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Laurence Olivier's Freudian Hamlet: An Indecisive Procrastinator with Mommy Issues

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In the opening of his 1948 Hamlet , Laurence Olivier identifies indecisiveness as the prince's tragic flaw, the "particular fault" that brings about his downfall. As the film unfolds, Olivier provides a Freudian explanation for that indecisiveness. I don't buy this interpretation of the play, but the film remains one of my favorites. Its unforgettable performances and creative camera work make it one of the best Shakespeare movies. It’s my desert-island Hamlet film. I've come to enjoy its Freudianism the way I enjoy the clothing or cars in a film noir, as an entertaining artifact of mid-twentieth-century culture. Introducing Hamlet's "Particular Fault" The opening credits roll over a castle that perches atop a surreally high promontory rising from a roiling sea. After the credits finish, the screen goes black, and then we see swirling fog and a title: "SCENE — ELSINORE." The fog parts to reveal the castle and tower again, only now they...
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My Favorite "Moment of Happiness/Celebration in Shakespeare"

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Henry Stacy Marks (1829-1898), pen and ink drawing of The Winter's Tale Act Five Last year,  Andy McLean , who was compiling a series of posts for the  Bell Shakespeare blog , asked me to choose my "favorite moment of happiness/celebration in Shakespeare." Here's an explanation of my choice. Moments of happiness in Shakespeare often come as a surprise to his characters, the most extreme examples being when loved ones thought to be dead are revealed to be alive. This happens in Much Ado About Nothing, Pericles , The Winter's Tale , and The Tempest . In each of these except Pericles , characters are manipulated into believing themselves responsible for their loved ones' deaths. In Much Ado and Winter's Tale , Friar Francis and Paulina make Claudio and Leontes believe that Hero and Hermione have died of shame. In The Tempest , Ariel appears in the guise of harpy to tell Alonso that his ill treatment of Prospero and Miranda has angered "the powers"...
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The Most Romantic Moment in Shakespeare?

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Helena Bonham Carter, Imogen Stubbs, and Toby Stephens in Trevor Nunn's 1996 Twelfth Night When asked to choose the most romantic moment in Shakespeare, many Bardophiles will likely choose a moment in Romeo and Juliet 's balcony scene or the scene in its entirety. That's a fine choice, but when I was asked this question for the Bell Shakespeare blog , the moment that popped into my head was from the last scene of Twelfth Night –the climax of Viola's agonizing, unrequited love.  We first hear of her agony at the end of her first appearance as a boy, after Orsino asks her to woo Olivia: " a barful strife! / Whoe'er I woo, myself would be his wife." Shakespeare had used this situation—a disguised woman forced to woo a rival—in one of his earliest plays, The Two Gentlemen of Verona . Verona 's Julia woos her rival for her beloved, but the rival doesn't fall in love with her disguised self, as Olivia falls in love with Viola/Cesario. That twist increase...
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Disney's 1959 Shaggy Dog Scared the S—t Out of Me

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In my last post , I described why I think the scene after Duncan's murder is one of the most frightening in Macbeth . I forgot to mention one of its most frightening features, that Macbeth can never return to being what he was before the murder.  This made me think about a movie that scared the s—t out of me when I was a kid: the 1959 Walt Disney comedy The Shaggy Dog . I saw it in 1969 as part of a rerelease double feature with The Absent-Minded Professor .  The film was advertised as "a new kind of horror movie . . . HORRIBLY FUNNY!" But to me there was very little that was funny about it. The main character's metamorphosis was scary, but what was truly terrifying was the sense that the transformation was permanent, that he could never go back to what he was. That was far scarier than the fighting trees in The Wizard of Oz , though those were plenty scary.
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A Candidate for the "Scariest Moment in Shakespeare"

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  Jon Finch and Francesca Annis in Roman Polanski's 1971 Macbeth   Two years ago, Andy McLean asked me to be part of a panel for Bell Shakespeare, the national Australian Shakespeare company. We were asked to vote for Shakespeare's greatest death scene and greatest lovers . Choosing the death scene was easy—I think it's hard to top Cleopatra's suicide. Choosing the lovers was tough. I went with Romeo and Juliet, though when I saw the winner, Shakespeare and the "lovely boy" of the sonnets , I wished that I had thought of it.   This year, I've been asked to choose a candidate for the " scariest moment in Shakespeare ."  I simplified my decision by eliminating moments that are not merely scary, but horrifying, like Lavinia being dragged away to be raped and mutilated in Titus Andronicus .   Macbeth has its moment of pure horror—when the Macduff boy is murdered in front of his mother—but much of the rest of the play is "scary," in the s...
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Seven Reasons Why Someone Who Doesn't Usually Read Epic Fantasy Might Want to Try Joe Abercrombie's First Law Trilogy

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I gobbled up a huge amount of science fiction and fantasy when I was a kid, but had largely stopped reading it by the time I went to college. Though I still read SF&F by "literary" writers, for years I didn't read anything that might be found in a bookstore's science-fiction-and-fantasy section. I even sold my collection of SF&F paperbacks, something I regret, much as Ray Bradbury regretted selling his collection of Buck Rogers comics . About fifteen years ago, I began reading science fiction and fantasy again. I'm not sure why. Perhaps what happened to me was what C. S. Lewis told his goddaughter might happen to her—I became "old enough to start reading fairy tales again" (dedication in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe ). Or perhaps I was inspired by reading fantasy children's books aloud to my daughters (the greatest reading experience of my life). Or perhaps the change came when, prompted by good reviews, I read Susanna Clar...
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Alexander Barnett's King Lear

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Alexander Barnett's King Lear , which was released worldwide in October, is also available in a fifteen-episode version on Vimeo . Here's a preview.  
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Accurate List of Hamlet's Soliloquies

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Though Hamlet's "To be or not to be" speech is his fourth soliloquy, many websites call it his third. They're skipping the twenty-line speech that follows his interview with the Ghost, which in my view is a particularly bad mistake since Hamlet's monomaniacal vow there is at the heart of his tragedy. The internet's cosmic sinkhole of misinformation will never be filled, but it's worth throwing some dirt in when we can, so here's an accurate list of Hamlet's soliloquies, with a short description of where they occur and what they say, along with a few observations.
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Seven Reasons Why Someone Who Doesn't Usually Read Epic Fantasy Might Want to Try Joe Abercrombie's First Law Trilogy

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I gobbled up a huge amount of science fiction and fantasy when I was a kid, but had largely stopped reading it by the time I went to college. Though I still read SF&F by "literary" writers, for years I didn't read anything that might be found in a bookstore's science-fiction-and-fantasy section. I even sold my collection of SF&F paperbacks, something I regret, much as Ray Bradbury regretted selling his collection of Buck Rogers comics . About fifteen years ago, I began reading science fiction and fantasy again. I'm not sure why. Perhaps what happened to me was what C. S. Lewis told his goddaughter might happen to her—I became "old enough to start reading fairy tales again" (dedication in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe ). Or perhaps I was inspired by reading fantasy children's books aloud to my daughters (the greatest reading experience of my life). Or perhaps the change came when, prompted by good reviews, I read Susanna Clar...
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"To Be or Not to Be" in Laurence Olivier's Hamlet

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I once asked readers of this blog to vote for the best of four movie performances of Hamlet's fourth soliloquy (3.1.58-90). (If you'd like to compare them, they're posted here .) I now regret not asking about more than the acting since other elements contribute so much to these interpretations. For instance, each rendition is reinforced with a different setting. Franco Zeffirelli puts Mel Gibson's melancholy musings in a crypt, while Kenneth Branagh, who won the poll, has his Hamlet rage at a one-way mirror behind which Claudius and Polonius are hiding. Michael Almereyda—like many of you, I'm eager to see his Cymbeline —has Ethan Hawke meditate in voiceover while walking past the "ACTION" shelves in a Blockbuster, a contemporary setting in 2000 that now looks as dated as rotary phones and typewriters. Elsinore Laurence Olivier sets the soliloquy on the castle tower that he first shows us at the beginning of his 1948 film. As I described in my p...
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