Screen Adaptations: Shakespeare's Hamlet ― The Relationship Between Text and Film

Hamlet is Shakespeare’s signature work, the most often produced play in the western literary canon, and a fertile global source for film adaptation. This study seeks to understand a variety of cinematic approaches to translating Shakespeare’s “words, words, words” into film’s particular grammar and rhetoric. Samuel Crowl, a noted scholar of Shakespeare on film, focuses on the importance of the screenplay, film score, setting, cinematography and editing as the director and his team find their unique way of adapting Shakespeare from text to screen.

Crowl concentrates on two sharply contrasting film versions of Hamlet by Laurence Olivier (1948) and Kenneth Branagh (1996). The films are placed in their particular post World War II and post Cold War political and cultural contexts and explored to reveal how those contexts shaped the aesthetic choices made by their directors and stars.

Olivier and Branagh are two crucial figures in the history of film adaptations of Shakespeare. Olivier’s Hamlet is the only film version of a Shakespeare play to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, and Branagh led the revival of Shakespeare on film in the 1990s and has directed more Shakespeare films, five, than any other director in the history of the genre. Their Hamlet films influenced those which followed and this book traces that influence through subsequent Hamlet films made by directors in Germany, Russia, Italy, Japan, and China as well as by those in England and America.

Samuel Crowl is Trustee Professor of English at Ohio University. He is the author of several books on Shakespeare in performance including Shakespeare Observed, Shakespeare at the Cineplex, The Films of Kenneth Branagh and Shakespeare and Film. He has lectured at colleges and universities in the United States, England, Europe, and Africa and has been five times honored for distinguished teaching.