Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet (1996)

You're half way through Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet. Many of you are reading the play for class. Some of you are performing the stage play later this week, a production we are all going to go see. These three experiences – Hamlet the text, Hamlet the theatrical production, and Hamlet the film – give us a perfect opportunity to examine the different natures of artistic form. So let’s do it.

For those of you reading the play, notice how the text makes itself available to all possible interpretations simultaneously. Hamlet can be a brooding adolescent, a middle-aged mama’s boy, or a heart-broken young man all at once. You can take a line like “the universe is out of joint; oh, cursed spite that ever I was born to set it right,” and see that as a metaphor for the shift from a theocentric world view to a more humanist one. Or you may chalk it up to a certain petulance on our hero’s part. Each choice means that you read the lines that follow and seen subsequent scenes in different ways, but you can hold all the possibilities in your mind and be participating in a variety of parallel explorations of meaning.

Certainly in your mind’s eye, you’re probably “seeing” the text’s characters and setting in a consistent way. Good readers, studies tell us, do this visualization. But it’s a free flowing experience, capable of shifting as the text shapes your experience from scene to scene. With Shakespeare, specifically, a highly visual writer, we are encouraged to visit this theater of the mind. Take Ophelia’s revelation to her father, Polonius, of her encounter with Hamlet in Act 2, scene 1:

As I was sewing in my closet,
Lord Hamlet, with his doublet all unbraced,
No hat upon his head, his stockings fouled,
Ungartered, and down-gyved to his ankle,
Pale as his shirt, his knees knocking each other,
And with a look so piteous in purport
As if he had been loosed out of hell
To speak of horrors – he comes before me. (2.1.87-94)

You don’t need to have seen that to “see” it. So the text is a space of unlimited possibilities and dimensions, allowing us, as readers, to assemble our own coherent worlds and meanings.

On stage, Hamlet takes place in an imagined space. The action, for example, occurs in the castle of Elsinore. Look at the stage this weekend when your classmates are performing. What visual elements evoke Shakespeare’s setting? How do you place it in time? Where is it? What does the set suggest about the action and psychology of the characters? Choices have been made – how do they shape a single vision of the play? Whatever your answers to these sorts of questions, your responses will rely on imagination. You’re not really looking at Elsinore’s walls. You’re probably looking at painted Styrofoam, and the palace, with its bedrooms, antechambers, throne room, battlements, hallways, and library (however Mr. Severson or Mr. Dutton choose to represent these) will all be compressed into a space roughly 35’ x 16’. That you believe in the setting is a form of willing suspension of disbelief, but more importantly this imaginative interaction allows the play’s language (e.g. “Two nights together had these gentlemen, / Marcellus and Bernardo, on their watch, / In the dead waste and middle of the night, / Been thus encountered: a figure like your father, … / Appears before them.”) and its events (i.e. ghosts) to have meaning on two levels, one literal and one figurative. In short, theatrical drama takes place both on stage and in our minds.

Filmic Shakespeare takes place in a realistic space. That is, when Branagh wants you to see Elsinore, he gives us the stunning establishing shot of Blenheim Castle and then we cut away to an interior with black and white tiled floors, floor-to-ceiling mirrors, and a crowd of courtiers, as well as other equally well-appointed rooms. In the place of imagination, we have the acceptance of vicarious experience. The emphasis of movies is on feeling the realness of a story, no matter how fantastical. As you watch the remaining portion of Branagh’s Hamlet, consider how this realness affects your perception of story, character, and ideas in ways that would be different if you were reading the text or watching the play on stage. One example: Branagh depicts, via flashback cutaway, an actual sexual relationship taking place between Ophelia and Hamlet, while Ophelia discusses Hamlet with her dad, Polonius. These flashbacks aren’t possible on stage and don’t appear in the text; they are a filmic trait. And their presence creates a specific reality out of something that in the text is ambiguous and on stage is created, if at all, subtextually.

In the end, seeing is believing. We simply want to stress that what you see – words, staging, or celluloid – makes all the difference.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser