ACTIVE VIEWING ASSIGNMENT
While watching Zeffirelli’s production of Hamlet pay careful attention to the details chosen and decisions
made. Mel Gibson, Helena Bonham Carter, Glenn Close and the rest of the cast bring Zefirrelli’s cast to
life. Use the grid below to take notes on the characters and how they act and appear.
Using the notes you’ve taken below and the attached commentary by Frank Kermode write a detailed
response discussing what you think of Zeffirelli’s work. Your response should be at least 3 welldeveloped (beefy) ¶‘s, include no less than a total of 4 quotes from Kermode (attached) and / or
Shakespeare (Use Act.Scene.Line format for Hamlet), and be word-processed.
Character
Hamlet
King Claudius
Queen Gertrude
Polonius
Ophelia
Horatio
Laertes
Costuming
Actions
Attitude
ACTIVE VIEWING ASSIGNMENT
Reading / Note-taking Directions: As you read the commentary below highlight important information
(details that intrigue or interest you and information you question or disagree / agree with) by
highlighting, underlining or bolding the text. This will make your life easier when writing the assigned
response. (I like to highlight myself; you can even choose different colors.)
The Zeffirelli Hamlet: A Commentary by Frank Kermode
Shakespeare's Hamlet is four hundred years old. It survives only because it has been constantly reimagined, made available to later audiences by the intelligence and the art of later directors and actors. It
is their job to make the piece modern and thus to reaffirm its value in the different circumstances of our
world. That is what Franco Zeffirelli and his team have done in their film of Hamlet.
To get some idea of their achievement it is helpful to remember certain historical facts about
Shakespeare's play. First of all, and most obviously, Hamlet is exceedingly long. The Globe was an openair theatre without artificial lighting. Hamlet is expertly written to use the facilities and exploit the design
of such a playing place, but its full text was simply too long. Imagine a performance given in a winter
afternoon beginning at two o'clock. It would have end between four and five, since after that the actors
would be invisible. But a full text would have taken four hours at least. So, even in the Elisabethan theater
for which it was written, Hamlet was probably never performed in its entirety.
Shakespeare was the principal playwright of the time and a part owner of the Globe, so he knew its
limitation as well as its virtues. His much-admired opening scene is there partly to establish that the action
has to be imagined as taking place in the dark - it was really 2 p.m. and broad daylight, but the ghost
appears sharp at 1 a.m. Such device is, of course, unnecessary in a film, and Zeffirelli has, possibly with
regret but quite rightly, cut the scene.
We simply don't know why in this occasion Shakespeare wrote so much text - Hamlet is about twice as
long as Macbeth. A fair guess is that he fell in love with the story and took so much pleasure in
elaborating it that he didn't want to stop. So he wrote it at length, knowing it could be cut to suit the time
and also the place of performance. We happen to know that in 1607 it was performed on a freighter
anchored off the coast of Sierra Leone, and we can imagine how much adaptation that required.
The prime modern playing place for drama, especially when it has a lot of action, is the cinema, and
putting a play on to the screen is a task that makes its own peculiar demands. There have to be cuts and
changes. When you cut a text you change it, and if you do so thoughtfully, imaginatively, you are doing
what must always be done if you don't want to be left with a sterile classic - you are re-interpreting it,
making it modern, making it speak clearly to a new, popular, youthful audience. This is what the Zeffirelli
film does. And it is what the original play did, too. The original audience went to see a play adapted from
an earlier play by the best writer around, with the best actor, the great star Richard Burbage, in the
principal part. Its modern counterpart goes to see how a major director adapts and reworks a major play,
with a major screen star instead of Burbage.
It might still seem that the first audience had certain advantages over us. Hamlet was a Revenge Play, and
they knew about Revenge Plays the way we know about Westerns. They were used to ghosts coming back
to explain how they got murdered, and they had seen other heroes working out various problems before
getting round to taking the revenge their filial duty required... And although they were always being told
how wicked it was, they were probably easier with the whole idea of personal revenge than we are. But
the modern cinema audience is familiar enough with supernatural occurrences, with indiscriminate
slaughter, and with stories that roughly follow conventional lines, as in Western or science-fiction or
police movies. At their best, such stories can, like Hamlet, be about deep and anxious human
relationships.
ACTIVE VIEWING ASSIGNMENT
Another possible stumbling block for modern people is the language of the piece. It is in English, but the
English of 1600. With a little effort this apparent problem disappears, for it really is the same language,
only used more expansively and more memorably. Here it is important that quite a lot of Hamlet has
passed into ordinary speech, like "To be or not to be" or "To thine own self be true" or "There are more
things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy". To that extent some of its language is
already familiar to people who have never seen or read it. Hearing more of it, they may be surprised not
only by its scope but by its intelligibility.
What a modern audience needs is simply that the actors should understand what they are saying, and say
it with clarity and intelligence. We need to listen carefully, but if they do their part that becomes an
exciting and agreeable exercise. With a cast like that of the Zeffirelli film there is no difficulty. They have
all done their work with professional skill, and I don't think I have heard the lines of the play spoken by
an entire cast with such authority and resource as in this film.
All Hamlets however original in conception, need to have certain qualities in common. Clarity of speech
is one such quality. Another is vivid action. The play is full of treachery, intrigue and violence. People
talk about Hamlet as a gloomy Dane, and it is true that he is prone to melancholy. But he is also highspirited, even wild. He is an athlete - a fencer good enough to bear Laertes, who has been coached by a
French champion. He is just as vigorous mentally, penetrating, witty, zany. He easily sees through the
pretenses of the unhappy spies, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Baiting Polonius he is both clever and
cruel. Disposing of the old man's body he is both ruthless and coarse. When the travelling players arrive
he skillfully doctors their play to trap his uncle the king. He has the arrogance and charm and sometimes
the courtesy of a prince, as well as the moodiness and occasionally the craziness of a clever student. We
all know that clever young people often have plenty to worry about, even if it isn't as bad as murder or
incest. The point is that Hamlet, with his weird mixture of brilliance and melancholy, decision and
indecision, mania and depression, is not altogether unlike people we've all met, only a grander scale. He is
vivid, dangerous, unpredictable, violent, crazy even when he's not pretending to be. He is a multiple killer
and he talks like an angel...
The Hamlet here presented by Mel Gibson under Zeffirelli's direction fits this pattern. We see him under
pressure, trapped in a corrupt court dominated by his enemy and his target, the king - crafty, lecherous,
hard-drinking murderer who has grabbed the dead king's throne and also his thoughtless widow, Hamlet's
mother. Polonius, heavy father, trusted counselor, windbag and spy, is no match for Hamlet, but the king
is another matter, so crafty that he brings about his own downfall.
With all these people Hamlet handles himself well. His treatment of Ophelia, the daughter of Polonius,
whom he had once courted, may seem more ambiguous, less controlled. Ophelia presents special
problems to director and player. At first she seems to be merely the meek daughter, typically oppressed at
home, and bewildered by Hamlet's strange behaviour. But later she loses her wits. In her madness she is
the ancestress of many heroines who go charmingly crazy on stage, and there is a risk that she herself may
seem just that, so she must be re-imagined in a way that gets rid of mere theatrical prettiness. Ophelia's
mad talk and song is full of sexual references.
In this film Helena Bonham-Carter's Ophelia - betrayed and beyond help, bawdy and mad - is powerful,
modern, freshly imagined, lacking that fatal staginess. The part has recovered what we can imagine to
have been its original force.
There is, in the play, a famous scene in which Hamlet half-crazily tells Ophelia not to trust men, and to
avoid the corruption he sees in all women (especially his mother) by flying to a nunnery. The film
transfers this material to the scene of the play within the play, when Hamlet, about to expose the crime of
ACTIVE VIEWING ASSIGNMENT
the king, is in his most manic mood, bold, arrogant and foulmouthed. The "nunnery" material works very
well in the atmosphere of diseased excitement, and moving it enables Zeffirelli to bring together the older
and the younger woman, the Queen and Ophelia, each in a different way loved by Hamlet. Disgusted by
his mother's corrupt sexual connection, Hamlet simultaneously urges Ophelia to avoid, if only by
abstinence, the horror and corruption he now associates with sex. It is a bold and brilliant move, another
genuine reimagining of the story.
The root tragedy of Hamlet lies in the agonizing relationship with his mother, who has become "my
father's brother's wife" - a way to putting it that stresses an unnatural distance within their closeness. The
scene in which Hamlet accost his mother in her bedroom is very boldly handled in the movie - the
implications of sexual pathos and sexual violence are brought out by transforming a bitterly reproachful
conversation into what almost looks like a sexual assault.
Hamlet's condemnation of his mother, his repeated insistence that she stay out of her husband's bed, are
thus made more visual and more forceful. He is maddened by the thought that his mother and the hated
king can be thought of as "one flesh" and he torments himself by following up the logic of this and calling
the king "Mother".
This is the heart of the matter, as Zeffirelli's script makes clear from the onset. He replaces Shakespeare's
opening scene on the battlements with the funeral of the old king, Hamlet's father, and gives the new king,
his uncle and stepfather, the first pregnant line: "Think of us like a father". This use of the royal plural
"us" compounds the injury to Hamlet, for he has lot not only a father but also his succession to the throne.
And he will shortly lose his mother to this same odious king.
Before he can have his revenge he must outwit his enemy. The path to success is difficult. By the time he
finishes off the king, Hamlet has already killed Polonius, Rosencrantz and Guilderstern and Laertes; and
he has seen Ophelia and his mother dead.
Hamlet, because of his moment of melancholy and brooding over his own inaction, has sometimes been
played as a wimp. Those who watch - and hear - Mel Gibson's vigorous and sensitive performance will
easily see that such readings of the part are wrong. Zeffirelli won't let you forget that in the claustrophobic
and corrupt atmosphere of his court the sensitive, even introspective, Hamlet needs to be active,
resourceful, sometimes cruel, as he is in this film.
In fact, his is a Hamlet that stays faithful to its original by re-imagining the play as a classic for modern
audiences, audiences who understand films and, like their ancestors, went to see a favorite star as Hamlet.
It is, after all, the greatest of all starring roles in the tradition of the popular theatre, and that tradition is
best carried on by such movies as this one.