Hamlet on Stage: English vs. European Interpretations

Introduction: Two Interpretive Traditions

The many contemporary interpretations of Shakespeare enacted on the modern stage underline the fact that Shakespeare was a playwright for the ages, not simply a man of his own time. However, in the ways Shakespeare has been adapted to modernity, it becomes apparent that modern directors are just as intent upon revealing their own personal preoccupations as they are upon revealing the nuances of Shakespeare's plays. This can be seen clearly when comparing British interpretations with European and other non-English-language stagings of Hamlet.

Although the most obvious difference between these two categories is that British interpretations are in Shakespeare's original language while European stagings are enacted in translation, the difference runs far deeper. English productions tend to emphasize the psychological, internal conflict of Hamlet and view the play in terms of its personal drama. In contrast, European interpretations of Hamlet have stressed the social dimensions of living in a Denmark ruled by a murderous king with a secret — a place which Hamlet himself calls a prison. Shifting attitudes toward truth can be seen in all nations' productions, but the individualism of the English-speaking world has tended to de-emphasize the political aspects of the work.

Hamlet's Original Political and Religious Context

It should be noted that in its original form, Hamlet contained both a political and a personal dimension. Take, for instance, Hamlet's father's ghost. In Protestant Elizabethan England, the idea of a ghost would have been a forbidden concept. As the scholar Anselm Haverkamp observes, "The ghost presents an interesting double bind for the audience, and defines a new type of theatricality. The ghost, in whom the public does not believe — belief would be forbidden both religiously and morally — achieves his effect only in retrospect… the ghost, in the truth of his untruth, cannot actually be doubted in the slightest" (Haverkamp 2006: 176).

According to the Renaissance scholar Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet is awash in concerns about what it meant to mourn the dead in an England that had rapidly transitioned from Catholicism to Protestantism. What did it mean to have a ghost asking for revenge in a Protestant country, coming from a purgatory that officially no longer existed? As Peter Goldman explains in his review of Greenblatt's Hamlet in Purgatory: "Purgatory… was at the center of a vast web of institutional rituals and customs, and these practices had been forcibly repressed by the Church of England for almost forty years when Shakespeare's Hamlet was first performed… Reformers often rushed to discard age-old customs and practices that had acquired the familiarity and authority of ancient tradition. The iconoclasm of the Reformation left an enormous gap in the cultural and spiritual life of the English people, and Renaissance drama stepped in to help fill that gap" (Goldman 2001). The original Hamlet was intended as a commentary on the new relationship between humanity and God that had been imposed upon the people of England by the state.

Yet long after these concerns were no longer cultural obsessions, Hamlet continued to grow in popularity. The universal themes of revenge and parent-child relations caused the play to be interpreted again and again, translated anew for the theater long after its original religious controversies had abated. Hamlet contains many elements that have made it attractive for philosophical or psychological study, drawing the attention of figures ranging from John Keats to T.S. Eliot to Sigmund Freud. The apparent strangeness of Hamlet's actions — deciding to feign madness and refusing to kill his uncle — makes his psychology uniquely complex yet impenetrable.

European and Eastern European Stagings: Hamlet as Political Dissident

In the continental European theater, Hamlet has often been presented as a prisoner of an oppressive state — someone who is very sane, rather than possibly mad. The fact that many dissidents during the communist era were imprisoned in asylums only sharpened the perceived analogy between the plight of Hamlet and the plight of those who protested authoritarian regimes.

For example, in a 1977 East German staging of Hamlet by director Heiner Müller, titled Hamletmachine, "the spectral presence of Hamlet's father materializes on two television monitors framing the stage, and placed strategically on the near side of the audience beyond the proscenium. It is as if the summons to vengeance, emanating from beyond the fourth wall, is an ironic twist on the fate of East Berlin's capitulation to voices that carried over from the West past the other wall. Partially overhanging the auditorium was a mechanized contraption consisting of a spotlight and a speaker that moved on tracks, a cruel reminder, I was told, of the clandestine technology the Stasi, or secret police, in the East would employ to spy upon its citizens" (Dasgupta 1991: 175).

The view of Hamlet as the archetypal protestor remains omnipresent in Eastern European productions. In a 2006 Polish production titled Hamlet from Gliwice, "keeping the memory of the father becomes both a duty and a burden to the protagonist. While the mother urges him to remember, the hero struggles with postwar guilt as a German raised in Poland. Hamlet from Gliwice does not ask who killed his father, but rather whom his father killed while in the Wehrmacht. The play thus becomes the means to catch the conscience of the author, actors, and the audience, rather than that of the murderer (in this production Claudius is imagined as Hitler)" ("Hamlet Gliwicki: Full video," Global Shakespeares, 2006).

In this interpretation, translating Shakespeare's vision for a modern audience is less important than using the cultural resonance of the figure of Hamlet to make a commentary about a real, historical past. Claudius in the original Shakespearean play is a far more complex and ambiguous character than Hitler — Hamlet's uncle attempts to pray for forgiveness, but ultimately cannot bring himself to relinquish the treasures for which he killed. In the Polish rendition, the play and the character are used as instruments of political discourse rather than as explorations of Hamlet's psyche.

English-Language Productions and the Psychological Hamlet

Of course, every director, regardless of nationality, brings his or her own interpretation to Hamlet. But in the English-speaking contemporary theater, Hamlet's internal psychology — rather than the exterior, oppressive nature of the court of Denmark — tends to be at the forefront of interpretation. One of the most famous examples is Laurence Olivier's staging of Hamlet, later filmed, which employed the Freudian interpretation of Hamlet as a man in love with his mother who unconsciously wishes to kill the father-figure Claudius. According to Freud, "Hamlet is able to do anything but take vengeance upon the man who did away with his father and has taken his father's place with his mother — the man who shows him in realization the repressed desires of his own childhood. The loathing which should have driven him to revenge is thus replaced by self-reproach, by conscientious scruples, which tell him that he himself is no better than the murderer whom he is required to punish" (Freud 1911). To further underline the primacy of the relationship between Gertrude and Hamlet over that between Hamlet and Ophelia, Olivier cast an actress as the Prince's mother who was not much older than the woman playing Ophelia. In contrast, politically oriented productions tended to emphasize Ophelia's role as a victim of the state's political machinations.

Gradually, as the English-speaking theater became more influenced by the socially conscious European theater, British Hamlet stagings began to take on a more radical cast. In 1965, Peter Hall created a production in which the young prince wore a long red scarf similar to those worn by French anti-government protestors. The actor who played Hamlet was only twenty-four — much younger than actors who had traditionally taken the role. "Hall was keen to attract a youthful audience to the production, and did so by presenting Hamlet as a contemporary youth, disillusioned by the world around him. The look of Hamlet was quite significant. He was scruffy in his appearance and attire, wearing a moth-eaten black gown and red scarf, looking every inch a university undergraduate" ("Sixties Hamlet," BBC Hamlet: Past Productions, 2012). However, unlike the European conception of Hamlet as a reasoned and mature man in an insane society, Hall's Hamlet was rude and boorish. Although he may have been a Hamlet with whom young 1960s audiences could identify, his individual adolescent rebellion — rather than calculated rage at an oppressive ruler — was at the forefront of the production.

This emphasis on Hamlet's psychology was also apparent in a 1989 production directed by Ron Daniels. "The set immediately gives us a sense of what Elsinore and Hamlet's state of mind is like. The window is at a slant, it looks to be falling away — something is out of joint. You can also see through the window that there's a tempest brewing" ("Rebel without a cause," BBC Hamlet: Past Productions, 2012). Rather than being visibly set within a kingdom, the set design resembled a kind of Never-Never Land. Hamlet wore pajamas for most of the production, looking like a mental patient in blue-striped institutional garb. He appeared seriously unhinged during his scenes with Ophelia and Gertrude — which drains much of the weight from the interpretation of Hamlet as the sanest man in Denmark and suggests instead that his perceptions are not to be trusted. Although the ghost may be correct and Claudius a murderer, Hamlet in this production was not presented as a figure with whom the audience might wish to positively identify.

Conclusion: Translation as Illumination

Because European versions of Hamlet are performed in translation, it might be tempting to view them as less valid renditions of the original text. However, keeping in mind Shakespeare's own transposition of his political situation into the drama of the court of Denmark, a better way to understand the contrast between these interpretive styles is to see them both as different ways of illuminating Shakespeare's play. The English-speaking tradition shines a light on Hamlet's internal world; the European tradition illuminates the political prison that surrounds him. Both dimensions are present in Shakespeare's original text.

Shakespeare is indeed a portable playwright whose works transcend space as well as time. Each tradition — whether reading Hamlet through Freud or through the lived experience of political oppression — reveals something genuine about the play's inexhaustible richness. Rather than one approach invalidating the other, the global history of Hamlet in production demonstrates that the play is large enough to sustain both, and that translation, far from diminishing Shakespeare, can become a powerful instrument for recovering meanings that a single cultural vantage point might otherwise obscure.

Works Cited

Dasgupta, Gautam. "Germany's Fourth Wall." Performing Arts Journal, 13.2 (May 1991): 62–77.

Goldman, Peter. "Hamlet's Ghost: A Review Article." Greenblatt, Stephen. Hamlet in Purgatory. Princeton UP, 2001. Anthropoetics 7.1 (Spring/Summer 2001).

Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams (3rd ed.). Translated by A.A. Brill (1911).

"Hamlet Gliwicki: Full video." Global Shakespeares. 2006.

Haverkamp, Anselm. "The Ghost of History: Hamlet and the Politics of Paternity." Law and Literature, 18.2 (Summer 2006): 171–198.

"Kozintsev's Hamlet (Soviet version, 1964)." Hamlet Guide.

"Rebel without a cause." BBC Hamlet: Past Productions. BBC.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Shakespeare Homepage.

"Sixties Hamlet." BBC Hamlet: Past Productions. BBC.

Tatspaugh, Patricia. "Shakespeare Onstage in England, 2004–2005." Shakespeare Quarterly, 56.4 (Winter 2005): 448–478.

"Visible ghosts." BBC Hamlet: Past Productions. BBC.

"Vysotsky's Hamlet (Soviet Union)." Hamlet Guide.