Z - “Zounds!”
In Branagh’s screenplay and the film, Hamlet uses the exclamation “‘Swounds!”—which is very often alternately spelled “‘Zounds!” in many of Shakespeare’s plays. This is short for “God’s wounds,” which was a very strong oath or curse in Elizabethan England. In the printed Quarto 1 (1603), “‘Zounds” is used, while Quarto 2 (1604) uses “‘Swounds,” and the First Folio (1623) replaces such curses with “Why.” This is likely due to changes in parliamentary censorship in the late Elizabethan/Early Jacobean era.
Due to political strife, all plays in London at this time were subject to approval from the Master of Revels, who, empowered by the Queen, had the power to censor submissions and grant them the right to be performed. The Act to Restrain Abuse of Players of 1606 specifically stated that performers could not use the name of God or Jesus in a profane or parodic manner. This could partially explain some differences in printed editions of many of Shakespeare’s plays, which employ euphemisms for the offending oaths.
Sometimes, entire tracts of dialogue were omitted to adhere to the Master’s rules. Most notably, almost the entire abdication/deposition scene Richard II was excised in 1595, because the Queen reputedly said “I am Richard II, know ye not that?” In 1601, the Earl of Essex, who had fallen out of Elizabeth’s favor, asked Shakespeare’s company to perform Richard II uncensored—and paid them extra to do so—the day before the Earl’s planned rebellion. The rebellion failed, and Essex was beheaded a few weeks later.
The Hollywood film industry has had its own history of censorship, in the form of the so-called “Hays Code” of 1934. When motion pictures were first invented, they were entirely unregulated, and obviously, many contained graphic subjects of all stripes. As audiences in America started to realize the influential power of publicly screened pictures, conservative groups lobbied to enact laws against depicting “morally offensive” material. Between the mid 1930s and the mid 1960s, American films were subject to the moral code set out by the Production Code Administration.
The Code ostensibly went by the wayside after the 1948 Supreme Court ruling of “U.S. v. Paramount Pictures,” which eliminated the major studios’ oligopoly stranglehold on distribution, i.e. theatre houses. Released from their fiefdom under studios’ rule, theatres began screening foreign films from Europe, which hadn’t the kind of strict censorship laws established in America. By the 1960s, The Code was all but dissolved, and audiences were spoiled for choice in movie-going experiences. In 1968, the picture-rating system took effect, to guide viewers’ screening decisions. That itself has undergone a number of revisions over time.
Branagh’s Hamlet was given a PG-13 rating (a designation not adopted until 1984, mostly due to Spielberg’s Indiana Jones movies), but given its usage of “‘Zounds!” the Master of Revels would have stamped it with a big “X.”
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Postscript:
Thus concludes my “ABCs of Hamlet” project. It was a privilege and pleasure and I am most proud of my personal Roman Empire that is… about a dozen things, to be fair… but Shakespeare and Film and Branagh are certainly three of them, so rolling them all into one big package of research is exactly what makes my heart sing.
While I’d love to do another like this someday, I can’t think of another Shakespeare film that I’m as obsessed by. I’ll have to keep researching my monthly plays and see what strikes my fancy. Until then, as Hamlet says, “Let be.”
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