The Exfoliating Folio, or Transnational and International Avant-Gardes from Bernhardt’s Hamlets to Hollywood’s Europeans

Abstract

Although it occupies only a modest place in the posthumous First Folio of 1623, five plays from the end, Hamlet was a signal moment in Shakespeare’s development. For Stephen Greenblatt, it marks the dramatist’s transformation from a successful writer to a self-conscious artist, containing irresolvable ambiguities of character for the first time in his known oeuvre, a decisive phase-shift that seems indicated by a larger proportion of invented words than in any play before or since.¹ Aptly, then, it is the most adapted of Shakespeare plays, if one discounts the possibility that Romeo and Juliet (whether borrowed literally or ironically) may be the distant origin of countless plots in popular cinemas the world over.² Regarded from a very early date as a touchstone of great acting, Hamlet is also the play that when translated into cinema has attracted the widest range of performance styles, from the seeming replication of a theatrical performance on celluloid to a commentary on the incipient rottenness of the business world so verisimilar as to have escaped detection as a Shakespeare film for more than a generation. It has inspired directors to try to capture the flavor of a decidedly French prose translation (Bernhardt) and an equally Gallic tour de force of special effects (Méliès); it has functioned as something of a rebuke in an Italian cinematization (Rodolfi) that owes fragments of inspiration to a quasi documentary of a British stage performance (Plumb-Hepworth), and it has served the finest of its interpreters as both a bravura extension of her star persona and a learned essay on Shakespeare’s sources and critics (Nielsen).