‘Either for tragedy, comedy’: Attitudes to Hamlet in Kenneth Branagh’s In the Bleak Midwinter and Hamlet

Abstract

During the mid-1990s, the British actor-director Kenneth Branagh, in association with Castle Rock Entertainment, made two films based on Hamlet. In the Bleak Midwinter (1995) is a low-budget, feel-good comedy set among a troupe of actors rehearsing and performing Hamlet in a disused church. Hamlet (1997) is the fullest version of the play ever committed to celluloid, running at over four hours and stuffed with special effects and star cameos. While on the surface the two films could hardly be more different, they are, in fact, intimately connected. Both films have a particular fin-de-siècle self-consciousness about their Shakespearean material: explicitly in the case of In the Bleak Midwinter, implicitly in the case of Hamlet. A close analysis of In the Bleak Midwinter reveals some of the ways in which it anticipates and allegorizes the contemporaneous pre-production travails of Branagh’s ambitious Hamlet, at the same time as it mediates the broader relationship which has vexed a century of Shakespeare on film, that between theatre and cinema. Most crucially, it is also an attempt at a scapegoat, diverting what is potentially ridiculous and laughable about the play itself, siphoning off Hamlet’s dangerous proximity to comedy, and leaving the film of Hamlet as generically pure and serious high art.