Abstract
Laurence Olivier’s film version of Hamlet (1948) begins with a line Shakespeare never wrote: “This is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind.” The sentence was added by the director (and principal actor) Olivier himself and represents a long-standing British theatrical tradition of supplementing Shakespeare’s language with words deemed necessary to clarify the original plot. Sometimes this required cutting the play-text itself. For example, Olivier’s 1944 version of Henry V removes several scenes and speeches which explore aspects of the king’s ruthlessness, thereby turning Shakespeare’s complex protagonist into an idealized military hero fit for a wartime audience. A more infamous example of this kind of editing is Nahum Tate’s drastic rewriting of King Lear (1681) to create a happy ending more palatable to the tastes of a post-Restoration audience.
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Notes
Peter Thomson, “Shakespeare and the Public Purse,” in The Oxford Illustrated History of Shakespeare on Stage, ed. Jonathan Bate and Russell Jackson (Oxford University Press, 2001), 160–75 (169).
Quoted in Arthur P. Mandel, “Hamlet and Soviet Humanism,” Slavic Review 30/4 (December 1971), 733–47.
See Peter Holland, “‘More Russian than a Dane’: The Usefulness of Hamlet in Russia,” in Translating Life: Studies in Transpositional Aesthetics, ed. Shirley Chew and Alistair Stead (Liverpool University Press, 1999), 315–38 (319).
The paraphrase was first noted by Anna Kay France, Boris Pasternak’s Translations of Shakespeare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 26.
See Vladimir Markov, “An Unnoticed Aspect of Pasternak’s Translations,” Slavic Review 20/3 (October 1961), 503–8. Significantly, Kozintsev retains this subversive passage in his film script.
Katherine Gardiner Rodgers, “The Lessons of Gethsemane: De Tristitia Christi,” in The Cambridge Companion to Thomas More, ed. George M. Logan (Cambridge University Press, 2011), 259.
John Guy Thomas More (London: Hodder, 2000), 209.
Gerard Kilroy “Requiem for a Prince: Rites of Memory in Hamlet,” in Theatre and Religion: Lancastrian Shakespeare, ed. Richard Dutton, Alison Findlay and Richard Wilson (Manchester University Press, 2003), 143–60 (146).
Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton University Press, 2001), 240–41.
Quoted from T.S.R. Boase, Death in the Middle Ages: Mortality Judgment and Remembrance (New York: McGraw Hill, 1972), 44.
Zdeněk Stříbrný “Shakespeare in the Cold,” in The Whirligig of Time: Essays on Shakespeare and Czechoslovakia, ed. Lois Potter (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007), 214–33 (221).
John Guy “Introduction: The 1590s: The Second Reign of Elizabeth I?,” in The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade, ed. John Guy (Cambridge University Press, 1995), 1–19 (18).
Valentine M. Berezhkov, At Stalin’s Side, trans. Sergei V. Mikheyev (New York: Birch Lane Press, 1994), 202.
Christopher Devlin, Hamlet’s Divinity and Other Essays (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1963), 42.
John Guy Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), 494.
See David N. Beauregard, Catholic Theology in Shakespeare’s Plays (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008), 198, footnote 17.
Quoted from Alan Bullock, Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives (New York: Alfred A. Knopl, 1992), 488–89. For Larina Bukharin’s memoir, see This I Cannot Torget: The Memoirs of Nikolai Bukharin’s Widow, trans. Gary Kern (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991).
Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope: A Memoir, trans. Max Hayward (New York: Atheneum, 1970), 48.
Manuel José Prieto, “Reading Mandelstam on Stalin,” New York Review of Books 42/10 (June 10, 2010), 68–72 (69).
Jan Kochanowski, Laments, trans. Stanislaw Baranczak and Seamus Heaney (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), 21.
See Arthur F. Marotti, “Manuscript Transmission and the Catholic Martyrdom Account in Early Modern England,” in Print, Manuscript, and Performance: The Changing Relations of the Media in Early Modern England, ed. Arthur F. Marotti and Michael D. Bristol (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000), 172–99.
Nicholas Fogg, Hidden Shakespeare: A Biography (Amberley: Stroud, 2012), 94.
Ben Jonson, Sejanus, ed. Jonas A. Barish (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), 87.
For these examples, see Bruce Danner, Edmund Spenser’s War on Lord Burghley (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 161–63.
Brian Morton, Shostakovich: His Life and Music (London: Haus Books, 2006), 56. For the composer’s own account of his Fifth Symphony with its deceptively tragic finale, see Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, ed. Solomon Volkov and trans. Antonina W. Bouis (New York: Limelight Editions, 2004), 183.
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© 2014 Alfred Thomas
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Thomas, A. (2014). ‘The Heart of My Mystery”: The Hidden Language of Dissent in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Grigori Kozintsev’s Film Gamlet . In: Shakespeare, Dissent, and the Cold War. Palgrave Shakespeare Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137438959_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137438959_3
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