Portrayals of Hamlet

Hamlet, a tragic play by William Shakespeare, has been appealing to mass audiences for more than 400 years. Why is it that a story about murder, revenge, internal strife, and death lasts so long? Hamlet has even remained the most frequently performed play of Shakespeare’s tragedies ever since it was first staged (“Hamlet: A Modern Perspective” by Michael Neill). With modern technology, there are also at least 43 different movie versions of Hamlet. Even though these versions follow the same plot line and stay close to Shakespeare’s written speech, they vary from one another. Three of the many versions of Hamlet are those directed by Franco Zeffirelli (1991) starring Mel Gibson, Kenneth Branaugh (1996) starring himself, and Michael Almereyda (2000) starring Ethan Hawke. The settings of these versions are quite different: a Medieval Denmark, similar to the play itself in Zeffirelli’s; a more recent Denmark of the early 1990’s in Branaugh’s, and a modern twist set in New York...