The First Feature-Length Hamlet

Hamlet. Dir. Hay Plumb. Perf. Sir J. Forbes-Robertson, Miss Gertrude Elliot, and the Full Drury Lane Company. 1913. On-line video [available to those in the UK on the BFI Player]. Hepworth.

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Cowboy Junkies. "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry." The Trinity Session. Compact Disc. Latent Recordings, 1988. 

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I'm still fascinated by silent Shakespeares, and I was thrilled when I found that the first feature-length silent Hamlet became available.

"Feature length," for early silent films, means approaching one hour. 

Imagine trying to convey the depth and breadth of one of Shakespeare's masterpieces in less than an hour and without any complete speeches! Such a production, which must depend on prior knowledge of the play, could easily become not much more than the CliffsNotes version of the play. I had a Shakespeare professor who was fond of talking about a five-minute silent film version of Hamlet. He used the anecdote to illustrate what Horatio's account of the events of the play must have been like:

                                   So shall you hear
Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,
Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters,
Of deaths put on my cunning and [forc'd] cause,
And in this upshot, purposes mistook
Fall'n on th' inventors' heads: all this can I
Truly deliver. (V.ii.380–86)

A five-minute silent Hamlet, he argued, might not even do as much as that.

The 1913 Hay Plumb Hamlet does significantly more, but, I think, only for those who have more than a passing familiarity with the play. The title cards, for example, mainly start us off with the first line or two of a scene or a soliloquy and leave the audience to run with it.

Still, even with that limitation, it's a powerful adaptation of the play. It opens with brief portrayals of Hamlet and Ophelia, each with what might be considered a representative line, and then it throws us in to the world of the play.

Taking those two brief, almost dumb-showesque scenes as my cue, I've put together a (roughly) five-minute sampling of the film. Note: The film itself is widely available on the internet, but none of the versions I've seen have supplied any soundtrack. I've rectified this with a song by the Cowboy Junkies (I happened to be listening to it while editing the clip, and it happened to be just the right length—and also to fit the melancholy mood of the play.

That should give you a sense of the film and its approach to the Hamlet / Ophelia relationship. 

I'm particularly fond of the most famous speech in Shakespeare boiled down to a one-line title card. But, in this setting at least, that's enough. 

And we learn (via title card) that "Hamlet discovers the King behind the curtain"—without any mention of Polonius. That emphasis means that we don't get a "Where's your father?" title card . . . and that we just jump straight to "Get thee to a nunnery." 

The film is worth watching in its entirety. Indeed, I'm working on ways to bring it in to my current Shakespeare and Film course!

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Links: The Film at IMDB. The Film on the BFI Player (for those in the UK).

Bonus Image: The Best-Known Title Card from the Play:

C. S. Lewis on Hamlet

Lewis, C. S. "Hamlet: The Prince or the Poem?" In Selected Literary Essays, edited by Walter Hooper. Cambridge University Press, 1969.

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In the circles in which I teach, we joke about increasing enrollment in courses simply by adding ". . . and Lewis" to the course title. "T. S. Eliot and D. L. Sayers . . . and C. S. Lewis" or "British Literature to 1798 . . . and C. S. Lewis" or "Contemporary Non-Western Literature . . . and C. S. Lewis" will almost certainly get more students.

Lewis is a remarkable writer on Medieval English literature—his Allegory of Love is particularly admirable—and non-dramatic English Renaissance literature (his English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama is tremendous). 

But when it comes to Shakespeare, I'm not altogether convinced. I've tried multiple times to read Hamlet: The Prince or the Poem?—the Shakespeare lecture he gave to the British Academy on Shakespeare's Birthday Eve in 1942—and I find it less than compelling and not altogether useful.

But perhaps I am too much embedded in those elements of the academy that Lewis is critiquing.

The work starts off well enough—Lewis is critiquing the current state of criticism on Hamlet: 

All of that is well and good—if not entirely fair. It's true that T. S. Eliot's 1920 "Hamlet and his Problems" argued that Hamlet, lacking an "Objective Correlative" is "most certainly an artistic failure." Here's the relevant passage from Eliot:

The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked. If you examine any of Shakespeare’s more successful tragedies, you will find this exact equivalence; you will find that the state of mind of Lady Macbeth walking in her sleep has been communicated to you by a skillful accumulation of imagined sensory impressions; the words of Macbeth on hearing of his wife’s death strike us as if, given the sequence of events, these words were automatically released by the last event in the series. The artistic “inevitability” lies in this complete adequacy of the external to the emotion; and this is precisely what is deficient in Hamlet.

 

I do appreciate Lewis' argument that we can find ourselves convinced by that argument—until we read or see the play again. But I don't think critics are paralyzed by the thought of their being multiple Hamlets in multiple Hamlets. 

Lewis' conclusion is better—but still, somehow, inadequate. He wants the critics to get out of the way of the play—to read the play with a sense of childlike wonder:

Although I entirely sympathize with this view of Gulliver's Travels, I'm not sure how far this takes us. Is it an admonition to us as teachers not to demand a specific reading of Hamlet? Is it advice to us as readers to get caught up in the imaginative world of the play? Is it something remarkably profound and life-altering that I just don't get?

I welcome the direction of those who know more about Lewis and Shakespeare than I.

 

Update: The article "Hamlet in Narnia" opens some interesting doors on this subject (Sarah R. A. Walters, "Hamlet in Narnia: The Prince and the Poem in Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia," Mythlore: A Journal of J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature 43, no. 1 (2024): 41–64).

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Julie Taymor's Midsummer Night's Dream

A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Dir. Julie Taymor. Perf. Kathryn Hunter, David Harewood, Tina Benko, Max Casella, Zach Appelman, Brendan Averett, Roger Clark, Lilly Englert, Hermia, Joe Grifasi, Jake Horowitz, Z Infante, Robert Langdon Lloyd, Mandi Masden, Helena, Jacob Ming-Trent, Okwui Okpokwasili, and William Youmans. 2014. Blu-ray. Kino Lorber, 2014.

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I put off watching Julie Taymor's Midsummer Night's Dream far too long. I knew that it would be visually interesting, but I did not realize it would be stellar in nearly every aspect—from its conception to its acting to its deep understanding of the play.

I don't think I could do better than to show you some representative scenes.  

In this scene, we meet the rude mechanicals and get some sense of the stage Taymor has at her disposal:

Here's where the lyricism of Shakespeare's poetry beautifully harmonizes with the visual effects Taymor uses:

And I showed you that first scene to show you this. You have a sense of Bottom; now see Bottom translated:

It's quite a remarkable transformation—and a great piece of stage technology.

I wish I could show you the rest of the show. Puck is wild and wonderful. The woods outside Athens is created with dozens of poles that are manipulated by the actors in a terrific choreography. Francis Flute's final speech as Thisbe is remarkably moving—delivered by an excellent actor who had been playing a terrible actor and who then becomes a very good actor.

Track it down—the show bears watching and re-watching.

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Links: The Film at IMDB.

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Book Note: The Quality of Mercy

Kellerman, Faye. The Quality of Mercy. Fawcett Crest, 1989.

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Note: I have not made it through this novel. And the more often I start over from the beginning, the less likely it seems that I will ever finish it. I keep getting to "Reproach me not" shortly followed by "I know not" and finding a singular lack of the momentum needed to carry on. 

I came across Faye Kellerman's Quality of Mercy in various sources while preparing my Mystery and Detective Fiction course. But I've seldom found a Shakespeare-related novel that failed to grip as much as this one.

It starts off immediately after the funeral of the murdered famous actor Harry Whitman, and Shakespeare, one of the few mourners, provides the point of view. 

Let me give you the opening few pages to give you a flavor:

I'm quite curious to know how many of you want to read on after that—and how many of you even made it that far.

The blurb on the back of the edition I read will let you know something about what to expect next:

If anyone has insight into the novel, let me know, but I don't think I'll make any further investment (unless an audiobook version turns up somewhere).

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What's a Montjoy?

The Song of Roland. Translated by Dorothy L. Sayers. Penguin Books, 1957.

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Shakespeare, William. King Henry V. Ed. T. W. Craik. Arden Shakespeare. Third Series. Methuen Drama, 1995.

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In my seemingly never-ending quest to read everything Dorothy L. Sayers ever wrote, I finally came to her marvelous translation of the anonymous Song of Roland, an epic poem in Old French from around the eleventh century.

The story is thrilling and the history of the events it relays is fascinating.  And Sayers' notes and translation are astonishing.

It's also very funny at times. The last line of a given stanza is often a corporate response, and I think they're mostly hilarious. Observe:

Quoth Blancandrin . . . .

"Better their heads should fall into their laps

Than that fair Spain should fall from out our hands,

And we should suffer grave losses and mishap."

The Paynims say: "There is some truth in that."  [Stanza 4, page 53]

And . . .

"If you contrive this treaty to arrange,

Of gold and silver I'll give you goodly weight,

And lands and fiefs as much as heart can crave."

The Paynims answer: "That will be ample pay."  [Stanza 5, pages 53–54]

Or the last line sometimes has a quick understatement / summary of action, as when a number of knights (in essence) are making proposals to Marsilion and we learn who gets the glove of approval:

"I'll set Spain free, unloosing of her bonds

From Gate of Spain to Durstant and beyond.

Charles will lose heart, the French will yield anon,

You shall be quit of wars your whole life long."

He gets the glove from King Marsilion. [Stanza 69, pages 85–86]

In addition, the used copy I read was annotated, emended, and illustrated by (most likely) a slightly-bored high school student. The most amusing change Eric made (his name is on the flyleaf) was changing the name of Duke Naimon to "Duke Nukem."

But I haven't gotten to the Shakespeare connection (which is, I admit, oblique). As the French go into battle, they often cry "Mountjoy!" or "Mountjoy St. Dennis!" and it reminded me of the only Mountjoy I knew: Montjoy, The French Herald from Shakespeare's Henry V. Here's where I learned what the word meant around the year 1100:

That seems to be in line with the word when it finally entered English as montjoy in 1653 (according to the OED):

What, then, does Shakespeare mean by Montjoy? Every time I had read Henry V before reading Song of Roland, I had assumed that it was a name: "Dr. Jones? Have you met Mr. and Mrs. Montjoy yet?" 

With my mind opened to other possibilities, I checked the notes to the Arden edition. In the "List of Roles," I learned that Montjoy's "name is titular, not personal." And in Act III, scene vi, I found this note:

I find that fascinating! It's also fascinating to note that Kenneth Branagh's film version of Henry V replaces the "Ambassador" who brings Henry tennis balls in Act I with the Montjoy who first appears in Act II of Shakespeare's play.

But that's not all! Dorothy L. Sayers herself brings Shakespeare in with a note to Stanza 114:

Naturally, we now need to head over to Venus and Adonis (from William Shakespeare, The Poems, ed. F. T. Prince (Arden Shakespeare, 2000):

The note to lines 295–98 is priceless. It also takes us to Virgil's Georgics.

But I'm going to call it a day, leaving that as an exercise to the reader.

In short, ain't it marvelous what we can learn from Shakespeare and how what we learn elsewhere can take us back to Shakespeare?

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