Hamlet has been one of William Shakespeare’s most popular plays for over 300 years. But it stands alone in one category: Hamlet has been adapted for the big screen more than any of Shakespeare’s works, even Macbeth. Since Mel Gibson played Hamlet in Franco Zeffirelli’s 1990 feature film, there have been six major film adaptations of the play. That’s one big Hamlet film every five years. This doesn’t include innumerable filmed stage performances, such as Benedict Cumberbatch’s 2015 National Theatre production, or made-for-TV films.
We don’t know the exact date of the play’s first performance, but it was likely in 1601 or 1602, with Richard Burbage playing the lead. It was performed regularly afterward, but it wasn’t until after the theaters were reopened following the restoration of King Charles II in 1660 that its popularity rose rapidly. Writing in 1710, Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, remarked that Hamlet “seems to have most affected English Hearts” and “has perhaps been oftenest acted of any that have come upon our Stage.”
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It is still one of his most performed and read plays three centuries later. But it is also embedded in popular culture in a way no other Shakespeare play is.
Sons of Anarchy, which ran on FX from 2008 to 2014, borrows the plot of Hamlet. So, too, does HBO’s Station Eleven (2021), which is based on the 2014 novel by Emily St. John Mandel. There are allusions to Hamlet in The Simpsons, Frasier, several Star Trek episodes, Arrested Development, South Park, Futurama, ER — the list goes on.
References to Hamlet in contemporary literature are too innumerable to count, but it plays a significant role in Ian McEwan’s 2016 Nutshell, which retells the story from the perspective of an unborn Hamlet in the womb of his mother, Trudy. Isabella Hammad’s 2023 Enter Ghost centers on a production of Hamlet in the West Bank.
Hamlet is Shakespeare’s biggest character — far bigger than Macbeth or Lear or Falstaff. He is the play. The drama takes place almost entirely in Hamlet’s mind and revolves around the question: Why does Hamlet waver when his father’s ghost tells him that he has been murdered by his brother? The ghost demands vengeance, blood for blood, but Hamlet waits, feigns madness, broods.
Why has the play stuck with us? One reason is that we see ourselves in Hamlet’s longing for an objective ground for acting boldly, heroically even, but like him, we are plagued by doubts. We are then embarrassed by our failure to act. To make up for lost time dithering, we look for an easy solution to whatever is holding us back, but, of course, we can’t find one. We have only wasted even more time. We brood and grow depressed.
In fact, Hamlet was until recently a synonym for failure and indecisiveness. In the New York Post, Fred Dicker remembered Mario Cuomo as “Hamlet on the Hudson.” The former governor, who dithered on whether to run for president and in 1992 reportedly still had chartered planes on the runway ready to take him to file for the New Hampshire primary hours before he announced he wouldn’t run after all, “was an underachieving enigma — brilliant yet indecisive, accomplished as a lawyer yet riddled with self-doubt as a politician.”
But this isn’t how a younger generation of readers sees him. In some of the most recent uses of Hamlet in popular culture, what is striking is how little space is given to Hamlet’s indecisiveness. The moral dilemma Hamlet faces, his self-doubt, and what Nietzsche called his “nauseating reflections on the … absurdity of existence” are all swept under the rug to give us a much cleaner Hamlet. Instead of the play’s tragic view of life, we get one that is naive, where “bad” people get what they deserve and everything turns out all right in the end.
This is painfully the case in The Northman, which uses Saxo Grammaticus’s 13th century account of Hamlet as a source rather than Shakespeare’s play to give us a Prince Amleth, as he is called in Grammaticus’s Danish History, who is a man of action.
There is no doubt in The Northman. Amleth sees his father murdered by his half-brother with his own eyes and runs away to save himself, rather than faking madness as he does in Danish History. Amleth does delay avenging his father’s death, but not because of a moral dilemma. Rather, the memory of the injustice “feeds the river of hate that runs in my veins,” he tells us, which makes him a fearsome warrior and pillager. When he is confronted by fate to kill his uncle, he does so methodically and viciously. “I am vengeance,” he says at one point, and while he dies shortly after he kills his uncle, as in Shakespeare’s play but not in Danish History, he has a vision of his two children, a boy and a girl, reigning in his place. The moral simplicity of The Northman exceeds even that of Danish History, which at least asks us to consider if Amleth is more “worthy of immortal fame” for “his wit or his bravery.”
HBO’s Station Eleven is far more subtle, and entertaining, than The Northman. But it, too, gives us a reduced Hamlet. The series follows Kirsten Raymonde, a child actress who survives a pandemic, first with the help of the “unemployed writer” Jeevan Chaudhary and his brother Frank, then with the help of the Traveling Symphony, a group of actors and musicians who perform Shakespeare’s plays, mostly Hamlet, on a tour of human encampments they call “The Wheel.”
Kirsten plays Hamlet in most performances, and she is like him in some respects. She is intelligent and sensitive and is regularly visited by “ghosts” from her past. But she is also a person of action. When Tyler Leander, a strange young man called “The Prophet,” visits the Traveling Symphony, she stabs him on intuition alone that he is somehow dangerous.
The play is therapeutic for Kirsten — it gives her a reason for living — and it is therapeutic for other characters, too. When Kirsten’s friend Alex is allowed to play the lead, it empowers her. “There’s something about being Hamlet,” she tells Kirsten, “and just, like, devouring people.”
In the series conclusion, the Traveling Symphony visits the Museum of Civilization, an outpost of human survivors who live in an airport, to put on a performance of Hamlet. The museum is run by Tyler’s “uncle” Clark and his mother, Elizabeth. Tyler, who survived Kirsten’s attempt to kill him, returns to the Museum of Civilization, not to avenge his father’s death but to punish Clark for planning to abandon him and his mother in the early days of the pandemic.
At one point, Clark tries to cancel the play because he finds it politically dangerous. “I never realized how insolent Hamlet is to the power structures,” he tells Elizabeth. “Imagine if our teenagers felt that anger that clearly,” he continues. “It’s like heroin.” But Station Eleven passes over this banal view of the play to give us one that is even more banal — that art heals all wounds. Instead of burning the museum to the ground, Tyler plays Hamlet, with Clark playing Claudius, which “heals” him of his lust for vengeance. After the play’s conclusion, Tyler walks off into the sunrise with his band of young followers.
Hamlet also plays a major role in Hammad’s sensitive Enter Ghost, but here, too, the play becomes one-dimensional. The actress Sonia Nasir visits her sister in Haifa after an affair gone wrong in London and finds herself increasingly involved in a performance of Hamlet in the West Bank, which is directed by the politically active Mariam. Mariam complains at one point that art often does not inspire political action or change. She tells Sonia that when you watch a play, “you might feel a kind of flowering in the chest at this sight of your community’s resistance embalmed in art,” but “in the end you, or at least the middle classes, are less likely to fight the fight because despair has been relieved.” But in the end, it’s not art that is the problem. It’s the bourgeoisie. “Did you know,” she continues, “that in the old days … when Mustafa al Kurd used to perform, the audience would leave the auditorium and immediately go out into the streets and demonstrate?”
In a conversation in the middle of the novel, which is formatted like the dialogue of a play — it is a play within a play, you see — the cast discusses the meaning of Hamlet. Some of the actors think that Gertrude is Palestine, who is being raped by her brother-in-law Claudius. Hamlet must act to free his mother. Others think “Hamlet is a guy who thinks too much and talks too much.”
For Hammad, the symbolism of the play isn’t important. The question is: What does the play — what does art — do? At the end of the novel, the troupe puts on a performance of the play at a border checkpoint. Things go well at first, but soldiers appear to stop the performance. Shots are fired. “Tear gas expands like dry ice.” The idea is that art is dangerous to those in power. It causes revolutions.
In Shakespeare’s play, art is dangerous to those in power, but it’s dangerous to Hamlet, too. After Hamlet puts on a performance of his play The Mousetrap, which he hopes will “catch the conscience of the king,” he kills Polonius by accident, thinking it is Claudius. The play has led Hamlet to become overconfident, to overreact, and in his overreaction, he has become guilty of the same sin as Claudius: murder. In the end, it’s not art that allows Hamlet to exact justice on Claudius. It’s sheer dumb luck. He finds Claudius’s letter to the king of England asking him to kill him and changes it.
The fact is there are no simple moral lessons in Shakespeare’s play. It doesn’t teach us to trust ourselves. It doesn’t teach us to act decisively. It doesn’t teach us that art heals all wounds. And it doesn’t teach us that art brings low the oppressor and frees the oppressed.
So, why do these contemporary works use the play to communicate precisely these lessons? There’s a certain pleasure in revision, of course, and Hamlet is one of the few remaining Shakespeare plays writers and directors can trust their audiences to know.
But these revisions aren’t just about being clever. They’re also motivated by an aversion to entertaining contrary points of view. Everything today must be explained in the simplest of terms. There must be an easy answer to every moral question and political problem. We can’t abide the idea that violence is inescapable, as Nietzsche observed in his commentary on the play. So, the play must be changed. It must affirm what we supposedly already know. There must be no record of dissent.
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James Ijames’s play Fat Ham, which won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and just closed on Broadway, makes Hamlet into a play about race and sexual identity, but it also ends on a high note — not with a duel, but a dance, with Juicy (Hamlet) finding himself one step closer to being his “true self” as a queer man. The play, one reviewer wrote, teaches us “how people might overcome circumstances, expectations and their own demons to forge new paths through life.” The past must be reshaped to fit the present.
It could be argued that all art does this, that this is what Shakespeare himself did with the Hamlet myth. But the question is, does a revision give us a deeper understanding of human nature and the world around us, or does it give us a more superficial one? It’s hard to say anything much simpler than, “And they lived happily ever after.”
Micah Mattix is a professor of English at Regent University.
