Alas, Poor Hamlet: Film Popularizers and the Prince of Denmark

Abstract

Hamlet asks the Player King to speak a speech from a play that ''pleased not the million; 'twas caviary to the general" (2.2.446-7)¹, and the result of this unpopularity was, we are told, that the play was never acted or was acted only once. Many directors seem to have felt that Shakespeare in general (and Hamlet in particular) was caviar which would not please the untrained tastes of the millions of film goers they hoped to attract, and they set out to make the plays more palatable, blander, easier to digest, and therefore considerably more bankable. The Olivier and Zeffirelli Hamlets are especially good (or bad) examples of this process, but Kevin Kline, Michael Almereyda, and even Kenneth Branagh in his complete text version are also among the guilty.