When Laurence Olivier’s film of Hamlet—Shakespeare’s longest and most deeply philosophical play—opened in 1948, the critics were almost without exception entranced. The exhilarating production won four Oscars, including Best Actor and Best Picture. Olivier’s celebrated version also paved the way for other filmmakers to significantly cut the text, an action already commonly undertaken in stage performances, but one which later critics were to lament. Among other cuts, Olivier and his co-editor, Alan Dent, struck Rosencrantz and Guildenstern from the text along with Fortinbras’ last entrance and at least two of Hamlet’s most famous soliloquies. Had Olivier massacred the Bard?
Kenneth Branagh may have thought so. His 1996 production showcased nearly the entire script, resulting in a film with a running time of 4 hours and 2 minutes, nearly 1.5 hours longer than Olivier’s production half a century before, which came in at a slick 153 minutes. (It may or may not be significant that Branagh’s version garnered zero Academy Awards, though it did receive four nominations that did not include either Best Actor or Best Picture, but did include Best Writing – Adapted Screenplay).
Counter-critics to those lamenting Olivier’s cuts have praised the 1948 production for being, for example, ‘thrillingly intelligent and moving’ (Rafferty, 2000, para. 3), also referring to the interpretation as having been sensitively reduced to its ‘largest, most mysterious, and most intractable theme’ (Rafferty, 2000, para. 4): morality.
The London Literary Salon’s latest study of Hamlet also examines a carefully curated script. Our study will focus on 2,600 of Hamlet’s 4,167 lines. We will be working from the 1604 quarto, which was printed from a manuscript believed to be Shakespeare’s ‘foul papers’ (his rough drafts). Our own ‘version’ is more exhaustive than Olivier’s. It includes all the play’s subplots—Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Fortinbras, and Hamlet’s relationship with Ophelia—as well as all of Hamlet’s soliloquies. Together, we will dive into the heart of the text, considering not only its philosophical core but also its most spectral and cinematic aspects: the paranormal, incest, adultery, murder, madness, and above all, revenge.
References: Rafferty, T. (2000). Hamlet. The Criterion Collection.
