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In 1910 Ernest Jones published an article, "Hamlet and Oedipus," which was to have a significant influence on the performance of Shakespeare's play. Jones said that an Oedipus complex dwells at the heart of Hamlet's mystery. This idea labors under a heavy load of theoretical and practical difficulties, but in films of Hamlet it seems to have become gospel. The idea is at the root of performances of the "closet" scene in each of the four readily available English-language films: Laurence Olivier's 1948 version, the 1969 production directed by Tony Richardson and starring Nicol Williamson, the 1980 BBC version with Derek Jacobi as Hamlet, and the 1990 production, directed by Franco Zeffirelli and starring Mel Gibson and Glenn Close.
Not only have these actors and directors all shown their belief in the Oedipal nature of Hamlet's story, but the idea seems to have become fixed in the popular understanding of the play. For instance, in its 1990 Christmas Eve issue, Maclean's magazine offered its readers a survey of films for holiday viewing, including the new Hamlet. The review, generally favorable, offered the observation that although Glenn Close "looks too young to be Gibson's mother, that serves to heighten the hint of incest" (Johnson 50). This casual comment indicates how deeply the "hint of incest," or the "Oedipus complex," has been inscribed upon the popular understanding of the play and the character.
This unquestioning acceptance of the same idea also appears in the recent scholarly commentary on the film productions of Hamlet. In an article examining Olivier's film version and the 1980 BBC television production, June Schlueter and James Lusardi note that it is "the Oedipal premise that provides a coherent sequence of stage images" (166), but they do not presume to comment on the persuasiveness or emotional effect of that sequence. More recently, Murray Biggs, in a survey of the treatment of the "closet" scene in four film versions, deplores Zeffirelli's translation of "the Oedipal theme into a full-blown, vulgarized, traditional screen romance between coevals" (61). Thus Biggs, who certainly knows better, writes as though the "Oedipal theme" were an explicit fact of the text, rather than an interpretation.
How did this situation develop? And what should we think of it?
Jones's idea about the...