Hamlet by William Shakespeare

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Recommended: Hamlet movie versus book

Hamlet Introduction Hamlet is one of the most popular plays of Shakespeare. It has been filmed in a variety of ways. When filming Shakespeare’s plays there is some autonomy acquired by the producers that are taken for either artistic benefit or to keep it shorter. These liberties are up to the director’s interpretation of Hamlet. The director’s interpretations make each Hamlet production different. In the Mel Gibson production they add a lot to the dialogue especially in the beginning. The film begins at the funeral of King Hamlet rather than on the watch with Marcellus and Bernardo. The Mel Gibson version also takes a lot of dialogue out of Hamlet including the whole idea of Fortinbras. He is not in the 1990 production so that it is shorter. As for the 1964 version where Anthony Hopkins plays Claudius, the dialogue is almost exactly the way Shakespeare wrote it. The 1948 and the 1964 production were very near the actual dialogue while the 1990 version with Gibson had several differences. The first scene of Zeffirelli's Hamlet, a wake for Hamlet's father, doesn't exist in Shakespeare: the dialogue has been trimmed from elsewhere in the play and made to work in a different context. This typifies Zeffirelli's approach to the material, which is decidedly non-reverential. He isn't afraid to take liberties with the material, or to eliminate descriptive exposition in favour of showing us the actual events. The result is perhaps the most accessible filmed version of the play: this is, after all, the version of Hamlet that the Alicia Silverstone character in Clueless could quote. Body Mel Gibson’s played the insane part of Hamlet well too. His face and understanding of the text made it seem more realistic than when I read it (Berman, 1965...

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...n imagine a first time viewer failing to make the link to Polonius' death). This is unfortunately typical of the film's entire treatment, in which events seem to happen at random, and far too suddenly. Zeffirelli also hits trouble on a couple of the occasions in which he switches Shakespeare's verbalized events to visualized ones. The death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is one example of this device not quite working: even less successful is the odd compromise depicting Ophelia's drowning. References Berman, Ronald. A Reader's Guide to Shakespeare's Plays: A Discursive Bibliography. Chicago: Scott, Foresman, 1965. {VMI} Kliman, Bernice W. Hamlet: Film, Television, and Audio Performance. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London; Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1988. Bevington, David, ed. Hamlet. New York: Bantam Classics, 1988.

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