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WSWS : Arts Review : Film Reviews

Hamlet by William Shakespeare, directed by Kenneth Branagh

A note on the necessity of Shakespeare

By David Walsh
24 February 1997

British actor-director Kenneth Branagh has given us, in his new film version of William Shakespeare's Hamlet, an honest and spirited presentation of one of the most extraordinary dramas ever written or performed.

Branagh's decision to film an uncut, four-hour version is praiseworthy from a number of points of view. To undertake such a work, which can only be screened a limited number of times each day in a given movie theater, is to fly in the face of the "market realities" that strictly govern the commercial film world. In filming his Hamlet Branagh has, moreover, rejected another of the entertainment industry's cardinal principles--that the general filmgoing public is composed almost entirely of idiots to whom one dare not present anything but the most banal material.

Branagh's artistic life seems primarily driven by a deeply-felt confidence in Shakespeare, the firm belief, almost pedagogical in character, that the Elizabethan playwright can and should be made to speak to wide layers of the population. He could be driven by far worse things! For fifteen million dollars, a paltry sum by contemporary standards, Branagh has gathered a cast of talented performers, including Derek Jacobi, Julie Christie, Richard Briers, Michael Maloney, Kate Winslett, Jack Lemmon, Billy Crystal, Robin Williams, Gerard Dépardieu and Charlton Heston, and put together a conscientious and entertaining production.

Not every production of Hamlet is a contribution to cultural life. The play forms a part of the standard, which is to say, the ordinarily unconsidered, repertoire. Educated members of a certain social class take for granted that they are familiar with Hamlet, when in reality its more troubling aspects remain for many a closed book. The mounting of a serious production of the play is a real service. Such acts of intellectual bravery play a role, if only by virtue of their implicit critique of current artistic work, in reorienting and enriching popular consciousness.

The film is an honest work, not a complete artistic accomplishment. The 36-year-old, Belfast-born Branagh is a fine actor and a talented director of other actors; he is not possessed of an extraordinary visual or film sense. His previous attempts at filming Shakespeare's plays- Henry V (1989) and Much Ado About Nothing (1993)--were lively and interesting, but flawed. His other film credits-- Dead Again (1991), Peter's Friends (1992), Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994) and A Midwinter's Tale (1995)--do him relatively little credit. In Hamlet his lighting, camera movements, sets, costumes, choice of music seem haphazard at best. This is not quibbling. The danger always exists that such a film, whose essential strength lies principally in its spoken language, will be little more to the spectator than "mere words."

But on the whole, the presentation of the play's entire text, something rarely done (Laurence Olivier's 1948 film version, for example, is nearly two hours shorter), proves a great strength. Branagh's effort to grapple, in a fairly literal-minded fashion, with the meaning of each individual moment brings to light, even if it doesn't thoroughly explore, Hamlet's depths. Branagh is neither an opportunist nor is he principally interested in showing off his declamatory skills, and his fundamental artistic integrity wins the day.

Shakespeare is presumed to have written Hamlet around the year 1600. The essential plot of the play is well known: a Danish prince commits himself to revenge the murder of his father, the king, at the hands of the king's own brother, who has married his victim's widow. The story derives from a Scandinavian folk-tale set down in the twelfth century in Latin by the Dane Saxo Grammaticus. A Frenchman, François de Belleforest, retold it in 1580. Thomas Kyd or another of Shakespeare's contemporaries is believed to have adapted the story for the English stage some time before 1598; that play is lost. The popularity of Shakespeare's version was immediate and enduring.

From the socio-historical point of view, the essential dilemma of the play is not so hard to fathom. The German playwright Bertolt Brecht offered a reading which remains useful as far as it goes. Branagh's approach to the play strongly suggests that he is familiar with this interpretation.

Brecht noted that the play was set in an age of warriors and placed great emphasis on the bloody struggles for power, both within Denmark and between Denmark and Norway, that frame the essential action. In most productions, Olivier's for instance, these elements are cut down or entirely excised. The turning point of the play, in Brecht's view, comes when Hamlet encounters the Norwegian prince Fortinbras, who is leading his army into a predatory war against Poland. Brecht writes: "Overcome by this warrior-like example, he [Hamlet] turns back and in a piece of barbaric butchery brings about the death of his uncle, his mother, and himself, leaving Denmark to the Norwegian. These events show the young man...making the most ineffective use of the new approach to Reason which he has picked up at the University of Wittenberg. In the feudal business to which he returns it simply hampers him. Faced with irrational practices, his reason is utterly unpractical."

This interpretation is certainly a cut above those that suggest the play is merely the study of a man who "can't make up his mind." However, it would be reductive indeed to leave the matter there. The conflict between "the new approach to Reason" and "the feudal business" found artistic expression in countless works, many of which are no longer read or performed. Why does Hamlet still fascinate us?

There is, of course, the language, the wit, the sheer variety of voices and tones, which Branagh's version makes available to the spectator. How many familiar phrases, which still find echo today, there are in this play! "Frailty, thy name is woman," "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark," "The time is out of joint," "Though this be madness, yet there is method in't," "The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king," "The lady protests too much" and so forth and so on. This is not a secondary matter. No authority can introduce a phrase or adage into the language by means of legislation, much less oblige anyone to use it. By their choice of expression people over the course of decades and centuries reveal a collective understanding that the given words catch something of life in a unique fashion.

There is furthermore in Hamlet the sheer range of themes and problems: love and hate, in a multitude of forms; the fear of death, the wish for death, death itself; primal psychological relations-between parents and children, between siblings. In passing, there is a devastating critique of a social order which oozes abuse of power, corruption and dishonesty from every pore. The problems of appearance and reality, madness and sanity, passion and reason, free will and determinism, are not simply discussed, they are given dramatic flesh and fought out before one's eyes. The play Hamlet contains another play, partly written and directed by the character Hamlet, which provides the opportunity for a consideration of the art of acting and drama itself.

But there is something more than all that in Shakespeare's play. What is Hamlet? A man who detects lies and dishonesty, who deliberately seeks out treachery and crime, who sets out, at whatever the cost, to lance the moral and social abscess. Throughout most of the play-until, that is, its bloody denouement-his intellect operates like an acid poured over the personalities and actions of every character, including himself. He curses his uncle, berates his mother, scorns his lover, insults her father, taunts her brother and lacerates himself.

In the same speech Hamlet can declare: "What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how noble in faculty...in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god!...And yet to me what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights me not." Or consider the beautiful, terrifying self-analysis he makes to his former lover Ophelia: "I am myself indifferent honest, but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me. I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offenses at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. What should such fellows as I do crawling between heaven and earth?" It is this voice--at once arrogant and self-hating, forthright, infinitely mutable--that stays with one.

One senses in the presence of Hamlet that a new type of personality, more human than those previously existing, has arrived on the scene of history, a restless, dissatisfied personality that will leave nothing untouched. If one only considers the intelligence demonstrated, the level of analysis attained--what can remain hidden for long from such eyes? Does not the play make clear that humanity has reached a stage at which it becomes possible--perhaps not for the individual Hamlet, but for humanity as a whole if it adopts his methods--to discover the truth about things?

Hegel, in his remarks on Shakespeare, says of Hamlet: "The sandbank of finite condition will not content his spirit. As the focus of such mourning and weakness, such melancholy, such a loathing of all the conditions of life, we feel from the first that, hemmed within such an environment of horror, he is a lost man..." He is lost, not because he endlessly probes and uncovers, but because he lives in barbaric times and is a barbarian himself.

It is this refusal to be contented by "finite condition," by the already existent, that is so compelling. Hegel commented that Shakespeare confers on his characters "intelligence and imagination; and, by means of the image in which they-by virtue of that intelligence-contemplate themselves objectively as a work of art, he makes them free artists of themselves..." (Emphasis added)

That is to say, mankind has not only reached the point at which external reality can be grasped in its essence, but men and women are potentially endowed with the ability to remake themselves and their world. Hamlet is hemmed in by his "environment of horror," but if material circumstances were to catch up with his consciousness, what would limit him, or any of us? In this sense the play, if deeply felt and thought about, directs the spectator to the problem of human freedom. It makes tangible the possibility of humanity consciously constructing for itself a harmonious and complete life.

Shakespeare is an essential ingredient of the intellectual air we ought to be breathing. The extent to which Branagh is conscious of these issues is unclear and may, in any event, be an academic matter. His production, including his performance in the leading role, serves as a means for their general apprehension. That deserves heartfelt congratulation.