The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark: Why does everyone get this play so wrong?
Having seen every cinematic adaptation of Hamlet e'er released, I muse upon why it is they all seem so poor relative to other tragedies.
Act I
Nineteen to twenty-three, I carried with
Me in my backpack everywhere I went
A No Fear Shakespeare reader of the play
Hamlet. In school we'd read the Scottish Play
And Romeo and Juliet; from these
I learned that I myself indeed was quite
The fan of all the Bard's great tragedies.
Of all those I had read and seen, I knew
From Slings & Arrows, Canada's premiere
Satirical Shakespearian tele-
Vision series, that Hamlet would to me
Be fondest of the lot.
This was despite
That never had I watched or read the play
Myself, not in its entirety.
Yet even so I felt, from what I'd seen,
A kinship with the Melancholy Prince,
Though whereupon I knew precisely not.
But all this changed when I enrolled into
An acting class anon, and there, one night
When choosing of a scene, the instructor
Did direct me toward Elsinore, and thus
I knew my course. And so I learned my true
Love for Prince Hamlet, melancholy Dane;
A man with whom I felt such kindred pain.
Act II
Therefore it comes as no surprise to hear
I have myself a certain set of strong
Opinions on how this play should be
Presented in production. Alas!
I never had the good fortune before
The days of COVID came to see Hamlet
Performed as live upon a city's stage,
But I have seen all the most notable
Cinematic adaptations, which all,
I find, share with themselves a certain trait:
A little more than goodly, less than good.
Of all I've seen, the best filmed in Russian,
The worst with Benedict Cucumberpatch,
None seem to get the play, and above all
The Prince himself, quite right. Unlike Macbeth,
For which the mean, I would contest, is good
Enough, every production of Hamlet
Gets at the play at least half wrong. Even
The finest, Russian Gamlet, alongside
Branagh's fourteen hour long masterpiece,
Do err greatly from how I think the play
Should play, indeed needs play, if it is to
Achieve its full effect as well as e'en
A poor production of King Lear might do.
I have myself the role performed pieces
Across the last four years; so it should come
As no surprise that this has coloréd
My views on what and what not should be done
If putting on this show. So be aware
That all the thoughts enclosed herein are but
My own subjective, tainted feelings on
Hamlet, the man and play and tale alike;
But bold enough I am to claim aloud
That truly great a show of Hamlet ne'er
Has e'er been put to film. The reasons why?
Well, thus I will an explanation try.
Act III
Unlike the other tragedies, Hamlet
Is strange. Its plot meanders, focus lost:
Of five acts, two are spent confirming that
Which viewers know already to be true--
That Claudius indeed did slay the king.
The antic disposition once assumed
To us in modern day makes no to lit-
Le sense. Perhaps some context has been lost
That to Elizabethans would explain
The gain in false erratic behavior.
All this and more does complicate the tale
And makes the Prince himself the key to the
Whole show, in such a way that other plays
Suffer not from.
Perhaps it comes as no
Great shock that Hamlet is the key with which
A play named Hamlet might be thus unlocked;
And yet the point I mean to make is that
Hamlet, the man, is just what's always wrong,
From Branagh to Olivier, and from
Tennant to Smoktunovsky, all these fail,
Great actors though they are, to find
The core of who the char'ter is. Foremost:
Always is Hamlet played too old. He is, despite
Being perhaps the hardest role in all of theatre,
A child. The play ceases to make all sense
When Prince Hamlet is played adult; wherefore
Would he have not ascended to the throne
If he himself was yet of age? The plot
And all its hue hinges completely on
This fact.
Hamlet, if passed over for king
Once an adult, is cast himself
As deficient somehow in character--
Whereas in fact we're told this much, that as
[Hamlet is] loved of the distracted multitude,
Who like not in their judgement, but their eyes.
And where 'tis so, th' offender's scourge is weighed,
But never the offense.(Spoken by Claudius: Hamlet, Act IV, Scene 3)
In words much easier to parse: the Prince
Is popular with common folk, and so
King Claudius is thus constrained in what
He is allowed to do to dispatch with
His ever-more annoying nephew-son.
The only explanation for his uncle's
Ascendancy to king, therefore, is the
Minority of Prince Hamlet. This goes
Similarly to show how sane the Prince
Must be, to be beloved so by those
Of the many "distracted multitude."
Throughout all of the play it is remarked
How well a king Hamlet would make, once he
Was old enough to bear the weight of all
The realm of Denmark. It is thus alone
That we conclude Hamlet must be a child
If at all the story is to function.
Yet more significant reasons remain
Why Hamlet should, at most, be twenty years
Of age, or leastways played as a young man,
E'en if the actor in the part is fully grown.
This is because, at all its core, Hamlet's
Primary task is to determine what
A type of man he is: a warrior or
A poet? To be a king, or be a bard?
The Prince's tragedy is not that he
Cannot make up his mind, as many claim,
But that he does not know who he should be at all.
His mother wants a prince; his father wants
A vengeful warrior; he himself, howe'er,
Seems nothing more to want than be a bard.
Of all the conflict in the play, foremost
Is youthful confusion, uncertainty,
Duty placed in antithesis to dreams:
O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.
(Spoken by Hamlet: Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2)
With these prose words spoken above so clear
Is made this fact: were not that Hamlet had
Bad dreams, tormented by his father's ghost,
To be an actor and a prince contents
Him well enough. It's duty thus that sets
Him on his course, and forces him to choose
'Tween what he wants, and what he's forced to do.
There is no boy for whom this question fails
To stoop. Yet should an older boy, a man,
By thirty at the latest, answers lack,
The fault lies not upon his stars, nor in
The nature of mankind, but in himself.
That tale is not a tragedy; it is a farce.
Indeed it is my opinion that all
The characters within this play
Should be as young as they can be playéd.
What cause has Claudius to love the Queen
When she is old, and withered, best unseen?
The King is cool, well-liked by all, and he
Should thus be played as such.
T'was not, methinks, poor Billy's plan,
For Claudius to be so old a man:
Act IV
The qualities that best distinguish The
Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
from Shakespeare's other tragic works
Lie in its sense of humor and of wit.
A cautionary tale though might it be,
HAMLET IS FUNNY.
From out his lips fly jokes and puns and jibes
With wit enough to even Yorrick shame.
Hamlet's defining feature as a man
Is his quick wit and excellent fancy,
Though deeply tarnished it may be of late.
This is the greatest reassurance in
The play that he in fact is sane. As has
Been said by many a critic, Hamlet
Is far-away the sanest person in the play.
Combined with Polonius' foolishness,
For Polonius is the best among
All Shakespeare's many clowns, Hamlet is thus
A play that bursts with irony and jokes,
Just waiting on the page to be let out.
And yet they never are, 'least not in film.
Take Branagh, who I use, though flawed he be,
For overall a strength in soliloquys:
Act II, Scene 2: Polonius to King
Claudius reads the poems Hamlet wrote
And gifted to his daughter out of love:
Doubt thou the stars are fire,
Doubt that the son doth move;
Doubt truth to be a liar,
Never doubt I love.
This poem reads to me innocuous.
A young, infatuated man grants to
The target of his crush a love poem.
I do maintain the notion that Ophelia
And Hamlet slept together ere the play
Began to be absurd. Who for his lover writes
Such innocent and boyish poetry? It's thus
That when Polonius responds aghast
To this so simple a declaration of
A young man's love, he is thus made to seem
All more the fool.
And yet! In Branagh's scene the music swells,
The lady in her eyes has tears, the shock
Upon the faces of the cast is clear
And all the joke within this scene, the joke
That Polonius is a busy-body'd fool,
Is lost. So melodrama earned, all mirth
Is stricken from the play.
(I would provide a screenshot of the scene
With which my point to illustrate. Alas,
Jeff Bezos has decreed that such a use--
Though fair and legal yet it is--should be
Impossible to do when snipping from
An Amazon webplayer video.
I offer thus instead this picture of a cat:)
Alas, this is
But one example from Branagh's account.
His cruelest sin of all in this regard
Is his delivery, whereby he fails
To get across Prince Hamlet's wit. In place
Of boyish playfulness he acts anger;
Intense the whole play through, not even with
The players, or Horatio, does his
Intensity e'er wane. In short, he comes
Across as madder than the prince, methinks,
E'er should. When Hamlet with his wit doth strike,
To Branagh does this seem to signal madness,
And not, in fact, to show how sane the boy remains.
(To be entirely frank, playing Hamlet this way ruins the character Shakespeare wrote. When Branagh channels Hamlet's sanity and his wit, as he does with Osric right before the final confrontation with Laertes, he has the character down precisely as I'd wish to see him. But only in that one scene. Nowhere else does Hamlet feel witty; he is otherwise only mad, insane, or acting. All in all, he's impossible to understand when presented in this fashion.)
But 'bove all else Branagh never seems to
Be thoughtful or contemplative. These two
Character traits combined are oft what we
Do think of first when first we think of Hamlet.
Be all this as it is, his performance
Remains the best of all the ones I've seen;
For though such madness comes across as wrong
When put in larger frame with all the play,
At least does he do something with the man.
And criticize his film although I might,
He does with Claudius the best I've seen in film.
One more remark on Branagh dear I have.
The fault which he, along with all other
Movies save one do seem to share, lies in
The fair Ophelia.
She's wrong.
So wrong.
To make this clear to all who read me now
I draw attention to the film Gamlet.
This marvelous translation of the Bard
Alas rests far without my plan today.
It dazzles and amazes with its scope
And all its care for history. But 'bove
All else where most it shines is in Ophelia.
Ophelia must have these qual'ties three:
She must be pure as ice, as chaste as snow,
And as a puppet to her father's will.
Thus when her father is by Hamlet sent
Anon to supper with the worms, the girl,
Her brother absent at the time, her love
Rebuked (upon her dad's request), is left
Without a man to pull her strings and give
Her body movement. A pretty puppet,
Nothing more: that's all Ophelia should be.
Yet always in these films she's hideous,
With buckéd teeth and too-large eyes, and no
Clear cause why any man would be in love
With her, except on pain of torture or on death.
Beyond, she's normal, nothing much: a girl
On no point to remark. For Branagh's film
This is a deathly touch. Wherefore comes madness
When Ophelia is but a normal girl?
Always too modern is she made, too free
And liberated from femininity.
When played proper, as in Gamlet
She stands in as a proxy for all young
Women of feudal aristocracy:
So robbed by men of all her agency,
This is, not else, the girl's tragedy.
(The line I'm quoting above, from the infamous Get Thee to a Nunnery scene, is the largest proof, by the way, that Hamlet and Ophelia haven't slept together. Ophelia IS as pure as ice. She IS as chaste as snow. And thus, once her father dies, her only recourse to "escape calumny," as Hamlet puts it, is to die. This obviously makes no sense if she and the Prince are sexually engaged. This fact is so blindingly obvious to me that I sometimes wonder if anyone who plays the two as in-the-sheets lovers has actually read the play. This is to say nothing of the fact that Hamlet himself is a boy who channels youthful feelings of romantic confusion and sexual frustration; again, all that is ruined if his relationship with Ophelia is played as carnal and not that of a childish mutual infatuation--if he in fact could have Ophelia, were it just not for Polonius. OH, ALSO, the only one who insinuates that Hamlet and Ophelia ARE having sex is Polonius, the FOOL, who's the FOOL, who is FOOLISH, who is saying things that obviously aren't true because he's a FOOL. Only fools would follow the foolish in devising an interpretation of this play.
Act V
And so it is it can be known why I
Think none on screen have ever got the Dane
Quite right. The play is long and full of twists
And though the role be one all actors wish
To play, in fact Hamlet is nothing like
All other tragic 'heroes' of Shakespeare.
Tender is he, sensitive, soft, with wit
Beyond compare: he's thoughtful, playful,
Both cruel and kind; confused and sad, yet brilliant all the same.
Ingenious, choleric as melancholic,
Yet funnier than any man could swear.
Perhaps I be too prideful to proclaim
That in Hamlet I see what others don't;
But yet it is that never have I seen
Him done in just the way he reads to me,
Upon the page, in which I see myself.
One final word, ere I depart, is to
Remark upon how well the Dane has dwelt
Within my mind. For four years since, when e'er
I'm down, I hear his voice in mine, saying,
"Oh, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!"
Or else, "to be, or not to be, that is the question;"
I think, "There's nothing either good or bad
But thinking makes it so;" and always do
I try my best to shine my wit as bright
As his. And thus I think it safe to say:
With Hamlet William Shakespeare bridged the times,
And to this day, the genius in his soul still rhymes.