Why Does Gertrude's Use Of Setting In Hamlet

Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, while being an inherently visual work, lacks detailed stage directions, and instead consists mainly of dialogue. This ambiguity in Shakespeare’s intention for the space in which the play is to be presented is interesting because it allows directors and actors wide latitude with which to create a setting that accurately represents the tone and themes found within the dialogue of the play. However, the setting of the play is often irrelevant to portraying Hamlet’s themes because much of the meaning can be derived from the interactions and dialogue between characters. The role of setting is then most important in terms of keeping the audience engaged in the work when the characters recite monologues. For instance, Hamlet, during his monologues, often finds himself alone and as such the actor cannot portray the themes of the play through interactions with other actors but instead through interactions with the environment surrounding him. Various film versions of Hamlet do this in differing ways, however the most interesting of these films are those directed by Zeffirelli in 1990, Branagh in 1996, and Doran in 2009. Hamlet is played by Mel Gibson, Kevin Branagh, and David Tennant, respectively.
Hamlet’s soliloquy in Act I Scene ii has a consistent message in all
versions, which is to present Hamlet’s anger towards his mother, Gertrude, for marrying so soon after his father’s death. However, each film presents it differently, and the nuances in each present additional meanings not immediately obvious in the text.
For instance, all three directors create a large physical distance between Hamlet and some representation of Gertrude in order to represent the emotional distance between the two as well as Gertrude’s inability to understand Hamlet’s anguish over his father’s death. Zeffirelli presents this idea literally, by having Hamlet look down at his mother from a window several stories high. Gertrude’s face and expression are indiscernible, however, based on the cheers that greet her as she steps into the sun with Claudius, her happiness can be inferred. Gibson’s Hamlet, meanwhile, is seen brooding several steps away from the windowsill, only heightening the distance between the two. This introduces the idea that the space between Hamlet and Gertrude is in many ways artificial and a construction of Hamlet’s angst rather than a lack of comprehension by Gertrude.
Doran and Branagh’s versions, on the other hand, occur in the throne rooms of a castle and choose to represent Gertrude and Claudius using their empty thrones rather than their physical beings. This is far more effective as the lack of the physical presence of any other character besides Hamlet during his monologue establishes his irrationality and creates a profile of Hamlet that is not merely melancholy but severely disturbed and upset by the events that have lead to the scene.
However, a single commonality can be observed in all three films: none blame Gertrude.
In Shakespeare’s text, Hamlet’s insistence that Gertrude has rushed to “incestuous sheets” conveys a far less sympathetic view of her character, and essentially putting her at fault for marrying Claudius and betraying the late King Hamlet. Instead, the directors use the nuances of a setting in order to shift the blame to Prince Hamlet and create a far less biased view of his emotions and motivations. As a result, Hamlet’s preoccupation with finding an entity to blame can be observed by the reader as a consequence of his being overwhelmed by various emotions, such as anger and possibly
depression.
Hamlet’s next soliloquy, in Act II Scene ii of the play, is far more violent. The emotions that Hamlet expresses through the text in the previous soliloquy manifest themselves in Hamlet’s physical actions in all three versions to varying degrees of intensity. For instance, Branagh’s version has Hamlet walking around a room, with the violence confined to the most self-deprecating parts of the soliloquy. In this case, “violence” refers to nothing more than Hamlet’s despairing cries and a moment of overwhelming anger at which point he pushes a small table over. Zeffirelli largely subdues the violence in this scene as well, choosing to show Hamlet’s frustration through the motion of running up a large flight of stairs.
Doran, on the other hand, uses motion as well as interaction with objects in order to create a scene that highlights the chaos and inner turmoil that the character is faced with, not just in this soliloquy, but throughout the play. The soliloquy in this version begins with Tennant’s Hamlet ferociously tearing a security camera from the wall, and after briefly sitting and lamenting about the actor’s performance, suddenly jumps up and begins his journey around the room. Unlike Branagh’s Hamlet, who slowly moves around the periphery, Tennant jumps and gestures and bends and falls, seemingly showing off the full range of human motion. As such, the kinetic nature of the scene is highlighted and creates a parallel between the movement of Hamlet’s thoughts and his actions. This parallelism is seen in Branagh and Zeffirelli’s versions as well, but to a lesser degree, and in all cases creates the illusion of forward momentum. In reality, in all three films, at the end of the soliloquy, Hamlet returns to where he began the soliloquy, or very close to it. This false sense of forward momentum coupled with the circular path that Hamlet takes within all the versions emphasizes one of the most conspicuous issues with Hamlet’s transformation: his deteriorating mental state in the face of his new found decisiveness and coherence.