Hamlet - Full Play

16.07.2023

Hamlet is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare sometime between 1599 and 1601. It is Shakespeare's longest play, with 29,551 words. Set in Denmark, the play depicts Prince Hamlet and his attempts to exact revenge against his uncle, Claudius, who has murdered Hamlet's father in order to seize his throne and marry Hamlet's mother.

Hamlet is considered among the "most powerful and influential tragedies in the English language", with a story capable of "seemingly endless retelling and adaptation by others".

Synopsis:

The ghost of the King of Denmark tells his son Hamlet to avenge his murder by killing the new king, Hamlet's uncle. Hamlet feigns madness, contemplates life and death, and seeks revenge.

His uncle, fearing for his life, also devises plots to kill Hamlet. The play ends with a duel, during which the King, Queen, Hamlet's opponent, and Hamlet himself are all killed.

The Play:

Directed by Paul Radford

Set and Costume Design by Jeffrey Stegall

Lighting design by Richard Streeter

Director's Notes:

"Hamlet has played an important role in the history of Shakespearean performance at BJU. It was first performed in 1932 at the original campus in College Point, Florida. The production was so well received that the Classic Players took it on tour to several cities in Florida and Alabama. In 1933 Hamlet was the inaugural Classic Players production in Cleveland, Tennessee, the institution’s second home, where both players and play received a warm welcome.

Happily, Shakespeare designed the play with enough intriguing interpretative issues to keep any director and cast from reducing it to a “definitive” version. Classic Players’ productions of Hamlet have been set in several different eras, including the early Renaissance and Cavalier periods. As the 1948 program suggests, “The spirit of the play knows no limit of time or place, but is universal.”

Our current costume and set designs pay homage to the first Greenville production of Hamlet in 1948. The style is predominantly Byzantine, with glimmering color and lurking shadows, suggesting a period of opulence masking political turmoil and intrigue. The features of the set lack symmetry as the Royal Palace at Elsinore is seemingly “out of joint.” There is something “rotten in the state of Denmark,” and a reign that appears legitimate and strong already shows sign of decay.

Our Hamlet is focused on the essential moral truth at the heart of the play: the violation of one’s conscience will bring the justice of divine retribution. We follow the journey of a young man of integrity who is transformed into a “scourge” of God when he violates his own conscience in rashly killing an “unseen good old man.” Additionally, we follow the reverse journey of a murderous king who unintentionally reveals a blackened, guilty conscience before the eyes of his court. But in the case of Hamlet, Shakespeare also suggests the positive truth that Providence can enable a person to repent and correct his course, turn away from evil, and even become the instrument of its defeat.

A modern audience may not easily identify with the plight of a Danish prince called on by a tortured ghost to kill a villainous king. However, we can all relate to the human drama of a moral person faced with the ultimate question of his personal responsibility to right the wrongs in the society around him. We all must face the question, “What is the right thing to do about evil?” Viewed in this way, we see in Hamlet a mirror image of our own temptations and frailties".

The Movie:

Laurence Olivier's Hamlet was made four years after his rousingly patriotic Henry V (1944), and is a very different proposition. Unsurprisingly, given the tone and content of the play, the overall mood is that of brooding introspection - tellingly, in a phrase not in Shakespeare's original, Olivier opens by telling us that it is "the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind", foregrounding the film's central theme, a neat metaphor for the uncertainty of the immediate postwar years.

He also largely eliminates the play's political intrigue: Fortinbras is banished, and so too are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern - the three characters most indelibly associated with the world outside Elsinore. These cuts focus attention on the play's central theme: the relationship between Hamlet, his lover Ophelia, mother Gertrude and stepfather Claudius.

Olivier was forty when he played the part, old by Hamlet standards, but a side-effect of this is to intensify the latent eroticism of the scenes with his mother, most notably following Polonius' murder, but also at the climax, when it's made clear that she knowingly drinks the poison to kill herself.

Stylistically, Hamlet is quite different from Henry V. Shot in high-contrast black and white, it's not quite as overtly Expressionist as, for instance, Orson Welles' Macbeth (also 1948), but it's certainly a similarly claustrophobic, stifling experience, with none of the opening-out of its predecessor, or any continuation of Olivier's explorations of the contrast between film and theatrical performance.

Although almost entirely filmed in the studio (the major exception being Ophelia's drowning, inspired by Millais' Pre-Raphaelite painting), the crane-mounted camera is constantly on the move, constantly shifting our perception of the characters' relationship with each other in a way that would be impossible with a stage production.

The following year Hamlet became not just the first British but the first non-American film to win the Oscar for Best Picture, along with Best Actor (Olivier), Best Art Direction and Best Costume Design.

CAST

Hamlet - OLIVIER, Laurence

Gertrude - HERLIE, Eileen

Claudius - SYDNEY, Basil

Ophelia - SIMMONS, Jean

Polonius - AYLMER, Felix

Horatio - WOOLAND, Norman

Laertes - MORGAN, Terence

Gravedigger - HOLLOWAY, Stanley

Osric - CUSHING, Peter

Bernardo - KNIGHT, Esmond

Marcellus - QUAYLE, Anthony

First Player - WILLIAMS, Harcourt

Francisco - LAURIE, John

Sea Captain - MacGINNIS, Niall

Player King - TROUGHTON, Patrick

Player Queen - TARVER, Tony

Priest - THORNDIKE, Russell