SOURCE: Crowl, Samuel. “Zeffirelli's Hamlet: The Golden Girl and a Fistful of Dust.” Cineaste 24, no. 1 (1998): 56-61.

[In the following review, Crowl examines Franco Zeffirelli's 1990 film version of Hamlet, starring Mel Gibson as Hamlet and Glenn Close as Gertrude. Crowl praises Zeffirelli's casting, textual editing, and exploitation of cinematic space and landscape, and claims that the film offers a full exploration of the play as a family romance centered around Gertrude.]

Franco Zeffirelli, the maker of the most commercially successful of all Shakespeare films, has received paradoxically less critical attention than any of the other major directors of Shakespeare films. Olivier, Welles, Kurosawa, Kozintsev, and Branagh all have found their work at the center of scrutiny in the growing body of critical literature devoted to Shakespeare on film. But not Zeffirelli. Of the six books which appeared between 1988 and 1992, and which constituted a mini-explosion of critical interest in Shakespeare as a subject for film, only one, Peter Donaldson's Shakespearean Films/Shakespearean Directors, contained an extended analysis of a Zeffirelli film.¹ He was ignored by the others, as he was by Charles Eckert's pioneering collection of essays on Shakespearean films which appeared in 1972 just four years after the release of Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet.² Only Jack Jorgens, in his groundbreaking Shakespeare on Film (1977), gave Zeffirelli his due with chapters devoted both to Taming of the Shrew and Romeo and Juliet.³ Recent collections, Shakespeare and the Moving Image (1994) and Shakespeare, The Movie (1997), have tried to restore the balance somewhat by including omnibus essays on Zeffirelli's Shakespeare films, but even they are measured in their assessment of his achievement.⁴ The attention paid to Kenneth Branagh's work may lead, as Robert Hapgood suggests, to renewed interest in Zeffirelli's as Branagh's flamboyant realism is so obviously indebted to Zeffirelli's lush and energetic film style.⁵

Why has Zeffirelli's work been so generally ignored or discounted by Shakespeare on film scholars? His Taming, so obviously a vehicle for its famous stars, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, did not transcend their limitations and appeared just at a moment when modern feminism was suggesting a host of alternative approaches to the play beyond treating it as broad, battle-of-the-sexes, farce. Jorgens is right to see that the film's most innovative moments are its opening scenes with Lucentio and Tranio arriving in Padua just as the city breaks into festive swirl and abuse, as the university students celebrate the first day of the new term.⁶ Zeffirelli's frame clearly wishes to reimagine the play's farce as participating in the festive, holiday atmosphere of Shakespeare's major romantic comedies. But Cassius to the contrary, the fault is sometimes in our stars and Burton and Taylor fail to transcend the quasiautobiographical impulses which led them to this Shakespearean project.

Romeo and Juliet, perhaps, suffered from the opposite fate. Here was a film so bold and stunning, which immediately found and held its teenage audience, that critical analysis was largely superfluous. This film, at least until Donaldson's suggestive essay, didn't need interpreters—it spoke directly and powerfully to students by passing the Shakespeare establishment. Zeffirelli's film reflected the 1960s in romanticizing the passion, intensity, and beauty of the young destroyed by the quarrels and conflicts of their parents. The film became the first to reshape the teaching of Shakespeare in the American high-school English curriculum. For almost seventy-five years Julius Caesar and Macbeth topped the list of the ten most taught Shakespeare plays—a list on which Romeo and Juliet did not appear. By 1975 Romeo and Juliet had leapt to the top of that list where it has remained, sustained by countless replays of Zeffirelli's film, for the past twenty-five years. So the film's immense popularity and its association, at least in America, with the high school curriculum were perhaps two reasons for its critical neglect.

One might have expected that the huge financial success of Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet (1968) would have created the commercial atmosphere conducive to the making of more Shakespeare films, but the failure of Polanski's Macbeth (1971) to recapture and extend the young audience Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet had found doomed the genre for almost two decades until the advent of the Branagh revolution. Though the planning for Zeffirelli's film of Hamlet (1990) long predated the release of Branagh's Henry V in 1989, the surprising success of Branagh's low-budget film certainly helped pave the way for Zeffirelli's return to screen Shakespeare after an absence of almost twenty-five years.

Though some commentators feel that Hamlet presented the romantic Italian with a world less congenial than Taming's Padua or Romeo's Verona (“One cannot move from his Padua and Verona to his Elsinore without a feeling of sensory deprivation,” Robert Hapgood perceptively remarks), Zeffirelli's fascination and involvement with the play reaches back to his emergence as a major director for the stage.⁷ In fact the first Shakespeare he directed after the remarkable success of his production of Romeo and Juliet for the Old Vic in 1960, was a prize-winning Italian version of Hamlet with Giorgio Albertazzi, which went on tour to Paris, Vienna, Moscow, and London in the summer of 1964. That stage production was sandwiched between several operas he was also directing including Joan Sutherland in I puritani and Maria Callas in Norma: “This was the spring of both my divas,” Zeffirelli comments in his autobiography reminding us that his first Hamlet sprang to life in the midst of his work with two of the greatest divas of the age—one just emerging, the other beginning her decline.⁸

When, years later, Zeffirelli came to film his Hamlet most attention was given to his casting of Mel Gibson, known primarily for his lead roles in the Mad Max and Lethal Weapon action films, and to Gibson's eventual performance as Hamlet. Because of Gibson, most responses to Zeffirelli's film sought to place it firmly in the film culture of its star. I do not quarrel with that approach but believe that the casting of Glenn Close and Zeffirelli's passion for the opera diva exerted as strong an influence on many of his production decisions which is why, visually, Gertrude emerges at the center of the film. Zeffirelli's visual interpretation of the play makes an intriguing match with Janet Adelman's Gertrude-centered reading of the play in her Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origins in Shakespeare's Plays, “Hamlet” to “The Tempest,” which appeared in 1992 just after the release of Zeffirelli's film.

Adelman locates the reintroduction of the mother (in general) and Gertrude (in specific) into the Shakespearean universe as initiating the tragic phase of his career. The successful negotiations with masculine legacy and female sexuality which Shakespeare dramatized in the Lancastrian tetralogy and the comedies—plays noted for their absence of mothers—collapse in Shakespeare's tragedies where female sexuality intrudes upon and ruptures masculine identity. For Adelman, Hamlet initiates this tragic pattern and Gertrude is at its core:

Hamlet thus redefines the son's position between two fathers by relocating it in relation to an indiscriminately sexual maternal body that threatens to annihilate the distinction between the fathers and hence problematizes the son's paternal identification. At the same time, the play conflates the beloved with this betraying mother, undoing the strategies that had enabled marriage in the comedies. The intrusion of the adulterous mother thus disables the solutions of history and comedy as Shakespeare has imagined them; in that sense, her presence initiates tragedy.⁹

After establishing shots of castle and courtyard, Zeffirelli's Hamlet begins with a sob and a dumb show which silently and decisively answers the text's opening query: “Who's there?” The camera pokes its way down into the castle's crypt where we discover ourselves at Old Hamlet's entombment. Our first close-up is of Glenn Close's Gertrude, whose pale, sobbing face is wreathed by thick blonde braids, followed by quick cuts to Alan Bates's fleshy Claudius and Paul Scofield's silent king. Gertrude approaches the coffin and removes a pewter rose from her hair and places it on Scofield's chest and then turns and collapses into Polonius's waiting arms. This misty interlude is shattered as a fist, clutching a handful of dust, enters the frame and slowly opens to allow the dirt to sprinkle down on the corpse. The camera follows up from hand to arm to capture the hooded face of Mel Gibson's Hamlet just as Claudius speaks the first lines of the film script: “Hamlet think of us / As of a father, for let the world take note / You are the most immediate to our throne.”

As Gertrude's sobs mix with the film score's violins, Hamlet turns and exits. This tableau establishes Zeffirelli's decision to focus on Hamlet as a family romance, to place Gertrude firmly at its center, to compete extravagantly with Olivier's Oedipal version of the play, and to offer a Hamlet defined more by that fistful of dust than by thinking too precisely on the event.

Gibson's presence as Hamlet has made comparisons with his work in the Lethal Weapon and Mad Max films inevitable, and Linda Charnes is right to see that the characters he played in those films share with Hamlet personalities made mad by marriages.¹⁰ I am less convinced, however, by her desire to see Glenn Close's Gertrude as a combination of her good-bad girl roles in films like The Big Chill and Fatal Attraction. For Zeffirelli, Gibson walks out of film culture, but his context for Close is opera. Gertrude is conceived as the film's diva, she is the golden girl at the center of a drab masculine world. Zeffirelli's camera adores Close and repeatedly captures her glowing girlishness. Opera is, of course, as uncongenial a medium for Hamlet as are the Mad Max and Lethal Weapon films but in the visual tension between the two, played out in Zeffirelli's direction of Gibson's and Close's performances, the film generates an excitement in translating the play into a mixture of the artistic conventions which have governed Zeffirelli's professinal life as a director and designer.

The poet, Wayne Koestenbaum, has written an extended rhapsody on the opera queen, The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality and the Mystery of Desire,¹¹ which explores gay fascination with opera in general and the diva in particular. While the communion between opera queen and diva is largely conducted by listening in the dark with the diva's throat and voice as the medium of ecstasy and thrill, Koestenbaum's text often and naturally links the diva with the female film star from Gloria Swanson to Julie Andrews: “Callas sang in the era of Sunset Boulevard: in legend she became Norma Desmond.”¹² He also understands that not all opera queens worship from afar and in the dark:

In a photograph, Visconti wraps his arms tightly around Callas and kisses her on the cheek—it looks to be a firm, authentic kiss—and she smiles, flattered and gratified to be kissed; Zeffirelli, doughy and devoted, kisses Callas, and she smiles radiantly, knowing the limits of the kiss; Bernstein holds Callas's hands and studies her, and they seem to be playing a seesaw game, figuring out whether their bodies are equivalent; gaunt and shirtless, Pasolini directs Callas as Medea, and she is attentive, obediently holding her hands to her face. These photographs attest to a specific historic configuration: the gay man venerating the theatrical woman and the woman responding gaily, the woman imitating the gay man and the gay man imitating the woman, the gay man directing and then listening and admiring, the man and woman collaborating.

A composite of those photographs showing Visconti, Zeffirelli, Bernstein, and Pasolini all giving rapt attention to Callas might serve as an analogue to the ways in which Zeffirelli surrounds Glenn Close's Gertrude with her quartet of male admirers—Scofield's Ghost, Gibson's Hamlet, Bates's Claudius, and Holm's Polonius. The analogy breaks down, of course, because of the differences in the mystery of desire contained in the two tableaux. Close's Gertrude “smiles radiantly,” is “flattered and gratified to be kissed,” and wants to respond “gaily” to the men in her life. The problem is that they are not her director and do not know, especially Hamlet, the “limits of the kiss.”

Zeffirelli's film keeps flirting with imagining Gertrude as the diva who, in the world of opera, releases her dazzle but keeps her distance with and through her voice. Shakespeare's queen is, however, as much body as voice and her physical presence seems to demand intimacy rather than devotion.

Zeffirelli's film, like Adelman's critical analysis, shapes the play with Gertrude at its center, or at the center of Hamlet's fractured consciousness, rather than the ghost or Claudius. The film is much more about sons and mothers than fathers and uncles, which is evident not only from the opening dumb show but in Zeffirelli's casting decisions as well. Close and Gibson are of an age; Scofield's Ghost is ancient and old enough to be Gertrude's grandfather and while, by comparison, Alan Bates's Claudius appears much younger than his brother, he is still almost old enough to be Close's father. Helena Bonham Carter's Ophelia (with eyebrows wonderfully sullen and defiant) is never a visual match for Gibson's Hamlet; she is out of his “star” not because of social standing but because she can't compare or compete with his dazzling mother. She's a plain, puzzled child; Close is the film's radiant golden girl and Gibson's Hamlet naturally (and unnaturally) finds it impossible to “step from this picture [Gertrude] to this [Ophelia].” The predominant visual image of Zeffirelli's Hamlet is of the pale blonde Close dressed in virgin blue, shot in golden light, surrounded by a host of swarthy, hairy males all dressed in drab colors. Even Ophelia's dress and coloring align her with the men rather than with the glamorous queen.

Everyone in the film is fascinated by her. Anthony Dawson intelligently sees that “the gesture that seems to define Franco Zeffirelli's vision of the play is the glance. The camera moves, bodies move, but more than anything in his films, eyes move.”¹³ And, from the opening dumb show, those glances are directed as much at Gertrude as at Hamlet. She is the center of the male gaze and female gaze as well, as Carter's Ophelia repeatedly is found by the camera giving Close her puzzled scrutiny as if to say: what has she done to my man and how can I tap into that power?

Father is as absorbed as daughter. Ian Holm's Polonius is clearly captivated by Gertrude. From his move to comfort the weeping queen in the opening scene, to his report of Hamlet's and Ophelia's romantic relationship, to his preparation of Gertrude for Hamlet's arrival in the closet scene, Holm is more solicitous of Gertrude's opinion than of Claudius's. Holm's performance is subtle and meticulous. His Polonius is more the scholar (or pedant, note his cap) than the statesman and his windy announcement of the Hamlet/Ophelia relationship is as much to Gertrude as to Claudius. Zeffirelli repeatedly places her at the center of attention. The play insists that it is Claudius who has usurped the center (“popp'd in between the election and my hopes”) which rightfully belongs to Hamlet, but here Alan Bates's Claudius seems just another male admirer of Gertrude's radiance. It is clear that his Claudius has murdered more for lust than power, but he appears shy and almost overwhelmed by his prize rather than proudly possessive.

Zeffirelli's shift of the play's family power dynamics is made most clear in his handling of the film's version of 1.2. As we have seen, he lifts a snippet of it as the first spoken dialog in the film's opening scene. He cuts from the crypt to the court with elements of Claudius's opening address heard first as a general announcement (over an establishing shot of Elsinore's castle) and then from Claudius himself enthroned alongside his queen in the castle's great hall. Hamlet is absent from Claudius's slick congratulations to the court for their reception of funeral and wedding. He has to be sought out and it is Gertrude who leads the search party. She nuzzles Claudius into accompanying her to Hamlet's room shrouded in darkness and filled with books and rudimentary scientific equipment. She swings open a giant curtain exposing her son, certain that she is a light and life bringer. She laughs amusedly at Hamlet's crack about being “too much in the sun,” having literalized his pun and missed its sting. Close's Gertrude tries to soothe her son in the same manner she handles Claudius—with nuzzles and tender touches and kisses which become increasingly complicated and ambiguous. Here when Hamlet sinks to the floor on his capitulation, “I shall in all my best obey you, madam” Gertrude goes to her knees to kiss his forehead, eyes, lips and to press his defeated head into her abdomen. The sound of barking dogs and hunting horns recalls her to Claudius waiting on horseback in the courtyard below and she bolts out from her embrace of her son and down the stairs where a great blue cape is swirled over her shoulders. She dashes out into the courtyard where she nearly pulls Claudius out of his saddle with an eager kiss before mounting and riding off with her blonde tresses billowing in the wind.

This sequence allows Close to give full reign to her winsome, vigorous Gertrude. The language of her power is physical; she exudes a sensuous vitality which, strikingly, is confusing to both of the men in her life. Hamlet, obviously, is both attracted and repelled by her physical expressiveness and Claudius, whom one would imagine to be completely caught up in her dazzle, is almost always shot with a cup of wine either in hand or at lip—a sign that he's anxious about their relationship even before Hamlet begins directly (and indirectly) to work on exposing his guilt.

This scene also reveals the ways in which Zeffirelli uses the vertical and horizontal lines in his film to get at issues of enclosure and release embedded in the text. Denmark … prison; nutshell … infinite space; golden roof … congregation of vapors; paragon of animals … quintessence of dust; undiscovered country … no return; and heaven … earth all speak to Hamlet's desire for release and his sense of containment. “What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven,” he rhetorically asks Ophelia staking out the boundaries and central question of the human condition. Olivier visualized this cluster of images by his Hamlet's repeated flights up the stairs from Elsinore's bowels (Claudius's territory) to the high platform above (the Ghost's). Olivier's Hamlet is always trapped on the vertical; his Elsinore is an expressionistic image for the mind's labyrinth from which there is no escape.

Zeffirelli and Gibson present us with a Hamlet who wants to believe he has more options, more avenues of awareness, and modes of attack. They too exploit the perpendicular by repeatedly positioning Gibson's Hamlet above the action unfolding below. He's on a high catwalk above the courtyard seemingly overhearing as well as overseeing Polonius chastising Ophelia for being a “green girl” in accepting Hamlet's tenders of affection. He's perched atop the shelves in Polonius's library in the fishmonger scene and pushes the library ladder away as Polonius attempts to climb up to reach him. He enters above Polonius and Claudius when they are plotting to “loose” Ophelia on him; and he hops up on the council table (wearing Polonius's skull cap) to play the fool with Claudius about Polonius's where-abouts after the closet scene. He peers down from the ramparts through a grill to observe Claudius's (and the entire Court's) reveling below as he awaits his rendezvous with the Ghost. In each of these instances Gibson's possession of the high vertical line is an expression of Hamlet's superiority to the carnal, duplicitous, and obtuse world below. Crucially his one movement down and under comes as he retreats to the crypt after the nunnery scene to deliver the “To be or not to be” soliloquy as if it were his attempt to share his anguish and impotence with the dead, particularly his father.

Besides giving Hamlet a command of the vertical, Zeffirelli and Gibson also hold out the possibility that he might appropriate the horizontal as well. Gibson's restless Hamlet prowls Elsinore's upper and lower reaches and, in a stunning jump cut (immediately after he finishes the “To be or not to be” soliloquy), from dark to light, from inside to out, the film finds him outside Elsinore sprawled out under a bold blue sky on a green hillside overlooking a fjord with his horse grazing in the rear of the frame—a portrait of the hero who has lost the name of action. The glimpses of the external world we get from Olivier are gray and cold, melancholy landscapes mirroring his film's brooding Dane. Zeffirelli's romantic Italian blood can't imagine a world where a vibrant sun isn't always shining and violent action always a possibility. Gibson's reverie is broken by the arrival on horseback of Rosencrantz (Michael Maloney) and Guildenstern (Sean Murray) and the three men gallop off to a solitary log cabin which signals the landscape of an American Western and reminds us of that fistful of dust which first introduced us to Gibson's Hamlet. Zeffirelli allows his Hamlet to move in a landscape beyond the confines of Claudius's poisoned court, but it finally offers neither solace nor escape, for its beauty seems only to echo the corruption of his mother's.

In a dazzling essay which fatally misreads Zeffirelli's Hamlet, Linda Charnes faults the film for failing to grasp the play's essential film-noir quality.¹⁴ But Zeffirelli's film style is as far removed from noir as slapstick is from screwball. Zeffirelli's sensibility is romantic and grandly operatic; his artistic blood beats in technicolor, not black and white; his sensibility is passionate and sentimental, not cool and cynical. His solution to the Oedipal conflict, complicated in his own case by his bastardy and homosexuality, is not to destroy the father but to glorify the mother.¹⁵ This is the source of his lavish visual imagination and his attraction to the diva from Callas to Sutherland to Graves. That artistic attraction to the tragic female, the center of the operatic form, spills over into his Shakespeare films. Reading his autobiography (and the films themselves) reveals his greater preoccupation with Elizabeth Taylor and Olivia Hussey than with Richard Burton and Leonard Whiting. The same pattern is at work in his Hamlet where the landscape and atmosphere of the film seem more a reflection of Gertrude's zeitgeist than Hamlet's.

This is reinforced by Zeffirelli's handling of the end of Hamlet's first encounter with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Hamlet's Western interlude, and its possibilities for flight and independence, is foreclosed by the arrival of the players who literally transport him back into Elsinore and his reengagement with the family drama. Now, in the film's only reversal of this perspective, it is Gertrude who peers down from a high window on her son in the courtyard below making merry with the actors. Hamlet acknowledges her presence with a glance before slipping into the shadows to formulate his plan for “The Mousetrap.”

The actors have brought him back into the world of the female, which Zeffirelli underlines by transposing key lines between Hamlet and Ophelia from the nunnery scene as a frame for the play-within. In fact, by doing so “The Mousetrap” becomes less about Hamlet's power struggle with Claudius than about the conclusion of his relationship with Ophelia and the preparation for his confrontation with Gertrude which follows.¹⁶

Zeffirelli shoots Hamlet's exchange with Ophelia about “country matters” in a tight two-shot; Hamlet's tone is more intimate than bitter or bad-boy bawdy and Bonham Carter's Ophelia registers her puzzled understanding of his double-entendres with a raised eyebrow rather than a blush. Gibson's voice becomes more bold and bitter as he spits out, “Look you how cheerfully my mother looks, and my father died within two hours.” Then, in an intriguing textual transposition, he replies to Ophelia's “Nay ‘tis twice two months, my lord,” with “So long? Then get thee to a nunnery. Why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?,” followed by a cut to the actors juggling with torches as a prologue to evening's main event. Everyone's playing with fire here. Then the film cuts back to an anguished Hamlet almost pleading with Ophelia: “What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven?” After the film's brief (and largely mimed) version of “The Mousetrap” has caused Bates's Claudius to rise and stagger toward the platform with his hand pressed to his right ear before uttering a guttural laugh and exiting, the film returns to Hamlet and Ophelia for “Believe none of us. We are arrant knaves all.” Long passionate kiss. “Farewell.”

At this moment in Shakespeare's text, where Hamlet is most ecstatically fixated on Claudius and the way in which he has signaled his guilt, Zeffirelli's film insists on displacing Claudius in Hamlet's imagination with Ophelia and by extension and cross-cutting, Gertrude. Certainly it is a bold idea to interweave the nunnery scene with “The Mousetrap” and there is a curiously apt logic to Zeffirelli's move to create a necessary link in Hamlet's mind between the confirmation of Claudius's guilt and his rejection of Ophelia (a replay of his visit to her room after his encounter with the Ghost) but it is also simply further evidence of the way in which Zeffirelli's film repeatedly stresses that Hamlet's key relationships are with his mother and lover rather than with his uncle and father.

This pattern is again made evident in the film's dismissal of all but two lines of Claudius's attempt at confession and prayer, so that Hamlet can more quickly speed to the central confrontation with Gertrude which follows. This is the duet to which the entire film has been building. Zeffirelli bathes Gertrude's bedroom in a golden glow which emanates as much from Close's face and hair (down and fully displayed for the first time in the film) as from the fire which blazes in her huge stone fireplace.¹⁷

Gibson and Close give us the most intense and passionate encounter between Hamlet and Gertrude in the world of Hamlet on Film. Anthony Dawson is right to quip that here “lethal weapon meets fatal attraction in what turns out to be a dangerous liaison.”¹⁸ Violence, lethal and sexual, infuses and comes to climax in the scene. Gibson's Hamlet threatens Gertrude with his sword, rams it home into Polonius through the wild animal embroidered on the arras, and later straddles his mother and thrusts away at her in a terrifying mock rape to the rhythm of the text's ugliest image: “Nay but to live / In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed / Stewed in corruption, honeying and making love / Over the nasty sty.”

As Hamlet hammers away at Gertrude physically and Claudius verbally Close finally pulls Gibson into a desperate, passionate kiss meant not only to silence his aggression but to express her own repressed longings. This moment is as primal as the murder of Polonius and, for Zeffirelli, signals the ultimate release of Hamlet's wild discontent and opens the possibility for reconciliation with his mother. Scofield's sad, sweet Ghost (shot framed in a Romanesque archway to resemble a weary, worried saint in an altar piece) seems oblivious to the action he has interrupted. The film's kiss is the climax here, not the text's conjuration of the ghostly authorial father. The murder of Polonius and the rape of Gertrude have made Hamlet an arrant knave and allowed him a perspective from which, finally, to understand and share his mother's flawed humanity. By finally enacting the ugly image which has both disgusted and transfixed him, Gibson's Hamlet has freed its powerful hold on his imagination. When Hamlet leaves he gives Gertrude his chain with the locket of Old Hamlet on it and she signals her acceptance of their compact by tucking the locket away when Claudius enters her room.

For Zeffirelli this scene is as much about Gertrude as it is about Hamlet. Close's Gertrude is impetuous (she gives Gibson a vicious slap for his impudence) and passionate; she's a player here and not a poor one. This scene confirms that for Zeffirelli she not only “earns a place in the story,” but commands a central one. Again Adelman is extremely helpful in outlining the psychoanalytic pattern of interaction between mother and son here which the film realizes visually. By reminding us that Hamlet's first and last words in the scene are “Mother,” Adelman follows the progress by which Hamlet appears to rid himself of his ugly fantasies about the sexualized maternal body. For Adelman “Hamlet cannot stop imagining, even commanding, the sexual act that he wants to undo.”¹⁹ Zeffirelli's film allows us to see that Gibson's Hamlet can rid his imagination of this contaminated vision only by reenacting it, allowing the expression of his own incestuous desires to finally obliterate Gertrude's, so that they can both be tarnished and thus capable of redeeming one another.

Gibson's Hamlet becomes, after the closet scene, the performance embodiment of Adelman's reading of his reconciliation with Gertrude: “Trusting her he can begin to trust in himself and in his own capacity for action; and he can begin to rebuild the masculine identity spoiled by her contamination.”²⁰

This scene is obviously cathartic for Gibson's Hamlet who suddenly is released into the action hero mold his performance, up to this moment, has strained against. While the text indulges the offensive vigor of Hamlet's wit in his exchange with Claudius concerning Polonius's whereabouts, Gibson's Hamlet is also physically energetic in this scene as he prances on Claudius's council table wearing Polonius's skull cap in an action which matches the topsy-turvy motion of his wit, which turns the world, and its power and gender hierarchies, upside down as he traces the progress of a king through the guts of a beggar and bids Claudius farewell by calling him “dear Mother.” Gibson's Hamlet is never held captive in these exchanges and he leads Rosencrantz and Guildenstern away on “Come, for England!”

Gibson's Hamlet is also several steps ahead of Shakespeare's as Zeffirelli's visualization of the shipboard exchange of ambassadorial instructions reveals that Hamlet has already prepared his revised version of the king's dispatch before he is fully aware of the contents of Claudius's. Zeffirelli returns Hamlet to Denmark on horseback as befits the action hero and the climactic duel is once again less about Hamlet and Laertes and Claudius than about Hamlet and Gertrude. She's the golden seraphic mother dressed in virgin blue with her hair now in two long braids. He's the vigorous, clownish son mocking the machismo of the duel for his mother's delight. It is as if the two of them existed once again in a pre-Claudian state of innocence. There's no suspicious anxiety on either of their faces in the repeated cross-cuts Zeffirelli makes between Hamlet's performance and Gertrude's spirited appreciation of her son's antics. Hamlet even signals one of his physical jokes with a wink, directed not at us, but at his mother. There's no physical or even eye contact between Claudius and Gertrude in this scene until she moves down from the dais to drink from the poisoned cup. Bates's and Close's reading of their exchange is wonderfully nuanced, capturing both his realization that he's the last person in this world to caution another about taking a drink, and her smiling girlishness in ignoring his warning. From this moment the pace of Zeffirelli's cross-cutting between Gertrude and the duel intensifies and she collapses at the moment Hamlet receives the fatal hit. Hamlet's eventual attack on Claudius is anticlimactic and is delivered with none of the energy and panache devoted to the strike by Olivier, or subsequently, by Branagh. Claudius has never been the center of Zeffirelli's attention, Gertrude is at the core of his understanding of the play. And the film reminds us powerfully of the fates of the men who become infatuated with her golden girl glow from husbands and advisors to sons and lovers. The diva dies in an ugly parody of orgasm, having helped her quartet of male admirers to dusty death.

Zeffirelli's casting of the principal roles, his reshaping of the text, his use of cinematic space and landscape, the rhythm of his editing all have established the family romance at the heart of his interest in the play. By doing so his film gives visual substance and significance to Gertrude's central place in that romance, a place which—as Adelman notes—is much more opaque (but no less tantalizing) in Shakespeare's text. For Adelman, Gertrude remains “more a screen for Hamlet's fantasies about her than a fully developed character in her own right: whatever individuality she might have had is sacrificed to her status as a mother.”²¹ Zeffirelli and Close attempt to use the fantasies of another screen to shape a modern film version of Gertrude which has remarkable resonance with Adelman's powerful feminist and psychoanalytic reading of the play. For Zeffirelli, Close's Gertrude becomes the tragic diva—the golden girl of the West.

This article is an abridged version of a chapter from Samuel Crowl's book, The Branagh Renaissance: Reimagining Shakespeare in the Age of Film, forthcoming from Ohio University Press.

Notes

1. See Anthony Davies, Filming Shakespeare's Plays (Cambridge University Press, 1988); John Collick, Shakespeare, Cinema, and Society (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1989); Peter S. Donaldson, Shakespearean Films/Shakespearean Directors (Boston, MA: Unwin Hyman, 1990); Lorne M. Buchman, Still in Movement: Shakespeare on Screen (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1991); and my own Shakespeare Observed: Studies in Performance on Stage and Screen (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1992).

   H. R. Coursen does include a brief treatment of Glenn Close's Gertrude in his chapter “Gertrude's Story” in his Watching Shakespeare on Television (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1993), pp. 70-79.

2. Focus on Shakespeare Films (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1972).

3. Shakespeare on Film (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1977).

4. See Ace G. Pilkington's “Zeffirelli's Shakespeare” in Shakespeare and the Moving Image, eds. Anthony Davies and Stanley Wells (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 163-179; and Robert Hapgood's “Popularizing Shakespeare: The Artistry of Franco Zeffirelli,” in Shakespeare, The Movie, eds. Lynda E. Boose and Richard Burt (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 80-94.

5. Hapgood, “Popularizing Shakespeare,” p. 92.

6. Jorgens, Shakespeare on Film, pp. 74-75.

7. Hapgood, “Popularizing Shakespeare,” p. 89.

8. Zeffirelli: The Autobiography of Franco Zeffirelli (New York, NY: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986), p. 191.

9. Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origins in Shakespeare's plays, “Hamlet” to “The Tempest” (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 14-15.

10. “Dismember Me: Shakespeare, Paranoia, and the Logic of Mass Culture,” Shakespeare Quarterly 48 (Spring 1997), pp. 1-16.

11. Wayne Kostenbaum, The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality and the Mystery of Desire (New York, NY: Persea Books, 1992), p. 142.

12. Ibid., p. 151.

13. Hamlet in Performance (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1996), p. 197.

14. “Dismember Me,” pp. 7-11. Charnes wants Zeffirelli's film to be father-centered when, as I am arguing, it is relentlessly about mothers.

15. Hapgood quotes Zeffirelli as saying about Hamlet: “The problem of the boy is quite simply—whom to love? He did not really love his father; that was a secondary character in his life. Ophelia? No, there is no love-story possible there, he is always uncertain, ambiguous—because his heart is not come out of his mother's womb! Because there is no safer place in all the world.” “Popularizing Shakespeare,” p. 90.

16. Michael Skovmand argues “Leaving the nunnery injunction (‘Get thee to a nunnery …’) out of the nunnery scene and shifting it to the play within the play, gives it a more logical context, placing this rather definitive statement in what is effectively the last scene with Ophelia and Hamlet together, their only later ‘encounter’ being at Ophelia's funeral.” “Mel's Melodramatic Melancholy: Zeffirelli's Hamlet,” in Screen Shakespeare (Aarhus, Denmark: Aarhus University Press, 1994), p. 118.

17. Skovmand is excellent on Zeffirelli's use of tinting and filters in the film: warm amber for Gertrude, cold gray-blue for the Ghost. “Mel's Melodramatic Melancholy,” p. 127.

18. Hamlet in Performance, p. 205.

19. Suffocating Mothers, p. 32.

20. Ibid, p. 34.

21. Ibid., p. 34.