F - “First Folio Text”

 

A note in Branagh’s published screenplay states that it is based upon the text of Hamlet “as it appears in the First Folio… and some passages absent from it… have been supplied from the Second Quarto.” It also notes using emendations from early printed texts and modern editors, e.g. in 1.4, the phrase “over-daub” (Oxford Complete Works, 1988) replaces “of a doubt” (Second Quarto, 1604-5)—a much contested edit that differs greatly among the three sources most often referenced in modern editions. 

Lord Laurence Olivier directed an “uncut” stage version starring Peter O’Toole as Hamlet and Derek Jacobi as Laertes in 1963.  Olivier chose to present an unabridged Hamlet to mark the birth of the National Theatre Company in London. Directors rarely mount Hamlet without cuts, due to its being the longest of the oeuvre. Branagh’s “eternity version” is the first and only film presenting a “full text” of the play, and he expressed the purpose for his ambition in a introduction recorded for the DVD released in 2007:

There has never been onscreen the full-length Hamlet… This is part of our cultural life whether we know it or not and this is a chance for everybody to understand why it is and in total why it is, so your kids are going to be talking about this and your grandchildren are going to be talking about this because it’s important. No we ain’t curing cancer et cetera but we’re doing something important that matters and we want to do it the best we possibly can. If I never do another movie, the privilege of saying these lines, the privilege of passing this story on to an audience out there with this degree of clarity both pictorially and with what we hope to do is beyond measure. It’s a once in a lifetime. No one has done this before. No one will do it again.

André Bazin would identify Branagh’s grand impulse as “the mummy complex,” which he defines as the origin of all plastic arts: the desire to artificially preserve one’s appearance to “snatch it from the flow of time.” He explains that is it “man’s primitive need to have the last word in the argument with death by means of the form that endures.” Time will tell if anyone will attempt a full Hamlet again before humanity ends, but at least for our lifetimes, Branagh’s assumption may very well be correct, lest—God help us—Marvel decides to make a superhero out of the melancholy Dane. Hopefully, they’re satisfied enough with Branagh’s treatment of Thor.

The First Quarto (1603), the Second Quarto (1604), and the First Folio (1623) have for four centuries provided Shakespeare scholars and editors much fodder for debate and speculation about the length of the play and how it is meant to be performed. The Folio is 73% longer than the First Quarto, but it is 4% shorter than the Second Quarto. There are also dialogues that appear in F but not in Q2 and vice versa.  These differences point to several juicy possibilities. Q1 may be a first draft of Shakespeare’s “new and improved” version of what has come to be known as Ur-Hamlet (1589? Written by Thomas Kyd?) or a kind of “bootleg” version of the play, possibly remembered by a performer or viewer. Q2 may be an “authorized” expansion or revision based on something as authoritative as Shakespeare’s manuscript—his so-called “foul papers.” Such close study of these texts often reveals the machinations and complications of the publishing world in Elizabethan and Jacobean London.

Whatever the finished text, it is no doubt originally based upon either Saxo-Grammaticus’ Danorum Regum heroumque Historiae (1514) or François de Belleforest’s Histoires Tragiques (1572). The basic revenge tale about Amleth was in the zeitgeist in Shakespeare’s time, but he fleshed it out with pathos and modern, introspective intrigue. He was so taken by the story that he named his only son Hamnet (one of many accepted spelling variations for the Prince’s name at the time), who tragically died at the age of eleven.

In 1994, Danish director/writer Gabriel Axel (best known for the classic film Babette’s Feast (1987)) filmed Prince of Jutland aka Royal Deceit, which draws upon Saxo’s original story. It stars a veritable royal court of actors: Dame Helen Mirren, Brian Cox, Gabriel Byrne, Tom Wilkinson, Kate Beckinsale, and Christian Bale as the Prince himself. Beckinsale had starred as Hero in Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing (1993) and Bale was the slain luggage boy Branagh carried over the battlefield near the end of Henry V (1989). Bonus fact: the “King of Mo-Cap,” Andy Serkis, made his first film appearance as a proto-Rosencrantz/Guildenstern character. In 2019, he admitted to never having seen the whole movie. 

Sources:

Branagh, Kenneth, and Russell Jackson. Hamlet by William Shakespeare, Screenplay, Introduction and Film Diary. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1996.

Hamlet, National Theatre, October 1963 (The Guardian)

Bazin, André. “The Ontology of the Photographic Image from What Is Cinema?.” Film Theory and Criticism, edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 195-211.

Shakespeare, W. Hamlet, Revised Edition. Ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2021.