I - “Ice”

Hamlet is literally a winter’s tale—“the air bites shrewdly; it is very cold” (1.4.1)—and though it was filmed from January-April of 1996 in Oxfordshire, there was little to no actual snow or ice to be seen for much of the filming. It was indeed cold and wet, as most English winters go, but the wind was so bad that it often blew away the ersatz detergent foam “snow” that the crew had sprayed all over the grounds for outdoor scenes. Sometimes, the cameras would freeze during night shoots, and they’d have to thaw them out with hot lights before continuing. 

Re-creating snow for film is often a messy endeavor, commonly involving shredded paper, soap, PVC, salt, even painted cereal (noisy) piled on the ground or blown around by wind machines. Before the toxicity of asbestos was understood, Citizen Kane (1940) and The Wizard of Oz (1939) used flakes of the monochromatic substance, as did families who wanted some indoor snow for their Christmas trees. David Lean famously had an entire house and set sprayed with white melted wax in Doctor Zhivago (1965), which resulted in a striking “ice palace.” Hamlet actually used 200 tons of artificial snow spread over 180 acres—more than any film preceding it, including Zhivago.

In December of 1598, in Shoreditch, London, the Theatre—which was designed and built by James Burbage for Shakespeare’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, in 1576—was deconstructed during the freezing night, board by board. Burbage had died, and the renewal status of the lease on the land was uncertain, but a clause in the deal made with the landowner allowed for the builders to tear down the structure and remove it if they so pleased. The legend goes that the entire theatre was carried across the then-frozen Thames river to Southwark, where they re-built it and dubbed it “The Globe.”

The Thames did sometimes freeze over solidly enough that marketplaces were temporarily hosted on the ice, but the “frozen” Thames in this tale was as fake as the snow in film—it was too thin that year for anyone to walk across it. However the company managed it, they had a new playhouse that was to be the storied home for Shakespeare’s productions until it burned down in 1613 during a performance of Henry VIII (which arguably makes it even more unlucky than “The Scottish Play”).

In at least one scene in Branagh’s Hamlet, a real blizzard provided a backdrop. Branagh recounts in his audio commentary that as soon as a storm came blowing in, he rushed to bundle up Nicholas Farrell for a few pages of script that didn’t require rehearsal or memorization: the short scene where the sailors deliver Horatio the letter from Hamlet. Farrell merely had to brave the howling wind and read the prop letter aloud before the wet snowflakes started making the ink run. 

Sources:

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

How they make fake snow for movies (Film School Rejects)

Hamlet (1996) Blu-Ray Digibook “Trivia” 

Razing the Theatre, Raising the Globe (Folger Shakespeare Library)