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Heart of Hamlet’s Darkness: Prince Hamlet, The Freudian, and Zeffirelli’s Vision

“Now mother, what’s the matter?”

– William Shakespeare, Hamlet (3. 4. 8)

“Specifically, in Mr. Zeffirelli and Mr. Gibson's interpretation, he's a prince who has never fully let go of the royal apron strings.”

-1991 press release from the Los Angeles Daily News

The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark occupies a singular space in the pantheon of

literature. Of all of William Shakespeare’s plays, it is the most performed, so much so that it is

estimated that a performance of Hamlet occurs somewhere in the world every minute of every

day (Bradley and Worthington). According to Ernest Jones, psychoanalyst and author of the

watershed book Hamlet and Oedipus, more scholarship has been composed about the play’s

eponymous prince than any other fictitious character in history (Jones 22). Like much of

Shakespeare’s work, its contribution to the English language is immense. The magazine Life

once noted that “[The play] has passed into the language so completely that millions of people

who have neither seen nor read the play unknowingly repeat fragments of its stirring lines in

everyday conversation to describe their own situations and emotions” (Brode 114).

Commonplace phrases, such as heart of hearts, own flesh and blood, method to the madness, woe

is me, and when it rains, it pours all originate (often in deviated form) from the Bard’s

Elizabethan revenge tragedy (Brode 114). This seminal revenge tragedy also greatly impacted

the field of psychology. In a footnote in The Interpretation of Dreams, Dr. Sigmund Freud puts

the Danish prince “on the couch”, diagnosing him with what would later be known as the

Oedipus complex, effectively making Hamlet the first piece of literature to pass through

psychoanalytic criticism. With this, Freud gave the world a new interpretive lens, influencing the

way twentieth century readers, audiences, stage directors, and filmmakers viewed Hamlet. Of the

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more than fifty cinematic adaptations of the play, Franco Zeffirelli’s 1990 appropriation is the

film most deeply steeped in the Freudian interpretation. The psychoanalytic dimensions of the

play Hamlet are central to all aspects of Zeffirelli’s cinematic adaptation, visually and

thematically manifesting themselves in various forms throughout the film.

Freud first defined the Oedipus complex in his watershed 1899 book Die Traumdeutung,

translated into English as The Interpretation of Dreams. Freud theorized that almost all children

subconsciously direct their first pangs of innate sexual desire toward their opposite-sex parent,

while simultaneously feeling that they are in competition with their same-sex parent. For most,

these feelings of sexual desire eventually redirect themselves away from the opposite-sex parent

and subsequently the concurrent jealousy of same-sex parent ceases to exist. Those whose

parental desires continue to manifest themselves throughout adolescence and adulthood are

afflicted with the Oedipus complex, becoming “psychoneurotics…revealing to us, by magnifying

it, what goes on less clearly and less intensely in the inner life of most children” (Freud 201).

The literary namesake of the complex comes from the Sophocles play Oedipus the King,

in which Oedipus, abandoned as an infant and thus unaware of the true nature of his parentage,

kills his father King Laius in a sudden quarrel and accepts his mother Queen Jocasta’s hand in

marriage. After some time passes, a soothsayer reveals to King Oedipus that he has committed

both patricide and incest. Ridden with disgust and guilt, Oedipus blinds himself with his

mother’s dressing pins and runs away from the kingdom, thus fulfilling an ancient oracle’s

prophesy.

Freud attributed the effectiveness and timelessness of the Ancient Greek play (written in

the fifth century, B.C.) to the fact that it touches upon something primordial and inherent within

human nature. According to Freud, “His fate moves us only because it could have been our own

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as well, because at our birth the oracle pronounced the same curse upon us as it did on him”

(Freud 202). In a footnote, he claims that the selfsame rationale lies behind the timelessness of

Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Freud theorizes that the force behind the central dilemma of the play’s action, Hamlet’s

hesitation toward killing his uncle Claudius, is of an oedipal nature. Claudius, the man who

murdered Hamlet’s father and married Hamlet’s mother, is the physical manifestation of the

young prince’s deepest, darkest, and most repressed desire. Following this logic, it makes sense

that Hamlet can only bring himself to avenge his father once Gertrude is dead, and avenge him

he does, and rather swiftly at that, immediately after the queen’s death. With the causation of

Hamlet’s inner tumult is gone, the prince can at last complete the task his father’s ghost assigned

to him.

Prince Hamlet is contemptuous of King Claudius. It is clear throughout the play that

Hamlet is revolted by his uncle’s actions, but this revulsion is duplicitous in its nature:

O God, a beast that wants discourse of reason

Would have mourned longer—married with my uncle,

My father’s brother, but no more like my father

Than I to Hercules. (1. 2. 150-53)

In this bitter soliloquy, by simultaneously comparing Claudius’s defective nature with his own,

Hamlet verbally acknowledges an existing link between himself and his uncle. Claudius has

actuated an ultimate desire that has lurked in the most obscure, most forbidden, and most

repressed recess of Hamlet’s mind and soul since childhood. The king acts as mirror for the

prince, reflecting his own sexual desires for his mother and intensifying the guilt he has toward

these feelings. What Hamlet hates in Claudius is what he hates in himself. This is another major

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component of Hamlet’s hesitancy, as he sees himself as being “no better than the sinner he has to

punish” (Freud 204).

Hamlet recognizes that, by killing Claudius, he will be symbolically slaying a pivotal part

of his own identity. Thus, when Laertes informs Hamlet that he has been stabbed with a poisoned

blade, it is only natural that the prince’s immediate ensuing course of action is to kill the king.

His object of desire (Gertrude) being gone, and his interconnection to his uncle being rendered

irrelevant by his impending death, Hamlet is psychologically unhampered and can at last avenge

his father.

This slaying holds manifold meaning. Not only does the prince honor his dead father’s

command, he performs an exorcism of sorts, expelling his oedipal demon:

Here, thou incestuous, murd’rous, damnèd Dane,

Is thy union here?

Follow my mother. (5. 2. 293-95)

Once again, and for the last time, Hamlet verbally acknowledges the connection between himself

and his uncle. “Incestuous”, “murderous”, and “damned” are all adjectives that can apply to

Hamlet as well as Claudius, and Hamlet knows this. With these lines, Hamlet bids a triumphant

farewell to the part of his identity that his uncle symbolizes, and bids it to join the recently

terminated other half of his torment, his yearning for his mother. Thus, it make sense that the

prince dies with an air of tranquility about him; he is, at last, ridden of his inner-demon.

By attributing Hamlet’s hesitancy in his vengeance to an Oedipus complex, Freud offered

an answer to a literary debate that has existed for centuries1, that has divided critics from Samuel 1 One of the most popular theories asserts that Hamlet’s inability to enact the revenge comes from some sort of inherent component of his character. This viewpoint was held by the likes of Coleridge, Goethe, Henry Mackenzie, and Shakespeare’s German translator August Wilhelm Schlegel (Jones 26). “To me it is clear that Shakespeare meant to present a great deed imposed as a duty upon a soul that is not equal to it,” wrote Goethe (Jones 27). According to Coleridge, the prince is endowed with “over-sensitiveness” and an “overbalance in the contemplative faculty” (Jones 27). Whatever the specifics behind the rationale may be, the diagnosis is the same: Hamlet is a man

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Taylor Coleridge to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Jones 26), and that has been called “the

Sphinx of modern literature” (Jones 22). If one is to understand the Freudian interpretation of

Hamlet, one must employ the psychoanalytic method of interpreting literature.

According to psychoanalyst Zelda Boyd, in her essay The Grammar of Representation in

Psychoanalysis and Literature, in the psychoanalytic theory of literary criticism, language is the

most crucial aspect of interpreting a text (Boyd 107). Symbolism, motif, and theme all exist

within the words, and within these words exist the signs which one must decode in order to

understand the deeper meaning of a text. The same principal holds true for the practice of

psychoanalytic therapy, in which the psychoanalyst must interpret the patient’s words and

actions in order to discover deeper causation of their issues. In the Freudian literary lens, “the

unspoken, the taboo, the text behind the text” (Boyd 108) is the main emphasis of interpretation.

Thus, in order to locate Hamlet’s Oedipus complex—that dark seed from which all his

tumult has grown—one must be able to interpret the subtle implications and double meanings of

what exists underneath the surface of not only what Hamlet says about himself, but what he says

in conversation with those around him and what those around him say about him.

An example of dialogue with meaning behind its more obvious meaning comes in scene

three of ACT I, while Laertes is lecturing Ophelia about the imprudence of a love affair with

Hamlet:

And now no soil nor cautel doth besmirch

The virtue of his will, but you must fear,

of indecisiveness, not action. His inability to complete the task presented to him is a byproduct of this character flaw. However, this notion is dismissible upon a deeper inspection of the text. Time and again, Hamlet proves himself to be man of action; swift and impulsive action, at that. His orchestration of the reenactment of his father’s murder to provoke Claudius, his instantaneous slaughter of Polonius when he hears a rustling behind the tapestry in Gertrude’s bedroom, his arranging of the execution of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and his acceptance of Laertes’s invitation to duel, are all instances of the prince’s ability to act with little forethought.

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His greatness weighted, his will is not his own,

For he himself is subject to his birth. (1. 3. 15-8)

On the surface, taken within the context, the meaning of this passage appears to be obvious;

Laertes is speaking of Hamlet’s monarchial position, and how this position inhibits much of

Hamlet’s free will. However, if one psychoanalytically interprets this passage, one will locate its

deeper implications. Along with his royal lineage, something else has been present with the

prince since his birth, an inescapable affliction that consumes his psyche, and “therefore his

choice must be circumscribed” (1. 3. 22). This is, of course, the Oedipus complex.

In the following scene, while in conversation with his most trusted confidant Horatio,

Hamlet himself alludes to his affliction:

So oft it chances in particular men,

That for some vicious mole of nature in them,

As in their birth, wherein they are not guilty

(Since nature cannot choose his origin),

By their o’ergrowth of some complexion,

Oft breaking down the pales and forts of reason, (1. 4. 23-8)

As in Laertes’ aforementioned dialogue, there are two meanings at play here: the literal and the

hidden. Literally, Hamlet is comparing Denmark’s bacchanalian reputation among other nations

to the reputation of an otherwise commendable man, tarnished by virtue of some congenital

character flaw. Symbolically, he is talking about himself. The prince acknowledges that a

“complexion”—in Elizabethan English, a synonym for the noun complex (Onions)—has existed

within him since birth. Furthermore, he asserts that this complexion was endowed to him by

destiny, and thus it is no fault of his own, and that it can rob a man of his mental faculties. With

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this, Hamlet’s speech not only foreshadows the madness that is to ensue throughout the course of

the play, but explains it as the natural byproduct of the actions of a man with his maladjusted

mental constitution. This echoes Oedipus the King, in which the titular character’s tragic fall

from grace is preordained by an oracle’s prophesy. According to Freud, the same could be said

about any adult with an Oedipus complex (Freud 202).

Nowhere in the text is Hamlet’s complex more evident than it is in his communications

with Ophelia. By his own account, he loves Ophelia, or at least, loves her as much as a man with

his condition can love another person. His maltreatment of her and his misogyny in general are

products of his unhealthy obsession with his mother. “Frailty, thy name is woman!” (1. 2. 146)

he declares, projecting his opinion of his mother onto the female sex as a whole.

The prince’s strong aversion to sexuality roots back to Gertrude as well, as he is “forced

to connect the thought of his mother with sensuality [leading] to an intense sexual revulsion”

(Jones 84). With this in consideration, his repeated uttering of “Go thy ways to a nunnery2” (3. 1.

124) to an undeserving, innocent Ophelia makes more sense, as does the following dialogue: “If

thou dost marry, I’ll give thee this plague for thy dowry: be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as

snow, thou shalt not escape calumny. Get thee to a nunnery, farewell. Or if thou wilt needs

marry, marry a fool for wise men know well enough what monsters you make of them” (3. 1.

130-33). Just as he identifies himself with Claudius, Hamlet identifies Ophelia with his other

object of desire. He projects onto Ophelia the crimes that he perceives his mother has committed

onto his father, that is, defiling the sanctity of her marriage with his father by wedding his uncle

immediately after King Hamlet’s death. However, as is the case with the prince’s hatred of his

uncle, Hamlet’s disgust toward Gertrude is twofold in nature. Felt more deeply by Hamlet than

his sense of filial obligation toward his late father, is the guilt he bears for harboring sexual

2 Elizabethan era slang for a brothel (Onions).

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longing for his mother. This perversion taints the prospects of a socially acceptable romantic

relationship, thus, Hamlet misdirects his anger and contempt toward Ophelia.

Franco Zeffirelli’s 1990 appropriation of Hamlet was not the first cinematic incarnation

of the play to employ the psychoanalytic interpretation. That distinction belongs to Laurence

Olivier’s 1948 adaptation, to which Ernest Jones served as a consultant (Donaldson 22).

However, Zeffirelli’s Hamlet is to date the film most deeply rooted in the Freudian view. It

brings what film scholar Douglas Brode refers to as “Olivier’s oedipal suggestions” (Brode 135)

to the forefront, taking the play’s psychoanalytic elements to unprecedented new heights.

According to the director himself, his prince of Denmark is “a man who has a terrible problem

with his mother” (Jacobs). This remark dispels any ambiguity; Hamlet’s “terrible problem” is his

Oedipus complex. The film’s unadulterated Freudian essence can be attributed to the era in

which it was released, since by 1990 “the screen enjoyed relative freedom of image and idea”

(Brode 135).

While the psychoanalytic soul of Zeffirelli’s Hamlet exists at the forefront of the film, it

exists within its subtleties as well. The directorial decisions made by Zeffirelli with this

adaptation illuminate this fact. This Hamlet cuts over half of Shakespeare’s dialogue (Cook 66).

The play’s opening scene, in which the ghost first appears (without Hamlet present), and the

character of Fortinbras, who appears after Hamlet’s death and whose speech is the final one of

the play, are both removed. This is by design, as the film begins and ends with the prince,

concerning itself entirely with the inner strife caused by his Oedipus complex. This can also be

seen in the set design of the film. This version of Elsinore Castle is gray, lackluster, and largely

unornamented. This serves to keep the film’s focus on the psychology of its main character. It is

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a portrait of a deeply disturbed mind, thus any lavishness by way of scenery would only be a

distraction from this intimate portrait.

Zeffirelli’s casting decisions also show his aspirations to create a Freudian Hamlet. In a

1991 interview, Franco Zeffirelli expressed his dissatisfaction with previous cinematic portrayals

of Prince Hamlet. According to Zeffirelli, just as many pre-Freudian literary critics interpreted

Hamlet to be an indecisive, overly sensitive man, ill-equipped to enact vengeance, prior to 1990,

actors and directors portrayed the prince as “a man who could not make up his mind” (Jacobs).

In this interview, the Italian director went on to refer to these representations of the Danish

prince as “the wimpys” (Jacobs); inadequate appropriations of Shakespeare’s “storm of a man”

(Jacobs). By contrast, Zeffirelli cast Mel Gibson in the titular role. At the time, Gibson was

known for his ultra-masculine roles in actions movies, such as the Lethal Weapon trilogy and

Mad Max (Brode 136). By casting Gibson, the director dismissed any notion that his Hamlet was

the frail, sensitive soul that previous interpretations held him to be.

As is the case in the source material, the prince’s Oedipus complex can be seen most

strongly in his relationships with the two women in his life. Helena Bonham-Carter’s Ophelia is

a doe-eyed, porcelain-skinned, naïve girl, innocent of any wrongdoing against Hamlet. She is

unaware of the reasons behind her father Polonius spying on her and Hamlet while they converse

in the lobby of the castle. For this reason, she is genuinely shocked by the prince’s enraged

reproaches of “get thee to a nunnery” (Zeffirelli) and his loud, vehement declarations of “no

more marriages” (Zeffirelli). What Ophelia is aware of (dimly at first, overpoweringly so by the

time she meets her own end) is that the object of her desire’s object of desire is his mother.

In this film, Ophelia and Gertrude share a common knowledge: the true nature of the

heart of Hamlet’s darkness. This creates a sort of unspoken bond between the two.

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Figure 1

Early on in the film, during a feast in which both women are in attendance, Ophelia observes

Queen Gertrude as she interacts with her husband and other attendees of the feast. The

expression on her face is not one of admiration, nor is it one of disgust, but piqued, perhaps

morbid curiosity (see Figure 1). She is clearly pondering over some matter that concerns the

queen, and given the nature of this adaption, it’s not difficult for one to guess what that matter

might be.

Zeffirelli’s Ophelia is driven to madness by her knowledge of the existence of Hamlet’s

Oedipus complex. It is this madness that leaves her incapacitated of preventing herself from

drowning while floating in a brook. Here, there is nothing to suggest that Ophelia’s death is

anything other than a tragic accident, caused by the indiscretion of a mentally unstable

individual. The speculation among the gravediggers about her right to a Christian burial, the only

instance in the text in which the possibility of a suicide is called into question, is not present in

the film.

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Figure 2

Figure 3

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Figure 4

As Gertrude informs Laertes and the denizens of Elsinore of Ophelia’s death, she smiles,

and speaks with admiration of Ophelia’s childlike penchant for flowers and reciting old tunes

(see Figure 2). As she continues speaking, and arrives to the details of the drowning, the queen’s

countenance changes, and she begins to weep (see Figure 3). An innocent life was lost, driven to

madness by Hamlet’s inability to reciprocate its love. Gertrude knows this and she knows that

she is the object of Hamlet’s desire, thus she is the reason that he is unable to form a healthy

relationship with Ophelia. As she tearfully bestows flowers on Ophelia’s grave (see Figure 4),

she murmurs, “I hoped thou shouldest have been my Hamlet’s wife” (Zeffirelli), lamenting the

painful truth that her son will be able to have a normal, socially acceptable romantic relationship.

When Gertrude meets her own fate she whispers her son’s name, convulses, lets out

several staccato moans, and then dies, laying down on the ground, perspiration glistening off of

her face (see Figure 5). The similarities between this death and an orgasm are evident. Through

his mother’s death, Hamlet vicariously experiences the realization of his oedipal desires. Though

he doesn’t actuate his desire, his mother’s death eliminates the source of his desire, and thus

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alleviates his affliction. As in the play, once this desire is eliminated, Hamlet can seek his

vengeance.

Figure 5

As established in the introductory paragraph of this essay, Hamlet is a work of art that

remains distinguished in its linguistic, cultural, literary, and philosophical importance. “To be, or

not to be?” (3. 1. 57), Hamlet asks himself and his audience. In doing so he brings forth a

question philosophers such as Nietzsche, Camus, and Sartre would grapple with four centuries

later. Perhaps more meaningful still is that he brings forth a question that every single human

being has had to reckon with, and yet not one concrete answer has ever been produced: what is

the meaning of our existence? Even if one accredits the Freudian interpretation of the play, one

must admit that as an interpretation it is e pluribus unum, one of out of many. What is astounding

is that some three-hundred years after Hamlet was written, and having been the subject of an

enormous amount of scholarship ever since that time, a new, unique interpretation immerged that

completely revolutionized the manner in which the readers and audiences of the 20th century

would view the play. Even more astounding still is the fact that a successful film, immersed in

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this interpretation, was made nearly one-hundred years after Sigmund Freud wrote his footnote.

It is a testament to the power of Hamlet, and the power of literature as a whole.

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Works Cited

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Jersey, USA: The Analytic Press, 1985. 107-11. Print.

Bradley, Kathleen, and Suzanne Worthington. "Did you know…?" RSC. Royal

Shakespeare Company, n.d. Web. 3 Apr. 2014.

Brode, Douglas. Shakespeare in the Movies: From the Silent Era to Today. Second ed.

New York, New York, USA: Berkley Publishing Group, 2001. 114-50. Print.

Cook, Patrick J. Cinematic Hamlet: The Films of Olivier, Zeffirelli, Branagh, and

Almereyda. Athens, OH, USA: Ohio University Press, 2011. 65-105. Web. 6 Apr. 2014.

Donaldson, Peter. "Olivier, Hamlet, and Freud." Cinema Journal 26.4 (1987): 22.

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Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Trans. Joyce Crick. New York, New

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Jacobs, Tom. "Zeffirelli insists his 'Hamlet,' and his star, are dangerous and funny." The

Baltimore Sun 4 Jan. 1991. Print.

Jones, Ernest. Hamlet and Oedipus. New York, New York, USA: W.W. Norton &

Company, Inc., 1949. 22-84. Print.

Lesser, Simon O. "Freud and Hamlet Again." The Whispered Meanings: Selected Essays

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Onions, C. T. A Shakespeare Glossary. Oxford, United Kingdom: Clarendon Press, 1911.

N. pag. Web. 1 May 2014. <http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?

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