that Olivier intended to concentrate on the intimate family drama at the heart of the play while ignoring its larger political and social implications. He also believed in principle that in adapting Shakespeare’s plays for the screen it was best to cut entire characters and plot elements rather than to uniformly reduce the text by relatively equal across-the-board amounts. Just as Shakespeare’s texts come to us in a variety of formats including quarto and folio versions (some based perhaps on Shakespeare’s ‘foul papers’ – the text in his own hand – or on prompt copies created by his theatrical company), so do screenplays. Some printed screenplays represent the film as originally presented to potential financial backers; some are elaborate shooting scripts with detailed camera directions tucked in around the dialogue; and others are produced after the film has been shot and edited for release so that they contain material found only in the finished film. Most screenplays, of

L AURENCE OLIVIER’S HAMLET

31

course, are never published in book format but those that are generally come from the last category. Some directors, Alfred Hitchcock for instance, map each film out in detail (including scene-by-scene sketches of the action called ‘storyboarding’) and shoot the film precisely as imagined in the screenplay. Others, Orson Welles for example, prefer to treat the screenplay as a general outline allowing the director to adapt each day’s shooting to particular circumstances (the weather for instance if shooting on location) and ideas that occurred on the set. Besides having to transform a work intended for the stage into the conventions of film, screenwriters face another problem when dealing with Shakespeare: how to treat his dense, rich, language loaded with verbal images. Film is primarily a visual medium. The word and the actor are consummate in Shakespeare’s theatre: they make the magic, but film magic depends not just on word and actor but on visual image and landscape as well. The screenplay must trim Shakespeare’s verbal overload even as it fashions subtle visual images suggested by the text. Olivier’s use of the sea crashing against the rocks of the Elsinore Castle as a visual image of the ‘sea of troubles’ throbbing in Hamlet’s mind is one such example; his use of deep focus photography to capture spatially the alienation between Hamlet and the other characters, especially Ophelia, is another. In film studies there has been a healthy debate about how much film is an art driven by the collaborative process in which many play a significant part in its creation and how much it is an art conceived and controlled by the director who by his ultimate creative authority is regarded as the author or ‘auteur’ of the film. I think it is safe to say that the history of film reveals that some directors become auteurs as we witness the development of a personal cinematic style and common subject matter traced over many films. Some directors, equally gifted, seem to move from project to project without leaving strong personal fingerprints on their work. Both can and have produced fine films. Most directors of Shakespeare films (and I am thinking here of Olivier, Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa, Franco Zeffirelli,

32

SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

Grigori Kozintsev and Kenneth Branagh) become auteurs because they are the prime force behind the making of the film. Most are intimately involved with an entire range of film roles, from producer to writer to star, and we can see by looking at the Shakespeare films they have made the hallmarks of their personal cinematic style in realizing Shakespeare on film. How they construct the screenplay, and what it retains or omits of the text, often is the first signal of their approach to their Shakespearean material. Olivier’s film version of Hamlet was heavily influenced by Freudian ideas about ego psychology that were prominent in the middle decades of the twentieth century. One of Freud’s key followers, Ernest Jones, a Welshman, had become Britain’s first psychoanalyst. When Olivier played Hamlet on stage at the Old Vic in 1937 he and the production’s director, Tyrone Guthrie, visited Jones to get his ideas about Hamlet. For Jones, Hamlet was stymied in his desire for revenge by his subconscious identification with Claudius, who has enacted Hamlet’s Oedipal desire to kill his father and marry his mother. Jones would later expand upon these ideas in his little book, Hamlet and Oedipus, published in 1949 and perhaps spurred into print by the popularity of Olivier’s film. Olivier’s decision to focus on the private, psychological nature of Hamlet’s turmoil necessitated his decision to cut the political dimensions of the play by eliminating a wide range of characters including Fortinbras, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. In contrast, he sought to heighten the sexual tension between Hamlet and Gertrude by casting an actress (Eileen Herlie) to play Gertrude who was in fact thirteen years younger (27) than he was (40). He also cast the very young Jean Simmons, who was only 17 when filming began, highlighting her youth and innocence and visually complicating her romantic relationship with a Hamlet twice her age. Olivier restrained, until the film’s climax, his reputation for being a physically robust and commanding actor by repeatedly shooting his Hamlet in passive positions or poses (sprawled on the floor, slumped in a chair, leaning against a column) to accentuate the character’s paralysis and inward turn of mind.

L AURENCE OLIVIER’S HAMLET

33

Olivier’s screenplay eliminated two of Hamlet’s most emotionally robust and bitter soliloquies, ‘O what a rogue and peasant slave am I’ and ‘How all occasions do inform against me,’ as well as his prose rumination on his loss of mirth, ‘O what a piece of work is a man.’ Bernice Kliman argues that Olivier’s decision to cut these vital speeches was perfectly in harmony with the film’s vision of Hamlet because ‘they do little to intensify the woman-centered motivation’ Olivier finds at the core of his approach to the character.2 It should be noted that, in fact, Olivier shot Hamlet’s final soliloquy (‘How all occasions’) but found, when screening it in the editing room, that it seemed flat and had to be cut: Whether from my unease or from a sudden failure of vitality, the speech seemed lifeless . . . and the more I looked at it on the moviola, the flatter it seemed. Murderous to my pride as an actor, murderous to my thoughts about Hamlet, murderous to the text of the play; it had to be cut.3 There is, of course, a grand touch of theatricality to Olivier’s rhetoric here, recollected in tranquillity almost forty years later, but also an important observation. Makers of movies acknowledge that a film is actually made three times: in the screenplay, in the shooting, and in the editing room. Olivier realized in the editing room that however much he loved the soliloquy as an actor, as a director he had to be ‘murderous’ in cutting it from the finished film because it did not fit with the essence of the Hamlet he had created and the pace and rhythm of the film he had directed.

Film score Music is an essential element in film’s vocabulary, and great artistic and commercial films have distinguished film scores. Most famous film directors have composers and arrangers with whom they have closely collaborated: Alfred Hitchcock (and

34

SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

Orson Welles) with Bernard Herrmann, John Ford with Elmer Bernstein, Federico Fellini with Nino Rota, Steven Spielberg (and George Lucas) with John Williams, David Lean with Maurice Jarre, François Truffaut with Georges Delerue, Ridley Scott with Marc Stritenfeld, and Woody Allen with Dick Hyman. Sometimes films successfully raid and adapt classical composers for their purposes, as Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) did with Strauss’s Thus Spake Zarathustra or the Swedish film Elvira Madigan (1967) did with Mozart’s Piano Concerto number 21. Songs are often a key element of the film score. Who can imagine Casablanca (1943) without ‘As Time Goes By’, or The Graduate (1967) without Simon and Garfunkel, or Dr. Strangelove (1963) without ‘Try a Little Tenderness’ and ‘When Johnnie Comes Marching Home’? Film demands music in a way that stage drama does not. In fact film uses the score to heighten tension, underline emotion, define character, and enhance landscape in a manner rarely if ever employed in the theatre (outside of musical comedy). In films the score is often allowed to come in under the dialogue in ways that would confound great modern playwrights from Chekhov and Ibsen to Beckett and Pinter. The film score then becomes a particularly complicated element in the Shakespeare film, where it has not been a natural ingredient in his performance on stage and where it threatens to rival or eclipse the powerful music created by his verse. Olivier, wisely, turned to a respected contemporary classical composer, William Walton, to create the film score for Hamlet. Walton had already composed the music for his Henry V (1944) and he would go on to write the score for Olivier’s last Shakespeare film, Richard III (1955). ‘Not uninteresting’ was Walton’s understated comment to a friend after completing his music for Hamlet. He went on, ‘I’ve had to do nearly an hour of appropriate but otherwise useless music’.4 The comment reflects less a judgement than a recognition of the different circumstances and challenges of the music that Walton wrote for Olivier’s Henry V and for his Hamlet, and the differing priorities of the two scores. Walton’s music for Henry V was

L AURENCE OLIVIER’S HAMLET

35

widely admired, notably by Olivier himself, who thought that Walton’s score was ‘the most wonderful I’ve ever heard for a film. In fact, for me the music actually made the film.’5 Unlike the music for Hamlet, the score for Henry V was written before the composer saw the film. The score was conceived by Walton as a musical realization of Shakespeare’s text, and only secondarily as an extension of Olivier’s famously nationalistic projection of that text. Walton’s music for Hamlet, on the other hand, reveals his close observation of the filmed play, and his strong investment in Olivier’s celebrated conception of his title character as ‘a man who could not make up his mind’. The close relation between composer and director is clear early in the film, in the overture-like music that translates Hamlet’s character, along with Ophelia’s, into distinctive themes that will accompany them throughout the film. Walton’s music cues our understanding of Olivier’s irresolute Hamlet by a theme first heard played by low strings in the otherwise silent, extended sequence after the first scene with the Ghost. The brief theme winds chromatically over a narrow range, using musical means to project ambiguity and indecision. In music theory a tonal resolution is the movement from a dissonant chord or note to a tonal harmony. Thus a suspended or ‘unresolved’ movement from a dissonant chord or note can be seen as the musical equivalent of an unresolved intention, like that of an irresolute avenger. Walton’s chromatic theme – obsessively repetitive, narrow in range, and circular in movement – embodies and reiterates Hamlet’s ‘one defect’, as Olivier explicitly described the character. Further, the theme expresses and extends into the general noir complexion and chiaroscuro of the film with its repetitious insistence, in scene after scene, identified with Hamlet’s ‘one particular fault’ – an inability to make up his mind. Hamlet’s unresolved chromatic theme is contrasted with the simple diatonic melody associated with Ophelia, first heard in the introductory ‘overture’. Ophelia’s woodwind theme is tonally centred, a harmonic counterpart to her home-centred sensibility, in contrast to Hamlet’s atonal introspective

36

SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

restlessness. When Ophelia’s fragile domestic harmony is shattered by Polonius’s death, in a striking use of the film score to underline, even create, meaning, Walton accompanies her final exit to her drowning with Hamlet’s chromatic theme. In his use of themes linked to characters and their psychological profiles, Walton borrowed the Wagnerian technique of signature leitmotifs for individual characters. Wagnerian opera was designed as an indissoluble blend of drama and music. Wagner’s example became a natural resource for film composers who wished to exploit a range of symphonic effects to extend and reinforce or comment upon words or images or subtextual signals in the dramatic text. In his score for Hamlet Walton used orchestral resources and leitmotifs with great ingenuity and dramatic effect. Drumbeats for heartbeats, for instance, are enormously effective in the Ghost scenes. Strong drum-heartbeats herald the approach of the ghost of Hamlet’s father at the beginning of the film, when the watch first sees the Ghost; then in the subsequent scene between Hamlet and the Ghost; but they are muffled when the Ghost appears in the closet scene to stop Hamlet’s attack on Gertrude, as if to echo the even rhythm asserted by Hamlet in his warning to his mother: ‘My pulse as yours doth temperately keep time/ . . . Lay not that flattering unction to your soul/That not your trespass but my madness speaks’ (3.4.141, 146–7). In the closet scene we see as well as hear this pulse in Hamlet’s outstretched neck as he looks up toward the Ghost. In a quite different way from the literalized drumbeats, Walton’s leitmotif technique comments on textual and visual drama in many key scenes. Once the relevance of Hamlet’s chromatic theme to his inner conflict has become established early in the film, viewers can be drawn back to the theme’s significance in new contexts, and similarly for Ophelia’s naive, ordered, tonal theme. Both themes emerge and merge throughout the film, as a few striking examples will illustrate. As earlier described, the first two themes are initially stated independently of the characters they are later linked to, in the overture-like music that follows the opening scene of the watch on the

L AURENCE OLIVIER’S HAMLET

37

ramparts. To Walton’s overture the camera descends from the battlements to track the castle halls and arched doorways, to arrive finally at the iconic curtained bed in the Queen’s bedchamber. Over Hamlet’s winding chromatic theme the camera winds through and probes into the inner landscape of Elsinore, and then over Ophelia’s lyric diatonic theme it pauses briefly but portentously for a shot of Gertrude’s bed. Only later do we recognize that the lyricism of Ophelia’s theme, while most closely associated with her, is also an abstract statement of human sexuality and love, and thus transferable among characters and scenes. A further notable example is the variation of Ophelia’s theme that recurs in the final humanizing comment on the tragedy beneath Hamlet and Laertes’s reconciliation after the duel, ‘Exchange forgiveness with me, noble Hamlet./Mine and my father’s death come not upon thee,/Nor thine on me!’ (5.2.334–6). Conversely, Hamlet’s introspective chromatic theme is also transferable, for example to Ophelia as a wisp of accompaniment behind her final exit after her mad scene. It also comments on both Hamlet and Claudius in the prayer scene after ‘The Mousetrap’ as each contemplates redemptive action and fails, one to strike, one to pray, both conflicted beyond resolution. Thus Walton’s use of Wagnerian leitmotif serves at once to particularize and to universalize character in Olivier’s film. Walton’s close commentary on the film is particularly evident in ‘The Mousetrap’ scene. Here Walton invests a full range of instrumental resources in the dumb show, fittingly enough replacing spoken dialogue with musical representation and non-verbal expression. As the actors enter, a small chamber ensemble of antique woodwinds, viol and drum plays a sprightly gavotte in quadruple metre. Then for the entry of the Player King and Queen the music and the tone change to a courtly saraband in a slow triple metre. Male and female voices in affectionate exchange are charmingly represented by a duet between woodwinds in middle and low registers, with low viol joining in to vary the male voice. After the King falls asleep and the Queen withdraws, the villain enters to ominous low strings

38

SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

and poisons the King. He leaves, and a plaintive solo woodwind accompanies the Queen’s re-entry and discovery of the body. Then with pointed musical irony the villain returns to mime his condolence and courtship of the widowed Queen over the same saraband we heard earlier at the King and Queen’s entrance. Suddenly, as the camera seeks out dramatic expressions of shock, triumph, concern, alarm, and fear on the faces of the assembled court, the thin, intimate texture of chamber music is swept aside by full orchestra, as private drama becomes fully public. As music subtly replaced dialogue in the dumb show, now dialogue returns with eruptive force in tandem with musical crescendo as Claudius breaks up the dumb show with a full-voiced ‘Give me some light!’ The crowd disperses, except for Hamlet and Horatio. In a triumphant musical flourish, Hamlet stands on the throne that Claudius has just vacated and belts out a distinctly operatic version of the song ‘Why, let the stricken deer go weep’. This conspicuously aria-like setting for the song is a climatic integration of dramatic and musical statement, a statement of resolution apparently achieved: the personal resolution of Hamlet’s ‘one defect’ and the musical resolution of Walton’s scoring for that defect. There is an immediate fall from that dramatic climax and operatic high note. Traditional opera is melodrama, not Wagnerian music-drama; it is aria in the service of emotional hyperbole and spectacle, and the scene after the dumb show is high melodrama. The scene and its musical scoring work ironically to contrast the subsequent return of Hamlet’s indecision in the Claudius prayer scene, his misguided killing of Polonius, and the tragic consequences of that act which play out in the final scenes of the film. Walton’s music for the duel scene and for Hamlet’s funeral march return the film, not to resolution in either the musical or dramatic sense, but to a Waltonesque balance between tragic destiny and lyrical transcendence. Lyrical forgiveness between Laertes and Hamlet echoes Ophelia’s theme. Then the funeral march which opened the film returns with reinforced orchestration in brass, strings, and percussion as Hamlet’s body is carried up Elsinore’s

L AURENCE OLIVIER’S HAMLET

39

winding staircase to the castle ramparts for burial. This music’s return brings full circle the film’s atmosphere of foreordained tragedy, but it is at the same time a reiteration of Hamlet’s flawed heroism: his potential ‘had he been put on,/To have proved most royal’ (5.2.402–3).

Landscape and atmosphere Walton’s score presents a character and a world that are ‘out of joint’. Olivier’s physical creation of Elsinore and the way in which it is lit and shot reflect Walton’s music. Olivier’s film creates an Elsinore whose interiors are dominated by open empty spaces, twisting staircases and a frequently revisited bedroom more attuned to symbolic dreamscape than to political activity. In fact, it is impossible to recreate a coherent architectural plan of the film’s castle, as the playing spaces (the court, the long corridor associated with Ophelia, the winding staircase, Gertrude’s bedroom, the high platform) are not contiguous. They exist primarily as extensions of Hamlet’s troubled imagination. The film, at Olivier’s insistence, was shot in black and white so that characters could be captured moving in and out of shadows, thus creating a mysterious chiaroscuro visual effect and suggesting, particularly in Hamlet’s case, a character with a fractured personality. The most stunning shadow shot comes near the film’s end in the gravedigger scene. The scene begins with the gravedigger singing while he shovels Ophelia’s grave. He unearths a skull and sticks it up outside of the grave on the top of a mound of earth. Suddenly the shadow of a human form leans into the frame from the left and the outline of its head stops exactly as it covers the skull. We then hear Hamlet’s voice inquiring ‘Whose grave is this, sirrah?’ as the camera cuts to the character. This is not only an imaginative and arresting shot but a deeply suggestive one as well. Hamlet and Yorick are visually equated before the skull is identified as the jester’s. The shot links Hamlet, the gravedigger and Yorick as the play’s

40

SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

fools and clowns – those who can joke about death. Olivier’s Hamlet is genuinely amused by being a part of this trio and his smile, for the first time in the film, is natural and relaxed rather than taut and ironic. This moment signals, for Olivier, the return of Hamlet’s equilibrium and his psychological ability to acknowledge that ‘the readiness is all’ (5.2.201). The use of black and white film stock also allowed Olivier to employ the photographic technique called deep focus, adapted from Orson Welles’s use of this technique in Citizen Kane (1941). Deep focus allows objects in the mid and rear of the frame to be seen as clearly as those near the camera. As Olivier comments: With deep focus I could beset Hamlet with faces around him which were, to him, too, too solid; I could create distances between characters, creating an effect of alienation, or of yearning for past pleasure as when Hamlet sees Ophelia in her innocent Victorian dress, an eternity away down the long corridor (150 feet away, actually), sitting on a solid wooden chair – in focus – with love clearly in her eyes.6 Another cinematic technique Olivier favours is the use of the dissolve, in which one shot fades out as the next comes into focus. He finds in the tension between the use of the dissolve and deep focus something of Hamlet’s inability to maintain a steady, unambiguous hold on the soiled and sullen world he uncovers after the death of his father. The film’s editor, Helga Cranston, has written that Olivier wanted the cuts to be smooth rather than jarring and that they had to happen ‘at the right psychological moment. [Such moments] could be dictated by a movement, a piece of the action or by the rhythm of Shakespearean speech’.7 Olivier had already underlined a particular psychological approach to the character in the film’s prologue, where he had intoned on the soundtrack, ‘This is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind’, under a shot of Elsinore looming in the fog.

L AURENCE OLIVIER’S HAMLET

41

Camera Hamlet’s turmoil is further incorporated in the restlessness of Olivier’s camera. The camera is in constant motion: tracking, panning, rising (or lowering) on a crane, poking its lens into Elsinore’s dark corners and hidden secrets. Anthony Davies maintains that the ‘narrative point of view of the camera is consistently restricted to Hamlet’s view of the world’,8 but as we have seen, Hamlet’s view of the world is not whole; it’s fractured. The camera is an extension of Hamlet’s probing intelligence and it is allowed a freedom to roam (symbolically as well as literally) that is denied to Olivier’s psychological conception of the character, who remains earthbound, trapped in his ‘mortal coil’ of tangled emotions. An excellent example of the use of this technique can be found in Olivier’s shooting of ‘The Mousetrap’ scene. The court is arranged in a semi-circle facing the players. Horatio stands on the right observing the King while Hamlet is seated next to Ophelia on the left. The camera shoots the scene through the Court audience by slowly tracking behind them from Hamlet’s perspective to Horatio’s (Hamlet’s other pair of eyes at this moment). Olivier’s Hamlet is frozen in place next to Ophelia, but the camera moves and clearly represents his perspective on the action and the response of the King and Queen. As Davies has described, the film is shot as much on the vertical as the horizontal plane.9 The set consists of several playing levels located above one another. The lowest level – the setting for the court scenes – is clearly associated with Claudius, though it is ringed by a series of higher platforms which are most commonly occupied by Hamlet. He appears on one of them in the film’s equivalent of 2.2 to overhear Polonius’s report to Claudius and Gertrude. Olivier here follows Dover Wilson’s suggestion about Hamlet’s double entrance in this scene and his argument that Hamlet’s melancholy results from Ophelia’s seeming betrayal of their relationship.10 Thus Olivier’s Hamlet is aware even before the ‘nunnery’ scene that Polonius

42

SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

plans to ‘loose’ his daughter on the prince while he and the King spy on their exchange. Hamlet then allows himself to be discovered walking along that platform by Polonius, who questions him from below as the ‘fishmonger’ exchange begins again, establishing Hamlet’s superior intelligence as he confounds the old man with the bitter method of his madness. The stone staircase so often explored by the camera twists up to several platforms at the top of the castle – an area the film repeatedly depicts as the Ghost’s space. The film’s action opens and closes here with shots of Hamlet’s funeral procession. Hamlet first confronts the Ghost on the highest platform. Later he races up the stairs after the ‘nunnery’ scene with Ophelia, seeking emotional relief and intellectual clarity but discovering only the sea crashing on the rocks below and his own mind throbbing with ‘a sea of troubles’. The final command perspective the film assigns to Hamlet is from the platform supported by a double staircase descending down into Claudius’s court where the fatal duel between Hamlet and Laertes takes place. These steps have earlier proved significant because after Gertrude and Claudius have read their letters from Hamlet, the King reaches out his hand to exit up one of the staircases with her but she refuses his offer and they ascend on separate stairs, indicating her separation from her husband and her recommitment to her son. This action presages her intuition, in the film’s final scene, that Claudius has poisoned the cup of wine he repeatedly offers to Hamlet before and during the duel. Thus when she takes the cup and drinks from it she does so thinking that she is sacrificing herself for her son (her motive made clear by Olivier’s camera work and crosscutting between Gertrude and the wine). When Hamlet, after having been fatally wounded, receives confirmation from Laertes of Claudius’s treachery (‘The King, the King’s to blame’ [5.2.305]) he dashes up the twenty-four steps of the staircase, moves to the centre of the platform, and launches himself, in a perfect swan dive with his sword held aloft, down fifteen feet to crash into the King clinging to his throne chair.

L AURENCE OLIVIER’S HAMLET

43

The two men roll over with Hamlet emerging on top and while straddling the King he repeatedly plunges his sword into Claudius’s chest. Olivier rehearsed the dive for crew and camera using a stunt man (who lost several teeth in one instance) but when it came time to make the actual dive for the rolling camera Olivier did it himself. It was the last shot in the making of the film. This is the moment in the film where Olivier gives his athleticism as a performer full rein. His Hamlet has been at last liberated from the film’s escalation of doubt by a swooping dive to revenge. In a film visually obsessed with the vertical, its hero’s final movement is down not up; down to a fatal embrace of Claudius – ‘a consummation/Devoutly to be wished’ (3.1.62–3). Hamlet’s dive is down to death, but the film will elevate him one final time by having the soldiers carry his body up the winding staircase to the highest platform to be, one assumes, reunited with his ghostly father. All Hamlet films face the particular problem of how to handle the ghost of Hamlet’s father. Film seems a medium even more receptive to handling the supernatural than the stage because of its technical abilities and special effects. But the history of Hamlet on film reveals that film-makers are often as stumped as stage directors in how to handle the Ghost. When Helga Cranston first went to Denham Studios to work on the film she found Olivier smeared with blackface and with a light bulb stuck in his mouth. He was experimenting with a radical way of filming the Ghost so ‘that he would appear like a negative [photographic] image’.11 Olivier was frustrated that the technique wasn’t working. Cranston told him that she had been in Paris recently where she had seen Jean Louis Barrault’s stage production of Hamlet. Barrault’s Ghost was barely visible but his presence was made powerful by the amplification of his throbbing heartbeat, which is passed on to his son. Olivier seized on this idea and refined it by making the Ghost a shadowy figure with a muffled voice (actually Olivier’s recorded at a slower speed) and powerful heartbeat which Olivier experimented with in terms of tempo and volume right up until the film’s first preview performance. So getting the

44

SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

Ghost right absorbed Olivier’s first and last technical thoughts about his film. Olivier’s Ghost is commanding, mysterious, and hard to fully comprehend or hold in focus. Olivier’s Hamlet is literally knocked-out, floored, by the Ghost’s appearance; both when they first meet high on Elsinore’s ramparts and later when the Ghost intrudes in the ‘closet’ scene to interrupt Hamlet’s interrogation of his mother. Though the Ghost wishes to rally his son to revenge, his appearance has the opposite effect; it paralyses Hamlet and sends him to the floor in a passive sprawl. Olivier adopts the same posture in both scenes; he lies on his stomach, chest slightly raised, with his left hand reaching out to his father. The Ghost’s debilitating effect is, of course, in perfect keeping with Olivier’s Freudian understanding of Hamlet’s character. He is crippled by the Ghost’s command because of his subconscious identification with Claudius. To kill the adulterous stepfather is, in essence, to kill himself. These moments are at odds with Olivier’s strengths as an actor, where voice and body carry equal power. The physical passivity of Olivier’s Hamlet seems unnatural – not necessarily as an image of the character but as an expression of this particularly kinetic actor. The film’s most interesting element is Olivier’s deliberately obtrusive camera technique which becomes an overt visual accomplice to Hamlet’s covert intelligence. The camera prowls Elsinore, climbs its twisting staircase, and pries into its nooks and crannies, including an obsessive curiosity with what Peter S. Donaldson describes as Gertrude’s ‘immense, enigmatic, and vaginally hooded bed’,12 gazes down long empty corridors and moves on a 180-degree rotation to shoot ‘The Mousetrap’ from behind its audience. Olivier conjures the camera as another character in the drama: Hamlet’s alter-ego. The tension here between film director and star was built into Olivier’s conception from the beginning. Helga Cranston reports that when she was given the screenplay to read she was ‘surprised at the precise description of every camera position and every camera movement it contained’.13 Sarah Hatchuel responds to the same qualities in Olivier’s screenplay. Citing

L AURENCE OLIVIER’S HAMLET

45

examples from Olivier’s treatment of ‘The Mousetrap’ sequence Hatchuel notes that his screenplay describes the movements of the camera . . . with extreme precision . . . For an actor originally coming from the theatre, one who has often been accused of being too ‘stagey’, Olivier displays a striking awareness of shot composition. While a more traditional form of subtext – such as the exclusive description of actions and feelings – might have been expected, it is surprising to note that Olivier’s screenplay focuses much more on metafilmic comments.14 Olivier manages to give us two Hamlets: one behind the camera and one in front of it. The camera (as orchestrated by Olivier-the-director) gives free rein to Hamlet’s probing intellect to move freely through and around Elsinore’s dreamscape while Olivier-the-actor remains trapped in a series of physically listless postures.

Stage and film conventions Another film device Olivier cleverly uses to reinforce Hamlet’s passivity is the use of the ‘voice-over’ for the delivery of those soliloquies retained in the film. This device, where we hear a character’s thoughts expressed on the soundtrack while he remains speechless on the screen would seem unnatural used on stage, but it works on film and, of course, brings the dramatic soliloquy into alignment with the novel’s internal monologue. Olivier employs voice-over immediately in Hamlet’s first soliloquy and also adds his own unique contribution to the convention. His camera shoots Hamlet sitting passively in a chair as the king and queen exit after the first court scene (1.2). As the camera cranes down into a medium close-up, we hear Olivier’s voice on the soundtrack utter the soliloquy’s opening line: ‘O, that this too, too solid flesh would melt/Thaw and resolve itself into a dew’ (1.2.129–30). Olivier rises and begins

46

SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

to move about the empty council chamber and, after several more lines recorded in voice-over, he breaks into spoken address on ‘Nay, not so much, not two.’ He repeats the pattern of breaking from thought to speech at later moments in the soliloquy with particularly fierce invective on ‘O God, a beast that wants discourse of reason/Would have mourn’d longer!’ (1.2.150–51), dramatizing the psychological effect of Hamlet’s simultaneous struggle both to repress and to release his outrage at his mother’s remarriage. Olivier effectively melds a theatrical convention (the soliloquy) with a film convention (the voice-over) to provide a novel touch of psychological realism to Hamlet’s emotional turmoil in dealing with the sudden loss (one to death, the other to a new marriage) of both his parents. The conflict between internal and external realities so central to Hamlet’s anguish is precisely in keeping with Olivier’s Freudian approach to the play. He employs a similar division, though with a significant variation, when he films Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy. Olivier shoots ‘To be or not to be’ immediately after Hamlet’s encounter with Ophelia (following the soliloquy’s placement in Q1). Traditionally most Hamlet productions use the Q2 placement which comes before their painful exchange. At the moment the soliloquy appears in Q2 nothing seems to support why Hamlet should suddenly have his most profound internal struggle with thoughts of death. But by placing the soliloquy after discovering what he believes to be Ophelia’s treachery, Olivier makes his Hamlet seem even more vulnerable. He knows powerful forces are spying on him and he is angry with himself for behaving so rudely to Ophelia. After spurning her (‘To a nunnery . . . go’ [3.1.148]), Olivier dashes up the winding staircase until he reaches the highest platform, where he stares down at the turbulent sea crashing on the rocks below. The camera slowly zooms in on the rear of Hamlet’s head (in a shot Olivier plucked from Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca) as though it was literally penetrating into his brain and finding in its frenetic mental patterns images which parallel the waves of the sea below.15

L AURENCE OLIVIER’S HAMLET

47

Here Olivier speaks the first five lines of the famous speech aloud until he says ‘to die’. Then he moves into voice-over for ‘to sleep’ and the following five lines before returning to spoken speech for ‘Perchance to dream’ and the final lines of the soliloquy. In his first soliloquy Olivier’s Hamlet broke out of thought and into speech when his anger at his mother’s remarriage could no longer be contained; in ‘To be or not to be’ he moves from speech to thought when he confronts the idea of death, an idea so powerful that Hamlet must silence its spoken expression. Olivier imaginatively uses film’s ability to express both spoken and unspoken speech to capture Hamlet’s turmoil and his passivity. In fact, when he reaches the line ‘and his quietus make/With a bare bodkin’ (3.1.74–5) he loses his grip on the dagger he has withdrawn from its sheath and watches it tumble down and disappear into the sea as he slumps into a supine position on the platform. Olivier’s Hamlet has been unmanned by his mother’s remarriage and his father’s command for revenge. They are the sea of troubles he cannot gather the energy and will to oppose and end. Olivier cuts all of the ‘O what a rogue and peasant slave am I’ soliloquy except its concluding couplet: ‘The play’s the thing/ Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King’ (2.2.539–40). Here he substitutes action for words as, in a long shot, the camera captures Hamlet making a dash down a corridor and up a few steps into the middle of the players’ space where, caught in a single spotlight, he makes an exaggerated pirouette with his arms thrown out wide above his head. This is perhaps the film’s most theatrical moment, because the arrival of the actors has released Oliver’s Hamlet from his paralysis and brought him to the brink of his first concerted action, the staging of The Murder of Gonzago. Olivier’s handling of this moment reveals one of his ideas about adapting Shakespeare from stage to screen. On stage we always see the actor in long shot; on film the camera frames, from shot to shot, what we see. Film’s natural grammar is to move from long shot to close-up. Watching George Cukor’s 1936 Romeo and Juliet allowed Olivier to see that film’s

48

SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

grammar establishes the wrong rhythm for Shakespeare’s great speeches. Olivier realized that as the actor builds to the speech’s climax the camera should be retreating rather than closing in, thus allowing the actor to give full voice to the emotion being expressed. He followed this practice in his film of Henry V, starting Henry’s great speech ‘Once more into the breach’ (3.1.1) in medium close-up and then gradually pulling the crane-mounted camera back and up into a long shot for the speech’s full-throated conclusion: ‘Cry God for Harry, England, and Saint George’ (3.1.34). He abandoned the practice in his film of Hamlet by employing the device of the voice-over for Hamlet’s soliloquies, with the exception of the brief snippet the film script retained of ‘O what a rogue and peasant slave am I’. Here he does revert to his pattern in Henry V, beginning with a close-up of Hamlet’s face in profile and followed by a long shot of the actor racing away from the camera to deliver a full-voiced version of the couplet. Olivier strikes a similar theatrical pose at the end of the play scene. When Basil Sydney’s Claudius bellows ‘Give me some light’, Olivier’s Hamlet twirls a flaming torch in front of the King’s face and after the court has scattered we find him standing astride Claudius’s chair still waving his torch in triumph. Olivier retains Hamlet’s next soliloquy ‘Now I might do it pat’ when he comes upon Claudius at prayer as he climbs the curving staircase to his rendezvous with his mother. Shakespeare is tinkering here with the convention of the soliloquy which traditionally has the actor on stage alone sharing his thoughts with the audience. Here the film convention of voice-over helps to solve the problem of two actors sharing the same space with one, on stage at least, unable to hear what the other says. Voice-over allows Olivier’s Hamlet to be poised, sword up ready for the kill, right behind Claudius as he debates whether or not to plunge it down into the King. Olivier actually adds a third figure in the scene. Claudius has knelt before a small altar containing a carved wooden statue of Jesus. The statue depicts Jesus not on the cross but standing with one arm crossed over

L AURENCE OLIVIER’S HAMLET

49

his chest as if offering mercy to the supplicant. As Olivier’s Hamlet lifts his sword, his eyes lift up from Claudius’s back and engage with the Christ-figure, prompting his pause to realize that killing Claudius at prayer sends him to heaven and would be ‘hire and salary, not revenge’ (3.3.79). Director Olivier shoots the rest of the soliloquy with only Hamlet and Christ in the frame: Claudius is erased, and thus allowed to live, by Hamlet’s mistaken assumption that his praying is sincere. Shakespeare’s irony is made richer here as it is directed for the first time at, rather than by, Hamlet. Hamlet repeatedly insists that he can distinguish between appearance and reality, yet at this crucial moment he accepts the appearance for the reality. As we soon learn, Claudius confesses to himself that he has not been sincerely repentant in his prayers because he still possesses ‘those effects for which I did the murder,/My crown, mine own ambition, and my Queen’ (3.3.54–5). Olivier has deftly used the film convention of voice-over to modify the stage convention of the soliloquy to fit his cinematic purposes in adapting Hamlet for the screen. Initially he uses voice-over to establish Hamlet’s attempt to repress his distrust and outrage at his mother’s behaviour in marrying Claudius. Later, in ‘To be or not to be’ he slips into voice-over when confronting the very idea of death itself, and in ‘Now I might do it pat’ voice-over allows Hamlet to debate the merits of killing Claudius at prayer while he stands right behind him. This moment, when Hamlet lifts his sword to strike, as William Walton’s film score reaches a tremulous crescendo, is one famously revisited in John McTiernan’s Last Action Hero (1993) starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as the action hero, Jack Slater. Slater is idolized by young Danny Madigan, whose English class is being shown a film clip of Olivier’s Hamlet about to strike Claudius. His teacher, played by Joan Plowright (Olivier’s third and last wife), pedantically intones that ‘Hamlet was the first action hero’. McTiernan is cleverly loading the cinematic, theatrical, and biographical layers on top of one another here in creating his meta-cinematic parody of both Hamlet and the action hero.

50

SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

Danny, frustrated by Hamlet’s failure to plunge his sword into Claudius, whispers ‘Just do it’. He then imagines Schwarzenegger’s Jack Slater as Hamlet dispatching Claudius and most of his court with a few bursts from his AK-47 while simultaneously lighting up a cigar. The nuances of Hamlet’s complicated desires to revenge his father, send Claudius to hell, rescue his mother from perdition, and keep himself alive while doing so, are lost on Danny, who – awash in late-twentieth century representations of violence – yearns for Hamlet to ‘Just do it’, and for Schwarzenegger’s Hamlet ‘To take out the trash’.

Hamlet and Gertrude As Hamlet retreats from the praying Claudius he resumes his journey up the staircase to prey upon his mother. Though the scene now seems understated and suggestive, particularly after Franco Zeffirelli’s heated version with Mel Gibson and Glenn Close, Olivier’s treatment of the encounter between Hamlet and Gertrude was radical for its time and still has the power to shock. Olivier was the first stage or film director to make Gertrude’s bed the focus of the scene. Her bed has been well established as a visual motif in the film from the opening shots, where the camera prowls the Elsinore court poking its lens into significant spaces the film will revisit. Her bed is not only framed by vaginally hooded drapes, but is contained in a circular room also suggestive of female space. Eileen Herlie has already established Gertrude as a warm-blooded woman with the passionate kiss on the lips she gives to Hamlet in the first court scene when urging him to remain at Elsinore rather than to return to school at Wittenberg. Her passionate nature is reinforced in the famous ‘closet scene’. When Hamlet arrives Gertrude is in her nightgown with a silk robe on her shoulders. When Hamlet throws her on the bed in his angry attack, rather than defensively pulling her robe more tightly around herself, she lets it fall open to expose the voluptuous contours of her body.

L AURENCE OLIVIER’S HAMLET

51

Following Ernest Jones, Freud, and his own dramatic imagination Olivier was determined to present a Gertrude who was both maternal and sexually alive. In a letter he wrote to Marcia Swinburne, one of the many actresses he screentested for the part, he outlined his conception of the character in language that treats what he regarded as a charged idea with a chummy innocence: [Gertrude] is a perfectly respectable Queen . . . who has been seduced for the first time in her life into having one hell of an absolutely gorgeous time. For the first time in her life she has been sexually awakened; for the first time she has a highly agreeable companion over a jolly nice whiskey and soda. There is between many a mother and son, an overdeveloped affection that is commonly known as the Oedipus complex. She must, in other words, be the most wonderfully glamourous mummy to Hamlet. Glamourous and Mummy. Very difficult; very, very hard to find, and almost impossible to cast in a film in view of the difficult situation wrought by either being too old for the part or too young for me.16 While I’m not sure the film captures the sexual energy between Gertrude and Claudius that Olivier’s letter suggests, it does create a charged sexual tension between mother and son that obliterates the obvious problem of the age difference between the two actors. Film noir, a genre Olivier borrows from in his Hamlet, usually features a blonde femme fatale who entices the hero to do her bidding (like murdering an undesirable husband) and then abandons him once he has murdered for her. Olivier’s noir version of Hamlet turns the genre’s pattern upside down. Here it is the hero who is the radiant platinum blonde trying to seduce the key figures in his world with his particular blend of passive-aggressive behaviour. Olivier’s blonde Hamlet is, as Anthony Dawson has noted, curiously feminized.17 In his case there is a double sense of

52

SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

manipulation. The Ghost manipulates his son, reducing a complex sensibility into the unambiguous role of the revenger. Because Hamlet resists such a reduction he ends up wreaking havoc in his word: murdering Polonius, driving Ophelia into madness, and being ultimately responsible for Gertrude’s death, as in Olivier’s film she drinks the cup of wine intended for her son knowing that it has been poisoned. Olivier’s noir avenger even reaches across gender boundaries in the coy manner in which he flatters Horatio: ‘Give me that man/That is not passion’s slave, and I will wear him/In my heart’s core – ay, in my heart of heart,/As I do thee’ (3.2.67–70). Olivier’s Hamlet dies on the throne being cradled in Horatio’s arms – the psychological once again trumping the political. Though film noir was a dominant Hollywood film genre in the 1940s and 1950s focusing on a dark and corrupt urban landscape filled with shadows and shadowy characters, its film style was so strong and pronounced that it appealed to both Olivier and Welles when they came to make their film versions of Hamlet (Olivier) and Othello (Welles). Initially Olivier’s Hamlet might seem to bear little resemblance to Hollywood noir but the film was made when the style was at its height, combining the decay of expressionism into a grim version of film realism. Olivier’s use of chiaroscuro, Hamlet’s edgy, sceptical behaviour, and the nervous camera exploring Elsinore’s staircases and bedrooms all attest to such an affinity. Another possible source for the mysterious film landscape Olivier creates is the great German silent film of Hamlet (1920) directed by Svend Gade and Heinz Schall and starring the wonderful Danish actress Asta Nielsen as the cross-dressed prince. Gade and Schall’s adaptation leaned heavily on the work of an American academic, Edward P. Vining, who conjectured that Hamlet was actually a woman in disguise. According to Vining, Gertrude hid Hamlet’s true identity from her birth, the day of the clash between Hamlet and Norway, as she feared for her child’s claim to the crown if her husband lost his country. Kenneth Rothwell perceptively observes that many of the stylistic markers that distinguish Gade’s film,

L AURENCE OLIVIER’S HAMLET

53

[an] array of expressionistic devices—lengthy hallways and corridors, vast assembly rooms, steep flights of stairs, sloping surfaces, chiaroscuro effects of contrasting light and shadows, energetic camera work, a brooding film noir type atmosphere, and ostensive acting styles taken from the stage are true of Olivier’s as well.18 Olivier is right to focus on 3.4. The closet scene is crucial to the great, ‘Oedipal cinepoem’ he is creating.19 It brings the family romance to a climax with the shattered family momentarily reunited with the appearance of the Ghost; it allows Hamlet to finally release the ugly image of his mother’s sexuality (as imagined in her ‘making love over the nasty sty’ with Claudius) and by so doing to forgive her. His confrontation with his mother also works as a mirror moment to the earlier ‘Get thee to a nunnery’ scene where he rejected Ophelia. Now we can see that it is his reconciliation with Gertrude that makes possible his declaration of love for Ophelia at her burial: ‘I loved Ophelia – forty thousand brothers/Could not with all their quantity of love/Make up my sum’ (5.1.258–60). Olivier allows the scene a full ten minutes of film time, more than any other single scene except the last. Olivier structures Hamlet’s encounter with Gertrude in four beats or segments. In the first Hamlet enters and immediately becomes both verbally and physically aggressive as he throws her on her bed, promising to ‘set you up a glass/Where you may see the inmost part of you’ (3.4.18–19). The second beat follows quickly as Polonius cries out behind the arras. Hamlet pulls out his rapier and a close-up catches a wild bug-eyed expression on his face before he turns and rams his rapier into the curtain: ‘How now? A rat? Dead for a ducat, dead’ (3.4.23). Gertrude is baffled and Hamlet’s excitement is deflated once he discovers that he has killed Polonius and not the King. Olivier’s Hamlet quickly returns to his usual mode of ironic disgust: ‘Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool, farewell!/I took thee for thy better’ (3.4.29–30). He now turns that disgust on Gertrude as he moves to join her on the bed to lecture her on her moral

54

SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

failings. Olivier’s camera holds Hamlet and Gertrude in a tight two shot for Hamlet’s long attack: ‘Look here upon this picture, and on this . . .’ (3.4.51). The moment continues without a cut as the camera tracks back when Hamlet rises from the bed to rip into Claudius as ‘a king of shreds and patches’ (3.4.99), and thus he is standing when we hear the Ghost’s muffled heartbeat on the soundtrack signalling the third segment of the scene. The camera cuts not to the Ghost but to Hamlet’s terrified face. The heartbeat is now so strong and loud that Hamlet appears to have internalized it, and actor Olivier even manages to make a vein in his throat throb to demonstrate how he is possessed by his father’s appearance. Here director Olivier sets up the camera as a glass where we, if not Hamlet, can see his ‘innermost part’. As in their earlier meeting on the battlements Hamlet is overwhelmed by the Ghost and collapses, almost trance-like, on the floor, where he again sprawls out in the same posture he adopted in their first encounter, stretching out his hand in the Ghost’s direction. For the first time Olivier now cuts to a shot of a vague misty figure framed in one of the room’s arched portals. Hamlet insists that his mother look at the Ghost, but when the camera cuts back to the portal it is empty. It is tempting to see both of these cuts to the Ghost’s space as point-of-view shots: Hamlet sees the Ghost because he wants to; Gertrude doesn’t see the Ghost because to acknowledge its reality would be shattering. This would allow us to regard the Ghost as a figment of Hamlet’s tortured imagination. But such a reading doesn’t square with the film’s earlier treatment of the Ghost where he is clearly seen by Horatio, Bernardo, and Marcellus and where they clearly hear his heartbeat (soft to them) on the soundtrack as the first sign of his appearance. The fourth and final beat of the scene begins as Hamlet turns back to his mother. The rage he had expressed about her sexuality that precipitated the Ghost’s entrance has now waned. He returns to his theme of her moral jeopardy but in a

L AURENCE OLIVIER’S HAMLET

55

calmer tone. He sits beside her on the bed and when he tells her ‘I must be cruel only to be kind’ (3.4.176) they share a passionate kiss and he drops his head upon her lap. These two gestures release the tension between them: the first acknowledges his Oedipal attraction to her, the second his desire to return to his childhood relationship with the nurturing mother. The scene ends with one final kiss and a farewell that indicates the return of normalcy in their relationship: ‘Good night, Mother’ (3.4.215). This scene takes on added significance in any Freudian reading of the text and particularly in Olivier’s screenplay, where Fortinbras and the larger political reaches of the play have been jettisoned. Olivier skilfully provides a dynamic portrait of the ruined family here with Hamlet trapped between the martial father demanding revenge and the soft mother in need of moral reclamation, but even now there is still something passive and dream-like in Olivier’s Hamlet. He is floored by his father and frustrated by his mother. When he lowers his head into her lap to have her hands caress his head as though he were indeed a small boy, he once again abdicates action for his ambiguous emotional needs.

Flashbacks In adapting Hamlet for the screen Olivier employed several other film devices to join his roving camera, the use of voiceover, cross-cutting, deep focus photography, the dissolve, and the occasional long shot. Most significantly he used film’s ability to use flashbacks to visually reinforce the narrative. Once again the use of flashbacks is a cinematic device rather than a theatrical one. Olivier employs the convention sparingly, generally to illustrate long narrative speeches describing a scene or specific action: the Ghost’s description of his murder, Ophelia’s report of Hamlet’s visit to her room, Gertrude’s account of Ophelia’s drowning, and Hamlet’s tale of his aborted sea journey to England. Though each of these moments

56

SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

provides information about the character speaking the lines, they primarily convey visual material. In each instance Olivier provides us with selected words and images, though the speech provoking the flashback is trimmed. Olivier the director is not prepared to completely erase word for image, but he is prepared, somewhat radically, to eliminate context. In Shakespeare’s text Ophelia narrates Hamlet’s distraught and dishevelled appearance in her room to Polonius. Olivier, however, cuts directly from Hamlet on the battlements immediately after having seen the Ghost to a close-up of Ophelia’s face as she begins, in voice-over, her account. The film then presents us with a flashback of their encounter, without the traditional establishing shot to provide us with a context in which to place Ophelia’s speech. When she has finished, the camera cuts back to her face and then to Polonius entering, a scene later, to announce to the King and Queen that he has found the source of Hamlet’s madness. Olivier repeats this pattern in Gertrude’s description of Ophelia’s death. The film has already provided us with a shot of Ophelia gathering wildflowers near the brook, so it is a landscape we associate her with. Here Olivier does not even provide us with a shot of Gertrude, he cuts directly from Claudius and Laertes to a flashback of the stream as we hear Gertrude’s voice on the soundtrack narrating Ophelia’s drowning. Olivier famously recreates Ophelia’s death in the manner of John Vincent Millais’s Pre-Raphaelite painting of Ophelia floating on her back surrounded by ‘fantastic garlands’ of wildflowers. Olivier does not give us a shot of Gertrude or Gertrude and Laertes at the end of Gertrude’s speech but cuts directly to Hamlet and Horatio’s entrance in the Gravedigger scene. Again Olivier has trusted a combination of film’s visual power and his audience’s presumed knowledge of Shakespeare’s text to allow him to present these two set pieces divorced from the action which provides their context. The film’s two other flashbacks are handled more conventionally, but not without something of a twist. The first comes as the Ghost recounts to Hamlet his murder by Claudius.

L AURENCE OLIVIER’S HAMLET

57

Olivier does not cut from the Ghost to the flashback but from a close-up of the back of Hamlet’s head. When the flashback is completed the camera cuts to a close-up of Hamlet’s face, underlining that the old King’s murder is imagined from Hamlet’s point of view. Olivier shoots the flashback with edges of the frame shrouded in fog so that neither we nor Hamlet are given a clear image of the murderer’s face. Perhaps Olivier’s Freudian reading makes it impossible for his Hamlet to see Claudius clearly, much as later in the closet scene Gertrude is incapable of seeing the Ghost of her former husband. The last flashback is simply a plot device. As the film has cut Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Oliver is free to excise Hamlet’s long report to Horatio about his discovery of their treachery and his rewriting and resealing the letters they carry to the English king. But Olivier’s film still has to account for how Hamlet manages to escape from Claudius’s guard and return to Denmark. He does so by having Horatio silently read the letter he receives from Hamlet as Hamlet’s voice narrates the letter’s content while a flashback provides us with images of the sea battle with the pirates and Hamlet’s escape to their ship. Olivier’s use of the flashback device reveals some of the ways it can be used to tell the story cinematically. More importantly, it can be used to establish point of view and, in the case of Ophelia and Gertrude, to link visually two characters who repeatedly mirror one another in Hamlet’s imagination. Both women, as in the manner that their flashbacks are presented, are eventually erased from the narrative as they are cast adrift by son, lover, father, and husband.

Hamlet at mid-century The Ophelia and Gertrude flashbacks also make a perfect stylistic fit with Olivier’s cinematic adaptation of Hamlet. In accordance with his Freudian approach Olivier’s landscape is internalized; his Elsinore is a dreamscape rather than a representation of a social reality anchored in a specific time

58

SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

and space. His Elsinore is empty: the film has no ‘extras’ except for the audience of the play scene and the final duel and even then they are kept to a minimum. No courtiers or servants roam its halls or scurry in its corridors. The film might well be taking place in Hamlet’s imagination, for only the locations that preoccupy him become central: the high platform, the Queen’s bedchamber, Claudius’s chapel, the twisting staircase, the empty Court. The film is framed by shots of these landscapes: the first time we visit them, after the opening scene with Horatio, Barnardo, and Marcellus on the battlements, we may well wonder about their significance. But when the camera revisits them as it follows the soldiers carrying Hamlet’s body up to the high platform, with the accompaniment of Walton’s funeral march, we understand their symbolic importance to Olivier’s cinematic approach to the play. The film has not been about the struggle for power, or about the shattering of a fragile identity, or even about sex or death, but about the twisted corridors of the mind. Almost all of the film’s admirers admit that one of Olivier’s mistakes was to preface his film with a quotation from the text to serve as an epigram: So oft it chances in particular men That for some vicious mole of nature in them By the o’er growth of some complexion, Oft breaking down the pales and forts of reason. Or some habit grown too much so that these men, Carrying, I say, the stamp of one defect. Their virtues else – be they as pure as grace. Shall in the general censure take corruption From that particular fault. (1.4.23–4; 27–9; 31; 33–5) These lines are spoken by Olivier as a swirling fog obstructs our view of the Elsinore battlements. They are lifted from Hamlet’s explanation delivered to Horatio and Marcellus

L AURENCE OLIVIER’S HAMLET

59

about Claudius’s swinish behaviour as he ‘drains his draughts of Rhenish down’ celebrating his coronation and his marriage. They do not describe Hamlet, nor does Shakespeare mean them to: Hamlet’s flaws, like his virtues, are myriad, not singular. As the clouds momentarily part, the camera peers down through them to a shot of Hamlet’s body, held aloft by the captains, on the high tower as Olivier’s voice, in silky insinuation, pronounces: ‘This [pause] is the tragedy of a man [long pause] who could not make up his [longer pause] mind.’20 Olivier, undoubtedly, was driven to this unnecessary signposting by the fear that a mass film audience would need help in unpacking (if not plucking out) the heart of Hamlet’s mystery. This reductionist beginning was the price Olivier evidently thought he had to pay for his daring psychoanalytic approach to adapting Hamlet for the screen. And while Olivier’s film does not display the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind, in the sense of being unable to make a decision, it does constitute, at least partially, the tragedy of a man who could not make up, in the sense of being able to invent and sustain a single, stable identity, his mind. Hamlet’s mind is very much Olivier’s subject, dictating his film’s design, casting, landscape, atmosphere, cinematography and film score. If Freud is Olivier’s chief intellectual influence, Alfred Hitchcock is his prime film model.21 Hitchcock’s psychological thrillers shape Olivier’s cinematic approach to investigating the multiple tensions and conflicts swirling in Hamlet’s mind and imagination. Olivier knew Hitchcock and his work well. They were both part of the British community in Hollywood in the 1930s. Olivier starred in one of Hitchcock’s most famous psychological thrillers, Rebecca (1940) and, as I have noted, stole one of its most famous shots to use in Hamlet. He was also aware of the popularity of Hitchcock’s explicitly Freudian film of Spellbound (1945) starring Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman and featuring dreamscapes inspired by Salvador Dali. Olivier was provocatively linking a classical icon of elite culture (Shakespeare) with a film style pioneered by one of

60

SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

Hollywood’s most popular directors (Hitchcock). In fact one of the films nominated, along with Hamlet, for Best Picture in 1948 was Snake Pit and, though not directed by Hitchcock, it worked a similar Hitchcockian psychological territory. As Kenneth Rothwell suggests, reading from Roger Furse’s sets to Olivier’s intentions: ‘His sets also remain sparse, abstract, and ultimately timeless . . . [and] make the castle a metaphor for the protagonist’s isolation and loneliness. The result is film noir for highbrows.’22 Olivier’s Hamlet was an artistic and commercial success. While it did not compete at the box office with more commercial Hollywood films of 1948, like Johnny Belinda, Red River, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, I Remember Mama, and The Paleface, it returned significantly more funds to the Rank Organization than its costs of production and distribution. The film received excellent reviews and went on to win four Academy Awards including those for Best Picture and Best Actor. The film continues to have the distinction of being the only movie to win the Academy Award for Best Picture without a single dollar of Hollywood financing. From its inception the film had the aura of a classic. England was Shakespeare’s home; Olivier was recognized as the finest Shakespearean actor of his generation; he had left a promising career as a Hollywood leading man in the 1930s to return to his country to enlist in the war effort; he was married to one of Hollywood’s brightest stars, Vivien Leigh, about to win her second Best Actress Oscar for her Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), and he had proven his ability to translate Shakespeare from stage to screen in his 1944 film of Henry V. Olivier’s film of Henry V was a bold, bright Technicolor crowd-pleaser meant to lift the spirits of his fellow countrymen on the eve of the Allied invasion of France in 1944. And it did. By taking a much starker approach to a more difficult and demanding text, Olivier was risking making a film that ‘pleased not the millions’ and might prove to be ‘caviar to the general’ (2.2.374–5). While it is the case that Olivier’s film turns away from the political dimensions of Shakespeare’s play to concentrate

L AURENCE OLIVIER’S HAMLET

61

on Hamlet’s inner life, this turn, in Anthony Dawson’s ingenious argument, may actually mirror the concerns of both British and American society as the end of the Second World War period morphed into the beginning of the Cold War. In Britain the loss of Empire in the Middle East and India coupled with the election of a Labour government in 1945 turned the country’s concerns inward away from international political engagement and towards internal social policy, just as Olivier’s film ‘turns away from both international and national politics towards an inner province of sovereign subjectivity’.23 Dawson sees a similar pattern at work generally at that moment in America, as Hollywood turned away from making Depression-era films that stressed collective social action and a radical critique of corporate America to the bleaker private world of film noir. The United States Congress became obsessed with ‘the enemy within’ and embarked on a Communist witchhunt that led initially to the movie industry’s refusal to employ any of The Hollywood Ten, those writers and directors who refused to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities and eventually before Joe McCarthy’s Senate hearings about communists in the government. The form and pressure of the times helped to create Hollywood films that looked away from an interest in collective action and inward to a ‘tortured subjectivity’.24 Olivier’s Hamlet, with its Hitchcock-inspired, brooding psychological intensity, brilliantly fitted the atmosphere of the early Cold War era. His film became the template for all the Hamlet films that followed in the next several decades – even when they departed from his Freudian approach – until the release of Kenneth Branagh’s film of the play in 1996, almost fifty years later. Branagh’s Henry V had appeared in 1989 at the moment of the fall of the Berlin Wall; by the time he turned to make his epic version of Hamlet the Soviet Empire had collapsed and the Cold War had ended. Branagh’s film of Hamlet proved to be as reflective of its historical moment as Olivier’s had been of his. Branagh’s film makes a decisive break with all the traditions, critical and cinematic, established by Olivier’s Hamlet

62

SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

and participates in creating a new conception of the play’s central figure at the fin de siècle.

Notes 1 Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean Howard, and Katherine Maus (eds), The Norton Shakespeare (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997), first edition, p. 67. 2 Bernice Kliman, Hamlet: Film, Television, and Audio (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 1988), p. 30. 3 Laurence Olivier, On Acting (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), p. 295. 4 Quoted in Michael Kennedy, Portrait of Walton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 139. 5 Ibid., p. 125. 6 Olivier, On Acting, pp. 289–290. 7 Helga Cranston, ‘Editing Olivier’s Hamlet’, unpublished manuscript in The Helga Cranston Papers, The British Film Institute, p. 10. 8 Anthony Davies, Filming Shakespeare’s Plays: The Adaptations of Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles, Peter Brook, Akira Kurosawa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 57. 9 Ibid., p. 58. 10 J. Dover Wilson, What Happens in Hamlet, 3rd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), pp. 106–7. 11 Cranston, ‘Editing Olivier’s Hamlet’, 5. 12 Peter S. Donaldson, Shakespearean Films/Shakespearean Directors (Boston, MA: Unwin Hyman, 1990), p. 31. 13 Cranston, ‘Editing Olivier’s Hamlet’, p. 7. 14 Sarah Hatchuel, Shakespeare from Stage to Screen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 146–7. 15 See N. L. Alkire’s ‘Subliminal Masks in Olivier’s Hamlet’, Shakespeare-on-Film Newsletter, 16.1 (December 1991), 5 for details indicating that the mental images we see in Hamlet’s

L AURENCE OLIVIER’S HAMLET

63

mind are, in fact, the masks of tragedy and comedy going in and out of focus. 16 Letter dated 19 March 1949 and contained in Box 80479 of the Laurence Olivier Papers at the British Library. 17 Anthony Dawson, Hamlet. Text and Performance Series (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), p. 175. 18 Kenneth Rothwell, A History of Shakespeare on Screen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). First edition, p. 24. 19 Jack Jorgens, Shakespeare on Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), p. 214. 20 Rothwell’s response to Olivier’s formulation is typical: ‘the movie is not about a man who couldn’t make up his mind but about a man who couldn’t relate to women’. A History of Shakespeare on Screen, p. 57. 21 Hitchcock even planned to make a modern dress film version of Hamlet with Cary Grant. See Patrick McGilligan, Hitchcock: A Life of Darkness and Light (New York: Harper-Collins, 2003), p. 387. 22 Rothwell, A History of Shakespeare on Screen, p. 55. 23 Dawson, Hamlet, p. 175. 24 Ibid., p. 177.

64

3 Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet: From text to screen Branagh and Olivier Kenneth Branagh’s 1996 film of Hamlet makes a stunning contrast with Olivier’s. Olivier made his film in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War when England was still faced with wartime shortages and the growing knowledge that even though it had won the war it had lost its empire and the economic advantages that came with it. As Anthony Dawson has argued, in the post-war period the Anglo-American world turned inward politically and personally.1 After experiencing two massive European wars in less than fifty years domestic politics trumped international engagement. Artistic interests turned from collective action to the exploration of the individual psyche. Olivier’s film of Hamlet, with its Freudian concentration on Hamlet’s psychological traumas, was perfectly attuned to the times. Branagh’s Hamlet was made at another significant twentiethcentury historical and cultural moment. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 symbolized the end of the Cold War and led to a critical realignment of Eastern European countries formerly locked in the Soviet sphere behind the Iron Curtain. The sudden lifting of superpower tensions in the 1990s led, in the 65

66

SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

world of mass culture, to a remarkable decade of Hollywood films based on the works of Shakespeare and other classical authors (Jane Austen, Henry James, Edith Wharton, etc.) replacing the anxiety-driven horror, doomsday, spy and war films that had proliferated in the Cold War years; films which have re-emerged after 9/11 in the Age of Terror. Branagh’s Hamlet arrived in the middle of the Shakespeare on film revival and was clearly meant to consolidate his position as the leading contemporary Shakespearean film actor and director. He was staking his claim to be the Olivier of his generation, and he did so not by producing a Hamlet meant to capture the psychological anxieties of his own age but by making a film that looked back to several expansive European and Russian nineteenth-century novels set against another period of European political instability. Olivier’s Hamlet, by radically trimming the text to jettison the political elements in the story in order to concentrate on the psychological tensions in the family drama, established the paradigmatic approach to the play, on stage and screen, for the next fifty years. Branagh was equally radical by determining to film the entire text and to place his Hamlet as much against a political backdrop as against a family one. If Olivier modelled his cinematic style on Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock, Branagh looked to the creators of cinematic epics like David Lean and Sergei Bondarchuk for his inspiration. Branagh not only retained Fortinbras (Rufus Sewell) but visually increased his stature in the narrative by repeatedly cutting away to images of Sewell’s Fortinbras in action when he is being evoked by other characters in the film, primarily Horatio and Claudius. Branagh’s Elsinore is as bright and glittering as Olivier’s is dark and gloomy. Olivier’s castle corresponds with his Hamlet’s inner psychological turmoil, while Branagh’s reflects (often literally) his Hamlet’s power struggle with Claudius and his slick command of a velvet hammer. Olivier’s approach fitted the Freudian nature of his age, Branagh’s the European politics of his, following the collapse of the Soviet empire and the brutal stirrings of old grudges in the Balkans.

KENNETH BRANAGH’S HAMLET

67

Olivier’s Freudian approach and thorough pruning of the text were radical cinematic choices for an English actor considered the heir of a Shakespearean stage-acting tradition reaching back from Henry Irving to Edmund Kean to David Garrick all the way to Richard Burbage, who first performed Shakespeare’s tragic heroes at the Globe. Branagh’s decisions about text and treatment were even more cinematically radical. Sound film was only two decades old when Olivier came to make his Hamlet: film had not yet supplanted the stage as the age’s most dynamic art form. Branagh is a child of the age of film. While Shakespeare was as important to his life and career as he was to Olivier’s, Branagh’s Shakespeare was equally a man of the cinema and a man of the stage. Branagh had plundered popular film styles in the making of his first two Shakespeare films, Henry V (1989) and Much Ado About Nothing (1993), and through those films had brought a whole new younger generation to Shakespeare. Branagh sought, found and cultivated a youth audience in his first two Shakespeare films. He tried to move beyond that audience for his Hamlet by choosing as his model for the film the intelligent adult epics made by David Lean, especially Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Dr Zhivago (1965). Lean’s influence was seen in Branagh’s decision to shoot in 70mm (a film format not used in England since Lean’s Ryan’s Daughter in 1972), his casting of Julie Christie (Lean’s Lara in Dr Zhivago) as Gertrude, and in his use of Alex Thompson as his cinematographer, for Thompson had worked years before as a focus-puller on Lawrence of Arabia. Branagh’s Hamlet is an attempt to merge the tragic with the epic: a tough task for, as Kenneth Rothwell notes, ‘Epic requires space; tragedy intimacy’.2 The film, with a running time of 238 minutes, is the longest commercial film to be released since Joseph Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra in 1964. Branagh was severely testing one of commercial film’s most well-established conventions: length. Filmgoers have been conditioned to expect films to last between 90 and 150 minutes. It is not a coincidence that Olivier promised the Rank Organization that

68

SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

his Hamlet would not exceed 145 minutes even as Arthur Rank himself continually pressured him to cut the film to two hours. Producers, if not directors, know that films lasting more than two-and-a-half hours test and try the audience’s patience (and expectations) and play havoc with traditional screening times at the multiplex. In length, conception, setting, casting, and directorial flourish Branagh was clearly taking on Olivier, and Olivier’s Hamlet, in his own version fifty years later. By an ironic twist of film fate, Branagh found himself, fifteen years later, literally taking on Olivier by playing him (and being nominated for an Academy Award for so doing) in My Week with Marilyn (2011). The film was about the making of The Prince and the Showgirl (1957), a movie starring Olivier and Marilyn Monroe, concerning the awkward comic romance between a Middle European Prince and the chorus girl he attempts to seduce. The film was the only non-Shakespearean film Olivier ever directed and he deeply regretted the experience, as Monroe was insecure, frequently late, and emotionally difficult to work with. Despite Olivier’s professional exasperation with her, Monroe stole the picture by her winning natural relationship with the camera. Olivier’s performance was stilted and static by comparison. Branagh’s Olivier, however, is always cinematically interesting (even when exasperated) and My Week with Marilyn is by far the more ambitious and clever film. The inevitable Olivier–Branagh parallels were furthered when, in 2012, Branagh was knighted, an honour Olivier received in 1947 when he was filming Hamlet.

Screenplay In fashioning his screenplay Branagh employed a series of narrative devices that sought to treat Shakespeare’s text as if it were a realistic novel. Sarah Hatchuel has intelligently traced this process to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century: ‘The desire to develop and explain what is left ambiguous in the Shakespearean text seems to have been encouraged by the

KENNETH BRANAGH’S HAMLET

69

rise of the novel.’3 Branagh’s screenplay not only gives us every word of Shakespeare’s text (in a conflated version of the First Folio and Second Quarto versions of the play) but also visually fills in gaps only suggested by Shakespeare’s language. This visual elaboration is most evident in Branagh’s treatment of Fortinbras. Olivier eliminated the character from his screenplay and his example was followed by the major film adaptations of the play in the next fifty years. Branagh follows an alternative course. He not only retains Fortinbras but increases his impact and importance by flashcuts when he is being mentioned by other characters. So when Horatio and Claudius first mention Fortinbras (in 1.1 and 1.2) the camera cuts away from the speaker to present us with the indelible image of Rufus Sewell’s swarthy, hawk-eyed, farouche Fortinbras engaged in the activities they describe.4 Branagh goes beyond the text’s rather shadowy version of Fortinbras (he makes a brief appearance in 4.4 on his military campaign against Poland and then reappears in 5.2 just in time to claim ‘some rights of memory in this kingdom’ [5.2.373]) to give us a vivid image of the man. Fortinbras’s strong visual presence serves to underline the political fortunes that are at work in the play and to establish Fortinbras as perhaps the most prominent of the many young male alter egos to Hamlet that Shakespeare creates in the play. Sewell’s Fortinbras is clearly a prince with an attitude. Branagh’s screenplay also follows his epic ambitions and again distinguishes his approach to his Shakespearean material from Olivier’s by seeking out an English palace with a rich political history. Branagh shot his exteriors at Blenheim Palace, an eighteenth-century country estate outside of Oxford built by Queen Anne for John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough, in recognition of his military triumphs over the French. The estate is one of England’s great country houses, resembling a monumental European palace, and has the added resonance for the English of being the birthplace of Winston Churchill. The building projects Empire. Branagh shot the palace interiors at Shepperton Studios where he had his designer, Tim Harvey, create a vast white and

70

SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

gold Great Hall lined with mirrored doors and floored with black-and-white marble, creating visual echoes of a combination of Louis XIV’s Versailles and Catherine the Great’s Winter Palace in St Petersburg. This sparkling space was adjoined by a variety of rooms accessed by secret doors and passageways, both suggesting the conflict in the play between exterior and interior realities and offering an apt and useful setting for the elaborate and subtle spy game played by Hamlet and Claudius. Harvey has explained, ‘Ken wanted the sets to be . . . far removed from the rugged medieval gloom one usually associates with the play’,5 thus distinguishing its visual texture from that of Olivier’s film. Once again, by locating his production so firmly in the late nineteenth century, by presenting Fortinbras as a major player in the drama, and by creating a Hamlet distinguished by his military uniform and bearing, Branagh was insisting that the play was more than the prince, especially the standard twentieth-century view of Hamlet as completely constricted by his inner psychological demons.

Film score Patrick Doyle has created the film scores for ten of Branagh’s twelve films, including all of his Shakespeare films. Doyle shares Branagh’s robust Irish love of a rousing tune, rich operatic melodies, and the tenor voice. Doyle’s soundtrack for Branagh’s film of Hamlet shows a close understanding of the director’s/actor’s visual and dramatic purposes. Doyle’s declared intent was to aid Branagh’s commitment to the accessibility of Shakespeare’s text by a simplicity of melodic means. Doyle’s themes cue central characters – Hamlet, Ophelia, Claudius – in a recognizable and memorable way, and then develop and acquire complexity along with the character’s experience over time. A tour de force of Doyle’s developmental simplicity is his Hamlet theme: two musical phrases built on a short diatonic melody and a steady quadruple

KENNETH BRANAGH’S HAMLET

71

rhythm. In the film this theme is heard variously as slow dirge accompanied by full orchestra (sung by Placido Domingo over the final credits); as a wedding march in quick double time and dotted rhythm, with brass instruments dominating; and in its primary statement beneath Gertrude’s appeal to Hamlet to ‘cast his nighted colour off’ and his rebuke to her that he has ‘that within that passeth show’. This moment and the accompanying theme demonstrate at this first appearance of Hamlet in the film the collaborative balance of text and music that Branagh and Doyle seek. The scene introduces spectator and auditor to the film’s emphasis on divergences between surface and depth, appearance and reality. Hamlet’s deep inner grief may, as he insists, surpass visible show, but it is musically shown through the emotional urgency of the theme that Doyle matches to the character. The two brief phrases of the theme, scored for low strings in the scene with Gertrude, project Hamlet’s conflicted and foreboding inner voices and their contrast by the gaudy external echo of the string theme in the rollicking brassy wedding march. This scene and its music are an initial model of ironic contrasts, simple in means and complex in uses yet to be developed. Interestingly, unlike the traditional sequence of theme and variation, the Hamlet theme here follows rather than precedes the wedding march variation (Elgar’s Enigma Variations plays a similar, more mysterious, game with source material). In Doyle’s hands the listener recognizes the source melody when it comes and grows alert to its eventual transformation from march to dirge – from ‘mirth in funeral to dirge in marriage’. The reversed sequence of variation and theme ingeniously reflects Hamlet’s ironic parallel between his father’s funeral and his mother’s hasty remarriage at Elsinore, where ‘The funeral baked meats/Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables’ (1.2.179–80). Doyle is perhaps most inventive in his musical setting for the cinematic spectacle that Branagh creates for the ‘How all occasions’ soliloquy that closes Part I of the film. At the

72

SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

beginning of this scene and speech the Hamlet motif is heard unadorned, in its by now familiar low register and unison string scoring, accompanying a close-up of Hamlet’s face and his meditative, sotto-voce delivery of the lines. Then the camera shot pulls back and broadens by degrees to take in the mountainous, rocky landscape through which Fortinbras and his army have just passed on their way to Poland, the vista framing Hamlet’s stark black silhouette, now full length and foregrounded. Again, by degrees now aural as well as visual, the introspective primary theme crescendos to full orchestral statement. Then, climactically, the solitary immobilized figure stretches out both arms – like a conductor – as if to signal thought roused to bloody action in a visual, musical, textual ensemble: ‘O, from this time forth/My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth’ (4.4.64–5). Doyle’s music for Claudius is also well coordinated with film and text. Claudius’s theme is a twisted chromatic sequence first heard as the Ghost describes his murder by his brother, and later delivered as the subject of a fugal canon played by a string quartet. The chromatic theme in the Ghost’s description of his murder is heard without counterpoint or accompaniment. It seems ingeniously to mirror the coursing of Claudius’s poison through the ‘gates and portals’ of King Hamlet’s ear and body. With pictorial literalness the theme angles slowly and circuitously down chromatically as if tracking the deadly potion from ear to brain. The later fugal setting of the theme in the confessional scene after ‘The Mousetrap’ is another kind of mirror, a formal mirror of Claudius’s consciousness, musically mimicking his compulsive returns to his deed. Like his music for Hamlet and for Claudius, Doyle’s music for Ophelia emerges from the character’s central qualities in the film. Under Branagh’s direction Kate Winslet projects a deeply romantic temperament: sensual, yearning, and vulnerable to extremes of emotion and despair. For her theme and supporting music Doyle draws on Mahlerian influences, invoking the world of nature and death. Her thematic motif recalls the adagietto of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, a source

KENNETH BRANAGH’S HAMLET

73

both cinematic and classical, whose poignant lyricism and elegiac associations are well known to film audiences from Visconti’s Death in Venice (1971) as well as to followers of Mahler. From the reading of Hamlet’s letter by Polonius (a scene in which Ophelia is shown as intensely reactive) to her mad scenes, to her drowning, Ophelia’s music complements her yearning, wounded witness to the tragedies unfolding around her. Except for the ways in which a full orchestral score is intentionally made to compete with Hamlet’s hyperbolic rhetoric in the final third of the ‘How all occasions’ soliloquy, Doyle and Branagh work to insinuate the score under the text in a muted fashion and only after a speech is well underway. Doyle wanted to work with a small orchestra and smaller ensembles like the previously mentioned string quartet ‘because so much of the film is internalized, the struggle with Claudius, Hamlet’s internal struggle, Ophelia’s internal struggle, I [preferred] to use a small orchestra. The harmonies are very exposed.’6 Branagh ascribes the importance of music in his films to his Irish upbringing, where song was an integral part of family gatherings from birthdays to wakes. He confesses that playing the piano and singing has always been a part of my life and it seems such a natural element in my approach to . . . Shakespeare where there’s magic in the web of it anyway; there’s a poetry in the weave of it that just calls out for a particular kind of rhythm, pace, orchestration, colour, mood, atmosphere that is implicitly musical.7

Landscape and character Branagh’s Hamlet is a soldier. He does not seem out of place at Blenheim. When we first meet him he’s dressed in a black military uniform (in contrast to the white and red wedding outfits worn by Gertrude and Claudius); he takes a keen interest in fencing; his manners are polite and formal; he’s

74

SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

genuinely pleased to greet Horatio (and even Marcellus); his verbal attack is swift and precise; and he is at clear pains to control his grief over his father’s death and his mother’s remarriage. He moves with force and purpose and refuses to strike poses except for those connected with putting on an antic disposition. He may command his soul to ‘sit still’, but his body is in constant motion. He dashes through purgatorial woods, with the ground heaving and splitting, in pursuit of the Ghost; he marches Rosencrantz and Guildenstern from their arrival by train up to the castle; he drags Ophelia down the row of mirrored doors in the ‘nunnery’ scene; he can’t sit still during ‘The Mousetrap’, moving up and down the steeply raked aisle of the make-shift amphitheatre commenting on the play, until he cannot refrain from entering the action itself; he leads the palace guard on a prolonged (and brilliantly shot) chase after the murder of Polonius; and fights the most vigorous and spatially expansive duel in the history of Hamlet films; and even finds a way, courtesy of Errol Flynn, to rival, at the end of the film, the physical hyperbole of Olivier’s fifteen-foot swan dive into Claudius. The only time Branagh’s Hamlet seems physically frozen is in the two great soliloquies: ‘To be or not to be’ and ‘How all occasions do inform against me’. In the former he is trapped in his own reflection in one of the Great Hall’s mirrored doors, in the latter he is positioned against the frozen wasteland that Fortinbras’s army is crossing on its way to Poland. In both instances that momentary stasis is quickly broken: in the first by the energy of Branagh’s attack on Ophelia after her guilty response to his query, ‘Where’s your father?’ (3.1.129) and in the second by the film’s intermission! Olivier’s Hamlet seems dreamy, passive, and abstract by comparison. Blenheim is a palace built to reward a military hero and Branagh positions a military prince within its golden stones and gilded halls. He also positions a massive military Ghost just outside the palace gates, and in so doing creates a distinct contrast with Olivier’s disembodied representation of the character. The opening frames of the film present us with a giant statue of

KENNETH BRANAGH’S HAMLET

75

Hamlet’s father and when Marcellus and Barnardo first sense the Ghost’s presence, Branagh cuts to the statue, which seems to lift its sword and begin to move, sending Marcellus, Barnardo, and Horatio reeling backwards in terror. This ghost is to be feared not for his mystery but for his looming military presence. When Hamlet comes to confront this figure he has to chase it through fog-shrouded woods, all shot through a blue filter, with the ground splitting open and spitting up the sulphurous flames of Purgatory.8 Olivier’s Hamlet is psychologically floored by his encounter with the Ghost; Branagh has to risk hellfire just to find his. When he does, Branagh’s camera captures Brian Blessed’s Ghost from a low angle perspective, further enhancing his monumental stature, but as the Ghost begins to tell his son his story, Branagh’s camera becomes fixed on Blessed’s face. This Ghost is huge and palpable rather than a creature of the shadows. Branagh’s camera remains in close-up on Blessed’s face until it cuts to a tight close-up of his mouth, then his bleeding ear, and finally his electric blue eyes as his tale unfolds. The film provides several flashbacks to a game of curls played at the palace involving the royal family as the Ghost describes Claudius’s seductive ‘gifts.’ As the Ghost reaches his judgement of his wife (‘So lust, though to a radiant angel linked . . .’ [1.5.55]) we get a quick flashcut to Claudius unlacing the strings of Gertrude’s corset. While this image must surely be one imagined by the Ghost, I think the film suggests that it is shared by Hamlet as well: father and son are now on the same illustrated emotional page about their good/bad wife and mother. When Blessed whispers ‘Remember me’ Branagh, on his knees, reaches out to take his father’s hand and, as they are about to touch, the Ghost melts away. Branagh’s Hamlet does sprawl on the ground here, momentarily overwhelmed by the Ghost’s story, but he quickly rises as his racing mind determines how he will hold his father in his memory: by making him both the subject and the author of his new identity. Branagh boldly spits out his commitment, whereas Olivier internalized

76

SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

his while gazing upwards into the fog, still searching for the vanished father.

Camera Olivier and Branagh’s contrasting use of the camera and their treatment of Hamlet’s soliloquies provide yet another illustration of their radical differences in approach and style. Olivier’s film is set on the vertical; Branagh’s on the horizontal. The crane is the most significant technical device Olivier utilizes to realize his conception; the dolly is Branagh’s. Branagh’s decision to film in 70mm meant that his film would stress the horizontal, for 70mm widens the screen and enlarges the details within the frame. As Patrick Cook points out, the higher resolution of 70mm allows closer reading of faces in the middle distance, reducing the need for conventional cutting in for a close-up to support the spoken word with visually communicated emotion . . . [this] format thus makes it easier for Branagh to film long stretches of dialogue in a single take without sacrificing the appeal of the orienting response, which camera movements can provide in a calibrated fashion.9 A fine example of Branagh’s use of his wide format, his deftly mobile camera and his experienced cast comes in Claudius’s reaction to Hamlet’s murder of Polonius. Branagh has such a powerful confidence in Derek Jacobi as an actor that he builds the scene around Jacobi’s ability to speak and move in one continuous flow of the action. In a single continuous shot, Claudius learns of the murder from Gertrude, leaves his room and crosses to hers, kneels by the pool of blood where Polonius tumbled through the arras to the floor, rises and briefly fingers the portraits of himself and his brother lying on the Queen’s bed and returns to his room to comfort his distraught wife. All of this action is contained within the

KENNETH BRANAGH’S HAMLET

77

shooting of two pages of dialogue (forty-six lines of the screenplay) without a cut. The camera tracks, pauses, circles, and retraces its path, matching Jacobi’s efficiency with its own. These are difficult shots to accomplish because they require so much running camera time, thus allowing ample opportunity for either actor or crew to miss a beat, muff a line, or mangle a mike. Branagh’s full-text screenplay includes all of Hamlet’s soliloquies and all are spoken out loud except for ‘Now I might do it pat’, which is delivered in voice-over. His practice is to shoot each speech in one continuous action without any cuts, allowing the actor the range and freedom to build and modulate the emotion and content of each soliloquy as it unfolds in space and time. He does, however, provide a different context and cinematic technique for each, making them distinct and distinctive moments in the action. In the first, ‘O that this too too solid flesh would melt’, we watch the massive crowd gathered in the Great Hall to celebrate Claudius and Gertrude’s wedding exit following the King and Queen covered in a shower of confetti.10 The camera, which has followed the exiting crowd, pivots and shoots the solitary Hamlet, in his black uniform, standing on the dais between the throne chairs. Designer Harvey sets Hamlet’s allblack attire off against the white and gold of the room and the bold bright colours of the Court party: white and gold for Gertrude and Laertes, red and gold for Claudius and Ophelia, green and gold for Polonius. This is clearly a festive occasion and Hamlet’s alienation from its high spirits is visually, as well as verbally, pronounced. Branagh begins the soliloquy trying to suppress his disgust at his mother’s rapid remarriage after the death of her husband. He moves down from the dais on ‘Fie on’t, ah, fie, ’tis an unweeded garden/that grows to seed’ (1.2.135–6) as he begins to move to his left down the room past the empty rows of bleachers recently filled with Danes loudly applauding Claudius’s apparent naming of Hamlet as his heir: ‘for let the world take note/You are the most immediate to our throne’

78

SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

(1.2.108–9). The camera dollies along beside Hamlet until he reaches ‘She married’ at which point it pivots, framing Hamlet against the massive double doors that open out into the interior rooms of the palace. As Hamlet finishes his emotionally charged outburst by promising to ‘hold his tongue’ the doors burst open as he turns back to face the camera. Branagh does not give us the expected cut here to make a clear division and distinction between the private and the public Hamlet. His Hamlet turns back to his guests as they enter the Great Hall. Once he has realized that one of them is Horatio he greets him with genuine delight. Hamlet’s bitter melancholy appears to dissipate in his warm welcome to his old university friend. The scene continues without a cut until Hamlet pulls Horatio, Marcellus, and Barnardo into his room on ‘For God’s sake let me hear!’ (1.2.195). Branagh’s technique here is to give his Hamlet full rein to reveal his emotional turbulence but also to segue from the private to the public Prince without a cinematic marker to separate the two. It’s one of the many cinematic techniques he adopts to keep his film moving even when it is overloaded with words. Branagh discovered the virtues of shooting with a steadicam in the making of his film of Much Ado about Nothing. The steadicam is a device that holds the camera when it is mounted on the camera operator’s shoulders. It allows the director and cinematographer to shoot with the freedom of movement associated with the hand-held camera – a technique favoured by an earlier generation of independent film-makers, especially the French New Wave directors like Godard, Renais, and Truffaut – without the jumps and jostles created in the image every time the cameraman moves. Unfortunately the 70mm camera Branagh had to use in filming Hamlet was too heavy to be mounted on a man’s shoulders, so his cinematographer, Alex Thompson, had a special dolly made in Italy on which to mount the camera that would allow the camera to have a freedom of movement approximating that of the steadicam.11 In the first soliloquy the dolly is moving in the open spaces of the Great Hall and we see its ability to track the solitary

KENNETH BRANAGH’S HAMLET

79

Hamlet as he moves down the room, to rotate on a tight axis when it pivots to reverse the angle of the shot, and then to circle the actors as Hamlet is joined in the scene by Horatio, Marcellus, and Bernardo. In the next soliloquy, ‘What a rogue and peasant slave am I’, the camera, by contrast, has to work in close quarters – Hamlet’s book-lined study. The room is small and crammed with things: a white mask, a drum, a globe, a sword, and most prominently a wooden version of a Pollock’s toy theatre. The camera follows the dishevelled Hamlet (his black tunic unbuttoned) as he moves along the bookshelves lacerating his own passivity with the example of the First Player’s emotion. When he reaches ‘He would drown the stage with tears’ he turns back towards the camera and opens up the toy theatre as he imagines the player making ‘mad the guilty’ with his histrionics. Branagh then moves on to the room’s only window, where he slides down to the floor in the defeated recognition that he ‘Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words/And fall a-cursing like a very drab’ (2.2.520–1) and the actor gives special vocal emphasis to ‘words’. But in this moment of collapse he generates an idea which lifts him to his feet and sends him back to the toy theatre. As the last beat of the soliloquy builds to its concluding couplet: ‘The play’s the thing/ Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King’ (2.2.539–40), the camera shoots through the rear of the theatre to Hamlet’s face framed by the proscenium. Between camera and character is the stage and toy figure of a king whom Hamlet dispatches to ‘the other place’ via the trapdoor. Branagh films the entire sequence without a cut. In this instance, however, he’s trapped in a tiny room and finds himself at an emotional impasse. In Branagh’s conception, the verbal lacerations that open Hamlet’s soliloquy eventually have their answer in the same venue: the theatre – another small room designed specifically for the release of huge emotions and murderous actions. Olivier, as we have seen, placed his version of the ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy after his emotional encounter with Ophelia

80

SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

in the ‘nunnery’ scene. After his savage, misogynistic attack on female duplicity: ‘God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another’ (3.1.142), he dashes up the winding staircase, seeking solace but finding instead the sea crashing on the rugged coast below in echo of troubled thoughts hammering away in his mind. Branagh, by contrast, embeds his Hamlet in the world of Claudius’s Machiavellian statecraft. Thinking he is alone, he delivers his thoughts to his reflection captured in one of the Great Hall’s mirrored doors; the very one behind which Claudius and Polonius have hidden to spy on Hamlet through a two-way mirror. Kate Winslet’s Ophelia is also present, abandoned in the shadows in the rear of the hall because her father and the King have rushed for cover on Hamlet’s entrance. Mirror shots are tricky (how do you keep the camera and its host of operators from also being caught in the reflection?) but are an imaginative device for translating the stage convention of the soliloquy into cinematic terms. Orson Welles uses one in a crucial moment in his Othello (1952) and Trevor Nunn also does so for Viola’s soliloquy in his film of Twelfth Night (1995). Branagh’s delivery of the speech is a quiet, determined, philosophical investigation rather than Olivier’s dreamy distracted reverie. When Olivier’s Hamlet pulls out his dagger on ‘might his quietus make/with a bare bodkin . . .’ (3.1.74–5) it slips out of his hand and tumbles down into the sea below: a gesture of Hamlet’s impotence and castration anxiety. When Branagh’s Hamlet pulls out his dagger we are given a quick reaction shot of Claudius and Polonius flinching behind the mirror. This Hamlet is potentially lethal and to be watched because he is also to be feared. When the soliloquy begins the camera shoots over Hamlet’s back and shoulder to capture his image in the mirror. As the speech progresses the camera slowly closes in so that finally we see Hamlet only in reflection, appropriate for representing his most reflective moment in the text. But the mirror also works to remind us how much Branagh’s Hamlet sees himself, or potential versions of himself, reflected in the many alter-egos

KENNETH BRANAGH’S HAMLET

81

Shakespeare’s full text provides him: Fortinbras, Horatio, Laertes, even Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Most significantly it provides Branagh with another imaginative cinematic technique to bring Hamlet and Claudius into conjunction with each other. In looks, dress, and manner they are twins as well as ‘mighty opposites’. Because Branagh emphasizes the political dimensions of Hamlet’s tragedy, his version of the play is more concerned with fathers than mothers. Olivier’s film concentrates on Hamlet’s relationship with his mother and his father’s ghost; Claudius plays a peripheral role. Branagh’s Hamlet, by contrast, is obsessed with Jacobi’s Claudius and the film repeatedly finds cinematic ways of linking them. In fact as Branagh’s Hamlet is presented with an array of contemporary alter-egos so is he surrounded by complicated father figures including the Ghost, Claudius, the First Player, and even Priam. The culmination of the film’s interesting twinning of Hamlet and Claudius comes in the scene of Claudius’s confession and Hamlet’s opportunity to ‘do it pat’. In the first three soliloquies the dolly was director Branagh’s key cinematic resource. He now abandons it and turns to other technical devices to capture the next two: ‘Now I might do it pat’ and ‘How all occasions do inform against me’. Branagh treats ‘Now I might do it pat’ in the most intimate manner. Claudius has retreated to the confessional booth in his chapel to deliver his ruminations about his sins. He sits facing the camera rather than the Christ-on-the-cross figure on the wall behind him or the confessional screen. Branagh’s Hamlet slips into the priest’s side of the booth (here playing both scourge and minister) and slides his dagger through the screen, aimed at Claudius’s left ear. There’s a quick cut where Hamlet imagines the dagger penetrating that ear as if adapting the biblical injunction, ‘an ear for an ear’, and then he quickly withdraws the instrument when he realizes that killing Claudius at prayer would be ‘hire and salary, not revenge’ (3.3.79). Here Branagh, for only the second time in his film, employs voice-over as he imagines and recounts the conditions under

82

SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

which he would kill Claudius: ‘When he is drunk asleep, or in his rage,/Or in the incestuous pleasure of his bed,/At game a-swearing, or about some act/That has no relish of salvation in’t . . .’ (3.3.89–92). Branagh treats this moment as if it were a companion scene to his encounter with his other father – the Ghost. Then, as the Ghost told the story of his brother’s personal (the Queen) and political (the crown) treachery, Branagh held the camera in tight close-up on Brian Blessed’s mouth and eyes and also used flashbacks that illustrated the murder and Claudius’s sly attentions to Gertrude as the royal family competed at a game of curls. In the confessional, Branagh now holds the camera in tight close-up on Hamlet’s left eye and provides flashbacks to Claudius’s lascivious behaviour: downing cups of Rhenish, murdering old Hamlet, unlacing Gertrude’s corset, and chasing her into her bedroom, climaxing wassail with rouse. Olivier’s film was focused on Hamlet’s relationship with the Ghost and with Gertrude and paid scant attention to Hamlet’s struggle with Claudius for political power. Branagh’s film makes it repeatedly clear that his Hamlet is caught between two powerful fathers: one who won’t stay dead, the other who remains annoyingly alive. They both insist: remember me. Branagh’s film makes the interesting suggestion that Claudius’s jealousy of his older brother extends not just to coveting his crown and his Queen but to his son as well. According to Russell Jackson’s diary account of the filming of Branagh’s Hamlet, when the great French actor Gerard Depardieu (who plays Reynaldo) arrived on the set to shoot his scene he became the first of many to be struck by the uncanny physical resemblance between Derek Jacobi’s Claudius and Branagh’s Hamlet.12 Branagh’s Shakespearean career has been intimately linked with Jacobi. He first saw Hamlet as a teenager when he took the train from Reading to Oxford to see Jacobi’s performance of the prince and it was that experience that inspired Branagh to want to be a classical actor. A decade later he invited Jacobi to direct him in a stage production of Hamlet for his Renaissance Theatre Company.

KENNETH BRANAGH’S HAMLET

83

Jacobi then played Chorus in Branagh’s film of Henry V (1989) and the villain in Branagh’s first Hollywood film, Dead Again (1991). Jacobi was the young actor’s inspiration and mentor, but also a stand-in, as Peter S. Donaldson suggests, for Olivier and an older generation of British classical actors whose work Branagh was challenging.13 Branagh’s Hamlet, in looks and manners, bears a much closer resemblance to Jacobi’s Claudius than Blessed’s King. Blessed is a big bear of a man and his Hamlet features a wide lecherous grin and a boisterous personality. Jacobi’s Claudius is by far the smoother and more subtle man: he suggests Nicholas II rather than Peter the Great. Jacobi’s Claudius is tough to oppose and eliminate not just because he has killed Hamlet’s father and married his mother but because he’s Branagh’s mentor as well. In fact, Branagh has had to kill him on film once before in the chaotic conclusion of Dead Again, where the actor is impaled on a giant pair of shears. Blessed is also closely intertwined with Branagh’s biography and career. Blessed played Exeter in Branagh’s film of Henry V where his importance as a guide to the young King was cinematically enhanced in ways not suggested in the text. Blessed was less a mentor to Branagh than a boisterous older brother cracking jokes on the set and challenging some of the director’s ideas. He served as best man at Branagh’s wedding to Emma Thompson and became one of the regulars in the core company of actors who appear in many of Branagh’s films. Only some of this history can be hinted at in the way in which Branagh positions his Hamlet between these two powerful forces, his own artistic development, and Shakespeare’s text. What Branagh’s film does suggest is that there is as much interesting resonance between 1.5 and 3.3 (Hamlet’s encounter with the Ghost and then with Claudius) as critics have long established exists between 3.1 and 3.4 (Hamlet’s encounters with Ophelia and Gertrude before and after ‘The Mousetrap’). Branagh’s handling of the last soliloquy (‘How all occasions do inform against me’) reverses the landscape and cinematic

84

SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

pattern of ‘To be or not to be’. There he was embedded in the deep interior of Claudius’s Court world as the camera closed in on his mirrored reflection, with Claudius and Polonius hidden behind the two-way mirrored door that he addressed. In ‘How all occasions’ – the soliloquy Olivier shot but ultimately edited out of his film – the impasse of being trapped in Claudius’s court gives way to the expanse of the barren frozen landscape Fortinbras and his troops are crossing on their way to fight over a little patch of Poland that ‘hath in it no profit but the name’ (4.4.18). Here in the film’s most hyperbolic shot, Branagh provides an homage to Olivier’s notion that for Shakespeare’s big speeches the director must reverse film’s natural flow from long shot to close-up. In one long uninterrupted crane shot the camera begins in close-up on Hamlet’s face, gradually pulls away as the speech builds, and finally zooms back – as Doyle’s score intensifies on the soundtrack – so that Hamlet is just a black speck against the wilderness as he throws his arms out wide on ‘O, from this time forth,/My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth’ (4.4.64–5). Branagh is aware of the chances he is taking here; even Alex Thompson, his director of photography, thought his handling of this soliloquy was over the top.14 Branagh regards the shot not as a celebration but as a critique of the character. Too often, for Branagh, Hamlet has the actor’s talent for both being ‘in the moment and observing himself’, and that divided perspective too often retards rather than releases his powers.15 As Branagh has commented: Here’s a man [Hamlet] of grand passions where, in small rooms and with great intensity, his situation and his reaction to it can fill this vast screen and yet in a moment.  . . he can see himself as a very small part of a very large picture that is almost overwhelming.16 Branagh’s treatment of Hamlet’s last soliloquy incorporates a visual translation of Hamlet’s understanding of how quickly

KENNETH BRANAGH’S HAMLET

85

man, although the paragon of animals reaching towards the angelic, can be reduced to a ‘quintessence of dust’. It also reinforces the tension in the text between Hamlet as actor and agent and in the film between Branagh as director and star. Branagh’s varied cinematic handling of the soliloquies has been an imaginative mingling of text and technology, allowing him to retain all those ‘words’ without bringing his film to a halt: in each instance, with the use of a dolly or crane, he makes the camera an integral partner with the actor in the expression of Shakespeare’s text.

Flashcuts and flashbacks Elsewhere in his film Branagh uses other film devices, primarily the flashcut and the flashback, to allow the visual to complement the verbal. In some instances he employs these film conventions to augment our awareness of character (as in the case of Fortinbras), to complicate a relationship (Gertrude and Claudius; Hamlet and Ophelia), to illustrate a described action (Danish war preparations; the Trojan War), or to underline a memory (Hamlet and Yorick). Interestingly Branagh avoids providing versions of the three flashbacks Olivier included in his film: Hamlet’s visit to Ophelia’s room after seeing the Ghost; Ophelia’s drowning; and Hamlet’s abortive sea journey to England. I have already mentioned the prominence Branagh’s film gives to Fortinbras to reinforce the larger political issues alive in the full text. Early in the narrative Fortinbras’s image is visually implanted in our minds by flashcuts to his activities when his military ‘stirrings’ against Denmark are mentioned by Horatio and then Claudius. Branagh doesn’t want us to forget Fortinbras, because he represents the political and military pressures exerted on Denmark by a powerful young figure provoked by old grudges and past conflicts between Norway and Denmark. Branagh’s film translates these tensions from Scandinavia to early twentieth-century Europe as several

86

SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

nineteenth-century dynastic empires collided in the Balkans, precipitating the First World War. Branagh was aware that such grudges were again alive in the Balkans, following the break-up of Tito’s Yugoslavia at the end of the Cold War, precisely at the moment he was planning and making his film. With Fortinbras, Branagh uses the flashcut and flashback to enrich the political texture of the film; later, with Hamlet and Ophelia, he will use the same technique to complicate their private relationship. Just as ambiguities in Shakespeare’s text allow us to wonder if Claudius and Gertrude have had an affair before the murder of the King (the Ghost calls Claudius ‘that adultrous beast’), so a similar mystery exists about the romantic relationship between Hamlet and Ophelia. Stage productions can, depending on the intimacy displayed between the two in the opening lines of the ‘nunnery’ scene, suggest the degree to which their affection is physical, but Branagh’s film is the only production I know – with the exception of Sherwood Hu’s recent Prince of the Himalayas (2006) and surely influenced in its treatment of Hamlet and Ophelia by Branagh’s film – that makes it absolutely clear that they are lovers.17 Ophelia’s decision to consummate their relationship enriches and deepens her psychological and political reality. She is an agent willing to betray her father and succour her lover rather than a passive pawn being used in Polonius’s power game. When she is rejected by Hamlet their previous physical intimacy raises the emotional consequences of her collapse. But the same independence of mind that led her into Hamlet’s arms reasserts itself in her own efforts to free herself (hiding the key to her cell in her mouth when undergoing the violent water-therapy) from Claudius’s control. Branagh shoots Polonius’s advice to Laertes in the palace’s chapel. When Laertes leaves, Polonius shuts the chapel’s iron gates and turns his attention on the trapped Ophelia as he hectors her about her relationship with Hamlet. As she defends herself by speaking of Hamlet’s ‘Many tenders/Of his affection to me’ the film makes a quick flashcut to their love-making. Branagh makes another such quick cut when Polonius

KENNETH BRANAGH’S HAMLET

87

confesses that ‘I do know,/When the blood burns, how prodigal the soul/Lends the tongue vows’ (1.3.115–17), thus linking the prying father and the passionate daughter. His erotic imagination has caught the reality, though without any understanding of his daughter’s genuine love for Hamlet. The film suggests that Ophelia has given herself to Hamlet not out of lust or revolt but out of innocence. She is trying to ease his pain over his father’s sudden death. Ophelia’s confusion and guilt are created not by her intimacy with her lover but by her brother and father when they regard her ‘tenders of affection’ as either naive or corrupt. The film provides another extra-textual moment in 2.1 where the scene between Polonius and Reynaldo (Gerard Depardieu) begins with Polonius getting dressed after his encounter with a prostitute (who remains in the scene huddled in the background wrapped in the bed sheets before Polonius nods her away). She may be a Danish tart but it is clear she has been supplied by a French pimp and her presence helps explain Polonius’s automatic association of love and lust. Branagh provides one more interesting use of the flashcut to flesh out the Hamlet–Ophelia relationship. Polonius brings Ophelia with him to his meeting with Claudius and Gertrude to reveal what he believes to be his discovery of Hamlet’s madness. Rather than having Polonius read Hamlet’s love letter, as in the text, here Polonius insists that Ophelia do so. She begins but quickly breaks off in embarrassment and leaves the room. Polonius now continues the letter but a flashcut brings us back to a post-coital Hamlet and Ophelia where it is Hamlet who now speaks the lines of the letter, beginning with ‘O dear Ophelia, I am ill at these numbers’ (2.2.119). The breaking up of the letter with the intruding patriarch positioning himself between the lovers (even as he does between the King and Queen) signals the break-up of Hamlet and Ophelia soon to be made manifest in the nunnery scene, where Ophelia becomes a pawn in the power struggle between Hamlet and Claudius; the public and political squashing the private and personal.

88

SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

The flashcuts also serve Branagh’s epic purposes by enlarging the narrative. They provide a parallel visual version to the dialogue, tracking from Hamlet and Ophelia’s love-making to Claudius’s murder of the King, to the royal family’s playing curls, to Fortinbras’s moves to reclaim his father’s lost military legacy, to Yorick’s entertaining of young Hamlet, and finally to the deep past and the Trojan War itself as the film cuts from the First Player’s speech to Priam and Hecuba in Troy’s ruins. This ability to instantaneously move about in time is virtually impossible on the stage but comes naturally to film. Branagh combines shooting in 70mm, using Blenheim Palace for exteriors and employing a vast number of flashcuts as a means of opening up and expanding the Hamlet narrative outwards in time and in space. Olivier seeks deep focus; Branagh the wide angle.

Landscape and atmosphere Olivier’s Elsinore is an empty space. It is, appropriately for the director’s intentions, a castle of the mind consisting of several symbolic landscapes: a high platform, a winding staircase, the Queen’s bed, a long corridor, and a brook. No courtiers move in its halls; no servants minister to the mighty; no material objects – except for Osric’s hat, a wine cup, the Players’ paraphernalia (including a little-noticed spaniel), a dagger, and fencing swords – clutter its world. Branagh’s Elsinore, by contrast, is fully inhabited. Servants polish boots and pour tea, whisky and brandy; diplomats receive written instructions and return with replies; the Great Hall is packed for the opening court scene with the aristocrats on risers and the bourgeoisie up in the balcony; fencers practise both inside and outside of the palace; Hamlet’s room (as previously mentioned) is crammed with books, a globe, a death mask, a drum and a toy theatre; Gertrude’s bedroom features trompe l’oeil Veronese-esque wall paintings and her own easel with a partially finished canvas; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern

KENNETH BRANAGH’S HAMLET

89

enjoy themselves riding about on Blenheim’s model train and move easily between the Great Hall and Claudius’s private rooms where his brandy snifter is always being replenished. Branagh’s Elsinore is not only a family residence but a fully functioning political court. That court is destabilized by three visitors: the Ghost, the Players and, in the final frames, Fortinbras’s army. All three participate in the way in which the past pressures the present in the film. The Ghost places the pressure of an heroic military legacy on his son in his desire for revenge; the Players bring the subversive power of drama to pressure Claudius’s conscience; and the single-minded Fortinbras leads his army crashing into Elsinore to collect the rewards of Hamlet’s coup d’état. It is the arrival of the Players that galvanizes Hamlet. Their example suggests to him a way of transforming his own histrionic tendencies into political action. Branagh’s Hamlet, disgusted with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s betrayal, lights up when he greets the Players. Branagh also reinforces his film’s epic impulse by casting Hollywood’s leading epic actor, Charlton Heston, as the First Player. Heston, famous for his portrayals of figures like Moses, Ben-Hur and El Cid and known in the industry as ‘Old Stone Face’, gives a remarkably warm and vulnerable performance as the First Player. He is aided by Branagh’s repeated low-angle camera shots increasing his size and prominence and his own deep, whisky- and cigarette-stained voice. Branagh has been at pains to stress Hamlet’s princely qualities: he is warm and sincere with his friends, interested in the military training underway in Claudius’s court, tender with Ophelia until he believes she has betrayed him, and formal in his manners and bearing. One might wonder about his performance in the first hour of the film: where’s the rub? Where are the potentially tragic qualities of the character? In one sense Branagh is working on the notion, counter to Olivier’s ‘one fatal flaw’ theory, that tragic heroes fall because of their virtues rather than their vices; or that their virtues, taken to excess, become flaws so that the two are tragically

90

SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

intertwined. Hamlet’s native intelligence, his ability to see the consequences of potential choices, his growing scepticism, his understandable desire to provoke Claudius to confess and thus to be subject to state justice rather than having to kill him himself as a rogue revenger, his desire to maintain a ‘perfect conscience’ all conspire to contribute to his tragedy. Branagh does give his Hamlet another quality that provides a potentially subversive side to his portrait of the ideal prince: a delight in mockery. It is clear that Branagh’s Hamlet puts on his ‘antic disposition’ because it allows him to cast his ‘nighted colour off’ and momentarily abandon his psychological and political burden. There’s never a moment where we are meant to wonder if Branagh’s Hamlet is actually mad; not even when he kills Polonius, though that is the moment when his mockery is out of control and lethal. Hamlet, of course, displays his bitter wit in his first line in the play: ‘A little more than kin, and less than kind!’ (1.2.65) which he utters to himself as an aside (and a voice-over in the film), not yet willing to publicly challenge Claudius’s slick attempt to recreate the happy royal family now with himself at the centre. That wit largely stays bottled up until he can turn it on Polonius in the ‘fishmonger’ exchange, which Branagh initiates by popping his face, encased in a skeleton’s mask, around a column as Polonius approaches. The mask indicates Branagh knows that Hamlet’s wit is diseased and that he cannot resist giving it full rein to baffle ‘these tedious old fools’ (2.2.214). The arrival of the Players further inspires Branagh’s Hamlet to become deeply attached to his new mode of performance; a new means of negotiating a corrupt world. Branagh’s Hamlet follows this arc from the conception of ‘The Mousetrap’ through to his confrontation with Claudius following the murder of Polonius and his attack on Gertrude’s compromised morals. He falls in love with his new persona. The engine that drives Branagh’s performance remains his emotional disgust and outrage at betrayal (by his uncle, his mother, his lover and his one-time university friends) but the mode of its expression becomes an antic disposition that verges on the carnivalesque.

KENNETH BRANAGH’S HAMLET

91

Branagh’s Hamlet becomes a Lord of Misrule dressed in black: his wit becomes his weapon. That wit is alive in his advice to the Players. It is perhaps fitting that when he comes to remind the clowns to ‘speak no more than is set down for them’ (3.2.37) he selects a young member of the company (whom the screenplay describes as a ‘cheekie chappie’) to instruct: instinctively associating the clown’s role with a young man like himself.18 As his emotions rise as the play approaches, his wit again turns dark and misogynistic, as he embarrasses Ophelia in front of the court audience with his bawdy innuendos, even turning his answer to what is ‘a fair thought to lie between maids’ legs?’ from one word ‘nothing’ into two: ‘no thing’ (3.2.114) to ram home his sophomoric joke. The makeshift auditorium constructed for The Murder of Gonzago is steeply raked. Branagh’s Hamlet is so keyed-up that he races up and down the aisle interrupting and interpreting the action. Finally he cannot resist joining the play and seizing the vial of poison from Lucianus just as he begins to pour it into the Duke’s ear. As Branagh’s Hamlet begins to perform that action, Claudius rises, takes a long pause to collect himself, and quietly says: ‘Give me some light. Away!’ (3.2.261). Branagh does not give us a direct confrontation between Hamlet and the King here, as opposed to Olivier’s wonderful device of twirling a torch in front of Claudius’s face as if to say: ‘You want light. Here it is: alive and dangerous.’ Branagh’s Hamlet, by contrast, seems less concentrated on Claudius than on the release of his manic behaviour. He doesn’t lightly toy with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern when they toady up to him but gives them a full blast of his repressed humour. He needles and wheedles; plays his mouth into exaggerated pouts and poses; throws in a bit of Groucho Marx and uses the recorder as a weapon (held from the back across Guildenstern’s throat) as well as an object lesson. His wit segues into actual anger on ‘you would pluck out the heart of my mystery . . . ’sblood, do you think I am easier played upon than a pipe?’ (3.2.355; 360–1). Only Polonius’s arrival saves

92

SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

him from exploding, for now he can return to sending up the old man with the clown’s mocking banter about the shape of the clouds. Branagh’s encounter with Julie Christie’s Gertrude is not the moment that his film, unlike Olivier’s, points to and pivots on. Branagh’s film is father–brother rather than mother–lover centred. This is not to deny that Hamlet’s father-centred struggle to achieve a unique, independent identity has strong Freudian undertones. Branagh’s film, concentrating on the struggles between fathers and sons, manages to merge the psychological with the political. Though Freud’s version of ego psychology was a powerful therapeutic method at mid-century, it had largely been surpassed by drug therapies by the 1990s. But Freud remained an important voice in literary studies in the works of eminent Shakespeareans like Janet Adelman, Harold Bloom, C. L. Barber, Marjorie Garber and Richard Wheeler.19 Branagh’s insistence on the ghost’s centrality to Hamlet’s tragedy echoes Barber and Wheeler’s understanding of the way in which Hamlet’s inability to bury his dead father and move beyond his imperious commands into his own mature personal and political identity is at the heart of the character’s dilemma: Hamlet dramatizes a crisis centered on identification with the murdered, heroic father who returns to demand that the son vindicate his heritage. Everything hinges on the protagonist’s struggle to inherit, his effort to identify himself totally with his father’s command. But identification with the father, instead of leading Hamlet out into the vengeful action to which he dedicates himself, blocks his purpose. In Hamlet, Shakespeare sets up the problem of the transmission of heritage in a radically disruptive way, in a way that blocks its own full expression, so that the play exemplifies the crisis it sets out to dramatize.20 Branagh’s Hamlet’s encounter with Gertrude is angry and powerful but not driven by forbidden sexual attraction. He

KENNETH BRANAGH’S HAMLET

93

never assaults his mother. He sits her down on her bed while he paces in a semi-circle around her. The only time they are on the bed together is when he kneels behind her to show her the pictures of her former and current husbands. Julie Christie is a ravishingly beautiful woman but her countenance throughout the scene is wasted and wan: she seems torn between genuinely believing her son is mad and a growing realization of her own complicity in his behaviour. Appropriately, given Branagh’s intentions, the most startling moment in the scene (after the murder of Polonius) is the appearance of Brian Blessed’s Ghost. When Hamlet first sees him we get a point-of-view shot of the Ghost’s palpable presence. The shot holds him in full image wrapped in a grey cloak: there is nothing vague, misty, or mysterious about him. He does, however, begin to fade away so that when Hamlet finally convinces Gertrude to look on him and she raises her eyes from her son the Ghost is gone. This scene, in Branagh’s version, is about many things: anger, shame, disgust, sin, repentance, and chastisement but only marginally about repressed sexual desire. The arc of Branagh’s mocking behaviour continues through his encounter (and momentary escape from in a brilliantly shot sequence) with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern coming to a conclusion when he provokes a vicious slap across the face from Claudius when describing ‘how a King can go a progress through the guts of a beggar’ (4.3.30). This is the last moment where Branagh plays the clown speaking wit to power. Hamlet has failed to play his part in Claudius’s narrative, preferring the clown’s role where he clearly violates his own advice by repeatedly speaking more than is set down for him, constantly impeding ‘some necessary question of the play then to be considered’ (3.2.40–41). When Branagh’s Hamlet returns from England he has shed his black military uniform for the traveller’s casual tan and beige; his wit no longer bites and he is content, even happy, to play the straight man to the Gravedigger. In fact Branagh’s Hamlet seems to have found his ‘fellowship of players’ in the

94

SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

quartet of Horatio, the Gravedigger, and Yorick. He’s happy to cede the clown’s role to the Gravedigger and to the memory of old Yorick (in the film’s final flashback where the young mop-headed Hamlet is being whirled about on Yorick’s back) and to commit himself to taking Horatio’s evenhandedness as a model. Branagh places Ophelia’s grave in the same wintry woods (shot with the same blue filter) where he had earlier pursued his father’s ghost. The linkage is significant because in this scene Hamlet reconciles himself with death, publicly announces his identity as King (‘This is I,/Hamlet the Dane’ [my italics]), and declares his love for Ophelia. Having been pushed to the periphery by Claudius’s usurpation, Hamlet now reclaims the centre by jumping in Ophelia’s grave in response to Laertes’s exaggerated hyperbole. Branagh’s Hamlet has regained his equilibrium and his ability to act within the world, rather than merely to comment cleverly from its edges.

Hamlet and fin de siècle The national crisis and private tragedy that Branagh’s epic film has structured move on parallel tracks and come crashing in and down together in the movie’s final scene. The Great Hall is the setting for the fencing match and Branagh provides us with the longest and most expansive version of the Hamlet–Laertes confrontation that we have on film. As the duel mounts in intensity Branagh cross-cuts to Fortinbras’s army charging toward Elsinore over a snow-covered landscape, evoking images of the storming of the Winter Palace. Fortinbras has swallowed up the bit of Poland he had invaded and, like all military adventurists, that taste of success has sweetened his desire for more. When the duel turns bloody and fatal Laertes points his finger at Claudius. Hamlet is up on the ornate bridge which links the two sides of the Great Hall’s balcony and Branagh provides him with a moment to rival Olivier’s famous dive down onto Basil Sydney’s Claudius. In a gesture equally

KENNETH BRANAGH’S HAMLET

95

evocative of Errol Flynn, Branagh whistles his rapier through the air and down into the retreating Claudius’s back. He then sends the Hall’s huge central chandelier crashing down to pin Claudius to his throne as Branagh swings down on its rope in fast pursuit. Within seconds Fortinbras’s troops come smashing through the gilded room’s sparkling windows and mirrored doors. It is hyperbolic sequences like this, the opening and closing shots of Much Ado about Nothing (1993) and the fourminute tracking shot after the battle of Agincourt in Henry V where the king carries the body of Falstaff’s page back across the battlefield piled high with dead bodies that many Shakespeareans find cinematically embarrassing. But they exhibit the energy and daring of Branagh’s film style; he is willing to risk much, if not all, on such Hollywood moments. As Branagh has quipped about the duel sequence in Hamlet: ‘I’m making six films at once. This one is Die Hard.’21 The film’s final frames cut between the impassive face of Rufus Sewell’s Fortinbras, now in control of the country; an overhead shot of Hamlet, with his arms thrown out Christlike, being carried by the soldiers out of the Great Hall; and the giant statue of Old Hamlet being toppled in front of Elsinore’s gates. Patrick Cook sees clearly how Branagh’s film presents a compelling visual account of how quickly and decisively Fortinbras takes over in Elsinore: He enters through the familiar doorway from the royal quarters, implying that he has already usurped the private domain . . . His series of point-of-view shots, including a tracking subjective shot that brings him into the room and a pan of the carnage, is unique in the film, communicating a kind of dominance unseen before. He seats himself in the king’s chair. . . . A crown is quickly placed on his head [and] . . . he asserts ‘rights of memory in this kingdom/Which now to claim my vantage doth invite me’ (5.2.373–4). His ‘vantage’ becomes a new Shakespearean pun linking conquest to the cinematic means that express it.22

96

SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

The political and private strands of Shakespeare’s text are being united here, and while Branagh sets his play at the turn of the nineteenth century, he is aware that the image of the statue being toppled brings the film decisively into our own age: ‘The image at the end of the statue being pulled down was obviously one familiar to us from Eastern Europe.’23 Branagh’s explanation of the film’s historical setting allows him to connect his version of the play’s public politics with the private struggle of its hero. Branagh’s Hamlet is under intense pressure to recreate and redefine a once-secure identity shattered by his father’s murder and his mother’s remarriage. He undergoes a process of shifting psychological demands as he negotiates the loss of father, mother, lover and friends. His fate is linked, in Branagh’s understanding, with Denmark’s: The story of the nineteenth century when it came to wars was one of constantly shifting boundaries: countries being created and then being obliterated and empires constantly shifting their borders. There was a volatility to the fate, the expansion, the diminishing of nations across that time.24 Branagh’s description of the political instability of late nineteenth-century Europe might well also serve as a mirror for Hamlet’s own fractured psyche, with its shifting boundaries and borders. Branagh’s full-text epic version of the play speaks to its historical moment just as Olivier’s more private and inward-turning treatment reflected Britain and America at the outset of the Cold War. The two films maintain a lively dialogue with one another over the fifty years which separate their making. Olivier, perhaps, gives us less of Hamlet and Hamlet than we would prefer and Branagh, for some, too much of each, but between them they have made the two Hamlet films by which all others have been and will be measured.

KENNETH BRANAGH’S HAMLET

97

Notes 1 Anthony Dawson, Hamlet. Text and Performance Series (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), p. 175. 2 Kenneth Rothwell, A History of Shakespeare on Screen: A Century of Film and Television (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 55. 3 Sarah Hatchuel, Shakespeare, from Stage to Screen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 146–7. 4 ‘Farouche’ is Russell Jackson’s term. He described Sewell as arriving on the set ‘looking a farouche in his day clothes as he does [in the film] at the head of the army’. ‘The Film Diary’ in Kenneth Branagh, Hamlet: Screenplay, Introduction, and Film Diary (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), p. 190. 5 Quoted in Sarah Hatchuel’s A Companion to the Shakespearean Films of Kenneth Branagh (Winnipeg: Blizzard Publishing, 2000), p. 29. 6 Sijbold Tonkens, ‘Interview with Patrick Doyle, Film Score (www.filmscoremonthly.com/features/sijbold3.asp), 15 November 2011. 7 Samuel Crowl, The Films of Kenneth Branagh (Westport, CT and London: Praeger, 2006), pp. 174–5. 8 The Ghost scene was a problematic moment in the film for Branagh. See my interview with him: ‘Communicating Shakespeare: An Interview with Kenneth Branagh,’ Shakespeare Bulletin, 20, 3 (Summer, 2002), 27. 9 Patrick Cook, Cinematic Hamlet: The Films of Olivier, Zeffirelli, Branagh, and Almereyda (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2011), pp. 106–07. 10 Branagh’s film of Much Ado about Nothing closed with a cascade of confetti celebrating the approaching nuptials of Hero and Claudio, Beatrice and Benedick. In Hamlet he opens the second scene in the film with such a celebration that quickly unravels and turns deadly. Comedies end with marriages; tragedies begin with them. 11 Personal interview with Alex Thompson, London, 25 October 2004.

98

SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

12 Jackson, ‘The Film Diary’, p. 182. 13 Peter S. Donaldson, ‘Taking on Shakespeare: Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 42 (Spring 1991), p. 62. 14 Alex Thompson, London, 25 October 2004. 15 Crowl, ‘Communicating Shakespeare’, p. 26. 16 Ibid., p. 27. 17 Branagh, Hamlet by William Shakespeare, p. 84. 18 Ibid. 19 See Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers (London: Routledge, 1992), C. L. Barber and Richard Wheeler, The Whole Journey: Shakespeare’s Power of Development (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986), Harold Bloom, Shakespeare:The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverside Books, 1998), and Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All (New York: Pantheon Books, 2004). 20 Barber and Wheeler, The Whole Journey, p. 242. 21 Jackson, ‘The Film Diary’, p. 205. 22 Cook, Cinematic Hamlet, pp. 157–8. 23 Crowl, ‘Communicating Shakespeare’, p. 26. 24 Ibid., p. 28.

4 Critical responses and the afterlife of text and film

Hamlet’s afterlife is inescapable: it has become not only Shakespeare’s signature work but also the most read and performed dramatic text in Western culture. Even in our own media-saturated world of mass entertainment Hamlet remains alive even to those who have never read or seen it. Mention the play to the world and the world responds: ‘To be or not to be’. Hamlet has been adopted and adapted by every generation to suit the form and pressure of the times. In our own age Hamlet has been conceived as everything from a passive melancholic romantic to a heady radical freedom fighter and everything in between. The play has sparked countless imitations, adaptations, spin-offs, including, most recently, an Arabic version in which Ophelia, challenging Hamlet’s indecision, becomes a jihadist.1 The Hamlet story informs classic modern novels as famous as James Joyce’s Ulysses and as popular as David Wroblewski’s recent Edgar Sawtelle. Less successfully the play has been turned into more than a dozen operas, but Hamlet resists going into operatic conventions and none have become regulars in the repertory. Film, however, is another story. Hamlet is the Shakespeare play most often transformed into screen versions. Kenneth Rothwell lists two dozen sound film or video productions.2 99

100

SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

Olivier’s Hamlet: Afterlife Olivier’s Hamlet was the first sound film of the play and has reached, in the sixty years since its release, iconic and canonic status. The film was made by the leading British Shakespearean actor of the twentieth century just as he was emerging from the shadow of his friend and rival, John Gielgud. Though Olivier had established himself as a great classical actor and a Hollywood leading man (starring as Heathcliff in William Wyler’s Wuthering Heights [1938] and as Maxim de Winter in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca [1940]) before the Second World War, it was the success of his first two Shakespeare films, Henry V (1944) and especially Hamlet (1948), that made him an international star. Hamlet won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1948 and Olivier won the Oscar for Best Actor for his performance of the prince. Made for a budget of £500,000 or approximately US$2,000,000, the film was expensive for its time. The marketing of the film established a pattern for Shakespeare movies emphasizing the film’s romance, spectacle and adventure and targeting high school and college students. The souvenir programme, included in the Laurence Olivier Hamlet archives at the British Film Library, reveals that the Rank Organization, the film’s producer, was in advance of its time in creating a series of commercial tie-ins, anticipating the marketing of Walt Disney animated films or block-buster series like the Star Wars or Harry Potter franchises. Pollock’s Toy Theatre produced a souvenir book, a model Hamlet theatre, and small lead statues of Hamlet and Ophelia. Argosy China produced ceramic figures of Hamlet, Ophelia, Gertrude, and Claudius. The woman’s fashion store chain, Doleis, featured ‘Ophelia’ sandals with a matching handbag and scarf. The press book trumpeted: Hamlet was ‘the greatest drama in world literature’. ‘The film’, it continued, was ‘the achievement of England’s finest actor and most imaginative director, [and] is now offered to the world in the sure belief that it will take its place among the historic presentations of this historic drama.’3

CRITICAL RESPONSES AND THE AFTERLIFE

101

The Rank Organization had its eye squarely on the expanding post-Second World War global film market. The film participated in the general post-war boom in cultural festivals in Europe, England, and North America, which almost always had Shakespeare as a central focus. Olivier’s film of Henry V, meant to rally his countrymen as the Allies prepared to invade France and break the Nazi occupation of Europe, was intimately related to the war. His Hamlet was a cultural present to the post-war world meant to champion both Shakespeare as an artist and film as an art form that belonged to the world. Olivier’s Hamlet quickly became the standard for excellence in translating Shakespeare to the screen. American artists from Mark Twain to John McTiernan have found Shakespeare, and especially Hamlet, fertile soil for parody. Twain, in fact, places his wonderful Hamlet parody at the very centre of the signature American novel, Huckleberry Finn (1885). Almost a century later another classic American novel, J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951), found Olivier and his film of Hamlet appropriate elite fodder for Holden Caulfield’s ironic anti-establishment voice: I don’t see what’s so marvelous about Sir Laurence Olivier, that’s all. He has a terrific voice, and he’s a helluva handsome guy, and he’s very nice to watch when he’s walking or dueling or something, but he wasn’t at all the way D. B. said Hamlet was. He was too much like a goddam general, instead of a sad, screwed-up type guy.4 In a mere three years Olivier’s film had become so much a part of the cultural landscape that Salinger, through Holden, can already be making cracks at the way the film captures the tension between the commanding director-star Olivier and the ‘sad, screwed-up type guy’ he’s meant to be portraying. Forty-five years later a postmodern version of Holden, Last Action Hero’s (1993) Danny Madigan, found Olivier’s Hamlet more of a passive wimp, in need of rescue by Arnold Schwarzenegger, than a ‘goddam general’. As recounted in an

102

SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

earlier chapter, John McTiernan’s clever study in meta-cinema refigures Olivier’s Hamlet, in Danny’s imagination, as a sixteenthcentury cigar-chomping, AK-47-toting, Schwarzenegger ‘taking out the trash’, i.e. Claudius, in Denmark. Olivier’s Hamlet is too much in command for the 1950s existential and angst-ridden Holden, while his Hamlet is far too passive for the 1990s Madigan, completely absorbed by his culture’s fascination with contemporary film versions of the action hero from Superman to the Terminator. But it is Olivier’s film conception of Hamlet that has implanted itself in the popular imagination over the last half of the twentieth century.

Olivier’s Hamlet: Critical response Olivier’s film was well received by contemporary reviewers, in tones ranging from respect to enthusiasm, in both Britain and America. As Anthony Davis reports: The Times praised the film’s successful balance of action and reflection, seeing Olivier’s Hamlet as ‘a virile man, a prince, athletic in body and in temper masculine’ but finding time to ‘turn away from his dramatic leaps . . . to commune with his own conscience and secret self’. [The Times reviewer] saw the film as proving that ‘the greatest of Shakespeare’s plays can be translated to the screen without loss of dignity to the author and to the immense enjoyment of a public suspicious of his name’. The Manchester Guardian’s film critic was especially impressed by the thrust of the film: ‘this was . . . a unified and purposeful film; this Hamlet was more than usually like a brilliant leader of men’.5 In America, James Agee gave the film high praise in a Time magazine cover story, but other voices, particularly those of Eric Bentley, John Mason Brown, and Robert Duffy had reservations, primarily about the film’s style and camera work.

CRITICAL RESPONSES AND THE AFTERLIFE

103

Bentley found that ‘the film had no style’, while John Mason Brown complained that Olivier’s roaming camera squandered ‘at least forty minutes . . . in travelogues up and down . . . the palace’.6 Robert Duffy went even further in faulting Olivier for following a theatrical rather than cinematic approach in his adaptation and found that his camera reeled ‘around rather drunkenly’.7 Agee, the most perceptive American film critic of midcentury, began his review of the film with several questions, an answer, and a prophetic remark about the future of Shakespeare on film: The question used to be: Can Shakespeare’s plays be made into successful movies? With his production of Henry V Sir Laurence Olivier settled that question once and for all. But Henry V raised another question that it could not answer: Can the screen cope with Shakespeare at his best? Olivier undertook to answer that one too . . . The answer is yes. The screen is indeed adequate to Shakespeare at his greatest – and Director-Actor Olivier’s Hamlet is the proof. With his admirable filming of one of the most difficult of plays, the whole of Shakespeare’s dramatic poetry is thrown wide open to good moviemakers.8 Agee is particularly sensitive to the film’s handling of Shakespeare’s language, which it refuses to overwhelm with spectacle: ‘The production is as austere, and as grimly concentrated, as Henry V was profuse and ingratiating. Only the wild, heartfelt, magnificent language is left at liberty.’9 Agee sees in Olivier’s central performance a great actor in full command of his craft: In its subtlety, variety, vividness and control, Olivier’s performance is one of the most beautiful ever put on film . . . Olivier is as sure in his work, and as sure a delight to watch, as any living artist. No other actor except Chaplin is as deft a master of everything which the entire body can

104

SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

contribute to a tale; few actors can equal him in the whole middle register of acting. He takes such little words as ‘My father’s spirit in arms!’ and communicates and is worthy of their towering poetry. He can toss off lines like ‘For every man hath business and desire’ in a way to make Shakespeare congratulate himself in his grave. His inflection of Hamlet’s reply to Ophelia’s ‘You are keen, my lord, you are keen (It would cost you a groaning to take off my edge)’ is enough to make the flesh crawl with its cruelty, the complexity which leaps into view behind the cruelty, and the brilliance of the actor who hides behind that.10 Agee ends his lengthy review and Time cover story by making a huge claim for the significance of Olivier’s achievement and an intelligent assessment of the way in which Olivier’s Shakespeare films triangulate the relationship between drama, film and literature. A man who can do what Laurence Olivier is doing for Shakespeare . . . is certainly among the most valuable men of his time. In the strict sense his films are not creative works of cinematic art: the essential art of moving pictures is as overwhelmingly visual as the essential art of his visually charming pictures is verbal. But Olivier’s films set up an equilateral triangle between the screen, the stage and literature. And between the screen, the stage and literature they establish an interplay, a shimmering splendor, of the disciplined vitality which is art.11 Agee here prophetically sets the terms for Olivier’s achievement in his Shakespeare films; terms which have guided the critical discussion of his art – trying to capture that shimmering interplay between text, stage and screen – for the past sixty years. The first sustained work of Shakespeare on film scholarship was Robert Hamilton Ball’s Shakespeare on Silent Film (1968) in which Ball gathered together as much information as he could find about the almost four hundred silent films

CRITICAL RESPONSES AND THE AFTERLIFE

105

made from Shakespearean material from 1899 to 1927. Ball’s work was followed by Roger Manvell’s groundbreaking Shakespeare and the Film (1971) which was the first work to survey and partition the Shakespeare on film landscape with chapters on silent film, the first sound experiments in Hollywood and London, the work of Olivier, Welles, and Zeffirelli, Russian and Japanese adaptations, and the work of contemporary filmmakers like Tony Richardson, Peter Hall, and Peter Brook. A particularly useful element in Manvell’s book was original material about the makings of major Shakespeare films collected from directors and producers. The first major critical analysis to focus exclusively on Shakespeare and film was Jack Jorgens’s Shakespeare on Film (1977).12 Jorgens credited Olivier and Orson Welles as the creators of the first mature Shakespeare films which then inspired the work of directors like Akira Kurosawa, Grigori Kozintsev, and Franco Zeffirelli. Jorgens, in a thorough reading of the film, describes Olivier’s Hamlet as a ‘dreamy, lyrical film’ that in its Freudian approach to the text becomes an ‘Oedipal cinepoem’.13 Bernice Kliman, in her book on film, television, and audio performances of Hamlet, picks up and extends Jorgens’s ideas about Olivier’s Shakespeare films and the theatrical mode by noting that his Hamlet film ‘is a hybrid form, not a filmed play, not precisely a film, but a film-infused play or a play-infused film’.14 Kliman notes that Olivier’s cinematic model is the great Russian stage and film director, Sergei Eisenstein: Olivier is like Eisenstein, who, in those last [stage] efforts before he finally turned to films altogether, staged plays in giant warehouses or factories, moving audiences around on stairways and catwalks to avoid the static perspective of the fixed seat. With film Olivier opens up space and moves the audience without losing the theatrical essence of nonrealistic space.15 Anthony Davies expands upon Kliman’s notion of the way in which Olivier transforms theatrical space into cinematic

106

SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

space by arguing that ‘the particular spatial dimension which the camera brings to this [Olivier’s] film is flow’.16 Davies uses his analysis of Olivier’s film techniques – the fluid camera, the use of deep-focus photography, the play of light and shadow, the appropriation of vertical as well as horizontal space – to demonstrate how far Olivier’s Hamlet travels from its stage origins even as it remains cognisant of them. Peter S. Donaldson provides a provocative development in the critical afterlife of Olivier’s film. If Kliman and Davies further develop ideas about theatrical and cinematic space in Olivier’s Hamlet first suggested by Jorgens, Donaldson’s work returns to and provides a surprising new twist to Jorgens’s notion that Olivier’s film is an ‘Oedipal cinepoem’.17 Donaldson latches onto several key personal details in Olivier’s autobiography, primarily a traumatic incident when the nineyear-old Olivier survived an attempted rape by an older choir boy when they both were students at All Saints School. The older boy led young Olivier (dressed in a kilt in his mother’s family’s tartan) up a stone staircase at the rear of the All Saints church house under the pretext of showing him the stage upstairs where the school plays were performed. When they reached the landing the boy threw the young, frightened Olivier down on the cold stone and jumped on top of him. His intended rape was interrupted by adult voices and he pushed Olivier down several steps as he made his escape above. Donaldson astutely reads this moment as combining Olivier’s Freudian approach to the Hamlet story with the spatial configuration of his film, where Hamlet is repeatedly captured ‘dashing up a stone staircase trying to free himself from Gertrude and Ophelia to achieve identification with his ghostly father’. The All Saints incident, Donaldson writes, ‘associates paternal gifts and sexual abuse, it echoes powerfully the visual design of [Olivier’s] Hamlet’.18 Donaldson’s analysis unites the two primary strains in the critical literature on Olivier’s film and does so by reading important psychological elements from Olivier’s life into his visual and spatial approach to Shakespeare’s text.

CRITICAL RESPONSES AND THE AFTERLIFE

107

In the most recent study of the film, Patrick Cook returns to the film’s origins as a theatre/film hybrid, as posited by Kliman and Jorgens, to see that the film’s lasting value exists in Olivier’s exploration of the tensions created by that mixed form. Cook argues: The co-presence of theatrical and cinematic techniques did not merely successfully mediate the sometimes conflicting expectations of a 1948 audience willing to experience the novelty of seeing both Shakespeare and a movie at the same time; it also provided an influential schooling for future filmmakers, who could see the residuals of the older art form juxtaposed with more truly cinematic transformations. Olivier taught later adapters through his failures to fully achieve what Stefan Sharff calls ‘cinesthetic impact’ as much as through his successes.19 It is not just Olivier’s Freudian approach to the content of his Shakespeare material which became a key element that future film adapters had to confront: his formal structure became equally important in what his film taught to his successors.

Olivier’s Hamlet and selected Hamlet films: 1948–1990 Olivier’s Hamlet has had a powerful influence on subsequent screen versions of the play, most conspicuously on the films directed by Grigori Kozintsev (1964), Tony Richardson (1969), and Franco Zeffirelli (1990). Other Hamlet films appeared in this period in Sweden, Germany, and America, but the trio I have chosen to highlight are those most likely to be encountered by contemporary students of Shakespeare on film. Kozintsev, Richardson and Zeffirelli, like Olivier, directed stage versions of Hamlet before making their respective films of the play. All three were influenced by Olivier’s example: Kozintsev at a

108

SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

respectful distance; Zeffirelli from a protégé’s admiration; and Richardson as a cheeky, subversive challenger to Olivier’s establishment tradition. Kozintsev knew Olivier only through reputation and his films of Henry V (1944), Hamlet (1948), and Richard III (1955); Zeffirelli, as a teenager, had seen Olivier’s film of Henry V in Italy immediately following the Second World War and dreamed then of following Olivier’s path as a stage and film director. Zeffirelli established himself in the 1950s as an opera director. He directed productions of Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci for England’s Royal Opera House that drew rave reviews for their energy, passion, and verisimilitude. Based on their success, Olivier invited Zeffirelli to direct a production of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet for England’s nascent National Theatre in 1960, thus realizing Zeffirelli’s dream of working with the man he regarded as his Shakespearean master and mentor. Zeffirelli’s production blew the cobwebs off the familiar love story by casting very young actors in the principal parts, including Judi Dench as Juliet, and creating a hot, passionate, Italian pace and atmosphere in which the tragedy unfolded. The production was so successful that it toured Europe and the United States and established Zeffirelli as a stage director known beyond the world of opera. Zeffirelli’s work on Romeo and Juliet led to his being invited to direct his first film, The Taming of the Shrew (1964), a project planned and developed by the film stars Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. The modest financial success of that film allowed him to arrange financing from the major Hollywood studio, Metro-GoldwynMayer (MGM), to make his film of Romeo and Juliet (1968), which became the largest-grossing Shakespeare film in history.20 Even with the Romeo and Juliet huge box office it took Zeffirelli twenty more years before he was able to raise the funds for his Hamlet (1990) film, finally joining his mentor Olivier (and Orson Welles and Akira Kurosawa) as the director of three Shakespeare films.21 Tony Richardson was one of a group of British stage and film directors in the 1960s including Lindsay Anderson,

CRITICAL RESPONSES AND THE AFTERLIFE

109

Karl Reitz, and John Schlesinger who brought new countercultural energies to their work. In their films they explored working-class issues and environments and cast a new breed of regionally based English actors, including Albert Finney, Tom Courtney and Michael Caine, in leading roles. Richardson’s radical romp Tom Jones won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1964 and led him several years later to mount an equally radical, but much darker, stage version of Hamlet in a London fringe theatre fashioned out of an old railway roundhouse. He later raised the financing to reimagine the stage production, starring Nicol Williamson as Hamlet, into a feature film. All three directors were intimately familiar with Olivier’s Hamlet and all took interestingly divergent approaches to the text as it had been conceived and filmed by Olivier.

Grigori Kozintsev’s Hamlet (1964) Kozintsev was well aware of Olivier’s film when he began to plan and shoot his Hamlet. His own approach to the text was more political than psychological – made possible by the cultural thaw initiated by Nikita Khrushchev when he succeeded Stalin as the Soviet leader. Kozintsev’s Claudius (Michail Nazwanov) is a barrel-chested cross between Stalin and Henry VIII who dominates the Danish court. His Hamlet (Innokenti Smoktunovski) is more robust and romantic than Olivier’s (in the opening scene he gallops home to Elsinore with his cape flowing out behind him) and much less attached to his mother. Kozintsev’s film is both a moving reaffirmation of Russian romanticism and a covert critique of Stalinist power politics. It also introduces another element in the process of adaptation from text to screen. Kozintsev’s film, naturally, is in Russian not English. His screen play was written by Boris Pasternak based on his own Russian prose translation of Hamlet. Kozintsev reports that:

110

SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

Pasternak considered that Shakespeare’s genius was most evident in his prose, that his verse was often overloaded with metaphors, too complex. He thought that the flow of unrhymed blank verse was no more than a method of speed writing: the poet was forced to hurry and this was the most convenient shorthand for his thoughts and feelings.22 Pasternak thus had the advantage of translating Shakespeare into the rhythm and idiom of his own language and of trimming the overload of Shakespearean metaphors by working exclusively in prose; an advantage denied to the Anglo-American screenwriter. Kozintsev’s film acknowledges Olivier’s in its use of black and white photography, its Elizabethan setting, and its employment of chiaroscuro effects to define Hamlet and his world. He also picks up and extends several of Olivier’s cinematic images: the fog, the sea crashing on the rocky shore, and Elsinore’s rough, cold stone. To these he adds the sky, fire, and iron to suggest Hamlet’s spirit (sky) and passion (fire) slowly crushed by Claudius’s power (iron). The built landscape of Kozintsev’s Elsinore is created in response to Hamlet’s remark to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that ‘Denmark’s a prison’. Olivier’s castle was an empty gothic space created to contain a psychological melodrama; Kozintsev fills his castle with the activities of everyday life. Farm animals move about its courtyard; labourers turn the huge portcullis that rises to cut the castle off once Hamlet’s horse has pounded home over its drawbridge. European diplomats circulate in the first court scene as we hear smatterings of German and French on the soundtrack. Later, when Hamlet returns from England, busts and portraits of Claudius are suddenly visible everywhere. Kozintsev creates a political universe but one which still maintains some elements of Olivier’s more abstract and symbolic landscape by shaping his visual text around images of sea, sky, stone, iron and fire. Though Smoktunovski’s Hamlet, like Olivier’s, is lithe and very blonde, he is much less passive. He prowls Elsinore like a

CRITICAL RESPONSES AND THE AFTERLIFE

111

caged animal and shares images of imprisonment with Kozintsev’s conception of Ophelia (Anastasia Vertinskaya). The film brilliantly imagines Ophelia as a beautifully trained court ‘puppet’ raised by Polonius as an ideal female representative of the aristocracy. The film’s conceit for this is to capture Ophelia at her dancing lesson, where she is being coached in a series of exquisite movements controlled by another. The film cuts between Ophelia’s lesson and shots of her pet bird in its gilded cage and we understand in a visual flash her beauty, her subjugation, and her fate. Kozintsev unites Hamlet’s prison images with Ophelia’s in the ‘nunnery’ scene where he shoots the beginning of their encounter through the balusters of a staircase: two blonde forlorn heads separated literally and symbolically by the social and political forces at work within Claudius’s court. His film then extends such image patterns when it captures Ophelia being strapped into an iron corset (her own personal cage) as she is being dressed for her father’s funeral. Olivier’s film, except for Ophelia’s death and the Gravedigger scene, remains trapped within Elsinore’s walls, but Kozintsev’s more romantic treatment allows Hamlet some moments of expanse: hurtling home in the film’s opening shots and wandering alone along the rugged sea coast on his return from his abortive trip to England. When he reaches the castle he spies a solitary seagull high in the sky who we imagine to be the soul of Ophelia who has died in her lover’s absence. The shot links Hamlet and Ophelia with Konstantin and Nina, their tragic counterparts in Chekhov’s The Seagull. Kozintsev’s film also features an extraordinary filmscore by the noted twentieth-century Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich. Kozintsev follows Olivier in seeking out an established contemporary classical composer to write the film’s score rather than turning to the Russian equivalent of Bernard Herrmann or John Williams. Shostakovich’s score ranges in power and subtlety from its early staccato percussive beats as Kosintsev’s camera moves from shots of a stone wall, flaming torches, and the sea pounding on the rocky shore to the gentle

112

SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

gavotte theme of Ophelia’s dancing lesson with its aristocratic Baroque setting for harpsichord (mimed by a lute player in the film). With its rhythms simplified and tempos quickened, the same tune becomes the background for the Gravedigger as he prepares Ophelia’s grave; here Renaissance dance, in a wry musical joke worthy of the Gravedigger, joins with Soviet work song. Though the two films share some interesting surface details and Kozintsev is certainly working in the shadows of Olivier’s achievement, ultimately they are as different as the societies and historical moments from which they spring. Olivier wants to disengage from history and embrace the Freudian present while Kozintsev’s film seizes on the cultural thaw that followed the death of Stalin and rise of Khrushchev to raise questions about man’s place and role in the historical cycle. As Jack Jorgens comments, ‘Olivier plays Hamlet and sees everything through his eyes and in terms of his personality. Kozintsev directs Hamlet and sees him as part of a larger pattern.’23 Two visuals signal this divide. When Olivier’s Hamlet stabs Polonius through the arras there’s nothing behind the tapestry but the ‘wretched, rash, intruding fool’ and the camera pivots back to a focus on Gertrude. When Kozintsev’s Hamlet runs the old man through, the entire tapestry collapses revealing a host of Gertrude’s empty dressing dummies stretching back to the rear of the frame. Those silent dummies represent those silenced and suppressed by aristocratic tyrants like Claudius. Kozintsev wants to make a political point by evoking an historical context; Olivier a psychological one by turning his camera back to the personal intimacy of the family drama.

Tony Richardson’s Hamlet (1969) Tony Richardson’s 1969 film of Hamlet was based on his 1968 production of the play at the Roundhouse theatre in London. He used the theatre as the setting for his movie but fully translated the world of the stage production into the language

CRITICAL RESPONSES AND THE AFTERLIFE

113

of film. While his approach (and Williamson’s central performance) is meant as a bitter, cynical, low-budget challenge to Olivier’s establishment high culture canonical masterpiece, Richardson ends up following Olivier’s lead in focusing on the personal rather than the political in his version of the text. He is less driven by doctrinaire Freudian ideas than Olivier but remains equally interested in sex rather than power in exploring Hamlet and his world. Though Richardson set his film in the late Renaissance – the characters were dressed as if they had stepped out of a Rembrandt painting – its tone and atmosphere more reflected London’s swinging 1960s than the 1660s. The film was shot largely in close-ups and medium-close-ups, emphasizing the impasse of Hamlet’s world. He’s trapped, literally framed by Richardson’s camera, by the other faces that surround him: some, like Horatio, quite benign; others like Polonius, Claudius, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern potentially lethal. One great tight three-shot had Williamson caught between Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as his eyes danced from one thick schoolfellow to another as he probed to discover why they had suddenly appeared in Elsinore. Nicol Williamson’s Hamlet was a bitter ironic Scot who wore the scholar’s spectacles and who spoke with a native nasal twang far removed from Olivier’s more musical Oxbridge tones. The use of Williamson’s native accent was one of the film’s most exciting features. Most British productions of Shakespeare (until the last thirty years or so) were delivered in what is known as Received Standard Pronunciation – the official vocal tones of church and state and aristocracy. Williamson’s prince announced his difference by the very sound of his voice. He was a decidedly anti-establishment prince. Williamson’s Hamlet had some of the cheeky cocky wit of the early John Lennon and Liverpool was closer to his domain than Whitehall. Richardson used several candelabra and the Roundhouse’s brick walls to visual effect. The set was dimly lit, with the lighting aimed primarily on the actors’ faces which made them stand out against the dark. Hamlet, out-manned but not outwitted, was often shot next to a candelabra as his racing

114

SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

mind tried to stay several steps ahead of Claudius’s treachery; his mind being the most impressive light in Claudius’s muffled world. Williamson circled the candles as his imagination soared and then began to pinch them out one by one as his ideas turned to potential action and Richardson’s camera ironically caught the puffs of smoke rising from their extinction. Richardson wanted his film to share the liberated ideas about sexual behaviour set loose in the 1960s rather than Freud’s more dour interpretation of sex’s centrality to human suffering and neurosis. He cast the wonderful rock singer Marianne Faithfull as Ophelia and she shared a passionate kiss with her brother when he was chastising her about protecting her ‘chaste treasure’ from Hamlet’s ‘unmastered importunity’ (1.3.31–32). Hamlet and Ophelia began the ‘nunnery’ scene lying, in intimate proximity, together in a hammock. Their first exchanges were soft and tender and did not turn bitter until Hamlet spied Polonius through the cords of the hammock. The staging clearly suggested that they were lovers. Claudius (Anthony Hopkins) and Gertrude (Judy Parfitt) were shot sharing grapes and nuzzles in a large bed they inhabited along with several Great Danes (Richardson’s irrepressible wit at work here rather than Shakespeare’s). Though Hamlet’s actual confrontation with Gertrude after ‘The Mousetrap’ was not sexually charged, when Gertrude drank the poisoned wine Parfitt played her death as though it was a parody of an orgasmic climax. For Richardson it was Claudius’s sexual attraction, not Hamlet’s, that proved fatal. Richardson’s film was meant as an anti-establishment answer to Olivier’s mainstream, institutional version but, in its desire to be sexually provocative, couldn’t escape Olivier’s influence after all.

Franco Zeffirelli’s Hamlet (1990) The director who made no attempt to disguise his admiration for Olivier’s film, Franco Zeffirelli, created a Hamlet film in 1990 that in many ways not only follows but completes

CRITICAL RESPONSES AND THE AFTERLIFE

115

Olivier’s Freudian focus on Hamlet’s relationship with his mother. Zeffirelli cast two Hollywood stars, Mel Gibson and Glenn Close, as Hamlet and Gertrude, trusting that audiences would be familiar with their most recent film roles and leading Anthony Dawson to quip that ‘lethal weapon meets fatal attraction in what turns out to be a dangerous liaison’.24 Close’s blonde, vital Gertrude is at the visual centre of Zeffirelli’s film. She is its diva. Gibson’s Hamlet is deeply puzzled by her behaviour, beginning with the silent scene of old Hamlet’s burial which opens the film. Close’s Gertrude sighs, sheds tears, and shares knowing glances with Claudius as she places a metallic rose on her former husband’s dead body. Her behaviour is closely scrutinized by her son hooded in a monk’s robe. When Hamlet professes his discontent in the first court scene (which Zeffirelli breaks in half and shoots in two different locations – the court and Hamlet’s study) Gertrude smothers him in her arms and kisses him (as Eileen Hurlie’s Gertrude kisses Olivier’s Hamlet at a similar moment) with an intensity which seems more than maternal. While Gibson’s Hamlet is less passive and more virile than Olivier’s (after all, he is an action hero) he shares Olivier’s Hamlet’s fixation with his mother. Zeffirelli’s film builds to the famed meeting between son and mother in 3.4. Zeffirelli bathes Gertrude’s bedroom in a golden glow that radiates out from Glenn Close’s face and her long blonde hair. Close’s Gertrude is a powerful image of mature sexuality. Gibson and Close provide us with the most intense and passionate encounter between Hamlet and Gertrude on film. The repressed lethal and sexual violence of their relationship comes to a climax in the scene. Gibson’s Hamlet literally mounts Gertrude and thrusts away at her in a furious mock rape as he utters the play’s ugliest image: ‘Nay but to live/In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed/Stewed in corruption, honeying and making love/Over the nasty sty!’ (3.4.92–94). As Hamlet loses control, Close pulls Gibson into a passionate, almost desperate kiss, meant not only to silence his wild aggression but to express her own confused longings as well.

116

SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

This moment is as primal as the murder of Polonius and for Zeffirelli signals the ultimate release of Hamlet’s repressed Oedipal desire as well as, paradoxically, opening up the possibility of reconciliation with his mother. When Paul Scofield’s wan sad Ghost appears to reunite the ruined family he appears oblivious to the full import of the action he has interrupted. The film’s kiss between Gertrude and Hamlet is the true climax here, not the intrusion of the ghostly authorial father. By finally enacting the powerful image that has both disgusted and transfixed him, Gibson’s Hamlet has freed its grip on his imagination. His final parting gesture is to give his mother the chain he has worn around his neck with his father’s picture attached to it, and she signals her acceptance of their reconciliation by tucking the locket away under her pillow as Claudius enters the room. Zeffirelli’s treatment of this crucial encounter is certainly inspired by Olivier’s, but goes beyond Olivier in making the Oedipal subtext passionately vivid. Through his murder of Polonius and mock rape of his mother, Gibson’s Hamlet realizes he too is tainted. By finally acknowledging his own full participation in the complex mystery of the Oedipal triangle, Hamlet can forgive Gertrude and restore her as the good mother. Zeffirelli’s film, like Tony Richardson’s, is shot in Technicolor, but while Richardson’s tones are registered in Rembrandt’s subdued palate, Zeffirelli’s are bright and bold. The sun actually shines in Zeffirelli’s Denmark. Hamlet and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern gallop their horses along a gorgeous fjord suggesting figures out of a Western; Gertrude, her blonde hair flowing behind her, similarly goes riding with Claudius; sun spills in through the castle’s clerestory windows splashing light on the site of Hamlet’s duel with Laertes; and Hamlet is literally ‘too much in the sun’ when Gertrude swings open the blind that keeps his room shrouded in darkness. All this is simply to note that even though Zeffirelli follows Olivier’s example in making Hamlet’s relationship with Gertrude the central one in the drama, he does so in a decidedly

CRITICAL RESPONSES AND THE AFTERLIFE

117

Italian manner. Gibson’s prince is more hot-blooded than Olivier’s and more romantic than Williamson’s. The actor has more Hotspur in him than Hamlet and that aspect of his personality keeps informing his performance. In fact, Gibson plays the final fatal duel as something of a joke to amuse his mother rather than as a serious challenge to his legitimacy. Zeffirelli’s editing here frequently cross-cuts between mother and son to re-establish their bond rather than to underline Hamlet’s subversive efforts to topple Claudius. When Close drinks the poisoned wine she dies, as Parfitt did in Richardson’s film, in a painful orgasm linking once again the Western fascination with the connection between sex and death. By casting two prominent Hollywood stars in the leading roles and by flirting with Hollywood genre conventions like the Western and films like Fatal Attraction, Zeffirelli was anticipating the Hollywood influence that would come to dominate the wonderful exuberance of the myriad Shakespeare films released in the 1990s. These three directors and their films all adapt Shakespeare’s core text to their own purposes, and each reveals something about the historical moment of their making while still carrying trace elements of Olivier’s pioneering film version of the play. The greatest challenge to Olivier’s film would come from the full-text four-hour version directed by Kenneth Branagh and released in 1996. Branagh’s film established a new paradigm for movies of the play; a paradigm that was to prove to be a powerful influence on the Hamlet films that followed the release of Branagh’s adaptation. A selection of those films will be discussed at the end of the section on the afterlife of Branagh’s epic version of Hamlet.

Branagh’s Hamlet: A new paradigm Olivier’s Hamlet also established the pattern for stage productions of the play for the next forty years. Gertrude was no longer played as a dowager but as a handsome and sexually

118

SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

vital woman. The closet scene (3.4) was rarely played without her bed as a prominent element in the staging.25 And, again with a few noted exceptions including Richard Burton and Albert Finney, Hamlet’s melancholy and passivity was linked to his repressed Oedipal desires. Starting in the 1980s, actors, most notably Jonathan Pryce at The Royal Court (1980) and Mark Rylance (1989) at The Royal Shakespeare Company, began to break away from the Olivier mode and manner. Clearly the moment was ripe for a new paradigm and Branagh’s film provided it. Branagh’s film (and his performance of Hamlet) made a sharp break with Olivier’s. Branagh’s film style was influenced by both Olivier and Orson Welles (primarily in his version of Agincourt in Henry V) but perhaps most strongly by Franco Zeffirelli. All of Patrick Doyle’s scores for Branagh’s films have big operatic elements and more closely resemble Nino Rota’s scores for Zeffirelli than William Walton’s for Olivier. Branagh is a neo-romantic film director far more comfortable working with Hollywood codes and conventions than was Olivier. The landscape of Branagh’s Hamlet intentionally jettisoned the gloomy, Gothic castle Olivier created for his film and gave us instead a bright, bold lavish court combining elements from Versailles and St Petersburg’s Winter Palace in its interiors and Blenheim’s golden stones for its exteriors. Olivier wanted to seize upon film as a means of bringing Shakespeare to a wider audience but he was also a creative representative of Shakespeare’s elite, iconic status in midcentury culture. The cinematic techniques he employed, shooting in black and white and using deep-focus photography, were elements more common to the art films of the period than to Hollywood blockbusters. With the exception of his Freudian approach (and daring design of Gertrude’s bed) which went largely unnoticed by the contemporary reviewers of the film, Olivier’s movie is tasteful and conventional. He surrounds himself, with one exception – Jean Simmons – with solid but largely unknown English stage actors, none of whom challenge his star turn as Hamlet. Jean Simmons was only seventeen

CRITICAL RESPONSES AND THE AFTERLIFE

119

when filming began fresh from her triumph as Estella in David Lean’s film of Great Expectations (1947), but she was the only film actor he used. Olivier worked at a cultural moment when Shakespeare and Hollywood did not mix, so thoughts of using major film stars like Cary Grant, Clark Gable, or even Vivien Leigh or Gloria Swanson were never a possibility.26 Olivier did not even cast his three English classical actor contemporaries John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, and Alec Guinness, even though the latter two had by 1948 established themselves as actors as comfortable in front of the camera as on stage. Richardson would have made a stunning Polonius and Guinness a brilliant Osric, but Olivier chose less well-known alternatives. Branagh, following Zeffirelli’s lead, had no such qualms. Not only did he wish his Hamlet to project a sparkling intensity all wrapped up in Technicolor and 70mm film stock, but he loaded his cast with stars from Hollywood and England’s Royal Shakespeare Company and National Theatre, including Robin Williams, Billy Crystal, Charlton Heston and Jack Lemmon from the former, and Derek Jacobi, Judi Dench, Michael Maloney, John Gielgud and Simon Russell Beale from the latter. He plucked Julie Christie, Timothy Spall and the then largely unknown Kate Winslet from the world of British film. Shakespeare’s Hamlet cast is a large one with prime roles for the supporting players, but Branagh made it star-studded in a way it had rarely been on stage or screen. He was not afraid to place himself in a family triangle that included Jacobi and Christie and to allow secondary players like Robin Williams and Billy Crystal to be successful scene-stealers.27 The idea was to create a Hamlet film as far from Olivier’s as possible: in size, scope, landscape, and casting. Branagh was happy to concede the art house to Olivier; he wanted to reach the large, youthful crowd who pack the cineplex on the weekends. The tragedy of his Hamlet was that he failed; his film ‘pleased not the million’. The one consolation is that while the film bombed at the box office it has had robust sales in video and DVD and is likely to

120

SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

be the film of Hamlet most watched by high school and college students coming to the play for the first time.

Branagh’s Hamlet and the Shakespeare films of the 1990s Branagh’s Hamlet is an example of his cinematic ethos and aesthetic which helped inspire the greatest decade in the long history of Shakespeare on film. Branagh’s Henry V and Much Ado about Nothing momentarily loosened Hollywood’s purse strings in underwriting Shakespeare films long regarded (as they are once again now) as box office poison. Branagh’s success in Much Ado about Nothing with mixing Hollywood stars (Denzel Washington, Michael Keaton, Robert Sean Leonard) and members of his Renaissance Theatre Company (Richard Briers, Brian Blessed, Emma Thompson) with a flamboyant film style, created the first commercially successful film of a Shakespeare comedy that more than tripled its production costs in box office revenue. Branagh’s early work with Shakespeare on film opened up the funding for Trevor Nunn’s Twelfth Night (1995), Oliver Parker’s Othello (1995), Richard Loncraine’s Richard III (1995) and Al Pacino’s Looking for Richard (1996). Pacino gave full credit to Branagh for reviving the Shakespeare film genre: ‘Branagh opened it all up with Henry V. Now you can say Shakespeare on film in Hollywood and people listen.’28 The turning point in the decade’s interest in Shakespeare on film was 1996. It reached its apex in the stunning commercial success of Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, which surpassed Zeffirelli’s 1968 Romeo and Juliet as the highest-grossing Shakespeare film: 1996 also featured the release of Branagh’s film of Hamlet, which cost approximately eighteen million dollars to make but grossed less than a third of that sum, thus eradicating the modest financial glow that had surrounded his first two Shakespeare films. Luhrmann’s

CRITICAL RESPONSES AND THE AFTERLIFE

121

success kept the Hollywood money flow open for Shakespeare films for several more years, but the commercial failure of a rash of films released at the century’s end (Julie Taymor’s Titus [1999], Michael Hoffman’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream [1999], and Branagh’s own Love’s Labour’s Lost [1999]) failed to recapture the teenage audiences that had flocked to Much Ado about Nothing and William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet. All of the fin de siècle Shakespeare films were noted for the ways in which they pushed the boundaries of the model of the ‘popular’ Shakespeare film established by the films released between 1989 and 1995. Taymor’s Titus extended the Shakespeare film into the realm of the symbolic by mixing and merging images from ancient Rome with those from contemporary culture – and by including what she termed ‘penny-arcade nightmare’ sequences which translated Shakespeare’s verbal images into visual ones in quick metacinematic flashes. Taymor understood that Titus Andronicus’s violence leaps beyond realism into the symbolic and surreal. Her film, even with its non-Shakespearean ending which has the young Lucius lift Aaron’s baby from its cage and cradle it in his arms as he walks out of the Colosseum (where Taymor has shot Titus’s catastrophic revenge) into the dawn as Elliot Goldenthal’s film score swells on the soundtrack, couldn’t deliver Shakespeare’s bitter, bloody tale to a mass audience. Branagh’s no less daring transformation of another early Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost, into a 1930s Hollywood musical comedy met a similar fate. Branagh made repeated attempts to find contemporary movie genres that found congenial, even witty, associations with his Shakespearean material. With Love’s Labour’s Lost he turned to a once powerful and popular (particularly in the Fred Astaire–Ginger Rogers films) movie genre that had fallen on hard times. Just as the triumph of rock and roll in the 1960s sent jazz packing for several decades, so the hard realism of films of the 1960s and 1970s wiped out musical comedy’s elegant fantasies. The only contemporary movie musicals to gain attention were

122

SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

Greg Marshall’s Chicago (2002) and Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge (2001). Both films were tough and cynical, with Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge emerging as a version of Puccini’s La Bohème reconceived and rewritten by Kurt Weill and Bertold Brecht. Branagh’s film was met with the same general indifference as Taymor’s Titus, though it is a remarkable accomplishment in form and content. Branagh manages to retain something like 25 per cent of the text, the basic plot, and ten song and dance numbers, including ‘Dancing Cheek to Cheek’, ‘I Get a Kick Out of You’, ‘I Won’t Dance’, and ‘They Can’t Take That Away From Me’. Branagh’s film faced three hurdles in getting to the public: an unfamiliar Shakespearean text, a movie genre that had been dead for fifty years, and a cast of stage and film actors with almost no professional experience in delivering song and dance routines. The film failed to glide or even tap dance over any of those hurdles in attracting an audience.

Branagh’s Hamlet: Critical response The critical afterlife of Branagh’s Hamlet is still relatively fresh but certainly mixed. Olivier’s Hamlet had only his Henry V to anticipate it, while Branagh’s was released more than midway through the greatest decade of Shakespeare films in the genre’s first one hundred years. The British newspaper reviewers were largely critical, even savage, in their assessment while American reviewers were on the whole more generous to the film, though without according it the praise they had lavished on his earlier films of Henry V and Much Ado about Nothing.29 Janet Maslin writing in the New York Times was perhaps the most enthusiastic of the American film critics: Kenneth Branagh’s fine, robust performance as Hamlet is the bright centrepiece of his lavish new version of the play . . . This Hamlet . . . takes a frank, try-anything approach to

CRITICAL RESPONSES AND THE AFTERLIFE

123

sustaining its entertainment value, but its gambits are most often evidence of Mr. Branagh’s solid showmanship. Mr. Branagh is a great popularizer of Shakespeare and now has the chance to speak some of the most famous lines in the English language as if they had just come to mind. He makes a dashing figure if not a terribly melancholy Dane, typifying this film’s preference for bold strokes and gloomy introspection . . . The style here is unabashedly flamboyant, but it also works.30 Maslin’s adjectives – ‘robust’, ‘bright’, ‘dashing’, ‘bold’ and ‘flamboyant’ – certainly capture Branagh’s intentions to create a Hamlet and an Elsinore in stunning contrast to the tradition created by Olivier’s film. Some of her nouns, ‘showmanship’, ‘entertainment’ and ‘popularizer’, though here intended as compliments, were precisely the terms used by others to dismiss the film. My own previous work on the film was in many ways an extension of Maslin’s first response. I found ‘Branagh’s Hamlet the most ambitious and audacious Shakespeare film ever made’.31 The use of the full text, the sheer cinematic size of shooting in 70mm, the use of Blenheim, the vast hall of mirrors built at Shepperton Studios for the interior scenes, the cast crammed with English, American, and even French film and stage stars, and Branagh’s central performance of a sane, resolute, witty Hamlet blocked from his revenge not by psychological neurosis but by his own active moral conscience were all revolutionary departures from tradition in productions of the play on stage and film. Judith Buchanan intelligently sees that even as Branagh’s film breaks with tradition it carries tradition with it: Virginia Woolf is reported to have said that were a man to make notes on his readings of Hamlet every year of his life, by its end he would have written his autobiography. Branagh, by contrast, in performing his own screen Hamlet, so full of retrospective reflection on many aspects of the

124

SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

play’s theatrical and cinematic heritage, produces in the process an oblique biography of the performance history of the play itself.32 Buchanan provides an extended example of Branagh’s use of Charlton Heston as the Player King and John Gielgud as Priam to make reference to films outside of the Hamlet tradition, particularly Joseph Mankiewicz’s 1953 Julius Caesar and Stuart Burge’s later (1969) film of the same play. Sarah Hatchuel sees Branagh’s screenplay latching on to the narrative devices that propelled the great nineteenth-century European and Russian novels, Instead of elaborating his personal vision by deleting passages [as Olivier had done], Branagh chose to develop whole narrative pieces through the use of flashbacks and parallel stories. The screenplay of Hamlet thus describes several interpolated images (or whole scenes) that interweave different narrative lines and levels of reality. Instead of concentrating on the hero’s own turmoil, the film leads the audience into a centrifugal experience in which the stories of Ophelia and Fortinbras gain importance and contribute to a decentralization of space and time.33 Hatchuel, Buchanan, and I are all, in our varying ways, responding to the sheer size and scale of Branagh’s film. Michael Anderegg, Mark Thornton Burnett, Maurice Hindle, and Douglas Lanier all focus on smaller but no less telling details. Anderegg, acknowledging that Branagh’s film seeks to merge the personal with the epic, finds him more successful in accomplishing the former rather than the latter: ‘As a positive consequence of Branagh’s approach to Hamlet, nearly every scene, every speech, every moment is given a painting, a psychological underpinning that at best results in sheer dramatic intensity’.34 Anderegg then proceeds to fault Branagh’s cinematic treatment of the ‘How all occasions’ soliloquy because the epic presentation overwhelms the intimate resolution of Hamlet’s

CRITICAL RESPONSES AND THE AFTERLIFE

125

words. Cinematic razzle-dazzle trumps text. Mark Thornton Burnett argues that Branagh’s ‘cunning’ approach does allow the personal and epic to co-exist and reinforce one another in a series of stunning visual effects. He provides an alternative take on Branagh’s handling of the ‘How all occasions’ soliloquy.35 Aligned with both the film’s epic magnitude and at the other end of the scale its attention to the local and personal is its productively inventive camera work. Often camera movements repeated in different sequences illuminate psychological connections. In the opening scene the camera zooms outward to show the disappearing ghost, a trajectory followed again for Hamlet’s ‘How all occasions’ speech: the comparable tracking shots hint at a revitalized paternal and filial alliance. Some critics, particularly Bernice Kliman, have complained about Branagh’s repeated use of flashbacks and flashcuts in his film. Maurice Hindle finds them unique and significant: The movie also breaks new ground, not only by melding and toying with theatrical and cinematic conventions . . . but also by creating a new cinematic device. These are the silent flashbacks and inset sequences introduced by Branagh to visualize elements in the backstory of the play . . . They not only offer an imaginative method of enabling the director to blend together elements of film and theatre, they can also be seen as the cinematic equivalent of Shakespeare’s own dramatic insets, films-within-the-film in dumb show which inform and entertain at the same time as a homage of the silent screen to the silent stage is presented.36 Finally Douglas Lanier notes another interesting feature of Branagh’s film which seeks to unite the private with the public: its atmosphere. Lanier, with a nod to Branagh’s previous film In the Bleak Midwinter (1995), notes that ‘this Hamlet is a midwinter’s tale’.37 Lanier finds the film as cold in its human relationships as it is in its snow-covered landscapes. Noting that the film echoes St Petersburg’s Winter Palace and the fall of the Romanovs, Lanier argues:

126

SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

Though the epic scale is intended to lend the play’s events and characters greater impact, it also dwarves the characters in icy landscapes and vast halls, often stressing their isolation in Elsinore’s public spaces. Instead of dark metaphysical shadows of conventional productions, Branagh offers an Elsinore glittering with surface splendor that masks an emotional chill . . . [At the end of 1.2] the snowy confetti that falls on Claudius and Gertrude as they make their triumphal exit suggest that an affective winter has descended on this community.38 These examples from a few of the major academic Shakespeare on film critics indicate that the primary focus of analysis has been to unite the two main strands of interest in the film: its full-text epic scale and the myriad personal tragedies connected with the destruction of both the Polonius and Hamlet families. The size and scope of Branagh’s Hamlet will continue to be an object of critical interest, but future critics of the film are most likely to follow in Burnett and Lanier’s path to discover and unpack moments when the private and public interact. Curiously, Branagh’s film, unlike Olivier’s, where the cutting and reshuffling of the text points dramatically to the director’s intentions, is more difficult to parse precisely because he insists on giving us every word of Shakespeare’s text. The debate about the finished product will continue and Branagh’s film will, I believe, eventually eclipse Olivier’s as the Hamlet of choice for modern audiences, but I doubt that its afterlife will inspire any further full text cinematic treatments of Hamlet.

Branagh’s Hamlet and selected Hamlet films: 1996–2006 The afterlife of Branagh’s Hamlet had its most significant impact on the three Hamlet films released just as the new century was commencing: Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet

CRITICAL RESPONSES AND THE AFTERLIFE

127

(2000), Campbell Scott’s Hamlet (2001), and Sherwood Hu’s Prince of the Himalayas (2006), giving us five Hamlet films in this golden decade-and-a-half (1990–2006) of Shakespeare on film. Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet is a radical cinematic alternative to Branagh’s epic masterpiece. Almereyda works with an American cast including film stars such as Ethan Hawke, Bill Murray and Julia Stiles; television actors such as Kyle MacLachlan and Steve Zahn; stage actors such as Diane Venora and Liev Schreiber; and the great American playwright Sam Shepard playing the Ghost. Almereyda’s Hamlet is the only film of the 1990s revival period, with the exception of Branagh’s Agincourt battle sequence in his Henry V, to carry the decided influence of Orson Welles. Almereyda comments that Welles described his film of Macbeth ‘as “a rough charcoal sketch of the play”, and this remark, alongside the finished picture, provoked in me a sharp suspicion that you don’t need lavish production values to make a Shakespeare film that is accessible and alive.’39 Welles’s cinematic style is at the forefront here, but surely Almereyda’s ‘sharp suspicion’ about ‘lavish production values’ is a critical aside directed at Branagh’s Hamlet, still fresh in memory. Scott’s film has many virtues including a strong American cast, led by his own performance of Hamlet and Roscoe Lee Browne’s as Polonius. His film follows Branagh’s in its length (almost three hours), its concentration on the political rather than the psychological, and its elevation of the Polonius family into full participation in the play’s tragedy. But the film was probably seen by fewer people than any Shakespeare film released in the period. It was shown several times on the Oxygen Cable-TV Network and had a limited two-week release at a single movie theatre in New York City. The film suffered by appearing at a moment when the Shakespeare on film genre was saturated and its audience satiated. Because Branagh’s film trumps it in textual inclusiveness, cinematic dazzle, and star power it has not achieved a strong afterlife in DVD distribution.

128

SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

Sherwood Hu’s recent spectacular Chinese adaptation follows Branagh’s in his treatment of the Hamlet narrative as a lavish tragic epic played out in ancient Tibet against the backdrop of the Himalayas.

Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet (2000) Almereyda’s film was conceived as a radical alternative to Branagh’s, much as Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet (1996) was meant to challenge and transcend Zeffirelli’s 1968 version of Shakespeare’s ‘tale of woe’. Both Almereyda and Luhrmann wanted to use all the resources of modern film-making in adapting their Shakespearean material. Almereyda shot his film in Super 16mm (and then had it blown up to 35mm for theatrical distribution); Branagh’s was shot in 70mm – the first film to be shot in that epic format since David Lean’s Ryan’s Daughter in 1972; Almereyda’s screenplay retains about 35 per cent of Shakespeare’s text; Branagh’s 100 per cent plus a few added exclamations; Almereyda’s film lasts a tidy 113 minutes; Branagh’s 238. Almereyda’s film is meta-cinematic; Branagh’s is metatheatrical. Almereyda’s film strives to be in the first person; Branagh’s in the third. These last two distinctions require elaboration. When Branagh’s Hamlet conceives the idea of using a re-scripted performance of The Murder of Gonzago to activate Claudius’s conscience and provoke a guilty reaction he is in his study examining a model wooden theatre. He shoots the climactic moment (‘The play’s the thing/Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King’ [2.2.600–1]) with the camera positioned backstage looking out at Hamlet’s face framed by the theatre’s proscenium arch with the toy figure of the King between them. Hamlet pushes a lever and the King disappears down through the trap. When Branagh films the play-within-a-play scene, he is its busiest actor, bounding up and down the makeshift auditorium’s steeply raked aisles,

CRITICAL RESPONSES AND THE AFTERLIFE

129

inserting his commentary into the action. Eventually he cannot restrain himself from breaking through the fourth wall by joining the actors on stage, grabbing the poisoned vial out of Lucianus’s hand, and beginning to pour it into the Duke’s ear before Claudius rises, calls for lights, and ends the performance. In Almereyda’s treatment Ethan Hawke’s Hamlet doesn’t rescript a play, he makes a video collage to create what a series of credit titles on the screen announce as: THE MOUSETRAP/ A TRAGEDY/BY HAMLET/PRINCE OF DENMARK. The collage has clips from films ranging from Life With Father to Deep Throat, culminating with a man standing before a mirror fitting his head for a crown. Throughout the film, Hawke’s Hamlet, wearing sunglasses, remains slumped in his seat, only once turning his head to glare at Claudius. Deborah Cartmell reads this moment as a microcosm of Almereyda’s intentions throughout. She sees his ‘blatant erasure of theatricality’ as revealing that his ‘film . . . is more interested in itself as an adaptation of other films of Hamlet than as a version of Shakespeare’s play’.40 Welles’s Shakespeare films have received similar criticism (as being more about Welles than Shakespeare); that criticism goes to the heart of their very American cinematic approach to translating Shakespeare from stage to screen. Almereyda’s decision to conceive of Hawke’s Hamlet as a film-maker gives his film the form of a first-person narrative. Branagh’s camera, in contrast, functions more like the omniscient narrator of a nineteenth-century Russian novel, which his film in many respects mirrors. Branagh’s camera often cuts away from the dialogue, from Horatio’s first mention of young Fortinbras, for instance, or to Hamlet’s evoking his memories of Yorick as he holds his skull, to illustrate what the words describe. Sometimes, as in the Fortinbras instance, the camera is providing us extra visual information independent from the speaker; in other instances, as in the Yorick example, the camera is flashing back to a specific memory evoked by the speaker’s lines.

130

SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

Almereyda, on the other hand, turns his Hamlet into a filmmaker by equipping Ethan Hawke with a toy Fisher-Price pixel camera on which he records the endless home movie, culminating in his film of ‘The Mousetrap’. Claudius is conceived as the CEO of Denmark, Inc., a giant media corporation, while Hamlet is a member of the New Wave or Dogma 95 independent film groups. Almereyda is positioning his film and his film aesthetic as far from Branagh’s flamboyant realism as possible. As Shakespeare teaches us, mock kings are only made possible by real kings. Almereyda’s clever, brilliant Hamlet gathers its considerable energies from the way it opposes and occasionally mocks Branagh’s epic version. Curiously, Branagh’s robust action-hero version of Hamlet drives Almereyda and Hawke back to mid-century as a cultural context for their Hamlet. Hawke’s Hamlet watches a clip of James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955) as the spur to the ‘O what a rogue and peasant slave am I’ soliloquy; Hawke has remarked that ‘Hamlet was much more like Kurt Cobain or Holden Caulfield than Sir Laurence Olivier’;41 and his performance seems weighed down by existential angst. Actually Hawke’s sensitive, brooding, pacifist Hamlet bears a much greater resemblance to Olivier’s ‘man who could not make up his mind’ than to Branagh’s activist prince, constrained more by his own conscience and social scruples from killing than by any native passivity.

Campbell Scott’s Hamlet (2001) Scott’s film (co-directed with Eric Simonson), in screenplay and style, falls between Branagh’s political epic and Almereyda’s charcoal sketch. In its three-hour length, late-nineteenthcentury setting, meticulous attention to action and text, and post-Oedipal approach it mirror’s Branagh’s version. But in providing rich and rewarding opportunities for American actors to flex their Shakespearean muscles on film and in some

CRITICAL RESPONSES AND THE AFTERLIFE

131

risky interpretive moves it makes in Scott’s performance and his relationship with his father’s ghost, the film reflects Almereyda’s American willingness to experiment boldly with translating Shakespeare into film. The film was shot in the gardens and interiors of a great American estate on Long Island. In the opening credits and again in transition shots between scenes the camera captures close-ups of the gothic faces of stone gargoyles that decorate the estate’s exterior upper walls. These faces, both by their context and content, suggest the pressure of the ancient past while the more immediate and dangerous past looms on the interior walls of the great house in the full-length portraits of Claudius, Gertrude, and Old Hamlet. The gargoyles and oils literally frame Scott’s way of working with his Shakespearean material. When his Hamlet escapes from Gertrude and Claudius’s entreaties in 1.2 he flees up the grand staircase, not to his room, but to his father’s study. Here again he is haunted by regal portraits of the Old King, one featuring his father in full military regalia, now just propped up against the wall and surrounded by shipping crates. The room’s contents are in the process of being packed up and buried in cold storage giving added poignancy to Hamlet’s: ‘That it should come to this:/But two months dead . . .’ (1.2.137–8). Scott’s Hamlet is already struggling to keep his father’s memory alive even as his legacy is being crated up and locked away. When Hamlet exits, after hearing Horatio’s report of seeing his father’s ghost, he grabs his father’s sword as a talisman of his military identity. That sword becomes a crucial prop in the film. Scott carries it with him to his encounter with the Ghost. The scene is filmed on the beach and the soundtrack frequently reminds us of the sea’s presence by the sounds of waves lapping on the shore and of the ringing of buoy bells. There is much stirring in the sands during the ‘old mole’ business and when the Ghost, from beneath, growls his final ‘Swear’ suddenly his arm reaches up out of the sand and yanks the sword out of Hamlet’s hand, wounding his son in the process.

132

SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

The image is powerful and shocking as this ghost both provokes and disarms his son. Scott’s Hamlet is not passive but he is genuinely confused by his relationship with his father. He’s angry with his mother (Blair Brown) but not oedipally fixated by her behaviour; he’s disgusted with Claudius (Jamie Sheridan) but doesn’t seem overwhelmed by his presence – his central and fatal conflict is with his father. When, in the film’s version of 3.3, he discovers Claudius at prayer and raises his sword ready to strike, the Ghost reappears and pushes down the threatening blade. When Hamlet does, finally, dispatch Claudius his eyes fly about the stunned faces of the court audience searching for his father, who suddenly materializes among the crowd. The film never confirms if these moments are ghostly reality or merely Hamlet’s fantasy, but in either case they reinforce Hamlet’s inability to shake or satisfy the demands of the father. This father not only looms; he intrudes. He’s both the demonic gargoyle on the exterior wall and the paternal portrait in the estate’s great room, and he remains alive in deeply troubling ways for his son. The film’s screenplay heightens the impact of Hamlet’s first encounter with the Ghost by moving the ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy up to immediately follow their exchange rather than appearing at its more traditional placement either right before (Q2) or right after (Q1) the ‘nunnery’ scene with Ophelia. Scott’s distracted Hamlet, wearing wire-rimmed spectacles and carrying a book, wanders through the estate’s empty rooms. He flings his book away and sits down at a desk and slaps his glasses on its top, breaking one of its lenses. He then picks up a shard and contemplates running it across his wrist, but instead makes several painful slashes across his forearm and lowers his head on the desk. From that odd angle, peering out directly into the camera in tight close-up, he begins the famous soliloquy. Something like the pattern with the Ghost is at work here: ritual maiming and unmanning as he wilts under the burden of the ‘thousand natural shocks/ That flesh is heir to’. Scott, like Branagh, films the soliloquies in one continuous shot, allowing language and emotion to

CRITICAL RESPONSES AND THE AFTERLIFE

133

build and ebb based on the actor’s, rather than the editor’s, pace and power. Dan Gillham’s camera work is tight and efficient (the film was shot in a speedy twenty-nine days). His preference is for close-ups and medium close-ups with very few establishing shots. We rarely get a long shot except when we get one of a line of tents and campfires establishing the presence of Fortinbras’s army bivouacked on the beach or shots of Claudius and Gertrude flirting in the estate’s gardens as perceived by Hamlet from within the house. Gary De Michele’s film score is minimalist: a few chords (oft repeated) of a solo jazz piano, a touch of percussion when Hamlet is agitated, and the occasional clanging of those buoy bells mentioned earlier. Scott’s film is interesting and ambitious. He is the only American who has attempted to pull off the Olivier and Branagh double act: directing and starring in film versions of Hamlet. If the film is, like Branagh’s rather than Olivier’s, father- rather than mother-driven perhaps that is because Scott is working out his own heroic struggle with his famous actorfather noted for his Shakespearean roles for Joseph Papp’s New York Public Theater: George C. Scott.

Sherwood Hu’s Prince of the Himalayas (2006) Shakespeare on film has become a global phenomenon in the past three decades, displacing its Anglo-American–European axis of the mid-twentieth century. Only the great Japanese film-maker Akira Kurosawa managed to bring Asian themes and film genres to filmed Shakespeare in that period. Now Shakespeare on film has expanded into Latin America (particularly Mexico and Brazil), India, Africa, and China. Sherwood Hu, born and raised in China but educated in the United States, has written and directed an epic version of Hamlet set in ancient Tibet which provides a thrillingly

134

SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

romantic (and, in his rewriting of the Claudius–Gertrude relationship, melodramatic) version of Shakespeare’s tale. No previous Shakespeare film, with the possible exception of Kurosawa’s Ran, makes such stunning use of its location setting. The film incorporates (and makes central to the image patterns Hu uses to create his version of the Hamlet story) clear mountain lakes, roaring streams, and snow-covered landscapes surrounded by the looming Himalayas. Hu’s epic setting, a romantic rather than melancholic Hamlet, and details of the plot (as in Hamlet and Ophelia’s love-making and Hamlet’s relationship with Claudius) all align his film with Branagh’s version, though he is also clearly familiar with Olivier’s and Kozintsev’s versions as well. Hu’s Hamlet, like Kozintsev’s, comes pounding home from school (in this case in Persia rather than Germany) to his father’s funeral on a beautiful white horse, but Hu’s Hamlet remains connected with that steed throughout the film so that one might be tempted to retitle the movie: Hamlet on Horseback. Hu, comfortable working within both eastern and western traditions, retains the basic characters and plot outline of Shakespeare’s play while embedding it within Tibetan culture. He brings a romantic cinematic energy to his camera work accomplished by tracking shots, overheads, quick cuts between long-shots and close-ups in capturing his Shakespearean material. He rearranges scenes, eliminates most of Hamlet’s soliloquies, and radically shifts the lines lifted from the ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy from the middle of Shakespeare’s text to the end of his screenplay in making a movie as visually arresting as it is an intelligent. Hu is fond of Hamlet’s wit and so retains the lines in his first exchange with Horatio (Horshu) about his mother’s marriage following hard upon his father’s funeral as well as his sexually suggestive remarks to Ophelia when he asks if he might ‘lie in your lap’. When Laertes leaves the palace it is not to return to school but to go hunting the snow leopard, so Polonius’s famous ‘To thine own self be true’ speech is refashioned (but still in keeping with Shakespeare’s concept of the character as

CRITICAL RESPONSES AND THE AFTERLIFE

135

a windbag) into common precepts about the appropriate rules for hunting. The gift that Ophelia tries to return to Hamlet (3.1 is repositioned in the film to follow 3.4 and the death of Polonius) is the ivory Persian knife he has brought her from Persia which he refuses to accept. The Tibetan elements Hu adds to his Shakespearean material include an aged crone known as the Wolf Woman who is determined, like a deity out of Greek tragedy, to guide the plot away from the Ghost’s call for revenge to a more ameliorable outcome and a lengthy back story detailing the relationship between Claudius and Gertrude. Claudius, in Hu’s version, is much younger than his brother, as is Gertrude. The two are romantically involved but are separated by the king’s insistence on marrying Gertrude. Even as a young woman Gertrude is the more aggressive partner, and it is her idea that she and Claudius consummate their relationship before her marriage to his brother. The product of that union is young Hamlet (Lhamoklodan), a secret that is kept from him until the final scenes of the film. Hu here makes literal the visual suggestion in Branagh’s Hamlet that Branagh bears a much greater physical resemblance to Derek Jacobi’s Claudius than he does to Brian Blessed’s King. Hamlet’s compromised birth is paralleled, and redeemed, by the child who is born from his love-making with Ophelia (Odsaluyang). Ophelia delivers her child (cutting its umbilical cord with the ivory-handled knife Hamlet has brought her from Persia) in the mountain lake which serves as a sacred site in the film and then she bleeds to death as the lake’s clear water turns red. The child is rescued by the Wolf Woman who names him ‘The Prince of the Himalayas’, and we understand that he will be the image that ends the cycle of bloodshed that inevitably follows the death of one king and the rise of another. The film’s repeated refrain is ‘When a new king ascends the throne blood will flow in the rivers’. The new prince, the film’s final frames suggests, will bring that cycle to an end. Hu’s film takes Shakespeare into an exotic landscape and makes him seem at home there. His only flaw, to my mind, is

136

SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

to overly complicate the family drama at the centre of Hamlet. By making Hamlet Gertrude and Claudius’s son the film vitiates Hamlet’s relationship with his father’s ghost and his struggle to forge a unique masculine identity out of his encounters with his father and Claudius. Perhaps Hu wants to challenge the Western fascination with patriarchal structures and the archetypal struggle between fathers and sons as one of its central myths. Hu flirts with melodrama and even soap opera (Claudius poisons Hamlet’s sword to ensure that he will kill Laertes [Lessar]) but then Hamlet insists that he and Laertes exchange swords before the duel begins) which works against the rough, raw, rude landscape against which he sets his film: those tumbling streams, the racing horses, the birds whirling in the night sky, the ever-present yaks bearing their burdens, and the Himalayas looming in the distance defining the borders of Hamlet’s world. But his film has the key ingredient of a successful adaptation: it respects its source without being awed by it. Like Kozintsev and Kurosawa before him, Hu makes his own work of cinematic art, inspired by Shakespeare but transformed by his own imagination into something rich and strange. Branagh’s Hamlet certainly influenced Almereyda, Scott and Hu in the making of their Hamlet films, but it is the cumulative impact of his six Shakespeare films that have exerted the most powerful afterlife on the Shakespeare film genre. The field of adaptation studies is so rich and broad that it has proved difficult to develop a satisfactory taxonomy to describe all of the possible variations that can result from works inspired by a single global classic like Hamlet. At the beginning of serious critical interest in Shakespeare on film, Jack Jorgens developed a taxonomy for Shakespeare films that has proved useful in at least describing a few basic types among those films which recast in cinematic terms a familiar Shakespearean narrative. Jorgens divides such films into three categories: the theatrical, the realistic, and the filmic (or poetic).42 While acknowledging that many Shakespeare films overlap these boundaries, he argued that Laurence Olivier’s films

CRITICAL RESPONSES AND THE AFTERLIFE

137

largely belonged to the first category, Franco Zeffirelli’s to the second, and Orson Welles’s to the third. Branagh and his contemporaries in the 1990s helped to fashion a fourth category which I have called the hybrid.43 The hybrid consists of films that find their inspiration as much from other Hollywood films and film genres as they do from their Shakespearean source material. These films boldly link Shakespeare, his plots and his language to popular film genres. Shakespeare is no longer regarded by these film-makers as simply material for elite art-house films but as having the potential for profit at the suburban cineplex. It is no surprise that such directors should emerge in the postmodern age where pastiche and parody and the mingling of high and low culture have been aesthetically celebrated. The creation of the hybrid Shakespeare film may prove to be Branagh’s most significant contribution to the genre. One final interesting and unusual instance of the afterlife of Branagh’s Hamlet was revealed with the publication of John Updike’s nineteenth novel, Gertrude and Claudius, in 2000. Updike is the first novelist to acknowledge that one of his fictional works was at least partially inspired by a Shakespeare film. In an afterword to Gertrude and Claudius, Updike writes: ‘To Kenneth Branagh’s four-hour film of Hamlet in 1996 the author owes a revivified image of the play and certain off-stage characters such as Yorick and King Hamlet.’44 Updike’s novel focuses on Claudius and Gertrude’s adulterous affair (rich Updike territory) and ends as the action of Shakespeare’s play begins. Earlier I speculated that Tom Stoppard may have been inspired to write Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and to place Hamlet’s clueless Wittenberg classmates at the centre of his work not only because Shakespeare places them at the margins of his Hamlet but because Olivier eliminates them entirely from his film of the play. Branagh’s film, in its interesting visual suggestions about the relationship between Claudius and Gertrude, provoked Updike to provide his version of their adultery and, in one long novelistic flashback (again following Branagh), their passion. Hamlet, as it has

138

SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

done for several centuries, will continue to haunt writers, actors, and audiences. Now that haunting will be extended and complicated by film versions of the play, all crying out, like the Ghost of Hamlet’s father, ‘Remember me’.

Notes 1 See Jawad Al-Asadi’s Forget Hamlet (Brisbane: Brisbane University Press, 2006), translated by Margaret Litvin. 2 See Kenneth Rothwell, A History of Shakespeare on Screen: A Century of Film and Television, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 337–40. 3 The Laurence Olivier Hamlet Archives, The British Film Institute. 4 J. D. Salinger, Catcher in the Rye (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 1951), p. 152. 5 Anthony Davies, ‘The Shakespeare Films of Laurence Olivier’, in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), ed. Russell Jackson, p. 172. 6 Ibid., p. 172. 7 Ibid., p. 173. 8 James Agee, Agee on Film: Volume I (New York: Gossett and Dunlap, 1969), pp. 388–9. 9 Ibid., p. 390. 10 Ibid., pp. 394–5. 11 Ibid., p. 396. 12 Jack Jorgens, Shakespeare on Film (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1977), p. 8. 13 Ibid., pp. 217 and 214. 14 Bernice Kliman, Hamlet: Film, Television, and Audio Performance (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1988), p. 23. 15 Ibid., pp. 24–5. 16 Davies, ‘The Shakespeare Films of Laurence Olivier’, p. 45.

CRITICAL RESPONSES AND THE AFTERLIFE

139

17 Jorgens, Shakespeare on Film, 217. 18 Peter S. Donaldson, Shakespearean Films/Shakespearean Directors (Boston, MA: Unwin Hyman, 1990), p. 35. 19 Patrick J. Cook, Cinematic Hamlet: The Films of Olivier, Zeffirelli, Branagh, and Almereyda (Athens, OH: The Ohio University Press, 2011), p. 24. 20 The box office for Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet was eventually eclipsed by that for Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet. 21 Olivier, Welles and Kurosawa set the standard by each making three Shakespeare films. Zeffirelli joined the group in 1990. Kenneth Branagh has now surpassed all of them by directing six Shakespeare films including In the Bleak Midwinter. 22 Grigori Kozintsev, King Lear: The Space of Tragedy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), p. 51. 23 Jorgens, Shakespeare on Film, p. 232. 24 Anthony Dawson, Hamlet. Text and Performance Series (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), p. 197. 25 Gertrude’s ‘closet’ is her dressing room. Nothing in the text requires a bed but it has been a vivid presence in all the major Hamlet productions of the past sixty years with the exception of Peter Hall’s for the National Theatre in 1975/6 which eliminated it. I would argue that Olivier’s film is responsible for the bed becoming a central object in the playing of the scene on stage and screen. 26 Max Reinhardt dreamed of such a cast including Greta Garbo, Charlie Chaplin, Gary Cooper, Fred Astaire (as Puck), Joan Crawford, and Clark Gable for his 1935 film of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He had to settle for Victor Jory, Anita Louise, Dick Powell, Olivia de Havilland, Mickey Rooney and James Cagney. 27 Branagh nurtures surprisingly fine performances, especially from Charlton Heston and Billy Crystal, from his eclectic cast. Only the great Jack Lemmon seems ‘o’er parted’ as Marcellus perhaps because his round face is so out of proportion with the tall military hat he is required to wear. 28 Quoted in David Rosenthal, Shakespeare on Screen (London: Hamlyn, 2000), p. 215.

140

SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

29 For a thorough assessment of the early reviews of Branagh’s Hamlet see Nina da Vinci Nichols, ‘Branagh’s Hamlet Redux’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 15, 5 (Summer 1997): pp. 38–40. 30 New York Times, Section B1, 25 December 1996: 1. 31 Samuel Crowl, The Films of Kenneth Branagh (Westport, CT and London: Praeger, 2006), p. 29. 32 Judith Buchanan, Shakespeare on Film (Harlow: Pearson/ Longman, 2005), p. 29. 33 Sarah Hatchuel, Shakespeare from Stage to Screen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 144. 34 Michael Anderegg, Cinematic Shakespeare (Lanham, MD: Rowan and Littlefield, 2004), p. 134. 35 Mark Thornton Burnett, ‘The “Very Cunning of the Scene”: Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet’, Literature/Film Quarterly, 25, 2 (1997): 80. 36 Maurice Hindle, Studying Shakespeare on Film (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 197. 37 Douglas Lanier, ‘ “Art thou base, common, and popular?”: The Cultural Politics of Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet’, in Spectacular Shakespeare (Rutherford: NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002), ed. Courtney Lehmann and Lisa S. Starks, p. 158. 38 Ibid., pp. 158–9. 39 Michael Almereyda, William Shakespeare’s Hamlet: A Screenplay Adaptation (London: Faber and Faber, 2000), vii. 40 Deborah Cartmell, ‘Theater on Film and Film on Theater in Hamlet’, in Shakespeare’s World/World Shakespeare: The Selected Proceedings of the International Shakespeare Association World Congress, Brisbane, 2006 (Cranbury: NJ: Associated University Presses, 2008), ed. Richard Fotheringham, Christa Jensohn, and R. S. White, p. 180. 41 Quoted in Almereyda, William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, p. xiv. 42 See Jorgens, Shakespeare on Film, pp. 7–12. 43 Samuel Crowl, Shakespeare and Film: A Norton Guide (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2008), pp. xix–xx. 44 John Updike, Gertrude and Claudius (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000), p. 211.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adelman, Janet. Suffocating Mothers. London: Routledge, 1992. Agee, James. Agee on Film: Volume I. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1969. Al-Asadi, Jawad. Forget Hamlet. Brisbane: Brisbane University Press, 2006. Alkire, N. L. ‘Subliminal Masks in Olivier’s Hamlet.’ Shakespeare on Film Newsletter 16, I (1991): 5. Almereyda, Michael. William Shakespeare’s Hamlet: A Screenplay Adaptation. London: Faber and Faber, 2000. Anderegg, Michael. Cinematic Shakespeare. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004. Ashworth, John. ‘Olivier, Freud, and Hamlet.’ Atlantic Monthly 183, 3 (1949): 30–33. Ball, Robert Hamilton. Shakespeare on Silent Film: A Strange Eventful History. New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1968. Barber, Cesar Lombardi and Wheeler, Richard. The Whole Journey: Shakespeare’s Power of Development. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986. Barr, Charles. ‘CinemaScope: Before and After.’ Film Quarterly 16, 4 (1963): 4–24. Bellour, Raymond. The Analysis of Film, edited by Constance Penley. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000. Biggs, Murray. ‘“He’s Going to His Mother’s Closet”: Hamlet and Gertrude on Screen.’ Shakespeare Survey 45 (1992): 53–62. Billigheirner, Rachel V. ‘Psychological and Political Trends in “To Be, or Not To Be”: Stage and Film Hamlets of the Twentieth Century.’ Literature in Performance 7, I (1986): 27–35. Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York: Riverside Books, 1998. Bordwell, David. Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985. ———. On the History of Film Style. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. 141

142

BIBLIOGRAPHY

———. The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modem Movies. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006. Bordwell, David, and Thompson, Kristin. Film Art: An Introduction, 3rd edn. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1990. Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson. The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film: Style and Mode of Production to 1960. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Branagh, Kenneth. Beginning. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989. ———. Hamlet by William Shakespeare: Screenplay, Introduction and Film Diary. London: Chatto and Windus, 1996. Buchanan, Judith. Shakespeare on Film. Harlow: Pearson/Longman, 2005. Buchman, Lome M. Still in Movement: Shakespeare on Screen. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Buhler, Stephen. ‘Double Takes: Branagh Gets to Hamlet.’ PostScript 17, I (1997): 43–52. ———. Shakespeare in the Cinema: Ocular Proof. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2002. Burnett, Mark Thornton. ‘The “Very Cunning of the Scene”: Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet.’ Literature/Film Quarterly 25 (1997): 78–82. ———. ‘ “To Hear and See the Matter”: Communicating Technology in Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet (2000).’ Cinema Journal 42, 3 (2003): 48–69. ———. ‘ “I See My Father” in “My Mind’s Eye”: Surveillance and the Filmic Hamlet.’ In Screening Shakespeare in the Twenty-first Century, edited by Mark Thornton Burnett and Ramona Wray, 31–52. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006. ———. Filming Shakespeare in the Global Marketplace. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. ——— and Wray, Ramona. Screening Shakespeare in the TwentyFirst Century. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006. Burt, Richard. Medieval and Early Modern Film and Media. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Campbell, Kathleen. ‘Zeffirelli’s Hamlet-QI in Performance.’ Shakespeare on Film Newsletter 16, I (1991): 7–8. Carroll, Noel. Theorizing the Moving Image. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Cartelli, Thomas and Rowe, Katherine. New Wave Shakespeare on Screen. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

143

Cartmell, Deborah. Interpreting Shakespeare on Screen. New York: St. Martin’s, 2000. ———. ‘Theater on Film and Film on Theater in Hamlet.’ In Shakespeare’s World/World Shakespeare: The Selected Proceedings of the International Shakespeare Congress, Brisbane, 2006. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2008. Charnes, Linda. ‘Dismember Me: Shakespeare, Paranoia, and the Logic of Mass Culture.’ Shakespeare Quarterly 48 (1997): 1–16. Coleman, Terry. Olivier. New York: Henry Holt, 2005. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Notes and Lectures upon Shakespeare and the Old Dramatists. London: George Bell and Sons, 1902. Collick, John. Shakespeare, Cinema and Society. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989. Cook, Patrick J. Cinematic Hamlet: The Films of Olivier, Zeffirelli, Branagh, and Almereyda. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2011. Coursen, H. R. Watching Shakespeare on Television. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1993. ———. Shakespeare in Production: Whose History? Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1996. ———. ‘The Critical Reception of Branagh’s Complete Hamlet in the U.S. Popular Press.’ Shakespeare in the Classroom 5, 2 (1997): 29–39. ———. Shakespeare in Space: Recent Shakespeare Productions on Screen. New York: Peter Lang, 2002. Cranston, Helga. ‘Editing Oliver’s Hamlet.’ Unpublished manuscript in the Helga Cranston Papers, The British Film Institute. Cross, Brenda (ed.). The Film Hamlet: A Record of Its Production. London: Saturn, 1948. Crowl, Samuel. ‘Hamlet.’ Shakespeare Bulletin 15, I (1997): 34–5. ———. ‘Flamboyant Realist: Kenneth Branagh.’ In The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film, edited by Russell Jackson, 222–40. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. ———. ‘Communicating Shakespeare: An Interview with Kenneth Branagh.’ Shakespeare Bulletin 20, 3 (Summer 2002): 25–9. ———. Shakespeare at the Cineplex: The Kenneth Branagh Era. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2003. ———. The Films of Kenneth Branagh. Westport, CT and London: Praeger, 2006.

144

BIBLIOGRAPHY

———. Shakespeare and Film: A Norton Guide. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008. Davies, Anthony. Filming Shakespeare’s Plays: The Adaptations of Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles, Peter Brook, Akira Kurosawa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. ———. ‘The Shakespeare Films of Laurence Olivier.’ In The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film, edited by Russell Jackson, 163–82. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Dawson, Anthony. Hamlet. Text and Performance Series. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995. Dent, Alan. ‘Text-Editing Shakespeare with Particular Reference to Hamlet.’ In Hamlet: The Film and the Play, edited by Alan Dent, 7–30. London: World Film Publishers, 1948. Donaldson, Peter S. Shakespearean Films/Shakespearean Directors. Boston, MA: Unwin Hyman, 1990. ———. ‘Taking on Shakespeare: Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V.’ Shakespeare Quarterly 42 (Spring, 1991): 90–95. ———. ‘Remediation: Hamlet among the Pixel Visionaries; Video Art, Authenticity, and Wisdom in Almereyda’s Hamlet.’ In A Concise Companion to Shakespeare on Screen, edited by Diana E. Henderson, 216–37. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006. Donne, John. ‘The First Anniversary’, in Herbert Grierson (ed.), The Poems of John Donne, London: Oxford University Press, 1933. Duffy, Robert A. ‘Gade, Olivier, Richardson: Visual Strategies in Hamlet Adaptations.’ Literature/Film Quarterly 4 (1976): 141–52. Eliot, T. S. Selected Essays: New Edition. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1950. Fabiszak, Jacek. ‘Elizabethan Stage vs. Cinema in Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet.’ Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 34 (1999): 333–40. Furse, Roger. ‘Designing the Film Hamlet.’ In Hamlet: The Film and the Play, edited by Alan Dent, 50–65. London: World Film, 1948. Garber, Marjorie. Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers: Literature and Uncanny Causality. New York: Routledge, 1987. ———. Shakespeare after All. New York: Anchor Books, 2004. ———. Shakespeare and Modern Culture. New York: Anchor Books, 2009. Gielgud, John, with John Miller. Acting Shakespeare. New York: Scribner, 1992.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

145

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, trans. Thomas Carlyle. London: Oliver & Boyd, 1824. Greenblatt, Stephen, Cohen, Walter, Howard, Jean and Maus, Katherine (eds). The Norton Shakespeare. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997. ———. Hamlet in Purgatory. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001. Gross, Sheryl W. ‘Poetic Realism in Olivier’s Hamlet.’ Hamlet Studies 2, 2 (1980): 62–8. Guneratne, Anthony R. Shakespeare, Film Studies, and the Visual Culture of Modernity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Halio, J. L. ‘Three Filmed Hamlets.’ Literature/Film Quarterly 1 (1973): 316–20. Hapgood, Robert. ‘Popularizing Shakespeare: The Artistry of Franco Zeffirelli.’ In Shakespeare, the Movie: Popularizing the Plays on Film, TV, and Video, edited by Lynda E. Boose and Richard Burt, 80–94. New York: Routledge, 1997. Hatchuel, Sarah. A Companion to the Shakespearean Films of Kenneth Branagh. Winnipeg: Blizzard Publishing, 2000. ———. Shakespeare from Stage to Screen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Hawke, Ethan. Introduction to William Shakespeare’s Hamlet: A Screenplay Adaptation, by Michael Almereyda, xiii–xv. London: Faber and Faber, 2000. Hindle, Maurice. Studying Shakespeare on Film. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Hirsch, Foster. Laurence Olivier on Screen. Boston, MA: Twayne, 1979. Hodgdon, Barbara. ‘The Critic, the Poor Player, Prince Hamlet, and the Lady in the Dark.’ In Shakespeare Reread: The Text in New Context, edited by Russ MacDonald, 259–93. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994. Holderness, Graham. ‘Shakespeare Rewound.’ Shakespeare Survey 45 (1992): 63–74. Holland, Peter. ‘Film Editing.’ In Shakespeare Performed: Essays in Honor of R. A. Foakes, edited by Grace Ioppolo, 272–98. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2000. Howlett, Kathy M. Framing Shakespeare on Film. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2000.

146

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Jackson, Russell. ‘Kenneth Branagh’s Film of Hamlet: The Textual Choices.’ Shakespeare Bulletin 15, 2 (1997): 37–8. ———. Shakespeare Films in the Making: Vision, Production and Reception. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Jones, Ernest. Hamlet and Oedipus. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1949. Jorgens, Jack. Shakespeare on Film. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1977. Kennedy, Michael. Portrait of Walton. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Kidnie, Margaret Jane. Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation. London: Routledge, 2009. Klein, Holger and Daphinoff, Dimiter (eds). Hamlet on Screen. Shakespeare Yearbook 8. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1997. Kliman, Bernice. ‘A Palimpsest for Olivier’s Hamlet.’ Comparative Drama 17, 3 (1983): 243–53. ———. Hamlet: Film, Television, and Audio Performance. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1988. ———. ‘The Unkindest Cuts: Flashcut Excess in Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet.’ In Talking Shakespeare: Shakespeare into the Millennium, edited by Deborah Cartmell and Michael Scott, 151–67. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001. Knight, G. Wilson. The Wheel of Fire, 4th edn. London: Methuen, 1949. Kott, Jan. Shakespeare our Contemporary. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1966. Lanier, Douglas. ‘ “Art Thou Base, Common, and Popular?”: The Cultural Politics of Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet.’ In Spectacular Shakespeare: Critical Theory and Popular Cinema, edited by Courtney Lehmann and Lisa S. Starks, 149–71. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002. ———. ‘Shakescorp Noir.’ Shakespeare Quarterly 53, 2 (2002): 157–80. Lawrence, D.H. ‘Twilight in Italy’ in D.H. Lawrence and Italy, introduced by Anthony Burgess. New York: Viking Press, 1972. Lehmann, Courtney. Shakespeare Remains: Theater to Film. Early Modern to Postmodern. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002. Lumet, Sidney. Making Movies. New York: Vintage Press, 1995.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

147

MacDonald, Andrew and MacDonald, Gina. ‘(Re)Writing Shakespeare for Film: Devore/Zefferelli’s Hamlet vs. Branagh’s Hamlet.’ Creative Screen Writing 5, 2 (1998): 42–53. Manvell, Roger. Shakespeare and the Film. New York: Praeger, 1971. Maslin, Janet. New York Times, Section B1, 25 December (1996): 1. McGilligan, Patrick. Hitchcock: A Life of Darkness and Light. New York: HarperCollins, 2003. McManaway, James G. ‘The Laurence Olivier Hamlet.’ Shakespeare Association Bulletin 24 (1949): 3–11. Meier, Paul. ‘Kenneth Branagh with Utter Clarity: An Interview.’ TOR: The Drama Review 41, 2 (1997): 82–9. Nichols, Nina da Vinci. ‘Branagh’s Hamlet Redux,’ Shakespeare Bulletin, 15, 5 (1997): 38–40. Olivier, Laurence. ‘An Essay in Hamlet.’ In The Film Hamlet: A Record of Its Production, edited by Brenda Cross, 11–15. London: Saturn Press, 1948. ———. Confessions of an Actor. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982. ———. On Acting. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986. Pennington, Michael. Hamlet: A Users Guide. London: Nick Hern Books, 1996. Rafferty, Terrence, ‘Solid Flesh,’ The New Yorker, 13 January 1997, 80. Rosenberg, Marvin. The Masks of Hamlet. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1992. Rosenthal, David. Shakespeare on Screen. London: Hamlyn, 2000. Rothwell, Kenneth S. A History of Shakespeare on Screen: A Century of Film and Television. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Rutter, Carol Chillington. ‘Snatched Bodies: Ophelia in the Grave.’ Shakespeare Quarterly 49 (1998): 299–319. Salinger, J. D. The Catcher in the Rye. Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 1951. Sanders, Julie. ‘The End of History and the Last Man: Kenneth Branagh’ s Hamlet.’ In Shakespeare, Film, Fin de Siècle, edited by Mark Thornton Burnett and Ramona Wray, 147–64. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. Shaltz, Justin. ‘Three Hamlets on Film.’ Shakespeare Bulletin II, 1(1993): 36–7.

148

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Shapiro, James. A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599. New York: HarperCollins, 2005. Shaw, George Bernard, Shaw on Shakespeare, edited by Edwin Wilson. New York: Dutton, 1961. Silviria, Dale. Laurence Olivier and the Art of Filmmaking. East Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1985. Simmons, James R., Jr. ‘“In the Rank Sweat of an Enseamed Bed”: Sexual Aberration and the Paradigmatic Screen Hamlets.’ Literature/Film Quarterly 25 (1997): 1–18. Skovmand, Michael. ‘Mel’s Melodramatic Melancholy: Zeffirelli’s Hamlet.’ In Screen Shakespeare, special issue of The Dolphin (no. 24), edited by Michael Skovmand, 113–31. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 1994. Sloboda, Noel. ‘Visions and Revisions of Laurence Olivier in the Hamlet Films of Franco Zeffirelli and Kenneth Branagh.’ Studies in the Humanities 27 (2000): 140–57. Stam, Robert and Raengo, Alessandra (eds). Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Adaptation. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. Starks, Lisa S. 1999. ‘The Displaced Body of Desire: Sexuality in Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet.’ In Shakespeare and Appropriation, edited by Christy Desmet and Robert Sawyer, 160–78. New York: Routledge, 1999. Taylor, Neil. ‘The Films of Hamlet.’ In Shakespeare and the Moving Image, edited by Anthony Davies and Stanley Wells, 180–95. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Teker, Gulsen Sayin. ‘Empowered by Madness: Ophelia in the Films of Kozintsev, Zeffirelli, and Branagh.’ Literature/Film Quarterly 34 (2006): 113–19. Thompson, Ann and Taylor, Neil (eds). Hamlet. London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2006. Thomson, David. The New Biographical Dictionary of Film. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. Tyler, Parker. ‘Hamlet and Documentary.’ Kenyon Review II (1949): 527–32. Updike, John. Gertrude and Claudius. New York: Alfred Knopf, 2000. Van Watson, William. ‘Shakespeare, Zeffirelli, and the Homosexual Gaze.’ Literature/Film Quarterly 20 (1992): 308–24.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

149

Weiss, Tanja. Shakespeare on the Screen: Kenneth Branagh’s Adaptations of Henry V, Much Ado About Nothing and Hamlet. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1999. Weller, Philip. ‘Freud’s Footprints in Films of Hamlet.’ Literature/ Film Quarterly 25 (2005): 119–24. Welsh, James M. and Vela, Richard. ‘Hamlet.’ In Shakespeare into Film, edited by James M. Welsh, Richard Vela and John C. Tibbetts, 17–26. New York: Checkmark Books, 2002. White, Mark. Kenneth Branagh. London: Faber and Faber, 2005. Willson, Robert F., Jr. ‘Olivier’s Hamlet: Film Realism versus Poetic Ambiguity in II.i and IV.vii.’ Hamlet Studies 1 (1979): 137–9. ———. ‘Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet: The Revenge of Fortinbras.’ Shakespeare Newsletter 47, 1 (1997): 79. Wilson, John Dover. What Happens in Hamlet, 3rd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956/1967. Wood, Robert E. ‘Medium Cruel: Hamlet in 2000.’ Studies in the Humanities 31 (2004): 60–68. Zeffirelli, Franco. Zeffirelli: The Autobiography. New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986.

150

INDEX

Adelman, Janet 16, 92 Agee, James 102, 103, 104 Allen, Woody 34 All’s Well That Ends Well 4 Almereyda, Michael 23, 126, 128–130 Anderegg, Michael 124 Antony and Cleopatra 6 As You Like It 3, 4 Ball, Robert Hamilton 104 Barber, C.L. 16, 92 Barrault, Jean Louis 43 Beale, Simon Russell 21, 22, 23, 119 Beckett, Samuel 18 Belleforest, Francois 2 Bentley, Eric 102, 103 Bergman, Ingrid 59 Blessed, Brian 75, 83, 120, 135 Bloom, Harold 16, 92 Bondarchuk, Sergei 66 Branagh, Kenneth 21, 23, 25, 27, 29, 61, 65–96, 117, 122–126, 130, 134, 136, 137 Brown, Blair 132 Brown, John Mason 102, 103 Buchanan, Judith 123, 124 Burbage, Richard 67 Burnett, Mark Thornton 124, 125 Burton, Richard 13, 19

Cartmell, Deborah 129 Casablanca 34 Catcher in the Rye, The 107 Caulfield, Holden 101, 130 Cheek by Jowl 20 Chekhov, Anton 111 Christie, Julie 67, 92, 93 Churchill, Winston 69 Citizen Kane 40 Claudius and Gertrude 137 Close, Glenn 50, 115, 117 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 13 Condell, Henry 5 Cook, Patrick 76, 95, 107 Cranston, Helga 40, 43, 44 Crystal, Billy 119 Cukor, George 47 Dali, Salvador 59 Davies, Anthony 41, 102, 105 Dawson, Anthony 51, 61, 65 Dead Again 83 Dean, James 130 Dench, Judi 108 Dent, Alan 30 Depardieu, Gerard 82, 87 Die Hard 95 Dillane, Stephen 20 Domingo, Placido 71 Donaldson, Peter 44, 106 Donne, John 10 Doyle, Patrick 70–73, 84, 118 Duffy, Robert 102, 103 151

152

INDEX

Eliot, T.S. 15 Eyre, Richard 20 Faithfull, Marianne 114 Fiennes, Ralph 22 Finney, Albert 20, 109, 118 First Anniversary, The 10 Fitzgerald, F. Scott 14 Fleming, Alexander 26 Flynn, Errol 74, 95 Ford, John 34 Freud, Sigmund 14, 32, 51, 59, 92 Gable, Clark 119 Gade, Sven 26, 52 Garber, Marjorie 13, 14, 92 Gibson, Mel 50, 115, 117 Gielgud, John 19, 100, 119 Gillham, Daniel 133 Goethe, Wolfgang von 13 Graduate, The 34 Grant, Cary 119 Greenblatt, Stephen 5, 16, 29 Guinness, Alec 119 Guthrie, Tyrone 32 Hair 17, 19 Hall, Peter 20, 29 Hamlet 1–27 Hamlet (film, Almereyda) 126, 128–130 Hamlet (film, Branagh) 29, 61, 65–96, 117–138 Hamlet (film, Hu) 127, 128, 133–136 Hamlet (film, Kozintsev) 109–112 Hamlet (film, Olivier) 29–62, 100–117

Hamlet (film, Richardson) 112–114 Hamlet (film, Scott) 127, 130–133 Hamlet (film, Zeffirelli) 114–117 Hamlet and Oedipus 15, 32 Hamlet in Purgatory 17 Harvey, Tim 69, 77 Hatchuel, Sarah 44, 68, 124 Hawke, Ethan 129, 130 Heminges, John 5 Hemingway, Ernest 14 Henry V 3, 4, 34 Henry V (film, Branagh) 83, 95, 120, 127, 128 Henry V (film, Olivier) 34, 48, 60 Herlie, Eileen 32, 50, 115 Herrmann, Bernard 111 Heston, Charlton 89, 124 Hindle, Maurice 124, 125 Hitchcock, Alfred 31, 33, 46, 59, 66 Hopkins, Anthony 114 Hu, Sherwood 86, 133, 134, 135, 136 Huckleberry Finn 101 In the Bleak Midwinter 125 Jackson, Russell 82 Jacobi, Derek 76, 77, 82, 135 Jones, Ernest 15, 32, 51 Jorgens, Jack 195, 112, 136 Joyce, James 13 Julius Caesar 3 Kidnie, Margaret Jane 24, 26 King Lear 6 Kliman, Bernice 105, 125

INDEX

Kline, Kevin 13, 22 Knight, G. Wilson 9, 15 Kott, Jan 8, 17 Kozintsev, Grigori 107, 108, 109–112 Kubrick, Stanley 34 Kurosawa, Akira 26, 133 Kyd, Thomas 3 Lanier, Douglas 124, 125 Last Action Hero 49, 101 Law, Jude 22 Lawrence, D.H. 13 Lean, David 34, 66, 67, 119 Leigh, Vivien 60, 119 Lewis, Daniel Day 21 Lion King, The 26, 27 Loncraine, Richard 120 Love’s Labour’s Lost (film, Branagh) 121 Luhrmann, Baz 25, 120 Macbeth 6 Macbeth (film, Welles) 127 Mankiewicz, Joseph 67 Manvell, Roger 105 Martin, Steve 26 Maslin, Janet 122 McCarthy, Joseph 61 McTiernan, John 49, 101 Millais, John Vincent 56 Much Ado about Nothing (film, Branagh) 95, 120 My Weekend with Marilyn 68 Nielsen, Asta 52 Nunn, Trevor 80 Olivier, Laurence 19, 27, 29–62, 65–68, 79, 82, 84, 88, 96

153

Othello 6 Othello (film, Parker) 120 Othello (film, Welles) 80 Pacino, Al 120 Parfitt, Judy 114 Parker, Oliver 120 Pasternak, Boris 109, 110 Peck, Gregory 59 Prince of the Himalayas 86, 133–139 Prince and the Showgirl, The 68 Pryce, Jonathan 20, 118 Rebecca (film, Hitchcock) 59, 100 Rebel without a Cause 130 Reitz, Karl 109 Richard III (film, Loncraine) 120 Richardson, Ralph 119 Richardson, Tony 107, 108, 112–114 Romeo and Juliet 6 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead 18 Rylance, Mark 17, 20, 118 Salinger, J.D. 101 Saxo Grammaticus 2 Schall, Heinz 52 Schlesinger, John 109 Schwarzenegger, Arnold 49, 50, 102 Scofield, Paul 116 Scott, Campbell 127, 130, 131 Scott, George C. 133 Sewell, Rufus 69 Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human 16

154

INDEX

Shapiro, James 17 Sheridan, Jamie 132 Shaw, George Bernard 13 Shostakovich, Dimitri 111, Simmons, Jean 32, 118 Smoktunovski, Innokenti 109, 110 Spall, Timothy 119 Spanish Tragedy, The 3 Spellbound 59 Stam, Robert 25, 26 Stoppard, Tom 18, 19, 137 Stubbs, Imogen 21 Suffocating Mothers 16 Swanson, Gloria 119 Swinburne, Monica 51 Sydney, Basil 48, 95 Taming of the Shrew, The (film, Zeffirelli) 108 Taymor, Julie 120, 121 Tennant, David 21 Thatcher, Margaret 21 Thompson, Alex 67, 78, 84 Titus (film, Taymor) 121, 122 Troilus and Cressida 4 Truffaut, Francois 34

Twain, Mark 101 Twelfth Night (film, Nunn) 80 Updike, John 137 Venora, Diane 22 Vining, Edward 52 Wagner, Richard 36 Waiting for Godot 18 Walker, Timothy 20 Walton, William 34–39, 49, 58, 118 Warner, David 19 Welles, Orson 31, 34, 40, 66, 80, 127 West, Samuel 21 Wheeler, Richard 16, 92 Whishaw, Ben 21 Williams, John 111 Williams, Robin 119 Williamson, Nicol 13, 109, 113, 117 Winslet, Kate 72, 80, 119 Wooster Group, The 22 Zeffirelli, Franco 25, 107, 108, 114–117

155

156

157

158