Polonius alone reads the lines from the letter. In the original scene where Polonius reads Hamlet’s love letter to Ophelia to Gertrude and Claudius, they are the only characters on-stage. The next scene is in Act 3 Scene 1 when Ophelia and Hamlet run into each other in the hall, while Claudius and Polonius spy on them.īranagh introduces a tragicomic element in the scene from Act 2 Scene 2 when he includes Ophelia directly. I will focus on two scenes in the film featuring two passages from the play, the first of which is in Act 2 Scene 2 where Polonius approaches Gertrude and Claudius with Hamlet’s love letter to Ophelia.

By staging scenes to place more focus on Ophelia’s plight, Branagh also comments on the difficult position of women in the play. Hamlet’s rejection of Ophelia is made all the more tragic in this film because Hamlet’s affection for Ophelia is so apparent, while it is left ambiguous in the play.

I argue that Branagh deliberately stages the scenes with Ophelia in terms of Hamlet’s affection for her to make Ophelia’s later madness overdetermined, strengthening the link to Hamlet’s rejection of her as well as her father’s death in driving her mad. The relationship between Ophelia and Hamlet, while left ambiguous in the play, is made explicitly sexual in the film. Since he cannot play with editing the script and sequence of the scenes, he finds creative ways around this restriction through switching dialogue from one character to another, flashback editing and voice-overs. In choosing to make it an unabridged version, Branagh is faced with the task of visually supporting the text to make each scene seamless and each line ring true in the film without slowing the action down. It is a four-hour monstrosity of a film, without any lines cut out.

:3 I just wanna hug him.īranagh’s Hamlet (1996) is the only unabridged film adaptation of Hamlet.

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