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Hamlet’s Mirror Image: Theatre, Film, and The Shakespearean Imaginary

In 1964, Richard Burton appeared on Broadway playing the title role in a production of Hamlet, directed by John Gielgud.1 Later that year, a film version of that stage production was released simultaneously on screens across the United States, in a limited run of one week.2 Watching that film decades later, Barbara Hodgdon admires the way that, in the “To be or not to be” speech, Burton “sweeps both hands across his face . . . with a gesture of self-erasure” that, even mediated by film, gives Hodgdon a strong sense of the meaning-making role of the body in the performance of Shakespeare’s texts.3 This article is about Hamlet. It is also about bodies, especially Shakespearean bodies. It is in part an article about the discourses employed in the field of Shakespeare in Performance. And, finally, this is an article about the ghostly relationship between recorded and live performance. Marvin Carlson argues that theatrical performance is “a cultural activity deeply involved with memory and haunted by repetition.”4 For Carlson, Marcellus’s fearful question about the ghost of King Hamlet, “[H]as this thing appeared again tonight?” is “profoundly evocative of the operations of theatre.”5 In the Shakespearean productions that I discuss in this study, performance—theatrical and otherwise—consistently finds its ghostly afterimage in the archive of cinematic representation. My work has for some time focused on the disappearance and reappearance of bodies.6 When I look at film versions of Shakespeare, I often find myself watching the way a tradition of embodied performance (early English theatre) has been rendered disembodied, or virtual rather than actual. Seeing Shakespeare on film in this way is not nostalgia but a recognition of the technology and (im)materiality of cinema. Moreover, I am aware, as Sarah Bay-Cheng would hasten to remind me, that no medium, however seemingly virtual, is really disembodied.7 One pleasure of watching a film is the haptic sensation of vicarious experience, the times at which a flat projection can remind us that we, the audience, have bodies even if the recorded images on the screen do not. We control the technology of such images in various