My week of 8 Hamlets, the value of an artist, and why human creativity can't be replaced.
By Alexis Puthussery
Spoilers for Hamlet, The Northman, and Haider below.
A week ago I got the sudden urge to revisit Hamlet. For whatever reason, the tortured Prince of Denmark was calling out for me to watch his descent into madness, violence, and despair. And watch I did. For reasons even more inexplicable as to why I suddenly wanted to watch Hamlet in the first place, once I started, I couldn’t stop. When one adaptation of Hamlet would come to a close, I’d start scouring the Internet for another Hamlet to watch. This fixation took me to England, Kashmir, the US, and Germany from the 1920s to the 2020s. I was steeped in its melancholy and brooding, in its soaringly high stakes, and the bodies that would pile at the end of every production like clockwork.
And after having seen 8 iterations of the Prince of Denmark in the span of a week, I know one thing for certain: Hamlet is more relevant than ever. I won’t speak to the play’s thematic relevance. There is endless literature on this written by those far more educated than me on the subject. What I do think I can speak to is how the 400 year old play fits into the current state of creativity and why after all this time, it still matters.
Hamlet is a play of uncertainty. Its most famous line is a question: “To be or not to be?” The questions don’t stop there, though. How real is Hamlet’s madness? How guilty does Claudius truly feel? How complicit is Gertrude in her husband’s murder? How true is Hamlet’s love for Ophelia? How true is Gertrude’s love for Claudius and Claudius’ for Gertrude? Shakespeare constantly asks, but never quite answers. The play makes the distinction between seeming and being, but it leaves its reader to decide between the two in the countless questions it poses.
Therefore, to adapt Hamlet, you need to make decisions. You need to come up with your own answers to the questions it asks. Shakespeare gives you what the characters say and do, but often a character will conflict themselves, just as real people do all the time. The ability to portray characters as people who don’t always make sense is a testament to Shakespeare’s brilliance. Only a person (not a computer, machine, or God forbid AI) completely in touch with what it means to be human could do this. On top of these conflicting characters, you don’t have a narrator like you might have in a novel to tell you or even hint to you why the character is behaving the way they are. The reader must fill in the gaps themselves. It's the job of the adaptor to not only tell Hamlet, but to tell their Hamlet. Thus, another layer of humanity and a specific human perspective is added when you watch someone else’s production of Hamlet. Any good version of Hamlet should have the distinct fingerprints of Shakespeare, the director, the actors, and the crew visible all over the production.
Julia Stiles and Ethan Hawke as Ophelia and Hamlet in Hamlet (2000) / photo: Miramax
Because of the uncertainty and subjectivity that is the very fabric of the story, the Hamlets I watched would often differ from one another quite a bit despite being adaptations of the same play. As I watched different iterations, I found myself picking and choosing what I liked or found interesting from each one. Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet (2000), starring Ethan Hawke in the titular role, worked on almost no level for me. I found most of it silly at its best and stale at its worst. But Julia Stiles’ Ophelia stuck out as a shining aspect in an otherwise dull film. The choice to make Ophelia not only deadpan and sulking, but to make her genuinely depressed from the beginning of the play was something I haven’t seen in other productions and thought was quite inspired. Ophelia’s dialogue or actions from the original play aren’t altered. There’s simply a change in the presentation of these things from the norm. Ophelia is often not given the same consideration as other characters by the adaptor and her switch from the ideal happy, doting daughter and sister to a woman incapable of expressing an intelligible phrase, while shocking and upsetting, rarely feels truly earned to me. The internality of Stiles’ Ophelia separate from her relationships to Hamlet, her father, and her brother is given attention even before she goes mad and I think that’s what makes the difference to me. Though the rest of the movie left much to be desired, I found myself thinking of Stiles’ Ophelia every time I watched a new Hamlet thereafter.
Amleth, his father, and Gudrún in The Northman (2022) / photo: Universal Pictures
Robert Eggers’, The Northman (2022) is an adaptation of the Scandinavian legend of Amleth, the story that Shakespeare took direct inspiration from for Hamlet, and combines aspects and themes of both stories, fleshing them out into a grand Nordic revenge epic for the big screen. The Northman takes away the uncertainty in both the plot and character of Hamlet himself by having Amleth (Alexander Skarsgård) actually watch his uncle betray and murder his father. He becomes single-minded in avenging his father, bent on killing his uncle and rescuing his mother, Queen Gudrún (Nicole Kidman), whom his uncle marries. But Eggers adds new uncertainty to the story when Amleth finally does reunite with his mother. She reveals that Amleth’s father had taken her as an unwilling captive and mistreated her when she was his wife. She’s happy he’s dead and is happier in her new marriage. The screams from his mother the day his father died that haunted Amleth all those years was in fact laughter. Unlike Gertrude, Gudrún is defiant and even victorious in the face of her husband’s death and in the face of Amleth. It poses a new set of questions. Did Amleth really know his father at all? Was his father a good person? Was his uncle justified in his filicide? And even more broadly: How do we truly know the people in our own lives? This extreme answer to Hamlet’s question of Gertrude in Kidman’s Gudrún is refreshing and not only makes you rethink characters in The Northman and Hamlet, but makes you rethink how you may judge or view other people in your life as well.
Hamlet dies in Horatio's arms in Hamlet (2009) / photo: BBC
Gregory Doran’s, Hamlet (2009) produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company leans into the romantic nature of Hamlet and Horatio’s relationship more than other direct productions I’ve seen through David Tennant and Peter de Jersey’s touching and touch-y performances. Tennant’s Hamlet lights up every time he sees Horatio and de Jersey’s Horatio looks upon Hamlet with a warm, tender gaze. Hamlet’s constantly embracing Horatio, leaning into him, whether to fix his bowtie or whisper about other characters. Horatio is the only character in the play always inside on Hamlet’s feigned madness (that is, when it is feigned) and de Jersey is often laughing with Tennant in scenes where other characters stare in irritation or fear. Within this Hamlet, there is a tragic love story that ends with Hamlet dying in Horatio’s arms as Hamlet holds Horatio’s head, their hands clasped together. The open affection and genuine trust and love between Hamlet and Horatio, that to me, is a vital pillar of Hamlet’s character, is on full display in this production.
Haider (2014), Vishal Bhardwaj’s Hindi language adaptation of Hamlet set in militarized Kashmir, recontextualizes the conflict of the original play completely. The cruelty of characters from Hamlet is reflected in the cruelty of the countries fighting over Kashmir’s land. It blows up the conclusion of the original play quite literally, ending in an explosive shoot out instead of a fencing match. Most notably, the film makes the drastic change in having Haider (Shahid Kapoor) spare his uncle and live, himself in the end. He walks away from the bloodied graveyard as his injured uncle begs Haider to kill him. Bhardwaj uses the expectations the audience has of not only how a production of Hamlet should end, but of how conflict in a militarized and preyed upon country should end only to subvert both of these. Haider’s final decision is made that more poignant and perhaps hopeful because of the very source material it pointedly strays away from.
Shahid Kapoor as Haider in Haider (2014) / photo: UTV Motion Pictures
I could go on and on about the decisions made in the versions of Hamlet I had watched. There’s so much that you can do with what Shakespeare has put down in the original story. It’s why it’s been adapted over and over again for hundreds of years and will continue as such. It’s a living, breathing, human play that demands not only from its adaptors, but from its audience, their attention and their opinion. In a culture where passive consumption of media is being pushed— songs made by artists designed to play in the backgrounds of Tik Toks, movies in which a celebrity cameo is the driving force for audiences, a general normalization of being on your phone while a film or show plays on the television— a story that cannot possibly be passively adapted or watched is vital. Meaningful art cannot be derived from or made to fit an algorithm and Hamlet shows this.
Efficiency has become the priority in creative spaces. “How fast?” and “How cheap?” are being asked more urgently than “How well?” Creators such as writers are invaluable and should be treated as such and the thought that machines should replace them because of efficiency is utterly laughable. Shakespeare’s catalogue is extensive, but I think even if he had just written Hamlet in his lifetime, he would still be talked about today. More stage and screen adaptations of Hamlet have been made than are possible to count and it’s because of the humanity in the story. It hides information and reveals truths. It’s a mirror ball which reflects off new readings with every new person who approaches it. It’s brilliant because it’s so elusive— the moment you think you understand it, it slips from your fingers and you find yourself reaching out for it again and again. Hamlet shows the inherent value that one really good piece of human art can have.
There has been much debate over whether Shakespeare was one person, or if he was a collective of people, if he was an aristocrat who disguised himself as a commoner, or a middle-class writer who wrote for the Queen. I don’t know that all that matters as much as the fact that we are certain he was a human being. A machine could not have made Hamlet, nor can it effectively adapt it. This shouldn’t need saying, but as I write this, a strike caused by the devaluation of human creativity is occurring. Lived experiences are what informs the art we create and how we receive other people’s art. Hamlet is the culmination of this. The thoughts and opinions of the adaptors of the Hamlets I saw could not have come from collected data. Almereyda saw a sullenness in Ophelia even before tragedy struck that others didn’t. Eggers decided that Gertrude deserved more agency in her own marriages and that perhaps sons have the tendency to idolize their fathers. Doran could see the tenderness between Hamlet and Horatio and thought it just as important as the madness and despair found in the characters, and Bhardwaj saw the violence from an 400 year old English play in a territory that his own country of birth preyed on. It was their own emotions and opinions and lives which informed how they viewed Hamlet which is why each adaptation of the same story is so distinct. In viewing all these adaptations of Hamlet, I got to view a spectrum of human being and the art that comes out of that— and that’s really beautiful.
The value of art made by people for people— not for any kind of monetary or social capital— cannot possibly be quantified (a living wage for writers is a great place to start though!). Distributors have turned to algorithms to mass produce films, books, and music, preying on the psyche of the population to most efficiently sell their products. But this is all in vain because I know that for how complex a machine may become, how much it may seem like a human, it will never be one. A machine can write two-hundred plays in the span of ten minutes, but it couldn’t possibly grasp what it means to be. Or what it means not to be for that matter.
What I’ve taken away from my week of Hamlet is not just the brilliance of Shakespeare, nor is it just the brilliance of writers (though the latter cannot be overstated). It’s the brilliance that can only come from humanity that shines through the lines of Hamlet. During an incredibly scary time in the state of art, Hamlet comforts me. It’s proof that words thought and written down by people will stand the test of time. I know I’m far from the first person to gush over this play and I certainly won’t be the last. But that’s what makes it special. Getting to be part of a tradition of appreciation that’s lasted hundreds of years, that ties you to those long gone and those who are yet to come, is a privilege that is special to humanity. Humans are profoundly good and profoundly evil. They are “the beauty of the world”, yet also “the quintessence of dust” as Hamlet himself says. What it means to be human cannot possibly be captured by anything but a human themself. And the moment something else replaces people in the creation of art is the moment it ceases to be art at all.
List of Hamlets I Watched:
Hamlet (Dir. Rhodri Huw and Robert Icke, 2018)
Haider (Dir. Vishal Bhardwaj, 2014)
Hamlet (Dir. Michael Almereyda, 2000)
Hamlet (Dir. Laurence Olivier, 1948)
Hamlet (Dir. Heinz Schall and Svend Gade, 1921)
Hamlet (Dir. Gregory Doran, 2009)
The Northman (Dir. Robert Eggers, 2022)
The Lion King (Dir. Robert Allers and Rob Minkoff, 1994)
Letterboxd Link to List of Hamlets + My (Brief) Reviews of them: https://boxd.it/oLW7U
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