TS Eliot called Hamlet “the Mona Lisa of literature”. Like Leonardo’s enigmatic portrait, Shakespeare’s prince and the play in which he appears have stimulated countless poets, novelists and creative artists. The latest in the field is Ken McMullen, who has written and directed a dreamlike movie, Hamlet Within, subtitled Five Acts in Search of a Murderous Prince and screened at Cannes. It is an attempt to de-romanticise the dithering Dane and is duly stimulating even if I sometimes felt it was pushing at an open door.
You get the idea in the prologue when Claudius is described by John Shrapnel as “an unhappy king killed by his nephew because of some whimsical speculation”. The idea is later advanced that the Ghost represents Hamlet’s unconscious: a notion confirmed by having Ian McKellen, memorably pensive, reading the dead king’s speech in a recording studio as if to suggest he is a projection of his son’s imagination. After a section on Shakespeare’s debt to other writers, including an interview with Jacques Derrida on plagiarism, we then get to a crucial discussion of Hamlet’s character in which the tone is set by the Shakespeare scholar Richard Wilson.
