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"Hamlet, Part Eight, the Revenge" or, Sampling Shakespeare in a Postmodern World Author(s): Kay H. Smith Source: College Literature, Vol. 31, No. 4, Shakespeare and Popular Culture (Fall, 2004), pp. 135-149 Published by: College Literature Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25115232 . Accessed: 15/05/2011 17:12 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=colllit. . Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. College Literature is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to College Literature. http://www.jstor.org

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"Hamlet, Part Eight, the Revenge" or, Sampling Shakespeare in a Postmodern WorldAuthor(s): Kay H. SmithSource: College Literature, Vol. 31, No. 4, Shakespeare and Popular Culture (Fall, 2004), pp.135-149Published by: College LiteratureStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25115232 .Accessed: 15/05/2011 17:12

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unlessyou have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and youmay use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at .http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=colllit. .

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

College Literature is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to College Literature.

http://www.jstor.org

"Hamlet, Part Eight, The Revenge" or,

Sampling Shakespeare in a Postmodern World

Kay H. Smith

In The Great Hamlets, an educational video

of interviews with famous actors and direc

tors of Hamlet, made in 1985 and released

by Films for the Humanities in 1996, the nar

rator, Trevor Nunn, has the following

exchange with Laurence Olivier:

Nunn: The subtitle Laurence Olivier

gave to his film [Hamlet] was much

debated when the film was released.

What had led [you] to calling it "The

story of a man who could not make up

his mind"?

Olivier: I'd heard it in a film with Gary

Cooper, about?I think it was sort of an

18th-century period film, on a ship, and

Gary Cooper was reading Hamlet, and

someone said to him, "What are you

reading?"

?He said, "Well, it's a play, called

Hamlet."

Kay H. Smith is a professor in

the Department of

Interdisciplinary Studies at

Appalachian State University.

Her most recent publication is

"Will! Or, Shakespeare in

Hollywood:Anthony Burgess's

Cinematic Presentation of

Shakespearean Biography" in

Remaking Shakespeare:

Performances Across Media,

Genres and Cultures (2003).

136 College Literature 31.4 [Fall 2004]

?"What's it about?"

?"It's about a man who can't make up his mind."

And I felt that has a succinctness that ought to be useful. It was too simple for my critics. They thought that was an outrageously simple explanation.

But I needed something for my?as you say, talk about the millions who've

never dreamt of seeing Hamlet; they're going to now?I needed every rea

sonably helpful sop I could to that fact. (Great Hamlets, 1996, vol. 2)

While Olivier claims this filmic allusion is merely a "reasonably helpful

sop," Nunn is accurate in recognizing it as a "much debated" assertion. As sig nificant as the assertion itself is the fact that Olivier's most prominent inter

pretive stance in his film version of Hamlet, one that has provoked debate and

speculation for over fifty years, should be taken from another film. This

famous tagline has a cinematic provenance acknowledged by Olivier: he is

referring directly to an allusion to Hamlet from a popular film, confirming, in the process, the significance of the use of allusions and references, or to use

postmodern terms, paratexts, or samplings of Hamlet in feature films.The film

that Olivier refers to in his conversation with Nunn is the 1937 action

drama, Souls at Sea, directed by Henry Hathaway, starring Gary Cooper and

George Raft. In Gary Cooper, American Hero, Jeffrey Meyers notes that in this

film Cooper "is unusually talkative, intellectual, and literate. He plays chess, tells the story of the Trojan Horse, refers to the career of Sir Walter Raleigh, reads Hamlet aloud, and quotes from Romantic poetry" (1998,147). Clearly, it is not just the postmodern sensibility which recognizes the importance of

recycling and repositioning high and low culture.

It is, nevertheless, widely acknowledged that one aspect of postmod ernism is its tendency to recycle. Whether it is called "paratext," "bricolage,"

"sampling," or more old-fashioned terms, like "parody," "allusion," and "liter

ary borrowing," the phenomenon has particularly infected movies of the last

two decades (Mallin 1999,128). We have become used to seeing "based on"

in the credits of films like Clueless, based on Jane Austens Emma, or Ten Things I Hate about You, based on William Shakespeare s The Taming of the Shrew, or

O, based on Othello. It should not surprise us, given the film industry's con

tinuing enthusiasm for Shakespeare on film, to find that "sampling," the term

I will use to describe this phenomenon, of Shakespeare in film extends far

beyond a simple lifting of obvious plot elements. While Olivier's example reminds us that this is not a new occurrence, it should also remind us that

Hamlet is a prime source for sampling. Perhaps no other of Shakespeare's

plays has been ransacked for lines, scenes, plot devices, or oblique but telling references as often or as completely in films of the last two decades as Hamlet.

Examples ran the gamut from Tom Stoppard's witty attempt to turn Hamlet

Kay H. Smith 137

inside out in his 1967 play and 1990 film of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are

Dead to Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas's deliberately witless attempt to

turn Hamlet into beer-guzzling farce in their 1983 film, Strange Brew. Hamlet

adds high culture archetypal allusions to The Lion King (Allers and Minkoff

1994) and provides a frame for the mass culture thrills of Last Action Hero

(McTiernan 1993). It illuminates cultural politics in Star Trek VI: The

Undiscovered Country (Meyer 1991) and sexual politics in Mick Jackson

(director) and Steve Martin's (writer) L.A. Story (1991). In these films, of which Stoppard s is perhaps the fullest example, the text

of Hamlet becomes a kind of "raw material" that both has meaning in itself

and also derives meaning from its rearticulation within a new form. This

essay examines the effect of such borrowings from Hamlet, keeping in mind

that Hamlet itself was the first work of art to borrow deliberately from

Hamlet.The play within the play of act III draws its power to catch the con

science of the king by reiterating what the ghost has told Hamlet in Act I.

The story of Old Hamlet's death is literally rearticulated within a new form

in the dumb show and the play-within-the-play of The Murder of Gonzago. Yet not all filmmakers have been as successful as Shakespeare was in using ele

ments of Hamlet to expand the significance of a work. In fact, Hamlet can

become a problematic literary icon, which disrupts through the contrasts it

establishes.

Samplings of Hamlet range in complexity and significance, but can be

easily categorized. First, short quotations from key scenes are often used in a

film to illuminate character or theme. These brief snippets usually refer to the

best-known moments in Hamlet, as in the "to be or not to be" speech used

in Denys Arcand's 1989 film, Jesus of Montreal. Somewhat more extensive use

of Hamlet occurs when archetypal plot elements are borrowed, as in The Lion

King. Hamlet can be used in more complex thematic ways to underline con

flict, as in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, or to resolve conflict, this

time romantic rather than martial, as in L.A. Story. Yet paradoxically, the use

of Hamlet becomes more problematic the more central Hamlet becomes to a

film. When Hamlet is presented as the "first action hero" in order to link his

heroic qualities to the story of Last Action Hero, or when the effect of read

ing and understanding this great story becomes the major task of the film, as

in Renaissance Man (Marshall 1994), perhaps too much of a contrast is set up between Hamlet and the vehicle that embodies it. Repositioning Hamlet in

this kind of frame tends to show the relative tawdriness of the frame.

Surprisingly, this is true even in what must be the most elaborate frame story

using Hamlet, Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. In a

reverse of postmodern expectations, sampling from Hamlet can cause the

high cultural elements of this acknowledged masterpiece to subvert the low

138 College Literature 31.4 [Fall 2004]

cultural context in which it is placed. Nevertheless, filmmakers have found it

tempting to take advantage of the audience s knowledge of Hamlet to

advance plot, enhance theme, underline character development. In doing so,

they allow us to examine both the benefits and limitations to be found in the

range of Shakespearean sampling. The most basic sampling of Hamlet might be characterized by its com

bination of brevity and familiarity. This brief illumination of theme or quick characterization often falls to the most recognizable lines or scenes from

Hamlet. Hamlet may be used as a kind of shorthand that is easy for the audi

ence to read and interpret. Thus, one of the most common uses of

Shakespeare and Hamlet, both in movies and in life, is the kind of one

upmanship that reveals character. In the 1995 comedy, Clueless (Heckerling), for instance, the heroine, Cher, a seemingly airhead Valley Girl, corrects the

attribution of one of the most famous lines from Hamlet, "To thine own self

be true." Not only do w? applaud when the pseudo-intellectual pretensions of her art student rival are countered by a girl who may not know

Shakespeare but "know[s] Mel Gibson," but we also cannot help but approve of a heroine who can correct one of the most misattributed lines in all of

Shakespeare's canon. Like Emma Woodhouse, her fictional counterpart from

Jane Austen's Emma, Cher may often be willful and wrongheaded, but she is

basically cleverer and smarter than she might wish to admit, as the smile on

the face of the young man who represents Mr. Knightly clearly indicates.

In a more serious context but with a similar strategy, Denys Arcand

(1989), director of Jesus of Montreal, uses an extremely well known passage from Hamlet to illuminate theme. In the decidedly secular and high-tech

world of Jesus of Montreal, Shakespeare has become one of the few universal

ly recognizable sacred texts. This point is made briefly and succinctly in the

film. With its reenactments on several levels of the life of Christ, Jesus of Montreal examines the significance of the sacred in the modern world. In the

film one of the actors agrees to appear in the passion play that is central to

the plot only if he can quote Hamlet's "To be or not to be" speech. By

choosing to insert this quotation in the resurrection scene of the passion play, Arcand posits a Jesus who is as unsure as Hamlet of the nature of the here

after. As a subtext, the passage reminds us of the problems of secularization

that the film highlights, when Shakespeare resonates more deeply than the

Bible on such a solemn occasion.

These brief uses of Hamlet are actually not unlike "totalizing" uses of

Hamlet, in which a filmmaker basically says, "Please note how much my film

resembles Hamlet." The Lion King is one such well-known film. The appear ance of the ghost of Simbas father, who reiterates "Remember ..." like the

ghost of Hamlet's father, illuminates the archetypal conflicts between Simba

Kay H. Smith 139

and his evil and usurping uncle, Scar. While it may add depth to the story,

causing the audience to associate Simbas plight with Hamlet's struggle, this

sprinkling of "Hamlet-dust" over the plot is really designed to help at least a

portion of the audience recognize some elements of tragedy and redemption that give this animated Disney feature a claim to having a serious theme.

Thus, while the kids enjoy the hyenas, at least some of the parents can enjoy a little nod of recognition of The Lion King's literary underpinnings.

In contrast to the "serious" use of Hamlet in The Lion King, Rick Moranis

and Dave Thomas use Hamlet to underscore the silliness of their 1983 film,

Strange Brew. In Strange Brew, two young Canadian guzzlers set out to get as

much free beer as they can and end up embedded, like Rosencrantz and

Guildenstern, in the story of Hamlet. The beer company they set out to

defraud is called Elsinore Brewery, located in a picturesque castle straight out

of Olivier's Hamlet. There they discover that the owner of the brewery has

recently died and his daughter, Pamela, who should have inherited the busi

ness, has been pushed aside by her uncle, Claude. Moreover, Claude has mar

ried Pamela's frivolous and careless mother. Our heroes bungle around try

ing to set things straight in Elsinore. While the totalizing "Hamlet-dust" is all over this film, it is hard to call any of it consequential. Rather it is the con

trast between the silliness of the Strange Brew story and the seriousness of

Hamlet that provokes the laughter that Moranis and Thomas seek. Both The

Lion King and Strange Brew need Hamlet but for exactly the opposite reasons,

indicating how flexible and useful these "take-over" samplings?loosely called "adaptations"?of the Hamlet plot can be.

Transitory uses of Hamlet tend to be pointed and functional.

Occasionally, however, films like Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country and

L.A. Story can more successfully combine disparate elements from Hamlet.

These films make creative use of prominent themes and language from the

play to set up the significant conflicts that they will explore. They are gener

ally more creative and risk-taking in their approach to Hamlet. This is true in

the verbal and thematic exploits performed on Shakespeare in the early 1990s contribution to the Star Trek film series, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered

Country. With a sub-title from Hamlet's "To be or not to be" speech and

seemingly more quotations from Shakespeare than Bartletfs Familiar

Quotations, the film, at first glance, overwhelms us with Shakespearean refer

ences that it challenges us to sort out. In fact, the title is one of the best uses

of Hamlet in the film. In his soliloquy, Hamlet realizes that it is the dread of

change and of the unknown, the "undiscovered country" after death that

leads us to accept, or at least bear, the many pains and wrongs of our present situations. In Star Trek VI, the "undiscovered country" is not death but the

possibility of intergalactic peace. In this Cold War parable, we are encouraged

140 College Literature 31.4 [Fall 2004]

to mourn for the lost stability of the "Great Powers" era as we enter the

chaotic period surrounding the decline of the Soviet empire. The crew of the

starship Enterprise accepts the discomforts and threats of enmity far better

than they deal with the promise of peace. The "Shakespeare gimmick" in Star Trek VI is that the Klingons claim the

Bard as their own cultural property and proceed to quote rings around the

bemused officers of the Enterprise. Here at the "end of history," when the

Klingons and the Federation are supposedly making peace, ideological oppo sition takes the form of cultural appropriation. As the Klingons make the "To

be or not to be" speech from Hamlet uniquely their own, and as the crew of

the Enterprise react with surprised frustration and irritation to their claim

that Shakespeare is a Klingon, we in the audience discover that hostilities

between these two old enemies have not been abandoned: they have merely shifted ideological ground as cultural politics supplant realpolitik.1

It is no surprise to learn that the two major Klingons in the film are

played by Shakespearean-trained actors, Christopher Plummer and David

Warner. Plummer, in particular, as General Chang, has the presence and

potential to be a true Shakespearean villain, like Richard III, magnetic and

repulsive simultaneously. When he quotes the "To be or not to be" speech in

Klingon and then says to the officers of the Enterprise, "You should read

Shakespeare in the original Klingon," he makes a cultural claim that causes

us to smile, then to feel a bit uncomfortable as we realize how proprietary we in the "English-speaking world" are about the works of the Bard. But

Nicholas Meyer, the director, never really delivers the potential of his villain

and Chang becomes a less significant figure. Instead of squaring off Kirk

against Chang, Meyer chooses to pursue some Hamlet-like: thematic echoes

in Kirk's desire for revenge for his son. Detours to a Klingon Siberia further

distance us from Chang.

Quickly, Chang becomes a completely flat character, identifiable by his

eye patch and his penchant for quoting Shakespeare on all occasions. The

audience begins to feel they have hit the "Shakespeare" category on

"Jeopardy" as they madly try to link quotations to plays. The quotations from

other plays lose the initial impact of those from Hamlet. The game gets tire

some to us even before it gets tiresome to the crew of the Enterprise, who

must endure a barrage of quotations from Chang as he tries to blast them out

of the sky. In fact, one of the biggest laughs of the film occurs when Bones,

desperately trying to save the day, says of Chang's Bardic efforts, "I'd give real

money if he'd shut up!" While Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country may make few demands on

us besides the admonition to "Brush up your Shakespeare," this "cultural lit

eracy" approach to Shakespearean allusion does elaborate on the cultural

Kay H. Smith 141

claim made more briefly in films like Jesus of Montreal: Shakespeare is the only author of world reputation who could be used and abused in this way.

Everybody in our ever-widening English-speaking world is expected to rec

ognize a little Shakespeare, and Star Trek VI makes it easy by assigning almost

all the quotations to one character, so we can all play the game. Yet when

Bones tires of the incessant barrage of Shakespeare, he is mimicking the feel

ings of many in the audience who have endured poor performances, tyranni cal teachers, and a whole cultural establishment that insists on defending the

cause of Shakespearean hegemony while simultaneously commodifying it.

If Star Trek VI inadvertently makes claims about Shakespearean cultural

politics, Steve Martin's 1992 L.A. Story quite deliberately uses Shakespeare to

expand cultural politics into sexual politics. One critic has called this film

"the most exhaustive compendium of Los Angeles jokes ever assembled"

(Johnson 1991, 47). From the traffic signals that say "Uh, like walk" to the

Nazi-like maitre d' at the fashionable restaurant, L'Idiot, Martin finds more

than enough to satirize about L.A. In fact, he begins the movie with a rather

typical Shakespearean satirical barb. While the camera focuses on an outdoor

"park" for stationary bikes, Martin quotes in a voiceover from John of

Gaunt s speech in Richard II: "This other Eden, demi-paradise / . . . This

happy breed of men, this little world, this earth, this realm, this . . . L.A." As

if in counterpoint, a "cyclist" in the background collapses and an ambulance

arrives. One more of this "happy-breed' has been laid low by the amenities

of L.A. This opening sequence is an indication that Martin is going to use his

Shakespearean samplings against the grain, which is of particular significance for Hamlet, which Martin will expertly refocus to fit into the realm of

romantic comedy.

In all, L.A. Story contains quotations from Macbeth, As You Like It, and, of

course, Richard II, as well as a full-blown parody of the Gravedigger scene

from Hamlet. In a film with lots and lots of jokes, some less successful than

others, it is easy to see the Shakespeare material as of indeterminate conse

quence. In his negative New Republic review, Stanley Kaufmann complains

that "The rationale behind these Shakespeare spoofs is no more substantial

than anything else in the picture" (1991, 29). In complete contrast, in her

article in Shakespeare Quarterly, Linda Chames claims that L.A. Story is

"arguably the paradigmatic postmodern Hamlet" (1997,11).These comments

seem to me to be overstatement in both positive and negative directions.The

Shakespearean material is more significant than Kaufmann recognizes, yet the

Hamlet quotations and parodies seem to serve the romantic comedy rather

than turning the romantic comedy into postmodern tragedy, as Chames

claims. It is in the use of Shakespearean tragedy to serve the ends of roman

142 College Literature 31.4 [Fall 2004]

tic comedy that Martin makes his most original contribution to sampling

Shakespeare in this film.

As a comic satirist in L.A. Story, Martin has two particular problems: first

an almost ridiculously easy target; second, an insider's viewpoint. As

Kaufmann says, "Satire about L.A. is like ice in Antarctica?it goes with the

territory" (1991, 28). Martin, a native of Los Angeles, makes his character, Harris K. Telemacher, a participant, sometimes reluctantly but often willing

ly, in the dizzy goofiness of the place. It is Harris, after all, who orders "a half

double decaffeinated half-caf with a twist of lemon" in the wonderful scene

spoofing L.A. lunches. In Annie Hall, which is, as Pauline Kael notes, "a film

L.A Story turns inside out," Woody Allen takes an outsider's, a New Yorker's,

perspective on L.A. in order to produce his biting satire (1991, 74). Of

course, satire is most effective if it presents a stated or implied norm against which its subject can be judged. But Harris is too much a part of the place

to provide that norm. In L.A. Story, Martin solves the problems of both place and perspective by creating the Annie Hall-like Sarah, a visiting British jour nalist with whom Harris falls in love. Sarah is not only the outsider Martin

needs to give his story perspective, she is decisively English, and her nation

ality, with the values and culture it implies, sets up a much-needed contrast

to L.A. The Shakespearean quotations in the film move from being primari

ly satirical in intent to being romantic as they are more and more associated

with Sarah. Most of the Shakespearean quotations are not unmotivated and

unsubstantial, as Kaufman would claim; rather they re-enforce the romantic

plot, just as "Pyramis and Thisbe" in its own antic tragi-comic way re

enforces the romantic plot of A Midsummer Night's Dream. In fact, by the end

of the movie, we are pretty sure that we are "in a wood near Athens," as the

plot twists bring the right couples together, and the interaction of the human

and magical worlds clearly evokes Shakespearean romantic comedy. It is thus ironic that the most extensive use of Shakespeare in L.A Story

is the fully developed parody of the gravedigger's scene from Act V of Hamlet.

Do the morbidity and the trenchant wit of this scene tinge the film that uses

it with postmodern tragic overtones or can it be made to advance the

romantic plot of L.A Story? I believe that Martin succeeds in incorporating this tragic material into romantic comedy. First, of course, Martin cannot

resist the urge to hang a few L.A. jokes on this scene from Hamlet, starting with Harris's claim that Shakespeare wrote "Hamlet, Part Eight, The Revenge"

in L.A. But Martin quickly moves the parody along. When Harris picks up the skull of the Great Blunderman, and acknowledges his debt as a comedi

an, Sarah, the observer, begins to recognize and quote the source material

from Hamlet" She's got it," says the Gravedigger, played by Rick Moranis,

making his second and more significant appearance in a Hamlet parody. The

Kay H. Smith 143

fact that Sarah knows Hamlet, and in particular can quote the lines associat

ed with a comedian who could "set the table on a roar" seems to be just the

right romantic formula for Harris, and it is from this point that their romance

really begins.Thus, this funny but ultimately bleak scene from Hamlet is repo sitioned to work in the context of romantic comedy in L.A. Story.

Confirmation of this repositioning occurs near the end of the film, when

Sarah resolves the word scramble "HOW DADDY IS DOING" (surely a

Hamlet reference) into "SING DOO WAH DIDDY" Harris has initially been

given this word-scrambled clue to the meaning of life by the "talking" free

way signpost which serves as his unusual spiritual guide throughout the

movie ("gimme a sign!"). He confronts the signpost, asking:"Sing Doo Wah

Diddy? That's the mystery of the ages?" The signpost replies, "THERE ARE

MORE THINGS N HEAVEN AND EARTH, HARRIS, THAN ARE DREAMT OF IN YOUR PHILOSOPHY." Indeed, there are more uses for

Hamlet in romantic comedy than one might have expected. In this blending of genres, L.A Story may not quite be the "paradigmatic postmodern Hamlet"

but it is decidedly postmodern nevertheless.

Both Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country and L.A Story bend various

aspects of Hamlet to their uses in illuminating cultural and romantic conflict.

Films that tend to reposition Hamlet in this way, as we see, gain resonance

from this material. However, films which "swallow" chunks of Hamlet whole

sometimes have trouble digesting them. This is particularly true of films that

allow key elements of the Hamlet story to dominate them. These films are

characterized by the way in which they actually "show" scenes from Hamlet

imbedded within the film. While they are paradoxically the most direct

examples of sampling, they are also the ones most likely to be disruptive to

the film. This is true of Renaissance Man and Last Action Hero, and, surpris

ingly, of Rosencrantz and Gildenstern are Dead as well. Each of these films actu

ally presents parts of Hamlet, either through performance and pedagogy, as in

Renaissance Man, preview-trailers, as in Last Action Hero, or through the clever

shift in perspective that allows us to see Hamlet from the point of view of

minor characters in Rosencrantz and Gildenstern Are Dead.

The 1994 comedy, Renaissance Man, tries to show us why Hamlet can still

have relevance to today's youth, but, in doing so causes us to question why we would want to bother with a comedy as shallow as Renaissance Man when

we have Hamlet. The premise of this film is that Army trainees who have

failed in almost every way will find success through studying Hamlet. In

Renaissance Man, a hapless advertising executive, played by Danny DeVito,

who loses his job, finds another and far tougher job remediating Army recruits who have failed to make the grade in the classroom or in the field.

This is the archetypal Lynn Cheney era National Endowment for the

144 College Literature 31.4 [Fall 2004]

Humanities story, in which students who were turned off by an educational

system which catered too much to popular tastes find redemption and intel

lectual respectability by reading the classics, in this case Hamlet. Their teacher, in the best Mr. Chips/Dead Poets Society tradition, finds that, while they can

barely keep an interest in Archie comics, the students are immediately

intrigued and engaged by one of the most demanding of Shakespeare s plays. DeVito's character, like his students, seems a natural in the classroom, organ

izing flawlessly paced discussions and effectively using a performance-based

pedagogy. Indeed, some of the best moments in the film come when the

recruits study and perform Hamlet. While it is alluring for professional

Shakespeareans to believe that classroom contact with Hamlet can have this

redemptive power, it has to be somewhat disconcerting to see this argument

being made in such a weak film overall. While the classroom sequences may seem to represent every teacher's dream, the rest of the film is often far weak

er and less entertaining. The competitive relationship that develops between

the teacher and the drill sergeant, played by Gregory Hines, falls flat; their

small passions look even smaller in comparison to the passions the students

are glimpsing in the world of Hamlet.Yet the director, Penny Marshall, seems

to have realized that no matter how inspirational the classroom scenes might

be, the audience might not willingly sit through two hours of what amounts

to instruction. When she attempts to open the movie out with scenes of the

teacher on the training tower, the movie degenerates into slapstick. When she

attempts to create pathos with stories of the individual students, we merely see stereotypes being confirmed. Indeed, we must ask ourselves how this

deeply conservative film can have the audacity to argue that a late encounter

with Hamlet can correct endemic social problems like racial and regional

conflict, family violence, and years of under-funded schools and neglected students. In the end, it turns out that these military students are studying the

wrong play anyway: they may like Hamlet, but when they witness a per formance of Henry V, every Army recruiter's dream play, they respond to it

with an enthusiastic victory on the training field. It is the patriotic Henry, not the melancholy Dane, who must become their model.

1993's Last Action Hero also uses Hamlet in a classroom setting, only to

discover problems similar to those that plague Renaissance Ma?. The intrigu

ing premise of this film is that movie action heroes who magically step off

the screen and into the real world find themselves ill suited for everyday life.

The story focuses on a pre-adolescent boy who worships his screen hero, Jack

Slater, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger. The boy acquires a magic ticket

that allows him to penetrate the illusional world of the film. Ultimately,

through some mishap, the boy and his hero must return to the real world to

capture a villain who has escaped from the film and is creating real-life may

Kay H. Smith 145

hem. In this film, the framing effect of Hamlet is very significant to the

theme. The scene from Hamlet occurs early in the film, when the boy,

trapped in a boring classroom, is forced to watch Hamlet by his well-mean

ing teacher, played by Joan Plowright. For the knowledgeable viewer,

Plowright's presence plays with illusion and reality since she is the real-life

widow of Lawrence Olivier. Those highbrow Shakespeare buffs in the audi

ence who recognize her might consider this inside joke to be on them since

they have clearly chosen to see a film that prefers Schwarzenegger to Olivier.

Naturally, Plowright screens for her charges Olivier's film version of Hamlet.

In her role as teacher, Plowright attributes to Hamlet those characteristics

that would most likely appeal to her inattentive class of ten-year-olds.

Emphasizing the many poisonings, duels, and deaths in the play, she refers to

Hamlet as "the first action hero."

In this film about film reality, it is significant that Hamlet is presented in

one of its most well-known film adaptations, the Olivier Hamlet, in which

the theme of Hamlet's hesitation, rather than his decisive action, is under

scored by the famous initial voice-over that reminds us that "this is a story of

a man who could not make up his mind." When we recall that this tagline itself comes from a film, we can see the way in which a film reference to

Hamlet can come full circle. What influenced Olivier's Hamlet to emphasize doubt and delay, here influences Last Action Hero to posit its exact opposite, a Hamlet who is precipitous in his decisive actions. The scene that the boys

watch is perhaps the locus classicus of Hamlet's hesitation, in which Hamlet

passes up his chance to kill Claudius while at prayer because he desires eter

nal damnation, as well as death, for Claudius. While many readers and view

ers of Hamlet have been horrified at Hamlet's motivation in this scene, oth

ers have shared the boy's frustration as Hamlet fails to act decisively. At this

point, the boy substitutes in his imagination the kind of hero he would like

Hamlet to be, and Arnold Schwarzenegger replaces Olivier on the screen.

The clip moves out of the boy's imagination and becomes a kind of preview of what a Schwarzenegger Hamlet would be like, complete with the charac

teristic enthusiastic voice-over of action previews. In a very expensive movie

with elaborate special effects, it is not surprising that this is all very well done.

The archetypal turreted castle, high on the cliffs above the sea, blows up with

satisfying billows of flame as Schwarzenegger says "To be or not to be ... not

to be," while lighting the fuse to the bomb with his cigar. In his very inter

esting analysis of Hamlet in the John Ford Western, My Darling Clementine,

Scott Simmons calls our attention to a similar scene in that film:

The Hamlet-soliloquy scene in Clementine . . . ends with [Ike] Clanton's

advice to his boys, brought home with his whip: "When you pull a gun, kill

a man." In the context of Hamlet's scrupulous worry over action and mor

146 College Literature 31.4 [Fall 2004]

tality, the line earns an audience laugh every time: it cuts through Hamlet's

Gordian Knot. But, of course, in having such an evil figure do so, it legit imizes Hamlet's scruples. (Simmons 1996,122)

In a similar way, Last Action Hero, for all its cleverness about illusion and

reality, legitimizes Hamlet's scruples because the thoughtless heroics of

Schwarzenegger's Jack Slater ultimately fail to engage the audience. Neither

those who prefer a more Hamlet-like hero nor those who prefer a typical action hero are completely satisfied by this film. Eric S. Mallin notes that

"what [Schwarzenegger] seems to want in his movie is a fiction of masculine

sensitivity swathed in the potential for infinite and meaningless violence"

(1999,129). AsTodd McCarthy says in his Variety review of Last Action Hero,

there is a "total imbalance between the money and effort lavished on every scene and the utter lack of emotion or human interest to latch on to" (1993,

22). Despite the potentialities of the Hamlet theme that Mallin notes, it is dif

ficult not to see the film as diminishing Hamlet while not enhancing itself.

Hamlet is neither the "first action hero" nor, in fact, much of an action hero

at all, a fact which he regrets in every soliloquy and with which all film adap

tations, even film samplings, of Hamlet have to struggle. Both Renaissance Man and Last Action Hero try to make an argument for

an active, dynamic and multi-faceted Hamlet, able to engage even the most

difficult and jaded students; many scholars and teachers know that this argu ment is largely correct. Why, then, are both of these movies unable to use

Hamlet in ways that strengthen, rather than undermine the films? I think it

is because in both cases the contrasting complexities of Hamlet, rather than

adding depth to the films, highlight problems of plot, action, and characteri

zation. Hamlet can be dangerous material for the filmmaker.

In Tom Stoppard's sixties play and 1990 movie, Rosencrantz and

Guildenstern Are Dead, Hamlet does indeed prove to be dangerous material,

particularly for the eponymous heroes. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, whom Paul Delaney has called those "spear carriers from the wings of

Shakespeare's imagination" (1990, 14), meet their preordained fate, death, as

they struggle to understand what is going on around them. Indebted stylis

tically to Beckett and the theater of the absurd, Stoppard's play changes the

perspective of Hamlet to follow the two hapless anti-heroes to their death

(Cantor 1989, 95). The film, which was made twenty-five years after the

debut of the play, was Stoppard's first time as a film director. In examining the changes that Stoppard made as he transferred the play to the screen, one

notices first that Stoppard's addition of scenes from Hamlet has increased dra

matically?by over fifty percent?from stage to screen. In contrast to his film,

Stoppard's play limits rather carefully the material that is directly imported from Hamlet, in order to suit the need for focus and compactness on the

Kay H. Smith 147

stage. In fact, Stoppard describes the stage setting as "a place without any vis

ible character" (1967,11).This barrenness on stage has to be opened out for

the film, as Stoppard has acknowledged: "In the play by its very nature,

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are standing and sitting around in one spot and the action moves past them. The whole thing in the film is that they are

trying to chase the action" (qtd. Seidenberg 1991, 49). In trying to chase the action, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern bump into

Hamlet and the rest of the troubled and troubling gang from Elsinore much

more frequently in the film than in the play. Surprisingly, the result is to

weaken the film in contrast to the play.While Rosencrantz and Guildenstern has

a fundamentally different attachment to Hamlet than, say, Renaissance Man, it

nevertheless rearticulates some of the problem that film had in sampling Hamlet. There is just so much more of Hamlet in the film, at least doubling

the number of Hamlet scenes from the play. Many times these scenes are clev

erly joined to the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern story as in the scene in

which Hamlet and Ophelia act out the "sewing scene" at the beginning of

act II. As in Olivier's Hamlet, Stoppard makes the choice to show what is a

narrated action in the play, but he links this action to Rosencrantz and

Guildenstern with a sight gag of curtains falling and hiding them while the

scene goes on around them. Later Stoppard will use a similar linkage, with

Hamlet and Ophelia, in high temper at the end of the "nunnery speech,"

bursting through the stage curtains while Rosencrantz and Guildenstern

watch the Tragedians rehearse the dumb show. The dumb show itself is

repeated over and over again, in many different forms and in ways that are

hauntingly predictive of the fate of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; yet this

repetition also keeps the outline of the Hamlet story constantly in the audi

ence's mind.

Clearly, opening out the play in this way facilitates the transfer from stage to film: the film has more of a sense of the action of Hamlet swirling around, ever present at the edges of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern s perception. Yet,

just as the power and quality of the Hamlet story can undermine lesser efforts, it tends to do so here as well. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's fate is deter

mined by the larger play, Hamlet. If too much of the larger play is "on screen"

it threatens to overwhelm the two characters, moving them from their odd

centrality, and once again literally diminishing their roles and our interest in

them. In fact, the glimpses we catch of Hamlet in the film make us want

more: even in these brief interludes, we sense a fuller and more turbulent

inner life than we ever see from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

Visually Stoppard had no choice but to open out Rosencrantz and

Guildenstern Are Dead for the screen. The additions from Hamlet, the inven

tions that Rosencrantz nearly achieves, the slapstick sequences, the addition

148 College Literature 31.4 [Fall 2004]

al spectacle of the Tragedians' expanded dumb show which retells the Hamlet

story, while they bemuse our bungling heroes, make the film work as a film.

Yet the reviews of Stoppard's film were largely negative. Most critics cite the

conventionality of his directorial style, with Terrence Rafferty noting in the

New Yorker that Stoppard "isn't familiar enough with cinematic style to toy with it in the cheeky, abandoned way he toys with theatrical style" (1991,89).

Looking back on other films which have made use of Hamlet in ways that slip out of directorial control, I would argue that Stoppard "samples" too

much of Hamlet in his film. Like Renaissance Man and Last Action Hero,

Stoppard's film uses Hamlet to frame a story that is finally less significant and

engaging than Hamlet's story. While Hamlet remains a cultural icon that

tempts screenwriters and directors to incorporate it, while it can be used

cleverly, while it can be sophisticated and comedie as well as tragic, bringing

high culture into fruitful contact with low as in Star Trek VI or L.A Story, Hamlet can also be problematic. The dynamic qualities that have caused it to

be acknowledged as a great literary work, even in diminished, sampled forms, can bring much trouble to a film. The collapse of high culture into low cul

ture is another widely recognized characteristic of post-modernism. With

Hamlet in films such as Renaissance Man, Last Action Hero and even Rosencrantz

and Gildenstern Are Dead, we see that high culture can and does remain sub

versive of low culture. One samples Hamlet at some risk.

Notes

1 See Dionne (2002). My comments on Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country are based on a paper I gave at Florida State University's Literature and Film confer

ence in 1992. Dionne's essay largely agrees with and expands my analysis.

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Chames, Linda. 1997. "Dismember Me: Shakespeare, Paranoia, and the Logic of Mass

Culture." Shakespeare Quarterly 48.1-16.

Corrigan, Timothy 2002. "Which Shakespeare to Love? Film, Fidelity, and the

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Delaney, Paul. 1990. Tom Stoppard: The Moral Vision of the Major Plays. New York: St.

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