Laurence Olivier's Freudian Hamlet
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're below us, as if we're looking down from the clouds, a perspective reminiscent of the opening of Olivier's 1944 Henry V, which shows us Elizabethan London from above.
Olivier's fondness for aerial perspectives may have come from his experiences as a pilot in the Royal Naval Reserve. In On Acting, he writes that seeing England from the air made him think of John of Gaunt's patriotic "sceptered isle" speech from Richard II (2.1.31-68; Olivier 268). A minor detail of this story, the plane Olivier was flying, is challenged in Terry Coleman's biography (145), but there's no reason to doubt the gist. Flying over his country made Olivier think of Shakespeare and feel patriotic.
In his Henry V, he uses the aerial perspective patriotically, to show his wartime audience a high point of English civilization at a moment when it was being threatened. In his Hamlet, he uses the perspective to introduce his vision of the play he considered Shakespeare's best.
He shows us the castle tower for a moment before letting the fog close over it. Another title appears, a version of Hamlet's "mole of nature" speech from act one, scene four. In that scene, Horatio and the soldier Marcellus have brought Hamlet to the castle parapet to see the Ghost. Before the Ghost appears, they hear kettledrums, trumpets, and cannon fire. When Hamlet explains to Horatio that these accompany the King's drinking, Horatio asks, "Is it a custom?" which raises questions about his character. Is he Danish? Why doesn't he know about the custom when he knows so much else about the Danish court, like the history of its trouble with Norway and what the old king looked like?
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Christien Anholt and Mel Gibson
in Franco Zeffirelli's 1990 Hamlet. |
Hamlet famously responds to Horatio's question by saying that the drums and trumpets are a custom but one "More honored in the breach than the observance" (1.4.18). He goes on to make an analogy between the Danish national fault of excessive drinking and individual faults. In Olivier's opening title and voiceover—and again when the speech comes up in the story—the second half of the analogy goes like this:
So oft it chances in particular men,
That for some vicious mole of nature in them,
By the o'ergrowth of some complexion,
Oft breaking down the pales and forts of reason,
Or by some habit grown too much; that these men—
Carrying, I say, the stamp of one defect,
Their virtues else—be they as pure as grace,
Shall in the general censure take corruption
From that particular fault.
(1.4.18.7-8, 11-15, 17, 19-20; emphasis added)
That the passage is specifically about Hamlet becomes clear when the title dissolves into another downward shot of the tower, which now holds Horatio and four soldiers carrying Hamlet's body. The sight of the corpse tells us that the passage we've been reading and hearing refers to the fault that led to Hamlet's undoing.
And what is that fault? Olivier doesn't make us puzzle this out. He finishes his voiceover of the "mole of nature" passage, pauses, and then tells us, "This is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind."

Hamlet as an Indecisive Procrastinator with Mommy Issues
The idea that Hamlet is about its protagonist's indecisiveness began appearing in literary criticism after the 1795-96 publication of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship. Before Goethe, most people seem to have regarded Hamlet as a decisive and vigorous character, who runs after a ghost, stabs an old man, sends boyhood friends to their deaths, jumps on a pirate ship, and wrestles in a grave. After Goethe described the prince as psychologically too weak for the task he's been given, the idea that he was an indecisive intellectual took root in criticism and popular culture. By the time Grover Jones and Dale Van Every wrote the screenplay for Souls at Sea, they could count on people in their audience recognizing this portrayal.
Seeing Hamlet as a dithering egghead crudely reduces one of literature's greatest characters. While most readers would agree that it's silly to respond to the first ("O, that this too too solid flesh ") and fourth ("To be or not to be") soliloquies by saying, "Kill yourself or don't—make up your mind," many of these readers will argue that Hamlet is a procrastinator, unable to commit himself to avenging his father. But surely deciding to kill someone else should be as difficult as deciding to kill yourself, and to see Hamlet as a procrastinator means missing the complexity of moments like the one in act three, scene three, when Hamlet decides not to kill a praying Claudius. In that scene, Hamlet has progressed from being a monster who could "drink hot blood" (3.2.360) to becoming genuinely demonic. No longer content to simply murder Claudius, he now wants to send his soul to hell. We miss the horror of this moment if we see it as procrastination.
People who argue that Hamlet is a dawdling intellectual point to two soliloquies: the third ("rogue and peasant slave") and seventh ("How all occasions").
In the third soliloquy, like a student with a late paper, Hamlet chastises himself for not acting (2.2.547-57). But the problem he raises near the soliloquy's end is perfectly legitimate. He can't know that Claudius killed his father—the Ghost may well be what Horatio suggested it was, a devil sent to damn Hamlet's soul. Before murdering the King, he should test the truth of the Ghost's tale.
In the seventh soliloquy, Hamlet again chastises himself for not acting on his vow of revenge, saying that his failure to act is all the more disgraceful because he has the "cause and will and strength and means / To do't" (4.4.9.36-37). As I described in my soliloquies post, he may have the "cause and will and strength," but he doesn't have the "means"—he's being led out of the country under guard. The seventh soliloquy shows us a Hamlet so gripped by his desire for revenge that he can't see the reality of his situation. This Hamlet is far more interesting than the one who can't act because of unresolved Oedipal problems.
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Master and disciple:
Sigmund Freud and Ernest Jones.
Image from sciSCREEN.
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Jones's interpretation was firmly entrenched in the theater world when Olivier was preparing to play the role for the first time, in 1937 at the Old Vic. It would probably have influenced his performance even if he hadn't spoken to Jones himself. During long conversations, Jones not only reinforced the interpretation, he advised Olivier on how to use it on stage. He told the actor not to make Hamlet's Oedipal problems obvious: "You're not supposed to tell the audience with every wink and nod that one of the reasons for your present predicament is that you wish you were still hanging on your mother's tits" (On Acting 79).
Olivier followed this advice, letting Hamlet's supposed Oedipal problems inform his performance but not making the problems explicit. A decade later, in his film version, he made them more obvious by casting the American actress Eileen Herlie as Gertrude. Herlie was eleven years younger than Olivier—she was born in 1918, Olivier in 1907—and on screen they make a plausible romantic couple, while Herlie and Basil Sydney, who plays Claudius, look a bit like a trophy wife and her drunken creep of a husband. From the first moment we see Herlie's Gertrude and Sydney's Claudius together, holding hands in the second scene, we can understand why Hamlet would find them repulsive.
Gertrude caresses Hamlet's cheek . . .
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and kisses him when Claudius turns away.
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Herlie and Olivier's performance is unforgettable, and I suspect that Franco Zeffirelli had it in mind when he directed Glenn Close and Mel Gibson in the same scene. As is true of Herlie and Olivier, the age difference between Close and Gibson—she's only nine years older—makes them seem more like lovers than mother and son. Throughout the film, Close kisses Gibson on the lips. When they reach act three, scene four, the kisses' sexual nature becomes obvious. Gibson throws Close on a bed and simulates intercourse as she gasps. After she kisses him on the mouth, he calms down and puts his head in her lap. Other than being more explicit—what was permissible on screen had changed considerably in fifty-two years—Zeffirelli's rendering of the scene closely resembles Olivier's. His representation of the Gertrude-Hamlet relationship is identical.
But what had seemed bold in 1948 seemed dated by 1990. For over half a century, critics had been pointing out that the play provides no solid evidence for Jones's interpretation. Hamlet hates his father and wants to sleep with his mother? Really? He twice describes his father as god-like (1.2.140, 3.4.55-58), and being repulsed by his mother's overhasty marriage doesn't mean that he wants to have sex with her. Freudians answered these objections by saying that Hamlet's praise of his father is a way of overcompensating for his hatred and that he can't consciously acknowledge his desire for his mother. There was no arguing with critics who used the absence of evidence as evidence, and Jones's interpretation remained popular until the 1970s and '80s when more critics, psychologists, and others began talking about the interpretation's underpinning—the Oedipus complex—as a fantasy.
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