Getting Hamlet Wrong

I recently watch the Laurence Olivier version of Hamlet from way back. Jean Simmons, so lovely, played Ophelia. It had a lot to commend it, and I probably know Hamlet as well as any of Shakespeare's plays (definitely more than Lear, and quite a bit better than Othello and MacBeth). 

However, at the beginning of the film, Olivier has a voice-over where he says, "This is the story of a man who could not make up his mind."

What? How could they represent it that way? It makes the play sound like watching a man decide on a burger or a chicken sandwich. I wonder if he said that as a joke about the shallowness of Hollywood (that is, that's how the Aerican film public would see it).

Hamlet is about a man grieving and in existential crisis, not about indecision. Yes, he is trying to take revenge and cannot bring himself to it, talking himself out of it at various times, but it's the why that matters. 

Yet I like to turn plot on their heads. What if the ghost is malevolent? Why trust a ghost, anyway? What if the ghost is lying to bring chaos to the kingdom? What if Gertrude and Claudius have conspired to kill the older Hamlet because he was a wicked, unjust king and this was for the kingdom's best, and younger Hamlet is so self-absorbed, narcissistic, or mentally ill that he has missed the reality about his father? 

When teaching it over several years and watching many versions, I had wondered if Shakespeare was drawing on the writing of Machievelli in The Prince--the idea that a king must lack scruples for the good of the nation. And Hamlet the Younger has too many scruples. perhaps? I did find that there was scholarship on that subject. 

Whic brings me to the topic that most performances overlook--the first and last parts of the play, and some interludes within it. Fortinbras wants to conquer Denmark and uses the chaos, the something rotten there, to achieve his goals. Of the versions I've seen, only Kenneth Branagh's gets this--Fortinbras, played by Rufus Sewell, takes over at the end, sitting on the throne. 

It's a dense and wonderful play, and Hamlet is no hero. He ends up as unscrupulous as he believes his uncle to me. His treatment of Ophelia is wicked. He kills (or secures the death) of his "friends." He cares nothing for the country and people and its security. He murders Polonius and jokes about it. He whines about himself. 

And I've never figured out why the bedroom scene with his mother is staged like an attack, even a rape at times. The language doesn't require it (just like the fact that performances of The Doll's House has Torvald strike Nora, and that's not in the script--as if we can't see her oppression, and her complicity in it, without physical abuse). Nothing in the script of that scene in Hamlet means Gertrude has to be pulled around and knocked on the bed. I have been told these are post-Freudian interpretations and not how it was performed in the 1800s and before. That makes sense. Audiences then would not have stood for the implication of incest. We are too weird, and do. (Well, I don't. I hate those versions. They are just gross.)

I am planning out a novel about a cult group based on a retelling of Hamlet. The cult leader, truly evil, is murdered by his wife and a close relative but the cult leader's son, who would be the next in charge, knows its the truth but thinks his father was everything the cult said him to be, and is deluded about the whole nature of the cult, power, faith, and justice. Now, believe it or not, this is based not too loosely on something that went on (or possibly did) in Dalton, Georgia.