Hamlet – Kenneth Branagh’s take on Shakespeare’s most elusive – and greatest - character.

Kenneth Branagh’s (1996) Hamlet is a four hour feast that the reluctant wife recently saw was being offered for free on one of the streaming services.  It was the only complete Hamlet to be filmed at the time and is still a brilliant and seemingly contemporary enactment.  By the time we found a four hour block to devote to it, it had been pulled from the free slot and we couldn’t find it offered anywhere.  Our anniversary weekend, we found it again and thought that watching it would be a lovely way to spend time together.  It was, but it was hardly the stuff of romance.  As Harold Bloom noted, Hamlet is in love with no one – not Ophelia (whom both the reluctant wife and I had thought was Hamlet’s sister – how did we not know she was his lover? – OH, he didn’t love anyone – this isn’t Romeo and Juliet), not his mother, not even his friends.  He stays Horatio from killing himself in the last scene not because he cares about Horatio, but because he wants Horatio to live to tell Hamlet’s tale after Hamlet realizes that he will die. 

Oddly, though, and perhaps because Hamlet does not love the characters around him, this feels less like a tragedy – which I heard described recently as the audience knowing before the hero does that his end is near – and more like an inevitability – one that the audience and the hero share knowledge of.  And, yes, despite having forgotten the relationship between Hamlet and Ophelia, this play is so familiar that the last scene with all the dead bodies strewn about the stage is in my mind from the beginning, but I think the viewers connection with the hero is much deeper than this – and I think that Bloom, again, leads us in a useful direction.  In his book, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Bloom’s thesis is that Shakespeare created the human subjectivity that Freud (and many others) would later plumb – and Hamlet is the quintessential example of this – the iconic human, filled with contradictory feelings and thoughts that need to be weighed and, as Socrates exhorted almost two millennia before - examined.  I agree with this thesis, but believe that Bloom does not push the idea quite far enough.  I will do that in a moment.

It is propitious for us to be watching Hamlet at this moment.  We have just returned from a trip to Florence and Rome, and we have been learning about the Italian renaissance.  If Shakespeare was not the kid from Avon, but Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, which I find a convincing argument, he would have been exposed to the Venetian state as it was at war with Milan and in an uneasy alliance with Florence.  He would have been rubbing shoulders with the art of the renaissance – art that was returning man as  an object of study central to the artistic endeavor - art was in the process of being released from the bonds of informing the illiterate masses of important religious stories.  In a side note, I also wonder, in terms of the idea that Edward de Vere might have had a workshop of people composing the plays, whether he would have seen the workshops of visual artists where the work of art was a product of a team rather than an individual and may have fashioned his way of working, his process in human interaction – in addition to focusing his subject matter on this thing – this human – this mind – that is so tuned to interacting with others - that he was becoming fascinated by.

Bloom places the writing of Hamlet at a pivotal moment for Shakespeare (whom Bloom definitely sees as the man from Stratford).  This play, which appears to have been a reworking of an earlier now lost play, perhaps by Shakespeare (whoever he or they was or were) himself, but perhaps by another playwright, is written at the juncture between Shakespeare’s early, light work and the great tragedies that are about to emerge from him.  This hero, this Hamlet, though, is unlike his jolly and outwardly facing Falstaff; Hamlet is an inward person – not someone resonantly connected with the world, but a person who is connected – or more precisely – trying to connect - with his internal world.  In this way, I see him as being very much like the reluctant children.  They seem impervious, in their late adolescence, to the best advice that I have to give them (as Laertes might be to Polonius), and they dive off in directions unknown to me – in the case of the reluctant son – because he tells me about the important events in his life only five years later, and in the case of the reluctant stepdaughters – about whose lives I know much more – because their decisions – which they articulate – are based on premises that are frequently opaque to me and, I think, often to them.

So, seeing Hamlet – at least in the first four acts – as the adolescent that he is – a twenty year old who is just wanting to head back to University at Wittenberg and not be bothered by all the craziness of his life at home (for instance his mother’s marriage to his uncle not two months after his father’s death and his girlfriend’s rejection of his affections - some typical, some not so typical adolescent concerns) – but who feels compelled, against his will and by his father’s ghost, to discover if his father really was killed by his uncle so that he can follow the ghost's dictate and exact revenge by killing his uncle - who is now his (step)father (not such an ordinary dilemma).  Were it up to him, we suppose, he would simply head back to Wittenberg and bury his head in his books.  But he gets caught up in the intrigue and has to keep his wits about him – he can trust no one – everyone except for Horatio is a spy for his parents – and so he appears to lose his wits to deceive the court and get himself out of town after accidentally killing his girlfriend’s father Polonius when he was talking with his mother.  Hamlet assumed that it was his uncle who was spying on him from behind a curtain and killed his girlfriend's and Laertes' father the latter would turn out to be his future  killer - again not the stuff of the typical adolescent coming of age tale. 

As we watch these first four acts, we get to know a whole ton of characters.  And they are interesting characters:  Claudius, his father-in-law, is cunning and not to be trusted.  Polonius is a dolt.  Ophelia, Polonius' daughter, apparently in love with Hamlet, is a fool who listens to Polonius and bars her doors to Hamlet.  Hamlet’s mother is bewildered – well intentioned (perhaps - we have our doubts), but clueless.  Laertes is an earnest and dutiful son who is prepared to make the best of himself and seems truly concerned, though a bit judgmental, about his sister Ophelia.  But where is Hamlet in all of this?  He seems to be the water that these other characters swim in.  Bloom, who has read the text much more closely than I, maintains that Hamlet changes his perspective on almost everything from line to line.  While those around him are characters who run true to their predictable type, he remains free to roam – to wander and to wonder - to consider things from many perspectives – but he is also, therefore, famously limited in his ability to act.

Bloom maintains that the seven soliloquies  are the places where Hamlet is able to hear himself think.  This is where Hamlet is discovering who he is.  And this sounds like a very psychoanalytic experience.  Not just that he is talking and in the process hearing himself – which is a central component of the psychoanalytic technique – but also that this is the way the psychoanalytic mind is constructed – it is a mind that acts without words – and the words that articulate what we think come after our thoughts.  We discover our most intimate and dear thoughts and feelings by putting words to them – they are not constructed by a mind that thinks primarily in words – words' function is to allow us to communicate – and here Hamlet is communicating both with the audience and himself – but also, and here again, I am indebted to Bloom, with Shakespeare.  Even someone as wordy as Shakespeare forms his words to describe his thoughts – and I think this is what Bloom means by Shakespeare inventing the human.  In this play, I think Shakespeare (whoever he or they is or are) is inventing himself by writing his thoughts – by giving words to them which, in turn, allow him to know them - and by that means to know himself.  And it is helpful – as it is to the mere mortals among us – to hear our characters speak to us – as we do in dreams when the people that we dream of, whom we necessarily have created and given scripts to, tell us stuff that seems both novel and important to hear – even if we can’t quite divine what the meaning of those words is.

In the space between the fourth and fifth act – the space of only two weeks in actual lived time – Hamlet discovers a plot against his life, dispatches those who would kill him (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern – two characters that are confused – and confused with each other – characters who are not yet human and characters that we duplicitously leading Hamlet to his death), and resolves – in one of those soliloquys at the end of the fourth act that propels us into the fifth - to quit fooling around and get down to business.  By the end of those two weeks, Hamlet has aged from twenty to now thirty years old, by the reckoning of the gravedigger, and, when he returns and responds to his uncle/father’s request to duel Laertes, who would revenge his father and sister’s death, he agrees to do so with certainty – he has been practicing at swordsmanship, but also, we think, at court intrigue and at being a competent courtesan - and he engages as a knowledgeable and decisive man in the actions that bring the plot to its close.

This play is considered to be a play about revenge, but I don’t think it is.  I don’t think the characters on the stage are actually people – I think they are characters – internalized figures that Hamlet/Shakespeare must wrestle with in order to move on with his life – not to die on the stage – but to let the part of himself that is meek – that is afraid to assert itself and take action – to die – so that the part of him that has not yet written his greatest tragedies – can come forth.  His old self – the adolescent self in whom turmoil foments - needs to be remembered – by Horatio – and by us as we listen to this play – but also to be replaced – by Fortinbras – the king from Norway who has come to fight the Danes only to find them lying dead all over the stage – and to take his seat – unopposed and uncontested – as the king of the country – or, in Shakespeare’s case, the king of the stage.  Hamlet has not died – he has been transformed.  He has lived through his adolescent angst, he has gotten his pins under him – and he is ready to move forward into the most productive and definitive period of his life.  No longer will his adolescent – but also deeply human – conflicts and uncertainties chain and delay his actions – they will serve as a springboard - as the furnace in which great plots and great characters can be fired to be forged by the hammer blows of Shakespeare’s brilliance into the plays that we most highly value.

Hamlet is driven by the ghost of his father to avenge his death – for Hamlet to kill his father’s killer and cuckolder.  But when did the cuckolding begin?  Bloom clarifies that Freud saw this as an Oedipal struggle – but we need to ask with whom?  Is Claudius his father?  Is Hamlet, his reputed father – merely the man who was married to his mother?  Does he wish for a more cunning, smarter, more modern father – one who (unlike stodgy old me with my adolescent children) could be understood as cool and conniving and someone whom his mother could love – rather than the draconian ghost who simply demands of Hamlet that he be like his namesake and kill for honor’s sake?  Does Hamlet need, at the same time, to get past the idealized (and despised) father whom he fears is in competition with him and has stolen the limelight from him?  Does he need to remain detached from the world in order to find out who he is and so is he – oddly to everyone but himself – a cold fish?  Do we, in our identification with him, realize that he feels frighteningly free if he is to cast off the demands of all of the father (and mother) figures in his life and forge his own new – subjectively determined – life?  What if he writes about people as he experiences them rather than using the tropes of the stage?  What if, when he creates his own ceiling in the Sistine Chapel, it will be a play that will be seen not just by the priests and cardinals and popes in the inner sanctum of that chapel- not just by the royals at the court of Elizabeth, but by those in the penny gallery? What if those plays encourages every(wo)man to think of him or herself as divine – as Michelangelo has encouraged those in the Chapel to imagine what it really means that God has created man is his image?  Michelangelo's images spill out from the inner sanctum to become iconic beacons that draw us from all over the world to behold who it is that we might be and what it is that we are capable of.  What if we are all gods?  What if we end up imagining that a penny actor from Stratford could create the greatest works in the English language?  Where will this end?

One place it will end is in this particular – I believe magnificent – production of Hamlet.  I have not been a big Branagh fan.  I have also seen this production once before - many years ago – but this viewing of it spoke to me in ways that were surprising.  This movie bears rewatching – on at least an occasional basis.  As Roger Ebert notes, the unabridged text used here allows aspects of this play that get swept out of the way in more typical productions to come to the fore – and enrich the experience of the internal world of Hamlet by exposing us to the richness of the characters around him.  Play on!

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