At last Kenneth Branagh got around to releasing his 1996 film of Hamlet to DVD, and circumstances dealt me an opportunity for an uninterrupted viewing. This is the complete Hamlet and it's magnificent -- I can't praise it more highly as a film than to point out that it manages to include roles by Billy Crystal and Robin Williams without making either of them annoying. Not many films can say that.
I think I'll credit the completeness of this production for the degree to which the play's focus on cosmology stands out. Other productions of Hamlet seem more focused on Hamlet's sense of honor or his sanity-insanity tightrope antics, which is to say, other productions focus too much on the title character and pare the play down to an opportunity for an actor to put in his Big Serious Shakespearean Role -- I purposely didn't mention Mel Gibson by name.
To be fair, the Hamlet character is enormously rich and varied, but Branagh allows the richness of the character feed the larger philosophical themes rather than vice-versa. There are, of course, Hamlet's most famous lines, which are arguably Shakespeare's and English literature's most famous lines, in which he weighs the option of suicide. I'll only quote from them because it would seem lazy not to, and because I don't know if there will be another post about Hamlet on this blog:
... who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all
Anyone else would have rendered this as "life sucks, but the afterlife might be worse, so suicide is a big risk," but this is Shakespeare at the height of his powers, using his amazing facility for poetic expression to linger over the question at the center of the play, thus using poetry where someone else might have used exclamation marks, yelling, cursing, or, in George W. Bush's case, nauseating overuse of the phrase "in other words ..."
Hamlet later has the opportunity to kill Claudius, but declines to do so because he sees him in prayer and refuses to give him a death in a state of grace. Lesser productions of the play portray this as just another example of the Hamlet character's vacillations, but Branagh's Hamlet seems perfectly resolute in the decision, confirmed in his plans rather than plagued by his doubts, evoking the exact words of his father's ghost's importunings:
[Hamlet]: O, this is hire and salary, not revenge.
He took my father grossly, full of bread;
With all his crimes broad blown, as flush as May;
And how his audit stands who knows save heaven?
But in our circumstance and course of thought,
'Tis heavy with him: and am I then revenged,
To take him in the purging of his soul,
When he is fit and season'd for his passage?
No!
The "No!" is unambiguous and unwavering in the text and in Branagh's production. I see Hamlet's loquacity not as hesitation but as another example where Shakespeare elongates the poetic expression to linger on the play's very long view of life, death, the afterlife, and how they interrelate. It is an interpretive stretch well within the reach of English departments everywhere to note Hamlet's use of money-related words like
audit,
hire,
salary, and
flush, and to connect those with similar words used by the Ghost when describing the state of his salvational balance, so to speak, at the time of his murder: "no reckoning made, but sent to my account / with all my imperfections on my head."
The fate of souls after death arises again, and very forcefully in theological terms, at the grave of Ophelia. Questioned by the grieving Laertes about the minimal rites granted his sister, the Priest replies curtly, with doctrinaire assurances that come so easily to someone with no personal stake in the matter:
Her obsequies have been as far enlarged
As we have warrantise: her death was doubtful;
And, but that great command o'ersways the order,
She should in ground unsanctified have lodged
Till the last trumpet: for charitable prayers,
Shards, flints and pebbles should be thrown on her;
Yet here she is allow'd her virgin crants,
Her maiden strewments and the bringing home
Of bell and burial.
LAERTES
Must there no more be done?
FIRST PRIEST
No more be done:
We should profane the service of the dead
To sing a requiem and such rest to her
As to peace-parted souls.
LAERTES
Lay her i' the earth:
And from her fair and unpolluted flesh
May violets spring! I tell thee, churlish priest,
A ministering angel shall my sister be,
When thou liest howling.
HAMLET
What, the fair Ophelia!
The contrast between clerical aloofness and human connectedness goes from 10 to
Spinal Tap 11 here, for it is here when Hamlet realizes the funeral he's been watching from the sidelines and shadows is for Ophelia, the woman with whom he has been toying for so long. Suddenly he is flooded with passions of love and grief, and it takes no small effort to keep Hamlet and Laertes from strangling one another over who loved her more. Their conflict builds from here and rolls through the play's bloody end, when Hamlet succeeds in avenging his father's ghost, and Laertes and Hamlet, in the last moments of life, realize common destinies and human affinities that outweigh the petty schemings leading to this point:
LAERTES
He [Claudius] is justly served;
It is a poison temper'd by himself.
Exchange forgiveness with me, noble Hamlet:
Mine and my father's death come not upon thee,
Nor thine on me. [Dies]
HAMLET
Heaven make thee free of it! I follow thee.
Regarding what comes next, they have resignation and small hope.
