Translating any work from text to a film production requires a great deal of decision-making on the director’s part. While a text allows for endless possibilities for interpretation on the reader’s end, a visual manifestation of that text must take certain measures to declare a more specific understanding, which is to be visually reproduced for the audience. Shakespeare’s Hamlet has been produced on stage and film throughout the centuries and is controversial in its various interpretations. The film adaptations by Frank Zeffirelli and Kenneth Branagh clearly depict very different “virtual” texts (Iser 1524) and thus a very different interaction between the work and each director. Using Iser’s principles of the reader-response theory, we can identify the “gaps”(Iser 1527) that each director has filled, as well as the journey described by Iser as each director’s “wandering viewpoint travels between all [the] segments” (1528) between the “explicit and the implicit” (1527) of the text.
Wolfgang Iser describes the process of interpreting a text, stating: “As the reader passes through the various perspectives offered by the text, and relates the different views and patterns to one another, he sets the work in motion, and so sets himself in motion, too” (1524). As Iser points out, this process is in fact an interaction, and one in which Iser focuses on the individual rather than the historical contexts for a particular conception. Iser also explains that this “interpretive activity” (1524) is similar to the act of in-person communication, except that the text cannot provide the reader with the necessary feedback to alter or direct the reader’s perception of the work. In describing communication, he explains that the interaction will result in “a view of others and, unavoidably, an image of ourselves” (1525). With the visual and audio advantages of film, the space allowed for interpretation between the audience and the original text is condensed, therefore increasing the amount of interaction permitted to take place. Film then is one step closer to one-on-one communication than a text, and therefore leaves the audience with a greater image of self, particularly the self of the director who is visually reproducing their own conception of the work.
Three, among various items of great debate with regard to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, include: Hamlet’s motivation, his sanity, and his relationship with his mother. In Shakespeare’s original text these topics are some of what Iser might refer to as a “the missing link[s],” (1528) and therefore according to Iser, the stimulation which invites the reader to interpret and react with the text. While Shakespeare has created a single “artistic pole,” both Zeffirelli and Branagh have visually produced their own “aesthetic text”. In Branagh’s version of Act I Scene V, the ghost of Hamlet’s father is pictured towering over him in heavy armor, staring right through him with cold and bright blue eyes. The ghost’s voice echoes loud and booming, amost suggestive that the audience could be hearing the voice from withing Hamlet’s head. This is suggestive of the position that Hamlet is in fact crazy and that the ghost is not real. In contrast Zeffirelli illustrates the ghost as approachable, seated wearing robes, and speaking in gentle tone. This portrayal of the ghost lends Hamlet’s sanity much more credibility in comparison to Branagh’s representation. To infer what is motivating Hamlet to kill his Uncle, Branagh’s version might imply fear of the ghost, while Zeffirelli’s suggests a love and adoration for his father. Each director’s choice in this instance clearly affects other perspectives of the text, as Iser qualifies as a journey of interaction. The perception of the father-son relation affects the understanding of the mother-son relationship: In Branagh’s film it is contemptuous and incestuous in Zeffirelli’s. The bridge between the two missing links indicates an entire network of considerations that took the reader (or in this case the director) from one perspective to another.
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