1948 Laurence Olivier Production

This production, directed by Olivier and starring him in the title role and his voice as the voice of the Ghost, also featured Basil Sydney as Claudius; Eileen Herlie as Gertrude; Norman Wooland as Horatio; Felix Aylmer as Polonius; Terence Morgan as Laertes; and Jean Simmons as Ophelia.

In his 1971 book Shakespeare and the Film (40–47), Roger Manvell praised the film’s visual and verbal effectiveness; noted that Hamlet’s included soliloquies mix “voiced thought and direct speech” (42); called the acting “full of detailed touches” (42); and admired William Walton’s music (43). Manvell considered this film, of the several Shakespeare productions directed by Olivier, most worth “detailed examination,” although he remarked that it suffered from certain flaws. These included “longeurs”; “camera movement” that is “sometimes inexplicably overdone,” so that it becomes “technically self-conscious” and thus “destroy[s] the atmosphere”; and “[m]oments of pictorialism [that] can strike a false note” (as in the shot of Ophelia’s body in a stream). He considered it “over long” but thought it “suffers from certain important losses through the drastic cutting of the text,” but he concluded that this Hamlet is the “most imaginative in treatment and realization” and “by far the most demanding” of Olivier’s three Shakespeare movies “as a play” (44).

Jay L. Halio, in a 1973 essay titled “Three Filmed Hamlets,” compared and contrasted Olivier’s movie with later productions starring Richard Burton and Richard Chamberlain, noting that Olivier’s version cuts “about 1900 lines” but arguing that “only Olivier’s stands up as a full cinematic experience. And so it was conceived from the outset. Literary purists, who have long lamented what Olivier did to Shakespeare, completely miss the point. Olivier started out to make a film, not to reproduce Shakespeare’s play.” Halio reminded readers that in “his own time, Shakespeare frequently revised, cut, added to, and in many other ways altered his plays to meet the changing needs of his company or the changing fashions of the day.” He therefore thought it “an error to maintain, as some critics persist in doing, that by altering the text we are somehow violating Shakespeare or doing anything more than he would do—and as the evidence clearly shows, did do” (319).

In an article published in 1976 and titled “Gade, Olivier, Richardson: Visual Strategy in Hamlet Adaptation,” Robert A. Duffy argued that “the real appeal of the Olivier version lies in its truly cinematic approach to Shakespeare, an artistic strategy which is made to serve the text, even enhance it in certain details,” because “Olivier uses film where film most effectively functions. The phenomenal world, the realm of shape, texture, form and artifact, serves as visual counterpoint to the verse of that poet most sensitive to the poetically evocative power embodied in the universe of things.” According to Duffy, “Academic elaborations of the parallels between Shakespearean and cinematic technique cannot communicate the effect of the fusion practically achieved on film. Of course, a great deal of its success stems from the vocal skills of Olivier’s players, but the poetry is energized by a mise-en-scene possible only in the cinema, a conception of Elsinore and its accidents which imparts palpable form to the poetic force of the text” (148–49).

Jack Jorgens, commenting on this Hamlet in his 1977 book Shakespeare on Film (207-19), noted that although this play is often cut in any performance, Olivier’s production deliberately simplifies and reduces the work, focusing on the popular modern interest in private minds. International and domestic politics are downplayed; important characters never appear; details of the script are rearranged; and mysteries in the text are clearly explained (208). The cavernous, “Kafkaesque” set symbolizes the “mind’s labyrinths,” and voice-overs and striking distances emphasize Hamlet’s isolation (210). Jorgens compared this film to Welles’s Othello and Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, which also begin at the end. He admired its style; noted “Hamlet’s sense of disorientation” and randomly associative thought (emphasized by the “wandering camera”); stressed the film’s “ambivalent and shifting points of view”; and suggested that viewers tend to identify with Hamlet (211). According to Jorgens, sexual imagery and behavior abounds, especially when Hamlet and Gertrude are involved, although he considered the film’s resolution less complex than the play’s, its sounds “less inventive” than they might have been, and its use of “tableaux” excessive. He did, however, admire the way Olivier often suited movement to words, although he considered the music less impressive than it had the potential to be (217).

In an article published in 1977 and titled “Olivier’s Hamlet: A Film-Infused Play,” Bernice W. Kliman discussed such matters as the “mammoth” sets, the “traveling, tracking camera” (306), the “time gap[s] between scenes” (307), and the “non-realistic sets” (308). She commented on the “feeling of emptiness” created by the “sparse sets” and “few supporting actors,” the use of spotlighting (308), the ways “Olivier’s cuts serve his design” (309), his various brief additions (310), and his frequent use of “transpositions” (310–13). She concluded by asking, “How can one, finally, evaluate the film? Olivier’s Hamlet is not Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It fails, then, to be a substitute for or even an illustration of Shakespeare’s text. But since that is not the purpose of the film (only an incidental purpose that we teachers may make of the film), this failure need not enter into our evaluation. For fortunately,” she continued, “we are not forced to make a choice between Olivier and Shakespeare. We have both. Because Olivier uses every means at his disposal to create a meaningful, coherent, and unified work, because he clarifies with his rigorously applied conception much of the nature of film and theater, his work is, in spite of its few flaws, excellent.” She felt that the “scenes that one remembers—the soliloquies using voiceover; the close-up of the two foils, the one bated and the other unbated; the semi-transparent ghost with the haunting voice; the moving torch filling the frame before it is thrust into Claudius’ face—all these could only be expressed on film. But more important,” Kliman concluded, “are those aspects that film and stage can share: the clear interpretation and the magnificent acting of all, but especially of Olivier himself. It is fascinating to see how Olivier fruitfully plays one medium against the other, producing a film that makes a significant comment on the nature of each medium” (313).

In another essay from 1977, this one titled “Sight and Space,” J. L. Styan discussed the “Mousetrap” episode by writing that “Olivier’s rule for this complex scene seems to have been to create tension and meaning out of camera movement. In lieu of Shakespeare’s pattern, that of the audience watching Hamlet watching the throne watching the players, Olivier has done what only the film can do: provide a constantly changing point of view, but especially cutting between Hamlet and Claudius until the latter cracks up. However,” Styan continued, “for all the camera movement throughout the scene, the point of view is finally Hamlet’s alone: that is, Hamlet is the winner. Now this reading of the scene is a legitimate one, although it is not necessarily Shakespeare’s.” According to Styan, “The important spatial difference between the scene as it might be staged and what we see on the screen is that on the stage Shakespeare can sustain the mystery and promote its ambivalence, as so often in his tragedies, while on the screen it is harder for the camera to remain neutral—it must forever be pointing and making statements. There is,” Styan added, “one other related point. In the general absence of words to do the talking, William Walton’s music assumes abnormal importance. … It is cheating a bit when the music finally swells up to full orchestration as if to cry, ‘Eureka!’” Styan argued that “[w]hen Olivier’s camera travels on the faces of his actors, we see what we are told to see. This treatment is a kind of simplification, for in effect it replaces Shakespeare’s cat’s-cradle of interactions by spelling out the mood and atmosphere of the scene at secondhand. In the theatre, the act of perception is directly experienced, and the scene’s dramatic tension is what an audience receives and enjoys in the act of direct perception, since it is part of our creative and interpretative contribution to the making of the play.” He concluded that “[i]f the film camera reduces our function and does too much of the thinking for us, dissolving too much of the space which our eyes must scan and span, we remain passive spectators, and with all its urgent movement the scene is visually a still-life picture” (27–28).

Writing in an article published in 1983 and titled “A Palimpsest for Olivier’s ‘Hamlet,’” Bernice W. Kliman suggested that changes from a preproduction script to the film itself (a) helped de-emphasize unnecessary instructions to the audience (244); (b) eliminated “obtrusive sound effects” (245); (c) “untwisted complications [in] Shakespeare’s text” (246); (d) helped “clarify connections among characters” (247); (e) helped “clarify motivations” (248); and (f) helped “heighten the drama” (250). Kliman offered examples of all these changes and their effects.

Rachel V. Billigheimer, in a 1986 essay titled “Psychological and Political Trends in ‘To Be, or Not To Be’: Stage and Film Hamlets of the Twentieth Century,” wrote that Olivier’s film “has been criticized as shaping the character of Hamlet towards too extreme a Freudian conception,” portraying him “as a man incapable of decisive action, effeminate, contemplative, and mother fixated.” But Billigheimer suggested that “[a]lthough Olivier announces at the beginning that the tragedy of Hamlet is that he could not make up his mind, Olivier plays Hamlet as a man who is continually trying to make up his mind. The heroic aspects of Hamlet’s character are omitted in order to portray Hamlet as a sensitive and sentimental nobleman.” Thus, the “‘To be, or not to be’ soliloquy is rendered in the manner of a meditation on suicide. Hamlet’s death is in fact portrayed with the suggestion of suicide or self-sacrifice as the soldiers bear his body to the tower” (28).

In his 1988 book Filming Shakespeare’s Plays (41–64), Anthony Davies wrote that “[m]uch critical comment is condescendingly disparaging about the film, claiming that Oliviers ‘sense of cinema’—so successfully evident in Henry V—is unsuited to the demands of Hamlet, and that it is a fumbling attempt to apply a cinematic strategy with few new ideas to material which remains unyieldingly theatrical” (41). Davies, however, disagreed, praising the film’s “integrated … spatial strategy,” commending its thorough exploitation of “[s]ingle ideas,” and concluding that “the film is radiant with its essential cinematic conception, and that it constitutes an orchestrated whole whose spatial structure is irrefutably filmic,” becoming a fine film rather than merely a filmed theatrical production (64). Davies discussed the film’s resemblances to Olivier’s Henry V; the reactions of various critics to this later effort; and its use of “associative pattern[s],” especially of imagery (including light and darkness and shadows). He noted how Ophelia is associated with imagery of nature and plant growth; how Olivier uses “deep focus”; the ways distances of space are depicted; and the ways Hamlet is depicted in relation to the court. Commenting on the use of diagonal movement, Davies found the film not “consistently expressionist”; defended it from criticism that it over-uses camera movement; discussed controversies concerning the play-within-the play; explored its use of “visual reminiscences” or echoing scenes; and emphasized its use of the “relationship between space and time” (64).

In a 1988 essay titled “Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet,” Bernice Kliman wrote that because “Olivier uses every means at his disposal to create a meaningful, coherent, and unified work, because he clarifies with his rigorously applied conception much of the nature of film and theater, his work is, in spite of its few flaws, outstanding. The scenes one remembers—the soliloquies using voiceover: the closeups of the two foils, the one bated and the other unbated; the semi-transparent ghost with the unforgettable voice; the moving torch filling the frame before Hamlet thrusts it into Claudius’s face—all these could be expressed only on film” (35).

Peter Donaldson’s 1990 volume Shakespearean Films/Shakespearean Directors (31–68) is an especially insightful book, full of detailed analysis and also brimming with many still photos from all the films discussed. It offers a very thorough discussion of Olivier’s Hamlet, emphasizing its Freudian aspects, its relevance to Olivier’s own life, its effective use of settings, and many other matters.

Discussing the film’s Oedipal aspects in some detail (35, 48), Donaldson also noted such imagery as “the persistent use of vacant chairs and empty rooms” and “the frequent absence of human figures from the image.” He suggested that these details implied “Hamlet’s self-absorption” and the ways “Oedipal confusion” implies “an irresolution of roles and meanings” (48). Camera movements suggest Hamlet’s roaming throughout the castle; “the spying of others is always prepared for by elaborate and explicit conspirings”; but Hamlet himself always seems to be somewhere “precisely when something is to be overheard,” so that “even when he is not there we expect him” (54).

According to Donaldson, “the film’s emphasis on emptiness” suggests Hamlet’s narcissistic “Oedipal difficulties. He is often the sole inhabitant of a large, unpeopled space, isolated and grandiose” (55), with his final attack on Claudius taking the form of “an acrobatic move impossible to repeat” (61). In a good summary of his whole argument, Donaldson writes that “Olivier’s Hamlet displays both the greatness of spirit and the tragic waste of his gifts that Shakespeare’s text calls for. He is vigorous, courageous, intellectually powerful, and ethically sensitive. But neither his mission nor his factitious Oedipal victory can supply a firm sense of worth or provide a stable connection between this brilliant but isolated character and the human world around him” (63).

Lorne Buchman, writing in 1991 in his book Still in Movement: Shakespeare on Screen (98–101), called Hamlet “the most ‘cinematic’ of Olivier’s Shakespeare films,” one that “repeatedly uses devices unique to the medium,” including “close-ups, extensive camera movement, flashbacks, and multiple angles and perspectives, all combined with a dominant soundtrack” (98). But he also noted that its “‘staginess’ … is undeniable” and has been often criticized, as when the set sometimes “appears wholly filmic” and sometimes less realistic. Buchman wrote that Olivier “contrasts a restless, moving camera with moments of stasis that expose ‘blocked’ scenes and precisely choreographed stage tableaux” (98) and argued that the movie most obviously combines filmic and theatrical methods in the play-within-the play, which comments “through the process of a performance on the nature of theatrical activity” (100). According to Buchman, the “film viewer finds himself or herself in a chain of observers, watching (and being watched by) others in the cinema in the same process of watching the Olivier film depicting a scene of characters in Hamlet watching each other watch ‘The Mousetrap’” (101).

Justin Shaltz’s 1993 essay “Three ‘Hamlets’ on Film” compared and contrasted Olivier’s film with those directed by Tony Richardson (1969) and Franco Zeffirelli (1990), arguing that none of these versions “manages to capture the spirit of Shakespeare’s text in both the early scenes involving the Ghost and the concluding duel scene” (36). According to Shaltz, “Zeffirelli’s film locates Hamlet’s motivation almost entirely in grief for a beloved father … whereas the text, Olivier’s version, and, much less effectively, Richardson’s film center the motivation for revenge primarily in the brutal demands of an angry, dominating monarch and secondarily on the righting of a wrong.” Shaltz mentioned several different examples of the ways the dueling scene differed among the films and between the films and Shakespeare’s text (37).

In a 1994 essay titled “The Films of Hamlet” (181–84), Neil Taylor, writing that Olivier offered a relatively pruned “Essay” on the play, also reported that the “cuts are fairly evenly spread,” with “three whole scenes” completely dropped; discussed the film’s emphasis on “Hamlet’s individual personality and mental state” (181); called Olivier’s focus “psychological” rather than “political,” a focus enhanced by his voice-overs (181–82); noted the film’s use of “high-angle” shots; and discussed Olivier’s multiple contributions to the film (182). He also noted the film’s Freudian emphasis; its stress on staircases; the ways its details have been interpreted; and Hamlet’s alleged “narcissism” (183).

Discussing the film in his 1995 book on Hamlet (part of the Shakespeare in Performance series), Anthony B. Dawson (171–84), examined such matters as the opening scene (171–73), the use of a “serpentine tracking camera”; the ways Gertrude’s bed “seems almost comic” in its obvious sexual symbolism (173); and the way the tracking camera makes the castle seem to be almost the inside of Hamlet’s brain. Dawson considered this an “essentially conservative” film because it focuses on “Hamlet’s psychology” rather than on politics of any sort; said it “privilege[es] individual consciousness as the ultimate measure of reality” (174); argued that Olivier had “eliminated all traces of a political world”; and wrote that the film emphasized the “confines of mental, not political, disorder” (174). Suggesting that the film reflects “Olivier’s own Oedipal tensions” with his father (175) and that it is “almost devoid of social ramifications of any kind,” Dawson suggested that it represents “a move toward a time when the social responsibilities of artists were in retreat” (176). He examined Olivier’s rearrangements of various scenes (178) and found in this film a “continuous edge of self-conscious play-acting in the presentation of [Hamlet’s] tortured inner life, a sense of pose and deliberate showiness that combines with the arty camera-work to render the self paradoxically hollow as well as full” (179). Other topics included the way “the theatrical, constructed nature of ‘reality’ is hinted at”; the way the ghost is initially hidden in the “closet scene” (181); and the way that, after this scene, Gertrude is clearly “on Hamlet’s side” (182). Dawson argued that Gertrude drinks poison “to sacrifice herself to save her son” and to “make amends for her past sin” and that she thus also “reveals Claudius’s treachery” (182), so that Olivier emphasizes “Gertrude’s stature” as well as the “mother-son reconciliation” (183).

Commenting on the Olivier film in his 1996 book Shakespeare in Production; Whose History? (57–62), Herbert R. Coursen wrote that this adaptation deliberately “carries forward the overt theatricality of [Olivier’s] Henry V and, in its way, predicts the theater-like qualities of [his] Richard III and Othello.” Like many earlier critics, Coursen emphasized the striking “personality” of the film’s set, “beginning with its introduction as a dream castle floating in clouds.” According to Coursen, “Olivier’s camera makes us very aware of its selective presence and movement” (58).

Four separate essays mentioning the Olivier film, included in a 1997 collection titled Hamlet on Screen (edited by Holger Klein and Dimiter Daphinoff), were composed by Deborah Cartmell, Lawrence Guntner, Patrick Hunter, and Leigh Wood. Each discussed a different aspect of Olivier’s adaptation. Deborah Cartmell, in “Reading and Screening Ophelia: 1948–1996,” commented that in the Olivier version “it is Hamlet rather than Polonius’s death that causes Ophelia’s madness,” adding that “the camera pans away from her distraught figure on the stairs and she becomes increasingly insignificant,” so that “the tiny Ophelia is juxtaposed with the close-up of the back of Hamlet’s head (which fills the screen) in the subsequent sequence, reflecting their relative importance” (31).

Lawrence Guntner’s 1977 article “A Microcosm of Art: Olivier’s Expressionist Hamlet”—argued that “Olivier masterfully blends elements from the German Expressionist film—the darkly oppressive settings, chiaroscuro lighting, the psychological atmosphere, and the subjective camera work—and the American film noir—the black-and-white film, low-key lighting, and deep-focus photography—to break down the ‘fourth’ wall characteristic of most film adaptations of theater.” According to Guntner, Olivier then “creates a shadowy and claustrophobic cinematic psychogram on the screen that corresponds to the fears and anxieties of Hamlet’s interior universe,” adding that “[a]ny direct references to social or political dimensions in the play that might allow the audience recourse to their own reality … are carefully avoided” (134).

Patrick Hunter’s essay, titled “Hamlet’s Ghost on the Screen,” mentioned in passing that “Olivier visually indicates that Hamlet’s conflict doesn’t stem from an indecisive nature” (as the film’s opening famously claimed) but rather implies “that he has excellent reason to doubt this ghost, especially with its appearance so unsettling.” According to Hunter, “Of the many English film versions of Hamlet, Olivier’s Ghost is the one most like a phantom and the one with the most mystery” (20).

Finally, a fourth essay in the 1997 Klein-Daphinoff collection—Leigh Woods’s “Abstract and Brief Chronicles on Film: The Players Scenes in Hamlet”—commented that the “use Olivier finds for the players seems more dignified and, at the same time, less metaphorical than those in [some] later films. The theatre is granted a proud and clearly institutionalized place in Olivier’s Hamlet, much as it enjoyed in postwar Britain” (60–61).

In his 1999 book A History of Shakespeare on Screen, Kenneth Rothwell wrote that the film’s “black-and-white enhances the deep-focus photography” as well as the “atmosphere of a dark and forbidding tragedy.” He called the sets “sparse, abstract, and ultimately timeless,” termed “the castle a metaphor for the protagonist’s isolation and loneliness,” and judged the whole effort “film noir for highbrows” (57). Describing this production as in “many ways a stagy film,” with “all forty of the sets but three having been filmed” inside a studio, adding that the “sole outdoor shot is apparently of Ophelia’s drowning and is modeled on Sir John Millais’ famous nineteenth-century painting” (57). Observing that the film is framed by opening and closing shots of “the windswept battlements of Elsinore,” he called the movie in between those shots “sex-infused,” with repeated attention to Gertrude’s bed implying “Hamlet’s horror of sexuality, of women, of penetration into the female body,” adding that, ironically, “the movie is not about a man who couldn’t make up his mind but about a man who couldn’t relate to women,” particularly “since the [play’s] political aspect has been shut out by the banishment of Fortinbras” (59). Reporting that Olivier had recently and fittingly played Oedipus on stage, Rothwell called Olivier’s Hamlet simultaneously an “avenger, wit, actor, manager, director, philosopher, murderer, duelist, soldier, courtier, ‘glass of fashion,’ and almost every other imaginable human trait” (59–60) and similarly noted that Elsinore “is filled with balconies, stairwells, [and] ledges, so that high and low angle shots can be employed for empowering and disempowering characters” (60), while the absence of such characters as Fortinbras, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern “makes the movie seem all the more centripetal and claustrophobic.” Rothwell suggested that “the mistaken slaughter of Polonius and the visibly erotic bond between son and mother grotesquely restate the primal love and death motif so pervasive in Elizabethan verse” and also found (if differently presented) in such other plays by Shakespeare as Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra (61). Finally, Rothwell commented that, as Ophelia, “Jean Simmons in her blonde wig looks too sweet and virginal to even think about copulating with Hamlet” (61).

Writing in an essay from 2000 titled “The Effects of Primacy and Recency upon Audience Response to Five Film Versions of Shakespeare’s Hamlet,” James H. Lake asserted that “[c]urrent research concludes … that it is natural and predictable to recall both first and last impressions more readily than those in the middle and that last impressions can eradicate those which immediately precede them” (112–13). He wrote that “Olivier uses a voice-over, in the first seconds of his movie, to imprint the idea that Hamlet simply ‘could not make up his mind’; he then tracks, through the opening sequence, all the visual images important to his interpretation of the play, … repeating them methodically in the film’s final scene. Thus we retain not only Olivier’s version of the play-script but are impressed by his film’s artistic coherence” (113).

Daniel Rosenthal, in his 2000 volume Shakespeare on Screen (22–24), briefly remarked of the Olivier production that it “is a hybrid: part grim fairy-tale, part psychological case study,” adding that the “colourful pageant of his Henry V … gives way to an equally stylized, monochrome engraving: sombre, disturbing and accessible.” Rosenthal, like many others, wrote that Olivier “completely ignores the play’s politics in favour of the domestic tragedy and the troubled mother-son relationship that lies at its core” (22). Discussing the film more fully in his book from 2000 titled Shakespeare in the Movies (119–23), Douglas Brode remarked that Olivier’s “traveling shots take up so much time (some lasting three minutes) that the [play’s] text” had to be significantly pruned, causing the loss of such figures as Fortinbras (“essential to Shakespeare’s view of civil order restored”) and also the second gravedigger and Rosencrantz along with some “famous speeches,” such as “the self-loathing ‘O what a rogue and peasant slave am I’; the paranoid ‘How all occasions do inform against me.’” Some lines were “modernized,” so that “Recks not his own rede” … becomes “Minds not his own creed,” while, on the other hand, “Olivier depicted sequences only reported in the play, including the drowning death of Ophelia … so that image and words compliment rather than repeat one another” (121). Brode thought the film’s “enduring importance” resulted from Olivier’s efforts to make the play an actual movie rather than a mere filmed stage play. Brode concluded that although Olivier’s “Hamlet is, in many respects, aesthetic and soft, there’s enough adventurous bouncing about to suggest that the time had come to put the romantic cliche to rest, reviving the earlier, virile Hamlets who dominated what was essentially an Elizabethan Death Wish” (123).

Also writing about Olivier’s Hamlet in 2000—this time in an essay titled “Gertrude’s Willow Speech: Word and Film Image,” Hanna Scolnicov compared and contrasted various films of Hamlet, including Olivier’s, with Kenneth Branagh’s recent lengthy film of the entire play. Commenting on Gertrude’s account of Ophelia’s death, Scolnicov wrote that “Olivier manages to mould events into a coherent, sweeping movement by avoiding showing the crucial moment in Gertrude’s account. But Branagh’s film demonstrates how trusting the play, rather than trying to smooth and regularize it, results in a highly satisfying presentation of great complexity, yet also of great clarity, compassion, and beauty” (110).

Yvette K. Khoury, in an essay from 2006 titled “‘To Be or Not to Be’ in ‘The Belly of the Whale’: A Reading of Joseph Campbell’s ‘Modern Hero’ Hypothesis in Hamlet on Film,” sought to demonstrate that in various films of the play, the “To be or not to be” speech “is placed in the Separation/Departure stage of the hero’s journey, which takes place inside ‘The Belly of the Whale’” … according to [mythographer Joseph] Campbell, so that it functions as “a metamorphic step when ‘the hero, instead of conquering or conciliating the power of the threshold, is swallowed into the unknown, [where he] goes inward to be born again,’” adding, “it is a nightmarish sentiment with ancient resonance; it is the last moment of decision-making before the hero has to take action” (120).

Maurice Hindle, in his fine 2007 book Studying Shakespeare on Film (185–90), called Olivier’s Hamlet even better than his Henry V; said it was widely accessible thanks to its Freudian emphasis; saw it as combining German expressionism and film noir; and praised Walton’s score. He admired its “imaginative design and setting,” its inventive use of cameras, and its effective opening voice-over, and thought its interpretation of the play seemed authorized by Shakespeare (185). He noted the film’s emphasis on Hamlet’s “aberrant mind,” the ways its political dimensions (including the role of Fortinbras) were cut, and its internal, psychological focus (185). Hindle thought the mists shown above the castle symbolized both the ghost and also Hamlet’s unfocused mind; commented on Olivier’s use of dissolves, close-ups, deep-focus shots, long shots, and medium shots; and discussed the ways Olivier made Hamlet stand out in crowd shots, thanks in part to his striking blond hair (187). Providing insightful explanations and illustrations of deep-focus shots, Hindle suggested that both distant and close-up shots implied both alienation and connection (188); cited the regal chairs as a recurring visual motif; noted the effective juxtaposition of light and darkness (189); and suggested that Olivier’s film was influenced by such earlier famous films as The Cabinet of Dr. Caliguri and Nosferatu. He closed by stressing Olivier’s use of chiaroscuro (the treatment of light and shade) and crane shots and the ways his film resembled the noir movies popular in the 1940s (190).

In her 2007 book Shakespeare on Film (15–20), Carolyn Jess-Cooke saw Olivier’s movie as providing a “heavy portrait of Hamlet as a psychoanalytic text” (15). Asserting that this adaptation “neither realises Olivier’s intended ‘thesis’” (that Hamlet could not make up his mind) nor was “satisfactory as a visual essay,” as Olivier termed it (18), she noted its use of symbolic shots from above; said that this Ophelia “regresses to an infantile psychological state as a result of a desire, like Hamlet, to return to the womb” (19); said that various performances “deliberately avoid developing autonomous characters”; and complained, instead, of the heavy influence of the film’s “thesis” (20).

In his 2008 Norton Guide titled Shakespeare and Film (23–27; 50–51; 102–3; 137–38; 167–68; 180–81), Samuel Crowl discussed this movie’s use of chiaroscuro; its psychological emphasis; the influence of Alfred Hitchcock’s film Rebecca; and the use of voice-over in some soliloquies (24). He wrote that “the camera prowls Elsinore,” especially Gertrude’s bedroom; said this Hamlet is generally “passive”; noted the influence of Orson Welles’s film Citizen Kane; and commented on the use of “deep focus” photography, especially to emphasize the distance between Hamlet and Ophelia (25). He called the depiction of Elsinore “gloomy” and “gothic” and thought it lacks emphasis on everyday details (50); considered Hamlet “isolated” and “haunted”; suggested that his environs are “more psychological than material” (51); and saw the camera as an extension of Hamlet’s own “prying eyes” (102). Commending the effective use of camera in the “mousetrap” episode (102–3), Crowl commented on Olivier’s emphasis on Freudian psychology (especially the Oedipus complex), saying it is underscored by particular film techniques, such as chiaroscuro, deep focus, and film noir elements (138). He also admired the effective use of voice-over in the soliloquies (180–81).

Patrick Cook, in his 2011 book Cinematic Hamlet (23–64), analyzed the Olivier film very closely, offering much careful discussion of its moment-by-moment details but making few generalizations. Cook’s volume could easily be read as an accompaniment to viewing the film. He commented often on how the play’s details have frequently been cut or rearranged in the movie (23), discussed the film’s influence on later directors, including the influence of its errors, noted the way the opening three minutes are simultaneously cinematic and theatrical (24), but also commented that soon the theatrical elements diminish as the cinematic elements receive greater emphasis, especially through repeated alternation between the horizontal and the vertical dimensions, with the result that one remembers the action largely as “a series of passages through Norman arches and up and down staircases” (25), so that Elsinore eventually seems “at once mysterious and familiar, a fully three-dimensional site that piques curiosity” (26). Cook noted that “the film’s first close-up, which momentarily ratchets up our mirror-neuron stimulation, is of a man experiencing terror” (27), but he added that Olivier’s “inspired handling of the ghost’s first arrival gives way to an odd decline in intensity. The music disappears, the camera becomes static, and shots alternate conventionally between the ghost and the three [sentries], whose array, geometrized by the lines of upraised spears, remains unchanged. The men’s tone of voice is subdued. Their facial expressions scarcely register emotion” (27). Commenting on Hamlet’s gradual revelation (29), Cook also discussed such other matters as the film’s initial emphasis on close-ups, its use of parallel motion (30), the inventiveness of Hamlet’s soliloquies, and the film’s “careful choreography” (31), “sudden reversal[s],” “identical positioning[s]” (32), and “brilliant transitions”—all of which he thought highlighted, by contrast, the occasional uninspired blandness of other moments, which ironically inspired some later filmmakers to do better with certain scenes (32).

Agnieszka Rasmus, discussing the Olivier film in her book from 2008 titled Filming Shakespeare, from Metatheatre to Metacinema (103–9, 157–63), wrote that this film seems advanced for its era (103). She asserted that it contains four “films-within-the-film,” involving, respectively, the Ghost, Ophelia, Horatio, and Gertrude as narrators or sources (103) and claimed that the first such film resembles “an old silent movie” and foreshadows the “Mousetrap” episode. Noting that Olivier speaks not only as the narrator but also as Hamlet and the Ghost and that Olivier is both the director of and actor in the film and also director of the Mousetrap (104), she commented that the “films within” use various methods but that all illustrate Olivier’s control of the whole larger film (105). Rasmus said that he uses two key props—Hamlet’s chair and a boy’s wig, the latter reminding Hamlet of Ophelia (106). Observing how the camera presents the relationships between Polonius, Claudius, and Gertrude (107), she also discussed why Olivier chose to use black and white, especially because of the play’s emphasis on death (157), and explained how Olivier emphasizes the relationship between Hamlet and the Ghost as well as the Ghost’s relationship with the camera (158). Noting that Elsinore does not seem actually inhabited and reporting that other critics have seen various characters as resembling ghosts (159), Rasmus commented on the film’s use of shadows (160); reported various critics’ reactions to it (161); and suggested how this film associates cinema with death (163).

Describing, in an abstract, her own 2011 essay titled “The Ghost and the Skull: Rupturing Borders between the Living and the Dead in Filmed Hamlets,” Victoria Bladen wrote that, “[a]s a spirit without material substance, the Ghost” in Hamlet “transgresses the border between life and death, a bodiless life crossing back into the material world. In the graveyard, Hamlet contemplates the reverse phenomenon in the skull of Yorick, a material object bereft of life; an empty shell remaining in the physical world while the spirit of the former court jester has gone on to the next world.” According to Bladen, the “porous border between life and death, one of the significant concerns of the play, has been articulated in different and innovative ways,” presenting “unique challenges and opportunities for filmmakers to explore the boundary between life and death.” Although focusing especially on Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet, she also discussed the adaptations of Olivier, Kozintsev, Richardson, and Zeffirelli.

Samuel Crowl, in an abstract describing an essay from 2011 titled “Hamlet on Film at Mid-Century and Fin de Siècle: Olivier and Branagh,” wrote that of “all the Hamlet films produced in the last half of the twentieth century, the versions directed by Laurence Olivier (1948) and Kenneth Branagh (1996) most aspire to being definitive.” Crowl argued that the “films make a stunning contrast,” with “each reflect[ing] the moment of their making: Olivier’s a product of Freud’s Age of Anxiety and Branagh’s anticipating a world suddenly released (by the collapse of the Soviet Union) from global dominance by two superpowers.” Crowl explained that “Olivier’s film significantly trimmed the text and was shot in black and white to link Hamlet to motion picture history in general and to the film noir tradition in particular.” Meanwhile, “Branagh’s full-text four-hour version was shot in 70 mm to emphasize the epic reaches of Hamlet’s personal and political struggle to expose and topple Claudius and his regime and in homage to David Lean’s film style in Lawrence of Arabia and Dr. Zhivago.” Crowl explored “the myriad ways the two films talk to each other over the almost fifty-year gap between the moments of their creation. Primarily [he focused] on the ways the two films were influenced by social and political currents alive in their respective cultures and the ways in which those currents help to explain each director’s approach to Shakespeare’s text and the translation of the resulting screenplay into an appropriate visual style to contain and express their vision.”

Describing in an abstract his 2011 essay “To Cut or Not to Cut? What’s in the Written Text of Filmed Hamlets,” Jacek Fabiszak reported that his “article focuses on how the verse is handled in a medium that heavily relies on image, in other words how the text is presented (also) graphically on screen,” especially in the films by Olivier, Kozintzev, Zeffirelli, Branagh, and Almereyda. Fabiszak argued that all these “versions share one characteristic: they are attempts to translate, albeit in technologically and aesthetically different ways, the dramatic (or literary) and theatrical (or historically determined conventional) into the filmic. Interestingly enough,” he concluded, “one of the most problematic aspects of such a process is the soliloquy, a device which functions both as a poem and a typical theatrical convention which is difficult to justify in highly realistic cinema.”

Russell Jackson, describing his 2011 essay titled “The Gaps in Gertrude: Interpretations of the Role in Five Feature Films,” wrote that “[m]any actors have found Gertrude a role that is both rewarding and frustrating. Some—though by no means all—have expressed a wish that she had at least one soliloquy, and there have been many interpretations of her relationship with Claudius after the closet scene and its revelations.” He explained that “[i]n the theatre directors have sometimes chosen to follow the First Quarto in having Gertrude receive news of Hamlet’s return to Denmark,” adding that this information “may be contained in the letters ‘to the queen’ which in other texts the messenger presents to the King in Act 4, scene 7 (and which often in performance the King appears to intercept).” Jackson considered “interpretations of the role in feature films”—those by Olivier, Kozintsev, Zeffirelli, and Almereyda—“with particular emphasis on the ways in which actors and directors have dealt with the ‘missing elements’ of the role.”

Peter Cochran, in his 2013 book Small-Screen Shakespeare (35–37), called this one of the best Shakespeare films ever, partly because of Olivier’s acting and partly because of its striking use of black and white. But he also considered the film “formal and sentimental” as well as theatrical rather than a genuine movie (35). He thought that Gertrude here is played by too young an actress and that Olivier’s own performance is less effective than Mel Gibson’s in a much-later film by Franco Zeffirelli (36). Asserting that Olivier’s actors are, with a few exceptions, shot at too far a distance, Cochran suspected in some instances the influence of Orson Welles’s recent film Citizen Kane (36). He noted the number of minor characters who are cut (36) but thought the mouse trap and duel scenes are indispensable here, with the duel particularly credible (36).

In another detailed discussion of the Olivier film, Samuel Crowl, in his 2014 book Shakespeare’s Hamlet: The Relationship between Text and Film, noted the elimination from the movie of such characters as “Fortinbras, Voltemand, Cornelius, Reynaldo, the English Ambassador, the second gravedigger and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern,” cuts emphasizing “the intimate family drama at the heart of the play while ignoring its larger political and social implications.” According to Crowl, Olivier believed it better “to cut entire characters and plot elements rather than to uniformly reduce the text by relatively equal across-the-board amounts” (30). Commenting on Olivier’s use of symbolic imagery, such as “the sea crashing against the rocks of the Elsinore Castle” to symbolize Hamlet’s “sea of troubles” (31), Crowl also noted how the casting of a young actress to play Gertrude helped “heighten the sexual tension” between mother and son, while casting the even younger Jean Simmons as Ophelia highlighted “her youth and innocence while visually complicating her romantic relationship with a Hamlet twice her age.” To make his Hamlet seem more passive than Olivier himself, the character was often depicted in recumbent positions in order “to accentuate the character’s paralysis and inward turn of mind” (32), in the same way that some of Hamlet’s soliloquies were cut if they conflicted with the film’s interpretation of his personality (33). According to Crowl, William Walton, the film’s composer, worked closely with Olivier to emphasize the director’s interpretation of the play, creating “overture-like music that translates Hamlet’s character, along with Ophelia’s, into distinctive themes that will accompany them throughout the film,” with unresolved chords often emphasizing the irresolution of Hamlet’s mind. On the other hand, “Ophelia’s woodwind theme is tonally centred, a harmonic counterpart to her home-centred sensibility, in contrast to Hamlet’s atonal introspective” point of view (35). Eventually, “[b]oth themes emerge and merge throughout the film” (36).

Commenting on the ways the castle—with its open empty spaces, twisting staircases and a frequently revisited bedroom—symbolically reflects the film’s themes, Crowl also noted how the film “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” (39). Similarly, Olivier found “in the tension between the use of the dissolve and deep focus something of Hamlet’s inability to maintain a steady, unambiguous hold” on his world, although he wanted “cuts to be smooth rather than jarring” and wanted them to occur at psychologically appropriate moments (40). Restless cameras symbolized “Hamlet’s turmoil”; they are “in constant motion: tracking, panning, rising (or lowering) on a crane, poking … into Elsinore’s dark corners and hidden secrets” (41). And although “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” (44). Such passivity is further emphasized by the voice-over soliloquies, which Crowl discussed at length, saying they keep the visible character speechless, as if engaging in an “internal monologue” (45).

Commenting that “Olivier’s treatment of the encounter between Hamlet and Gertrude was radical for its time and still has the power to shock,” Crowl also observed that “Olivier was the first stage or film director to make Gertrude’s bed the focus of the scene” (50), with Hamlet acting generally as a kind of “platinum blonde” figure from a noir film (usually a woman’s role in such movies) “trying to seduce … key figures … with his particular blend of passive-aggressive behaviour” (51). Adding to such other devices as “his roving camera, the use of voiceover, cross-cutting, deep focus photography, the dissolve, and the occasional long shot,” Olivier also occasionally used flashbacks, typically employing them “to illustrate long narrative speeches describing a scene or specific action” (55). He depicted Elsinore as a mostly empty “dreamscape,” generally lacking “extras” (except in the play-within and the eventual duel), and “even then they are kept to a minimum.” According to Crowl, “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, [and] the empty Court” (57–58). Crowl thought that although Olivier’s Hamlet could make up his mind in the sense that he was eventually able to decide, he could not make up his mind “in the sense of being able to invent and sustain a single, stable identity, his mind. Hamlet’s mind,” Crowl continued, “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” (59).

Crowl thought that “Olivier’s Hamlet, with its Hitchcock-inspired, brooding psychological intensity, brilliantly fitted the atmosphere of the early Cold War era” and also “became the template for all the Hamlet films that followed in the next several decades” (61). Discussing the “film’s afterlife and critical reception” (100–107), Crowl concluded that such later directors of Hamlet films as “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 respectful distance; Zeffirelli from a protégé’s admiration; and Richardson as a cheeky, subversive challenger to Olivier’s establishment tradition” (107–8).

Peter E. S. Babiak, in his 2016 book Shakespeare Films: A Re-evaluation of 100 Years of Adaptations, offered a “nihilistic reading” of the film as emphasizing conflict between love and death, a common postwar theme. He said that most action occurs in the castle’s “lower chambers,” that Hamlet’s Renaissance appearance and costume seem “incongruous” in the film’s general medieval setting, and that Hamlet’s personality seems “effeminate” and implies an “underdeveloped ego” (61). Babiak thought that Olivier’s Hamlet ironically resembles both Horatio and Osric (a fool) and “lacks psychological insights into himself,” a fact that ordains his fall. Commenting that the film emphasizes a “recurring motif of journey[ing] up and down stairs,” with many shots implying “shifts in point of view,” Babiak (calling Stephen Buhler’s discussion of the film’s “visual strategy … overly simplistic at best”) thought the movie conveyed “the sensibilities of a dream” (62).

In her 2017 book Shakespearean Star: Laurence Olivier and National Cinema (50–81), Jennifer Barnes explored various “particular contexts” (50) of the film in its own era, including its relevance to Olivier’s own life, its initial life as a theatrical production, its function as a response and “refined” alternative to the growing popularity of American films in Britain, and its function as an effort to preserve British cultural traditions, noting that some reviewers saw the work as “an intensely British film, the emblematic product of a national film industry unhampered by the aesthetic and cultural demands of Hollywood” (57). Barnes discussed such other matters as the efforts to publicize the movie in the British press; the contemporary emphasis on Olivier as an innovative director whose background lay in British theatre; and a stress on the film itself as “an innovative compromise between the theatre/theatrical films of the past and the new, modern cinema” (62). Olivier himself was sometimes presented as “a cultural surrogate for Shakespeare” (63) and the film was presented as a “new venture in the cultural reproduction of Shakespeare” (64). Barnes argued that Olivier’s use of “cinematic expressionism” helped him emphasize his Freudian interpretation of the play and also relate the play to his own life (67–68). Noting “the level of cultural significance attributed to Hamlet not just by the film industry but by Olivier as actor-director and Shakespearean star” (69), she argued that the “cinematic sense of an alternate focus on—or constant oscillation between—Olivier-as-Hamlet and Olivier-as-narrator/director is made particularly explicit in the film’s opening moments, where an overwhelming awareness of Olivier’s presence as Olivier haunts our introduction to Elsinore” (69). Barnes offered detailed discussion of particular scenes and moments in the film; explored Olivier’s anxieties about taking on the role and doing justice to it, especially in light of previous great actors who played Hamlet; and discussed the film’s financial and critical success and its status as an important work of British cinema (69).

In a 2019 essay titled “Modern Filmed Versions of the Opening Lines of Ophelia’s First ‘Mad Scene,’” Robert Evans compared and contrasted fourteen different performances of those lines. He commented that although “this episode takes less than a minute” in the Olivier film, “it is powerful. Ophelia is beautiful, pathetic, and pitiable. Gertrude seems mature, wise, compassionate, and almost motherly. Olivier,” according to Evans, “created a memorable opening for Ophelia’s first mad scene” (57).

Neil Forsyth, in his 2019 book Shakespeare the Illusionist (94–99), discussed in detail the opening scene with the ghost and then the first scene featuring Claudius and his court, arguing that in the latter scene, because of cuts, “Olivier loses the complexity in the language, the mixed-up relations in kin and kind, [and] the problem of the sun/son idea mixing kingship and kinship” (97). He wrote that the “first two scenes are quite different (outside and inside, dark and light, mysterious and formally ordinary) and yet deliberately linked as [the film’s] moving camera travels inside and down the stairs of the castle, symbolically looking for the rotten part of Denmark but also descending into the Hamlet-Olivier personality, which Elsinore comes more and more to represent” (98). He also discussed in detail the scene in which Hamlet confronts the ghost as well as noting the film’s emphasis on Hamlet’s relations with Gertrude (99).

Grace McCarthy’s 2021 book Shakespearean Drama, Disability, and the Filmic Stare (96–99, 103–5) argued that Olivier’s “long shots allow us to stare as Hamlet breaks behavioral norms,” adding that “Olivier marries these long shots with relatively long takes, adding a temporal element to the filmic stare. Staring,” she explained, “is an action that takes place over time, whereas fast cutting can obscure the action in the mis-en-scène. The advantage of Olivier’s combination of long shot, long take and deep focus,” McCarthy thought, “is that viewers have the time and space to stare and be sure that they are in fact seeing the aberrant behaviours,” such as Hamlet “breaking verbal scripts, physically abusing Ophelia, [and] the extremes between lounging against pillars and sprinting across sets and upstairs”—actions that all “add up to a mad Hamlet” (98).

1953 NBC Television Production

Directed by Albert McCleery, this adaptation starred Maurice Evans as Hamlet; Wesley Addy as Horatio; Ruth Chatterton as Queen Gertrude; Sarah Churchill as Narrator/Ophelia; Barry Jones as Polonius; and Malcolm Keen as The Ghost.

Shortly after this television adaptation was broadcast, Alice V. Griffin (an early pioneering scholar of Shakespeare-on-film broadcasts) wrote in her 1953 article “Shakespeare Through the Camera’s Eye—Julius Caesar in Motion Pictures; Hamlet and Othello on Television” that this production and several others revealed “the advantages of the camera in telling a story and revealing character in a visual medium” (331). She admired “Evans’ clear-cut if not profound characterization” but found “no sense of over-all tragedy, chiefly because the acting was so uneven and the time so short” (333), adding that “Evans and Barry Jones as Polonius were much the best performers on the show, with Jones adding a touch of sympathy and humor to the old statesman, but not playing him as a comic character. On the distaff side,” Griffin continued, “Sarah Churchill as Ophelia and Ruth Chatterton as Gertrude were so inadequate in their roles that the viewer might well have wondered whether they did not appear on this program by mistake, having actually been destined for some other television production, like a mystery thriller” (334).

In their fine 1988 anthology Shakespeare on Television, J. C. Bulman and H. R. Coursen offered excerpts from various contemporary reviews of this production, including one calling it “splendid, mobile, imaginative, and graceful” and praising Evans’s performance as “a triumph of intelligence and talent” and another finding the broadcast “memorable and exciting” and “superbly arresting theatre” and saying it “adhered to … medium ‘shots’ that minimized abrupt changes” while terming some scenes “a trifle cluttered and overcrowded” but featuring generally “superior” direction (238).

In an essay from 1988 titled “Maurice Evans’s Hamlet (1953),” Bernice Kliman wrote that “the sets ultimately are what spoil [this production] because, by imposing, with … [many] artifacts, an aura of realism on the play, they highlight all the other defects, which in essence are failures of verisimilitude. Spaces are small; shots are tight. This,” Kliman continued, “was the standard of realism at the time—artificial realism, a standard that Evans’s Hamlet meets or even exceeds. All representations of reality on stage or on film are illusions, of course—but it is easier to see the artifice from a distance” (128).

1959 Dupont Show of the Month Production

This television broadcast, based on a Broadway play and featuring the same cast, was directed by Ralph Nelson and featured Margaret Courtenay as Gertrude; David Dodimead as Horatio; John Humphry as Laertes; Barbara Jefford as Ophelia; John Neville as Hamlet; Oliver Neville as Claudius; and Joseph O’Conor as Polonius.

In a 1988 essay titled “Dupont Show of the Month with John Neville (1959),” Bernice Kliman wrote that “[b]ecause of the attractive television values in setting and camera work, it is just possible that the television production was superior to the generally panned stage production with the same cast. The producers,” she wrote, “employed film techniques—that is, a large unit setting, with a wide range of camera distances and angles. Perhaps they were not thinking in terms of television’s usual problems—the small screen and the shallow depth of field—but in any case, in ignoring the problems, they seemed to have found at least one solution: combining the long shots of films with sets more bare than those usually in films but more spacious than those usually on television” (138).

1961 Hans Peter Wirth Production

This German-language adaptation, directed by Franz Peter Wirth, starred Maximilian Schell as Hamlet; Hans Caninenberg as Claudius; Wanda Rotha as Gertrude; Dunja Movar as Ophelia; Franz Schafheitlin as Polonius; Dieter Kirchlechner as Laertes; and Karl Michael Vogler as Horatio.

Lillian Wilds, in a 1976 article titled “On Film: Maximilian Schell’s Most Royal Hamlet,” noted various flaws, some of which she found hard to defend. Among these, she mentioned that “Hans Caninenberg’s Claudius [is] an overacted, one-dimensional, black-garbed villain who regularly displays evil by a narrowing of his eyes. Wanda Rotha’s Gertrude, on the other hand, has an opposite tic mannerism: she consistently widens her eyes for ‘grand’ moments … when she is called upon to portray dismay, anguish, and even determination,” as “when she deliberately—in this interpretation—drinks the poison intended for Hamlet.” Wilds speculated that “[p]erhaps because these two are classical stage actors, their gestures are too broad for the penetrating intimacy of the close-up, [but] too often we find ourselves wincing, for example, at the heaviness of slyly exchanged glances between the characters.” She did add that “[b]road, stagey acting, however, is not a criticism that can be leveled at Maximilian Schell’s portrayal of Hamlet” and noted that “Schell s performance has been universally praised, even by those who claim not to like the film. It is one of the least quirky of the filmed Hamlets” (135).

In a 1988 essay titled “Peter Wirth’s Production with Maximilian Schell (1960),” Bernice Kliman wrote that the “performance is so severely limited by the inadequacy of the dubbing into English from German that evaluation is almost impossible, but, given the creative use of a television studio setting and Schell’s fascinating Hamlet, it could have been excellent. As it is,” she continued, “it is only interesting. Within a limited space, however, Wirth creates some unforgettable images, such as the ‘To be’ recited partly as Hamlet peers between two steps, closeup, or the head-high crosses in the graveyard scene, or the receding arches through which Hamlet sees Claudius at prayer.” She also mentioned “the colonnade of pillars by which Ophelia runs when Hamlet frightens her in her closet … [and] the two burnished metal thrones that stand empty in almost every scene, a reminder to us of what Hamlet has lost” (153).

1964 Grigori Kozintsev Production

This film, directed by Grigori Kozintsev and produced in Russia, starred Innokenty Smoktunovsky as Hamlet; Mikhail Nazvanov as Claudius; Elza Radzina as Gertrude; Yuri Tolubeyev as Polonius; Stepan Oleksenko as Laertes; Anastasiya Vertinskaya as Ophelia; and Vladimir Erenberg as Horatio.

Commenting on this production in 1966, Alice Griffin, a pioneer in the study of Shakespeare on film, wrote that “the effect of watching this movie, especially for the viewer who cannot understand the lines the actors are speaking (in a translation by Boris Pasternak) and must rely on sketchy subtitles, seems like two films. One,” she continued, “is a visual and musical tone poem based on Hamlet, with images of water, a lonely sea-gull, a bleak castle perched atop a cliff (these often are used during the soliloquies), accompanied by an impressive score by Dmitri Shostakovich. The ‘other’ film,” she added, “consists of ‘scenes from Hamlet,’ some of them very good. Claudius (Mikhail Nazvanov), Gertrude (Elza Radzina), and their attendants carousing while Hamlet awaits the Ghost suggest excellently a malevolent ruler and his corrupt court. The play-within-the-play is brilliantly done, on a platform stage at night near the seashore.” She concluded, however, “that as interpreted by Innokenti Smoktunovsky, the character of Hamlet is angry, resentful, bitter, and very little more. There is nothing to suggest the virtues, the complexities, the humor or the nobility of Shakespeare’s character” (385).

In his 1971 book Shakespeare and the Film (77-85), Roger Manvell commented on such matters as the actors “shown in silhouette” and also “vistas seen at the end of long, empty corridors or …through a sequence of rooms linked by successive archways,” as when “Ophelia is framed by an archway in the distance, and then Hamlet is seen at a similar distance in reverse.” These patterns reminded Manvell of similar effects in “Eisenstein’s later films”; he called the effect “intentionally artificial, indeed highly theatrical” and “in contrast to the comparatively naturalistic appearance of occasional outdoor scenes.” Manvell noted criticism of such aspects of the film as the black-and-white photography, the alleged “over-use of travelling shots, [and] the camera tracking, panning and circling around the sets and the actors” (85).

Ronald Hayman, in a 1973 interview with Kozintsev, wrote that the director saw Hamlet “as being centred on two main images, [in which] Wittenberg represents the main focus of Renaissance values. [Kozintsev stated that] ‘Wittenberg represents the high point of Renaissance humanistic ideas and it represents the pre-history of Hamlet’s days as a student—before the tragedy began. The second image or metaphor which contradicts the first is Elsinore, a state which is absolutely humanistic in its relationships between people but unhumanistic in its methods of education, as we see in Polonius’s treatment of his children.’” He added that “‘There’s the careerism of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; there’s the killing of love in the relationship between Polonius, Laertes and Ophelia. And so on. The destruction of all normal relationships both in the family and in the state. This is Hamlet. Two worlds: Wittenberg and Elsinore’” (13).

In a 1973 essay titled “Image and Meaning in the Kozintsev Hamlet,” Jack Jorgens noted that the Russian “film is more than a series of powerful single images. Their effect is a cumulative one. Kozintsev continually urges his viewer to make connections by juxtapositions or repetitions. Some of the juxtapositions are elementary ones, as when he cuts from festive bulls’ heads or a panting Great Dane to Claudius, or from Ophelia mad to Laertes mad. Some of the repetition,” Jorgens continued, “is mere replication of characters which shows how ‘common’ they are. There is a whole bevy of Osrics, any one of whom might come down the stairs to invite Hamlet to the duel. Gertrude’s ladies in waiting, Fortinbras’ fellow soldiers, Claudius’ council — all mirror their betters, while Hamlet’s dress, disdain for decorum, and eccentric movements make him unique. But frequently,” Jorgens added, “the pattern is more subtle, the links in the mind of the viewer not fully conscious. The proliferating dead fireplaces late in the film contrast with the blazing one stressed by a rising camera as Horatio tells Hamlet of the appearance of the ghost. Empty chairs become important. Claudius calls upon Hamlet to fill his role as his chiefest courtier and his son only to find the place unfilled.” According to Jorgens, “Hamlet sits at a table for a long time gazing at the two empty thrones at its head while he thinks upon the possible implications of the appearance of the ghost. Polonius sets up a ‘throne’ in his house which permits him to play the petty Claudius” (308). “Billowing cloth,” Jorgens observed, “is continually linked in the film with death: the wind disturbs Hamlet’s cape as he rides toward the castle, the cloths and flags of mourning, the ghost’s cape, the tapestries just after the death of Polonius, the sails of the ship which is intended to carry Hamlet to his death” (308–9).

Writing in a 1975–76 essay titled “‘The Mirror up to Nature’: Notes on Kozintsev’s Hamlet,” Barbara Hodgdon asserted that Kozintsev’s Hamlet “re-invents Shakespeare’s play by expanding the limitations of its stage reality in order to show us a more complete world.” She noted his use of symbolic “counter-pointing” of the “lyrical” and the “tough”; his “epic scope” (as in a Russian novel); the way he uses “film montage”; and the ways he uses “spaces and rhythms”; “his conception of Ophelia”; and “his cinematic translation of the ritual and improvisational occasions of Shakespeare’s play” (305). Hodgdon wrote that ultimately “Kozintsev’s commitment to multiplicity seems to me to destroy the enigmatic incompleteness of Shakespeare’s play” and that “the film often intensifies the dramatic fabric of the play, heightening our impressions of some … moments” while “its expansions, intended to explain and clarify, sometimes over-tell Hamlet’s story” (316).

Jack Jorgens, in his 1977 book Shakespeare on Film (217-31), noted the influence of Olivier’s Hamlet on Kozintsev’s version, including “the impersonal mask covering the suffering human face of Hamlet’s father, the empty chairs and prominent tapestries and staircases, the tableaux of theatrical props associated with the players, and the symbolic crosses (prominent in the graveyard scene), the voice-over soliloquies, and the concluding funeral procession.” But he also considered Kozintsev’s film “remarkably different in both style and interpretation,” partly because of its emphasis on “a crowded castle which has a history and is the center of a society rooted in nature—sky, stone, plains, and the sea.” Kozintsev’s wide-screen format “permitted him to stress vast horizons, crowds, dances, and processions” and to “modulate between close-ups isolating significant objects” and “complex medium shots including subtle gradations of emphasis from background and décor.” He was able to highlight “minor motifs” and “major themes,” “central characters and actions,” and “extreme long shots isolating a figure against great expanses of castle, sky, or rock, or separating characters horizontally.” Abrupt cuts were used (unlike “Olivier’s dreamlike … dissolves”); realism and symbolism were combined; and in general, Jorgens thought Kozintsev’s “film retains a greater proportion of the play’s complexity and mystery [than Olivier’s], not merely because his images have a Shakespearean realism and grandeur to them, but because the visual texture is denser, the images and connections more consistently meaningful” (219). Jorgens also commented on such matters as meaningful changes in costume (220); “beautiful and significant isolated images” as well as “powerful patterns of images” involving “repetitions, associations, and contrasts”; Hamlet’s obsession with symbolic objects; and Hamlet’s meaning-laden gestures (223). Elsinore is emphatically presented as a prison (228), and the film’s “characters are never purely good or evil. They are people with good qualities which have been corrupted by lust, ambition, hate, timidity. Hence they are shown not in stasis but in conflict” (229).

Bernice Kliman, in a 1988 article titled “Kozintsev’s Visual Mastery,” wrote that “[w]hatever the shortcomings in plot and characterization, the visual images transcend the limits of the film’s thesis. The film succeeds on many levels in spite of the pruning of characters forced by the interpretation. We remember the film’s dynamic use of space—beach, sky, sea, castle; its Hamlet at once desperate and altruistic; its terrible, awe-inspiring ghost scenes with the slow-motion silhouettes, [and] the haunted, very human eyes of the ghost.” Kliman then mentioned many more details before concluding that the “film comes so close to being a perfect Shakespearean adaptation that one can only wish that it had been even better, wish for the impossible—for the filmmaker to layer all possible interpretations onto one piece of film. Making choices inevitably means that other choices must be left out” (113).

In his 1989 book Shakespeare, Cinema, and Society (134-41), John Collick, contrasting Kozintsev’s film with Olivier’s, noted the Russian director’s emphasis on “political corruption” rather than on Hamlet’s personal “inner flaw” and suggested that whereas Olivier offered what was, in essence, a psychological analysis from a single point of view, Kozintsev chose a vaster, more epic scale. Commenting that “Kozintsev is at pains never to show the castle as a whole,” instead providing “mere glimpses of its monolithic architecture” from which viewers have to infer the entire structure, Collick also suggested that the world in Kozintsev’s film is “seen as the site of political victimization” (139–40) and of “political history.” He concluded that by “[s]hirking the determinism of Olivier’s character-centred reading, Kozintsev perceived Hamlet’s purpose as the destruction of a corrupt Machiavellian court and his tragedy as a ‘tragedy of conscience.’” According to Collick, the fact that “the conscience of an intellectual should be so important is, in itself, a revealing comment on Kozintsev’s perception of himself and his work. Hamlet’s indecision and final death proceed from his involvement in a historical process which has little room for intellectual honesty” (141).

Lorne Buchman, in his 1991 book Still in Movement, saw Kozintsev’s Elsinore as a “static, political trap,” an emphasis made explicit in the opening “raising of the castle draw bridge (an image of isolation) and the simultaneous lowering of a huge iron portcullis after Hamlet enters” the castle. The outside world of motion contrasts with the inner world of “stillness” and stasis, with the strange atmosphere of the court symbolized by wall hangings that “depict scenes of slightly distorted and lifeless figures in acts of hunting and war, all set against a flowery background that suggests an incongruous context of benevolence.” According to Buchman, the “figures of the tapestries find their walking counterparts throughout the court in the form of Claudius’s politic worms milling about. Moreover, the artificial images of hunting and war find a parallel in the violence of the King’s deeds, also couched in benevolent seeming” (46). Buchman argued that other details “suggesting the static character of the inside include the director’s myriad statues, dress-forms (for Gertrude’s wardrobe), shadows, the tense and rigid poses of Claudius’s courtiers, and the hard and immobile textures of stone and iron prominent inside. But,” he continued, “the movement of the outside finds its way indoors through the hero himself. Hamlet is a moving fire within the stone and iron of Elsinore and, as such, he threatens the political stability of Claudius’s regime.” We first see him “galloping on a white horse, moving against an ominous sky of thick black cloud”—a “figure always on the move, restless, and associated with fire, sea, and sky.” Buchman noted that Hamlet “is the only major figure to appear on several occasions outside” the castle, even going “outside to die at the end of the film.” But initially he moves from Wittenberg to Elsinore, moving “from the new humanism of the outside to the feudal barbarism of the inside, a departure to a political reality that makes the advance of truth and knowledge a fruitless and inconsequential quest in the face of tyranny” (47).

Buchman, arguing that the Ghost also, like Hamlet, moved from outside Elsinore to inside to challenge Claudius’s tyranny (48), saw the Ghost not only as “a force of the past materializing in the present” but also as a sign of the future and “a force of the historical process,” which “collides with a king who tries to tyrannize [his people], to isolate his regime in history as he isolates his fortress from all that surrounds it.” Kozintsev associates the Ghost symbolically with a clock “striking the hour of midnight, the moment when beginning and end are one” (48). Returning to his main theme, Buchman then argued that “Hamlet is of both worlds: Wittenberg and Elsinore, movement (thinking) and stasis (his delay), the Ghost and Gertrude. Ultimately, though, Hamlet sets events in motion. He challenges the static interior with movement; he brings with him the uncompromising spirit of the outside, a spirit that takes the form of thought, of questioning, of political challenge.” Even Hamlet’s famous “to be or not to be” soliloquy “highlights the tension between inside and outside, between movement and stasis. Interestingly, Kozintsev employs his medium to shoot the speech ‘on the move’ in the outside world; Hamlet walks along the seashore, negotiating its rocks and dodging the waves washing on the beach as he contemplates the question of action. We move with the camera as it moves with the hero in a compelling blend of contemplation and motion” (49).

Discussing the Kozintsev production in a 1994 essay titled “The Films of Hamlet” (184–87), Neil Taylor noted the tendency of Russian intellectuals to identify with Hamlet; compared this film’s Elsinore to a prison that swallows the prince; observed the film’s stress on staircases (184); and commented on the play’s interest in politics (185). He compared the film to a “symbolist poem,” with “strong emphasis on imagery, music, and careful visual composition and frequent camera movement” (185) and said that Hamlet is never shown alone; that Kozintsev often uses low-angle shots (185); that the film combines “social realism and visual formalism” (186); and that it is less pessimistic than has sometimes been claimed (187).

Anthony B. Dawson, in his 1995 book on Hamlet for the Shakespeare in Performance series (184–96), contrasted the ending of Kozintsev’s film with the ending of Olivier’s (184); noted that Kozintsev’s Elsinore bustles with activity, unlike Olivier’s; and noted that Kozintsev emphasizes what he called “solitude in a crowd” (185). Explaining that nineteenth-century Russians and Germans competed for “owning Hamlet” (185–87), he then discussed various subtle details of Kozintsev’s film (187); noted that it stressed Hamlet’s isolation in an oppressive society (188–89); suggested that Ophelia’s presence emphasizes the power of Claudius’s court over bodies (189); and commented on Ophelia’s own isolation (190–91). Highlighting what Kozintsev called the film’s “theme of government” (192), Dawson observed how this film’s Claudius shows self-control in the Mousetrap scene (193); commented that the “court world is inescapable” (193); asserted that Kozintsev’s emphasis, unlike Olivier’s, is on the “outside forces” impinging on Hamlet (194); and said that Kozintsev makes “no effort to soften the harsh edges of Hamlet’s character” (194). Reporting that Russian tradition “always included the rough laughter and ready cruelty of the Prince” (194), Dawson observed that this fact “helps to explain Hamlet’s bitter treatment of Ophelia” (195) and noted, in Kozintsev’s film, lots of “barbed irony” but “little actual humour.” He thought the filmed emphasized “the defeat of both the tyranny and the heroic rebel” (195) and said its finale ultimately represents a “Romantic Hamlet” (196). Meanwhile, Herbert R. Coursen, in his 1996 book Shakespeare in Production (62–65), commented in passing that of “all the Hamlet films, Kozintsev’s suffers the greatest loss when put on cassette. It is hugely scaled in Sovscope, a seventy-millimeter medium, which makes an epic of the play whether it wants to be or not” (64).

Patrick Burke, in a 1997 article titled “‘Hidden Games, Cunning Traps, Ambushes’: The Russian Hamlet,” praised the “formal elements” in Kozintsev’s film, including “its use of space, camera angles, balance of light and shade, integrating of music and soundtrack, editing in the service of rhythm” as well as “the in-depth acting of the Hamlet, the King and, in the best performance on film, the Ophelia.” He thought that “[t]hose elements enrich and support the coherence of the director’s thematic focus on Hamlet as a contest of ‘mighty opposites,” namely “Claudius and Hamlet, capable, courageous but corrupt administration versus personal integrity and idealism free of neurosis or introversion, the possibilities of oligarchy versus those of democracy.” Calling Kozintsev’s production “the finest film version of Hamlet to date,” Burke said it “speaks with impressive nuance to the Shakespeare text, to the debate on freedom in the Soviet Union of [the] post-Stalinist ‘thaw’ and to the moral uncertainties of our own threatened time” (179).

In an essay published in 2000 and titled “The Effects of Primacy and Recency upon Audience Response to Five Film Versions of Shakespeare’s Hamlet,” James H. Lake wrote that “[c]urrent research concludes … that it is natural and predictable to recall both first and last impressions more readily than those in the middle and that last impressions can eradicate those which immediately precede them” (112–13). He thought that an “unsubtle use of primacy-recency sequencing for the purpose of suggesting such coherence is obvious … in Kozintsev’s Hamlet, where the film’s opening symbols of freedom and imprisonment are repeated for us in the final scene. Shots of the pounding sea, symbolic of freedom … dominate Kozintsev’s first take, as his camera traces Hamlet’s approach into Elsinore, its high walls looming like those of a prison …. The primacy effect of this sequence causes us to recall it at the end of the film, when Kozintsev again tracks Hamlet’s actions, Horatio leading him slowly from Elsinore, to die near the roaring sea” (113).

In his book from 2000 titled Shakespeare on Screen (26–27), Daniel Rosenthal noted that the “film’s ending has been interpreted in allegorical terms: the tyrannical Claudius (Stalin) is replaced by the more tolerant Fortinbras (Khrushchev), who will eradicate some of the corruption in Denmark (Russia).” He wrote that Smoktunovsky, as Hamlet, “gives a lucid performance, neatly balanced between internalized and externalized emotions: some soliloquies are delivered quietly as voice-overs, others out loud with unrestrained passion. The prince starts off distracted, moves through dazed disbelief after the ghost’s revelations, and on to self-knowledge, accompanied by engaging reminders of his own mislaid mirth.” Suggesting that this interpretation stresses Hamlet’s initial lack of purpose, Rosenthal claimed that “[m]ore than any other film Hamlet, Smoktunovsky appears a completely changed man” when he finally decides to become an avenger, thus turning “his conversation with the plump, bald gravedigger into a remarkably life-affirming moment” (27). Praising the way the “rhythms of Hamlet’s thoughts are matched by Kozintsev’s wonderfully fluid camera movements, particularly in the prince’s frequent walks on the castle’s spectacular cliff-top fortifications,” Rosenthal nonetheless did think that Kozintsev “overdoes expressionistic shots of fluttering banners, scudding clouds and waves crashing against rocks to reflect the mental turmoil already expressed so vividly by the verse (Pasternak’s translation is subtitled with Shakespeare’s original).” On the other hand, he wrote that “Shostakovich’s supple score provides perfectly judged accompaniment” (27).

Writing in an essay from 2000 titled “Gertrude’s Willow Speech: Word and Film Image,” Hanna Scolnicov compared and contrasted Kozintsev’s Hamlet with three others, arguing that “none of the shortened versions” of the willow speech “really confronts the textual contradiction I have been following.” She thought, however, that “Kozintsev succeeds in creating a powerful series of visual images and a musical atmosphere that successfully convey and even substitute the textual suicide version of Ophelia’s death,” although she preferred Branagh’s full-text version (110).

Douglas Brode, in his 2000 book Shakespeare in the Movies (127–29), wrote that Kozintsev’s “Russian Hamlet barely paused for reflection. Most soliloquies … were cut, as was what many consider Hamlet’s moment of truth: his decision not to kill Claudius at prayer.” Brode quoted a contemporary review suggesting that the Russian Hamlet was ready to avenge his father’s death right from their first encounter but was repeatedly interrupted; he had no trouble making up his mind, just trouble in actually being able to act. Brode admired the film as a true “work of cinema,” full of detail in its setting, costumes, abundant extras, and symbolically dark sky. Noting Kozintsev’s various debts to the Olivier film, Brode commented that the Russian director “returns again and again to the sight and sound [of the nearby ocean] until the surf all but overpowers the film, conveying the theme of inevitable natural power in the universe” (128–29).

Discussing Kozintsev’s Hamlet in his 2002 book Shakespeare in the Cinema: Ocular Proof, Stephen M. Buhler wrote that while the film “includes enough of a political charge to be interpreted as an anti-Stalinist fable by some,” the movie “suggests little hope for renewal,” with Smoktunovsky’s Prince “find[ing] himself blocked in every direction” and Vertinskaya’s Ophelia “ground down” by her own family. She dances dutifully, without joy, and after her father dies she is “caged in a metal corset and suppressed under the heavy, dark fabric of a mourning dress,” although her own “death is marked by a hint of release” as the camera follows “the flight of a seabird over the expansive ocean.” But this proves “only a brief respite,” for we eventually see her imprisoned again as “we see the lid [of her coffin] placed firmly over her” and “the Gravedigger pounds heavy nails into the lid, keeping her in place once more” (164).

In 2006, John Russell Brown, in his book on Hamlet (155–57), wrote that Kozintsev’s Elsinore resembled a prison; observed that Smoktunovsky’s Hamlet was “physically strong and intellectually careful” and therefore not almost wholly insane, as in some British productions (156); remarked that Elizabethan England was itself a kind of tyranny; and observed that Shakespeare’s text was much cut for this production, especially in the soliloquies and longer speeches. Brown noted that in this production the words are usually “spoken slowly”; remarked that the film lacked much humor (156); and suggested that it was influenced by Olivier’s film (157).

In an essay from 2006 titled “Empowered by Madness: Ophelia in the Films of Kozintsev, Zeffirelli, and Branagh,” Gülsen Sayin Teker wrote that “Kozintsev’s 1964 version of Hamlet depicts Ophelia not as a feminist prophet but as a paradoxical character who is timid but precociously seductive, innocent but a shrew, and inexperienced but mature. Her transformation from an innocent, loving young lady to an object of the lover’s hatred, from a courtier of Gertrude to a prisoner of the court, and from the symbol of living energy to an ‘emblem of death’ … signifies the repeatedly underlined motif of the film, which is a pervasive sense of loss and decay in one’s being and in all human relations” (115).

Carolyn Jess-Cooke, in 2007 in Shakespeare on Film (20–24), discussed the production’s political and historical background; noted that Hamlet was little produced during the Stalin years (20–21); wrote that dynamism “is clearly intended here to characterize” this Hamlet, adding that his “turmoil is not psychological” but rather “is clearly caused” by living in “a politically corrupt environment” and by “his knowledge that he alone must bring the criminal monarchy to its knees.” She wrote that even the film’s “cinematography is consistently, and poetically, political,” as when “Kozintsev recurrently shoots his actors behind bar-like objects” to imply their imprisonment (22). According to Jess-Cooke, “Smoktunovsky’s Hamlet is neither mad, nor is he a performer. He is controlled, powerful and merciless,” as “when he is made to answer for Polonius’ death.” Even “when Laertes’ poisoned blade brings death to Hamlet, he does not wilt to the floor, but rather walks outside the castle and rests upright against the cliff, looking out to sea. The suggestion is that even in death, he is still standing.” Jess-Cooke saw this Hamlet (unlike Olivier’s) as “a solid, undeterred political outsider who eventually martyrs himself in the quest for liberty” (23). Meanwhile, Samuel Crowl, commenting briefly on Kozintsev’s film (49–50, 168–69) in his 2008 Norton Guide, asserted that the Russian director “crafted his Hamlet out of images of sea, stone, iron, and fire” (49); discussed Shostakovich’s music, Hamlet’s entrapment, and Kozintsev’s use of voice-over (49); and commented on Ophelia’s entrapment, especially in the scene featuring an iron corset (50). Crowl said that Kozintsev alluded to the opening of Olivier’s Hamlet in his own opening; commended Shostakovich’s opening music; discussed particular camera shots and costumes (168); and assessed the film’s political dimensions (169).

Erik Heine, in a 2009 essay titled “Controlling and Controlled: Ophelia and the Ghost as Defined by Music in Grigori Kozintsev’s Hamlet,” wrote that Shostakovich’s music in this film “focuses on three characters: Hamlet, Ophelia, and the Ghost. Hamlet’s music, initially heard at the outset of the film after the funeral bell tolls, appears over the course of the film, with various treatments, both melodic and instrumental, and in various keys depending on Hamlet’s state at the time. In contrast,” Heine continued, “Ophelia does not have a particular melodic motive or theme associated with her character. However, the one constant in all cues in which she appears is the use of the harpsichord. The character of Ophelia is always controlled by an influence outside of herself.” Finally, he argued that “the Ghost controls Hamlet, and the Ghost’s music is always presented in the same way: B-flat minor, and in half notes. The Ghost’s music is unchanging, offering no development, and always presented at a dynamic of forte.” Heine’s article examined “how Shostakovich’s music … assists in Kozintsev’s interpretation of Ophelia and the Ghost” and tried to demonstrate “how various forces affect Ophelia and the Ghost, and their effects on other characters throughout the film” (109).

Describing, in an abstract, her own 2011 essay titled “The Ghost and the Skull: Rupturing Borders between the Living and the Dead in Filmed Hamlets,” Victoria Bladen wrote that, “[a]s a spirit without material substance, the Ghost” in Hamlet “transgresses the border between life and death, a bodiless life crossing back into the material world. In the graveyard, Hamlet contemplates the reverse phenomenon in the skull of Yorick, a material object bereft of life; an empty shell remaining in the physical world while the spirit of the former court jester” has gone on to the next world. According to Bladen, the “porous border between life and death, one of the significant concerns of the play, has been articulated in different and innovative ways,” presenting “unique challenges and opportunities for filmmakers to explore the boundary between life and death.” Although focusing especially on Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet, she also discussed the adaptations of Olivier, Kozintsev, Richardson, and Zeffirelli.

Jacek Fabiszak, describing in an abstract his 2011 essay “To Cut or Not to Cut? What’s in the Written Text of Filmed Hamlets,” reported that his “article focuses on how the verse is handled in a medium that heavily relies on image, in other words how the text is presented (also) graphically on screen,” especially in the films by Olivier, Kozintzev, Zeffirelli, Branagh, and Almereyda. Fabiszak argued that all these “versions share one characteristic: they are attempts to translate, albeit in technologically and aesthetically different ways, the dramatic (or literary) and theatrical (or historically determined conventional) into the filmic. Interestingly enough,” he concluded, “one of the most problematic aspects of such a process is the soliloquy, a device which functions both as a poem and a typical theatrical convention which is difficult to justify in highly realistic cinema.”

Describing in an abstract her 2011 essay titled “The Country Matters in Kozintsev’s Elsinore,” Dominique Goy-Blanquet wrote that “[c]oming some twenty years after Laurence Olivier’s, Kozintsev’s film marked a complete break with its aesthetics, acting style, and political content. Ten years after his own optimistic theatrical production of the play,” she continued, “it records the disillusion after the brief ‘thaw’ that followed Stalin’s death. In this testimony on the role and fate of the artist in Soviet Russia, Kozintsev, allied with two other major artists, Pasternak and Shostakovich, sets out to retrieve the hero from layers of French, German and Russian Hamletism.” Instead, these Russian artists wanted “to invest him with a mission, speak the truth and speak for justice, in a country where corruption sits at the head. The hero cannot win against such odds, but his stance against oppression, his use of the theatrical medium to expose falsehood acquire a virtue of their own which silence cannot stop.” Goy-Blanquet argued that “Shakespeare’s play needs little prompting to echo the contemporary situation, and all three partners are well aware that in speaking for the past they speak to the present. All three have learnt from hard experience to master the oblique speech of resistance. Man is not a pipe, their Hamlet proudly asserts, in refusing to play the oppressor’s tune.” Instead, “He stands for the spirit of Wittenberg, which Kozintsev identifies with intellectual courage, against the iron age of Elsinore.”

Russell Jackson, describing his 2011 essay titled “The Gaps in Gertrude: Interpretations of the Role in Five Feature Films,” wrote that “[m]any actors have found Gertrude a role that is both rewarding and frustrating. Some—though by no means all—have expressed a wish that she had at least one soliloquy, and there have been many interpretations of her relationship with Claudius after the closet scene and its revelations.” He explained that “[i]n the theatre directors have sometimes chosen to follow the First Quarto in having Gertrude receive news of Hamlet’s return to Denmark,” adding that this information “may be contained in the letters ‘to the queen’ which in other texts the messenger presents to the King in Act 4, scene 7 (and which often in performance the King appears to intercept).” Jackson considered “interpretations of the role in feature films”—those by Olivier, Kozintsev, Zeffirelli, and Almereyda—“with particular emphasis on the ways in which actors and directors have dealt with the ‘missing’ elements of the role.”

Peter Cochran, in his 2013 book Small-Screen Shakespeare (192–93), admired the black-and-white photography, the realistic setting, the emphasis on imprisonment, and the effective symbolism. He thought this might be the best production he assessed thanks to the credible tragedy, Ophelia’s insanity, and the political emphasis. He found it strange that Claudius’s corpse is never shown (192); commended this production’s Hamlet; but found nothing especially new in his performance (193).

Courtney Lehmann, analyzing the film in a chapter on Kozintsev in a 2013 volume titled Welles, Kozintsev, Kurosawa, Zeffirelli (103–16), wrote that “Stalin’s hatred of Hamlet was well known; it was not merely his least favourite of Shakespeare’s plays, it was a text that he held in unqualified contempt,” so that Kozintsev’s “decision to adapt Hamlet—Gamlet in Russian—suggests Kozintsev’s identification with the play’s agitational properties,” which the audience should heed, perceiving the play as, in the director’s words, “a tocsin that awakens the conscience,” so that the film “opens with the ‘tocsin’ of a tolling bell as a massive, menacing shadow looms over a violent sea” (103). Noting the “camera’s almost total avoidance of eye-level perspectives,” Lehmann said that “extreme low- and high-angle shots establish disequilibrium as the norm; rarely does the spectator occupy a standard—let alone privileged—viewing position, leading the audience to wonder if it is they who are being watched.” She thought that the “shocking staccato intrusions of Shostakovich’s score augment the sense of paranoia by intermittently jolting the audience” (103). Calling this Hamlet an ever-active “agent of manifest destiny” (104) and viewing this film’s Elsinore as “a corrupt bourgeois machine” (105) full of “bureaucratic gargoyles that surround [Hamlet] on all sides” (106), Lehmann considered the Prince as this castle’s “only conscientious objector,” his “insubordination” suggested by his posture even before he says a word, so that in “contrast to the well-coifed members of the king’s privy council, all of whom sit perfectly upright awaiting their cue to applaud him, Hamlet sits outside their circle, slumped irreverently in a chair” (106).

Seeing Hamlet as “a prisoner of conscience” and Ophelia as “incarcerated by custom,” Lehmann wrote that “Kozintsev’s deliberate, detailed conceptualization of her character is one of the most distinguishing features of the film,” which depicts her as an innocent, fragile doll who is infantilized and manipulated by others (107), while the massive Ghost moves like a huge robot “ensconced in a majestic, billowing cape” (108). Lehmann intriguingly observed that “[w]hen the Ghost retreats backwards from Hamlet to return to whence it came, a sliver of light creates an inverted, Lone Ranger-style mask on its face, exposing a pair of searing eyes.” Then, “[b]owing its head to shun discovery, the Ghost immediately exposes another, more abstract face etched in the visor atop its helm,” for a moment resembling a “Noh warrior” from the Japanese theater that long intrigued the Russian director (109). But if the Ghost’s size suggests power, Claudius’s suggests “obscene appetites,” although it is Polonius “whom Kozintsev holds in the highest degree of contempt as [in his own words] a ‘cog in the machine of state’” (110). Lehmann thought it appropriate, therefore, that Polonius dies “amidst a backdrop of extravagant gowns posed on headless dress forms, joining the ranks of the royal dummies who licked the king’s boots before him.” In contrast, Hamlet is associated with the common people rather than being portrayed as an “elitist … petulant prince” (111). Instead, he is a kind of hero who “neither feigns nor feels madness” (112), although this means cutting some of his soliloquies to make him seem “a man who knows his course of action and merely awaits the opportunity to execute it” (114) despite the fact that he and Ophelia are “repeatedly framed behind bars” (114–15). Lehmann concluded by noting that at the end of this version of the play, “the stony shadow of the castle [gradually] crosses the screen from right to left, coming to rest in the middle of the frame; at the same time, a lone seagull flies from left to right and beyond the screen, reinforcing the unresolved tensions between air and earth, the winged and the real. To close the film any other way,” she thought, “would not be an ending but a capitulation” (116).

Discussing Kozintsev’s Hamlet in an important 2014 book about the play, Samuel Crowl began by summing up such standard ideas as Olivier’s influence and Kozintsev’s political approach, noting that this approach was “made possible by the cultural thaw initiated by Nikita Khrushchev when he succeeded Stalin as the Soviet leader.” He called Kozintsev’s Claudius “a barrel-chested cross between Stalin and Henry VIII” and his Hamlet a “more robust and romantic” figure than Olivier’s and one “much less attached to his mother.” Crowl considered “Kozintsev’s film … both a moving reaffirmation of Russian romanticism and a covert critique of Stalinist power politics” (109). Commenting on Kozintsev’s adapted script—prepared by the eminent author Boris Pasternak—Crowl noted how the Russian “rhythm and idiom” of the prose trimmed an “overload of Shakespearean metaphors” while also noting Kozintsev’s debts to Olivier in his film’s “use of black and white photography, its Elizabethan setting, and its employment of chiaroscuro effects to define Hamlet and his world,” adding that Kozintsev “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)” (109). Observing that “Smoktunovski’s Hamlet, like Olivier’s, is lithe and very blonde, he is much less passive” (110), Crowl commented that the film also “brilliantly imagines Ophelia as a beautifully trained court ‘puppet’” who, in her dancing lesson, is “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.” Prison imagery is prominent when both Hamlet and Ophelia, shot “through the balusters of a staircase,” are seen as “two blonde forlorn heads separated literally and symbolically by the social and political forces at work within Claudius’s court.” Ophelia’s “iron corset (her own personal cage)” echoes the earlier caged bird imagery and makes her seem even more confined than Hamlet, who is given an occasional chance to roam freely outside (111).

In his 2017 book The Shakespeare Films of Grigori Kozintsev, Michael Thomas Hudgens began by discussing the opening of the play and then discussed such topics as Kozintsev’s knowledge of the work; his use of black and white in the film; his choice of cast members; and the diary he kept concerning the film (91–99). Hudgens also commented on how Japanese Noh plays influenced this adaptation; then quoted extensively from the script and final film; and then discussed some of the ways the play was cut for the movie while explaining Kozintsev’s decisions concerning numerous details (99–115). The book’s final chapter, like much of the rest of the work, drew heavily on Kozintsev’s own writings.

Peter E. S. Babiak, writing about the Kozintsev adaptation in his 2016 book on a hundred years of Shakespeare films (84–93), discussed the use of Pasternak’s translation (85), the movie’s contemporary Russian contexts (85), the visual emphasis on “formless, relentless and barren rock,” and the ways such settings may symbolize the isolation of Stalinist Russia (86). Commenting on the film’s emphasis on various voices (including official voices, the voices of courtiers, and the voices of the powerful [87]), Babiak frequently offered detailed discussions of individual scenes, observed that the court resembled a Soviet politburo (88, 90), said that Kozintsev sometimes used voiceovers to enhance the film’s credibility (88), and stressed the imagery of Ophelia’s entrapment (89), noting that both she and Hamlet seem powerless (89–91) while Polonius is portrayed as a “would-be king” (90). Babiak commented on the film’s debt to Sergei Eisenstein’s path-breaking Alexander Nevsky, wrote that Hamlet’s costume “becomes increasingly distinct,” suggested that the seagull symbolism implies freedom (91), and emphasized Claudius’s self-destruction (92).

In a 2019 essay titled “Modern Filmed Versions of the Opening Lines of Ophelia’s First ‘Mad Scene,’” Robert Evans compared and contrasted fourteen different performances of those lines. He wrote that “Grigori Kozintsev’s 1964 Russian production (roughly 144 minutes long) is beautifully filmed (again in black and white) and its initial mad scene is shockingly memorable. Everything is dark and gloomy and the scene (starting at roughly 1:38:25) opens suddenly” (57). He concluded that in this episode “Kozintsev wants us focused entirely on Ophelia, her singing, and Gertrude’s reaction to both. Both women’s behavior is quiet and understated, even when Gertrude approaches Ophelia (without touching her) to ask her song’s meaning …. Ophelia, ignoring the question, slowly moves away and sings some more. By now,” according to Evans, “well over two minutes have elapsed. Kozintsev has taken his time (and ours) in creating an Ophelia diametrically different from Olivier’s. Kozintsev knew his film would be compared with its predecessor. He clearly accepted the challenge, producing an initial mad scene that seems indelibly powerful” (59).

Discussing the film in his 2019 book Shakespeare the Illusionist (99–103), Neil Forsyth summarized its opening scenes, noted its echoes of Olivier’s production as well as of Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible, observed that Ophelia is treated like a puppet, and heavily summarized the plot (99–102). Observing that the “Ghost seems especially imposing against the beauty of the open sky,” Forsyth commented that he “is not shown in relation to any recognizable element of the scene and remains, therefore, in a space of his own, always separate from that of the other characters,” his mystery enhanced by Shostakovich’s “disturbing and moving music” as well as by disturbing “visual details” (102). Reporting that Kozintsev cuts the Ghost’s first entrance, Forsyth suggested that when the Ghost does appear in this film, it is “almost as if he appears in response to our distaste for Claudius, as if he comes as much to set right the politics of this corrupt court as to avenge his own murder.” Suggesting, unusually, that the film may have been intended to indict the pre-communist Russian monarchy, Forsyth claimed that it was not initially received as criticism of the Stalin regime (103). He concluded by calling it, for lovers of cinema, “the most powerful Hamlet film, not simply because of its ghost but because of the way the images and movements in the ghost scene prepare for and connect with everything else in the film that is disturbing and determinedly strange” (129).

1964 Bill Colleran/John Gielgud Production

Bill Colleran directed the filmed version of a famous New York stage production directed by John Gielgud. It starred Richard Burton as Hamlet; Hume Cronyn as Polonius; Alfred Drake as Claudius; Eileen Herlie as Gertrude; Philip Coolidge as Voltimand; John Cullum as Laertes; Linda Marsh as Ophelia; and Robert Milli as Horatio.

Jay L. Halio, in a 1973 essay titled “Three Filmed Hamlets,” compared and contrasted the Colleran/ Gielgud production with the adaptations starring Laurence Olivier and Richard Chamberlain, noting the way the play was cut and otherwise altered. Halio reminded readers that in “his own time, Shakespeare frequently revised, cut, added to, and in many other ways altered his plays to meet the changing needs of his company or the changing fashions of the day.” He therefore thought it “an error to maintain, as some critics persist in doing, that by altering the text we are somehow violating Shakespeare or doing anything more than he would do—and as the evidence clearly shows, did do” (319). Halio thought that “Richard Burton does not quite successfully transform Shakespeare’s Hamlet into [John] Osborne’s Jimmy Porter,” a character from Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (320).

Commenting on the production in passing in his 1997 article “Hamlet’s Ghost on the Screen,” Patrick Hunter remarked that the Ghost appeared here as a tall shadow that “darken[ed] most of the set, almost dwarfing Richard Burton,” so that the Ghost functioned less as a “character” and more as a “force of almost God-like power” (21). Daniel Rosenthal, in his book from 2000 titled Shakespeare on Screen reported that Gielgud’s performers were costumed in modern clothing and that “[t]here performances were recorded through the ‘revolutionary’ Electronovision process, which used small, electronic cameras that could deliver adequate picture quality using only available stage lighting. Five cameras were used and their positions switched nightly so that the edited ‘theatrofilm,’ as Hamlet was billed, could combine 15 viewpoints” (28). Rosenthal continued that “[a]s the brisk production unfolds on bare boards, Burton, dressed in close-fitting black, is physically intimidating yet as light-footed as a dancer, a brooding Hamlet who vacillates between self-love and self-disgust.” Adding that Burton’s “booming voice caresses and scours the poetry,” Rosenthal thought that voice “creates extraordinary tension from brief, unexpected pauses and then deflates it with startling, mocking chuckles. It’s remarkable how much humour he wrings from the text, with assistance from Hume Cronyn, who displays exquisite timing as an elderly, spry Polonius.” But Rosenthal concluded that aside from “Burton and Cronyn, the rest of the largely American cast seem terribly wooden” (28).

Douglas Brode’s 2000 book Shakespeare in the Movies (125–27) observed that “Gielgud had staged the production in ‘rehearsal clothes,’” with “actors wearing sneakers and sports coats or suits and ties while carrying swords,” conveying a sense of the play’s timeless relevance. Gielgud was able to be more explicit about the incestuous aspects of Hamlet’s relationship with Gertrude, so that “[w]hen Burton kissed his Queen … square on the lips, lingeringly and lasciviously, audiences gasped in amazement at what was more than a mere hint. Finally, they understood the perverse nature of this rugged Hamlet’s true problem” (127).

Peter Cochran, in his 2013 book Small-Screen Shakespeare (195–97), wrote that Burton delivers “a star turn” in “what remains the longest-running Shakespeare in history” (195). He noted some of the production’s highlights, strongly praising its Polonius (196) and Ophelia, its “To be” speech, and its direction, and calling it “a Hamlet which must be seen” (197).

In a 2019 essay titled “Modern Filmed Versions of the Opening Lines of Ophelia’s First ‘Mad Scene,’” Robert Evans compared and contrasted fourteen different performances of those lines. He commented that in this production “Marsh, apparently, was not considered especially effective by reviewers, and Gielgud considered replacing her.” Evans wrote that her “performance might have seemed a little less ‘over the top’ if this Hamlet had been an outright film rather than a filmed stage play. Compared with [earlier filmed Ophelias], Marsh seems more overtly aggressive” and also a “very modern Ophelia, not only because of her contemporary costuming and the stripped-down set but because she seems literally and figuratively remote from Gertrude.” Evans noted that “Marsh consistently keeps her distance, at least at first, from practically everyone except Horatio” (60–61).

1964 Philip Saville Production

This film, titled Hamlet at Elsinore and filmed at the actual castle mentioned in the play, was directed by Philip Saville, starred Christopher Plummer as Hamlet; Robert Shaw as Claudius; Alec Clunes as Polonius; Michael Caine as Horatio; June Tobin as Gertrude; and Jo Maxwell Muller as Ophelia.

In their 1988 anthology Shakespeare on Television, J. C. Bulman and H. R. Coursen quoted an early reviewer who wrote that Plummer’s Hamlet “is a romantic. … Having killed Polonius, he is momentarily appalled by the deed. He has wit and elegance; his pretended madness is a clever game. … He is the Hamlet of Goethe and Coleridge, the gentle spirit broken by a burden too heavy for him to bear” (240).

Bernice Kliman, in a 1988 essay titled “Hamlet at Elsinore with Christopher Plummer (1964),” wrote that the “actors are all remarkably comfortable in the setting, but the director’s uneasiness shows in excessive closeups and poorly motivated high-angle shots. Long ago,” she commented, “I told a friend who wanted to disguise the awkwardness of a long, narrow kitchen to pull out all the stops instead and paint stripes parallel to the long sides; rather than disguise the problem, embrace it, revel in it. He did not listen to me. Saville too, I think,” she continued, “should have reveled in the magnificence of Elsinore and had more faith that Shakespeare and these highly competent actors could have filled the volume. … What Saville needed was a more judicious blending of all kinds of shots and more courage” (165).

Peter Cochran, in his 2013 book Small-Screen Shakespeare (193–95), called this production “striking” but thought it got off to a weak start and noted that no Ghost is shown. He praised some particular moments while noting flaws in others (193–94), some of which he considered randomly placed (194). He extolled the closet scene, the mad scene, the grave-digger scene, and Michael Caine’s performance as Horatio (195).

In a 2019 essay titled “Modern Filmed Versions of the Opening Lines of Ophelia’s First ‘Mad Scene,’” Robert Evans compared and contrasted fourteen different performances of those lines. He wrote that in this production “Gertrude continues to sound compassionate as Claudius (Robert Shaw) approaches. Ophelia, in a very effective touch, begins to look at him flirtatiously. This Ophelia shifts rapidly from one mood to another, quickly running a whole emotional gauntlet. Her flirtatiousness toward Claudius is especially striking” (62).

1969 Tony Richardson Production

A 1969 British film directed by Tony Richardson and based on an earlier staged version starred Nicol Williamson as Hamlet; Judy Parfitt as Gertrude; Anthony Hopkins as Claudius; Marianne Faithfull as Ophelia; Mark Dignam as Polonius; Michael Pennington as Laertes; and Gordon Jackson as Horatio.

Roger Manvell, in his 1971 book Shakespeare and the Film (127-31), called Richardson’s production “an interesting experiment” intended to free the play from traditional theatrical stagings (127). He discussed the use of an old railroad building as the setting; compared Hamlet to a graduate student pulled away from his studies (128); disliked the presentation of the ghost (129); noted pervasive elements of cynicism; and described Hamlet as a “neurotic outsider” (130).

Commenting on the Richardson adaptation in a 1976 essay titled “Gade, Olivier, Richardson: Visual Strategy in Hamlet Adaptation,” Robert A. Duffy said that it “might be classed as the neurotic Hamlet” because “Richardson intensifies and acerbates Shakespeare’s sense of enclosure and confinement. For the most part the actors play against a background of total darkness although plain brick walls and an occasional tapestry substitute infrequently as backdrops.” Duffy explained that “Richardson in fact filmed the version primarily in medium shot and close-up, his basic frame composition the two and three shot. Moreover, the localities of action remain, except for an occasional set piece largely indistinguishable one from the other.” He added that the “film is shot in extremely shallow depth of field and focus; seldom do more than three characters in a shot appear with full clarity. The editing pace in the film is slow, with cuts in the two-hour adaptation totaling a meager two hundred fifty, for an average take of some thirty seconds.” Duffy called the “acting style … quite naturalistic, the verse read most often as prose, its emotional effect somewhat blunted. Nicol Williamson’s delivery is clipped, rapid, and nasal, at times almost frantically spit out.” According to Duffy, “not unpredictably, most critics—film and literary—reacted adversely to the adaptation,” but Duffy himself thought that the “nearly universal condemnation is in some measure unwarranted Although certainly not a great film, and decidedly not a great Shakespearean adaptation, Richardson’s Hamlet displays a distinct and artistically coherent style” (149).

Also in 1976, Glenn Litton, in his essay “Diseased Beauty in Tony Richardson’s Hamlet,” contended nearly every shot in the film “is designed to express metaphorically Elsinore’s diseased beauty” but that Richardson’s “means do not draw attention to themselves. Their quietness causes a trompe l’oeil effect, as if the viewer were able, by shifting his or her eyes ever so slightly, to see, first, an unblemished beauty, and then, the cancers at work in all their horror. This intimate, detailed style,” according to Litton, “is highly filmic. Richardson, his cast, and crew were not content merely to record the stage version of Hamlet that Richardson had recently directed [on stage].” Therefore, they “carefully adapted his stage version to the film medium,” so “Richardson’s many close-ups,” for instance, “allow his audience to catch flickerings of distress beneath masks of composure. His handsome cast is capable of appearing young and vital and, at the same time, tortured and weak.” Shifting close-ups created a sense of “disorientation,” and, to “heighten this effect, most of the action is surrounded by black undefined space. Against that void the autumnal colors of the richly textured costumes, highlighted with amber, suggest an ambiguous state between ripeness and rot.” Litton thought that “Richardson is especially sensitive to the ways in which a character’s use of a prop, or even his proximity to one, can change the meaning of a speech” (109–10).

Again in 1976, Michael Mullin, in an essay titled “Tony Richardson’s Hamlet: Script and Screen,” wrote that in Richardson’s Hamlet the “plot is streamlined and the distance—emotional and historical—between us and the characters is shortened,” so that “Williamson’s Hamlet becomes an existential anti-hero; the Ghost, an emanation welling up from deep within his psyche; Ophelia, a modern decadent; her father, a blend of statesman and roue; Laertes, Polonius-on-the-make; Claudius, a shrewd, self-indulgent dictator; and Gertrude, the youthseeking, thoroughly modern matron.” Mullin thought that the “shortened, re-arranged script may disorient those who remember the Folio text, yet memory returns what we miss, and, in returning, provokes a deeper reflection on things seen but not spoken” (130).

Rachel V. Billigheimer, in a 1986 essay on “Psychological and Political Trends in ‘To Be, or Not To Be’: Stage and Film Hamlets of the Twentieth Century,” wrote that although “the camera shots in Richardson’s production focus on faces, there is no appearance at all of the ghost,” whose “presence here is manifested by a gong-resounding voice with the affectation of a gleaming light which produces horror on the faces of those who perceive it.” This internalizing of the ghost may be explained as suggesting “hallucination or, more probably, the voice of the unconscious speaking aloud” (29–30). Billigheimer considered Richardson’s Ophelia “not a character of fascination or depth” but did think she “shows some lasciviousness,” so that there are “obvious suggestions of her affection for Laertes being that of a sexual involvement as they frequently embrace passionately.” She thought that as “Hamlet lies in bed reciting the ‘To be, or not to be’ soliloquy, the camera focuses directly on his face, which bears an expression of cynicism. Throughout the play Hamlet moves in a climate of ambiguity between the world of reality and the world of appearances” (30).

Bernice Kliman, in a 1988 essay titled “Richardson’s Hamlet with Nicol Williamson (1969),” wrote that “[c]ertainly, Richardson knows what he is doing and he does it very well. As always, however, the actor who plays Hamlet determines the success of the production. The closeups give full play to Nicol Williamson’s many moods, but finally, I think, his voice makes him the interesting Hamlet he is, as much for its nasalities, parodic whines, and mimicry of his enemies as for its expression of many emotions. Not everyone,” she thought, “will love his performance, but the superb handling of the medium allows us to receive it unobstructed. Much of Richardson’s interpretation can be described as actualizations of stage directions: the king’s and queen’s sensuality, Ophelia’s long-lost innocence, Polonius’s officiousness. But Hamlet’s character,” she added, “is so complex that no one line can define him; or, to put it another way, so many lines provide possible stage directions for his characterization that no one actor could encompass them all. Through activating stage directions in lines surrounding the character of Hamlet, Richardson creates the ambience within which the character of Hamlet unfolds” (179).

Justin Shaltz’s 1993 essay “Three ‘Hamlets’ on Film” compared and contrasted Olivier’s film with those directed by Tony Richardson (1969) and Franco Zeffirelli (1990), arguing that none of these versions “manages to capture the spirit of Shakespeare’s text in both the early scenes involving the Ghost and the concluding duel scene” (36). According to Shaltz,

“Zeffirelli’s film locates Hamlet’s motivation almost entirely in grief for a beloved father … whereas the text, Olivier’s version, and, much less effectively, Richardson’s film center the motivation for revenge primarily in the brutal demands of an angry, dominating monarch and secondarily on the righting of a wrong.” Shaltz mentioned several different examples of the ways the duel scene differed among the films and between the films and Shakespeare’s text (37).

In his 1994 essay “The Films of Hamlet” (187–89), Neil Taylor noted Williamson’s rapid speech (187); said this Hamlet is “full of a half-repressed infantile anger” that makes him a “neurotic outsider, spasmodically distressed and overwrought” (188); and stressed the film’s intense psychological emphasis, its many closeups, its shots full of characters, its many “long takes” (188). He commented on Williamson’s direct address to the camera, the ambivalent feelings he provokes in viewers, his “eccentric delivery,” and the unusual amount of time he is shown on screen, so that “Hamlet is defined as being, not just the hero, but the total subject of the film” (189).

Discussing this adaptation in his 1996 book Shakespeare in Production: Whose History? (65–66), Herbert R. Coursen called it “the most close-up Hamlet of all” (65), with Williamson’s Prince “an enraged, snarling” figure who seemed to symbolize such concerns of the 1960s as “the sense of displacement in society and alienation from the political process”—an instinctive questioner of authority, one filmed in a kind of “black void” in a “network as fragile as a spider’s web” (66). Patrick Hunter, in a 1997 article titled “Hamlet’s Ghost on the Screen,” briefly noted that this production’s ghost was “[e]lectronically recorded to simulate an echo-like effect,” thus “offer[ing] more mystery than … other off-screen Ghosts, and, because of the actor’s stentorian vocal powers,” also “suggest[ing] more authority” (22). Just as briefly, Leigh Woods, in a 1997 essay titled “Abstract and Brief Chronicles on Film: The Players Scenes in Hamlet,” wrote that as Richardson’s “Hamlet wears on … a much looser and more capacious definition of performance insinuates itself into the action. Here, the players prove as skilled and devious as improvisers as Olivier’s company were polished and well-rehearsed” (61).

Assessing Richardson’s film more fully in his book from 2000 titled Shakespeare on Screen, Daniel Rosenthal called Nicol Williamson “the most neurotic, fastest talking Prince of Denmark in screen history” (29). Terming some of the doubling (in which actors play more than one role) distracting, Rosenthal noted the absence of sets, the use of “blacked-out back-grounds,” and the fact that “the Ghost [was] represented by a spotlight shone onto Williamson’s face,” a strategy typical of the “unerringly narrow focus that is only possible on screen” (29). Rosenthal suggested that roughly “90 per cent of the shots are close-ups, generating a claustrophobic mood that is feebly undramatic for the crowded play and duel scenes, but tailor-made to carry the audience into Hamlet’s mind.” He saw this Hamlet as a typical figure from the 1960s—a “feverishly sardonic, anti-Establishment drop-out, in a hyperactive performance,” adding that although Williamson’s “strangulated vocal ticks and proletarian accent irritated many British reviewers, and [although] he is nobody’s idea of a romantic pin-up, yet the poetry has rarely sounded more spontaneous or heartfelt, connecting us with every aspect of Hamlet’s fears and frustrations” (29). He praised “Williamson’s breathtakingly rapid, though still crystal-clear, delivery, particularly when addressing soliloquies to [the] camera,” allowing more of Shakespeare’s words to be used even though this production was ninety minutes shorter than Olivier’s. Finally, commenting on another distinctive feature of this version, Rosenthal suggested that if any couple were incestuously attracted in this production, it was Ophelia and Laertes rather than Hamlet and Gertrude (29).

Douglas Brode’s 2000 book Shakespeare in the Movies (129–32) reported that even people who had “championed the stage production” considered the film a disaster, partly because it was visually uninteresting, embarrassingly brief, lacking in humor (130), and graphically sensual, with an unusual suggestion of incest between Laertes and Ophelia. According to Brode, “Richardson appears eager to destroy Shakespeare’s richness of texture, reducing beautifully realized supporting characters to cardboard caricatures,” stripping out the important “appearance-reality theme,” and allowing Williamson to deliver “famous lines so matter-of-factly” that “the audience could not later recall whether they had heard them or not. This,” according to Brode, “destroyed the most basic element of Hamlet’s personality: the notion that, whether effeminate or macho, he is a gifted individual, a true prince among men,” making Hamlet “crude” rather than “sensitive” and “talented” (131).

In 2002, Stephen M. Buhler, in his book Shakespeare in the Cinema (41–43), called “Nicol Williamson’s Hamlet … not visually youthful” but praised his “snarling” attacks on corruption, as if he were a 1960s student leader (in a film also featuring the popular singer Marianne Faithful as Ophelia). “This Hamlet,” Buhler wrote, “is an eternal and eternally world-weary graduate student, impatient with pretense yet naively hopeful that some ringing truth can be heard amid the hypocritical lies that pass for ‘sensible’ discourse” and perhaps implying that “insanity is the appropriate response to insane conditions.” Buhler noted the film’s focus “on the main character’s philosophical, psychological, and intellectual journey,” finding it little wonder that “Anthony Hopkins’s sensual Claudius offends Hamlet so.” He commented that “[t]hrough insistent mid-shots and closeups, Richardson crafts a surprisingly exciting drama of talking heads,” with the balding, bearded Williamson even resembling famous portraits of Shakespeare himself (42). Much briefer was John Russell Brown’s assessment in his 2006 book on Hamlet; he observed that the film uses “many long takes,” offers “unaffected acting,” and emphasizes self-centered characters, adding that it resembled a theatrical production (157).

In 2006, Robert Shaughnessy, in an essay titled “Stage, Screen, and Nation: Hamlet and the Space of History” (70–74), commented mainly on The Roundhouse, the building in which this production was filmed: “Simultaneously redolent of overt theatricality and the quasi-documentary real, the brick walls of the Roundhouse enclose a climate-free, artificially illuminated zone of performance which is both psychologically claustrophobic and socially indeterminate.” He reported that “Neil Taylor has calculated that ‘close-ups and medium shots account for ninety-six percent’ of the film, and that its penchant for lengthy takes means that it has ‘fewer shots per minute’ … than any of the major film versions of the play,” so that “the effect is to subject Claudius’ court to the dispassionate gaze of the documentarist, but also to reproduce the impression of intimacy and direct encounter attributed to live production (the film’s refusal of cinematic expansiveness has prompted speculation that it was intended for television”), although “the evidence is inconclusive.” According to Shaughnessy, because the film is “[d]ominated by close-grouped headshots,” it “inhabits a social milieu characterized by its lack of clear boundaries between public and private, or personal and political, spaces” (73).

Maurice Hindle’s 2007 book Studying Shakespeare on Film (71–73) commented on this film’s stress on intimate close-ups, its use of “a mobile camera and microphones which constantly strove to catch every gesture and word,” and the way its “dank and dimly lit Round House interior” (an old railroad building) made for an effective set. Hindle admired the “focus on the faces of the characters in one, two and three shots” and thought that the pruned text emphasized the production’s “shocking impact” (72).

Describing, in an abstract, her own 2011 essay titled “The Ghost and the Skull: Rupturing Borders between the Living and the Dead in Filmed Hamlets,” Victoria Bladen wrote that, “[a]s a spirit without material substance, the Ghost” in Hamlet “transgresses the border between life and death, a bodiless life crossing back into the material world. In the graveyard, Hamlet contemplates the reverse phenomenon in the skull of Yorick, a material object bereft of life; an empty shell remaining in the physical world while the spirit of the former court jester” has gone on to the next world. According to Bladen, the “porous border between life and death, one of the significant concerns of the play, has been articulated in different and innovative ways,” presenting “unique challenges and opportunities for filmmakers to explore the boundary between life and death.” Focusing especially on Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet, she also discussed the adaptations of Olivier, Kozintsev, Richardson, and Zeffirelli. Meanwhile, Peter Cochran, in his 2013 book Small-Screen Shakespeare (188), noted the use in this film of many close-ups and long takes and thus its “greater intimacy.” He praised the photography but faulted Williamson’s delivery; disliked the unvaried sets; and thought the actresses all look “too pale” (188).

Much more detailed was Samuel Crowl’s discussion in his 2014 book on Hamlet, which called this version “a bitter, cynical, low-budget challenge to Olivier’s establishment high culture canonical masterpiece” but one that, like Olivier’s film, stressed personal psychology, rather than larger political issues. Noting that the actors were dressed in Renaissance costumes, Crowl thought the film’s “tone and atmosphere more reflected London’s swinging 1960s” (113), with “Nicol Williamson’s Hamlet … 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” in “one of the film’s most exciting features.” This “was a decidedly anti-establishment prince,” with “some of the cheeky cocky wit of the early John Lennon” (113).

In a 2019 essay titled “Modern Filmed Versions of the Opening Lines of Ophelia’s First ‘Mad Scene,’” Robert Evans compared and contrasted fourteen different performances of those lines. Concerning this production, he wrote that “Faithful’s Ophelia seems the least insane Ophelia so far discussed, … [but] she does seem angry. She doesn’t scream out like [Olivier’s] Simmons, dash around like [Gielgud’s] Marsh, or walk mechanically like a dazed zombie, as [Kozintsev’s] Vertinskaya had done. Instead, she seems to know exactly what she is doing. She seems full of real hostility for the middle-aged queen. Certainly Gertrude apparently feels threatened by her—the first time we have seen this sort of tension between the two women in the versions so far discussed” (63).

Discussing the Richardson production in his 2019 book Shakespeare the Illusionist (103–5), Neil Forsyth called this version of the play “odd and almost forgotten.” He called Williamson’s voice “raw” and “whiny” and wrote that the “film went as far as possible into making Claudius (a splendid Anthony Hopkins performance) sympathetic in contrast to that whiny Hamlet” (104). Noting that Richardson replaced a visible ghost with a simple “blinding light” (105), Forsyth argued that “the effect of that odd light on Williamson’s face is not to make us experience the ghost as a projection of Hamlet’s conscience or consciousness, although of course we wonder, but rather to make us dislike that face and the extra attention we have to give it” (105).

1970 Peter Wood Production

This television adaptation directed by Peter Wood starred Richard Chamberlain as Hamlet; Michael Redgrave as Polonius; Margaret Leighton as Gertrude; Richard Johnson as Claudius; John Gielgud as the Ghost; and Ciaran Madden as Ophelia.

Jay L. Halio, in a 1973 essay titled “Three Filmed Hamlets,” compared and contrasted the Peter Wood production with the adaptations starring Laurence Olivier and Richard Burton, noting the way the play was cut and otherwise altered. Halio reminded readers that in “his own time, Shakespeare frequently revised, cut, added to, and in many other ways altered his plays to meet the changing needs of his company or the changing fashions of the day.” He therefore thought it “an error to maintain, as some critics persist in doing, that by altering the text we are somehow violating Shakespeare or doing anything more than he would do—and as the evidence clearly shows, did do” (319).

In their 1988 anthology Shakespeare on Television, J. C. Bulman and H. R. Coursen quoted a reviewer in the New York Times who wrote that Chamberlain “held his own remarkably well [with a] straightforward Hamlet… in the heroic and romanticized tradition. [Otherwise, the experienced British actors] virtually acted him right off the stage … [and a] star was born in the beautiful Ciaran Madden as the rejected Ophelia” (243).

Bernice Kliman, in a 1988 essay titled “Richard Chamberlain for Hallmark (1970),” wrote that despite “so much restraint, so much cleverness, this Hamlet nevertheless does not work. It does not seize the imagination. Hamlet has no humor, lacks the sardonic wit we expect in the first court scene and in the disclosure scene. Nor,” she continued, “is this a gracious Hamlet: he does not greet Marcellus and Bernardo; he does not say, ‘Nay, come let’s goe together.’ Chamberlain makes an enigmatic Hamlet, but opaquely rather than luminously. Though interesting in themselves, all sorts of production values cannot compensate for the central failure of a bland Hamlet” (187).

Commenting briefly on this film in his 1997 article “Hamlet’s Ghost on the Screen,” Patrick Hunter observed that “[s]tanding apart from all the bright colors is John Gielgud as the Ghost, appearing completely white” —a “strikingly neutral color, lending itself to a variety of interpretations. However, Gielgud, with an impassive and mournful voice, presents a largely pitiful appearance, completely lacking any hint of power or brutality” (22). Meanwhile, Patrick McCord, in a lengthy article in the same year, after calling this production a neglected masterpiece, discussed its initial critical reception, its later critical neglect, its setting in Regency England (with a Byronesque Hamlet), but also its relevance, in various ways, to its own era.

In his 2000 book Shakespeare in the Movies (133–35), Douglas Brode noted that this version of the play was “adapted from a British stage production” and was designed to be “a rethinking of Hamlet for its era.” He considered it, “[w]ithin the tight limits of a 115-minute running time,” a “happy update and an effective reconsideration of a stage production for the camera,” although he reported that director “Wood had not mounted (or, for that matter, even seen) the stage version” and was thus “free to think in original and cinematic terms,” adding that the “preponderance of close-ups rendered it ineffectual for theatrical screens; yet it was perfect for TV” (132). Brode admired Chamberlain’s performance; commended the Regency-era setting (an era resembling the 1960s); and described the production’s “anti-psychological, pro-romantic point of view,” so that “whereas Olivier led his audience down dark tunnels, Wood favored brightly sunlit courtyards leading into green gardens—truly, a flower-power Hamlet” (134). He reported that the “show received five highly deserved Emmy Awards,” finding it “inexplicable” that it was not issued for sale on video home system (VHS) tape in 1970 (133).

Describing, in an abstract, her 2011 essay titled “Hallmark Hall of Fame: Three Go’s at Hamlet (1953, 1970, 2000),” Bernice Kliman asked, “What do the Hallmark productions of Hamlet have to tell us about the play and how it is presented on television and film?” She answered: “The productions span a period from the 1950s (Maurice Evans’s live TV version is 1953 based on his 1940s stage productions), to the 1970 Richard Chamberlain version (a production that influenced Branagh’s 1996 film), to a production aired in 2000 (Campbell Scott’s TV broadcast conceived in film terms).”

1980 BBC Shakespeare Production

This production, part of the massive, multiyear BBC Shakespeare series, was directed by Rodney Bennett and starred Derek Jacobi as Hamlet; Claire Bloom as Gertrude; Patrick Stewart as Claudius; Eric Porter as Polonius; Lalla Ward as Ophelia; David Robb as Laertes; Patrick Allen as the Ghost; and Robert Swann as Horatio.

Henry Fenwick, in his essay on “The Production” (17–29) in the BBC booklet published to coincide with the play’s broadcast, wrote that according to set designer Don Homfray, one problem was how to deal with the concrete studio floors (18–19), with one solution being to use “ramps around the circumference of the acting space” (19). Homfray wanted the set to look dark but textured; wanted surfaces, like the play itself, to be ambiguous, partly by using the sense of a “box within a box” (19); wanted “Rembrandt lighting, the figures lit, but the background mysterious”; and wanted “‘more or less a mid-sixteenth-century look’ influenced by such artists as Durer and Brueghel” (20). Barbara Kronig, the costume designer, remarked that she wanted “quiet, reflective costumes in muted colours, that reflect the [actors’] faces” (20). According to Fenwick, everyone involved seemed to admire the space provided by the set (20), which allowed the actors to speak more theatrically rather than in a muted or subdued way (21). He reported that although some cuts were made in the text “to reduce the playing time … because modern attention spans” are “shorter than those in the renaissance,” this production was nonetheless longer than most versions staged in theaters (21). This production’s Hamlet was intended to seem dynamic and energetic rather than depressed (22), and efforts were made to prevent Claudius from seeming immediately or obviously a villain (22–23). Patrick Stewart wanted to present him as a competent and effective king admired by his court and by his queen, so that Claudius’s corruption would only be gradually visible (23). Derek Jacobi agreed with this approach, noting that his Hamlet was intended to seem initially annoying to everyone, with Claudius seeming the more reasonable of the two (24).

Jacobi discussed in detail how the “dumb show” is played in this production, commenting that because Claudius is too clever to react to it openly, Hamlet forces a reaction in a way that makes Hamlet seem unhinged, thus winning even more sympathy from the courtiers for Claudius (24). He also commented on the various ways Gertrude can be played—as a queen, as a mother, and finally as a lover, which is how she is played in this production (25). Claire Bloom commented at length about the challenges of playing Gertrude, a character with surprisingly few lines (25). She regarded Gertrude as “a woman who goes with whatever is happening at the time. She’s a weak-willed woman, but most of us are weak-willed if we’re in the power of somebody who is very strong—and Claudius and Hamlet are both pretty strong fellows.” She discussed Gertrude’s difficulty in explaining to Claudius her relationship with Hamlet (26).

Lalla Ward, playing Ophelia, did not think her character could possibly have been having a sexual relationship with Hamlet, because otherwise she could not have reacted as she did to his comment about the nunnery (26). She thought that Ophelia is isolated for much of the play, without a mother and without anyone giving her good advice or even caring about her or noticing her. Eric Porter, playing Polonius, resisted the idea of playing him as a buffoon because he thought that presenting him in this way would not do justice to the richness of his character. Finally, Jacobi, discussing his role as Hamlet, thought it possible to get “much more out of the relationship [between Hamlet and Horatio] on television than on stage”; said the relationship can be emphasized more on television (27); and described the occasional frustrations of performing in Hamlet in certain theaters, especially outside theaters. His recent experiences in such venues made him want to begin the BBC production with a fresh understanding of the play, although he did think that his experience of playing the role in the theater helped him have a sense of the entire flow of the work that benefited his television performance (28–29). He concluded by discussing his experiences playing Hamlet and how he has come to see the various ways in which the role can be effectively performed (28–29).

Reviewing the BBC production in 1981, Kenneth Rothwell found it “not entirely satisfactory,” asserting that it was “Hamlet without a Hamlet” (395)—or rather “a mercurial but dazzling Hamlet” who sometimes seems “hyped up” and resembles an “old-fashioned neurotic Hamlet of the nineteenth century. The neuroticism, however, includes a tinge of feline hostility not always pleasant to contemplate.” Rothwell found the camera work “[f]aulty”; noticed too little eye-contact among the actors; and thought that even “the settings … suffer from some kind of identity crisis, suggesting that the designer was unable to decide whether to aim for the real or the illusory” (396).

In their 1988 anthology Shakespeare on Television, J. C. Bulman and H. R. Coursen quoted from a variety of early reviews. One commentator called the BBC production “bold and venturesome” and “full of memorable images”; another said it offered a practical conception of Hamlet as “thriller” and conveyed a “hypnotic mood,” with Claire Bloom offering “a lovely, intelligent, and sympathetic Gertrude” and Jacobi “a Hamlet that demands attention and acclaim” despite some flaws in the setting. A third writer asserted that this Hamlet and Ophelia “have been lovers; this is unmistakable,” but despite considering the production “very stage-bound,” he wrote that “the stage belongs to Jacobi,” whom he called “a Hamlet you will not soon forget.” Finally, a fourth critic wrote that Jacobi “portrayed Hamlet with freshness and understaged conviction; we sensed in him a new kind of acting skill, tailored to the tiny screen” (264).

The Bulman-Coursen anthology also reprinted a lengthy 1982 review of the BBC production by Bernice Kliman, who wrote that the BBC producers had “finally met the demands of Shakespeare-on-television by choosing a relatively bare set, conceding only a few richly detailed movable panels and props to shape key locales” and thus revealing a “natural affinity between Shakespeare’s [original Elizabethan] stage and the undisguised sound set.” This starkness of setting, she thought, “admits poetry … [and] heightened intensity” (264) and also “allows for acting, the bravura kind that Derek Jacobi is so capable of,” even if “at first his mannerisms suggesting madness seem excessive.” She thought that this “Claudius never gives himself away, an unusual and provocative but not impossible interpretation” and later remarked that if Jacobi’s “Hamlet is mad, it is not so totally as to obscure reason or sensibility. Far from it.” This Hamlet, she suggested, “is left to struggle against himself—surely where Shakespeare intended the struggle to abide,” and because “Jacobi conveys so fully Hamlet’s aloneness and vulnerability, one could be struck, for the first time, [in this production] by the ghost’s silence about his son.” Kliman thought that the production’s “richness and suggestiveness was realized not only because Jacobi is a marvelous actor—as indeed he is—but also because within the set’s spareness that acting could unfold, an acting style that subsumes and transcends the real.’ This production’s space tells us what is possible for television presentations of Shakespeare. The more bare the set, it seems, the more glowing the words, the more immediate our apprehension of the enacted emotion” (265).

In an essay published in 1988 and titled “Cuts: BBC-TV Hamlet,” Bernice Kliman concluded that “the important point to note is that many of the BBC cuts are traditional, often deriving from long stage practice. Looking carefully at the cut lines—even lines innocently cut to remove difficulties or to avoid repetitions—reveals that they contribute either to the characterization of the person whose lines they are or to that of other characters. The omissions of lines,” she continued, “can also affect the whole ambience of the play, de-emphasizing the political element, changing the ghost from problematic to unquestionably sympathetic. Examining the function of the cut lines,” according to Kliman, “helps to discover their use by Shakespeare; the omissions of lines distorts or weakens such characters as Ophelia, Gertrude and Horatio, Hamlet’s enemies and Hamlet himself—sometimes in ways that contradict what the production is trying to do. That happens,” she wrote, “because directors accept the traditional cuts instead of rethinking the entire text. This is true although directors do not turn to an acting text, with passages already excised, but use instead a conflated text, such as the Signet edition, as the script for the production” (85).

In another essay from 1988, this one titled “Derek Jacobi in the BBC Hamlet (1980),” Kliman wrote that one “of the conflicts in this Hamlet results from his affinity, perhaps, more to the bureaucratic Claudius who handles war-scares with diplomacy and who sits at a desk while brooding over his sins than to the warlike King Hamlet who comes in full armor.” Kliman argued that “Hamlet may admire Fortinbras but is himself more like the bookish Horace. Through nuance of gesture, through body movement, through a face that is indeed a map of all emotions, Jacobi shapes a Hamlet who loves his father too much to disregard his command yet who cannot hate his step-father enough to attend to it.” She suggested that “[b]ecause Jacobi conveys so fully Hamlet’s aloneness and vulnerability, one could be struck, for the first time, by the ghost’s silence about his son—the elder Hamlet makes no declaration of love, expresses no concern about his son’s ascent to the throne. Hamlet is doomed, it seems, to care about those who consistently care more for themselves than for him” (200).

Assessing the BBC Hamlet in his 1992 book Shakespearean Performance as Interpretation (while paying special attention to the play-within-the play, titled Gonzago), Herbert Coursen called this production “probably the best version … we are likely to see this side of the stage. It is a television production, of course, but one that achieves depth within a medium that tends toward shallowness—its lack of physical depth seeming to dictate a lack of emotional and intellectual depth as well” (103). During [the play-within] we see more of Lalla Ward, Bloom’s weak-chinned look-alike, than we do of Bloom,” so that, as “BBC depicts it, we cannot read Oedipus into the moment of ‘Gonzago’s’ breakup” (113). According to Coursen, after the play-within concludes, “Jacobi’s Hamlet turns to Horatio and gives a remorseful look, as if to say, I blew it, didn’t I? It is to that assessment that this Horatio agrees. This production does not show ‘Gonzago’ as a ‘success.’ It becomes the locus of Hamlet’s failure and thus the climax of the tragedy” (121).

Neil Taylor, in his 1994 article “The Films of Hamlet,” commented that Rodney Bennett, a seasoned director of television, had never directed Shakespeare before (189). Taylor reported that Bennett saw the play as a kind of “thriller,” with Claudius, Gertrude, and Polonius presented as “‘essentially warm, sensitive, reasonable people’ and with all the characters presented ‘with compassion’” (190); with the relationship between Horatio and Hamlet receiving more emphasis than usual (190–91); and with an unusually full text, producing, at least for its time, “the longest Hamlet ever made,” if not entirely complete (191).

Discussing the BBC production for his 1995 book on Hamlet (214–23), Anthony Dawson wrote that Jacobi offers a “theatricalized, relentlessly histrionic” prince (214); that the production consisted of “almost four hours of talking heads”; and that the BBC production was “monotonous and overly psychological,” with an overemphasis on intimacy, an underemphasis on the “social scene” (215), and a strong stress on “domestic drama” (216). He thought Polonius was given a more “fatherly feeling” than usual (216–17), that this Claudius and Gertrude seem to be in a “relationship that matters”; that Bloom’s Gertrude is subtly played (217); and that Stewart’s Claudius, showing “seriousness and political competence, also displays introspection”—a trait some other critics found missing in his performance (218). Dawson cared less for Hamlet than for the other main characters; he wrote that Jacobi’s Hamlet sometimes seemed like an exasperating adolescent; and called his performance “misjudged and overwrought” and often “over the top” (222). Noting that the production’s director knew television well but had never directed Shakespeare before, Dawson ended by connecting the BBC series in general to British imperialism (223).

Patrick Hunter, in a 1997 article titled “Hamlet’s Ghost on the Screen,” wrote that the BBC ghost remains “longing for his queen whom he can no longer reach. Despite such moments of pathos, all in all, Allen’s Ghost comes across as a warrior, much the way Hamlet describes him” (23).

Michael Anderegg’s 2004 book on Cinematic Shakespeare (167–70) called the BBC Hamlet a “more sophisticated and skillfully mounted production than [the series’] Romeo and Juliet,” saying it “takes advantage of the edge television has over both theater and film in that the focus is almost entirely on the actor and the language. Soliloquies are delivered to the camera, an effect that seems less self-conscious than it does on film, perhaps because, with television, we expect to be talked at” (167). Anderegg thought that when set “[a]gainst the intense neuroticism of Jacobi’s performance, Patrick Stewart as Claudius and Clare Bloom as Gertrude provide an effective contrast. Solidly grounded and self-possessed, Stewart’s Claudius, essentially ‘a good man sullied by one bad act,’ is seldom fazed by Hamlet’s behavior, however insulting and contemptuous” (169). Commenting that occasionally “the preoccupation with individual performers, particularly their heads and faces, occludes the dynamic interplay among the various characters,” Anderegg continued that the “camera, which shows us precisely what the director wants us to look at, becomes tyrannical, so that the blocking and movement of actors often seem determined by camera placement rather than the other way around” (169). He found this production’s lighting uninteresting and said that its constricting sets sometimes constrict the play itself (170).

Peter Cochran, in his 2013 book Small-Screen Shakespeare (199–201), regretted that the studio is so visible here (199); noted the nearly complete text; highly praised Jacobi’s Hamlet (but also commended this Gertrude, Claudius, and Polonius); appreciated the full play-within scene and Hamlet’s chaotic behavior there; noted how unusual is Hamlet’s treatment of Gertrude in the bedroom scene; but was disappointed from this point forward by Hamlet (200), by Ophelia, and by the graveyard episode (200–201).

In a 2019 essay titled “Modern Filmed Versions of the Opening Lines of Ophelia’s First ‘Mad Scene,’” Robert Evans compared and contrasted fourteen different performances of those lines. He wrote that this “BBC version is especially notable for letting Gertrude openly express her guilt before Ophelia enters. The BBC’s Ophelia is also the most aggressive of the ones so far described. At least as much as Marianne Faithful [in the Richardson production], and perhaps even more, Ward’s Ophelia seems hostile and contemptuous. Meanwhile, Gertrude here seems more complex than previous Gertrudes because she explicitly acknowledges (if only to herself) her sense of guilt” (64).

1990 Kirk Browning/Kevin Kline Production

This production, directed by Kirk Browning and Kevin Kline, featured Kevin Kline as Hamlet; Diane Venora as Ophelia; Brian Murray as Claudius; Dana Ivey as Gertrude; Michael Cumpsty as Laertes; Josef Sommer as Polonius; Robert Murch as the Ghost/Priest; and Peter Francis James as Horatio.

In a 1992 article titled “At Last, An American Hamlet for Television,” Mary Z. Maher praised Kline for having “made a Hamlet for posterity,” reporting that “Kline had been involved in every stage of the development of the theatre production and of the television performance, including the complicated technical end of the work. He took full artistic responsibility for the enterprise. The final performance,” she noted, “was welcomed by academics and critics alike. … This was an antic, mercurial, quixotic prince who played on the fine line of wit and lunatic impulse. His cast was strong, equal to the star’s capabilities, and selected from the best the U.S. had to offer.” Clearly, in the case of Kevin Kline—who had “studied the play for twenty years and carried a copy of it in his pocket to make notes in—the readiness was all” (307).

Herbert R. Coursen, in his 1993 book Watching Shakespeare on Television, rapidly surveyed many different versions of the Yorick scene (57–70); examined three different versions of Gertrude; and then discussed, in depth but with few generalizations, the Kevin Kline Hamlet (80–92). Calling the camera work “sometimes trite, sometimes interesting” and adding that “[m]annerisms become inevitable in a long studio production” (90), he considered the production as a whole “competent but unexciting and not quite as good as many critics said it was when it first appeared.” He agreed with the assessment by Frank Rich of the New York Times, who termed it “polished, plausibly cast and well spoken” but also cited another critic who called it an “abstract American rendition … in which the lines are delivered slowly and straight forwardly with very little poetry, resembling a Shakespearean Our Town” (92).

In his 2013 book Small-Screen Shakespeare (188–89), Peter Cochran called this production “neatly packaged and well-lit”; noted how often Hamlet cries (188) and “grabs people by their hands” (189); found Kline’s performance too “predictable”; but admired how Claudius, Polonius, Ophelia, and Gertrude are acted (189).

In a 2019 essay titled “Modern Filmed Versions of the Opening Lines of Ophelia’s First ‘Mad Scene,’” Robert Evans compared and contrasted fourteen different performances of those lines. He wrote that “Venora’s Ophelia is memorable for numerous reasons, especially for the sheer variety of emotions she expresses and the surprising inventiveness of her actions. In fact, one reviewer—Sylvie Drake—singled her out (and her mad scenes in particular) as especially effective in a production that otherwise bored her. Certainly,” according to Evans, “Venora’s performance here merits high praise. [The] final image of Ophelia howling and then scratching the ground is especially unforgettable” (66).

1990 Franco Zeffirelli Production

This production, directed by Franco Zeffirelli, starred Mel Gibson as Hamlet; Glenn Close as Gertrude; Alan Bates as Claudius; Paul Scofield as the Ghost; Ian Holm as Polonius; Helena Bonham Carter as Ophelia; Stephen Dillane as Horatio; and Nathaniel Parker as Laertes.

Justin Shaltz’s 1993 essay “Three ‘Hamlets’ on Film” compared and contrasted Olivier’s film with those directed by Tony Richardson (1969) and Franco Zeffirelli (1990), arguing that none of these versions “manages to capture the spirit of Shakespeare’s text in both the early scenes involving the Ghost and the concluding duel scene” (36). According to Shaltz, “Zeffirelli’s film locates Hamlet’s motivation almost entirely in grief for a beloved father … whereas the text, Olivier’s version, and, much less effectively, Richardson’s film center the motivation for revenge primarily in the brutal demands of an angry, dominating monarch and secondarily on the righting of a wrong.” Shaltz mentioned several different examples of the ways the duel scene differed among the films and between the films and Shakespeare’s text (37).

Ace Pilkington, in a 1994 essay titled “Zeffirelli’s Shakespeare,” discussed such matters as the director’s tendency to prune and rearrange texts (165); his admiration for Olivier’s Hamlet and its influence on his own version (166); and the ways he rearranged Shakespeare’s text (166–67). Pilkington suggested that Zeffirelli had little trust in the mass audience to which he catered and that sometimes he even seemed to distrust Shakespeare himself (168–69). Writing that the film relied partly on an “appeal to youth” and on “star power” to achieve success, he noted critical praise of Gibson’s Hamlet; himself commended Gibson’s “manic” performance; and admired some of this production’s “first-rate” ideas and details (174). But he regretted Zeffirelli’s overemphasis on a Freudian, overly sexual interpretation influenced by Olivier’s Hamlet (175–76).

Neil Taylor’s 1994 essay “The Films of Hamlet” (192–93) noted the debt of Zeffirelli’s film to action movies, its numerous cuts and rearrangements, its often-shifting images, and its simplification of the narrative (192). Taylor commented that Gibson appears on screen less than some other Hamlets; noted this version’s stress on Gertrude; and observed its equally unusual stress on the erotic intimacy of mother and son, which offended some critics (193).

Discussing this production in his 1995 book on the play (197–213), Anthony Dawson wrote that it emphasizes moving eyes and glances (197); that politics are invisible here, as they are in Olivier’s Hamlet (198); that “what is public in Shakespeare becomes private in Zeffirelli, played out in little duologues unobserved by courtiers”; and that the “wonderfully palpable ghost … appears and disappears at will” (200). Dawson noted the film’s stress on the power of Claudius’s gaze (201); commented that in the play-within, Claudius becomes the object of others’ gazes (205); observed that there is a general emphasis on “watching and spying”; and thought that Ophelias madness mixes anger and pathos and potential violence (204), adding that Helena Bonham-Carter gives a powerfully “intense performance” in the role (205). Finding this Hamlet’s relations with Gertrude and Ophelia “riddled with ambivalence” (205), Dawson thought that “murderous violence, erotic attraction, and Oedipal tangles” characterize the film; said that it, like Olivier’s film, is indebted to the text of the first quarto; observed that Zeffirelli’s Hamlet already realizes Claudius’s English plot without having to read Claudius’s secret letters (207); and asserted that because Zeffirelli’s Hamlet is an action drama, Gibson, the star of several such dramas, was hired to play the lead (208).

Dawson remarked that the court in Zeffirelli’s Hamlet “seems to have only one function—reveling” (209). Relating the film to political and current events of the day (209), he thought that Zeffirelli’s own generally conservative politics help explain his avoidance of politics in this movie (210), which tends instead to emphasize “action, violence, and even comedy,” as in Gibson’s popular movie Lethal Weapon (211). Arguing that Zeffirelli’s adaptation “seems to lack both a coherent sense of the text and a firm grasp of its own aims,” Dawson called it “a kind of metaphysical thriller” (212) and a “cultural throwback” that rejects postmodern skepticism about the unified self (213).

Mentioning this production in passing in his 1996 book Shakespeare in Production: Whose History? (69-72), Herbert R. Coursen asserted that “[w]hatever we think of it, Zeffirelli’s film has implanted its images into the retinas and memories of our students as surely as the Olivier film did for my generation. It has become their Hamlet and it goes forward with them as part of their ‘history’” (73). Also commenting briefly, Patrick Hunter, in his 1997 survey of “Hamlet’s Ghost on the Screen” found Paul Scofield’s performance unforgettable (especially when he tells Hamlet to “Remember me” [24]), while Leigh Woods, also in 1997, suggested that in Zeffirelli’s movie the traveling “players are seen as relics” and that theater itself “is made to seem out of touch. Even the players’ appeal to rich and poor is viewed as nostalgic, measured against the modern theatre and its affiliation with high culture.” Wood thought it “not coincidental that the primary visual image to emerge from the [players’] performance—that of Lucianus/Claudius as a death’s head—suggests medieval origins rather than more hopeful and sophisticated ones from the Renaissance.” She concluded that the “theatre as these players practice it betokens the past. Their performance is efficacious, but more by accident—or by numbed habit—than because of anything the actors do wittingly” (68).

In a 1997 essay titled “Popularizing Shakespeare: The Artistry of Franco Zeffirelli,” Robert Hapgood, commenting on a key difference between Hamlet and Zeffirelli’s earlier Shakespeare movies, wrote that a viewer “cannot move from his Padua and Verona to his Elsinore without a feeling of sensory deprivation. Although some idea of the daily life of Elsinore is suggested, there is nothing like the involving abundance of surrounding life to he found in the earlier films.” Hapgood thought that the “open spaces in the castle seem huge and virtually deserted. Nor is there the same kind of color and beauty as before. Except for the queen’s costumes, clothing is drab and the stone walls are mostly bluish gray. Background music is sparingly used, primarily pedal tones for the Ghost; more frequently, the soundtrack records the neighs of horses, cries of gulls, howling winds and other atmospheric sounds” (89), so that the film seems less vivid than the ones that had helped make Zeffirelli’s reputation as a director of Shakespeare.

Also in 1997, Patrick Hunter, in his essay “Hamlet’s Ghost on Film,” briefly described Paul Scofield’s ghost in the Zeffirelli movie as the “most compassionate, most vulnerable Ghost on film, even crying tears at one point” (24), while Chris Lawson, defending the film in another essay from 1997, wrote that “[d]ue to the narrative drive of the screenplay, this adaptation has been described as ‘a fast-food Hamlet for the moment, without the stature to make it a Hamlet for the ages.’” But Lawson replied that “numerous images serve to embellish the narrative with a rich, visual subtext of meaning. These include the symbolism of Hamlet’s sword, interior and exterior location, colour tinting, and the use of sunlight and pastoral settings in contrast to the more sombre stone hues of the castle. While not always immediately noticeable, these aspects,” he continued, “heighten an awareness of contrasts that focus attention on key subjects. The final tableau is one of the few occasions (except for Old Hamlet’s funeral and the brief freezing of the players at the end of the ‘Mousetrap’), where Zeffirelli allows the whole scene to remain static for any length of time.” He concluded that “[w]hile purists may bemoan the undeniably drastic editing of dialogue, the sheer dynamism of Zeffirelli’s Hamlet makes for an exciting and compelling interpretation of the play onto film” (245–46).

Another 1997 article, this one by Mary Z. Maher, “Neither a Borrower, Nor a Lender Be: Zeffirelli’s Hamlet,” began on a positive note. Maher found “a great many qualities about the Zeffirelli film that are commendable. It moves quickly, it is engaging, [and] it is beautifully filmed in natural settings selected from three different British castles. There are strong individual performances in the film, character sketches which remained fairly fulsome despite the screenwriter’s blue pencil. However,” Maher thought that “the film offers a conservative and patriarchal point of view which presents a sober, dark Dane shorn of wit and intellect. Furthermore, the text is wildly re-arranged, and Shakespeare’s dialogue is re-sorted and re-cycled among various characters. The number of Shakespeare’s lines used is approximately 1300 or about 28% of the text. Olivier,” she reported, “used slightly under 50%.” She concluded that “the clever overlay of Hollywood public relations tricks is an attempt to hide fundamental weaknesses in the film. … If one has to distort the story and misrepresent the main character, perhaps the price of relevance is simply too high” (260).

Discussing melodrama in the play in another 1997 essay, Michael Skovmand began by writing that “Mel Gibson as an actor quite simply has a limited range of expression—you can only roll your eyes and shake your head so many times in the same film. This limited range, however, is largely offset by a surplus of vitality and vigorous movement, and an admirable clarity of diction.” Although Skovmand thought that “Zeffirelli has a sophisticated sense of texture, i.e., of mood, decor, costume, setting and staging,” he nonetheless found “the structure, i.e., the developmental dynamics of the play,” unclear. He considered Gibson’s Hamlet “a character whose motives are not complex, but unclear, up against an uncle who is not sufficiently villainous to provide [Hamlet’s vengeful] motivation, and a Polonius who is somehow neither the bureaucratic mastermind nor the loquacious comic relief, but somewhere in between.” Skovmand concluded that Zeffirelli had paid insufficient attention to the important theme of “powerlessness” and therefore that his Hamlet “lacks an overall sense of direction, in every sense of the phrase” (278).

In her 2000 book Framing Shakespeare on Film (20–51), Kathy M. Howlett wrote that by “[t]urning away from theatrical models to cinematic ones, Zeffirelli concentrates on those aspects of the revenge drama that are shared by the film Western, [such] as conflicts over morality, justice, family authority, and the value of violence as it relates to the construction of masculinity” (21). She noted that he drew mainly on the “swiftly moving” first quarto text of the play, with its emphasis on “private” rather than “political” scenes, as in Hollywood Westerns (21), a genre also known for its “prominent display of the male body,” although Gibson has less screentime than many other filmed Hamlets, with much attention paid to “the sheer spectacle of landscape that surrounds” him (25; see also 26). As in many film westerns, “the film conveys an impression of Hamlet’s moral clarity as reflected in the clarity of his masculine form against the barren landscape” (29) as Zeffirelli also juxtaposes “the confinements of social relationship” with “the open potential of sea and sky,” with Gibson often depicted “in close-up or medium shot against the blue expanse” of those two realms (34). Gertrude resembles the strong women often found in Western films; she is almost Hamlet’s equal in strength, in contrast to an Ophelia who “represents the world and its moral codes from which Hamlet is disaffected, the sacrificed daughter whose identity is fatally linked with that of her father” and whose death is depicted (and described by Howlett) in detail (45) that suggests “a redemptive spirituality and heroic significance” and that seems to result not from guilt but from “a natural momentum toward release” and freedom (46). According to Howlett, the duel scene also “explores the aesthetics of stock characters and situations within Western genre conventions,” as when Hamlet “drops his sword and renders Laertes swift justice with a punch on the jaw” (48). Eventually, in the film’s closing shot, we realize that his Hamlet “has not been predictable or understandable—that his end is, after all, a mystery. As the camera booms upward, it also moves away from the enclosure of conventions of genre and plot, including that of the film Western,” so that the camera’s “upward and outward movement … away from Hamlet’s body opens up the space of the irresolvable” (51).

In his essay from 2000 titled “The Effects of Primacy and Recency upon Audience Response to Five Film Versions of Shakespeare’s Hamlet,” James H. Lake, writing that “[c]urrent research concludes … that it is natural and predictable to recall both first and last impressions more readily than those in the middle and that last impressions can eradicate those which immediately precede them” (112–13), emphasized Zeffirelli’s opening and closing emphasis on death (114).

In a book published in 2000—Shakespeare on Screen—Daniel Rosenthal contended that Zeffirelli’s film “looks great and contains some compelling moments without so much as scratching the surface of Shakespeare’s great tragedy.” According to Rosenthal, “Gibson dominates virtually every scene” and “handles the verse competently enough, in a semi-convincing English accent and an adequate performance in Gertrude’s bedroom.” But “this Hamlet never stands still or speaks long enough for us to judge what’s really happening in his head or heart—or care when he dies.” Although his gloomy mood seems odd given the beautiful landscape and seascape, “the production design” is otherwise convincing and “looks faultlessly authentic,” so much so that “the medieval furnishings and outfits brought Oscar nominations for art direction and costume design.” But for Rosenthal most of the characters lacked great depth and complexity, and he wrote that “Bonham Carter’s Ophelia is distracted, fidgety and clearly halfway to insanity from the moment we see her, so there’s precious little shock when she really loses her mind, and Ian Holm is obliged to make Polonius an absurdly gnomish chatterbox. Only Paul Scofield’s despairing Ghost—the smallest of the five key supporting roles—retains enough of the script to make a telling impact” (30).

Also in 2000, in an article titled “Gertrude’s Willow Speech: Word and Film Image,” Hanna Scolnicov, wrote that it “is only when one views Branagh’s full version” of this episode “that one realizes what has been lost, or even distorted, as in Zeffirelli’s film, in previous versions,” arguing that Branagh’s film “serves the play —and its audience—by carefully pointing the textual complexity of Gertrude’s willow speech that creates this unique lyrical, dramatic and theatrical moment in the play” (110).

Douglas Brode’s 2000 book Shakespeare in the Movies (135–40) called Zeffirelli’s film “the most ambitious Hamlet since Olivier’s,” noted the more explicit Freudian overtones, but said that Gibson’s Hamlet was anything but “a man who could not make up his mind” (135). Brode wrote that Zeffirelli, as always, tried to make Shakespeare widely accessible by creating an adaptation that seemed a genuine, “naturalistic” movie, with “authentic settings rather than symbolic sets, dialogue mercilessly pruned, and actors encouraged to deliver lines as if they were prose rather than poetry. Even the casting of Mel Gibson … made clear that this would not be an artsy, elitist Hamlet but a visceral rendering” but one “full of action,” with the camera “constantly on the move, darting, slipping, and finally rushing madly,” so that both the camera and the prince are “robust and athletic, if deeply troubled or even schizophrenic.” According to Brode, although other versions of the play “are ambiguous as to Ophelia’s motivation for degenerating into madness,” in this film “the reason is obvious. She has seen the man she loves reject her for his own mother.” Brode considered Zeffirelli’s cuts to the script extreme, noting that at “135 minutes, his film is 3 minutes shorter than his Romeo and Juliet, based on a briefer tragedy” (138). Brode thought that the film’s attractive outdoor setting helped to emphasize how differently Hamlet sees his surroundings, which to him resemble a prison (138). Although he concluded admiringly that, as in Zeffirelli’s other films, we “see Shakespeare’s play entirely reimagined for the camera,” Brode thought Olivier’s version “came closer to communicating the full scope of the original,” so that “while carefully constructing a movie that beautifully plays to a modern audience, Zeffirelli allowed something of Shakespeare s eternal wisdom to slip away” (140). Meanwhile, discussing the Zeffirelli adaptation in his 2002 book on Shakespeare in the Cinema (69–72), Stephen M. Buhler called Paul Scofield’s interpretation of the Ghost “arguably the strongest performance in the film,” although he was also impressed with most of the other actors (70). Commenting that the “scene between Close’s Gertrude and Gibson’s Hamlet verges on the primal,” Buhler suggested that “Zeffirelli seems to chasten himself as well as his star performers with Scofield’s quiet but disconcerting presence to Gibson and absence from Close” (71).

Samuel Crowl, writing in 2003 in his book Shakespeare at the Cineplex (48–63), suggested that in this version of Hamlet, “the casting of Glenn Close and Zeffirelli’s passion for the opera diva” strongly influenced “many of his production decisions, with the result that, visually, Gertrude emerges at the center of the film” (49), so that the movie “is much more about sons and mothers than fathers and uncles” (52), with “the pale, blonde Close, dressed in virgin blue, shot in golden light, and surrounded by a host of swarthy, hairy males all dressed in drab colors. Even Ophelia’s dress and coloring align her with the men rather than with the glamorous queen” (53). Like Close, the landscape is strikingly beautiful, but even though “Zeffirelli allows his Hamlet to move in a landscape beyond the confines of Claudius’s poisoned court,” that landscape “finally offers neither solace nor escape, for its beauty seems only to echo the corruption of his mother’s.” According to Crowl, “Zeffirelli’s sensibility is romantic and grandly operatic; his artistic blood beats in Technicolor, not black-and-white; his sensibility is passionate and sentimental, not cool and cynical,” which explains his “artistic attraction to the tragic female, the center of the operatic form” (57) as well as the fact that “Gibson and Close give us the most intense and passionate encounter between Hamlet and Gertrude in the world of Hamlet on film.” Crowl thought that by “finally admitting his own full participation in the complex mystery of the oedipal triangle, [Zeffirelli’s] Hamlet can forgive Gertrude and restore her as the good mother” (61).

Commenting briefly on the film in 2006, John Russell Brown (157–58), wrote that this production offered “long vistas and carefully observed details”; called the actors “well-chosen” and the performances “fluid and subtle” (157); praised Gibson’s slow, thoughtful soliloquies (158); noted changes to Shakespeare’s script; said the performances are “instinctively alive in the present moment”; and generally offered strong praise of the film as a whole (158). In an essay from 2006 on the famous “To be or not to be” speech, Yvette K. Khoury argued that Zeffirelli’s treatment of the speech was one of several in filmed versions of Hamlet that could be understood in terms of Joseph Campbell’s famous idea about the hero’s journey (120).

Also in 2006, Gülsen Sayin Teker published an essay titled “Empowered by Madness: Ophelia in the Films of Kozintsev, Zeffirelli, and Branagh” that argued that “in Zeffirelli’s film, there is not an exchange of mutual tenderness between Ophelia and Hamlet,” Instead, “Hamlet loses faith in Ophelia when he secretly listens to the conversation between Ophelia and Polonius at the beginning of the film and witnesses Ophelia’s submissiveness. This eavesdropping scene functions, on the one hand, to fill a possible gap in the original text by explaining the reason for Hamlet’s harshness toward Ophelia; on the other, it helps to depict Ophelia as a victim of both a distrustful lover and an authoritative father.” Thus, in “the scenes where Ophelia appears as mad, wearing a white costume with her hair down and singing bawdy ballads, Zeffirelli follows the Elizabethan fashion of emphasizing the lyrical dimensions of her tragedy” (116).

In her 2007 book Shakespeare on Film (24–27), Carolyn Jess-Cooke called Gibson’s prince “a populist Hamlet” reflecting the popularity in 1980s films for “masculine heroism” and thus an “action hero” who is a “far cry from Olivier’s effeminate and indecisive Hamlet.” He is motivated not by any desire for “political liberty or grief for his father, but by pent-up passion for his promiscuous mother” that eventually results in “a garishly explicit depiction of masculine aggressivity that stems not from a repressed subconscious, but from a repressed libido” symbolized by frequent appearances of “long, drawn swords” (24). Jess-Cooke argued that “Zeffirelli continually juxtaposes Gibson cinematographically with subordinate characters in order to empower his character by contrast” (24) and also that the film’s settings “provide a motivational context for Hamlet’s soliloquies, thereby disavowing the latent introspection of the character by connecting his thoughts to external scenes” (25). She suggested that “[p]erhaps to reinforce Hamlet’s sexual frustration, his romantic interest in the film is depicted as a virginal, twitchy, naive teenager,” played by Helena Bonham Carter in a performance Jess-Cooke found “not entirely convincing: her character does not have much function or importance in the film, leaving Bonham Carter with unspent performative energy that crackles beneath her youthful exterior. Many of her lines are cut and replaced with scenes featuring Hamlet” (25), played here as a symbol of “post-Rambo masculinity” (an allusion to another popular film action hero). Gibson’s Hamlet reminded Jess-Cooke of the various “volatile, homicidal, heroic, comic, weapon-wielding characters” he had played in other films (26). She concluded that “[t]hanks to a pruned down, well-spliced script, his character consistently drives the plot forward, taking time to ponder the meaning of death only when it provides the audience with breathing space between action scenes” in a film that presents everything from Hamlet’s perspective (27).

Commenting briefly on Zeffirelli’s Hamlet in his 2008 Norton Guide, Samuel Crowl discussed Olivier’s influence on the film’s Freudianism and on its “cold dark stone castle” (57); noted the skill of the American actors; and argued that this movie draws on Zeffirelli’s background in opera, reveals effective acting, focuses on the relationship between Hamlet and Gertrude and shows the transformation of that relationship, so that it becomes positive by the end. Crowl also discussed the effective use of cross-cutting in the duel scene (59) and concluded by commenting that the opening scene echoes the openings of the Olivier and Kozintsev films of this play and prepares us for Zeffirelli’s focus on a “private, family dynamic” emphasizing Gibson and Close (169).

In an essay from 2009 titled “Cultural Anxiety and the Female Body in Zeffirelli’s Hamlet,” Xianfeng Mou argued that Zeffirelli can “both seem to promote and degrade the female characters” (54). Drawing on the theories of Judith Butler and Michel Foucault, Mou discussed such topics as the placement of the nunnery and mousetrap scenes (56ff) and the treatment (by Hamlet and Zeffirelli) of Ophelia and Gertrude (56–61). Mou stressed Hamlet’s power over both women but also mentioned Zeffirelli’s own “profeminist” views (61).

Patrick J. Cook, in his 2011 study titled Cinematic Hamlet (65–104), read the film very closely, offering much careful discussion of moment-by-moment details while making few generalizations. This is a book that could easily be read (with a television pause button nearby) while actually watching the film. Cook noted that although early “complaints about Gibson seem to have faded,” some “chagrin over the cutting and transposition of Shakespeare’s text persists.” But Cook himself thought that “Zeffirelli carries Olivier’s essayistic approach to a new level of accomplishment, very effectively coordinating the shortened text necessary in a film just over two hours long with cinema’s distinctive storytelling resources and the requirements of mass-marketed film” (66). It opens by focusing “more closely and quickly” on Hamlet; cuts “the first appearance of the ghost” and any appearance of Fortinbras; and “shortens every long speech and every section of dialogue in act 1,” thereby “[c]utting more than half of Shakespeare’s words in that act.” Praising “several wordless stretches of remarkable visual communication that immediately focus … on the oedipal triangle” (66), Cook extolled Zeffirelli’s cinematic talent (68); said he “packs” the ghost’s appearance to Hamlet “with visual interest” (72).

Commenting insightfully on such matters as camera work, physical movements, and other precise details (75–78), Cook also noted how Zeffirelli emphasizes Hamlet’s madness and his mother (78); how, in contrast to Olivier’s film, he “substitutes Elsinore’s depth for its height,” showing a “slow descent into a dungeon-like interior” instead of a “racing ascent onto the liberating exterior of the battlement”; how the present film differs from Olivier’s in other ways as well; and how he prevents “Hamlet’s ‘question’ from becoming, as it so often has in performance and in critical opinion, a specific debate over any particular course of action” (81).

Praising “Zeffirelli’s virtuosic delayed disclosures” (93) and asserting that “Zeffirelli declines to specify a cause for Gertrude’s decline from mastery over both of her men to a figure of frailty” (94), Cook analyzed, with his typical thoroughness, the implications of Fortinbras’s arrival at the end of the film, calling attention, for instance, to the use of “variable framing, allowing our perspective to widen slowly from … [the] relationship [between Hamlet and Horatio] to the small band of brothers (who have surprisingly remained with Hamlet to the end as a kind of substitute family) to the larger crowd of Danes, who have never been out of our sight for very long.” Cook concluded that up to “the last shot, Zeffirelli has sought to improve upon the essayistic method of Olivier, the oedipal ‘hero’ of his youth against whom he defined his filmmaking accomplishments, finding ever new means to compensate for his screenplay’s necessary cuts to the play-text” (104).

Describing, in an abstract, her own 2011 essay titled “The Ghost and the Skull: Rupturing Borders between the Living and the Dead in Filmed Hamlets,” Victoria Bladen wrote that, “[a]s a spirit without material substance, the Ghost” in Hamlet “transgresses the border between life and death, a bodiless life crossing back into the material world. In the graveyard, Hamlet contemplates the reverse phenomenon in the skull of Yorick, a material object bereft of life; an empty shell remaining in the physical world while the spirit of the former court jester” has gone on to the next world. According to Bladen, the “porous border between life and death, one of the significant concerns of the play, has been articulated in different and innovative ways,” presenting “unique challenges and opportunities for filmmakers to explore the boundary between life and death.” Although focusing especially on Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet, she also discussed the adaptations of Olivier, Kozintsev, Richardson, and Zeffirelli.

Jacek Fabiszak, describing in an abstract his 2011 essay “To Cut or Not to Cut? What’s in the Written Text of Filmed Hamlets,” reported that his “article focuses on how the verse is handled in a medium that heavily relies on image, in other words how the text is presented (also) graphically on screen,” especially in the films by Olivier, Kozintsev, Zeffirelli, Branagh, and Almereyda. Fabiszak argued that all these “versions share one characteristic: they are attempts to translate, albeit in technologically and aesthetically different ways, the dramatic (or literary) and theatrical (or historically determined conventional) into the filmic. Interestingly enough,” he concluded, “one of the most problematic aspects of such a process is the soliloquy, a device which functions both as a poem and a typical theatrical convention which is difficult to justify in highly realistic cinema.”

Russell Jackson, describing his 2011 essay titled “The Gaps in Gertrude: Interpretations of the Role in Five Feature Films,” wrote that “[m]any actors have found Gertrude a role that is both rewarding and frustrating. Some—though by no means all—have expressed a wish that she had at least one soliloquy, and there have been many interpretations of her relationship with Claudius after the closet scene and its revelations.” He explained that “[i]n the theatre directors have sometimes chosen to follow the First Quarto in having Gertrude receive news of Hamlet’s return to Denmark,” adding that this information “may be contained in the letters ‘to the queen’ which in other texts the messenger presents to the King in Act 4, scene 7 (and which often in performance the King appears to intercept).” Jackson considered “interpretations of the role in feature films”—those by Olivier, Kozintsev, Zeffirelli, and Almereyda—“with particular emphasis on the ways in which actors and directors have dealt with the ‘missing elements’ of the role.”

Pierre Kapitaniak, describing in an abstract his 2011 essay titled “Hamlet’s Ghost on Screen: The Paradox of the Seventh Art,” wrote that the “infinite possibilities offered by the cinema in terms of special effects … should have enabled directors to show infinite inventiveness in representing Shakespeare’s most famous ghost. And yet, the adaptations over the last century (1907–2007) remain peculiarly timorous in applying technological breakthroughs to Hamlet’s Ghost.” Kapitaniak offered “a survey of the different ways of representing the Ghost since Laurence Olivier’s version, such as omission, ellipsis, a living actor, superimposed image, video, etc., before confronting them [as] ghostly apparitions in other films, especially in fantasy and horror film.” He then offered “hypotheses likely to explain the lack of special effects which seems to characterize film adaptations of dramatic material.” His essay surveyed seventeen different productions, including those by Zeffirelli, Branagh, Scott, and Almereyda.

Peter Cochran, in his 2013 Small-Screen Shakespeare (28–33), wittily called Hamlet a “charismatic serial-killer, who camouflages his rampage by always killing people indirectly (as with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern) or through the curtain (as with Polonius). His uncle the king is Mr. Normal. He’s only killed one person, his brother, and there’s a respectable biblical precedent for that” (28). Cochran admired the way Gibson and the rest of the cast speak Shakespeare’s words (29); called all the main cast members fine actors (29); and noted how Zeffirelli cut the first scene, rapidly emphasized scene changes, and frequently showed Hamlet looking at other people from above (29–30). Saying that Scofield plays the ghost as a tragic figure in a subdued way (30), he discussed various scenes and detail, especially those that imply or create ambiguity (30–31); contrasted serious scenes and moments in this film with the same scenes and moments in the Olivier Hamlet (31); noticed various cuts but in some cases justified them; but regretted that the “Mousetrap” episode is rushed (31–32). Noting the incestuous overtones of the closet scene, Cochran wrote that Helena Bonham Carter seems more mad in the mad scene because her affect is so flat; found some music in that scene effective; and thought the castle here particularly credible (32). He felt that this film comes to its climax differently than other Hamlet films do, at the moment when Glenn Close realizes she has been poisoned (32–33). Cochran regarded this film as infinitely better than Zeffirelli’s Taming of the Shrew and even better (because the acting is so much more consistent) than his Romeo and Juliet, although he said he loved that film (33). Although admiring the Olivier and Kozintsev versions of Hamlet, Cochran thought that Zeffirelli, “despite his cutting, has done the play in three dimensions as no-one else has” (33). Returning to this production later in his book, Cochran admired the settings and shifts in setting; praised the use of color and the acting, especially of Glenn Close and Mel Gibson; commended the conversational delivery; and found Gibson’s Hamlet often more interesting than others (198), concluding that “Mel Gibson’s Hamlet has my vote as the most multi-dimensional one” and, along with Richard Burton’s, one of the most daring (199).

Romona Wray, in her chapter on Zeffirelli in a 2013 book titled Welles, Kozintsev, Kurosawa, Zeffirelli (169–81), noted this film’s emphasis on books (171–72); its stress on “natural light or sunshine”; and its “play of light and shadow” (172), commenting, however, that “[o]nly twice is the sense of claustrophobia induced by a concentration on dark interiors lifted.” (173). She saw echoes here of Olivier’s film (174); highlighted the importance of costumes, as in the contrasting costumes of Gertrude and Ophelia (175); observed that “[m]any speeches are separated out, cut into shorter units and distributed among several locales to suit Zeffirelli’s particular shooting style” (176); and noted the director’s focus on hands shown in close-up (176–77), swords to imply potential violence (177), and Hamlet’s frequent habit of “either overhearing or suspecting much of the plotting directed against him” (178).

Writing at length on Hamlet in a full-length 2014 book on filmed versions of the play, Samuel Crowl mentioned Zeffirelli’s admiration for Olivier’s film (114–15); wrote that in Zeffirelli’s own adaptation Gibson’s Hamlet is, right from the start, “deeply puzzled by [Gertrude’s] behaviour” (115); described the nearly sexual encounter between this mother and this son; and noted that “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” (115). Crowl interestingly commented that 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.” Crowl concluded that “Gibson’s prince is more hot-blooded than Olivier’s and more romantic than Williamson’s,” commenting that he “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” (117).

Peter E. S. Babiak, discussing Zeffirelli’s adaptation in his 2016 survey of the first century of Shakespeare Films (110–12), wrote that this film “establishes a discourse on acting practices from its outset” and includes a “depiction of a scene not found in Shakespeare’s play: the funeral of Old Hamlet.” Babiak wrote that “[u]nique acting choices are not confined to Gibson, but rather pervade this film”; observed that this Hamlet is immediately an active one (111); and said Zeffirelli emphasized the “theme of boundaries,” presenting them “as far less discreet than commonly thought,” as in the ghost’s simple clothing and the indistinct boundary between sanity and madness (112). He concluded that “despite a critical tendency to consider Zeffirelli’s adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays as the works of a ‘popularizer,’ [his] three films of Shakespeare’s plays show him to be an intelligent filmmaker who actively engages with the plays he represents in order to find visual analogues for the themes he finds presented” in Shakespeare’s works (113).

In a 2019 essay titled “Modern Filmed Versions of the Opening Lines of Ophelia’s First ‘Mad Scene,’” Robert Evans compared and contrasted fourteen different performances of those lines. He wrote that of all the directors he discussed, “Zeffirelli departs most from [Shakespeare’s] text. His Ophelia is more sexual and sexually aggressive than any previous Ophelia considered here: the young, flustered guard [this Ophelia assaults] is a pure (but unforgettable) Zeffirellian invention. Gertrude, meanwhile,” according to Evans, “seems absolutely terrified of this Ophelia, who appears both crazed and potentially dangerous. Bonham Carter makes for a highly memorable almost-mad-woman. The effectiveness of the lengthy episode with the guard is also literally underscored by quiet, mysterious music. Zeffirelli the master filmmaker is his typically inventive, skillful self” (68).

Neil Forsyth, in his 2019 book Shakespeare the Illusionist (106–12), called the Zeffirelli film “underrated”; wrote that “Paul Scofield as the Ghost seems merely to have dropped in for a serious talk with his son, not to have come from a different dimension” (106), so that he leaves Hamlet “not as if he were a ghost who must leave as dawn approaches but rather as if he were a man pressed for time” after speaking to Hamlet in a way “belonging entirely, and rather oddly, to the realistic side of film tradition,” so that he does not seem especially mysterious except when he occasionally disappears and then reappears. According to Forsyth, “every possible scene either takes place outside, in the bright sunlight, or moves outside as quickly as it can”—another unusual practice in Hamlet films (107). Moreover, by making Claudius and Gertrude initially attractive and casting Gibson as an action hero rather than “a melancholy, introspective Hamlet,” Zeffirelli once again was unconventional, although Forsyth called Gibson’s performance “very good indeed,” action-packed but with some appropriate “brooding” (108).

“But let us not,” Forsyth wrote, “make too much fun of [the film’s] star-crossed direction. Zeffirelli, after all, risks what [other directors] had not: he puts back Hamlet’s puns” (109). Forsyth’s discussion ended by comparing and contrasting this Hamlet with earlier filmed versions (109–12).

In a 2019 essay titled “Franco Zeffirelli’s Hamlet: A Survey of Reviews,” Bryan Warren reported on numerous assessments of the film, ranking them as negative, mixed, or positive. Describing one “mixed” review, for example, he wrote that “Michael Wilmington, in a review for the Los Angeles Times, … called Gibson’s Hamlet an ‘Elizabethan Lethal Weapon‘ instead of the normal ‘Gloom-and-Doom Dane.’” According to Warren, Wilmington “claimed that Zeffirelli’s films are usually full of ‘high-spirited flourish and flamboyance … [with] deliciously overdressed sets and rococo clutter.’” However, he argued that this Hamlet, “because it was often ‘swallowed up in chilly panoramas, dark castles, and sonorous verse-reading,’ sometimes came off as ‘cold and spiritless.’ But Wilmington,” Warren continued, “called it ‘not at all a bad film’ and said it was ‘exquisitely designed … by Dante Ferretti’ and ‘lushly photographed … by David Watkin.’ He also stated that despite any ‘amused expectations’ audiences or reviewers might have had, Gibson is ‘not bad either,’ particularly thanks to his ‘princely bearing’ and ‘resonant and supple voice for verse.’”

1996 Kenneth Branagh Production

This production, directed by Kenneth Branagh, starred Branagh as Hamlet; Derek Jacobi as Claudius; Julie Christie as Gertrude; Kate Winslet as Ophelia; Richard Briers as Polonius; Nicholas Farrell as Horatio; and Rufus Sewell as Fortinbras.

Mark Thornton Burnett, in a 1997 essay titled “The ‘Very Cunning of the Scene’: Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet,” discussed the film’s various strengths and weaknesses, remarking, for example, that it is “perhaps at its freshest, and at its most absorbing, after the ‘Intermission,’ when the break-up of Elsinore is an urgent prospect. Clearly apparent in the film’s latter stages,” according to Burnett, “is the shrunken character of the court: only a handful of attendants are present at Ophelia’s funeral, a stark contrast with the swelling numbers flocking to enjoy the play-within-the-play and an indicator of Claudius’s waning control. Even before Fortinbras makes his spectacular final entrance,” Burnett continued, “monarchical authority is wavering, as Gertrude’s increasingly sour expressions indicate. When the climax arrives, Fortinbras’s troops crash through the state hall’s windows and mirrored doors, a timely lesson for a court that has been incapable of recognizing its own fragile illusions. Hamlet is given a soldier’s funeral, a move which identifies him with Fortinbras, the commander whose superior military prowess allows him to declare himself the state’s inheritor” (81).

In a 1997 essay titled “Hamlet’s Ghost on the Screen,” Patrick Hunter cited the ghost in this film as one of various features “that do not fully work.” He called Brian Blessed, “a powerful-looking, burly man, completely convincing as a warrior, and certainly intimidating as the Ghost,” but said “his moments of pathos in the bed chamber scene become ineffectual” (26). Contributing to the same 1997 collection, Herbert R. Coursen, in an essay titled “Words, Words, Words: Searching for Hamlet,” offered a detailed, almost scene-by-scene analysis of the film but avoided large-scale generalizations and assessments. Also writing for the same 1997 collection, David Sauer Kennedy, in an essay titled “Suiting the Word to the Action: Kenneth Branagh’s Interpolations in Hamlet,” argued that in “the postmodern world of Branagh’s Hamlet, the ending appropriately deconstructs the very heroism it seems to posit,” as Hamlet triumphs over Claudius but in the process loses his own life and loses Denmark to Fortinbras, “as if the Ghost were taking down the whole kingdom with him, through his son.” According to Sauer Kennedy, this film’s tragedy “presents no Aristotelian recognition and reversal in the main character, who never sees or knows the consequences to his actions,” especially their consequences for the Danish kingdom (342). Finally, in the same 1997 anthology, Anny Crunelle Vanrigh asserted that Branagh’s Hamlet attempts “to span the whole development of the performing arts from the origins to the present day and examine their final compatibility. Starting with a (fairly awkward) representation of Hell (1.5) reminiscent of the Mystery Plays,” Branagh “then pays a passing tribute to the Commedia dell arte,” especially by presenting masked characters, while alluding to the medieval Dance of Death and staging the play-within episode in a “distinctly Elizabethan” fashion. “Then film references gradually take over, until the final showdown in Erroll Flynn style,” until ultimately “Fortinbras’s invasion is like the irruption of cinematic into theatrical space, dismantling it.” According to Vanrigh, the “three codes of page, stage and screen are constantly present in the film-maker’s mind” (366).

In a 1997 essay titled “Kenneth Branagh’s Film of ‘Hamlet’: The Textual Choices,” Russell Jackson, a consultant to the movie, explained in detail how and why changes and additions were sometimes made to the Oxford edition of the play, the film’s main source, while in another article from 1997 (“Branagh’s ‘Hamlet’ Redux”), Nina daVinci Nichols surveyed early reactions to the film, writing that in “general—and predictably enough—reviews, asides, complaints, and (a few) paeans cluster in two categories: one chiefly concerned with the film as a film, the other with Branagh’s interpretation of the play. While most reviewers marveled at this full, four-hour version for its sheer enterprise,” she reported, “many questioned the attempt at definitiveness measured by the clock, with all that might mean. The most intransigent critics commented on Branagh’s implicit aim to topple Sir Laurence Olivier’s legendary 1948 version from its perch at the summit of Shakespeare films” (38).

Discussing the film in his 1999 book Shakespeare: The Two Traditions (216–37), Herbert R. Coursen commented that Branagh’s Hamlet rarely addresses the camera directly (226) and suggested that Branagh’s Hamlet seems too “mature” and even “masterful” and thus conveys little hint of the character’s struggles and gradual growth. According to Coursen, “Process would have engaged us more. Branagh moves his character through a range of emotions, but does not suggest that Hamlet changes as a result of any of his experiences” (227–28). Coursen considered the music “a vague theme searching for a melody,” saying it “occasionally reinforces action” but “is mostly [quoting Samuel Crowl] ‘irritating muzak’” of the sort one might hear in “the aisles of a supermarket.” He called the music “particularly unfortunate when the lines are spoken so superbly by Branagh and Jacobi, who have 55 percent of the complete script,” saying it sometimes annoyingly repeats “a theme that Tchaikovsky discarded over a century ago” (231–32).

Kenneth Rothwell, in his 1999 History of Shakespeare on Screen, reported that despite the film’s “240-minute duration, many ordinary citizens said that they had found it anything but unendurable. Quite the contrary: it was gripping” (254). He did note that “[p]raise and condemnation for Branagh’s work were … distributed more or less evenly on both sides of the Atlantic. Few if any denied the movie’s visual splendor, its Masterpiece Theatre lushness of sets, costumes and good-looking people,” but some reviewers “found the very Masterpiece Theatre look too conservative, too middlebrow, and Branagh unconvincing as the prince.” Rothwell himself observed that “Branagh had continued his astute policies of casting internationally, of using a realistic speaking style, of choosing a setting consistent with the heightened language, and above all of making the work ‘accessible … to modern life’” (254) but was “immediately attacked for ‘stunt casting’”—using famous actors because of their fame rather than any significant talent (255). But Rothwell himself thought the main roles had been well cast, commenting that “Derek Jacobi turned out to be one of the greatest ever players of Claudius with a real knack for being a charming cad and bounder” and that he and Christie initially seem so charming that their “effervescence squashes any thought that Claudius could commit a dastardly deed like kill a king and then marry his widowed sister-in-law.” How, Rothwell asked, “can anyone be so sullen”—as Hamlet is—“in such jovial surroundings?” (255–56). Later, Rothwell noted that some critics disliked Branagh’s occasional shouting (258), but in general he was kinder in his assessment of the movie than some other early commentators were.

Discussing the film in her 1999 Branagh-centered-book Shakespeare on the Screen, Tanja Weiss provided a helpful descriptive outline of the film (131–41); discussed “The Impact of the Full Text, the Setting and the Cast” (142–50); analyzed the mostly original ordering of the scenes (142–43); and claimed that this latter decision made some of the characters seem “rounder” (143). She noted the “militaristic” setting and its late-Victorian, late-imperial milieu (144–45); argued that in this setting Hamlet “lives a solitary life in a great and crowded house, where, behind the façade, nothing is as it seems” (145); and observed that his solitude is emphasized by his black costume (145). Discussing the complexity of his relation to space that is sometimes cramped and sometimes expansive (146), she defended Branagh’s use of setting (146); and said the four-hour length allows for focus on both the inner and outer Hamlet (147). Remarking that the snowy setting makes the castle seem “cut off” from the outside world (147) and reporting that Hamlet is chased through all 28 rooms of the castle in Film Scene 40 (148), she questioned the success of the film’s international casting, finding it excessive and distracting (149–50). In her section on “Key Scenes—Key Locations” (151–53), Weiss discussed how the setting of the prayer scene helps explain and justify Hamlet’s hesitation in killing Claudius (151–52) even as it also implies the irony of Claudius’s final words (153). She thought the film’s second presentation of the ghost—in a forest—suggests a “horror movie,” an effect Weiss defended (154). Discussing in detail the “Editing and Close-Cutting” (158–73), she argued that film characters tend to be more individualized than stage characters, partly through close-ups (158–59), making conversation “more vivid and interesting” (159), adding that “editing and close-cutting allow the director the guide the spectators’ reception in ways not possible to achieve on stage” (161). She discussed particular filmed scenes in these terms (158–73), noted positive and negative responses to “Branagh’s use of circling, 360-degree camera movements” (165), and suggested that different kinds of irony can be emphasized through stage and screen presentation (173). Exploring “The Soliloquies and the Question of Delay” (173), Weiss wrote that “[f]ilm can endow soliloquies with … spiritualization,” especially through “a voice-over delivery of [the] speech” (174). She then concluded by discussing several of Hamlet’s soliloquies in these terms (175) and also defended Branagh’s film from the objection “that it does not ask why Hamlet delays” (185).

Deborah Cartmell, in her 2000 book Interpreting Shakespeare on Screen (34–38), discussed the frequent use of bright lighting in this film (saying that this “‘glare’ is particularly hard on the women in the play—not just in making them [especially Christie] look old before their time … but in making them look guilty,” in contrast to “Zeffirelli’s positive images of women, especially Glenn Close’s Gertrude” (36). Commenting on the film’s unusual length and quoting one critic who admired that aspect of it, Cartmell herself remarked that a “question open for debate is whether or not it is the full Shakespearean text or if it is Branagh’s interpolations which doom Ophelia here. Alarmingly, in a post-feminist era, it is acceptable to blame Ophelia as—at least, in part—a traitor to the man she seems to have loved” (38).

In an essay from 2000 titled “Branagh’s Two-Hour ‘Hamlet’: A Review Essay,” H. R. Coursen assessed a hard-to-find “shortened version of Branagh’s film,” saying that when viewing it “[o]nly occasionally is one aware that it was originally a wide-screen version. The long tracking shots are gone, as is the distant view of Fortinbras’ ant-like army in the snow. It would seem that the principle behind this edition is to give the main stars their moments on screen. Thus Polonius gets his ‘Mad I call it’ speech (2.2). Gertrude gets a full closet scene (3.4). Ophelia gets her songs (4.5)” (39).

Sarah Hatchuel, in her insightful 2000 Companion to the Shakespearean Films of Kenneth Branagh (65–90), noted that Branagh had played Hamlet in 1980, Laertes in 1984, and Hamlet again in 1988 and (on radio) in 1993. She extensively compared and contrasted the 1993 stage play and 1996 film in terms of their respective settings (73–76), soliloquies (76–77), ghosts (78–79), settings again (79–80), nunnery scenes (79–80), closet scenes (80–82), and characterizations of Hamlet (84–88). Noting that Branagh considered his 1993 radio Hamlet the best of his career and that he presented the prince there and on film as a “man of action” (84, 89), she reported that in the film he made Ophelia’s part larger (69), made the film itself less comic, but placed more emphasis on black humor and made Hamlet more “sensitive and vulnerable” (88). Commenting that Hamlet can seem either “extremely patriotic or shrewdly Machiavellian,” she wrote that Branagh emphasized the prince’s good side as well as his piety and sincerity (103–4). She observed that Branagh, as the director, “inserts flashbacks to stamp events and characters more firmly into the audience’s mind” (110); adds imagery to illustrate words; and uses one flashback in particular to make explicit Hamlet’s earlier sexual relationship with Ophelia and uses another to show Claudius killing Old Hamlet (110–11). Hatchuel suggested that Hamlet’s and Ophelia’s sexual relations help explain her madness (112); that Branagh gives “a cinematographic rhythm to Hamlet in spite of its length”; that he “illustrates the characters’ words as often as possible, clarifying meanings and circumstances, and avoiding fixed, monotonous images” (113); and that his “decision to perform Hamlet as a character not predisposed to melancholy, whose personality is vibrant, curious, and positive, has been translated to the film score” (128).

Asserting that the 70 mm film “format allows [Branagh] to show both the domestic and epic sides of the story” (128), she reported that he wanted the sets to seem the opposite of medieval and gloomy and wanted the costumes to look sexy (129), with the use of confetti implying “potential for happiness in the palace” but the chessboard floor intimating “a world full of disorder” (130). The abundant “mirrors evoke a rich, opulent, narcissistic, and vain world,” with Hamlet as a version of Narcissus (130), but the mirrors also imply that many “characters reflect one another” even as they are also filmed through bars, as if they are prisoners (132), with the castle’s many rooms giving the audience “a feeling of labyrinthine anguish” (133). Commenting on various examples of camera work, Hatchuel noted that Hamlet is often shot with his back turned to us; that the ten-second killing of Polonius involves fifteen shots of Hamlet (138); that images are often doubled and tripled in mirrors (139); and that in his various films Branagh has increasingly used circular shots, especially in this film (144), as is also true of his frequent focus on doors (144), snow and fire (146), and characters in huge rooms or landscapes (147). Commenting on his tendency to draw on various genres in the same film, as in his allusions to epic, thriller, and horror movies here (150), she especially discussed this film’s epic aspects (160–61).

In an essay published in 2000 titled “Film Editing,” Peter Holland discussed an unusual appearance by Ophelia in Branagh’s Hamlet (273–74). He surveyed the kinds of cuts directors often make to Shakespeare films; commented on Branagh’s treatment of Shakespeare’s text; and asserted that Branagh continually expands Ophelia’s role (294).

James H. Lake, in a 2000 essay titled “The Effects of Primacy and Recency upon Audience Response to Five Film Versions of Shakespeare’s Hamlet,” wrote that “[c]urrent research concludes … that it is natural and predictable to recall both first and last impressions more readily than those in the middle and that last impressions can eradicate those which immediately precede them” (112–13). Lake thought that “Branagh’s Hamlet … apprizes us of the future almost from the beginning. Less than a hundred lines into the script, Branagh’s camera visually defines his Fortinbras” and makes him “constant throughout the film. Not merely aggressive, this Fortinbras appears to be psychotic. Snarling from the screen, he is ‘ferocious,’ ‘crazed,’ and ‘wants revenge.’” Thus, when “this fellow enters at the end with his storm troopers and plants himself on Denmark’s throne, the audience has no doubt about the future” (115).

Daniel Rosenthal, in his book from 2000 titled Shakespeare on Screen (32–33), began by proclaiming that “here, at last, was a film that did justice to the extraordinary depth of Hamlet and the supporting characters. The portrayals of Claudius, Ophelia and Polonius alone were enough to vindicate Branagh’s faith in the uncut text.” He wrote that Branagh made this prince “a remarkably sane, sensible hero, tearfully dedicated to his father’s memory but also displaying the requisite mean streak. His verse-speaking is crisp and fluent, although he errs towards theatrical roaring in some of the soliloquies.” Among other things, Rosenthal admired Branagh’s “strong rapport” with Juliet Christie’s Gertrude; Jacobi’s “chillingly composed” Claudius (a “disturbingly complex villain”); the way “Branagh’s screenplay skilfully keeps Kate Winslet’s Ophelia in view when Shakespeare has forgotten her”; and the way “a flashback showing her and Hamlet making love introduces shame at her lost virginity as a plausible strand to her suffering” and her generally “devastating” performance. Praising Richard Briers for “rescu[ing] Polonius from harmless, doddery caricature” so that “instead we see an ambitious, unsympathetic figure, with a taste for young whores,” Rosenthal also admired “Michael Maloney’s sensitive Laertes” (32). But he regretted Hamlet’s laughably horrific encounter with the ghost and the ludicrous final approach of Fortinbras’s army (33).

Also in 2000, Hanna Scolnicov, discussing “Gertrude’s Willow Speech: Word and Film Image,” wrote that it “is only when one views Branagh’s full version that one realizes what has been lost, or even distorted, as in Zeffirelli’s film, in previous versions. Although each explores an interesting option” in dealing with the speech, she thought that “none of the shortened versions really confronts the textual contradiction I have been following,” but “Branagh’s film demonstrates how trusting the play, rather than trying to smooth and regularize it, results in a highly satisfying presentation of great complexity, yet also of great clarity, compassion, and beauty.” According to Scolnicov, “Although Branagh’s ‘conservative treatment of the passage, retaining it as narrative, offers no resolution of the conflicting reports, it serves the play—and its audience—by carefully pointing the textual complexity of Gertrude’s willow speech that creates this unique lyrical, dramatic and theatrical moment in the play” (110).

Douglas Brode, writing in his 2000 book Shakespeare in the Movies (140-47), quoted other critics’ lofty praise of the Branagh Hamlet; noted that at 242 minutes it was “the second-longest English-language film ever”; suggested that “clarity, not complexity [was] the goal” (141); and thought that Branagh had rightfully re-emphasized that Hamlet rightfully detests Claudius for stealing what should be Hamlet’s throne, thus “return[ing] the play to what Shakespeare created, which is nothing if not a political statement” (142). He asserted that the explicit sexual relationship between Hamlet and Ophelia helps explain not only the emotions and behavior of these two but also some later shrewd insights by Polonius (142). According to Brode, “Branagh insists, in direct opposition to earlier films, that Ophelia is part of her father’s conspiracy” but that Hamlet considers her “not wicked, only weak, false with people she sincerely loves (father, brother, lover), in a pathetic attempt to survive.” Explaining how Branagh, by presenting the play in its entirety, manages to depict correctly the relationship between Hamlet and Ophelia (a relationship earlier films had distorted), Brode also contended that by “including the complete text, Branagh emphasizes an important element that, sadly, often gets lost: the sincerity of Claudius’s love for Gertrude,” adding that “Jacobi’s talent, coupled with the character’s additional screen time, makes us aware of Shakespeare’s full achievement in presenting a multidimensional human,” so that “Claudius may be the tragic hero”—that is, “a good man who does bad things” and thus a foreshadowing of Macbeth (143).

Considering the possibility that Branagh’s Hamlet is a prince who is a “moral absolutist” who “wants, more than anything else, to do the right thing” (including obeying the ghost but only after establishing the truth of the ghost’s claims), Brode suggested that he therefore “hesitates not out of cowardice but out of idealism” (144), adding that this Hamlet, like Olivier, “is sensitive yet [also] masculine, like Gibson,” so that “Branagh gives us, for the first time, the best of both worlds.” Noting that “this is the only major English-language film in which [Fortinbras] appears,” Brode did see some resemblances between the ways he is depicted here and the ways Kozintsev depicts him, commenting that, as “a result of crosscutting, which suggests predetermination, Branagh makes clear that his Fortinbras is fated to arrive at Elsinore when most needed rather than showing up by happy accident,” although Branagh depicts him not (as Shakespeare does) as a symbol of “order restored” who happens to make “a friendly visit,” but as a hostile invader.

Brode did cite a few weaknesses, including Jack Lemmon’s performance (in contrast to Charlton Heston’s “inspired” Player King) and the overuse of “distracting circular” camera shots “disastrous in a movie that otherwise makes us all but forget the camera’s existence” [145]). But he highly commended not only Branagh’s filming of the “To be or not to be” soliloquy so that he can be seen and heard by Claudius but also the filming of the aftermath of Hamlet’s death (146). Brode concluded that “Branagh has fashioned not only a Hamlet for the common man but a commonsense Hamlet stripped of the interpretive layers successive generations imposed,” so that his “Hamlet comes close to delivering the definitive film” of the play (147). Meanwhile, discussing the Branagh Hamlet in his 2000 book on Shakespeare in the Cinema (113–23), Stephen M. Buhler mainly explored the film’s echoes of previous directors.

In his 2002 book Shakespeare in Space (143–51), Herbert R. Coursen intriguingly mentioned a shorter version of the Branagh Hamlet (a version hard to find today), remarking that in his pruned edition Branagh “cannot break the play’s many soliloquies up into smaller units without glitches in continuity, or having the words voiced over other action or placed in brief moments between actions. His technique of long takes greatly hampers his effort to condense his film,” so that Coursen even wondered if Branagh had been tempted “to abandon the project” (146). Reporting that in the shorter version the “long tracking shots are gone, as if the principle behind this edition is to give the main stars their moments on screen” (146), Coursen confidently asserted that “Jacobi’s performance is what the film will be celebrated for in future.” Mocking the performances of Jack Lemmon, Michael Maloney, and even Kate Winslett, Coursen found both versions of the film overly sentimental, especially the music (149), and ended by saying that the shorter film “shows more vividly the problems inherent in making a word-heavy film in the first place” (151). Meanwhile, Pascale Aebischer’s 2003 study Shakespeare’s Violated Bodies offered mainly a discussion of the scene involving Yorick’s skull (94–97).

Discussing the Branagh film in a 2002 essay titled “‘Art Thou Base, Common and Popular?’: The Cultural Politics of Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet,” Douglas Lanier credited Branagh with helping to revive interest in creating Shakespeare films (149); noted his “populist approach” to such filmmaking (150); and observed his emphasis on “naturalistic, colloquial” speech delivery (150). Commenting on the Shakespeare “scene” in British theater, he also discussed the development of Branagh’s career and artistry, the role of his film In the Bleak Midwinter in that career, and the ways Hamlet exemplified many of Branagh’s approaches to Shakespeare. Lanier concluded that, “[l]ike so many documents of popular culture, Branagh’s Shakespeare offers a cultural politics that is, particularly in his later films, maddeningly inconsistent and conflicted, an unstable mix of populist utopianism and reactionary nostalgia, institutional iconoclasm and mass-market commercialism” (167)

Offering a series of thoughtful comments on the film in his 2003 book Shakespeare at the Cineplex (135–54), Samuel Crowl described the Branagh movie as “a bright, bold mirror in stunning contrast to Olivier’s dark impressionist maze,” suggesting that Branagh “seeks to synthesize the Freudian operatic romance of Zeffirelli’s Hamlet with the austere politics of Kozintsev’s great Russian” version. Noting Branagh’s echoes of such earlier directors and films as David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia and Dr. Zhivago, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, and Franklin Schaffner’s Patton (28), Crowl also commented on Branagh’s use of such techniques as “montage, flashbacks, flash-forwards, and pictorial representation of material only mentioned in the text,” adding that his “camera tracks, circles, zooms in and out, [and] cranes high above. It is restless, like Olivier’s in his Hamlet, but more attached to the horizontal than the vertical” and is, “like his prince, on the prowl, but less confused and desperate” than either the camera or the prince in the Olivier film (36). Later, Crowl suggested that “Branagh’s version firmly embeds Hamlet in the perils of Claudius’s world, not the Ghost’s. His Hamlet is not trapped between above and below but between past and present, inner and outer, and the soliloquy becomes less a cry of hopelessness or despair than a determined thinking through of his own complicity in Claudius’s corruption, his own bitter understanding of the way in which Claudius’s narcissism releases and mirrors his own” (138). Commenting that Branagh showed a typically postmodern concern with the past (especially past art, such as previous stage productions and films), Crowl nonetheless also asserted that Branagh was “always striving to move beyond” postmodern “parody and pastiche to create big, bold, dazzling narrative images, to be populist and entertaining” (140). Discussing Branagh’s tendency to shoot Hamlet’s soliloquies in long, uninterrupted shots (and thus “requiring the utmost concentration on the part of both actor and cinematographer” [146]), Crowl saw Branagh’s prince as “tougher, less erratic and neurotic, and more powerful” than others but also capable of expressing a wide variety of emotions, thoughts, and kinds of thinking (148). He also thought that Branagh, by setting the play in the late nineteenth century, implied the collapse of imperial Europe during World War I and the subsequent rise of autocratic dictators (150).

Arguing that Branagh links politics and personal psychology “by focusing on the struggles between fathers and sons” (152), Crowl wrote that this Hamlet “is trapped between a demonic ghost and a super-subtle stepfather,” with the ghost as “the terrifying father [and] Claudius the puzzling one” and one who also resembles Hamlet in appearance and otherwise, so that “Jacobi’s Claudius repeatedly gives Hamlet reflection, not difference,” inspiring self-hatred in the prince as well as a hatred that “never gets released at its true objects—the father who won’t stay dead and the stepfather who refuses to carouse—but only at their substitutes, Ophelia and Gertrude” (153).

In his 2004 volume on Cinematic Shakespeare (128–34), Michael Anderegg praised the “extraordinary performances” of Jacobi and Christie in a production in which Hamlet is central but “not necessarily or always the center of our attention” (128). He wrote that “Branagh oscillates between carefully structured scenes and sequences that serve to clarify language and action and other moments when his visual exuberance threatens to obscure meaning altogether. He wants the eye to be fed even as the ear’s attention is most required” (130). Calling the “‘Hamlet and Ophelia in bed’ moments … the [film’s] ‘most problematic’ because they make obvious what need not be explicitly spelled out,” Anderegg contended that “the ambiguities of the Hamlet/Ophelia relationship are in the end more interesting than a literalization of it” (131). Although he thought Branagh’s performance as Hamlet produces only “mixed results,” he credited Branagh the director for using the play’s full text, thus “ensur[ing] that Hamlet retains its dual focus on interpersonal dynamics and the larger world of dynastic politics. Even here, however, it is by no means obvious just what Branagh’s political interpretation might be,” since Claudius seems to be running Denmark well and Hamlet would not obviously make a better king (132). But Anderegg concluded that one “positive consequence of Branagh’s approach to Hamlet [is that] nearly every scene, every speech, every moment is given a pointing, a psychological underpinning that at best results in sheer dramatic intensity. On the other hand, there are moments when Branagh fails to integrate the meaning of the words with the expression he wishes to give them or the effect he strives to achieve” (134). Meanwhile, John Russell Brown, commenting briefly on this film in his 2006 book about the play, called Branagh’s production “more old-fashioned,” more theatrical, and therefore less “filmic” than Zeffirelli’s recent effort (158–59).

Samuel Crowl, in his important 2006 book on The Films of Kenneth Branagh (129–48), called Branagh’s Hamlet “the most ambitious and audacious Shakespeare film ever made” (129). He compared and contrasted it with earlier Hamlet films, including Olivier’s (129–30); described Branagh’s film as completely untraditional, especially in such matters as its setting and strong political emphasis (130); said that Branagh drew on a recent Royal Shakespeare Company production; and also noted its debt to earlier epic films, such as ones directed by David Lean (131). He discussed the film’s setting and time period (132); claimed it is “politically radical” (133); and said it is set during the pre-World War I era, so that it is appropriate that Hamlet is dressed as a soldier (133). Crowl noted the film’s diverse uses of its bright setting (134); observed its fuller emphasis on the play’s minor characters (134), especially Polonius’s family but also Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (134–35); and described its witty, ironic illustrations of the sexual and political corruption at Claudius’s court, especially the corruption involving Polonius himself (135). Crowl considered even Ophelia somewhat devious (136); called Laertes an arrogant “prig” (136); and termed Rosencrantz and Guildenstern “puzzled and clueless” (136) and said they displayed a “genial thickness” (137). He wrote that filming the full text posed challenges but that the actors speak its words effectively (137); claimed that its imposing location and the 70 mm film created an epic scale to match the complex play (137); and described the actors and their professional experience (137–38) as well as their fitness for their roles in this production (138–39).

Crowl noted that Branagh used tracking shots for many of the more experienced actors and simpler shots for the less-experienced (139–40); reported that Hamlet’s soliloquies were often filmed in long, unbroken shots (140–41); discussed individual soliloquies (141–42); and said some were often flamboyantly filmed and sometimes unfairly criticized for that reason (142–44). He observed that Branagh uses flashbacks to highlight both sexual and political contexts (144–45); described the score as often “subdued, somber, and even lyrical”; and noted that the music is not heard until the Ghost first appears (145). He also commented on such matters as the film’s Freudian aspects; Hamlet’s friendliness; his instability; his sincerity; and his psychological uncertainty (146), suggesting that his confrontation with the Ghost is less Freudian than those of some other Hamlets (146). Calling this ghost a “huge, powerful military figure” and even a “braying satyr” (146), Crowl noted the physical resemblances between Branagh as Hamlet and Derek Jacobi as Claudius and termed Claudius a “puzzling” alternative father figure (147). He concluded by calling this Hamlet ambitious and unique but a “commercial flop,” although one that was often well-received by American rather than by British critics (148). Meanwhile, Emma French, in a 2006 book titled Selling Shakespeare to Hollywood (85–91), mainly discussed various unsuccessful efforts to market the film (89).

Yvette K. Khoury, in a 2006 essay titled “‘To Be or Not to Be’ in ‘The Belly of the Whale’: A Reading of Joseph Campbell’s ‘Modern Hero’ Hypothesis in Hamlet on Film,” sought to “demonstrate that, in the Branagh film, unlike in other recent filmed versions, Hamlet’s famous soliloquy takes place in the Initiation stage” identified by mythographer Joseph Campbell. In the same year, Gülsen Sayin Teker, in the essay “Empowered by Madness: Ophelia in the Films of Kozintsev, Zeffirelli, and Branagh,” argued that the “Ophelia of Kenneth Branagh (1996) is emotionally more mature and physically stronger compared with her predecessors. Branagh’s Ophelia is also sexually experienced and passionately in love with Hamlet. Her deterioration and madness are the outcome of her frustrated romance with the Prince as well as her status as a pawn of all the men in her life.” According to Teker, “Although Branagh sets his film in the nineteenth century, he seems to underline those problems that also apply to the present-day British monarchy. Consequently, power, love, incest, madness, and family scandals are in the forefront” (117).

Mark Thornton Burnett, in his 2007 book Filming Shakespeare in the Global Marketplace (50–57), compared and contrasted this Hamlet with one directed by Michael Almereyda in 2000 before reporting that Branagh’s “[d]esign sheets …make clear that no one European nation is envisaged as the context” for his film; instead, “a vaguely non-English setting is evoked that alludes simultaneously to various countries—France, Italy and Russia without any being specifically pinpointed” (50). Burnett even suggested Ireland as a possible inspiration, especially “eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary traditions” associated with “Irish Gothic,” which often depict “a beleaguered, besieged ‘Big House’” symbolizing “the exhausted and declining state of the landowning class” threatened by “revolutionary idealism and mob violence” (54; see also 57).

Commenting on Branagh’s Hamlet in his always-interesting 2007 book titled Studying Shakespeare on Film (191–97), Maurice Hindle noted its epic nature (189); commented on its stress on war, martial training, and military costumes; reported that it was shot at Blenheim, a massive British estate associated with the Churchill family; and observed its concern with political intrigue (192). He thought that this film offered a richer-than-usual portrait of Claudius, who was not depicted as merely a villain (192); that it also gave a fuller-than-usual treatment to the ghost and the visiting players (192–93); that it made effective, multivalent use of the carved name “Hamlet” as the film began (193); and that for the first time in any Hamlet film, the camera assumes the ghost’s point of view, as in a horror film, so that Hamlet’s perspective is no longer “privileged,” as in other films of this play. Commenting on the potent religious context the film implies, especially by focusing on the ghost and on Hamlet’s reluctance to kill the praying Claudius (194), Hindle also called attention to its “metatheatrical” and “metacinematic” dimensions, as in the mirror scene (194–95). He considered this film sometimes not as “taut” as shorter versions and sometimes badly cast, as in the case of Jack Lemmon (196), while also pointing to minor blemishes, “much fine acting,” and effective use of “flashbacks and inset sequences” (197).

Carolyn Jess-Cooke, discussing the Branagh Hamlet in 2007 in her book Shakespeare on Film (27–31), found Branagh’s own performance “larger than life” and thus “wholly befitting the film’s extravagance. Occupying almost every scene of this four-hour production, Branagh’s Hamlet,” she continued, “is at times exhausting for both viewer and (presumably) performer.” But she found his efforts “stimulating, traversing with swift dexterity the broad spans of sullen son, energetic comedian, gleeful friend, venomous ex-lover, talented actor, agile fencer and vociferous contemplator.” Terming his diction “crisp, musical and sculpted” (although “his soliloquies often climax to thunderous bawling”), she thought his Hamlet “makes for a vigorously dynamic performance that unabashedly aspires to the grandiose” (27–28). She discussed the mirror scene at length (28–29); considered Kate Winslet’s Ophelia “sensitive, complex and timely”; suggested that the flashbacks showing Hamlet and Ophelia in bed help explain Ophelia’s later mental breakdown (30), depicting her “as a passionate victim of patriarchy and political corruption … instead of a batty maid who melts into watery insanity.” Jess-Cooke concluded, however, that sometimes “it seems as though Branagh’s ‘pendulum’ performance—swinging between as many as three emotional states in one scene—verges on inconsistency and, instead of demonstrating the complexity of Hamlet’s character, teeters on confusion” (31). Meanwhile, commenting in passing on this film in his 2008 Norton Guide (103–4; 115–16; 171–72; 181–82), Samuel Crowl wrote that Branagh’s camera here resembles an all-knowing narrator, especially when dealing with the Fortinbras subplot (103–4); that Branagh also frequently uses flashbacks (104) and music (particularly, in the latter case, to underscore particular speeches [115–16]); and that Branagh employs the camera in ways to shoot various soliloquies (171–72) and to reveal character traits (181–82).

Patrick J. Cook’s 2011 book Cinematic Hamlet (105–60) discussed this and various other productions in impressive detail. It read the film very closely; offered much careful discussion of many aspects of it; presented almost a moment-by-moment analysis; and can even be profitably read while constantly pausing and restarting the movie. Cook commented on how (and how often) the play’s details have been cut or rearranged; noted the vast horizontal perspective provided by the use of “a 70 mm high-resolution film gauge”; regretted, however, that “[v]ertical movement and perspective become less dramatic than in standard format” (106); and suggested that, along with “deep focus, wide-screen” formatting can challenge individual viewers to notice and interpret more details more often on their own. He commented that “the higher resolution of 70 mm allows closer reading of faces in the middle distance, reducing the need for the conventional cutting in for a close-up to support the spoken word with visually communicated emotion,” thereby permitting “longer takes,” an increase in “closely followed motion of characters,” as well as “continuous camera movement” (106). Although finding the ghost and duel scenes weak, Cook appreciated Branagh’s use of the full play-text. He praised such moments of “inspired invention” as “the sense of unease sustained in the first ghost scene, the cunningly ambiguous insets, the concentration of the slow track-in for the ‘to be’ soliloquy, the comical meta-cinema of the pre-Mousetrap scenes, the surrealist doubling of Ophelia and Laertes in their mirrored ‘conversation,’ [and] the relentlessness of Claudius’s persuasiveness underlined by the relentless structuring of act 4, scene 7.” Citing such “individual triumphs,” Cook said they prevented this long film from seeming monotonous, just as he also appreciated Branagh’s “balancing of complication and clarification,” especially in the film’s insets and its presentation of Fortinbras (158–59). Cook concluded by praising Branagh’s “unparalleled mastery of both Shakespeare and the film medium” (159).

Jessica M. Maerz, in a 2011 essay titled “Beyond Epic: Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet and the Meta-Narrative Functions of Classical Hollywood Genre,” argued that in “the context of Branagh’s entire Shakespearean canon, Hamlet is significant for a densely layered approach to genre that moves his storytelling beyond stage tragedy.” According to Maerz, “the film employs three different, yet intricately interconnected, genres to metanarrate the Shakespearean text—all genres characterized, significantly, by a sense of excess. Here, Branagh’s generic approach is expansive, deploying devices drawn from the historical epic as a frame; further, the film incorporates domestic melodrama at its heart, and a horror-show encounter at its core” (128–29).

L. Monique Pittman, in her 2011 study Authorizing Shakespeare on Film and Television (19–37), argued that the “presentation of masculinity in Branagh’s Hamlet always threatens to dissolve into contradiction and can be traced to the director’s defiant stance towards Oedipal readings and performances of the play” (21). She commented that Old Hamlet’s statue features “phallic verticality” although the actual ghost is large and fat; and observed that the prince resembles Claudius more than his actual father and that Fortinbras more closely resembles Old Hamlet’s statue than Hamlet does and that he speaks more as an actual soldier might (24). She compared the relationship between Old Hamlet and the prince to that between Luke and Darth Vader in Star Wars (25–26); thought the “how all occasions” scene “typifies a performative masculinity the actor and the character fear they cannot match” (26); and suggested that Fortinbras and his army represent “normative masculinity” but that this norm is presented in some often-unappealing ways (27). Arguing that the “all occasions” speech undermines its own emphasis on martial heroism (partly because it is overdone and partly because it literally minimizes Hamlet [28]) Pittman also discussed the film’s interpolated images, including flashbacks (30); noted that some critics have found the film too frenetic (30–31); reported that most of its interpolations appear in its opening half (31); and commented that the film presents cuts in many scenes, such as in the scene when Hamlet first encounters the ghost (31–34). Pittman thought the film sometimes makes it difficult to distinguish what is real from what is imagined (35); compared and contrasted Branagh’s first scene with Hamlet and the ghost to Olivier’s treatment of the same scene (35–36); argued that the film’s length delays the appearance of Hamlet’s masculine energy (36); and maintained that Branagh and other film adapters of Shakespeare find “no escape from the world of male competition that destroys the individuals it defines” (37). She concluded that Branagh presents a Hamlet “who has steadily suppressed the maternal but who cannot ultimately identify with or emulate the paternal quite as relentlessly or successfully as some critics suggest,” so that in the “parting image of Fortinbras’s soldiers steadily at work, the film offers a directorial lamentation for the feudal scramble to primacy that the masculine subject seems destined to enact again and again, despite his better judgement” (37).

Describing, in an abstract, her own 2011 essay titled “The Ghost and the Skull: Rupturing Borders between the Living and the Dead in Filmed Hamlets,” Victoria Bladen wrote that, “[a]s a spirit without material substance, the Ghost” in Hamlet “transgresses the border between life and death, a bodiless life crossing back into the material world. In the graveyard, Hamlet contemplates the reverse phenomenon in the skull of Yorick, a material object bereft of life; an empty shell remaining in the physical world while the spirit of the former court jester” has gone on to the next world. According to Bladen, the “porous border between life and death, one of the significant concerns of the play, has been articulated in different and innovative ways,” presenting “unique challenges and opportunities for filmmakers to explore the boundary between life and death.” Although focusing especially on Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet, she also discussed the adaptations of Olivier, Kozintsev, Richardson, and Zeffirelli.

In an abstract describing an essay from 2011 titled “Hamlet on Film at Mid-Century and Fin de Siècle: Olivier and Branagh,” Samuel Crowl wrote that of “all the Hamlet films produced in the last half of the twentieth century, the versions directed by Laurence Olivier (1948) and Kenneth Branagh (1996) most aspire to being definitive.” Crowl argued that the “films make a stunning contrast,” with each reflect[ing] the moment of their making: “Olivier’s a product of Freud’s Age of Anxiety and Branagh’s anticipating a world suddenly released (by the collapse of the Soviet Union) from global dominance by two superpowers.” Crowl explained that “Olivier’s film significantly trimmed the text and was shot in black and white to link Hamlet to motion picture history in general and to the film noir tradition in particular.” Meanwhile, “Branagh’s full-text four-hour version was shot in 70 mm to emphasize the epic reaches of Hamlet’s personal and political struggle to expose and topple Claudius and his regime and in homage to David Lean’s film style in Lawrence of Arabia and Dr. Zhivago.” Crowl explored “the myriad ways the two films talk to each other over the almost fifty-year gap between the moments of their creation. Primarily [he focused] on the ways the two films were influenced by social and political currents alive in their respective cultures and the ways in which those currents help to explain each director’s approach to Shakespeare’s text and the translation of the resulting screenplay into an appropriate visual style to contain and express their vision.”

Jacek Fabiszak, describing in an abstract his 2011 essay “To Cut or Not to Cut? What’s in the Written Text of Filmed Hamlets,” reported that his “article focuses on how the verse is handled in a medium that heavily relies on image, in other words how the text is presented (also) graphically on screen,” especially in the films by Olivier, Kozintzev, Zeffirelli, Branagh, and Almereyda. Fabiszak argued that all these “versions share one characteristic: they are attempts to translate, albeit in technologically and aesthetically different ways, the dramatic (or literary) and theatrical (or historically determined conventional) into the filmic. Interestingly enough,” he concluded, “one of the most problematic aspects of such a process is the soliloquy, a device which functions both as a poem and a typical theatrical convention which is difficult to justify in highly realistic cinema.”

Pierre Kapitaniak, describing in an abstract his 2011 essay titled “Hamlet’s Ghost on Screen: The Paradox of the Seventh Art,” wrote that the “infinite possibilities offered by the cinema in terms of special effects … should have enabled directors to show infinite inventiveness in representing Shakespeare’s most famous ghost. And yet, the adaptations over the last century (1907–2007) remain peculiarly timorous in applying technological breakthroughs to Hamlet’s Ghost.” Kapitaniak offered “a survey of the different ways of representing the Ghost since Laurence Olivier’s version, such as omission, ellipsis, a living actor, superimposed image, video, etc., before confronting them [as] ghostly apparitions in other films, especially in fantasy and horror film.” He then offered “hypotheses likely to explain the lack of special effects which seems to characterize film adaptations of dramatic material.” His essay surveyed seventeen different productions, including those by Zeffirelli, Branagh, Scott, and Almereyda.

Assessing Branagh’s Hamlet in his 2013 book Small-Screen Shakespeare (46–47), Peter Cochran found both the film itself and Branagh’s performance completely unimpressive. He thought the play could easily have been cut and considered it odd that Branagh, having cut nothing, was Oscar-nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay (46). Cochran criticized the film for speech that is too rapid, for unsubtle editing, for mediocre music to stimulate bored viewers, and for imagery that is unnecessary because the text already implies it (46–47). Finding the number of “star” actors excessive and listing the names of many of them to make fun of their sheer number, he considered them distracting and called the Americans “all weak” (47).

In his important 2014 book Shakespeare’s Hamlet: The Relationship between Text and Film, Samuel Crowl noted Branagh’s debts to such other directors as Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, David Lean, and Sergei Bondarchuk; commented on the ways Branagh highlights the role of Fortinbras; contrasted his Hamlet with Olivier’s; and related his film to the recent “collapse of the Soviet empire and the brutal stirrings of old grudges in the Balkans” (66). Noting the movie’s extreme length (69), Crowl reported that “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,” especially when dealing with Fortinbras (69), whom Crowl called “perhaps the most prominent of the many young male alter egos to Hamlet that Shakespeare creates in the play.” Crowl discussed Branagh’s own “epic ambitions,” his choice of a history-laden real country house for his main set, and that set’s resemblance to other famous European palaces (69–70). In a detailed discussion of Patrick Doyle’s music, Crowl commented on the ways the soundtrack underlined meanings, linked specific characters with particular musical cues, and helped make the film accessible (70–73). He discussed Hamlet’s military uniform and forceful, purposeful movements (73–74); the ways such movements highlight, by contrast, his “physically frozen” delivery of two key soliloquies (74); and the ghost’s own “looming military presence” and “monumental stature” (75). Contrasting Branagh’s “horizontal” focus with Olivier’s “vertical” orientation and noting that “70 mm [film] widens the screen and enlarges the details within the frame” (76), Crowl also observed how Branagh, in filming the soliloquies, “provide[s] a different context and cinematic technique for each, making them distinct and distinctive moments in the action” (77).

According to Crowl, whereas Olivier stressed Hamlet’s relationship with his mother, Branagh stresses his obsession with Claudius as well as with various other “complicated father figures including the Ghost, Claudius, the First Player, and even Priam” (81). This Ophelia, Crowl wrote, “has given herself to Hamlet not out of lust or revolt but out of innocence,” in contrast to her own father’s lustful flirtation with a prostitute (87). He discussed Branagh’s frequent and meaningful use of “flashcuts” (88); the intrusion into Claudius’s “fully functioning political court” of the ghost, the players, and then finally Fortinbras and his army (89); and traits of Hamlet’s character such as his “native intelligence,” his foresight, his “growing scepticism,” and “his desire to maintain a ‘perfect conscience’” (90). Commenting that 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),” Crowl added that “the mode of its expression becomes an antic disposition that verges on the carnivalesque” (90). Crowl concluded that “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” (96). He noted that “British newspaper reviewers were largely critical, even savage, in their assessment [of Branagh’s film] while American reviewers were on the whole more generous” (122), but Crowl himself predicted that Branagh’s version would “eventually eclipse Olivier’s as the Hamlet of choice for modern audiences” but “doubt[ed] that its afterlife will inspire any further full text cinematic treatments” of the play (126).

Peter E. S. Babiak, in his 2016 book on Shakespeare Films (146–49), called the Branagh production a Hollywood epic comparable in length, star casting, and setting, to such other epics of the 1990s as Dances with Wolves, Gettysburg, Schindler’s List, Braveheart, Titanic, etc. (146). He situated it “firmly in the world of cinema rather than the theatre,” saying it resembled films by Orson Welles in its “repeated use of long takes and circular tracking shots which frequently violate the axis of action” while also featuring “cutaways,” a “technique specific to film which foregrounds the presence of the medium” (147). Babiak thought Branagh’s Hamlet both resembled and differed from his Fortinbras (147–48); said Branagh’s film emphasized the theme of imperialism; and thought that Fortinbras finally “canonizes Hamlet as a victim who died fighting corruption” (148). He saw in this film allusions to the fall of the Soviet Union (as in the toppled statue) but reported that “although critically acclaimed, Hamlet recouped only 26 percent of its production budget at the box office, which represented Branagh’s first commercial failure,” partly because the film was not widely released (149).

Discussing Branagh’s Hamlet in her 2017 book Devouring Time (179–97), Philippa Sheppard wrote that the film is marked by various gothic elements (including its setting, ghost, themes of death, decay, madness); that these gothic features position the film outside both social norms and typical Shakespeare adaptations; and that although British reviewers criticized the film for being overblown, Branagh’s direction may instead reflect authentic gothic sensibilities, especially if “gothic” is used in both its medieval and Romantic (eighteenth- to nineteenth-century revival) senses (179). She thought that the theme of nostalgia both connects and differentiates Hamlet and Fortinbras; that Fortinbras seeks revenge without ethical hesitation, whereas Hamlet delays due to philosophical reflection; that Hamlet interprets memory and forgetfulness as reflecting existential nihilism; and that although critics of Hamlet’s delay might favor Fortinbras’s decisiveness, Hamlet’s caution appears justified (185). She suggested that if Branagh had used a more traditional medieval or Renaissance setting instead of a late nineteenth-century one, reviewers may have been more receptive to the film’s gothic elements (192)—elements he enhanced (1) by using the play’s full text, with its many reflections on death and madness and (2) by visually stressing the macabre and grotesque, such as Polonius’s bloody death, Ophelia’s straight-jacketed madness, and recurring skull imagery (195).

In a 2019 essay titled “Modern Filmed Versions of the Opening Lines of Ophelia’s First ‘Mad Scene,’” Robert Evans compared and contrasted fourteen different performances of those lines. Concerning the Branagh Hamlet, he wrote that “Winslet’s confinement, conduct, and tone all make her seem (at least up to this point) one of the more pathetic of filmed Ophelias [Evans discussed]. She literally can barely move. She can’t rush around the set or even walk in stunned, cryptic silence, like [Kozintsev’s] Vertinskaya. There is no screaming, no singing, no dancing, no aggression, and no obvious hatred of Gertrude [as in some earlier productions]. This Ophelia is almost literally immobilized and seems already to have been judged, quite literally, insane” (69).

In his 2019 book Shakespeare the Illusionist (112–16), Neil Forsyth listed differences between this film and Olivier’s; found the ghost’s first appearance ineffective; and commented that “the Ghost speaks while viewed in close-up, always in a stage whisper that becomes increasingly tedious.” He wrote that “Branagh’s interest in the politics of the play has often seemed to work against an interest in the psychology of the characters. Yet there are sometimes ways in which his screenplay shows a more subtle feeling about what is going on between the characters” (114), although he thought that “Jack Lemmon is not all that makes us wince in this four-hour-long wide-screen film,” suggesting that many of the other star turns by famous actors were unsuccessful (116).

2000 Michael Almereyda Production

The version of Hamlet directed by Michael Almereyda and released in 2000 starred Ethan Hawke as Hamlet; Kyle MacLachlan as Claudius; Diane Venora as Gertrude; Sam Shepard as the Ghost; Liev Schreiber as Laertes; Julia Stiles as Ophelia; Bill Murray as Polonius; and Karl Geary as Horatio.

Commenting on the film in his 2000 book Shakespeare on Screen, Daniel Rosenthal thought that by setting the film outside the confines of Elsinore, Almereyda traded the intense, enclosed atmosphere of earlier adaptations (like those by Olivier and Richardson) for a sense of isolation within a sprawling urban environment. He thought this Hamlet is depicted as an off-putting protagonist who often speaks in a low, indistinct voice—even during the famous “To be, or not to be” soliloquy, which he delivers in a jarringly ironic location: the action movie section of a video rental store. He delivers another speech through glitchy laptop video, and the film consistently reframes his interest in spying and secrecy through the lens of contemporary digital technology (34). Rosenthal reported that critics were divided. Like other outlets, the New York Times praised the film as lush and meaningful, suggesting it redefined how Shakespeare could be adapted for film, but The New York Post dismissed it as a flat, uninspired rendition that might be the most ineffective version of the play ever made (35).

Herbert R. Coursen, in his 2002 book Shakespeare in Space (151–56), wrote that “[t]his is a low-budget film, and it shows. Almost everything potentially interesting in the inherited script suffers a grim reduction in this version.” He noted various implausible details (“the Queen’s bedroom is next to the fax center”) and criticized the costuming, noting that Hamlet’s “trendy … woolen cap” makes him look “like he is more ready for a snowball fight than for any conflict beyond that” and smirking that “Claudius the CEO [of ‘Elsinore, Inc.’] can afford neither a good tailor nor off-the-rack suits that fit,” so that “he dresses like a cop just promoted away from uniformed duty” (151). Coursen concluded by satirizing the “shabbiness that characterizes this seedy group” of characters (152).

In an essay from 2003 titled “‘To Hear and See the Matter’: Communicating Technology in Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet (2000),” Mark Thornton Burnett argued that Almereyda’s Hamlet “is a distinctively postmodernist cinematic statement that charts the ways in which the act of filmmaking allows a release from the pressures of global capitalism at the same moment as it creates a space for the articulation of a coherent subjectivity” (48).

Samuel Crowl, in his 2003 Shakespeare at the Cineplex (187–202), asserted that this film’s “greatest contribution to the ever-lengthening list of Hamlet films, and its most interesting quality, is its meta-cinematic awareness,” emphasized by this Hamlet’s own role as a filmmaker and video diary-maker, so that his “video diary becomes a film-within-the-film.” Crowl wrote that in fact “the two films—Almereyda’s, shot in color, with a wonderfully glossy surface, capturing the sleek look and feel of Claudius’s Manhattan world, and Hamlet’s, shot in grainy black-and-white, getting at the texture of his inner agony—compete brilliantly with one another during the first two-thirds of the master narrative,” but he regretted that Hamlet’s videos disappear from the movie’s final third (192). Writing that Hawke never attempts to outshine his fellow performers and praising his naturalistic, “low-key delivery,” Crowl reported that the soliloquies are fractured (196); asserted that the supporting cast rivaled the actors in Branagh’s film (197); and especially praised Sam Shepard’s Ghost while also calling this character one of “several fathers: one who challenges (Claudius); one who chatters (Polonius); and one who commands (the ghost).” Crowl thought that “[o]ne of the strengths of Almereyda’s direction is that while he makes imaginative use of Hawke’s video diary to provide fragmented images of Hamlet’s fractured consciousness, he holds his camera steady and his cutting to a minimum when working with MacLachlan, Venora, Murray, and Shepard,” giving “them space to work as actors” (199). Although Crowl disliked the film’s final third, he ultimately called it an Orson “Wellesian hall of mirrors, containing layers of reflecting images” and terming Hawke’s Hamlet “a brooding narcissist.” He concluded that the “film is willing to take risks with its Shakespearean material” and felt that “many of the risks—particularly the meta-cinematic elements—pay handsome dividends” (201). Meanwhile, assessing the Almereyda movie in his 2003 book Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance (110–13), W. B. Worthen called the film “metadigital, absorbing and meditating on the uses of personal technology—the digital video camera, the computer screen, the video monitor—in reframing the theatricalized world of Hamlet as a mediated, mediatized environment” (111) in an age when such media seem far more important and widely embraced than traditional theater (113).

Katherine Rowe, in a 2003 essay titled “‘Remember Me’: Technologies of Memory in Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet,” argued that the “media allegory in Almereyda’s Hamlet focuses more narrowly on technologies of memory. His preoccupation is the way film and video mediate past experience, both for the individual and the community” (46).

In his 2004 essay titled “‘To Be or Inter-Be’: Almereyda’s End-of-Millennium ‘Hamlet,’” Alessandro Abbate argued that the “film uses the play’s essential motif of Hamlet’s quest—his search for proof of his uncle’s crime, for moral transparency, for true mutuality, for a definitive answer to the question of existence—in order to address an end-of-millennium anxiety regarding the collapse of human relationships and the growth of personal alienation in a media-driven world of high-tech communications” (82).

Also in 2004, Michael Anderegg, in his study titled Cinematic Shakespeare (178–80) called Hawke’s delivery “awkward and uncertain” (179), and wrote that some lines seemed to be “taken from their original context” and “come out of nowhere,” but he nonetheless thought that “Almereyda clearly embraces Hamlet in its fullness and plenitude, however much he is forced and/or inspired to film it in bits and pieces, to cut and slash it into a shape he needs and desires” (180). He concluded that “Almereyda gives us a Hamlet that, for all of its moments of jejune self-indulgence and clever—as well as not-so-clever—tricks, pulses with something that is recognizably life” (180). Similarly, John Russell Brown’s 2006 book on the play, despite mentioning this Hamlet only briefly and despite remarking that Shakespeare’s text is often “left far behind and often drops out of view entirely—although not for those who know the words well,” nonetheless implied that the film succeeded (159). Again in 2004, Carolyn Jess, in her essay “The Promethean Apparatus: Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet as Cinematic Allegory,” noted that “the tools and techniques of film production … showcased here … [are] elements of cinematic apparatus … available … for individual use” and discussed some implications of that fact” (91), while in a 2005 essay titled “‘The Mousetrap’ and Remembrance in Michael Almereyda’s ‘Hamlet,’” Yu Jin Ko asserted that Hawke’s Hamlet “never quite manages to get beyond the youthful self-indulgence that sees only pathos and heroic resistance in alienation, whereas Almereyda seems acutely aware that a central part of the moral dilemma of Hamlet is that this alienation is also a product of narcissism that disables resistance” (22).

Discussing the film in his 2007 book Filming Shakespeare in the Global Marketplace (50–57), Mark Thornton Burnett compared and contrasted it with Branagh’s while also suggesting that Almereyda’s Hamlet and recent Macbeth adaptations emphasize stark, emotionless environments to mirror characters’ inner turmoil, saying that such films reflect a post-9/11 association of New York with depression and psychological trauma and use visual elements to reinforce this mood (52). He thought that the past is represented in various symbolic ways throughout Almereyda’s film, often evoking countercultural values.

Hamlet’s bedroom, for instance, contrasts with the sterile modern world—furnished with antique items and classical décor, it becomes both a space of resistance and a personal retreat. (53). According to Burnett, “Almereyda connects Hamlet’s rebellious identity with revolutionary icons and imagery. Thus, a map of Ireland hangs beside portraits of Che Guevara and Malcolm X, suggesting a student’s admiration for historical defiance, while a split-screen shot draws a visual analogy between the oppression of Ireland by England and Hamlet’s subordination to his father” (56). Burnett thought that even in seemingly generic urban settings, an Irish undercurrent runs through Almereyda’s Hamlet (and Branagh’s version as well). He suggested that this “Irish ghost” symbolizes potential, longing, and identity and argued that similar themes appear in recent Macbeth films, which use landscape, nostalgia, and regional identity to suggest romantic or idealized pasts (57).

Thomas Cartelli and Katherine Rowe, in their 2007 book New Wave Shakespeare on Screen (59–68), wrote that “Almereyda’s Hamlet is itself far from a perfect movie. But if we assume that everything in the film has its aim and intention, … the roughness and willful bad taste of the Mousetrap [episode] is consistent with the generational themes and grunge stylings” that pit “the oppositional moods of Hamlet and Ophelia [and] Horatio and his girlfriend, Marcela, against the corporate slickness, lusts, and ambitions of Claudius, Gertrude, and Polonius,” adding that “[w]e don’t need to know that Hawke modeled much of his performance on the inspiration of Kurt Cobain to see this” (67).

In his helpful 2007 study Studying Shakespeare on Film (198–205), Maurice Hindle wrote that, “for a small-budget movie,” Almereyda’s film “manages to achieve a kind of lavish look by making the expensive steel and glass commercial landscape of Manhattan a vital character” (60). He thought the text, although “much reduced” had been “integrated successfully into the periodised postmodern Manhattan setting” and that the film “succeeds largely because there is such a strong congruency between the power structures” of a modern corporation and a royal court, despite some “occasional oddities,” such as the anachronistic sword fight (84). According to Hindle, “The duel scene with rapiers between Hamlet and Laertes held on a balcony of Denmark Corp’s headquarters in the Elsinore Hotel high up among the vertiginous heights of the Manhattan skyline might seem a little out of key with what has gone before” (84). Hindle felt that Almereyda was targeting an arthouse audience rather than the viewers of MTV (198); that the film offered “many brilliant shots and sequences,” often involving juxtapositions of color and black and white; that the postmodern techniques helped make Hamlet sympathetic (199); and that the productions first thirteen minutes displayed “superb filmic economy” (200). He noted such effective details as the use of low-angle shots, voice-overs, Hamlet shown pacing in a video store aisle of action films, and various mirror shots (202–3), adding that the actors speak lines “often in continuous takes”; that Hamlet is presented as a “smoulderingly melancholic James Dean figure” (204); and that the result is “a fine American Shakespeare film” focused on a youth audience (205). Meanwhile, Carolyn Jess-Cooke in her 2007 Shakespeare on Film (72–75), offered a detailed discussion of edits in this film and of editing in general (72–75), while Samuel Crowl, in his 2008 Norton Guide (92–93 and 143–44) observed that the “text of the play is significantly cut, its structure is changed, and its casting is unconventional” (93). He called the city setting “soundless and sinister” (93); said this Hamlet resembles the alienated teenager in The Catcher in the Rye (93); praised the film’s effective camera work (93; see also 143); and called the movie “jagged, daring, American, and brief” (93). He termed it postmodern and metatheatrical; said it “fractures and fragments” Shakespeare’s text; and noted that it emphasizes surveillance as a major theme (144).

In her 2008 book Filming Shakespeare, from Metatheatre to Metacinema, Agnieszka Rasmus described Hawke’s Hamlet as an “internal actor, director, and spectator” (120). She recounted the film’s original ending, with Fortinbras as a filmmaker, but said the present final scene still has a “metacinematic feel” (127). Emphasizing this film’s stress on filming (132–33), especially in a way intended to explore reality (133), she said the film often focuses on Hamlet’s eyes and also presents itself as non-theatrical and not a Hollywood movie, continually reminding us that we are watching a film, particularly in “The Mousetrap” scene. Rasmus said that Hamlet’s own filmmaking is not objective and impersonal and maintained that the film ends by emphasizing ambiguity, without any clear sense of truth (136). Noting the emphasis on Ophelia as a photographer (163), Rasmus also emphasized memory as an important theme (164–65) and wrote that the film that Hamlet shoots preserves the memory of characters who will soon be dead, so that he thereby creates an “alternative reality” (166–67).

Discussing the Almereyda film in his 2011 book Cinematic Hamlet (161-216), Patrick J. Cook read the film very closely, offering much careful moment-by-moment discussion of specific details and often commenting on the ways the text of the play had been cut or rearranged. In one typical passage, for instance, he noted the “conspicuous presence of a volume entitled The Uncanny” in a particular scene to suggest one of the film’s own concerns, commenting that an “uncanny interplay of familiar and unfamiliar permeates this Hamlet, beginning with the insertion of an Elizabethan fiction into a modern New York setting, both familiar in themselves to varying degrees among the audience but not in their juxtaposition.” He perceived similar juxtapositions of “readable and unreadable, and relevant and irrelevant, titles on Horatio’s bookshelf and in the remarkable collage wall behind Hamlet’s desk.” He argued that “delayed disclosure will often promote one reading of a scene, only to reverse or qualify it, making the apparently unfamiliar familiar or vice versa” (164). A year later, in his 2014 book on different film adaptations of the play, Samuel Crowl briefly compared Almereyda’s version to Olivier’s, commenting that “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” (130).

Jacek Fabiszak, describing in an end-of-the-book abstract his 2011 essay “To Cut or Not to Cut? What’s in the Written Text of Filmed Hamlets,” reported that his “article focuses on how the verse is handled in a medium that heavily relies on image, in other words how the text is presented (also) graphically on screen,” especially in the films by Olivier, Kozintzev, Zeffirelli, Branagh, and Almereyda. Fabiszak argued that all these “versions share one characteristic: they are attempts to translate, albeit in technologically and aesthetically different ways, the dramatic (or literary) and theatrical (or historically determined conventional) into the filmic. Interestingly enough,” he concluded, “one of the most problematic aspects of such a process is the soliloquy, a device which functions both as a poem and a typical theatrical convention which is difficult to justify in highly realistic cinema.”

Russell Jackson, describing his 2011 essay titled “The Gaps in Gertrude: Interpretations of the Role in Five Feature Films,” wrote that “[m]any actors have found Gertrude a role that is both rewarding and frustrating. Some—though by no means all—have expressed a wish that she had at least one soliloquy, and there have been many interpretations of her relationship with Claudius after the closet scene and its revelations.” He explained that “[i]n the theatre directors have sometimes chosen to follow the First Quarto in having Gertrude receive news of Hamlet’s return to Denmark,” adding that this information “may be contained in the letters ‘to the queen’ which in other texts the messenger presents to the King in Act 4, scene 7 (and which often in performance the King appears to intercept).” Jackson considered “interpretations of the role in feature films”—those by Olivier, Kozintsev, Zeffirelli, and Almereyda—“with particular emphasis on the ways in which actors and directors have dealt with the ‘missing elements’ of the role.”

Pierre Kapitaniak, describing in an end-of-the-book abstract his 2011 essay titled “Hamlet’s Ghost on Screen: The Paradox of the Seventh Art,” wrote that the “infinite possibilities offered by the cinema in terms of special effects … should have enabled directors to show infinite inventiveness in representing Shakespeare’s most famous ghost. And yet, the adaptations over the last century (1907–2007) remain peculiarly timorous in applying technological breakthroughs to Hamlet’s Ghost.” Kapitaniak offered “a survey of the different ways of representing the Ghost since Laurence Olivier’s version, such as omission, ellipsis, a living actor, superimposed image, video, etc., before confronting them [as] ghostly apparitions in other films, especially in fantasy and horror film.” He then offered “hypotheses likely to explain the lack of special effects which seems to characterize film adaptations of dramatic material.” His essay surveyed seventeen different productions, including those by Zeffirelli, Branagh, Scott, and Almereyda.

Natalie Jones Loper, in a 2012 essay titled “Ordinary Stardom: The Tragic Duality of Julia Stiles’s Ophelia,” wrote that Almereyda’s Ophelia “commits suicide because she cannot balance the competing pressures placed on young women in contemporary society: she cannot be the dutiful daughter, the loyal sister, and the faithful girlfriend because the men in her life force her to choose between them, and her inability to choose destroys her. Without their approval,” Loper contended, Ophelia “cannot imagine a future, and she fails to embrace her independence. Instead, she withdraws into madness and seeks recourse in death.” According to Loper, “Stiles injects these final scenes with pathos that challenges her audience to realize the full effect of Ophelia’s loss because [Stiles’s] star image demonstrates Ophelia’s potential for another sort of life” (29).

Peter Cochran, in his 2013 book Small-Screen Shakespeare (189–90), admired Kyle MacLachlan as Claudius and also the acting of Ophelia’s mental collapse. He recommended a viewing (despite finding Hawke boring); praised the director’s inventiveness (189); and commended the ghost (190). In an essay also published in 2013, “The Heart of the Mystery: Surveillance in Michael Almereyda and Gregory Doran’s Films of Hamlet,” Elizabeth Klett wrote that “both films use onscreen cameras to extend and complicate the theme of surveillance that pervades the play. The two Hamlets—Ethan Hawke (in Almereyda’s film) and David Tennant (in Doran’s film)—are both the objects of the camera’s gaze and the wielders of that gaze. They are,” Klett continued, “watched by surveillance cameras and also perform surveillance of their own, using cameras to record, remember, and dismember their experiences. As observed and observers,” she contended, “these Hamlets foreground and interrogate the claim that surveillance can ‘find where truth is hid.’ Rather than using onscreen cameras to effectively pluck out the heart of Hamlet’s mystery, Almereyda and Doran instead emphasize the failure of surveillance to reveal coherence, wholeness, and truth” (104). Klett noted “the variety of surveillance practices (panoptic, synoptic, sousveillance) at work” and, “by comparing Almereyda’s approach to Doran’s” she maintained “that the two Hamlets are not merely victims of surveillance, but use it for their own purposes.” She argued that “Doran’s film … wonderfully complements Almereyda’s in the development of this theme” (105).

Discussing “The ‘New’ Ophelia in Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet” in 2014, Amanda Kane Rooks asserted that “[a]lthough numerous radical and decidedly disruptive stagings of Ophelia have been performed in theater productions over the last half-century or more, renderings of Ophelia in modern film, by contrast, seem distinctively less subversive in nature.” She claimed that “[p]opular films such as those directed by Laurence Olivier (1947), Franco Zeffirelli (1990), and Kenneth Branagh (1996) perpetuate … characterizations of [Ophelia] that focus on her beauty, innocence, eroticized madness, and victim status” (475), but argued that “[r]ather than trivializing Ophelia by means of focusing exclusively on her beauty, purity, hysteria, or sexuality, Almereyda highlights the complexities and contradictions in her character that render her, much like Hamlet, elusive yet ‘real,’ conflicted yet politically potent” (483).

In 2016, Peter E. S. Babiak, in his book on Shakespeare Films (162–64), thought the Almereyda adaptation suggested that “corporate culture is in the process of displacing reality and real relationships with the manufactured image”; that “Hamlet is destroyed not because he is outsmarted by Claudius, but because he is hopelessly conflicted” (163); that the ghost’s disappearance into a Coke machine is “a visual emblem of the film’s theme of the dissolution of the individual that globalization precipitates”; and that “Ophelia’s emotional development has become fixated at a far earlier stage than her physical development” (164). He concluded that Almereyda’s “Hamlet seems to spend much of this film in a dissociated state in which he obsessively views himself on video in order to convince himself that he exists. This fails, and Hamlet is destroyed” for a lack of real relationships (164).

Discussing the Almereyda Hamlet while comparing and contrasting it with Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet, Philippa Sheppard in her 2017 book Devouring Time saw comparatively little emphasis on religion in Almereyda’s adaptation (153), noting that although the film “is set in secular, contemporary New York,” the director “maintains many of the religious allusions of the Elizabethan playscript” (162). She thought this decision created problems for viewers, especially for our understanding of Claudius’s villainy (164) and Ophelia’s seemingly religious motivations (165). Sheppard felt that by cutting the gravedigger scene (168), Almereyda “loses much of the audience’s sense of Hamlet’s development” (172), just as she also pointed to other examples of the ways the language of the play “seems at odds with the hyper-contemporary, secular corporate setting that Almereyda has been at pains to establish” (174). She thought that, “while slashing the script of Hamlet,” he nonetheless “makes no consistent effort to render the language as secular as the setting,” so that the “religious language sits uneasily at times with the gleaming, modern interiors and pared-down death rites,” even though it “appears to have been integral to Almereyda’s overall sense of the play” (174).

In a 2019 essay titled “Modern Filmed Versions of the Opening Lines of Ophelia’s First ‘Mad Scene,’” Robert Evans compared and contrasted fourteen different performances of those lines. Concerning the Almereyda production, he wrote that “[t]his Ophelia seems more pathetic than aggressive, at least until she starts screaming. Her hair is neat and tidy but her behavior, ultimately, is anything but. Gertrude’s voice-over speaks of guilt, but her conduct mainly suggests discomfort at being part of an embarrassing public ‘scene.’” According to Evans, “The setting and the screams (especially [the] last scream) make this version particularly memorable.” He argued that of the performances he had thus far discussed, “There has not, in fact, been a bad filmed version of this scene yet. Each director has handled it differently, yet all have scored real successes. If any actress did disappoint a bit, it may have been Marsh in the 1964 Gielgud production, although even her performance can be defended” (71).

In 2019, Neil Forsyth, in his book Shakespeare the Illusionist (117–18 and 121–24) found Almereyda’s film unusual for adding “extra appearances by the ghost” (117) and called it “so interested in playing with self-reflexivity that it risks disappearing up its own lens” (118). Forsyth commented in detail about Almereyda’s emphasis on the ghost; mentioned the absence of the Mousetrap scene (121–24); and suggested that Samuel Crowl may have been too generous in his praise of this film (124).

2000 Campbell Scott/Eric Simonson Production

Co-directed by Eric Simonson and Campbell Scott, with Scott starring as Hamlet, this film also featured Blair Brown as Gertrude; Roscoe Lee Browne as Polonius; LisaGay Hamilton as Ophelia; Jamey Sheridan as Claudius; and John Benjamin Hickey as Horatio.

Discussing this production in a 2006 essay titled “Learning from Campbell Scott’s Hamlet,” Diana E. Henderson explored such matters as why this production has often been overlooked but deserves more attention (77–78); how it deals with matters of race (78); and her opinion that its creators are intelligent and articulate filmmakers (78–79). She described in detail the production’s genesis and its creators’ goals (78–90), noted that it was intended as an American take on this famous play, and observed that Polonius and his family are presented as African Americans. She concluded by arguing that critical “interpretations [of Shakespeare films] become both more accurate and more provocative by taking into account the intricacies of process. And they may also encourage what seems a more authentic form of celebration of Shakespeare on screen as a thing in itself: as an act and sign of collective human creation striving, missing, and ultimately—in thought, gesture, or emotion—giving” (94).

Pierre Kapitaniak, describing in an abstract his 2011 essay titled “Hamlet’s Ghost on Screen: The Paradox of the Seventh Art,” wrote that the “infinite possibilities offered by the cinema in terms of special effects … should have enabled directors to show infinite inventiveness in representing Shakespeare’s most famous ghost. And yet, the adaptations over the last century (1907–2007) remain peculiarly timorous in applying technological breakthroughs to Hamlet’s Ghost.” Kapitaniak offered “a survey of the different ways of representing the Ghost since Laurence Olivier’s version, such as omission, ellipsis, a living actor, superimposed image, video, etc., before confronting them [as] ghostly apparitions in other films, especially in fantasy and horror film.” He then offered “hypotheses likely to explain the lack of special effects which seems to characterize film adaptations of dramatic material.” His essay surveyed seventeen different productions, including those by Zeffirelli, Branagh, Scott, and Almereyda.

Describing, in an abstract, her 2011 essay titled “Hallmark Hall of Fame: Three Go’s at Hamlet (1953, 1970, 2000),” Bernice Kliman asked, “What do the Hallmark productions of Hamlet have to tell us about the play and how it is presented on television and film?” She answered: “The productions span a period from the 1950s (Maurice Evans’s live TV version in 1953 based on his 1940s stage productions), to the 1970 Richard Chamberlain version (a production that influenced Branagh’s 1996 film), to a production aired in 2000 (Campbell Scott’s TV broadcast conceived in film terms).”

Discussing this production in his 2014 book on filmed versions of the play, Samuel Crowl compared and contrasted this adaptation with previous versions while also calling “Dan Gillham’s camera work … tight and efficient.” He noted that Gillham’s “preference … for close-ups and medium close-ups with very few establishing shots”; termed “Gary De Michele’s film score … minimalist”; considered the film as a whole “interesting and ambitious”; and said Scott was “the only American who has attempted to pull off the Olivier and Branagh double act: directing and starring in film versions of Hamlet” (133).

In a 2019 essay titled “Modern Filmed Versions of the Opening Lines of Ophelia’s First ‘Mad Scene,’” Robert Evans compared and contrasted fourteen different performances of those lines. He wrote that “Hamilton’s Ophelia is unusually calm and self-controlled. She doesn’t scream, dance, slowly pace, clutch the floor, or writhe in a straitjacket [as previous Ophelias had done]. She seems remarkably strong and self-possessed, at least at this point in the film” (72).

In 2019, Neil Forsyth, in his book Shakespeare the Illusionist, briefly wondered why “Scott placed all this extra emphasis on the Ghost as the source of Hamlet’s determination to kill Claudius,” calling his decision “unclear.” He reported that “[a]s a young man [Scott] was delighted by the U.S. television series Creature Features, and the extra scenes for the Ghost may simply acknowledge that boyish fascination” (117).

2002 Peter Brook Production

This version, “The Tragedy of Hamlet,” was directed by Peter Brook and starred Adrian Lester as Hamlet; Jeffery Kissoon as Claudius and the Ghost; Natasha Parry as Gertrude; Bruce Myers as Polonius and the Gravedigger; Scott Handy as Horatio; and Shantala Shivalingappa as Ophelia.

Peter Cochran, in his 2013 book Small-Screen Shakespeare (215–16), considered this production excessively stripped down, thereby murdering the play, partly through boring delivery and partly through a jumbled plot (215). Cochran said that Brook robbed Adrian Lester of a real chance to truly perform so that even this production’s Hamlet himself is tedious (216).

In a 2019 essay titled “Modern Filmed Versions of the Opening Lines of Ophelia’s First ‘Mad Scene,’” Robert Evans compared and contrasted fourteen different performances of those lines. He wrote that in this production Brook “dispenses altogether with the discussion between Ophelia and Gertrude, just as he dispenses with Gertrude’s discussion with the Gentleman and Horatio and her thoughts about her own guilt. This mad scene,” he commented, “is stripped-down indeed” (73).

2009 Gregory Doran Hamlet

This production, broadcast on the BBC, was directed by Gregory Doran and starred David Tennant as Hamlet; Patrick Stewart as Claudius and the Ghost; Penny Downie as Gertrude; Mariah Gale as Ophelia; Peter de Jersey as Horatio; Edward Bennett as Laertes; and Oliver Ford Davies as Polonius.

Assessing this production in his 2013 book Small-Screen Shakespeare (201–3), Peter Cochran, finding Tennant’s Hamlet interestingly erratic but this Polonius tedious, commented on various specific moments (201); wished that the advice to the players had been cut; called this version trivial and unpolitical, but did admire Claudius’s self-condemnation (202). He praised this Gertrude’s closet scene and this Ophelia’s mad scene but found the double suicides of Claudius and Gertrude odd (203).

Also in 2013, Elizabeth Klett, in an essay titled “The Heart of the Mystery: Surveillance in Michael Almereyda and Gregory Doran’s Films of Hamlet,” wrote that “both films use onscreen cameras to extend and complicate the theme of surveillance that pervades the play. The two Hamlets—Ethan Hawke (in Almereyda’s film) and David Tennant (in Doran’s film)—are both the objects of the camera’s gaze and the wielders of that gaze. … As observed and observers,” she continued, “these Hamlets foreground and interrogate the claim that surveillance can ‘find where truth is hid.’ Rather than using onscreen cameras to effectively pluck out the heart of Hamlet’s mystery, Almereyda and Doran instead emphasize the failure of surveillance to reveal coherence, wholeness, and truth” (104). By studying “the variety of surveillance practices (panoptic, synoptic, sousveillance) at work … and by comparing Almereyda’s approach to Doran’s,” Klett sought to show “that the two Hamlets are not merely victims of surveillance, but use it for their own purposes. Doran’s film … wonderfully complements Almereyda’s in the development of this theme” (105).

Writing in 2019 in an essay titled “Critics’ Reactions to the Filmed Version of the Doran/Tennant Hamlet,” Robert Evans remarked that “[r]arely do productions of Hamlet—either on stage or on film—receive the depth and degree of enthusiastic praise that the Doran/Tennant production received. Hamlet, after all, is perhaps the best-known play in the English language. Most people who see one production have usually seen several (or even many) others. They also usually have read the play, often more than once. Therefore,” according to Evans “their expectations are usually not only high but also firm and often highly personal. The fact that the Doran/Tennant production could appeal to so many reviewers, and in such strong terms, is remarkable. It seems likely, then, that this version of Hamlet is one that will frequently be shown and studied in classrooms for years to come. Whether it will maintain its current almost ‘classic’ status is, of course, a verdict that only time will tell” (210–11).

In a 2019 essay titled “Modern Filmed Versions of the Opening Lines of Ophelia’s First ‘Mad Scene,’” Robert Evans compared and contrasted fourteen different performances of those lines. Concerning this production, he wrote that “Gale’s Ophelia seems even more dangerous than Bonham-Carter’s [in the Branagh production]: Bonham-Carter had simply cut off Gertrude’s attempted escape; Gale physically assaults Gertrude. Never before had any Ophelia studied here,” according to Evans, “reacted with such overt hostility. Sixty years after Olivier’s movie, directors and actresses were still finding memorable new ways to present the mad Ophelia on film” (74).

Neil Forsyth, discussing this version in his 2019 book Shakespeare the Illusionist (126–28), praised Tennant and Stewart; noted that the emphasis here on surveillance resembles a similar emphasis in Almereyda’s Hamlet; and said that this production “manages to avoid the boring quality of many filmed plays” (128). He observed that Doran included few special effects; stated that the “acting in particular is so superb that the television audience perhaps feels even more privileged to be in its (imagined) presence, that much closer to the action and the cast” (128); and wrote that Tennant’s Hamlet “parodies everyone—not only Polonius and Osric but even the player king, careening around and sporting a crown at a weird angle. Athletic and mercurial, he revels in his ‘antic disposition,’ which allows him to display the quicksilver intelligence and wild humor that is his way of countering the power of his enemies” (128).

John Wyver, in his 2019 book Screening the Royal Shakespeare Company (164–69), provided much information about the genesis of the production, including its design; wrote that the BBC in this era was bent on “attracting a younger, less elitist audience for Shakespeare”; and noted that “[p]ress response [to this production] was almost unanimously positive” (167), although he provided almost no discussion of the finished production itself since his focus was mainly historical.

2015 Sarah Frankcom/Margaret Williams Production

Directed for the stage by Sarah Francom and for film by Margaret Williams, this adaptation starred Maxine Peake as Hamlet; John Shrapnel as Claudius/Ghost; Barbara Marten as Gertrude; Gillian Bevan as Polonia; Thomas Arnold as Horatio; and Katie West as Ophelia.

In a 2019 essay titled “Modern Filmed Versions of the Opening Lines of Ophelia’s First ‘Mad Scene,’” Robert Evans compared and contrasted fourteen different performances of those lines. He wrote that “[t]his staging (at least until Claudius enters and Ophelia begins insulting him) lacks much emotional energy. It seems, both literally and figuratively, a bit more ‘stagey’ than some other versions but is nevertheless powerful in its own, more muted way” (75).

Writing in 2019 in an essay titled “Maxine Peake’s Female Hamlet: A Survey of Responses,” Jason Shifferd concluded that “[a]lthough the Frankcom/Peake production did receive some ‘rave’ reviews, most commentators found aspects to like among various details they disliked or regretted.” He reported that “[t]here was widespread condemnation of the use of jumbled clothes in the ‘graveyard’ scene, but there was also strong disagreement about the merits of particular episodes (such as the final swordfight), particular design choices (such as the use of lightbulbs to imply the presence of the ghost), particular elements of characterization (such as the decision to turn Polonius into Polonia), and particular performances (such as Gillian Bevan in the role just mentioned).” However, “Most reviews did find much to admire in Peake’s performance as Hamlet, but even in this case there was far from universal agreement” (213).

Bibliography