Larry

My melancholy month
A dozen Hamlets

The project that gave birth to this blog was a plan to screen as
many DVD versions as I could find of Shakespeare's tragedy of the melancholy
Dane, but if that was the birth, then the impregnation (or rather, farther back,
the foreplay, or even the first flirtation--but enough of that metaphor) was a
decision this winter to forgo my annual screening of the 1976 BBC miniseries I, Claudius in favor of rereading the Robert Graves novels on which the
series was based. Yes, that's right: every winter for the past, I don't know,
eight? ten? years, I've devoted eleven-plus hours of my winter
entertainment to what is essentially a soap opera about the imperial family of
first-century Rome. But not this winter.

That decision left a void in my wintertime weeknight dinnertime
viewing. (Let's strive for One Element of My Anality per paragraph: Monday
through Thursday, I typically watch a TV show on DVD with dinner; Friday through
Sunday evening, I watch a dinnertime DVD movie.) No problem: having completed my collection of the HBO western Deadwood, I was ready to re-view the entire run.

That in turn meant that I'd have thirty-six nights
worth of weeknight dinnertime entertainment reserved from my own DVD library,
rather than the usual thirteen. And that meant (here comes this
paragraph's anality fact) that instead of my standard employment of my
two-at-a-time-unlimited Netflix subscription--one TV disc and one movie per
week--I'd have both slots free for movies for the majority of the winter. So why
not do something unusual with that freedom?

Now at about this time I was reading a story in the New
Yorker--while on the stair machine in the morning, as is my wont (a.f.
#4)--about the contrast between Laurence Olivier's and Orson Welles's treatments
of Shakespeare when I thought, "The play's the thing!" Well, not in those words,
exactly, but I did decide right then to dine whole-Hamlet. So I loaded
my Netflix queue and reread the play, jotting a set of questions to ask about
each production.

Since I started the project, a friend has directed me to an existing Nine Hamlets, and then I stumbled onto the Hamlet Weblog. I'll read these once I've finished my own, and I'll look for the 15 or 20 more such sites that are probably out there, but for now, enough prologue; to it:

Who, when, how long?

Olivier, 1948, 2½ hr.

What sort of Hamlet?

Pretty.

What's missing?

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (and thus "I have of late . . . lost all my mirth"--the "What a piece of work is [a] man" bit that, because of Hair, is for my generation the most familiar, if rearranged and imprecisely quoted, passage); Fortinbras, and indeed any notion of Norway or the threat of war; Clown 2 (and thus the Gravediggers' dialogue before Hamlet and Horatio arrive).

What's changed?

The "nunnery" encounter preceded "To be," which is in turn followed by the (R&G-less) arrival of the players, whose scenes are thus consecutive. Ham's instructions to Hor to observe Claudius during the inserted speech are truncated, and the play is dumbshow only. Hor. gets some of Ham's lines with the Gravedigger, and he gets the nonexistent Fortinbras's final speech of the play dictating funeral arrangements for Ham--but that speech is then followed by "Good night, sweet prince/And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!" as the final lines of the film.

What's odd?

• Ophelia floating on her back in the river, singing.
• The sets, especially the (obvious) miniatures, seem to have been made of papier-mâché in Mrs. Willoughby's fourth-grade classroom.
• Ham's Howard Beale-like swoon after each encounter with the Ghost.
• A prologue, employing the "So oft it chances" line from act I, scene 4, followed by the utterly twentieth-century "This is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind"--bizarre.
• The "bare bodkin" looks like a letter opener; Ham drops it into the bay at "thus conscience."

Flesh is "too too" what?

Solid. And in another element with a significant variant, Ham does not jump into Ophelia's grave.

Ghost?

Zombiesque, or maybe a Greek tragedy mask. He's invisible in the scene in Gertrude's closet, but for a blurry moment.

Hamlet-Gertrude eros?

Yes, à la Lesbos. Claudius sees the mutual attraction, incidentally, and is jealous as hell. Also, Gert is completely convinced by Hamlet after the killing of Polonius and rejects Claud's touch thereafter.

Other people?

Ophelia and Laertes are sweet, dumb children of their father. Osric is an over-the-top fop--even gets to take a pratfall down stairs.

Olivier's approach is clearly to understate and subtilize the hero, allowing him anger only in his mother's closet and obvious disorientation only in the meetings with the ghost (where the focus-fucking camerawork anticipates Vertigo). Soliloquies presented mostly as voiceover. Approach to cutting is brave: rather than nibble at the edges, hack w/ a broadsword. Four bare bodkins.