Page 129 - Shakespeare in the Movie From the Silent Era to Shakespeare in Love

118 I Shakespeare in the Movies

Goodnight, Sweet Prince
Hamlet: The Drama of Vengeance
Art-Film Germany, 1920; Svend Gade

In 1920 Asta Nielsen starred in a Berlin-based version directed by
Danish filmmaker Svend Gade, with the screenplay by Erwin
Gepard. This Hamlet was, by the collaborators' own admission, only
peripherally related to the play, derived from an 1881 American
tome by Edward Vining, The Mystery of Hamlet. The book's central
conceit explains why Nielsen offered something altogether different
from Bernhardt—a woman playing a man whom many believed to be
effeminate. Nielsen incarnated the idea that Hamlet was actually a
woman who spent her life disguised as a man. Thus, Nielsen is a
woman playing a woman pretending to be a man who is perceived as
feminine—a unique, if debatable, solution to Hamlet's "problem."
Rather than Shakespeare's tragedy of enclosure, Gade crafted his
film in the epic-history-as-human-melodrama approach Griffith ini-
tiated five years earlier with The Birth of a Nation. Gade opened
with rapid crosscutting between old Hamlet, off fighting a battle
with old Fortinbras (whom he kills), and the birth of young Hamlet
at Elsinore. Gertrude gives birth to a girl; she is fearful her husband
may die and worried whether the population will accept a woman as
head of state, so she swears her nurse to secrecy, then announces
that a prince has been born. Years later, Gertrude (resembling wicked
Lady Macbeth more than Denmark's morally ambiguous queen) and
Claudius conspire to kill old Hamlet. Hamlet delays his/her
vengeance owing to a crisis of sexual identity rather than any failure
of nerve. Attracted to friend Horatio, (s)he must repress such yearn-
ings so that the secret will not be revealed. This Hamlet woos Polo-
nius's daughter only because Ophelia and Horatio are falling in love;
Hamlet can best keep Horatio free for him(her)self by seducing the
competition.
The gender-bending approach is so similar to the heroines dis-
guised as boys in Shakespearean comedies that one wishes Gade had
gone all the way, giving his film a happy ending. Nonetheless, Gade
employs the cinematic vocabulary created by Griffith to drive home
points in visual terms, most notably animal symbolism. Hamlet,
returning from Wittenberg, discovers Gertrude and Claudius (in long
shot) feasting; the camera tilts down to a closer shot of two snarling
dogs at the royals' feet, gnawing on bones, establishing a connection