Screen Adaptations: Shakespeare's Hamlet

The Relationship between Text and Film

Samuel Crowl

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781472538925
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Hamlet is the most often produced play in the western literary canon, and a fertile global source for film adaptation. Samuel Crowl, a noted scholar of Shakespeare on film, unpacks the process of adapting from text to screen through concentrating on two sharply contrasting film versions of Hamlet by Laurence Olivier (1948) and Kenneth Branagh (1996). The films' socio-political contexts are explored, and the importance of their screenplay, film score, setting, cinematography and editing examined. Offering an analysis of two of the most important figures in the history of film adaptations of Shakespeare, this study seeks to understand a variety of cinematic approaches to translating Shakespeare's "words, words, words" into film's particular grammar and rhetoric

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 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 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 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 middle-class 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.

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 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 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 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 ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Related Titles
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Credits/Filmography
• 1 Literary contexts
• 2 Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet: From text to screen
• 3 Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet: From text to screen
• 4 Critical responses and the afterlife of text and film
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright