Emily Vanston

Essay Submitted for Professor Thomas Olsen’s Spring 2023 Shakespeare and the Creative Continuum Seminar

 

More than four hundred years after Shakespeare’s death, his work remains an inexhaustible source of revelation, inspiring countless adaptations, retellings, and derivations in every possible format. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, film has emerged as a particularly powerful medium through which to interpret Shakespeare’s plays: the inherently visual nature of film complements the visual nature of theatre while simultaneously offering additional creative possibilities. Harry Keyishian goes so far as to assert that “while Shakespeare’s texts are conceptually and linguistically powerful . . . their force is matched, and perhaps exceeded, by the power of film—its aesthetic, social, and commercial power—to create and convey meanings” (73). When the “two mighty entities” of Shakespeare and film converge (73), directors are able to explore Shakespeare’s timeless themes in ways that resonate in both the playwright’s age and our own.

Of all of Shakespeare’s works, perhaps none is more appropriate for filmic interpretation than his masterpiece Hamlet, with its prominent theme of watching and its self-conscious meta-theatricality. Hamlet has been adapted for the screen by such notable directors as Laurence Olivier (1948, starring himself in the title role), Franco Zeffirelli (1990, starring Mel Gibson), Kenneth Branagh (1996, starring himself), Michael Almereyda (2000, starring Ethan Hawke), and Gregory Doran (2009, starring David Tennant), among many others. These films represent a wide range of genres and approaches, from Olivier’s film noire classic to Zeffirelli’s action adventure to Branagh’s majestic epic (Keyishian 75). In their respective 2000 and 2009 films, however, Almereyda and Doran offer technologically sophisticated twenty-first-century visions of Hamlet that self-consciously employ modern-day technologies to explore the motif of surveillance inherent in Hamlet and to translate the play’s meta-theatricality into a form of meta-cinema.

Shakespeare’s Hamlet opens with a scene of surveillance—sentinels on patrol at Elsinore Castle (1.1)—and the motif continues throughout the play: characters are constantly watching or being watched, spying or being spied upon, observing or being observed. Polonius asks Reynaldo to spy on Laertes (2.1) . . . the King and Queen ask Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to spy on Hamlet (2.2) . . . Polonius and the King spy on Hamlet’s interaction with Ophelia (3.1)     . . . Hamlet and Horatio watch the King and Queen watch The Mousetrap (3.2) . . . Hamlet watches the King in prayer (3.3) . . . Polonius spies on Hamlet and Gertrude (3.4) . . . the King asks Horatio to watch a disturbed Ophelia (4.2.73) . . . an unknown spectator watches Ophelia drown (4.4) . . . Hamlet and Horatio covertly watch Ophelia’s funeral procession (5.1) . . . even Hamlet’s death takes place before an audience of spectators watching his duel with Laertes (5.2).

Prince Hamlet describes Denmark as a “prison” [2.2.231.5], an image suggesting heavy, menacing surveillance and recalling Jeremy Bentham’s eighteenth-century panopticon prison, in which the few watch the many. Denmark’s royal family indeed employs spying and surveillance to observe and control its subjects: as Elizabeth Klett indicates, however, outside of the play’s diegesis its audience is simultaneously “implicated in synoptic surveillance of the characters; the ‘synopticon’ is the inverse of the panopticon, in which ‘the many watch the few’” (104). For those onstage in Hamlet, surveillance is truly inescapable: even when they are alone, they are being watched.

Hamlet is, of course, a tragedy: in the end, the ever-present surveillance that haunts its characters provides no answers, saves no lives. Polonius and the King glean no insight into Hamlet’s ostensible madness, through their own observations or the observations of those they employ . . . the King’s reaction to The Mousetrap does not conclusively reveal his guilt, despite Hamlet’s best-laid plans . . . Polonius, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern are killed for their efforts to spy on Hamlet . . . Horatio’s “good watch” of Ophelia does not forestall her drowning . . . and the various connivances of Hamlet, Laertes, and the King and Queen all result in their violent deaths. Indeed, in its very composition the play demonstrates the futility of surveillance: despite three or four hours of dedicated observation, audience members leave the theatre with more questions than answers. Why is Hamlet so hesitant to avenge his father’s death? What hand, if any, did Gertrude have in that death? What is the Ghost, and why is it sometimes visible only to Hamlet, sometimes to others? Is Hamlet’s madness truly feigned? What are his feelings towards Ophelia, and if he truly loves her, why does he treat her so cruelly? Was Ophelia’s death intentional or accidental? Who watched it, but without offering aid? What is Hamlet’s relationship with his mother? Hamlet remains riddled with ambiguities, and Hamlet himself remains an enigma who, Stephen Greenblatt suggests, “at once invites and resists interrogation. He is, more than any theatrical character before and perhaps since, a figure constructed around an unseen or secret core” (1181). Like the feckless Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the audience cannot “pluck out the heart of [Hamlet’s] mystery” (3.2.339).

Shakespeare’s Hamlet is acutely aware of its own theatricality, and meta-theatrical references appear throughout the play. Hamlet distinguishes between his inner grief (“I have that within which passes show” [1.2.85]) and its outward performative displays (“the trappings and the suits of woe” [1.2.86]), and later tells Horatio and Marcellus of his intention “to put an antic disposition on” (2.1.173) and feign madness. Hamlet welcomes a troupe of players to Elsinore (2.2), and during their stay offers them extensive suggestions and direction on the craft of acting (3.2). At his urging they perform a monologue of “Aeneas’s talk to Dido” (2.2) and stage the play-within-a-play The Mousetrap—through which performance Hamlet hopes to ascertain the King’s guilt (“The play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King” [3.1.523-24]). Greenblatt notes that Polonius’s listing of various types of dramas (2.2.324-26) “parodies the classifications of contemporary dramatic theorists” during Shakespeare’s time (1226n9), and that Hamlet’s reference to “this brave overhanging firmament” (2.2.261-62) possibly refers to “the ‘heavens,’ the roof overhanging the Elizabethan stage, which was decorated with stars” (1224n2). Multiple references to Julius Caesar, too (1.1.113, 3.2.94), can be read as nods to Shakespeare’s play of that name, which premiered shortly before Hamlet. The “War of the Theatres” passage in act two, scene two, which appears only in the Folio, seems to reference contemporary events in the Elizabethan theatre world (Greenblatt 1224n1). Hamlet also speaks of “this distracted globe” (1.5.97), possibly a reference to the Globe Theatre and its audience (Greenblatt 1212n5). Hamlet is, on many levels, a play about plays.

Almereyda and Doran transform this meta-theatricality into meta-cinema in their respective films: if Shakespeare’s Hamlet is a play about plays, Almereyda’s and Doran’s Hamlets are films about film. While a theatrical audience observes the action onstage directly, a camera mediates that relationship in film, and both Almereyda and Doran demonstrate the exponential complications that such mediation can generate. Both embrace the visual nature of cinema and use onscreen cameras to “extend and complicate the theme of surveillance that pervades the play” (Klett 104).

Closed-circuit television (CCTV) and other surveillance and recording devices figure prominently in both films. Doran’s Hamlet opens with a grainy black-and-white shot of the sentinels on patrol at Elsinore from the perspective of a CCTV camera in the ceiling, and as the scene progresses the shot cuts back and forth between the director’s camera and the CCTV. (Notably, King Hamlet’s ghost, which is visible to all assembled, cannot be seen through the CCTV camera—a detail which both complicates the audience’s understanding of the ghost’s reality and hints at the unreliability of surveillance). Another CCTV camera, installed in the mirrored hall where the majority of the film’s action takes place, also features frequently: we cut to its perspective several times over the course of the film, including immediately before and after Hamlet’s “O, that this too too solid flesh would melt” soliloquy (00:13:20), during Polonius’s instructions to Reynaldo (00:43:56), the arrival of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (01:07:56), and several other scenes. After being dismissed by Hamlet later in the film, the courtier Osric glares up at the CCTV camera in the ceiling, and we view Hamlet and Horatio’s subsequent exchange through its lens (02:51:15). Each cut to the CCTV’s view shakes audience members from the illusory impression that they’re witnessing the events onscreen directly and reminds them that their experience is being filtered through at least one camera, if not more.

In several cases David Tennant’s Hamlet interacts directly with the CCTV in Doran’s film. As Claudius and Polonius are spying on Hamlet and Ophelia through a two-way mirror, our view switches to that of the CCTV camera (01:02:03), whose audible refocusing alerts Hamlet to its presence. Suddenly aware that he’s being watched (although he assumes that the watcher is behind the camera, not behind the mirror), he demands of Ophelia, “Where is your father?” (01:02:08). In response to Ophelia’s (false) assertion that Polonius is at home, Hamlet turns to address the CCTV unit (and thus the audience) directly: “Let the door be shut upon him, that he may play the fool nowhere but in his own house” (01:02:16). Later, after the newly-arrived players depart along with Hamlet’s retinue, the prince is left ostensibly alone—at which point we cut to the perspective of the CCTV unit surveilling him (01:21:20), reminding us that he is not alone after all. Hamlet clearly realizes the same thing, and rushes across the room to tear the camera down: his furious face filling the screen is the last thing we see before the CCTV’s display cuts out. Hamlet flings the ruined CCTV unit across the room and speaks directly to the director’s camera as he stalks out of the room: “Now I’m alone” (01:21:42).

Ironically, of course, Hamlet is not alone—he is still under the surveillance of the director’s camera—and he acknowledges that fact by directly addressing the audience through it, thus implicating them in his observation. Hamlet and others break the fourth wall in this manner several times over the course of the film, paying homage to Hamlet’s theatrical roots (in which the performers often address the audience directly) and acknowledging the audience implicit behind the camera’s lens. In doing so, however, they complicate the distinction between diegetic and extradiegetic cameras: if the characters are aware of the director’s camera, where does the world of the film end, and where does the world of the audience begin? Are Hamlet’s soliloquies still soliloquies if he addresses them to his camcorder (02:28:25) or to the director’s camera (01:23:50)? Are the actors onscreen, like those onstage, ever truly alone?

Almereyda’s Hamlet—set in a sleek, technologically sophisticated New York City—reflects a similar preoccupation with surveillance. Almereyda himself states:

A lot of the play is about people spying on each other and being watched and playing parts and being aware of themselves playing parts. And that corresponds to contemporary reality where cameras are on . . . at least in the city. So that seemed like a natural way of mirroring things that were going on in Shakespeare’s text. (qtd. in Keyishian 82)

Mark Thornton Burnett points out that Almereyda’s Manhattan is “overwhelmed by listening devices, laptops, cell phones, and recording instruments” (53), creating a sense of claustrophobia, paranoia, and dread that sets the tone for the film. Urban environments are revealed to function as their own form of panopticon: as Edward W. Soja states, “[e]very city is a carceral city, a collection of surveillant nodes designed to impose a particular model of conduct and disciplinary adherence on its inhabitants” (qtd. in Burnett 52). The persistent and insidious scrutiny under which such figuratively incarcerated urbanites move through their daily lives rivals the surveillance system of any actual prison.

Closed-circuit television features prominently in Almereyda’s Hamlet as well: in fact, we first glimpse King Hamlet’s ghost via CCTV, riding the elevator up the Denmark Corporation’s high-rise office building (unlike in Doran’s film, the ghost is visible on video monitors [00:11:51]). Later, we observe portions of Hamlet’s exchange with Polonius (“Have you a daughter?”) through the grayscale grain of the CCTV (00:34:32). After Hamlet walks away, Polonius looks up and speaks directly to the CCTV unit: “How say you by that? Still harping on my daughter. He is far gone” (00:34:57). In doing so, Polonius “invests the audience with an uncomfortably Orwellian omniscience and ties the spying politician to a culture of surveillance” (Burnett 52). Simultaneously, by addressing both the operator behind the CCTV camera (presumably Claudius) and the audience behind the director’s camera, Polonius again complicates the dynamic between the diegetic and extradiegetic cameras, between the watchers and the watched.

Both directors’ Hamlets themselves wield video cameras, and train those cameras on others even as the directors’ cameras are trained on them. In Almereyda’s film, Ethan Hawke is an experimental filmmaker who uses the medium as an instrument of “self-reflection and self-understanding”: his work comprises video diaries expressing his cynicism and grief, home movies of Ophelia and his family, and clips from other films, including John Gielgud in a turn as Hamlet (Keyishian 82). Meanwhile in Doran’s film, David Tennant uses a Super 8 handheld camcorder to record various aspects of his life: the players rehearsing; The Mousetrap and the reactions it elicits; his act four, scene one soliloquy (02:28:25). In this sense both princes serve as proxies for the films’ directors. Even as they’re executing those directors’ visions onscreen, they are simultaneously in front of and behind the camera, simultaneously filming and filmed, observing and observed.

Both directors (and their camera-wielding Hamlets) transform The Mousetrap—the play-within-a-play at the heart of Hamlet—into a film-within-a-film. Doran’s Mousetrap is theatrically staged within the world of the film, but our experience of it is complicated by Tennant’s filming of the play with his camcorder. At times we watch Tennant through the director’s camera; at times we view the scene through his Super 8. In a particularly complex snarl of observation, the players are under the gaze of the King and Queen, who are under the gaze of Hamlet, both directly and through his camcorder; Hamlet meanwhile is under the gaze of the concerned Ophelia, who along with everyone else is under the gaze of the director’s camera, and through it, the audience. All of these entities, meanwhile, are simultaneously watching each other: Ophelia watches The Mousetrap, the King and Queen watch Hamlet, Horatio watches the King and Queen, etc. As Patricia Parker explains, “The multiple eyes of the Mousetrap Scene, which its doubled onstage spectators, are focused not just on this theatrical show but on a King who is himself both watcher and watched, spectator and anxious object of Hamlet’s eye” (83). The scene captures in microcosm the complex dynamics of surveillance that pervade the film at large.

In Almereyda’s Hamlet, Hawke attempts to “catch the conscious of the king” by screening his short film, The Mousetrap: A Tragedy: a “collage of home movies, symbolic stop-action cinema, and pornography, its shots linked by associative editing” (Keyishian 83). Almereyda acknowledges the meta-cinematic nature of the scene: “the audience of the movie is watching an audience watch a movie. It’s a hall of mirrors” (qtd. in Keyishian 82). Even the accusatory Mousetrap film itself places Claudius under a form of surveillance. Scholar and filmmaker Wheeler Winston Dixon asserts that any cinematic work inherently looks back at its audience: “The movie theatre is above all a zone of surveillance. . . . The returned gaze from the screen . . . is one additional coefficient of the reflective scopic process” (qtd. in Klett 109). Just as the CCTV cameras and those they surveil in Doran’s and Almereyda’s films look back at each other, so do film audiences and the films they consume.

Almereyda’s film, in particular, is dense with meta-cinematic images: Hawke’s Hamlet delivers his “to be or not to be” soliloquy, for example, while prowling the “Action” aisle of a Blockbuster video store (00:40:18). The moment finds Hamlet in a film, surrounded by films on the store’s shelves, Tim Pope’s 1996 revenge-fueled The Crow: City of Angels playing on the overhead monitors, all ostensibly under the surveillance of Blockbuster’s CCTV. Early in the film a television screen in Hawke’s room plays a clip of Thích Nhất Hạnh professing the need to “inter-be” (00:29:48): another reference to the famous speech. As Almereyda explains, “images currently keep pace with words, or outstrip them, creating a kind of overwhelming alternate reality. So nearly every scene features a photograph, a TV monitor, an electronic recording device of some kind” (qtd. in Guntner 127). Almereyda also frequently zooms in on Hamlet’s eyes (e.g., 00:09:02, 01:33:14), and in a particularly gruesome gesture, has his Hamlet shoot an unseen, spying Polonius through the eye (01:03:40).

Both Doran and Almereyda further capitalize on reflection as a central motif through mirrors and mirrored surfaces such as glass and water. The main hall in Doran’s film has a highly polished, mirrored floor which reflects the characters’ images: when Ophelia falls to the ground following her act three, scene one soliloquy (01:04:22), her reflection in the floor, which resembles a pool of still water, presages her drowning death. Mirrors hang on the walls of Doran’s Elsinore, Hamlet wields a hand mirror (01:29:30) and a reflective serving tray (01:41:47), and Claudius examines himself in a grimy stairwell mirror after sending his troublesome nephew off to England (while quite literally washing his hands of the matter [02:14:34]).

Almereyda’s New York, meanwhile, is a deliberately dizzying assault of mirrored surfaces: office buildings, limousine windows, sunglasses, even the slicked hair of Hamlet’s carefully coiffed parents (00:20:10). Water figures prominently in the film as well, particularly in association with Ophelia: early in the film she waits (futilely) for Hamlet at the Guggenheim Museum fountain (00:09:51), ultimately the site of her drowning (01:27:30). After Polonius shares her letters from Hamlet with Claudius and Gertrude, Ophelia stares at her reflection in the Hotel Elsinore swimming pool and fantasizes about throwing herself in (00:39:03). Even her photography practice involves water: when Hamlet goes to visit her, we see her in her darkroom, lifting a dripping photograph out of its processing bath (00:31:50).

Interestingly, in both films Polonius hides in a mirrored closet to spy on Hamlet and Gertrude during their act three, scene four confrontation—and in both films Hamlet shoots the counselor through the closet door, splintering the glass and “allowing Almereyda and Doran to play with the distorted and fragmented images reflected in the shattered mirrors” (Klett 111). The “circular pattern of cracking” in Almereyda’s mirror “suggests the watching eye of Polonius” (111), still relentlessly surveilling even after Polonius (and his eye) have been dispatched. Each of Doran’s characters, meanwhile, are reflected in fractured ruin at key points of personal conflict: Claudius, for example, surveys himself in a broken utility mirror as he contemplates “the present death of Hamlet” (02:14:44), which scene cuts directly to Gertrude reflected in her own shattered closet mirror as she refuses to speak to a distressed Ophelia (02:15:07). The mirror later reflects Ophelia herself, in her madness (02:16:51); Hamlet and Horatio, as the latter announces the deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (02:47:07); and Osric, as he arrives to announce Claudius’s deadly wager between Hamlet and Laertes (2:48:00). Lamenting his conflict with Laertes, Hamlet gazes at his multitude of selves in the broken glass: “For by the image of my cause I see the portraiture of his” (02:47:40).

The mirror motif serves as its own meta-cinematic reference in each film: Lacanian film theorists see the cinema as a mirror for its audience, allowing spectators to see their fragmented selves unified on the screen in the same way that an infant sees itself as an imaginary whole in a mirror (Tilakaratne). The profusion of broken mirrors and distorted or fragmented reflections in these films, however, complicates this association: as Klett indicates, “when the characters attempt to know themselves and others through the use of reflective surfaces, they are faced only with a proliferation of images” (111). A proliferation of images, of course, is essentially the definition of cinema: Dietmar Kammerer argues that montage (“the putting together of singular sequences into a larger, meaningful entity”) is fundamental to filmmaking. “It is at the heart of cinema,” says Kammerer, “to create completeness out of fragments, to put together disparate perspectives, pieces in a whole and (hopefully) meaningful narrative” (466). This phenomenon is demonstrated in the composition of Doran’s and Almereyda’s films themselves, and perhaps most clearly in Almereyda’s Mousetrap scene: an assemblage of unrelated film clips spliced together by Hawke’s Hamlet to form a semi-coherent narrative. In general, however, the fragmented images that proliferate in shattered mirrors, rippling water, and CCTV footage in both films fail to cohere into a meaningful whole.

Hamlet’s preoccupation with surveillance is perhaps a product of the political climate of its time. The 1570 papal bull Regnans in Excelsis, which forbid the subjects of Queen Elizabeth I from obeying her on pain of excommunication, and England’s 1581 Act Against Reconciliation to Rome, which forbid the practice of Roman Catholicism, created what Patricia Parker calls a “paranoid atmosphere of spying and being spied upon” marked by “the multiplication of ‘delators’ and spies encouraged by the need to ferret out recusants and harborers of secret treason to the queen” (62). Parker recounts that “one text from the decade before Hamlet . . . reports on the omnipresence of ‘secret spies’ who ‘do insinuate themselves into our company and familiarity’ with such pretense of ‘zeal, sincerity, and friendship’ that they are able both to ‘inform’ and to ‘give intelligence’ of the most ‘secret intents’” (62-63). Hamlet emerges from this historical moment, shaped by a “progressively more organized network of informers and spies,” and as a result “[s]pying is everywhere in Hamlet, adding to the sense of claustrophobia that pervades the world of the play” (Parker 76).

Doran’s and Almereyda’s high-tech Hamlets seem to deliberately respond to the anxiety and paranoia of the Elizabethan era by demonstrating our corresponding twenty-first-century concern with rampant surveillance. The proliferation of CCTV in the late 1990s created new concerns around privacy violation, captured in numerous contemporary publications. A 1998 article in American City and County entitled “Beyond the Big Brother Syndrome,” for example, indicated that “most privacy lawyers do not see a constitutional problem with what the [American Bar Association] calls ‘technologically assisted physical surveillance,’” and asserted that “there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in public” (Ward S4). That same year the English newspaper Western Daily Press reported on efforts to “clamp down on the sale of surveillance videos to broadcasters who use them for light-hearted television shows” (“Bid to Curb Screening” 44). At a product launch in 1999, in response to public backlash over consumer privacy issues, Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy declared, “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it” (Sprenger).

Many also challenged the value of this emerging technology: “Effectiveness of CCTV Questioned,” announced a 1999 article in Security Management, citing a British study that expressed doubts about the efficacy of CCTV surveillance as a crime deterrent (19). That same year the Scottish Sunday Herald stated the matter less equivocally: “CCTV ‘failing to prevent crime’” (6). This atmosphere of burgeoning surveillance technology and increasing alarm over that technology mirrors the sixteenth-century atmosphere of spying and informing from which Hamlet arises. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that Almereyda and Doran choose to portray their Hamlets through the lens of modern surveillance technology, to transform Elsinore into a cinematic landscape of “video technology, monitors, pixelvision cameras, walkmen, floppy disks and telephone answering machines” (Guntner 127).

Hamlet opens with a question—“Who’s there?” —and that question, “turned back on the tragedy itself, has haunted actors, audiences, and readers for centuries” (Greenblatt 1181). Shakespeare’s greatest play is also one of his greatest mysteries. Its “emphasis on questioning, espial, and informing crosses with an epistemological hunger to ‘see’ and ‘know’: the play is filled not just with spies but with what Polonius expresses as the desire to ‘find / Where truth is hid’” (Parker 77). Despite this desire, however, the pervasive surveillance that defines the prison house of Denmark yields little meaningful intelligence: those watching onstage come to tragedy; those watching from the audience come to no conclusions.

The disconnect between the “actions that a man might play” and “that within which passes show” (1.2.84-85) stands at the heart of Hamlet, and drives its preoccupation with theatricality. The actors onstage (or onscreen) are, by definition, playing a role; the person they present to the audience is not the same person that afterwards wipes off his or her makeup backstage. In Shakespeare’s age, the common practice of males playing female roles created another layer of artifice: such “gender crossing or confusion was of course part of the ‘secret’ of English transvestite theater in particular, itself suggestive of more hidden from the eye than could be ‘shown’” (Parker 83-84). Are Hamlet’s characters themselves always performing a role, then, knowing that they are perpetually under observation in the heavily surveilled halls of Elsinore? How much of Hamlet’s outrageous behavior during his quarrel with Ophelia reflects his suspicion that he’s being watched (“Where’s your father?” [3.1.127])? Is the prince’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy (3.1.55) actually a monologue, rendered for the benefit of an unseen onlooker?  Do the characters’ outward actions reflect their inner truth, or does their paranoid performativity obscure it?

Both Doran’s and Almereyda’s Hamlets (ironically) push back against ubiquitous surveillance through their use of cameras. In the end, however, the men’s inscrutability remains their ultimate defense against their surveillants. As Klett argues, they “ultimately provide the most potent resistance to surveillance by remaining unreadable. . . . By being visible to the various gazes and reflections at work in both of these films, but nonetheless remaining unknowable, Almereyda and Doran’s Hamlets refuse to yield up the secrets at the heart of their mystery” (112). Surveillance technology might have evolved since the sixteenth century, but the human psyche remains impenetrable.

Like their source text, Almereyda’s and Doran’s Hamlets emerge from an era of rampant surveillance, and their emphasis on the ubiquity and ultimate inefficacy of that surveillance challenges its persistent usage in our own time. By exploring Hamlet’s motif of watching through modern surveillance technology, the directors both pay homage to Shakespeare’s four-hundred-year-old play and remind us of Hamlet’s timeless and urgent contemporary relevance. As audience members file out of the cinema under the watchful eye of CCTV cameras, drive home with their location tracked by GPS, and fall asleep beside their alert Amazon Echoes or Google Nests, the panopticon persists; the watchers become the watched. Something, perhaps, is still rotten in the state of Denmark.

 

Works Cited

“Bid to curb screening of CCTV shots; Clamp on security footage.” Western Daily Press, 23 Feb. 1998, p. 44.

Burnett, Mark Thornton. “‘To Hear and See the Matter’: Communicating Technology in Michael Almereyda’s ‘Hamlet’ (2000).” Cinema Journal, vol. 42, no. 3, spring 2003, pp. 48-69.

“CCTV ‘failing to prevent crime.’” The Sunday Herald, 29 Aug. 1999, p. 6.

“Effectiveness of CCTV Questioned.” Security Management, vol. 43, no. 10, Oct. 1999, pg. 19.

Greenblatt, Stephen, et al., editors. The Norton Shakespeare: Essential Plays and the Sonnets. 3rd ed., Norton, 2016.

Guntner, J. Lawrence. “Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear on film.” The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film, edited by Russell Jackson, 2nd ed., Cambridge UP, 2007, pp. 120-140.

Hamlet. Directed by Michael Almereyda, Miramax Films, 2000. Amazon Prime.

Hamlet. Directed by Gregory Doran, Illuminations/Royal Shakespeare Company, 2009. Amazon Prime.

Kammerer, Dietmar. “Video Surveillance in Hollywood Movies.” Surveillance and Society, vol. 2, no. 2/3, 2004, pp. 464-73.

Keyishian, Harry. “Shakespeare and the movie genre: the case of Hamlet.” The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film, edited by Russell Jackson, 2nd ed., Cambridge UP, 2007, pp. 72-84.

Klett, Elizabeth. “The Heart of the Mystery: Surveillance in Michael Almereyda and Gregory Doran’s Films of ‘Hamlet.’” Literature/Film Quarterly, vol. 41, no. 2, 2013, pp. 102-115.

Parker, Patricia. “Othello and Hamlet: Dilation, Spying, and the ‘Secret Place’ of Woman.” Representations, no. 44, autumn 1993, pp. 60-95.

Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. The Norton Shakespeare: Essential Plays and the Sonnets, edited by Stephen Greenblatt, et al., 3rd ed., Norton, 2016, pp. 1194-1283.

Sprenger, Polly. “Sun on Privacy: ‘Get Over It.’” Wired, 26 Jan. 1999, https://www.wired.com/1999/01/sun-on-privacy-get-over-it/.

Tilakaratne, Wishka. “Lacanian Film Theory: A Very Brief Introduction.” MovieWeb, 17 June 2022, https://movieweb.com/lacanian-film-theory-a-brief-introduction/.

Ward, Janet. “Beyond the Big Brother Syndrome.” American City and Country, vol. 113, no. 11, pp. S4-S10.