Page 144 - Shakespeare in the Movie From the Silent Era to Shakespeare in Love

I Know Not Seems I 133

Chamberlain himself insisted, shortly before the broadcast:
"Hamlet has always seemed a contemporary play." As such, it not
only can be adapted to reflect on any temporarily modern period but
literally demands such an approach. "It is surprising," Chamberlain
continued, "that someone hasn't pressed the play into service as part
of the student protest, with Hamlet as victim of the generation gap."
The actor doth protest too much: That's precisely what he and Wood
opted for.
Their choice of a nineteenth-century setting (England's pic-
turesque Raby Castle served for exteriors) was not a case of imagi-
native interpreters arbitrarily picking a fascinating period, then
plopping some Shakespearean play into it. The decision was dictated
by, in Chamberlain's words, this era's being closest "to our own in
fashions and attitudes, so the play's contemporary qualities are
emphasized" despite a period presentation. The star's costumes,
including fluffy shirts, looked like Carnaby Street fashions; even
Chamberlain's sideburns were as in vogue for the peace-and-love era
as they had been for Regency England. More important was the emo-
tional similarity. In England and America, the youth movement
rejected everything recent in society, including intellectual psychi-
atric analysis, while openly embracing the values of Shelley or Keats.
Chamberlain admitted: "Our version is avowedly and unashamedly
romantic," turning away from the postwar period's neurotic Hamlet,
reviving an "earlier rendition that includes Irving, Barrymore, Giel-
gud and Redgrave—the prince as Byronic hero."
A Hamlet reimagined for the hippie era had to be, Chamberlain
insisted, "a man caught in a power struggle, with aspirations beyond
such mundane matters, finally forced into intrigues and destroyed
by them," For contrast, Claudius (Richard Johnson) was portrayed
as an unpleasant, Nixon-like corporate executive, suffering from five
o'clock shadow, often found at a desk completing paperwork.
Gertrude (Margaret Leighton) is highly sensual and remains married
to a powerful man in a suit while claiming to enjoy the Beatles.
Mary Lois Vann of Women's Wear Daily tagged her a socially ner-
vous aristocrat, "uneasy with the onset of age and particularly vul-
nerable to confrontation with youth." Her internal conflict is less
incestuously sexual, between deceased husband's brother and her
son, than generational; Gertrude can't decide whether to stick with
Claudius's Establishment or join Harnlet on a commune.
Intriguing, too, was the decision to make this the most supine
Hamlet ever. The great speeches are delivered with the prince on