THEATER CHRONICLE
A PRINCE OF SHREDS AND PATCHES
HAMLET, Williom Shokespeore, Pork Avenue Theoter
"You
liked
the Laurence Olivier
Hamlet?"
breathed a young
woman the other day in a shocked undertone, when I mentioned the
fact at a party. She herself had not seen the film, the news that it did
not employ "the full resources of the cinema" having reached her in
time. "And I hear Fortinbras has been cut," she continued, with an
inquiring glance into my features, "not to mention Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern. And that the Queen is too young, and the Oedipal theme
over-emphasized." From these objections one could not wholly dissent.
The film is indeed a photographed play, though why a photograph of
a play by Shakespeare should be such an inferior article it
is
hard to
know-would a movie which had "liberated" itself from the text be
really preferable? The other objections are more forceful. The Queen,
who looks a buxom thirty-five,
is
too well preserved:
if
the gravedigger's
memory does not betray him, Hamlet himself is thirty, middle age to
an Elizabethan, a fact, however, which Shakespeare himself seems un–
mindful of, moved as he is by the poignancy of Hamlet's youth, his
blighted studies, and unseasonable death. In the openly erotic scenes
between mother and son, the film is all too cinematic-what can the
Court be thinking, the audience asks itself; why does no one appear to
notice these scandalous goings-on? The omission of Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern no one greatly complains of, but Fortinbras is a different
thing. He is as necessary to the playas Hotspur to the first Henry Fourth.
I nsofar as
Hamlet
is a study of different kinds of young men, he, Hamlet,
and Horatio make a triad of
virtus,
as Osric, Rosencrantz, and Guilden–
stern make a triad of puerility. The play's frame, moreover, is
the
soldier's music and the rites of war;
beginning with an armed watch,
it ends on a peal of ordnance. Horatio is unfitted to sound the martial
note. Military funerals are not in his line; he is the perennial student,
like Raskolnikov's friend, Razurnikhin, the honest pedant, a little Ger–
manized, the uncouth and good-hearted intellectual. And it is charac–
teristic of the Shakespearean irony and tenderness that peace should
descend on the play to the sound of drum and bugle: the simplicities
of war, the rules of the field are order and blessed tranquillity when set
against the drama of blood and perfidy that has played itself out in
the castle. To Fortinbras, the outsider, the man who happens to be passing,
the heap of corpses in the hall is a prodigious and unnatural sight.
Clean up this mess, he commands, and, touched by something in the
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